Communities of the Soul

McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion

Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto.

series one G.A. Rawlyk, Editor 12 Piety and Nationalism

Lay Voluntary Associations and the
1 Small Differences Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community
Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, in Toronto, 1850–1895
1815–1922 Brian P. Clarke
An International Perspective 13 Amazing Grace
Donald Harman Akenson Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia,
2 Two Worlds Britain, Canada, and the United States
The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth- Edited by George Rawlyk and
Century Ontario Mark A. Noll
William Westfall 14 Children of Peace
3 An Evangelical Mind W. John McIntyre
Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist 15 A Solitary Pillar
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Marguerite Van Die Quiet Revolution
4 The Dévotes Joan Marshall
Women and Church in Seventeenth- 16 Padres in No Man’s Land
Century France Canadian Chaplains and the Great War
Elizabeth Rapley Duff Crerar
5 The Evangelical Century 17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy
College and Creed in English Canada in North America
from the Great Revival to the Great A Critical Analysis
Depression P. Travis Kroeker
Michael Gauvreau 18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land
6 The German Peasants’ War and Conservative Protestantism in British
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James M. Stayer Robert K. Burkinshaw
7 A World Mission 19 Through Sunshine and Shadow
Canadian Protestantism and the Quest The Woman’s Christian Temperance
for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in
Robert Wright Ontario, 1874–1930
8 Serving the Present Age Sharon Cook
Revivalism, Progressivism, and the 20 Church, College, and Clergy
Methodist Tradition in Canada A History of Theological Education at
Phyllis D. Airhart Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994
9 A Sensitive Independence Brian J. Fraser
Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries 21 The Lord’s Dominion
in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 The History of Canadian Methodism
Rosemary R. Gagan Neil Semple
10 God’s Peoples 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity
Covenant and Land in South Africa, The Protestant Churches and Social Wel-
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Donald Harman Akenson Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau
11 Creed and Culture 23 Evangelism and Apostasy
The Place of English-Speaking Catholics The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals
in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 in Modern Mexico
Edited by Terrence Murphy and Kurt Bowen
Gerald Stortz
24 The Chignecto Covenanters 10 Gentle Eminence
A Regional History of Reformed A Life of Cardinal Flahiff
Presbyterianism in New Brunswick P. Wallace Platt
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Eldon Hay Behaviour
25 Methodists and Women’s Education Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace,
in Ontario, 1836–1925 1750–1870
Johanne Selles Kevin McQuillan
26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy 12 Between Damnation and Starvation
William Lamont Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland
Politics, 1745–1855
series two In memory of John P. Greene
George Rawlyk 13 Martin Luther, German Saviour
Donald Harman Akenson, Editor German Evangelical Theological Factions
and the Interpretation of Luther,
1 Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1917–1933
1640–1665 James M. Stayer
Patricia Simpson 14 Modernity and the Dilemma of North
2 Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950
Experience William H. Katerberg
Edited by G.A. Rawlyk 15 The Methodist Church on the Prairies,
3 Infinity, Faith, and Time 1896–1914
Christian Humanism and Renaissance George Emery
Literature 16 Christian Attitudes towards the State
John Spencer Hill of Israel
4 The Contribution of Presbyterianism Paul Charles Merkley
to the Maritime Provinces of Canada 17 A Social History of the Cloister
Edited by Charles H.H. Scobie and Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries
G.A. Rawlyk of the Old Regime
5 Labour, Love, and Prayer Elizabeth Rapley
Female Piety in Ulster Religious 18 Households of Faith
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6 The Waning of the Green Edited by Nancy Christie
Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in 19 Blood Ground
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Mark G. McGowan for Christianity in the Cape Colony and
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Ukraine Elizabeth Elbourne
The Greek Catholic Church and the 20 A History of Canadian Catholics
Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, Gallicanism, Romanism, and
1867–1900 Canadianism
John-Paul Himka Terence J. Fay
8 Good Citizens 21 The View from Rome
British Missionaries and Imperial States, Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the
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Charles M. Johnston 22 The Founding Moment
9 The Theology of the Oral Torah Church, Society, and the Construction
Revealing the Justice of God of Trinity College
Jacob Neusner William Westfall
23 The Holocaust, Israel, and Canadian 37 Six Hundred Years of Reform
Protestant Churches Bishops and the French Church,
Haim Genizi 1190–1789
24 Governing Charities J. Michael Hayden and
Church and State in Toronto’s Catholic Malcolm R. Greenshields
Archdiocese, 1850–1950 38 The Missionary Oblate Sisters
Paula Maurutto Vision and Mission
25 Anglicans and the Atlantic World Rosa Bruno-Jofré
High Churchmen, Evangelicals, and the 39 Religion, Family, and Community
Quebec Connection in Victorian Canada
Richard W. Vaudry The Colbys of Carrollcroft
26 Evangelicals and the Continental Divide Marguerite Van Die
The Conservative Protestant Subculture 40 Michael Power
in Canada and the United States The Struggle to Build the Catholic
Sam Reimer Church on the Canadian Frontier
27 Christians in a Secular World Mark G. McGowan
The Canadian Experience 41 The Catholic Origins of Quebec’s Quiet
Kurt Bowen Revolution, 1931–1970
28 Anatomy of a Seance Michael Gauvreau
A History of Spirit Communication in 42 Marguerite Bourgeoys and the Congrega-
Central Canada tion of Notre Dame, 1665–1700
Stan McMullin Patricia Simpson
29 With Skilful Hand 43 To Heal a Fractured World
The Story of King David The Ethics of Responsibility
David T. Barnard Jonathan Sacks
30 Faithful Intellect 44 Revivalists
Samuel S. Nelles and Victoria University Marketing the Gospel in English Canada,
Neil Semple 1884–1957
31 W. Stanford Reid Kevin Kee
An Evangelical Calvinist in the Academy 45 The Churches and Social Order in
Donald MacLeod Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century
32 A Long Eclipse Canada
The Liberal Protestant Establishment and Edited by Michael Gauvreau and
the Canadian University, 1920–1970 Ollivier Hubert
Catherine Gidney 46 Political Ecumenism
33 Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, Jews, and Protestants in
Catholics, 1787–1858 De Gaulle’s Free France, 1940–1945
Kyla Madden Geoffrey Adams
34 For Canada’s Sake 47 From Quaker to Upper Canadian
Public Religion, Centennial Celebrations, Faith and Community among Yonge
and the Re-making of Canada in Street Friends, 1801–1850
the 1960s Robynne Rogers Healey
Gary R. Miedema 48 The Congrégation de Notre-Dame,
35 Revival in the City Superiors, and the Paradox of Power,
The Impact of American Evangelists in 1693–1796
Canada, 1884–1914 Colleen Gray
Eric R. Crouse 49 Canadian Pentecostalism
36 The Lord for the Body Transition and Transformation
Religion, Medicine, and Protestant Faith Edited by Michael Wilkinson
Healing in Canada, 1880–1930
James Opp
50 A War with a Silver Lining 63 The Catholicisms of Coutances
Canadian Protestant Churches and the Varieties of Religion in Early Modern
South African War, 1899–1902 France, 1350–1789
Gordon L. Heath J. Michael Hayden
51 In the Aftermath of Catastrophe 64 After Evangelicalism
Founding Judaism, 70 to 640 The Sixties and the United Church
Jacob Neusner of Canada
52 Imagining Holiness Kevin N. Flatt
Classic Hasidic Tales in Modern Times 65 The Return of Ancestral Gods
Justin Jaron Lewis Modern Ukrainian Paganism as an
53 Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing Alternative Vision for a Nation
with Ecstasy Mariya Lesiv
The Growth of Methodism in 66 Transatlantic Methodists
Newfoundland, 1774–1874 British Wesleyanism and the Formation
Calvin Hollett of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-
54 Into Deep Waters Century Ontario and Quebec
Evangelical Spirituality and Maritime Todd Webb
Calvinist Baptist Ministers, 1790–1855 67 A Church with the Soul of a Nation
Daniel C. Goodwin Making and Remaking the United Church
55 Vanguard of the New Age of Canada
The Toronto Theosophical Society, Phyllis D. Airhart
1891–1945 68 Fighting over God
Gillian McCann A Legal and Political History of Religious
56 A Commerce of Taste Freedom in Canada
Church Architecture in Canada, 1867–1914 Janet Epp Buckingham
Barry Magrill 69 From India to Israel
57 The Big Picture Identity, Immigration, and the Struggle
The Antigonish Movement of Eastern for Religious Equality
Nova Scotia Joseph Hodes
Santo Dodaro and Leonard Pluta 70 Becoming Holy in Early Canada
58 My Heart’s Best Wishes for You Timothy Pearson
A Biography of Archbishop John Walsh 71 The Cistercian Arts
John P. Comiskey From the 12th to the 21st Century
59 The Covenanters in Canada Edited by Terryl N. Kinder and
Reformed Presbyterianism from 1820 Roberto Cassanelli
to 2012 72 The Canny Scot
Eldon Hay Archbishop James Morrison of
60 The Guardianship of Best Interests Antigonish
Institutional Care for the Children of the Peter Ludlow
Poor in Halifax, 1850–1960 73 Religion and Greater Ireland
Renée N. Lafferty Christianity and Irish Global Networks,
61 In Defence of the Faith 1750–1950
Joaquim Marques de Araújo, a Comis- Edited by Colin Barr and Hilary M. Carey
sário in the Age of Inquisitional Decline 74 The Invisible Irish
James E. Wadsworth Finding Protestants in the Nineteenth-
62 Contesting the Moral High Ground Century Migrations to America
Popular Moralists in Mid-Twentieth- Rankin Sherling
Century Britain 75 Beating against the Wind
Paul T. Phillips Popular Opposition to Bishop Feild and
Tractarianism in Newfoundland and
Labrador, 1844–1876
Calvin Hollett
76 The Body or the Soul? 88 The Uncomfortable Pew
Religion and Culture in a Quebec Parish, Christianity and the New Left in Toronto
1736–1901 Bruce Douville
Frank A. Abbott 89 Berruyer’s Bible
77 Saving Germany Public Opinion and the Politics of
North American Protestants and Enlightenment Catholicism in France
Christian Mission to West Germany, Daniel J. Watkins
1945–1974 90 Communities of the Soul
James C. Enns A Short History of Religion in
78 The Imperial Irish Puerto Rico
Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great José E. Igartua
War, 1914–1918
Mark G. McGowan
79 Into Silence and Servitude
How American Girls Became Nuns,
1945–1965
Brian Titley
80 Boundless Dominion
Providence, Politics, and the Early
Canadian Presbyterian Worldview
Denis McKim
81 Faithful Encounters
Authorities and American Missionaries
in the Ottoman Empire
Emrah Şahin
82 Beyond the Noise of Solemn Assemblies
The Protestant Ethic and the Quest for
Social Justice in Canada
Richard Allen
83 Not Quite Us
Anti-Catholic Thought in English Canada
since 1900
Kevin P. Anderson
84 Scandal in the Parish
Priests and Parishioners Behaving Badly
in Eighteenth-Century France
Karen E. Carter
85 Ordinary Saints
Women, Work, and Faith in
Newfoundland
Bonnie Morgan
86 Patriot and Priest
Jean-Baptiste Volfius and the Constitu-
tional Church in the Côte-d’Or
Annette Chapman-Adisho
87 A.B. Simpson and the Making of Modern
Evangelicalism
Daryn Henry
 Communities
of the Soul
A Short History of Religion
in Puerto Rico

j o s é e . i g a rt ua

McGill-Queen’s University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021

isbn 978-0-2280-0839-2 (cloth)

isbn 978-0-2280-0840-8 (paper)
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Communities of the soul : a short history of religion in

Puerto Rico / José E. Igartua.
Names: Igartua, José E., 1946- author.
Series: McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of religion. Series
two ; 90.
Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s studies in the
history of religion. Series two ; 90 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210294329 | Canadiana (ebook)
20210294493 | isbn 9780228008392 (cloth) | isbn 9780228008408
(paper) | isbn 9780228009597 (epdf) | isbn 9780228009603
(epub)
Subjects: lcsh: Puerto Rico—Religion. | lcsh: Puerto Rico—
Religious life and customs.
Classification: lcc bl2566.p9 i33 2021 | ddc 200.97295—dc23
 Contents

Figures xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xxi

1 Life and Religion among the Taíno / 3

2 The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries / 12

3 The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries / 26

4 Religious Counter-Revolution in Puerto Rico, 19th Century / 38

5 Challenges to Orthodoxy, 1870–1900 / 49

6 American Dominion, 1898–1930 / 58

7 Protestantism, 1898–1960 / 75

8 The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 / 88

9 Varieties of Monotheism: Protestants, Jews, and Muslims

in the Late 20th Century / 104

10 Non-Institutional Forms of Religious Practice in the

Late 20th Century / 116

Conclusion / 126

Notes / 133
Bibliography / 157
Index / 171
 1


Figures

0.1 Puerto Rico municipalities. / xvi

1.1 Taíno cemí petroglyphs, Caguana, January 2012. Photo by the
author. / 7
4.1 Parish churches started by decade, Puerto Rico, 1520–1910. Data
from José A. Mari Mut, Los pueblos de Puerto Rico y las iglesias de
sus plazas (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Digitales, 2013), http://ediciones
digitales.info/PueblosPR/PueblosPR/Welcome.html. / 43
4.2 Periods of parish church construction, Puerto Rico, 1520–1910. Data
from José A. Mari Mut, Los pueblos de Puerto Rico y las iglesias de
sus plazas (Puerto Rico: Ediciones Digitales, 2013), http://ediciones
digitales.info/PueblosPR/PueblosPR/Welcome.html. / 44
6.1 The crowd in the hills of San Lorenzo, 1922. Puerto Rico Ilustrado, 2
September 1922. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. / 68
6.2 Madre Elenita’s preaching territory, 1899–1909. Data from Gerardo
Alberto Hernández Aponte, “‘Vuestra Madre’ de la Santa Montaña
en San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico: ¿La articulación del mito de la Virgen
María en la persona de Elena Ache?” Hispania Sacra 66, no. 134
(2014): 689–731. / 69
6.3 Approximate area of Cheos activity, 1902–1930s. Data from Samuel
xii figures

