attend to his duties as an ecclesiastical administrator in the capital. Rebuilding the demolished tabernacle, sacristy, and towers of Trujillo’s cathedral was paramount. He imagined a new neoclassical façade for the building—the same one that still adorns it today. He ordered a crypt constructed on the south patio to alleviate the foul odors resulting from the old practice of burying the city’s dead within the church itself. His drafting plans feature a window that allowed breezes to circulate, individual tombs one yard wide and two and a quarter yards long, and brick overlay on the limestone walls. In the new cabildo room that he commissioned for the cathedral, the Bishop gathered portraits of his thirty predecessors, compiling along with them a historical document detailing the major deeds of each.12
In addition to these matters of fábrica—church structure, materials, and decoration—the Bishop made changes to ecclesiastical education in Trujillo. He knew that seminaries were of special importance to Charles III and his ministers, who wished to submit ecclesiastical education to empire-wide regulations. They were particularly interested in secular conciliar seminaries that would teach aspirants to the priesthood standardized courses of doctrine, grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and art. The Lima Provincial Church Council of 1772 also stressed the importance of seminaries, arguing that reforming the manners and behavior of priests was the best way to ensure proper behavior among the populace. Martínez Compañón must have had these decrees in mind when, upon his arrival in Trujillo, he found that the city’s San Carlos Conciliar Seminary was no longer operational. He set to work almost immediately, and, under his watch, the first repairs were complete as early as November 1781. He planned for the seminary to educate forty-eight students, half of whom would pay full price and half of whom would be Indian scholarship students.13
But the Bishop’s vision for seminaries in Trujillo involved more than the traditional elite aspirants to the priesthood studying in the provincial capital. As Vasco de Quiroga had done with his own utopia in New Spain centuries earlier, Martínez Compañón was already imagining how seminary students in rural areas of Trujillo would become foot soldiers for his agenda of reform. Following the precedent of groups such as the Operarios del Salvador del Mundo and the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda (Propaganda Fide), first created in seventeenth-century Rome to recapture the faithful from Protestants, he planned four such missionary schools in the cities of Trujillo, Lambayeque, Piura, and Cajamarca. Priests, community members, and day students would study there, as well as young Indians who would learn Spanish, Christian doctrine, and basic literacy. The students, known as operarios eclesiásticos, or ecclesiastical workers, would make annual excursions into the countryside, where they would busy themselves “confessing the parishioners, visiting and consoling the sick, fixing disagreements and private discord … and leaving … rules of healthy governance.”14 They were to become, in essence, a native clergy of Creoles, mestizos, and Indians that could better reach people in sparsely populated areas distant from Spanish centers of control. The operarios would help to ensure that the people of rural Trujillo would behave as obedient subjects and proper Catholics, even when there were no parish priests or municipal officials close by to monitor them. Because they came from provincial communities themselves, local Indians, mestizos, and people of African descent would more readily accept them. They could stand in for civil government in areas where this often seemed entirely absent. With the operarios constantly reinforcing and spreading their mission, the seminaries would become vital support systems for the improved future of the bishopric. Like the preceding institutions and clergy who inspired them, the operarios would become foot soldiers of a future utopia.
Martínez Compañón imagined that of the four schools, Trujillo’s Seminario de Operarios del Salvador would hold jurisdiction over the other three. It opened its doors in September 1785, with the accompanying fanfare of a ceremony he later described as lengthy and well attended.15 In June of the following year, the seminary was confirmed by a royal decree. But official approval was never secured for the remaining three seminaries. Later referring to the attempt to found one in Cajamarca, Martínez Compañón worried about “the distrust of the town to be able to form an institution that it does not know, and has no experience with.” There was also the ubiquitous problem of lack of funds. The Bishop hoped to raise money for the seminaries through redistributing cofradía religious brotherhood income and selecting parish priests to serve in vacant parishes in Trujillo, so that they might hold Mass regularly and generate more tithe income. He also hoped that, since Indian children were welcome to be educated at the seminaries, native communities would make small annual donations for their operation costs. But none of these measures worked. When he found himself still unable to raise adequate finances for the seminarios by 1788, the Bishop turned to the ecclesiastical cabildo of Trujillo—which also denied the support that he needed to sustain the schools. The Spanish, mestizo, and Indian operarios would not become the foot soldiers of reform he had imagined they could be.16
While it must have been disappointing, the community’s general lack of interest in the seminaries had ample historical precedent: early attempts to allow Indians into the priesthood in sixteenth-century Mexico were promptly squashed with a 1555 Provincial Council ban—a prohibition that was first iterated in Peru in 1551 and again in 1567. As the career of archbishop Rubio y Salinas demonstrates, even in mid-eighteenth-century Mexico, a plan to found a seminary for Indian students was rejected, largely because of prejudice toward allowing Indians into higher education as well as fears about taking positions away from Spanish and mestizo priests.17
Although the seminaries that Martínez Compañón envisioned were not successful, Trujillo did not generally lack for religious figures. The bishopric was home to twenty-one monasteries and three convents, with the majority of the regular clergy being Franciscans, Mercederians, and Bethlehemites who lived in monasteries in the main population areas. As regulars, they were bound to follow the rules of their own orders; but the remaining priests and assistants who made up the secular clergy of Trujillo were directly subject to Martínez Compañón’s rule. Many of these were curas administering to the Spaniards, mestizos, and people of African descent who belonged to their own parishes, known as curatos, often located in the most densely settled coastal regions of the province. The less educated priests (often mestizos) who administered to the doctrinas, or Indian parishes, were known as curas doctrineros. Most often, their work brought them to the sierra towns where the largest groups of natives lived. In even more rural areas, traveling priests staffed ancillary churches called añejos. Especially in the jungle and the sierra, añejos were often located far from the communities they were meant to serve, limiting access to sacraments and worship.18
This isolation was even more problematic because in rural areas, priests and their assistants were sometimes the only Spaniards or mestizos of authority closely involved in daily life. Recognizing this, Martínez Compañón reminded Trujillo’s parish priests that one of their most important duties was to “reduce the Indians to civil life in town” by ensuring that all their charges lived “within the sound of the bell,” meaning that they could literally as well as figuratively be reached by their priest and their church. They were also to ensure adherence to the sacraments of communion, marriage, confession, and extreme unction. They should carefully record all births, deaths, marriages, and baptisms in their parishes, and keep meticulous tallies of all church income. They were to oversee proper behavior in the home, ensuring that parents married and that male and female children were properly clothed and that they slept in bedrooms separated by sex. With adults, they were to discourage drunkenness and adultery and to forbid men and women from bathing together in the same place.
While typical, such spiritual and moral directives were far from the only responsibilities Martínez Compañón gave to his parish priests. He also intended for them to participate in his vision of economic development, relying on them to share technological innovation, moral support, and organizational skills with the people. He told them to “speak lovingly of the fields” where the Indians worked, to explain which crops were best cultivated there, to show how to weed the soil, and to discuss how to grow fruit trees. He mandated that priests support young Indian women in their parishes by reallocating cofradía
