Spain: Notable Religious Figures, Theologians, Philosophers, and Orators

1483 - 1498 - Tomas de Torquemada (All Facts)

• Spanish Dominican Friar and First Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition

1436 - 1517 - Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros / Cardinal Cisneros (All Facts)

• Spanish Cardinal and Writer

1520 - Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros / Cardinal Cisneros: Complutensian Bible (All Facts)

• Work which the namesake author prepared and which was published posthumously in Aleala in Spain

• Work which contained the Old Testament in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek; the Aramaic Targum of the Pentateuch (Torah); and the New Testament in Greek and Latin

1523 -1 524 - Twelve Apostles of Mexico (All Facts)

• Evangelistic team of Franciscan friars who left Spain to found a Christian mission in Mexico

• They were proposed to be sent by Hernan Cortes with support and approval of King Charles and his people

• Spain’s discovery of the New World (and more pagans) was seen as divine intervention for the brown friars to go and convert the Aztecs to Christianity

1489 - 1531 - Geronimo de Aguilar (All Facts)

• Spanish Franciscan Friar and Missionary

• He was sent as a sailor to the Yucatan Peninsula where he survived a shipwreck alongside Gonzalo Guerrero but in which both were captured by the Maya

  • Unlike his counterpart, he was later rescued by an expedition of Hernan Cortes

  • He later served as a translator for Hernan Cortes during the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire

1475 - 1540 - Antonio de Montesinos (All Facts)

• Spanish Dominican Friar and Missionary

• He preached a sermon to the Spanish colonists in / of Hispaniola, where he questioned the religious principles of colonial ventures

  • He spoke out against the right of conquest, arguing that, because the native inhabitants of the New World were true men with souls, they should not be subject to enslavement

1524 - 1546 - Garica de Loyasa (All Facts)

• Spanish Archbishop of Seville

• He was the first president of the Council of the Indies, responsible for the administrative, financial, and legal matters in Mexico (New Spain) and other new Spanish lands

1468 - 1548 - Juan de Zumárraga (All Facts)

• Spanish Basque Franciscan Prelate and First Bishop of Mexico

1500 - 1549 - Luis Cancer de Barbastro (All Facts)

• Spanish Dominican Priest, Monk, and Missionary to the New World

• He was a veteran of missionary activity in Guatemala

• He had sought to bring the peoples of Florida to obedience by peaceful means

  • However, he was clubbed to death by natives while praying in Tampa Bay (in Florida)

1465 - 1550 - Luis Cabeza de Vaca (All Facts)

• Spanish Bishop and Humanist

• He was famous for tutoring the young King Charles in the Spanish language and customs prior to his kingship there

1506 - 1552 - St. Francis Xavier (All Facts)

• Spanish Cleric, Missionary, and Jesuit

  • He was one of St. Ignatius Loyola’s six companions who founded the Jesuit Order / Society of Jesus

  • He was known as the “Apostle of the Indies”

• He went on a mission to the Indies with three companions to carry out Jesuit Order’s original aim as missionaries

• He went on missions to Mozambique, Malindi, and Socotra in East Africa (to spread the gospel)

• He went on a mission to Goa in India (to spread the gospel)

• He went on a mission to Kagoshima in Japan (to spread the gospel)

  • He introduced Christianity into Japan for the first time

  • The Jesuit missionaries he left behind to help build up the nucleus of the new church in Japan came into conflict with the Buddhist priests there

• He went on a mission to Canton in China (to spread the gospel)

• He died of exhaustion near Canton in China

1511 - 1553 - Michael Servetus (All Facts)

• Spanish Theologian and Humanist

• He was a fugitive from the Spanish Inquisition

  • He preached in Geneva as a refugee

• He was burnt at the stake in Geneva on the orders of John Calvin for heresy as his attack on the trinity was intolerable

1531 - Michael Servetus: On the Errors of the Trinity (All Facts)