Silva Gotay, Catolicismo y política en Puerto Rico bajo España y

Estados Unidos: siglos XIX y XX (San Juan: Editorial Universidad
de Puerto Rico, 2005), 317. / 72
7.1 Division of mission fields in Puerto Rico, 1899. Data from J. Ernest
Macfee, “To-day in Porto [sic] Rico,” Missionary Review of the World
38 (August 1915), 577; Samuel Silva Gotay, Protestantismo y política
en Puerto Rico, 1898-1930: Hacia una historia del protestantismo
evangélico en Puerto Rico, 2nd edition (San Juan: Editorial de la
Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998), 112–14. / 77
7.2 Municipalities with more than one active Protestant denomination,
1905. Data from Samuel Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica de Puerto
Rico en el proceso político de americanización: 1898–1930 (Río
Piedras, pr: Publicaciones Gaviota, 2012), 114. / 78
8.1 A pilgrim taking water from the government pipe below the Virgen
del Pozo, Sabana Grande, March 2011. Photo by the author. / 96
9.1 The Holocaust monument in front of Puerto Rico’s Capitol, on
Avenida de la Constitución, San Juan, 2019. Photo by the author.
/ 112
10.1 Statue of the Vírgen de Monserrate at the Hormigueros basilica.
Jcarrillovii, “Virgen de Monserrate, Hormigueros, Puerto Rico”
(Creative Commons, 10 February 2008), https://commons.wiki
media.org/wiki/File:VirgenMonserrate-Hormigueros-PuertoRico.
JPG. / 120
10.2 Number of botánicas advertising in Yellow Pages–like web sites,
by municipality, 9 August 2018. Data from https://www.directorio
depr.com/categorias/categ-botanica.html; http://superpagespr.com/
Searchpg.aspx?nombre=Bot%C3%A1nica. / 122
 1


Preface

Religion is a fundamental component of Puerto Rican society. A 2014 Pew

Research Center survey reported that 99 per cent of Puerto Ricans believed
in God, 86 per cent believed in hell, 76 per cent said religion was very im-
portant in their lives, and nearly half attended religious services at least
once a week; only 10 per cent declared themselves neither Catholic nor
Protestant.1 From the cosmology of the Taíno to the wide array of Judaeo-
Christian churches, synagogues, and sects and the syncretic religious world-
views of the practitioners of spiritism, santería, brujería, and the customers
of the botánicas, religious practice in its many forms still permeates the lives
of a large majority of present-day Puerto Ricans.
But why is this of interest to me? I can claim to be Puerto Rican, having
been born in Aguadilla, on the north-west tip of the island, to a Puerto
Rican father and a French-Canadian mother. But I lived there only the first
four months of my life, after which the family moved to Quebec, where I
was raised by my mother, my father moving back to Puerto Rico when I was
a pre-schooler. I first revisited Puerto Rico in 1979 to reconnect with my
father and meet his side of the family. I am a historian,2 so I learned a little
of the island’s history during that visit. I was struck by the similarities in
xiv p r e fac e

the political trajectories of Puerto Rico and Quebec. Both were societies
twice colonized, once by a mother country that infused its colony with its
culture, its history, and its religion, and a second time by a conquering im-
perial power of different language, religion, and cultural values.
I became interested in the history of religious practice in Puerto Rico by
intellectual accident. After my retirement in 2008, I published a compara-
tive overview of the history of Quebec and Puerto Rican nationalism in the
Revista de ciencias sociales of the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras.3
A colleague who read this article asked me about the similarities and dif-
ferences in the Catholic church’s involvement in politics in both places. My
response was to start looking into the history of the Catholic church in
Puerto Rico with a view to comparing it to that of the church in Quebec.
At the outset, the most visible difference I noted was the growing impor-
tance of Protestantism, particularly Pentecostalism, in twentieth-century
Puerto Rico, which had no equivalent in Quebec. As I read about popular
religious practices, about the Catholic church’s precarious situation in
Puerto Rico, and about the many other forms of religious practices on the
island, the idea for this book took shape.
Before we proceed, I must spell out what I understand by “religion” and
“religious practices.” There is no accepted definition of religion,4 and this
is not the place for an extended debate. I take religion to be a collective set
of beliefs about the supernatural origins of the world and about rules of
conduct within human groups that allow for their cohesion and survival,
based on belief in life in the hereafter. I consider this definition broad
enough to encompass at once the Taíno worldview and those held by
Freemasons and Unitarians as well as Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and
Muslims, all of whom are present in contemporary Puerto Rico.
Long before print capitalism constituted nations as imagined commu-
nities,5 religion provided real communities of the soul. Besides individual
belief and faith, religion also encompasses individual and collective prac-
tices, which may be prescribed and regulated by organizations such as
clergy or parochial assemblies, or more loosely by social rituals that serve
to transmit knowledge of human, natural, or supernatural behaviour. In
Puerto Rico, these practices range from formal ceremonies of baptism in
various Christian denominations, which bring an individual into a com-
munity of believers, to commonplace vernacular expressions such as “¡Ay
p r e fac e xv

bendito!” (“Aw man,” or “Oh my God”) and the well-known celebrations

of parishes’ fiestas patronales (saints’ feast days), which incorporate both
religious and festive activities of sociability. From a sociological point of
view, then, religion is an activity of community bonding and mutual help.
This is the first synthesis of the history of religion in Puerto Rico. Despite
religion’s age-old importance in Puerto Rican daily life, it hardly figures
in the major textbooks on the island’s history.6 So I offer this book as an
overview, based on the vast scholarly production on religious structures
and practices in Puerto Rico. This production has come from historians,
anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, and assorted other scholars
from Puerto Rico and from elsewhere, written sometimes from a perspec-
tive critical of religion, sometimes in an apologetic vein. I try to avoid either
position. As well, I try to see the subject within the larger context of Latin
American religious history, with which it shares the features of a Catholic
hierarchical structure, but with different forms of state interference in re-
ligious affairs. Protestantism’s larger place on the island than most else-
where in Latin America also sets it apart.7
Of necessity, I have not attempted archival research, although I rely on
some printed primary sources. During my yearly winter stays in Puerto
Rico since 2009, I have done library research in San Juan’s academic insti-
tutions, conducted several interviews, and visited historical sites of popular
religious ceremonies, including the shrines to Our Lady of Monserrate at
Hormigueros and to the Virgen del Pozo at Sabana Grande, the Taíno cer-
emonial park at Caguana, near Utuado, and the Jacaná native archaeolog-
ical site near Ponce (see figure 0.1).
I have tried as much as possible to consider informal as well as formal forms
of religious practices. Informal practices occur mainly within formal struc-
tures that encourage, allow, or restrict such practices. Because of the dearth
of sources on religious practice before the nineteenth century, the first
chapters deal more with structures than I would like, but the book tries to
include as wide a variety of religious behaviour as possible.
Of necessity also, this short book offers generalizations about religious
behaviour, but, as anthropologist Juan F. Caraballo Resto has reminded
me,8 members of each religious community vary in the extent of reli-
gious practice and in the roles of faith and social standing as reasons for
belonging. Within Catholic communities, for instance, one can find the
Figure 0.1 Puerto Rico municipalities.
p r e fac e xvii

profoundly devout as well as those who attend church because it is the

norm in their social circles. In the Jewish and Muslim communities also,
there are those who regularly attend the synagogue or the mosque, and
those who strongly identify as Jews or Muslims but seldom take part in
their community’s religious rituals.
The book begins with the religious beliefs of the Taíno natives who pop-
ulated the island when explorers from Spain set foot on it. It examines the
Taíno creation myth, the depth of symbolic meanings in their cosmology,
their binary concept of the world and society, physical manifestations
of the spirit world, the role of religious and secular leaders, and the legacy of
the Taíno worldview.
Chapter 2 offers an overview of the Catholic church in Spain from the
sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Spain provided both the institutional
structure of the church in Puerto Rico and its clerical manpower during
that period. The chapter also outlines the popular religious practices that
Spanish settlers would bring to Puerto Rico.
Chapter 3 sketches how the island’s Catholic church established its in-
stitutions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, noting the small
numbers and the uneven quality of its clergymen, the physical distance
between priests and the laity in the interior of the island, and the laity’s
greater reliance on itself than on the institutional church to satisfy its spir-
itual needs.
Chapter 4 traces the extension of formal Catholicism on the island in
the early nineteenth century and the imperial context, which pitted metro-
politan Spain against the criollos’ (native-born) desires for autonomy. The
metropolis suspected criollo priests of disloyalty, so replaced most of them
with Spaniards. This increased the social distance between clergy and laity
and left room for the latter to continue the popular religious practices of
its forebears.
During the last third of the nineteenth century, the Catholic church
faced challenges that would weaken it before the island’s conquest by the
United States. Chapter 5 shows how the church’s institutional foundations
were shaken by changes to the church’s status in Spain and by the poor
quality of Spanish priests on the island. Spanish migrants to the island
continued to bring with them metropolitan popular religious practices.
This period witnessed the formation of the first Protestant congregations
xviii p r e fac e

in Puerto Rico, as well as the increasing public presence of Freemasonry,

spiritism, and its local folk variant, espiritismo, as forms of community-
based belief systems.
Puerto Rico’s Catholic church was further weakened by the US conquest
of the island in 1898. Chapter 6 shows how the church lost its status as an
institution of the state, its right to teach religion in public schools, and most
of its Spanish-speaking clergymen, who were replaced principally by Amer-
icans, further distancing the church from its Puerto Rican flock, while the
island’s new administration favoured Protestantism. Catholicism contin-
ued to be challenged by spiritism, whose practitioners sometimes claimed
to be Catholics as well. Local communities saw the emergence of female
and male lay preachers who called for a rejuvenation of faith and religious
behaviour, filling the spiritual void created by the church’s faint presence.
Chapter 7 traces the institutional arrival of Protestantism on the island
in the first half of the twentieth century, outlining the appeal of more
community-based forms of religious structures. This was particularly
true of Pentecostal communities from the 1930s onward, as they rested
on an egalitarian relationship among members, personal involvement in
the supernatural, and a strong sense of belonging, the price of which was
exemplary behaviour that differentiated these groups from the broader
island population.
Chapter 8 examines the Catholic church’s travails in the second third
of the twentieth century, as the church Americanized while Puerto Rican
cultural nationalism began to rise. Popular Catholic religious practices
persisted, mostly outside the purview of the church, which increasingly
opposed the island’s popular governor, Luis Muñoz Marín (in office
1949–65), and the Catholic political party failed dismally in the 1960s. The
appearance of liberation theology challenged the church’s ingrained con-
servatism, which ultimately prevailed.
Chapter 9 illustrates the growing diversity of religious practice today
by describing the continuing appeal of evangelical Protestantism and the
creation of Jewish and Muslim communities.
The last chapter returns to the theme of non-institutional forms of re-
ligious practice, exploring the persistence of popular Christianity and the
various forms of faith healing in the late twentieth century.
p r e fac e xix

As the Conclusion notes, the practice of religion in Puerto Rico will con-
tinue to evolve with the broad variety of communities of the soul that in-
habit the island. It will remain a vital component of puertorriqueñidad.
The present synthesis is not as comprehensive as I would like. For in-
stance, I am well aware of the sizable migration of Puerto Ricans to the US
mainland since 1945 and of the frequent vayven (comings and goings) be-
tween the island and the mainland and of the resulting close family ties,
but I have not attempted to inquire into the Puerto Rican communities of
the soul on the US mainland and their interactions with the island, as their
situation depended on their size, their age, their location, and their relations
with other Spanish- and English-speaking communities. These contexts
were different in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illi-
nois, Pennsylvania, California, Florida, and elsewhere on the mainland, so
generalizations would be a challenge. The fraught relations between Puerto
Rican Catholics and the church hierarchy in New York City, for example,
would be difficult to summarize.9
Another topic not discussed at any length below is Afro-Caribbean re-
ligious practices on the island. Before the arrival of Cuban immigrants in
the 1960s, these cannot be documented, attests Rafael López Valdés, the au-
thority on the history of African institutions in the Spanish Caribbean.10
There are a few short mentions of such practices in official government and
ecclesiastical documents, and I make brief reference to them. Dealing with
the post-1960 links between practices of santería on the island and the
mainland would have required inquiring further into the role of Cuban
migrants to the island and to the mainland and their own vayven. I had
decided at the outset of my research that I would focus on the island society,
notwithstanding the importance of circular migration between the island
and the US mainland.
I have found very little scholarly production on the history of “historical”
Protestant denominations in the period after 1945, so this topic also lacks
any treatment.
Despite these shortcomings, I hope the book gives readers an appetite
for learning more about the history of religion on the island of Puerto Rico.
 1


