Reformist Currents in the Spanish-American Councils of the Eighteenth Century

In the late eighteenth century the Catholic Church in Spanish America found itself torn between two ideological viewpoints: whether to maintain traditional forms of worship and discipline, or to accept the innovations favored by an Enlightened Crown that wished to reform observance and clerical discipline. Using a royal document known as Tomo Regio, dated July 21, 1769, Charles III addressed the metropolitans of the New World and ordered them to celebrate provincial councils to promote the changes that he, his reformist ministers, and ecclesiastical authorities in Spain deemed necessary to rejuvenate the Church. In response, five conciliar assemblies took place in Mexico (City) (1771), Manila (1771), Lima (1772), Charcas (1774–1778), and Santa Fé de Bogota (1774), all of them metropolitan capitals of Hispanic America and the Philippines.