know, are their true mothers and fathers.’ There was an invincible reluctance to admit that the fledglings might grow up, or assist them to do so. The Dominicans refused to found any secondary schools, and it was always against their policy to teach Latin - the key to advance of any kind- to Indians. The Franciscans and Augustinians were less dogmatic, and they in fact discovered that the natives took to Latin more easily than Spaniards. But the College of Santiago Tlateloko, where the Franciscans taught it, did not produce a single native priest. Even so attempts to educate the Indians met bitter criticism. Jeronimo Lopez wrote in 1541: 'It Is a most dangerous error to teach science to the Indians and still more to put the Bible and the Holy Scriptures into their hands. . . . Many people in our Spain have been lost that way, and have invented a thousand heresies.’ Teaching Latin bred insolence and, worse, exposed the ignorance of European priests. (Bishop Montufar quoted an instance in which, of twenty-four Spanish Augustinians brought to him for ordination, only two knew Latin.) One complaint was that ‘reading the Holy Scriptures, [the Indians] would learn that the old patriarchs had many wives at the same time, just as they used to have.' Eventually the college was accused of teaching heresy, and entrance to Indians was forbidden; thus it lost its purpose and decayed. Synods repeatedly made it clear, in any case, that natives were not to be ordained, or indeed admitted to monastic orders except as servitors. We know of one case in which an Indian. Lucas, was refused admission to the Dominicans, despite ‘his virtues and exemplary life’, the reason being stated bluntly ‘because he is an Indian’. If individual friars favored Indian priests, the policies of their orders remained-adamant until quite recent times. The Jesuits in South America were no more enlightened. They protected their Indian charges jealously but never accorded them the status of adult Christians. Hence, when the society was suppressed in the late eighteenth century, the reductiones had no native cadres to sustain them, and were quickly and ruthlessly pillaged by the settlers. The failure to produce self-sustaining Christianity among the natives was paralleled among the LatinAmerican communities of European descent. In the Roman Empire distinctive regional schools of Christianity had soon emerged, both before the development of orthodoxy, and after: Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, Spain, the Rhone Valley - all had made their cultural and doctrinal contributions to Christian richness within a few generations of receiving the faith. The process had been repeated again and again as Christianity spread over Europe. But the transplantation to Latin America bore no such fruit. This huge continent, where paganism was quickly expunged, where great cities, universities and sub-cultures were soon established, where Christianity was united and monopolistic, carefully protected by the State from any hint of heresy, schism or rival, and where the clergy were innumerable, rich and privileged, made virtually no distinctive contribution to the Christian message and insight in over four centuries. Latin America exuded a long, conformist silence. This is not entirely surprising. Spain, as we have seen, had staged its own orthodox reformation before the Lutheran schism. It possessed powerful and popular institutional machinery to stifle Clerical initiatives of any kind. Ecclesiastical control was, if anything, even more effective in the crown colonies than at home. And then, too, the clergy has always been employed by the Spanish kings as royal agents, just as their councils had served as legislative assemblies. The Catholic Church was a department of the Spanish government, and never more so than in the Americas. Right from the start Charles v and Philip Il used clerics to check abuses and limit the independence of early colonists and officials, the precedent being set by the appointment of Fr Bernado Boil to represent the crown's interests in newly discovered Hispaniola, the first settlement. In return, the Church required protection, privilege, and the crowns unswerving devotion to the orthodox faith. In these circumstances, there was no place or opportunity for experiment or deviation. Steadfast and united against change, both Church and crown liked this working arrangement, whereby the Pope was excluded along with heresy, and the crown ruled ~ but vicariously, through the hierarchy. The system was remarkably successful, and cheap. The royal garrisons were tiny. The clergy mesmerized Spaniards and natives alike. They could always be brought in to quell riots when soldiers failed, oY