Acknowledgments

My colleague Fernande Roy, of the History Department at the Université

du Québec à Montréal, was the person who inquired over ten years ago
about the role of the Catholic church in Puerto Rican politics, after she had
read my article comparing Quebec and Puerto Rico published in the Revista
de Ciencias Sociales. Her question led to my broader investigation of the
history of religion on the island. I would like to thank her again for her in-
terest in my work.
I must express gratitude for the help I have received throughout this pro-
ject. I want to thank first of all anthropologist Jorge Duany, now of Florida
International University, who introduced me to Puerto Rican social-science
scholarship when he was still at the Río Piedras campus of the University
of Puerto Rico, and whose extensive 1998 review of scholarly production
on popular religiosity on the island was a welcome starting point for much
of my investigation. Professor Duany also put me in contact with sociologist
Juan Manuel Carrión, with whom I shared an interest in nationalism, and
who was kind enough to publish my comparative article on Quebec and
Puerto Rico in the Revista de Ciencias Sociales. Professor Carrión also shared
some observations on contemporary Puerto Rico. My gratitude as well to
Professor Samuel Silva Gotay, whose scholarly work I have much relied on,
xxii acknowled g ments

and whose gracious company I was fortunate to enjoy. Professor Humberto

García Muñiz, of the University of Puerto Rico’s Institute of Caribbean
Studies in Río Piedras, provided a welcoming environment and beneficial
advice. My fellow historian and Aguadillana relative, Haydée E. Reichard
de Cancio, PhD, who has written broadly on the theme of religion in Puerto
Rican history, was generous with her research and advice on this project.
Several persons graciously gave me interviews about their communities
or about their research into religious practice in Puerto Rico. For granting
me interviews I wish to thank Diego Mendelbaum, spiritual leader of the
conservative Shaare Zedek synagogue, Norman Patz, visiting rabbi at
the Beth Shalom synagogue, Mendel Zarchi, rabbi at the Rohr Shabad-
Lubovitch synagogue, Imam Ibrahim Abusalem, of the Islamic Center in
Río Piedras, Imam Yunus Fasasi, of the Vega Alta mosque, Imam Nabil El
Fallah of the Montehiedra mosque, the late Jesuit historian Fernando Picó,
who shared with me his thoughts on the place of religion in the island’s
historiography, and anthropologist Juan F. Caraballo Resto, of the Cayey
campus of the University of Puerto Rico and of the Protestant Theological
Seminary in Río Piedras, who allowed me to benefit from his extensive
and considered knowledge of Muslim communities.
I also want to thank the affable administration and staff of the libraries
on the Río Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico for giving me
access to their collections, and the interlibrary loan services at the Univer-
sité du Québec à Montréal for their rapid answers to my requests. I also
thank McGill University in Montreal, the Centro de estudios avanzados
de Puerto Rico y el Caribe in Old San Juan, and the Seminario Evangélico de
Puerto Rico in Río Piedras for the use of their libraries. To the anonymous
members of various religious communities on the island, to the residents
of Isla Verde who have listened to my musings about this project, to my
Puerto Rican relatives, and to my immediate family, who have joined me
for the research time I spent on the island, I want to express my profound
gratitude. I also thank the two anonymous readers who assessed the
manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press: their insightful com-
ments and their valuable suggestions improved the book. The guidance of
my copy editor, John Parry, and of the editorial staff at the press helped
shape the final product. The errors contained in this work remain, of
course, solely my responsibility.
Communities of the Soul
 1


Life and Religion among the Taíno

Each year, in November, the town of Jayuya, in the mountainous centre of

the island, holds the National Indigenous Festival to celebrate its Taíno1
roots. Among the festivities is a pageant featuring Taíno princesses, the
woman and girl who most look Taíno in features and costumes. The fact
that no one has any idea of what a Taíno costume looked like – it is sup-
posed that the women wore only a loincloth – is of no consequence. Tra-
dition is invented to suit contemporary needs.2 There is a lot of room for
invention, as little is known about the Taíno at the time of their encounter
with Europeans in 1493. Within two decades Taíno society was dissolved by
war and disease and left little besides place names, archaeological sites, arte-
facts, and mitochondrial dna.3 These are found on the island and through-
out the Greater Antilles, which include Cuba and Hispaniola (Haiti and the
Dominican Republic).
In Puerto Rico the major sites of Taíno archaeology are the Taíno Cer-
emonial Center in Caguana, near Utuado in central Puerto Rico, and the
Tibes Indigenous Ceremonial Center just north of Ponce on the south side
of the island, an archaeological site displaying layers that reflect successive
Indigenous populations since about the time of Christ and first occupied
by the Taíno about 1000 ad.4
4 communities of the soul

The main ethnographical sources on native religion date from the first
contacts between Spaniards and Taíno. Thy are the notes made by the Cata-
lan friar Ramón Pané, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his
second expedition to America (1493–96), and who was charged with living
among the Taíno and learning their language, which he did from 1493 to
1498, but not living in a Taíno territory.5 Pané has been called the first ethno-
grapher. His original notes, written probably in a Catalan-affected Spanish,
have not survived; what remains is an Italian translation included in a his-
tory of Christopher Columbus in 1676 by his son Fernando, and this trans-
lation has been translated back into Spanish, then into English and French.
It is from these archaeological and ethnographic sources, then, that
scholars have attempted to draw sketches of Taíno society, culture, and re-
ligion. Both types of sources are of course contentious, and at times suspect.
The archaeological record is often interpreted as having religious signifi-
cation, particularly when there is no obvious secular explanation for the
artefacts. But a distinction between the sacred and the secular would be
foreign to the Taíno. As for Pané’s notes, we should read them with Pané’s
medieval Catholic worldview and intended audience in mind; he casts them
in the “compare and contrast” mode vis-à-vis his own culture, in order to
make himself understood by his readers, notably the Spanish monarchs.
The evidence is malleable and is often read in different ways by different
scholars. I have relied on the interpretations that seem the most convincing
to me. For instance, the archaeological reading of the petroglyphs at the
Caguana Ceremonial Court suggests that Pané’s understanding of religious
petroglyphs is “applicable in this case.”6
One of the functions of religion is to provide an understanding of the
world and of one’s place in it. Religions thus have creation myths, stories
that account for the origins of the physical world, of humans – meaning
the community that holds the creation myth – and the supernatural. A lit-
eral reading of the Bible, for instance, accounts for the creation of the world
by God in six days. But it does not explain how God himself (or herself)
came to be. Even contemporary science, in the form of the big bang theory,
has no explanation for what was before the big bang, or indeed if time ex-
isted before it. It is not unusual for creation myths not to have logical co-
herence in their literal meanings. They are metaphorical stories. This was
the case for the Taíno.
Life and Religion among the Taíno 5

a sing le cosmolo g y

Taíno religion was intimately linked to the Taíno’s view of the world. Like
other native societies in the Americas, the Taíno considered all of nature to
be endowed with human-like features.7 Everything – humans, rocks, trees,
the sea, animals, even the weather – could possess a soul. The term “ani-
mism” (from the Latin anima, or soul) has been used to characterize this
worldview. These souls have characteristics of personhood, characteristics
that could be divided and shared through “social relations and interactions
with other human and nonhuman beings, animals, spiritual and physical
things, even landscapes.”8 Souls therefore could communicate with and in-
fluence one another, connected “by elaborate manipulation of symbols,” as
a noted scholar of Taíno religion, Antonio M. Stevens Arroyo, has shown.9

The Origins of the World

Unlike the creation stories told by the Bible or the big bang theory, Taíno
stories imply an already-existing world. It is unclear whether the Taíno could
not conceive of the world not existing or whether Pané did not “push” his
respondents further on the issue, since he himself believed that God existed
from all eternity. Stevens Arroyo suggests that “Taíno social perception was
accomplished without historical consciousness.”10
In Taíno mythology the world was created by the transformation of fa-
miliar entities. Its account of creation tells of a man named Yaya – translated
as “Supreme Spirit” – who had a son, Yayael, whom he killed because the
son wanted to slay the father. Yaya put his son’s bones in a gourd, which he
hung from the roof of his house. One day the father wanted to see his son
and asked his wife to take down the gourd and open it. When the gourd
opened, “many fish, large and small, emerged from it. Whereby, seeing that
those bones had been changed into fish, they resolved to eat them.” Later
the same gourd, being dropped to the ground, produced the oceans as well
as more fish.11
This story, as anthropologists have pointed out, tells many things at once:
the importance of the oceans and rivers as a source of food; the gourd, as
“uterine symbol, where the bones (as a seminal force) mixed with the ‘am-
niotic’ fluid gestated life; upon overturning the calabash, the amniotic fluid
6 communities of the soul

gushed out with fish, thus populating the oceans and rivers.” But it also lays
down some cultural rules, suggests archaeologist José R. Oliver: “(1) that
sons, competitors of the chief/father, have to leave the natal home and es-
tablish their own house; and (2) that upon death, selected bones of the de-
ceased will be consumed by the surviving relatives as a proper or ideal
funerary ritual.”12 So Taíno myths can and should be read at many levels
to fully understand them.
This mechanism of transformation of objects underlying the Yaya story
also applied to humans. In another part of the creation myth, a man named
Mácacoel was entrusted with watching over the primaeval cave in which
the Taíno lived, so that he would see “where he would send or distribute
the people.” Mácacoel failed to return to the cave before sunrise as he was
supposed to and was seized by the sun and turned into a stone. The sun
captured others and changed them into trees.13 As for the sun and the
moon, they also came from “from a cave located in the country of a cacique
[chief] named Mautiatihuel,” whose name could be translated as “Lord of
the Region of the Dawn.”14

A Binary World

The Taíno view of the world is more interesting than its view of creation.
For the Taíno, the world was made of opposites that had to be reconciled.
Day and night, sun and moon, man and woman, natural and supernatural,
rain and drought, land and sea, but also “appearance and illusion, the con-
scious and the unconscious, the lawful and the lawless, the regulated and
the spontaneous, the expected and the unpredictable … each was defined
by its opposite. Reality consisted in reconciling the two.”15
This binary reality could be acted upon by the cemí represented in var-
ious artefacts, including the petroglyphs that have survived in Taíno cere-
monial centres and elsewhere. José R. Oliver defines the cemí not as an
object but as a “numinous power, a driving or vital force that compels ac-
tion; it is the power to cause, to effect, and also denotes a condition or state
of being.”16 For example, the Taíno accounted for the creation of wooden
cemís by trees moving their roots and calling for a behique, or shaman, to
fashion a cemí from the wood of the tree.17 Cemís could have good or evil
effects and could be treated as living beings. Pané tells the following story:
Life and Religion among the Taíno 7

Figure 1.1 Taíno cemí petroglyphs, Caguana, January 2012.

[The Taíno said] the zemi [cemí] they called Vaybrama … had been
burned in a war they had waged, and when they washed him with the
juice of the root we said above was called yuca [cassava], from which
they made cassava bread, he grew arms, and his eyes reappeared, and
his body grew; and because yuca or the aforesaid root was very small
in those days, after they washed him with yuca water, it was hence-
forth, as it now is, fat and very large. This zemi brought diseases to men,
according to their belief, for which they sought the help of the priests
or behiques, who were their prophets and theologians as has been said;
these priests would respond that the disease had befallen them because
they had been negligent or forgetful in bringing cassava bread and
yams and other things to eat to the ministers who swept and cleaned
the house or hermitage of Vaybrama, good zemi, and that he had told
him so.18

The story is telling on many levels besides the curative powers of the yuca
plant, which was central to Taíno diet. The dualism of the Taíno world is
readily apparent. The Vaybrama cemí was evil, but needed protection; but
8 communities of the soul

it could also be a “good zemi” if cared for properly by its “ministers” – their
self-serving purpose obvious in their explanation of disease. The yuca be-
came “fat and very large” after having treated the Vaybrama cemí, which
attests to this cemí’s power. This cemí has been identified on the Jacaná site,
near the Tibes site, north of Ponce.19
The Taíno’s binary view of nature has been emphasized at length by
Stevens Arroyo in Cave of the Jagua.20 He has distributed the various Taíno
cemís into two four-by-four tables, the first one with rows for the mascu-
line and “twins generated from the masculine,” and a parallel one with
rows for the feminine and “twins generated from the feminine.” The
columns represent the “Order of Fruitfulness” and the “Order of Inver-
sion.” The spirits of fruitfulness “bring plant and food life, provide water
for drinking and irrigation, and insure family fertility. On the other side
are the unpredictable spirits who destroy this order. Death, sexual promis-
cuity, the intrusion of dead spirits into the affairs of the living, and the ter-
rible hurricanes are powerful manifestations of numinous power. But
unlike the Spirits of Fruitfulness, the unpredictable spirits serve to invert
rather than to establish what is ordinary.”21 So, as examples of this binary
classification, the male Lord of the yuca plant, Yucahu, represents fruitful
strength, and his feminine counterpart, Attabeira, embodies the fertilizing
powers of water; the feminine opposite of Attabeira is Guabancex, the
power of the wind and of the hurricane, or the “untamed” and “indomitable”
in the feminine nature, while the masculine in the Order of Inversion rep-
resents death.22

