The Reformation Goes Global

A global Reformation

We usually picture the Reformation era as a European story, of Wittenberg, Geneva, Trent and London. But at the very same time, Christianity was expanding across the world on an unprecedented scale. In 1492, the year Spain conquered Granada and expelled its Jews, Christopher Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean. In 1498 Vasco da Gama reached India by sea. Within a century there were Catholic dioceses in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Goa, Macau and Manila. Ditchfield's chapter in the Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation stresses that Catholicism became the first world religion in this period, whose center was Rome but whose reach was global [check].

The Protestant churches, focused on survival in Europe and lacking overseas empires (and, in Calvinist thinking, often believing the Great Commission had been fulfilled by the apostles), did very little mission until the 1700s and 1800s (see The Great Century of Missions).

The patronage of kings

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI drew a line down the Atlantic, dividing newly found lands between Spain (to the west) and Portugal (to the east). This was adjusted by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which is why Brazil speaks Portuguese. The popes granted the kings of Spain and Portugal the patronato (or padroado): control over the church in their new territories, including appointing bishops and paying missionaries, in return for spreading the faith. Mission and empire were tied together from the start, for better and for worse.

Conquest in the Americas

The Spanish conquests were devastating. Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire in 1519–1521, and Francisco Pizarro the Inca Empire in the 1530s. Even more devastating were European diseases, especially smallpox, against which Indigenous peoples had no immunity. The Native population of Mexico may have fallen from perhaps 20 million to around 1.5 million within a century, though the figures are debated. Under the encomienda system, conquistadors were "entrusted" with Native communities. They were supposed to protect and Christianize them, but in practice they exploited them as forced labor.

Voices of conscience

Some missionaries protested fiercely. In 1511 on the island of Hispaniola, a Dominican friar, Antonio de Montesinos, preached to the Spanish settlers: "Are these not human beings? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves?" The settlers were furious.

Among those who heard him was Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), himself a settler and slave-owner. A few years later, he experienced a conversion, freed his Native laborers, became a Dominican, and devoted fifty years to defending Indigenous peoples. His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552) detailed Spanish atrocities. At the famous Valladolid debate (1550–1551), he argued against the scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who claimed, using Aristotle, that Native Americans were "natural slaves." Las Casas insisted they were fully human and rational, with rights to their lands and liberty, and could only be converted peacefully. His campaigning helped produce the New Laws (1542), which restricted enslavement, though they were poorly enforced.

Tragically, Las Casas at first suggested that African slaves be used instead of Native Americans. He later bitterly regretted it. The Atlantic slave trade, which carried some 12 million Africans to the Americas, was largely accepted by the churches of the time, though some, like the Jesuit Peter Claver in Cartagena, ministered heroically to enslaved Africans.

Catholicism goes global, c. 1500–1650

A new Christianity in the Americas

Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians and Jesuits baptized millions. Some learned Native languages, wrote grammars and catechisms, and recorded Indigenous cultures. The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún's encyclopedia of Aztec life is a priceless source. Bishops like Toribio of Lima of Lima organized the church. The Americas produced their own saints, like Rose of Lima (d. 1617), the first saint of the Americas.

The faith that emerged blended European Catholicism with Indigenous and later African traditions. The most powerful symbol is Our Lady of Guadalupe. According to tradition, in December 1531, near Mexico City, the Virgin Mary appeared to an Indigenous man, Juan Diego, speaking his language, Nahuatl, at a hill once sacred to an Aztec mother goddess. Her image, said to have appeared miraculously on his cloak, shows a dark-skinned woman. Historians debate the story's early history, but Guadalupe became the beloved patroness of Mexico and the Americas and a symbol of Indigenous dignity. Her basilica is now one of the most visited Catholic shrines in the world.

In the 1600s and 1700s, Jesuits in Paraguay organized "reductions," self-governing mission towns where Guaraní people lived protected from slave raiders. These were remarkable but paternalistic experiments, destroyed when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. In California, the Franciscan Junípero Serra Serra later founded missions (from 1769), a legacy now hotly debated.

Africa: the Kingdom of Kongo

Portuguese explorers reached the kingdom of Kongo (in modern Angola and the Congo) in 1483. Its rulers accepted Christianity. King Afonso I of Kongo I (reigned c. 1506–1543) was a devout and learned Christian who built churches and schools and sent his son Henrique to Lisbon. Henrique became a bishop in 1518, the first Black African Catholic bishop of modern times. Afonso wrote to the king of Portugal protesting the slave trade, which was devastating his kingdom. Kongolese Christianity developed its own African character and lasted for centuries.

Asia: Francis Xavier

Francis Xavier (1506–1552), one of Ignatius's first companions, sailed to Portuguese Goa in India in 1542. Over ten years he traveled tirelessly, to the pearl fishers of southern India, Malacca, the Moluccas and Japan, baptizing tens of thousands. He died in 1552 on an island off the coast of China, trying to enter that closed empire. He is considered one of the greatest missionaries in history and is patron of Catholic missions.

Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549 and was deeply impressed by its culture. He learned that Europeans must adapt to win respect. Christianity spread rapidly, especially in the south, where some feudal lords (daimyo) converted, partly for Portuguese trade. By 1600 there may have been 300,000 Japanese Christians. Under the Jesuit visitor Alessandro Valignano, missionaries learned Japanese, trained Japanese clergy, and adapted to Japanese etiquette.

Then the tide turned. Japan's new rulers grew suspicious that Christianity was a front for European conquest. In 1597 twenty-six Christians, including Japanese laymen, Franciscans and Jesuits, were crucified at Nagasaki. In 1614 Christianity was banned. Brutal persecution followed. Christians were tortured, forced to trample on images of Christ (fumi-e), or killed. A few thousand "hidden Christians" (kakure kirishitan) secretly kept the faith for over two centuries without priests, until missionaries returned in the 1860s. Shūsaku Endō's novel Silence (1966) explores this period.

China: Matteo Ricci

The Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) took adaptation further than anyone. He spent years mastering Chinese language and Confucian classics. At first he dressed as a Buddhist monk, then, realizing that the Confucian scholar-officials were the elite, as a Confucian scholar. He impressed them with European science: maps, clocks, mathematics and astronomy. In 1601 he was allowed to live in Beijing, the imperial capital. He wrote The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, presenting Christianity as the fulfillment of ancient Confucian teaching. He won a small number of influential converts, such as the scholar Xu Guangqi.

In India, the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) lived as a Brahmin holy man in Madurai, adopting vegetarianism and Indian dress to reach high-caste Hindus.

The Chinese Rites controversy

This approach, today called Inculturation, raised hard questions. Could Chinese converts continue to honor Confucius and their ancestors with ceremonies? Ricci saw these as civil and family customs, not worship. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries saw them as idolatry. Which Chinese word should be used for God? The dispute raged for a century. In 1704 and 1715 Rome condemned the "Chinese rites." The Kangxi emperor, who had been tolerant of Christianity, was offended and restricted missions. The ban was lifted only in 1939. The underlying question of how much a faith can adapt to a culture without losing itself remains central to world Christianity.