• Work which denies the Trinity and the divinity of Christ

1491 - 1556 - St. Ignatius of Loyola (All Facts)

• Spanish Basque Catholic Priest and Theologian

  • He was a nobleman, soldier, and monk

• He founded the Jesuit Order / Society of Jesus

  • He was the first (elected) Superior General of the Jesuit Order

  • He vowed to found the society in honor of Jesus Christ

  • He and six others took a vow to offer themselves to the pope (Pope Paul III) to be sent wherever the pope wished to convert pagans and infidels, even the Ottoman Turks

  • He saw his order’s numbers swell from a handful to over 1,000 members in just 25 years

• He came from a noble Basque family

  • He began life as a soldier devoted to chivalry

  • He defended Pamplona from a siege, where he was badly wounded in the leg, which left him disabled

  • During his long convalescence he turned to the life of Jesus and resolved to become a “soldier of Christ”

  • He had an intense religious experience which began his conversion

  • He then went on a retreat to Montserrat in Spain

  • He withdrew to a monastery at Manresa, where he subject himself to prayer, fasting, and self-flagellation

    • He only agreed to break things off when his confessor ordered him to eat

  • He went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land

  • He had to leave his native Alcala because his regime of self-discipline was denounced to the Spanish Inquisition, which went against him

  • He returned to Spain and was determined to become a priest at the age of just 33

1548 - St. Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises (All Facts)

• Work in which the namesake author explains the namesake, which were designed to break the will by contemplating the agonies of hell and the mercy of Christ

1484 - 1566 - Bartolome de las Casas (All Facts)

• Spanish Dominican Friar, Missionary, Clergyman, Lawyer, and Activist

  • He was the first Catholic Priest to be ordained in the New World

  • He was appointed the Bishop of Chiapas (in Mexico; a position to which he was appointed two years prior to his decision to take up such duties)

    • As a champion of native Mexican and American rights, he was given a hostile reception by the colonists

• He was famous for having participated in the Valladolid Debate arguing for the case against Spanish conquest of the Americas and condemning the brutality of Spain’s forces against the natives against the case for Spanish conquest made by Juan Gines de Sepulveda

• He once ran his own estate, but was so appalled by the excesses of the Spanish forces that he abandoned his holdings and began campaigning for colonial reform

  • He left Cuba and returned to Spain, where he publicized what he saw

  • He has shocked his compatriots with his terrifying account of military atrocities committed in the Spanish Conquest of Cuba

    • As a member of Panfilo de Narvaez’s expedition to Cuba, he revealed a nightmarish catalogue of torture and depravity that occurred there

    • His eye-witness report detailed he wholesale slaughter of the Native “Indian” population there, sparing neither man, women, nor child

    • He claimed that the Spanish troops in Cuba were overtaken by the Devil

    • He witnessed babies being torn from the breast, smashed onto rocks, and skewered on pikes

    • He witnessed adults, especially Cuban nobility, being roasted alive on grid irons and suspended from gibbets with fires lit beneath them

    • He witnessed friendly natives being butchered

    • He witnessed resistant natives being hunted without mercy by men and savage dogs

  • He campaigned against the Encomienda System, where large estates exploited slave labor of natives

• He drafted the “New Laws (of Burgos),” demanding an end to slavery in the New World

  • He even got King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles to back him, suspending any new encomienda grants thereafter

  • However, those who profited from the system rebelled and the laws were repealed 4 years later; however the extraction of labor as a tribute remained forbidden

1552 - Bartolome de las Casas: A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (All Facts)

• Work which attacked Spanish colonial practices in the New World, issuing a savage condemnation of Spain’s regime in the New World

• Work which demanded an end to Spain’s Encomienda System

• Work in which the namesake author shows expertise on the native inhabitants, citing a mass of evidence to prove that their culture, while neither European nor Christian, was just as complex and sophisticated as Spain’s

• Work in which the namesake author shows that the Encomienda System is not even sustainable and that due to the brutality of the overseers and ravages of diseases brought from Europe, there will eventually be no native Americans to exploit in the first place