Cemís and Sacred Grounds

The archaeological evidence found at the Jacaná site, one of many Taíno
sacred grounds in Puerto Rico, and its layout as well as its contents are con-
gruent with what textual evidence of Taíno celebrations tells us. Archaeol-
ogist José R. Oliver notes the “structural correspondence” between the cemís
on Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) described
by Fra Ramón Pané, and those that may be observed today at Caguana, so
that he “reads” the Puerto Rican cemís from their description in Pané’s
text.23 Cemís were at the centre of Taíno religious experience. They could
be found in private homes and in the homes of the shamans, but the most
Life and Religion among the Taíno 9

visible collections of cemís are on the sacred grounds such as Jacaná and
Tibes, and Caguana. Games and religious ceremonies were held on these
sites’ “ball courts”; their edges are often delimited by rows of boulders, some
of which represent cemís. For instance, in Caguana one may observe various
representations of female fertility figures24 (see figure 1.1).
Taíno society, like other American native societies, or our own contem-
porary society for that matter, lived a life imbued with symbolism. The
structure of Taíno families required balance of gender and age. Like their
gods, members of a Taíno family had opposite but complementary roles.
The attribution of tasks within a family was gendered: “It was men who
cleared the fields and women who tended the gardens; and it was women
who made the nets and men who used them to capture fishes.”25 This im-
plies that the care of children rested with women and thus constrained their
work-related mobility. The assignment of work tasks embodied the Taíno’s
binary view of the world: their gods, like them, were gendered and had
gender-specific roles in the Taíno cosmology.
Children, too, had symbolic meaning. They represented life and conti-
nuity, and the family’s bonds with both past – their parents’ lineage – and
the future, through their eventual spouses. Children were a gift from their
gods: cemís could bring “good fortune in childbirth.” But children were ex-
cluded from the shamanic ceremonies to cure the ill, so that they would
not disturb the proceedings.26

behiques and caciques

Taíno society had two intertwined structures of social power and control.
On the religious level, the behique, or shaman, was the intermediary be-
tween the Taíno and the supernatural, embodied in nature and in cemís.
Since everyday life was conceived as the interaction between natural and
supernatural, any malfunction, such as disease – physical or spiritual –
could be addressed by invoking the supernatural. This was the role of the
behique. Pané recounts the curing ceremonies performed by the behiques,
whom he called “physicians.” Before entering the house of the ill, the be-
hique rubbed his face with black soot “so as to make the sick man believe
whatever they wish about his illness.” The behique hid a small amount of
stones, bones, or meat in his mouth, then entered the ill person’s house,
10 communities of the soul

chewed on some herbs to induce vomiting, chanted, then pulled on the pa-
tient’s leg or sucked on his body to remove the evil, then blew the evil out
of the house and spat out what he had in his mouth, explaining that a cemí
had put it inside the ill person “because you did not pray to him or you did
not build him some temple, or you did not give him some land.” The be-
hique’s cure did not always work. When it failed, the dead patient’s relatives
had a ritual to find out from the dead whether the behique was responsible
for the death; if the dead person considered the behique guilty, then the
family gave the behique a beating, which, like the healing ceremony itself,
was a symbolic ritual.27
On the political and military level, it was the cacique, or chief, who led
Taíno society. He ruled by “charisma and entrepreneurship” and by his abil-
ity to convince his people to follow the course of action he advocated.28
This involved ritualistic practices similar to those of the behique. In council
meetings where decisions were taken, the cacique would snuff cohoba, a
powder ground from the hallucinogenic seeds of the cohóbana tree, enter-
ing into a trance that connected him with the cemís in order to see into the
future.29 Like the behiques, the caciques were entrusted with the safekeep-
ing of the cemís, which gave them power.

the end of the taíno?

As we saw above, Taíno society disintegrated within thirty years of the arrival
of the Spaniards in Puerto Rico in 1493. Smallpox, famine, war, and forced
labour accounted for the “precipitous” decline, from between 30,000 and
60,000 at contact. By the time of the first census in 1530, fewer than 1,200
natives were counted, most of them captured on other islands and brought
over as slaves.30 Some Taíno had fled to neighbouring islands, then returned
and settled in the hills of Añasco and San Germán, in the west, where, ac-
cording to the eighteenth-century chronicler Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra, a Bene-
dictine monk, they began to intermingle with the descendants of Spaniards
and Africans on the island only in the early eighteenth century.31 In this way,
Taíno genes have entered into the island’s broad gene pool. Some researchers
have claimed that present-day Puerto Ricans have inherited 61 per cent of
their mitochondrial (female-transmitted) genes from the Taíno. This figure
Life and Religion among the Taíno 11

is highly debated, and other estimates suggest about 18 per cent for the “av-
erage” Puerto Rican. A recent study has shown links between ancient Taíno
mitochondrial dna, extracted from a female’s tooth, and dna of today’s is-
landers.32 Very little male Taíno dna remains among Puerto Ricans. Euro-
pean and African contributions to the present-day gene pool coexist with
Taíno. Of course, there is no “average” Puerto Rican, so these figures do not
apply directly to individuals, and it is hard to link cultural practices to dna
composition. It is easy for anyone to claim Taíno ancestry and take pride in
it, as do the proponents of Taíno “revivalism.”33
Of greater interest for our purpose is the import of Taíno religious beliefs
and practices to the religious history of Puerto Rico. Stevens Arroyo has ar-
gued that Taíno religion, because of its “predilection for the unconscious
over the phenomenal world,” “endowed the adherents with a marvellous ca-
pacity to merge their beliefs with those of other religions.” The Taíno could
incorporate Christian components into their religious practices and be-
liefs.34 Some Taíno religious entities could correspond to the Christian Holy
Trinity, the Virgin Mary, or the Devil. Catholic icons could be understood
as having the same role and power as native cemís.35 But the Spaniards re-
pressed the Taíno cohoba ritual, which put its practitioners in a “trance” that
enabled them to predict the future and thus make decisions for their com-
munity, because it was “the key institution of governance, of political and
military decision making.”36 The encounter of Taíno and Catholic religious
practices was the beginning of Puerto Rican religious syncretism, the un-
conscious or deliberate amalgamation of different religious traditions.
Syncretism was not a one-way street: the popular veneration of Catholic re-
ligious images and the imploring of favours from the Virgin Mary and from
the saints, such as the “Prayer to Win the Lottery,”37 frowned on by Catholic
theology, may be said to resemble the Taíno cult of the cemís. And, of course,
the Taíno view of nature may be said to influence contemporary environ-
mentalism. In Puerto Rican society today, Taíno religion and its successors
had similar strategies for dealing with supernatural forces.
 2


The Catholic Church in Spain,

16th–18th Centuries

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Taíno society had religious and
political structures grounded in a worldview that united natural and su-
pernatural. Religious and political structures were vested in the behique
and the cacique, who exercised their power through ceremonies of con-
sultation with the spirits, but with the implicit consent of their fellow
Taíno. How different was sixteenth-century Spain? They look quite dif-
ferent, Spanish political and religious structures being much more rigid
and compelling than their Taíno equivalent. Spanish forms of governance
imposed in the New World would be incomprehensible to the native
populations. Institutional forms of political and religious power – the
state (monarchy) and the church, respectively, with their corporate rules
and memory embedded in each bureaucracy – were alien to the oral
social memory of the Taíno.
But perhaps sixteenth-century Spain appears as alien to our twenty-first-
century perspective as to the Taíno. It is accepted in Canada and the United
States that church and state should be separate, that belonging to a church
is an individual choice, but following the rule of law imposed by the state
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 13

is a citizen’s basic obligation. In Spain, the rule of religion was as binding

as the rule of the state. As with the caciques1 in Taíno society, the political
power of the Spanish monarchy claimed to derive from divine – supernat-
ural – authority. Catholicism was the state religion, so the state controlled
the Catholic hierarchy and enforced the practice of religion through various
forms of coercion, up to and including torture and execution. However,
the Catholic hierarchy held some moral sway over the monarchy, and the
king’s subjects sometimes had their own views on how to practise religion.
The neat order of authority in Spanish society did not always apply without
tensions or resistance; but such pushback did not have the same social le-
gitimacy as objections to religious or political authority in Taíno society.
Nevertheless, as the clergy’s sway over the Spanish population varied from
area to area, and as laymen had their own understanding of the power of
God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints, popular religious beliefs and practices were
often at odds with the church’s. Local communities of the soul had their
own dynamics and internal order.

a state re lig ion

Catholicism was the state religion of Spain, and after 1492 the only permit-
ted religion. Spain itself was a creation of the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies, the result of the wedding in 1469 of Ferdinand II of Aragon and
Isabel I of Castile and the annexation of Navarre in 1512. In the sixteenth
century, Spain became a world power as its empire expanded from Europe
to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. It extended its language and its
religion throughout its empire, including Puerto Rico.
The monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile (and then the
two jointly of Spain), and later Charles V and his son Philip II (reigned
1555–98), sought to enforce religious absolutism (absolutismo confesional),
that every Spaniard should be a Roman Catholic.2 This total religious uni-
formity (at least on paper) may be contrasted with the situation in France,
where the Catholic–Protestant wars of religion were ended by the Edict of
Nantes in 1598.
While Spain’s Catholic hierarchy endeavoured to maintain its indepen-
dence from Rome, the church had to support the crown financially and to
bow to its power over the church’s affairs.3 In 1523, King Charles V obtained
14 communities of the soul

from Pope Adrian VI the right to appoint the bishops of his kingdom, but
left the church to run its affairs, as he was mainly absent waging war against
France and the Ottoman Empire.4
The Spanish Catholic church had considerable revenues. These came
from tithe duties, rental of land, and mortgage interest. But seven-ninths
of tithe revenue were turned over to the crown, which could also take
money from bishoprics to pay pensions to “long-serving churchmen” and
received income from other church activities; all of this represented a size-
able portion of the crown’s annual revenue.5 The financial ties between the
church and the state meant that Catholicism was the state religion in prac-
tice as well as in theory.
Church and state sought to make Catholicism as prevalent as possible,
both by expelling non-Catholics perceived as a threat to orthodoxy, and by
attempting to convert those thought amenable.

Reconquest and Expulsions

In 1492, the joint monarchy of Aragon and Castile completed the Recon-
quista – the defeat of the Muslim Moors, who had ruled most of the Iberian
peninsula for nearly eight hundred years, tolerating, even protecting Chris-
tians and Jews. It now ordered the Jews of the kingdom to convert to Chris-
tianity or be expelled. This completed a series of expulsions of Jews ordered
by the Catholic Inquisition in Andalusia in 1483 and in Aragon three years
later. Many Jews decided on outward conversion, and the exodus was much
smaller than earlier studies have suggested. Discrimination, enforced seg-
regation, confinement to ghettos, and heavy taxation had preceded these
measures, all part of the monarchy’s effort to enforce Catholic orthodoxy.
The imposition of religious uniformity continued ten years later when
Queen Isabel ordered the expulsion of the Moors (Muslims) of Castile and
León, “since there is much danger in the communication of the said Moors
of our kingdom with the newly converted [who] may be drawn and in-
duced to leave our faith and to return to their original errors … as already
by experience has been seen in some of this kingdom and outside of it,”
wrote the queen.6 The remaining Moors, many of them highly skilled, pro-
vided a valuable workforce, but were considered a potential “fifth column”
for an eventual Turkish attack on Spain.
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 15

The religious “homogenization” of Spain continued further a century

later, in 1609, when Philip III ordered deportation of Muslims who refused
to be baptized. The church justified the expulsion on religious grounds, be-
cause of “the dishonour suffered by true Christians through their forced
coexistence with infidels and the need to placate God for having tolerated
non-believers for so long.”7
The Catholic hierarchy also sought to expose and expunge from its ranks
any cleric suspected of holding Protestant leanings. Lutherans and Calvinists
were hounded, even the learned Dominican Bartolomé Carranza, named
archbishop of Toledo in 1658, whose trial for heresy lasted from 1561 to 1576.
In some cases, exposed Protestants were burned at the stake, as happened in
Valladolid and Seville in the late 1550s. There were just enough Protestants
to inspire fear among Spaniards, and their presence had a paradoxical effect.
“The Inquisition used the spectre of Lutheran heresy, rather than the real ex-
istence of it, to instil fear into the Spanish people and to reinforce its ideo-
logical control over them. The calculated campaign directed by the Holy
Office in 1555–65, which reached its climax in the Valladolid and Seville autos-
da-fé (burning people alive) of 1559–60, successfully prevented Protestantism
from establishing a native root in Spain. As a result, it never posed a major
threat to the religious stability of the Spanish kingdoms.”8

convert ing the indigenous pe oples

Expulsion was a simplistic solution to an old problem that the Catholic

church in Spain had not effectively confronted: the evangelization of its
non-Christian minorities. For centuries, Jews and Muslims had converted
to Catholicism, but the authenticity of their conversion was often put in
question. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition had been set up in 1480 to inves-
tigate Jewish conversos, or converts, suspected of reverting to the Jewish
faith. In the sixteenth century, similar pressure was applied to the Muslims,
who were numerous in the recently reconquered kingdom of Grenada, and
who resisted, sometimes with violence, the pressure to convert. In all, nearly
300,000 moriscos, or Muslims supposedly converted to Christianity, were
expelled between 1609 and 1611. “By forcing Jews and Moors to accept Chris-
tian baptism rather than integrating them via a full programme of instruc-
tion, the crown ensured that they would long remain reluctant converts.”9
16 communities of the soul

Given the Spanish crown’s determination to turn Spain into a homoge-

neous Catholic kingdom, it is not surprising that the same determination
would apply to the New World. Spain had begun its extraterritorial expan-
sion in the Canary Islands, in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa, in 1341.
“By 1492 Spain had spent more than a hundred years acquiring island
possessions both in the Mediterranean (Balearic Islands) and the Atlantic
(Canary Islands),” notes Stevens Arroyo. It had used settlement, military
action, and the confinement of local populations into repartimientos – land
and population granted as spoils of war – to extend its domination of the
Canary Islands. The Spanish monarchy outlawed enslaving the Islands’
natives and fostered their conversion, the justification used for its conquest
of the islands. But conversion met resistance, as it would in the Caribbean,
where Taíno society, ravaged by European diseases, would dissolve before
conversion could take place.10
In 1508, the pope granted the Spanish crown complete control over the
church in America, even over papal bulls and edicts. “In the Americas, it
was the Spanish monarchy rather than the papacy that acted as the supreme
head of the Catholic Church.”11 There was a sustained debate in Spain,
within both church and state, about how to evangelize the “Indians” and
the need to “civilize” them before they could be truly converted to Chris-
tianity. The use of force and the “reduction” of natives to communities
under religious and military control often encountered criticism and re-
sistance from the natives’ defenders, since it benefited the Spanish landown-
ing elite in the colonies.
On the Sunday before Christmas 1511, at the beginning of Spanish rule
in the Caribbean, the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos, in a ser-
mon in the church of Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, accused
the parishioners of living in mortal sin because of the cruelty and tyranny
they inflicted upon the native peoples. He repeated his accusations the fol-
lowing week, adding that such sinners would no longer be heard in con-
fession or given communion. His parishioners complained all the way to
the king, who ordered the governor to reason with Montesinos. A more
direct reproach was sent by the Dominican superior in Spain to the Do-
minican provincial in Hispaniola, ordering the end of such “scandalous
doctrine.” The issue led to the “first comprehensive code of Indian legisla-
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 17

tion,” the Laws of Burgos, drafted by a committee of theologians and ju-

rists; it imposed Catholicism but set out regulations against ill treatment.12
The best known of the church’s defenders of the American natives against
exploitation, enslavement, and enforced conversion was Bartolomé de las
Casas. One of the first Spanish colonizers of Hispaniola in 1502, Las Casas
was a priest, a landowner, and a slave owner. He had heard Montesinos’s
sermon and had been unmoved by it. But in 1514 he was convinced by a
reading of Ecclesiastes that enslaving the natives was illegal and a great sin.13
He gave up his own slaves and began a life-long fight to convince the Span-
ish monarchy of his views. He had some success, being named protector of
the Indians, but was embroiled in an extended theological debate with other
clerics, who argued that the natives were of inferior stock and had to be
pacified and converted forcefully. This debate raised the issue of Spain’s
right to colonize America and the right to exploit native people and re-
sources, so it was understandably heated and prolonged.14
Whether by slow, peaceful, individual conversion or by quick, mass bap-
tisms, the Spanish missionaries in the New World attempted to inculcate
Catholic religious practices among the natives. The church sent members
of the regular clergy (members of a religious order), such as Franciscans,
Dominicans, and Jesuits, to evangelize the natives in the Caribbean and on
the American continent. The regular orders had the best-educated priests
that could be deployed in the Spanish New World. But their views on the
local population, and how to spread the Catholic faith, could differ sub-
stantially. A Franciscan monk, Geronimo de Mendieta, and others in his
order were ready to accept “the moderate use of coercion” in the pursuit
of conversion, while Dominican theologians “usually minimized and often
repudiated the principle of force.” Mendieta considered the Spanish monar-
chy mandated by God to “convert all of mankind on the eve of the Last
Judgment.” He and others recognized that “the Indians were defenseless in
contact with the Spaniards.”15
The missionaries attempted to replace the natives’ rituals – for example,
the veneration of ancestral idols – with Christian ones, such as devotions
to saints.16 In Puerto Rico, these efforts had little success. The Taíno
“abandoned Puerto Rico in large numbers rather than submit to Spanish
subjugation.” Those who remained had to accept the invaders’ religion to
18 communities of the soul

avoid forced labour. Taíno society disappeared after the smallpox epidemic
of 1518, even though some of its cultural traits persist in Puerto Rican so-
ciety today.17

catholic clerg y in spain

Catholicism in Puerto Rico arrived both with the regular clergy mission-
aries to the natives and the local Catholic hierarchy, and with the lay
Spaniards who settled on the island. Spanish migrants to Puerto Rico from
the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries had learned Catholic doctrine and
practice from a Spanish clergy whose religious knowledge and behaviour
were patchy and sometimes tenuous. The church’s institutional presence
on the island during the first centuries of colonization is the subject of the
next chapter. Here we explore the evolving situation of the Catholic clergy
in Spain, to reveal the religious environment in which Puerto Rico’s lay
Spanish settlers had grown.
The clergy ran the church’s business unevenly. Bishops, most of whom
had noble blood, sometimes put their lay duties, such as serving the
royal administration, ahead of their clerical ones. “The archbishopric
of Toledo – the highest ecclesiastical office in the Spanish Church – was al-
most exclusively held by an absentee servant of the crown in the early mod-
ern period.” Bishops could be promoted to different sees over time, making
for relatively short periods of administration.18 The size and distribution
of the fifty-five bishoprics and archbishoprics varied widely over the king-
dom. They were “concentrated in northern Castile and Aragon, where the
roots of Christianity ran deepest, and were more thinly spread further
south, where Moorish civilisation had survived the longest. Toledo … was
the largest archdiocese in Europe and the richest after Rome.”19 Differences
between north and south also applied to parishes. Three-quarters of the
twenty thousand parishes of late-sixteenth-century Spain were in northern
Castile – small, and thus poor, often with no resident priest. Conversely, in
the larger parishes of the south, there were so many souls to minister to
that “priests had little real contact with their parishioners.”20
The church accordingly “exercised minimal influence” over the daily lives
of Spaniards, who managed their religious affairs as they saw fit. Religious
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 19

instruction was often lacking and left ample room for “superstition and
ignorance,” particularly in Galicia, the Basque country, and the remote
Canary Islands.21 To counter this ignorance, even among priests, for which
the Council of Trent (1545–63) had mandated reform in clerical education,
twenty seminaries were established in Spain in the second half of the six-
teenth century, and a further eight in the seventeenth.
But this did not entirely solve the problem. “There remained profound
regional variations in the standard of pastoral leadership to be found in
post-Tridentine Spain. According to the findings of a recent study, reform
never touched the clergy of Cantabria, the majority of whom regarded their
office as a means of material gain. In 1580, half the clergy of Oviedo were
still not versed in Latin or able to administer the sacraments … Illiterate
priests could still be found in rural Catalonia at the end of the seventeenth
century. Friars were employed as preachers and confessors in certain areas
to make up for the deficiencies of priests.” Improvements in the training
of priests spread unevenly. “Reform … was essentially an urban phe-
nomenon. At the local community level, ancient religious customs and tra-
ditions were not easily dislodged to make way for a centrally imposed and
directed form of worship and belief. Huge areas of the peninsula remained
beyond the disciplinary reach of reformers.”22
The Spanish clergy was an influential and numerous “social class” with
considerable influence over matters both religious and civil. At the begin-
ning of Philip IV’s reign in 1621, it was estimated that Spain had 70,000 reg-
ular priests and 30,000 seculars, numbers that doubled under his reign.
Another estimate gives 200,000 priests at the beginning of the seventeenth
century. In 1634, there were 9,088 monasteries for men, and the number in-
creased considerably until the king’s death in 1665. Madrid, in particular,
was full of convents. There were too many priests for all of them to have
the vocation of sacrifice or the elevated spirit required by their ministry.
Their moral and intellectual levels were reputed lower than their predeces-
sors’ in the preceding century.23
Spanish clergy was often the source of complaints from bishops. For ex-
ample, many priests were considered ignorant of Latin. Monasteries were
a haven for lazy and ignorant men fleeing from work or military service.
There were often conflicts between religious orders. The Dominicans were
20 communities of the soul

the enemies of the Franciscans and Augustinians. All had a low opinion of
Jesuits. There were also conflicts about symbols of power between the clergy
and representatives of civil authority, as illustrated by disputes over who
would lead public processions.24
Neither was the clergy exempt from sins against its vows of chastity and
poverty. Some members took mistresses, slept with married women, and
perpetrated rape or pederasty. Some also accumulated material possessions,
gambled, engaged in scams or theft, defied authority, and carried on thiev-
ing in gangs.25
Female members of religious orders were also the targets of complaints.
Mundane and frivolous nuns outnumbered the virtuous. All kinds of
social gatherings, including dances and comedy, could take place in the
parlours of convents. But nuns were also victims of sexual exploitation
by monks, such as a certain Capa, found guilty in Toledo of having had
sex with 422 nuns.26
By the mid-eighteenth century, criticism against the ignorance and the
weaknesses of the flesh exhibited by both regular and secular clerics con-
tinued, while popular religious practice remained ritualistic, marked by
profane and “grotesque” public manifestations, the “excessive” adoration
of statues and relics, and the “blind” belief in some miracles.27 The Catholic
hierarchy decried the nighttime parades and festivities that turned religious
occasions into popular manifestations of what they considered debauchery.
These went on anyway.28

re lig ion among the pe ople

The practice of popular religion included individual and collective beliefs

and practices, some of which the Church approved and encouraged, as well
as practices it condemned, such as superstitions and what it defined as sin-
ful behaviour.

Beliefs and Rituals

Religious practices in Spain were not defined exclusively by the Catholic

hierarchy. Local communities insisted on defining their own religious prac-
tices for local purposes – to avert disasters or to improve local conditions,
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 21

for instance – or in memory of past local events. William A. Christian Jr,

has drawn evidence for this from replies to a royal survey of 1575–80 of
towns and villages of New Castile, which asked about “churches, benefices,
relics, hermitages, miracles, feasts, monasteries, and hospitals.” Christian
insisted on the rootedness of collective religious practice in the local com-
munity, whether it be large or small, urban or rural.29
The answers to the survey questionnaire reveal religious beliefs often
permeated with a “bargain with the gods” to obtain favours or to avoid dis-
asters such as droughts or epidemics. This bargain was set out in vows made
not only by individuals but by whole communities, which would then be
bound by the vows. These collective vows could promise abstinence from
meat-eating on the eve of a local holy day, or to hold a feast on the day itself,
or both. They could seek protection from disease, from epidemics, or from
natural disasters involving crops – infestations of grasshoppers, against
which excommunication was practised – or of insects that attacked vines
and forests, or drought.30
Many vows were for pilgrimages to shrines or chapels, or to construct
and maintain a community’s own shrine or chapel. The vows often “built
and almost completely maintained most shrines and chapels, and still do”
in modern-day Spain; they were, and are, “the quintessential institutions
of local religion.”31 In sixteenth-century Spain, the best known of these were
shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura and to the Virgin of
Montserrat in Catalonia. These two forms of Marian devotion became pop-
ular in the New World as well.
Processions were another form of communal “bargain with the gods.”
They could involve carrying saints’ relics or images, or a walk from the com-
munity to the site of a shrine. They were held in the countryside and in
large cities such as Barcelona and Seville to beg an end to droughts.32
Each community of course had its church’s patron saint, and the cele-
bration of the saint’s feast day was a mandatory local holy day. But other
saints could be “active” in the community, when, for instance, disasters
such as pestilence struck. Communities “seem to have considered the saint
on whose day a disaster occurred in some way the source of their misfor-
tune; the saint was thought to be angry and to need placation, or else the
saint was perceived as seeking devotion.” Saints could be angry, but more
often they were appealed to as intercessors. “Just as they paid their lawyers,
22 communities of the soul

sometimes going into debt to do so, villages and towns entailed their re-
sources in the form of future masses, penance, and work time to pay saints
to be their lawyers before God.” But people’s bad behaviour could also
provoke divine anger, and punishment would be meted out by God or his
angels.33 Patron saints were the anchors of the parishes’ communities of
the soul.
As saints could manifest their role, so too could holy images or statues.
Signs, whether from animals or strange lights, would indicate where to wor-
ship images or statues. Signals, such as the different rate of combustion of
candles, were used to select the saints a community should venerate on a
holy day.34
Veneration of saints declined after the sixteenth century, when they
mandated from thirty to forty holy days a year on top of the Sundays and
holy days decreed by dioceses; this amounted to about eighty-five days
a year when work was not allowed, except occasionally for bringing in
crops.35 This was almost one day out of four and had an obvious impact
on productivity.
The increased popularity of Marian devotion in the sixteenth century
compensated for the decline in devotion to saints. Mary was believed to be
the most efficacious intercessor between a community and God. Devotion
to her was encouraged by the clergy, and “most Marian feast days were obli-
gatory.” Shrines to Mary, usually in the countryside, were said to be the site
of many miracles.36
The sixteenth century also witnessed the rise in veneration of Christ,
which would continue to grow till about 1800. This was particularly man-
ifest in the creation of flagellant cofradías (brotherhoods), which became
very popular and would lead processions carrying crosses during Holy
Week.37 Other types of brotherhoods proliferated, especially those devoted
to Mary – estimated to represent one-third of late-eighteenth-century
Spain’s brotherhoods, which totalled over 25,000. These groups offered the
major channel of sociability in Spanish society, especially in rural areas.38

“Superstitions”

Communities’ sharing of religious belief extended beyond the saints,

Mary, or Christ. According to a specialist on Spanish religious life, super-
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 23

stition in Spain in the seventeenth century became so prevalent that he

dubbed it the major “health problem” of the period.39 People believed in
spells, amulets, apparitions, horoscopes, in the spiritual powers of the
planets, or in ghosts that bothered the living in order to obtain favours of
a religious nature.
Some material objects were believed to be endowed with specific magical
powers. For example, the “miraculous” church bells of Velilla, in the
province of Valladolid, would ring by themselves from time to time (twelve
times in the seventeenth century) to foretell of extraordinary events, mostly
unfortunate ones, such as defeat of the Spanish army.40 Relics of the saints,
which were objects of veneration by the church, were also used both by
clergy and by laymen to “ward off storms, as well as to bring the rains and
cure illnesses.”41 These beliefs and practices have obvious similarities to the
Taíno’s, suggesting they answered similar spiritual needs.
The devil was a source of popular superstition. He could cause violent
storms and possess people. The clergy, too, believed in the devil, Satan, and
in his acolytes, Lucifer and Beelzebub. Some possessions by the devil were
deemed “fake” and the clergy had advice on how to distinguish between real
and fake possessions. The devil could be countered by exorcism or by “white”
magic, which one Jesuit publication considered superior to science.42
Belief in witchcraft, another form of the devil’s work, took different
forms and varied in intensity. During the reign of Philip III (1598–1621),
witchcraft was particularly prevalent in the Basque region. Its practices
were different in Castile and Andalucía from those in Navarre. Repression
of it by the burning of witches also varied by region: the regional Inqui-
sition tribunals in Toledo, which included Madrid, and in Córdoba con-
demned witches to physical punishment but did not burn any. Rioja and
Navarre were less clement, and in Aragon and Cataluña, witches were put
in prison, tortured, or put to death by hanging.43 Witches, of course, were
mainly women, many of whom were considered witches because they were
gitanas (gypsies), but widows and prostitutes could also be accused of
being witches.
The ancient belief in the “evil eye” was also common in Spain. The
evil eye could cast spells; those who knew they had such an eye were to
cover it with a patch to avoid inadvertently casting a spell. Some folks
could remove spells with herbs, scents, and complicated ceremonies.
24 communities of the soul

There were also rituals to avoid bad outcomes or to obtain good ones,
such as getting rid of pain, winning at games of luck, or finding hidden
treasures.44 These practices, and their practitioners, recall the role and
actions of the Taíno behique.