1499 - 1570 - Domingo de Santo Tomas (All Facts)

• Spanish Dominican Friar, Missionary, Bishop, and Grammarian

1560 - Domingo de Santo Tomas: Grammar or art of the general language of the Indians of the kingdoms of Peru / Lexicon and Vocabulary (All Facts)

• Work which enabled Spanish missionaries to study Quechua, the language of the native Andean peoples of (Spanish) Peru

1485 - 1571 - Andres de Olmos (All Facts)

• Spanish Franciscan Priest, Grammarian, and Ethno-Historian of Mexico's indigenous languages and peoples

• He published the first Nahuatl grammar

1490 - 1573 - Juan Gines de Sepulveda (All Facts)

• Spanish Theologian, Philosopher, and Humanist

• He participated in the Valladolid Debate arguing for the case of Spanish conquest of the Americas against the case against Spanish conquest made by Bartolome de las Casas

  • He justified Spain’s actions by the Biblical text that said to “go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in”

  • He argued that the native Americans were a barbaric race, certainly not Christians and barely human

  • He said, “How can we doubt that these people - so uncivilized, contaminated with so many impieties and obscenities, have been justly conquered by such an excellent, pious, and most just king?”

1524 - 1579 - Diego de Landa (All Facts)

• Spanish Franciscan Bishop of Yucatán

• He led a campaign against idolatry and human sacrifice, ordering for the burning of a large number of Maya manuscripts which contained knowledge of Mayan religion, culture, and history

1515 - 1582 - St. Teresa of Avila (All Facts)

• Spanish Carmelite Nun, Mystic, and Spiritual Reformer

  • She was one of the leading reformers of the monastic movement in Spain during the Counter-Reformation

  • Her father was a Jewish convert

  • Her mother was a Castilian aristocrat

• She founded the first order of barefoot Carmelite nuns

  • She entered her first Carmelite convent at the age of 21

  • Shocked by the lack of piety she found, she was determined to lead a return to the Palestinian Carmelite tradition of the hermit living in the desert

  • She founded the convent of St. Joseph of Avila, where she insisted that the main role of the nuns was to pray for souls in danger and intercede for others

  • She founded many others, some with the help of St. John of the Cross, who shared her deep mysticism

  • She was also the prioress at the convent of the Incarnation in Avila, where St. John of the Cross was the confessor of the Carmelites

  • By 1576, she was forbidden by the church in Spain to found any more Carmelite convents

• Her asceticism, prayer, and piety took her to a state of intensely physical ecstasy of a kind which lesser mortals associate with sexual love

  • Thus, in contrast with her severe puritanism, her writing is rich with the erotic and sensual experience of the holy

• A complete edition of her works was published posthumously

  • She was also beatified after her death by Pope Paul V

1572 - St. Teresa de Avila: Book of the Foundations (All Facts)

1573 - St. Teresa de Avila: The Way of Perfection (All Facts)

1588 - St. Teresa de Avila: The Interior Castle (All Facts)

• Work that describes how the castle is the soul, which has to go through seven rooms to attain purity

• Work that describes how, in the final room, a divine union is achieved

1529 - 1585 - Cristobal de Molina (All Facts)

• Spanish Colonial Clergyman and Chronicler

• He was very fluent in Quechua

• He compiled an anthology / collection of Incan hymns called the “Tales and Ceremonies of the Incas”

1499 - 1590 - Bernardino de Sahagún (All Facts)

• Spanish Franciscan Friar, Missionary, Priest and Ethnographer

  • He was hailed as the foremost historian of the lands of Mexico (New Spain)

  • In parallel to his religious undertakings, he developed himself into an outstanding historian of the native tribes of Mexico (New Spain)

• He began his career as a missionary to the New World

  • He participated in the Catholic evangelization of Mexico (New Spain)