“Sinful” Behaviour

Before the Council of Trent (1545–63), the knowledge and practice of the
basic tenets of Catholicism were very unevenly held among the Spanish
population. Prayers, for instance, were taught by parish priests in Latin,
which even some of the priests had trouble understanding. Sunday Mass,
of course, was said in Latin, which precious few in attendance could fol-
low. Its celebration was, for the community, a spectacle in which it took
little part. Attending church on Sundays was more a social than a religious
occasion, as the bishop of Mallorca ruefully noted in 1570: “His parish-
ioners came to Mass halfway through and left before it was finished, talk-
ing and discussing their affairs throughout.” He was not alone: in Oviedo,
for instance, “Mass was often interrupted by violent disputes between
members of the congregation,” while in Burgos clergy could be insulted
during Mass, especially by those whose behaviour the priest had de-
nounced during his sermon.45
Local religious practice sometimes deviated from official Catholic the-
ology. Sex among unmarried persons was not considered sinful, a belief for
which the Inquisition would condemn large numbers of people in the last
quarter of the sixteenth century. Peasants also resisted going to confession.46
After the Council of Trent, the knowledge and practice of Catholicism
improved gradually, if unevenly. Learning the catechism from the parish
priest on Sundays, being able to recite the Ten Commandments, attending
Sunday Mass, and fulfilling the requirement of yearly confession became
more widespread, but did not reach some of the more isolated or priest-
deprived regions of Spain. As late as 1617, some parishes in the diocese of
Avila had never received a visitation from the bishop, and confirmation
was irregularly administered. The Inquisition made it its business to control
more closely the behaviour of the Spanish population. “Popular ignorance
and superstition now became criminal offences.” Blasphemy and erroneous
statements about the Catholic faith were subject to prosecution, fines,
The Catholic Church in Spain, 16th–18th Centuries 25

“lashes, or, in the more serious cases, public penance or imprisonment.”

This instilled a climate of fear and suspicion that would grow as the clergy
extended its reach.47

The Spanish practice of Catholicism, at the time of the “discovery” of Amer-

ica and in the centuries that followed, was rudimentary and uneven. It was
a state religion and became a heavier and heavier imposition on the Spanish
population, but it remained largely what orthodox Catholicism would con-
sider a shallow form of belief, marked by sparse knowledge of precepts and
uneven adherence to the outward manifestations of the faith. The Spanish
laity, however, took from Catholicism what it found appropriate, useful, or
comforting, as it fashioned its own religious beliefs and practices. These
were the practices that Spanish immigrants would bring to the New World.
 3


The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico,

16th–18th Centuries

The Catholic religion arrived in Puerto Rico with the first Spanish ships.
Columbus landed on the western coast of the island (there is a dispute as
to where exactly, in Aguadilla or Aguada) in November 1493. It was on this
trip to the Antilles that Columbus brought Brother Ramón Pané to His-
paniola. But Columbus did not undertake to settle Puerto Rico during this
trip; he only stayed two days. The first Spanish settlements occurred in
1508 and in 1509, when Ponce de León brought about a hundred men to
Caparra, in what is present-day Guaynabo, about 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles)
south of the bay of San Juan and close to the mountain streams that were
believed to contain the alluvial gold the Spaniards sought to take back to
Spain. Two years later, the first bishopric was created; it was the third bish-
opric in Spanish America, after the two in Hispaniola (Santo Domingo),
where the Spanish first settled.
Alonso Manso, a priest at the Spanish court, was named bishop of San
Juan. He arrived in 1513, the first Catholic bishop in America. He tried to
build a small church in Caparra but lost all he had brought from Spain for
the church when Taíno attacked the new settlement. He quarrelled with
The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries 27

civil and military authorities and his flock and found he had few material
resources to survive on (even with the 150 Taíno he was granted to work
panning gold); he returned to Spain three years later, but returned in 1519,
with the title of Inquisitor.1 These beginnings foretold of recurrent themes
in the church’s history in Puerto Rico under Spanish rule. Clerical presence
was scarce and intermittent; material resources to sustain the clergy were
meagre; religious authority was contested both by civil powers and by the
flock. These factors would account for much of the thinness of the links
between the Catholic clergy and the island population outside the capital.

the l at in amer ican context

The Puerto Rican church’s structure of governance during Spanish rule

depended on the arrangements the crown and the pope made between
1508 and 1512 to establish the church in Latin America. Broadly speaking,
the pope granted the king the right to “recommend” the nomination of
bishops, priests, and other religious dignitaries for approval by the pope.
In practice, the papacy always accepted these recommendations. As well,
the crown undertook the material support of the clergy: income pro-
vided by church tithes and other church revenues were to be collected
under crown authority and shared between the government and the
church. The crown would see to the creation of parishes and monasteries.
These agreements bore the name of Patronato Real (royal patronage).2
The Spanish crown would exercise even more power over the church in
the colonies than in the metropolis. It was also entrusted with the con-
version of natives to the Catholic faith.
The Patronato Real has its shortcomings, as the secretary of the Propa-
ganda Fide, Cardinal Ingoli, noted more than a century later, in 1628. Clerics
were ignorant of local idioms, dioceses and parishes were too large, and
priests mingled in civil affairs, conducted businesses, and mistreated the
natives. Ingoli recommended ordaining native clergymen. In 1644, he de-
nounced the meddling of civil authorities in church affairs and the incom-
petence of colonial priests appointed by the monarchy.3 His denunciations
had little effect.
The devout King Fernando undertook the crown’s religious duties, but
they coexisted with his other responsibilities, including administering the
28 communities of the soul

colonies and fostering their economic development, which required local

labour to exploit mines and for agriculture.
The easiest way to provide labour for the colonists was to enslave the
native population. In Puerto Rico this was a short-lived option, as natives
died from war or disease or fled to neighbouring islands or the mountains
of the interior. Enslavement, of course, was a poor inducement to conver-
sion into the Catholic faith. On the island of Santo Domingo, thousands
of natives were said to have committed suicide by drinking the poisonous
juice of the yuca plant, while native mothers aborted their fetuses or killed
their children.4 Nor did the bar to the ordination of natives as priests en-
courage participation in Catholic rituals.5
Importing slaves from Africa became the “solution” to the labour prob-
lem in the Caribbean and in Latin America. As slave ships arrived, Catholic
priests tried to teach the rudiments of the Catholic faith to the slaves and
to baptize them.6 The obstacles to their conversion were similar to those
affecting natives, but the latter died off while the African population even-
tually grew and resisted its white masters by keeping alive some of its own
rituals of belief. At the end of the sixteenth century, Nicolas de Ramos,
bishop of Puerto Rico, reported having discovered that Black men and
women met every night to pray to the devil and renounce the Catholic God,
the Virgin Mary, and the church’s sacraments. Three Black women who re-
fused to stop these practices were turned over to the civil authorities for
punishment by auto-da-fé (burning alive) in front of the San Cristobal
gate.7 Similar incidents took place in the early seventeenth century. Clearly
Afro-Caribbean religious practices were continuing,8 although their col-
lective manifestations remain undocumented.9 In other cases, Africans as-
similated Catholic veneration of saints to the veneration of their own deities
and melded these rituals together, as some Taíno had done with their own
and Catholic rituals.

l at in amer ican p opul ar

re lig ious pr ac t i ces

Spanish newcomers brought with them the popular religious practices of

the home country, as Puerto Rican historian Salvador Brau noted long
ago.10 Whether or not the first catechisms printed in Latin America (in
The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries 29

Mexico, in 1546 and 1548)11 reached Puerto Rico, for the illiterate population,
religious instruction came mainly from oral sources such as priests – Fran-
ciscans and Dominicans, and later, Jesuits as well as secular clergymen –
and nuns. The cult of the Virgin Mary was without doubt the most popular
Catholic veneration in Latin America, particularly the Virgin of Guadalupe,
who portrayed the “liberation” and “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors
and made miraculous apparitions in Mexico.12 Besides pilgrimages to Mar-
ian sanctuaries, Latin Americans also constituted cofradías (brotherhoods)
for devotional, charitable, and social purposes,13 like those so widespread
in Spain.14

a l a rge a n d thi n d i o cese

A few years after the diocese of San Juan was created in 1511, its territory
was extended to include the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles. This
made the bishop’s task even more arduous, and he seldom could visit all
of his flock. There was also a lot of turnover: eight bishops between 1511
and 1599, fifteen in the seventeenth century, and fourteen in the eighteenth
century.15 Ten of the first fifteen incumbents were from a variety of religious
orders.16
Given the scarce population of the island through that era, the creation
of parishes was slow: in the sixteenth century, besides San Juan, only San
Germán in the west (1512), Coamo in the south (1577, for about twenty
Spaniards), and Aguada on the north-western coast (1692), and in the sev-
enteenth, Arecibo on the north shore (1616), Hormigueros on the west coast
(monastery created in 1646), and Ponce on the south shore (1680). Most of
the other parishes today were eighteenth-century creations17 (see figures
4.1 and 4.2).
The main primary sources for this period consist of official church doc-
uments, such as letters to the authorities in Spain, notes from pastoral visits,
and the records of the synod of 1645, the period’s only one. These sources
offer little direct purchase on popular religious practice, but they do contain
some useful indications.
30 communities of the soul

size and qualit y of clerg y

As the island’s population grew, albeit slowly, so the clergy became more
diverse. At the top of the hierarchy, the bishop and his assistants formed
the curia, the administrative arm of the bishopric. In San Juan, the cathedral
had a chapter of canons – priests who administered the cathedral and were
also supposed to help the bishop in his ministry. This group was appointed
by the Spanish crown, which provided for its material support. For instance,
besides the Taíno whose labour he had been granted, the first bishop,
Alonso Manso, was given fourteen African slaves in 1528.18 He received the
same emoluments as other Latin American bishops, or about 18,000 pesos
per year. In comparison, the dean of the cathedral received five hundred
pesos.19 The bishop also received a quarter of the tithe collection, the cathe-
dral chapter another quarter, and the rest was divided among parish priests,
hospitals, churches, and their fabrics (the parishes’ administrative entities),
and the king of Spain.20 Thus the church’s material resources were concen-
trated in the capital city, leaving little material support for parishes and
their curates. This situation did not make for a numerous clergy.
From the early days of the colony, regular orders opened convents in the
colony. The Franciscans had a convent in Caparra by 1515. They arrived in
San Juan in 1634 and obtained land for their convent on San Francisco
Street in 1642.21 The Dominicans had been the first regular order in San
Juan, starting construction on their monastery in 1523.22 They had a
monastery and a church in San Juan (now known as the San José church,
across from the Plaza del Quinto Centenario), and by 1582 about ten of
them lived off alms and cattle ranching.23 They were “preachers and con-
fessors for the educated class”24 but did not always see eye to eye with the
local hierarchy. The second bishop of Puerto Rico, Rodrigo de Bastidas y
Rodríguez de Romera, a secular priest, complained that the Dominicans
were too prosperous, despite the order’s vow of poverty.25 The bishop
fought over resources with them and lost, and left for Hispaniola.26 In 1578
and 1579, Bishop Diego de Salamanca Polanco, an Augustinian, lamented
that the Dominican priests were not well educated.27
Puerto Rican priests – the first ones were ordained in 1547 – made up
most of the clergy in the sixteenth century, able to depend on their families,
The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries 31

according to Stevens Arroyo,28 while, as Bishop Salamanca noted in 1578,

priests from the metropolis were unable to sustain themselves.29 Later in
the century, the bishops of San Juan considered the home-grown secular
priests “extremely ignorant,” showing, like most Spaniards, contempt for
the criollos.30 Bishops reiterated this complaint in the early seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries.31
The numbers of secular priests proved inadequate. The smallpox epi-
demic of 1689–90 killed twenty-five priests; in 1713, twenty-two parishes re-
mained without priests. As late as 1760, Bishop Oneca counted only
fourteen priests for a population of 37,923 souls, and only one candidate
worthy of ordination.32 Early in the colony’s history, as we have seen, bish-
ops recruited regular clergymen, to which a number of the bishops be-
longed. Dominicans and Franciscans preached around the island.33 In the
late eighteenth century, Bishop Jiménez Pérez acknowledged the positive
effect of frequent missions by Franciscans and Dominicans, who some-
times served as parish priests for lack of secular clerics. Franciscans also
taught Taíno and children of poor families in San Germán and in San
Juan.34 The clergy gave religious instruction to local Black slaves and to
Blacks coming from Protestant colonies, the latter being granted their free-
dom if they joined the Catholic church. But some bishops refused to ordain
Blacks as priests,35 and at the end of Spanish rule this was still the practice,
as Father Juan Perpiñá e Pibernat, ecclesiastical governor and capitular vicar
of Puerto Rico, reported to US commissioner Henry K. Carroll in 1898: he
argued that the “clerical constitution of Spain” forbade the practice. Carroll
asked why, and Perpiñá’s answer is revealing:

Dr Carroll. What was the reason for the discrimination against

coloured men in the priesthood?
Father Perpiñá. I do not know the reason, but for myself I do not
consider it desirable to see coloured men with priestly robes admin-
istering the sacraments, and if I were a bishop I would never ordain
a coloured man.
Dr Carroll. Is there a race prejudice that would prevent it?
Father Perpiñá. There is none. There has always been, though, a
breach between the coloured and the whites since the emancipation
32 communities of the soul

of the slaves in the island. I think the coloured people have been con-
ceded many more liberties than they should have received, and what
they have not been conceded they have taken.36

The role of priests, of course, was to dispense the sacraments and instruct
their flock in the faith. In 1760, Bishop Martínez de Oneda ordered parish
priests to teach catechism on Sunday afternoons for half an hour, under
threat of fines, as he had noticed many did not bother.37
This was not the clergy’s only form of misbehaviour. In 1645, the new
bishop, Damián López de Haro, called a diocesan synod to “extirpate what-
ever abuses there are in our diocese.”38 The synod imposed many norms of
behaviour on priests, an admission of laxity. They were not to engage in
commerce, deal in land and crops, play dice, participate in “comedies,”
feasts, and dances, live with women, which might give rise to rumours, and
even work in the fields or in construction.39 In 1706, Bishop Urtiaga noted
that the majority of his twenty-five priests did not meet minimal conditions
for their duties. In 1760, according to Bishop Martínez de Oneda, most of
the island’s fourteen priests were too old or insufficiently trained.40

re lig ious pr ac t i ces of the l ait y

Lay religious practice at times is autonomous from clerical authority, at

times amplifies accepted forms of worship, and at times is constrained by
physical distance from clerical personnel.
Most information on popular religious practice comes from church doc-
uments, and we may assume that the hierarchy would stress the laity’s fail-
ings in order to obtain more resources for their pastoral duties. But its
observations are remarkably similar across the period, and accounts by vis-
itors to the island often support them. Ángel López Cantos examined 2,647
civil and criminal cases during the eighteenth century, and his findings cor-
roborate those from church documents on religious practices.41
For many Puerto Ricans in rural areas, or even in smaller towns, attend-
ing Sunday Mass or even going to Mass at Easter was not easy: they needed
to work, and there were few priests or roads, so that from 1645 on rural folks
needn’t attend Sunday Mass if they resided six leagues (a six-hour walk) or
more from a church, but had to attend Mass four times a year, at least at
Christmas and at Easter.42
The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries 33

There were many occasions to attend church. Besides Sundays, the feast
days of the saints – all the feasts of the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and the
“great saints” – totalled more than forty. But sugar-cane producers needed
workers during the Christmas holidays, and absenteeism lessened atten-
dance at religious holidays.43
Extreme poverty also prevented church attendance. Some parishioners
went about half-naked,44 as Bishop López de Haro noted at his arrival in
1644: “Many persons miss Mass on feast days because of lack of clothes
to go to Church in, and in the fields they go about naked and barefoot;
this is the case not only for Negroes and Mulattos, even in the city, but
also for many white women who don’t cover their flesh with anything.”45
His successor, Francisco de Padilla, noted the same thing in 1688, asking
the king for money to supply poor women with clothing so they could
go to church.46
The same factors kept many people from the sacraments that mark a
person’s stages in life. The lack of priests led midwives to baptize the new-
born.47 Bishops would confirm many parishioners during pastoral visits48
and hear confessions, normally the task of a parish priest: the synod of 1645
required parishioners to demonstrate their knowledge of Christian doc-
trine and to go to confession in their own parishes. Apparently, some of the
faithful were “shopping” for more amenable clerics than their parish priest.
The synod also reserved the absolution of some sins to the bishop: theft,
superstition, blasphemy, homicide, abortion, incest, sodomy, bestiality, per-
jury, but also failure to pay tithe or assault on a member of the clergy.49
Marriage was a sacrament often honoured in the breach. Fees, dispen-
sation re consanguinity, and prior confession and communion all posed
obstacles, leading to frequent common-law arrangements.50 This became
part of the jíbaro (rural folk) culture. Unlike the sacraments of baptism
and burial, which formally made one a child of God here and hereafter,
and were thus essential to salvation, common-law marriage, or amance-
bamiento, appears to have been perceived as a minor offence. There could
always be time for a religious wedding or, if not, for confessing the sin.
There were other ways to violate the sacrament of marriage. In 1798, the
bishop asked for married Spaniards and foreigners who took up concubines
to be deported. The civil authorities refused to act.51
Funeral services and interment in consecrated ground were the symbolic
end to one’s life on earth and the recognition of one’s entrance into Heaven,
34 communities of the soul

with or without some time in Purgatory to atone for any remaining sins.
At the 1645 synod, when there were few parishes on the island, fees were set
for different levels of funeral services and burial ceremonies. The fees per-
tained to burials in the San Juan cathedral. Cemeteries were divided into
three sections, by socio-economic class. Likewise, fees varied per type of
funeral service and burial to be provided. A solemn ceremony, with Mass
and a sung vigil, cost fifty-eight silver reales; a complete ceremony cost eigh-
teen reales; burial of a child of less than eight years cost thirteen reales. On
top of this, the parish fabric was to receive twelve reales, eight for the burial
and the rest for the mourners, and each priest three reales. Some people
avoided paying burial fees by burying their dead, particularly slaves, in the
desert. Others apparently “shopped around” for burial in a parish, as the
synod required burying the dead in their parish or, if not, paying the fees
to their parish anyway.52 Still others solemnly declared themselves poor,
and thus avoided funeral services and burial fees.53
So, for various reasons, parishioners did not always follow the church’s
precepts concerning the sacraments. But they manifested their beliefs in
the power of the supernatural by their devotion to the Virgin Mary and to
the saints by popular practices in their parish church, in the public space,
or at home in private. Praying to the Virgin Mary for favours or to intercede
on one’s behalf was probably the most popular of devotions and certainly
one of the earliest. The Virgin of Montserrat, patron saint of Catalonia, was
said to have kept alive an eight-year-old girl in the late sixteenth century
who had been lost for two weeks in the woods around Hormigueros. The
girl was the daughter of Gerardo González, a Hormigueros landowner of
Catalan origin who, in thanks for his daughter’s safe return, built a sanc-
tuary in honour of the Virgin of Montserrat, to whom he was used to pray-
ing. After his wife’s death, González became a priest and maintained the
sanctuary. That the synod of 1645 saw González as chaplain of that very
chapel suggests a later date for his story.54 González became an ardent pub-
licist for the Marian cult.55 The Hormigueros shrine eventually became a
church, and in 1998 the pope designated it a minor basilica.56 Other Marian
shrines were erected, for example in Coamo in 1685, as thanks for ending
a cholera outbreak two years earlier.57
The shrines were but the most spectacular aspects of Marian devotion.
Beginning in 1512, Saturday Mass was dedicated to the “honour and glory”
The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries 35

of the Virgin Mary, a practice formalized by the 1645 synod.58 But outside
the church, public space was also a locus of Marian devotion. In the late
eighteenth century, a visitor to the island noted bi-weekly public evening
processions of the rosary, led by brothers who sang litanies and played the
guitar.59 Another observed that Puerto Ricans wore rosaries around their
neck and recited the rosary at least twice a day.60
Prayers to the Virgin Mary were also held in private homes. In 1774, after
a pastoral visit of his diocese, Bishop Manuel Jiménez Pérez forbade, under
pains of a fine, home meetings of the faithful – men and women together
– to recite or sing the rosary as a promise made in exchange for a favour
from the Virgin. Some of these priest-less gatherings turned into large, all-
night parties, where people gambled, danced, and drank. If these events
took place on the eve of a feast day, many participants missed Mass the fol-
lowing day. This communal appropriation of religious rites for various pur-
poses stoked the clergy’s fear of losing control over manifestations of piety.61
From its earliest days, the Puerto Rican church encouraged devotion to
specific saints. John the Baptist was the patron saint of the island, which
was originally named San Juan de Puerto Rico. St Germain, selected in hon-
our of Germaine de Foix, Ferdinand II’s French-born second wife became
the patron saint of the island’s second parish, which comprised its western
half. The third saint was Patrick. An infestation of insects had ruined the
manioc crop during Manso’s tenure as bishop, and the locals, following a
Spanish custom, put all the saints’ names in a bag and drew one – Patrick’s.
Not being familiar with him, they tried again, and twice his name came up.
Taking this as a sign, the bishop ordered a yearly celebration of St Patrick,
with Mass, sermon, and procession. A second infestation of the crop in 1641
was ended after a series of celebrations in honour of St Patrick.62
Of course, new parishes chose a patron saint, whom they honoured each
year, a tradition that continues today. But there were also “specialist” saints
for various problems or situations. Difficult or desperate cases were sub-
mitted to St Rita; the blind invoked St Lucy, those giving birth St Raymond
Nonnatus (who was born by caesarean section), travellers St Christopher,
builders St Vincent Ferrer, while St Martha protected homes and St Augus-
tine consoled grief-stricken mothers.63
The lay faithful also joined cofradías set up for collective prayer and self-
help. One dedicated to Marian devotion was set up in San Germán in 1582.
36 communities of the soul

Similar groups had appeared in San Juan by the mid-seventeenth century.

A cofradía of the Souls, which prayed for the souls in purgatory, had
twenty-four members. It had a special Mass, with procession and sermon.64
By 1645, the brotherhoods had become so numerous that the synod feared
they would confuse the faithful, so it required the bishop’s approval to set
them up.65 Some, such as the Brotherhood of the Conception, in Coamo
in 1661, or that of the Souls, in Arecibo in 1720, were the bishop’s creation
on his pastoral visit.66 For the eighteenth century, López Cantos found in
practically every parish brotherhoods venerating the Holy Sacrament.67 In
1798, the bishop’s pastoral visit revealed ninety-seven cofradías, honouring
the sacraments, the Virgin, the souls of the blessed, and specific saints.68
They provided social interaction as well as devotion.69
Like recitations of the rosary in private homes, the activities of the
cofradías could turn to the profane: a pastoral letter of 1712 condemned
those content only to pay a Mass for their saint, while spending the rest of
the funds they collected on dances, comedies, banquets, races, and sinful
activities.70 The faithful, once again, mixed devotion and amusement, or
used devotion as a pretext for entertainment, depending on the depth of
their religious beliefs. Communities of the soul were also communities of
the flesh.

“s i n f u l” b e h av i o u r

Puerto Rico’s Catholic hierarchy was aware of its flock’s incomplete adher-
ence to the church’s precepts. The synod of 1645 addressed the two main
“vices” of the faithful: failure to marry before the church and absence from
Sunday Mass.71 More than a hundred years later, in 1760, Bishop Martínez
de Oneca attributed the prevalence of rape, adultery, common-law living,
delinquency, and lack of a work ethic to the dispersion of the population
and to the difficulties of travel.72 Bishops used pastoral visits to inquire
about parishioners’ habits and to condemn and repress heretics or the im-
moral. As in Spain, sins were civil offences and sinners criminals.
But civil repression of “sinful” behaviour had its limits, particularly when
both civil and religious authorities engaged in the same behaviour. An ex-
ample would be prostitution. The civil authorities considered whorehouses
The Catholic Church in Puerto Rico, 16th–18th Centuries 37

an instrument for maintaining public order, but the church severely con-
demned pimps. Ideally, prostitutes were to ply their trade without them.
In 1526, the Spanish crown authorized the opening of a whorehouse in San
Juan. Prostitution was tolerated from the sixteenth to the eighteenth cen-
tury.73 Sins of the flesh were deemed to be a common occurrence.74

The first two centuries of Catholicism in Puerto Rico established a religious

culture that, as elsewhere in Latin America, reproduced many elements of
its Spanish template. The scant population and its poverty made it difficult
for the church to extend its influence over the whole island. A certain social
distance developed between the clergy and the faithful from the physical
distance that separated them. Popular practices and beliefs evolved out of
this distance and set the stage for a more turbulent nineteenth century.
 4


Religious Counter-Revolution in Puerto Rico,

19th Century

the spanish church context

Like most other European countries, Spain in the nineteenth century ex-
perienced the struggle of liberalism against the old political and religious
order, which began with occupation by Napoleon’s armies 1808–14 and pro-
duced civil war, swings between liberal and reactionary government, and
eventually parliamentary supremacy. Turmoil at home reverberated over-
seas, and by the mid-1820s Spain lost its vast American empire, except for
Cuba and Puerto Rico. The church was caught in this turmoil: its struggles
with the state and with anti-clerical liberals and other free thinkers dimin-
ished its material resources and enfeebled its clergy. These events, of course,
affected Puerto Rico.
As Napoleon’s armies entered Spain in late 1807 on their way to Portugal,
the Spanish monarchy was threatened and had to abandon the throne to
Napoleon’s brother Joseph. Thus began was has been called the war of
Spanish independence, which was in large part a guerrilla resistance to the
French invaders. In the south of Spain, local authorities banded into juntas,
Religious Counter-Revolution in Puerto Rico, 19th Century 39

taking over political and military authority, and in 1810 they gathered at
Cádiz into a Regency Council in the forced absence of the king. This council
in 1812 drafted a constitution that recognized the sovereignty of the nation
(rather than of the king), constitutional monarchy, abolition of seigneurial
tenure, universal male suffrage, freedom of the press, and the right to prop-
erty; it also ended the Inquisition. Although the constitution confirmed
Catholicism as the state religion, it contained the germs of liberalism that
would challenge absolutist rule during the rest of the century.1 In September
1813, the Cortes nationalized the properties of the Jesuit order and those
of vacant convents and monasteries.2 In 1814, Napoleon put back on the
throne Ferdinand VII, who declared the Cádiz regency illegal and repealed
the 1812 constitution. A specialist on the Spanish church of the period sets
the metropolitan stage:

The end of the liberal experiment in 1814 did not resolve the funda-
mental constitutional and ecclesiastical questions posed for the first
time at the Cortes of Cádiz. The struggle between liberalism, deter-
mined to mold the Church to fit the demands of a new secular outlook
within the framework of a parliamentary system, and ecclesiastical in-
terests, as firmly committed to recover every particle of clerical au-
thority and privilege, continued with even more intensity. The balance
shifted first to the Church, during the initial period of Ferdinand VII’s
absolute rule from 1814 to 1820, and then against it during the second
liberal revolution from 1820 to 1823. Although the Church recovered
its position following the second restoration of Ferdinand, political
and dynastic circumstances between 1823 and the king’s death in 1833
finally ended ecclesiastical hopes for the reestablishment of the Old
Regime Church in all its splendour. The clergy, at least the vast ma-
jority, struggled to recreate the past with the same fierce energy it had
directed against the French and the constitutionalists of Cádiz. But
the consensus that had sustained the eighteenth-century monarchy
and the Church itself could not be resurrected. The Church threw its
resources into a losing contest for which it would pay a heavy price.3