  • While his central task as a missionary was to wipe out native idolatry and replace it with Christian worship, his natural inclination had been to discover as much as possible about the native tribes of Mexico (New Spain)

• He devoted his career to the Colegio de Santiago Tlatelolco, which was dedicated to the education of young native individuals of the tribes of Mexico (New Spain)

• He was an expert in native Mexican crafts, the best of which he saw himself

• He was an expert in native Mexican languages, of which he both read and wrote

1569 / 1585 - Bernardino de Sahagún: General History of the Things of New Spain (All Facts)

• Work which was essentially an encyclopedia of ancient Mexico

• Work which the namesake author begun with the aim of giving his fellow priests as wide as possible a knowledge of the culture with which they deal in evangelizing

• Work which was not the first such history of its kind, but in which the namesake author’s methods made it the most authoritative

1527 - 1591 - Luis de Leon (All Facts)

• Spanish Augustinian Friar, Theologian, Mystic, and Writer

• He entered the Augustinian Order, teaching theology at the University of Salamanca

• He was imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition and accused of heresy

• He died as he was about to be named Vicar-General of the Augustinians in Castile in Spain

1583 - Luis de Leon: Of the Names of Christ (All Facts)

• Work in which the namesake author defined 13 descriptions attached to the name and person of Jesus Christ

1542 - 1591 - St. John of the Cross / Juan de Yepes (All Facts)

• Spanish Catholic Priest and Monk and Carmelite Friar

• He wrote mystical treatises and poems including his masterpiece of the age “Spiritual Canticle”

• He founded the first monastery of barefoot Carmelites

• He escaped from a monastery in Toledo where he was imprisoned by Carmelites hostile to his proposals for reform

  • During his imprisonment, he wrote 30 stanzas of what would become his “Spiritual Canticle”

• He became rector of the college of Baeza in Andalucia

• He was a victim of betrayals and persecution up to the end of his life

• He died at the convent of Ubeda

1535 - 1600 - Luis de Molina (All Facts)

• Spanish Jesuit Priest, Theologian, and Scholastic Philosopher

• He was the Jesuit Professor of Evora

• He was a disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas

• He was famed for his treatise which opposes the Augustinian belief in the complete corruption of human liberty, asserting that free will is total and in accord with divine grace

1565 - 1615 - Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano (All Facts)

• First Spanish Bishop to visit North America

1548 - 1617 - Francisco Suarez (All Facts)

• Spanish Jesuit Priest, Theologian, Philosopher, and Lawyer

• He was a disciple of Luis de Molina

  • He adapted Molina’s ideas on predestination and free will to the tricky subjects of grace and special election

  • He argued that a certain elect were granted a special grace to whose influence they would willingly and infallibly yield; despite believing that all men were born equal, with an absolutely sufficient grace

  • He thus argued that this allowed for popes, but not for kings

• He was appointed to the First Chair of Theology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal at the request of King Philip II

1612 - Francisco Suarez: Tractatus de legibus ac deo legislatore (All Facts)

• Work which threatened a major split between church and state in Spain

• Work in which the namesake author

  • champions native American rights

  • challenges the divine right of kings

  • refutes the patriarchal theory of government

• Work in which the namesake author argues that

  • all legislative as well as paternal power is derived from God, and that every law should be His law

  • kings do not have the same power

  • all states are the result of a social contract to which the people must give their consent and that native Americans should be treated no differently in this respect

1613 - Francisco Suarez: Defensio Fidei (All Facts)

• Work which argued against the rule of King James of England

1536 - 1624 - Juan de Mariana (All Facts)

• Spanish Jesuit Priest, Scholastic Philosopher, and Historian

• His book criticizing the institution that was the Spanish Inquisition was put on the index of banned books

  • He was a critic of the institution from within the ranks of Catholic leadership

1599 - Juan de Mariana: The King and the Education of the King (All Facts)

• Treatise which justifies regicide and affirms popular sovereignty

• Work in which the namesake author rails against monarchy