In the short term, the king helped the church to get rid of liberal-leaning
clerics by banning them from benefices or even by arresting and impris-
oning them, as in the case of the canon Joaquín Lorenzo Villanueva, a pro-
40 communities of the soul

ponent of a vernacular Bible and prominent member of the Junta Central

of Cádiz. But the church’s problems ran deep. It had fewer resources for
charitable work, it had lost regular priests during the war and was unable
to replenish those ranks, and the secular clergy was often of questionable
quality, as two bishops remarked in 1816: some priests lived with their fe-
male housekeepers or servants, others were drunks, others still said Mass
“without devotion or any awareness of what they were doing.” A “distinctly
popular urban anticlericalism” emerged in the early 1820s and led the
church to focus more on the countryside.4
The fight for political control resumed with violence after the king’s death
in 1833. The absolutists, headed by his brother Carlos, sought to overthrow
the government of his widow, María Cristina, who became regent (their
daughter, Isabel, was only three), supported by liberal reformers. Under
María Cristina, liberals managed to hold on to power and instituted political
and economic reforms, eliminating male religious orders, ending restrictions
on female ones, and seizing the disbanded orders’ properties. In 1837 the
state abolished the tithe, which supported the secular clergy, and replaced it
with a meagre salary. It also deadlocked with the papacy about naming
bishops, so that by 1840 only eleven of the sixty dioceses had bishops, and
none in the major cities. In 1841, the Cortes ordered the sale of the secular
clergy’s holdings to service the national debt. This was continued in 1855
and extended to the church’s educational and charitable institutions.5
With monasteries gone, state and papacy agreed, in an 1851 concordat,
on state-supported seminaries to train priests. This ended the “centuries-
old tradition of theological education in the universities” and introduced
“an abbreviated course of study designed to produce as many priests as
possible within a short time,” providing little pastoral training. But the
regular orders – Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits –
obtained permission to train clergy for service in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and
the Philippines.6
Religious practice in Spain was framed in two unequal ways. First, the
rites practised by the clergy were often rote-based, and some priests cele-
brated “hasty Masses lacking in devotion,” while others did not bother with
Communion or sermons. Still, failure to receive Communion at Easter was
rare, estimated at between 1 and 6 per cent of the population for 1828–43,
Religious Counter-Revolution in Puerto Rico, 19th Century 41

for instance. Second, the church was less prone than in the preceding cen-
tury to condemn lay forms of devotion; it accepted “miraculous” happen-
ings reported by lay people and encouraged popular devotion to the Sacred
Heart, to the Eucharist, and to the Virgin. “The folkloric customs of ‘pop-
ular’ religion – placatory in nature and connected to the fears and preoc-
cupations of an uneducated peasantry – continued in the forms of local
shrines, pilgrimages, and rites designed to evoke intercession to remedy
specific ills … To the peasantry, for whom religion warded off disaster and
secured good fortune, the intercessionary aspects of devotion comple-
mented rituals of traditional ‘popular’ religion, which often had little to do
with formal belief.”7
In the 1840s, Rome encouraged missions to the Spanish countryside, to
give instruction in the catechism using new versions that made doctrine
easier to comprehend. Devotional literature emphasizing individual sal-
vation became popular. In late 1868, right-wing Catholics formed the
Association of Catholics “to propagate and defend the doctrines, institu-
tions, and social influence of the Church, particularly its liberty and the
Catholic unity of Spain … through peaceful means and under the protec-
tion of the law.”8
The first two-thirds of the nineteenth century saw challenges to the
moral authority of the Spanish church. During the war of independence,
and again in the early 1820s, Freemason societies of French or British in-
spiration were founded in Spanish cities, their members numbering in the
thousands by 1823.9 In the 1830s, English Bible societies began disseminating
Protestantism in Spain. During the turbulent early 1840s, various incidents
of disrespect for Catholic ceremonies forced local authorities to intervene.
To combat the substantial liberal press, the Catholic hierarchy launched
new press organs that gave its clergy “a sense of unity and purpose.”10

ex pansion of pa r ishes and bishopr ics

Even as Spain’s South American colonies freed themselves in the 1820s and
1830s, Puerto Rico remained a strategic holding in the New World. Spain
opened commerce in Cuba and Puerto Rico to traders from outside the
Spanish empire and allowed European Catholic immigrants to settle on
42 communities of the soul

the islands. Sugar plantations developed, and African slaves were imported
to work them. As the economy grew, so did the population, and the number
of parishes11 (see figures 4.1 and 4.2).
In 1800, the population was assessed at 155,000 in thirty localities (par-
tidos).12 By 1846, it had risen to 443,000, and by 1877 to 731,000.13 By 1900,
the number of localities had more than doubled.
Thirty-three churches were built all over the island between 1800 and
1850, sixteen of them dedicated to the Virgin Mary, suggesting the mass
devotion to her. Five took the name Nuestra Señora del Carmen, four that
of Inmaculada Concepción, two Nuestra Señora de la Monserrate, and one
Nuestra Señora de la Guadalupe, these last two names recalling popular
shrines in Spain and Mexico.
Until about 1850, communications across the island were difficult, relying
mainly on coastal navigation. A structured postal service began in 1866,
and island-wide telegraph service in 1874.14 Difficult travel impeded mon-
itoring of parish priests and their flocks. Thus confirmation, a bishop’s pre-
rogative, occurred only during infrequent pastoral visits: Utuado, for
instance, had no such occasions between 1832 and 1852, when the bishop
confirmed 5,876 people.15
San Juan lacked a bishop from 1833 to 1846. A seminary established there
in 1832 produced only four priests out of the forty-five who entered be-
tween 1832 and 1847. The seminary closed in 1852, and the island recruited
Spanish priests; between 1878 and 1883, the reopened seminary produced
about two dozen ordinations. In the 1840s, the acting bishop of San Juan,
Dionisio González de Mendoza, noted that very few island parishes were
looking for priests, so a sustainable living was open to very few curates. A
lucrative and prestigious clerical appointment to the cathedral chapter was
largely closed to natives of the island.16 Government seizure of the monas-
teries for revenue in 1837–38 reduced clerical resources.17 The fact that
priests had to be white males born in church-sanctioned wedlock further
restricted recruitment.18
As in Spain, priests in Puerto Rico were paid by the state under the pro-
visions of the Patronato Real. In 1815, however, the governor transferred the
task to parishioners. The salaries were set at three hundred pesos per year;19
by 1900, this figure had more than doubled.20 The last Spanish budget for
Figure 4.1 Parish churches started by decade, Puerto Rico, 1520–1910.
Figure 4.2 Periods of parish church construction, Puerto Rico, 1520–1910.
Religious Counter-Revolution in Puerto Rico, 19th Century 45

its Puerto Rican colony, in 1897–98, allowed $124,940 for the island’s 158
priests, for an average of $970 each. However, thirty-four parishes did not
have a resident priest at that date.21 Municipal or state subsidies helped
fund construction of some of the parish churches, so after the American
conquest, some municipalities claimed that the buildings belonged to
them and not to the church, as in Aibonito, Arroyo, Caguas, Cayey, Coamo,
Guayama, Humacao, Ponce, and Yacuboa.22
By the end of Spanish rule, the population stood at 890,820,23 and there
were 137 parish priests (only thirty-four of them island-born)24 – on average
one priest for every 5,602 parishioners. By comparison, Catholics in the
province of Quebec, in Canada, had a priest for every 680 parishioners.25

lo cal clerg y under suspicion

The scarcity of island-born priests reflected not only lack of training facil-
ities and poor pay, but distrust by imperial authorities and the church in
Spain of native-born Latin American priests in general as the independence
movements swept the region. The island’s first native-born bishop (and the
only one during Spanish rule), Juan Alejo de Arizmendi de La Torre, or-
dained six seminary students from Caracas after Venezuela declared inde-
pendence in 1810.26 This provoked suspicion in Spain, since he had, the
previous year, publicly endorsed Puerto Rico’s election of Ramón Power y
Giralt, a liberal and nationalist navy officer, to the Cortes of Cádiz, even
entrusting him with his episcopal ring.27 One of Arizmendi’s successors,
Pedro Gutiérrez De Cos, a monarchist who had fled Peru after indepen-
dence and became bishop in 1826, was mandated to reconcile his new flock
to the Spanish metropolis.28 In the 1840s, governors carried out a “clear
political offensive” against criollo priests and their role in municipal elec-
tions, where, they argued, these priests supported independence.29
In 1870, a vicar of San Germán, José A. Pierretti, lost his posting because
of his connection to the independence advocate Ramón Emeterio Betances,
who had organized the 1868 popular uprising in Lares, in the west of the
island.30 The same year, a judge proposed that peninsulares (persons of
Spanish birth) direct religious and civil education, to avoid contamination
of youth by subversive ideas.31
46 communities of the soul

As metropolitans were wont to do, the ecclesiastical hierarchy held a low

opinion of criollo clergymen. It considered Puerto Rican priests ignorant,
promiscuous, and leaning towards political independence, noted a canon.32
They sometimes failed to administer the sacraments; some, like the curate
of Isabela, Andrés Avelino Román, openly cohabited with their mistresses.33

the “invasion” of peninsul ar pr iests

To forestall any clergy-led independence movement, the Spanish crown

named Spanish-born candidates as parish priests. These nominees fought
anti-imperial sentiment, sometimes calling it anti-Christian.34 With this
attitude, its economic exploitation of the local people, and its defence of
slavery – some owned slaves35 – the Spanish-born clergy distanced itself
from its flocks.36 Also exploiting locals was the first long-term curate of
Utuado, Don Calixto Vélez Borrero, born in Isabela, on the north-west cor-
ner of the island, the most prominent landholder in the parish and a slave
owner; he seldom gave sermons or taught catechism.37
Priests in Puerto Rico came from various classes – indeed, from several
countries – unlike the case in some other nineteenth-century Catholic so-
cieties. In Quebec, for instance, most clerics were locals, more than a third
of them from farm backgrounds and a quarter from the artisan class, much
as in France.38 In Ireland, most domestic recruits hailed from farming fam-
ilies.39 Agricultural upbringings and similar social provenance related
priests in Quebec and Ireland to their flocks much more than was the case
in Puerto Rico.

p opul ar re lig ious pr ac t ices

As we saw above, physical and social gaps between clergy and laity hampered
religious instruction and administration of sacraments. Bishops’ rare pastoral
visits, noted Fernando Picó, provided sacraments such as confirmation.40
Similarly, the scarcity of priests impeded interaction with parishioners except
in the larger towns; in 1848, for example, the governor authorized in San Juan
the celebration of Sunday retreats, reserving two hundred seats in the city’s
plaza mayor (main square) for use by the public.41
Religious Counter-Revolution in Puerto Rico, 19th Century 47

As in earlier centuries, many ordinary people’s avoidance of church mar-

riage upset the upper clergy, as well as civil authorities. People found the
priest’s fees onerous; Father Picó called marriage the “most expensive
and most traumatic” of the sacraments – costing perhaps a day labourer’s
monthly income.42 Also, episcopal dispensations for marriage by cousins
in the second or third degree, not uncommon in rural areas, were expensive.
Gil Estéve y Tomás, the island’s bishop 1849–53, ordered marriages free of
charge for pobres de solemnidad (persons officially recognized as poor) and
personally performed “thousands” during his pastoral visits.43 This was
after the authorities advocated treating common-law spouses as vagrants,
subject to regulations that, among other things, restricted freedom of
movement.44 This official crackdown was repeated in the 1850s and 1860s,45
but did little to change popular behaviour.
One result was the high number of “illegitimate” (common-law) chil-
dren. Father Picó noted that in 1868, 41 per cent of children baptized in Hu-
macao, on the eastern shore, were born out of wedlock. The rate was 40 per
cent in the capital, where the visible presence of the Catholic hierarchy did
little to spur formal marriages.46 This could have serious consequences, as
“illegitimate” men could not become priests or government officials.
Among the laity in the early nineteenth century, as before, devotion to
the Virgin Mary was omnipresent. In 1798, Bishop Juan Batista de Zengotita,
a member of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy, enjoined the
curate of Porta Coeli, the church of the San Germán Dominican monastery,
to recite the rosary daily to “excite the fervour, affection, and devotion of
the faithful towards that Mother of Mercy” after the British attack on the
colony the previous year.47 The Virgin Mary was seen, in much of Latin
America and the Caribbean, as a mediator between human beings and
God.48 The price of obtaining her favours was often a sung rosary, perhaps
accompanied by guitars, maracas, or other instruments, which bishops had
difficulty condoning.49 In 1861, the chapter of the San Juan cathedral de-
creed 8 December the feast of the Immaculate Conception – “the object of
great veneration, as patron saint of the Spanish monarchy.”50
From earlier periods also persisted forms of popular practice relating to
nature, à la the “bargains with the gods” common in Spain as well. A promi-
nent doctor and liberal intellectual, Francisco del Valle Atiles, noted in his
48 communities of the soul

1887 description of Puerto Rican peasants that prayers and religious medals
were used as amulets against disease or the evil eye, which he considered
“absurd forms of devotion” due to ignorance.51 But in fact, remarked Fer-
nando Picó, the church showed some opening to popular religious prac-
tices, allowing for domestic altars to the saints, wakes for the Three Kings
(6 January), rosaries to the Holy Cross with singing and music,52 vows for
favours and religious dress as thanks for favours obtained, or traditional
celebrations of the Christmas season, Holy Week, or the feast of a patron
saint. It also arranged public processions and inserted dramatic touches in
church ritual,53 following metropolitan Spain.54

The history of the Catholic Church as an institution in nineteenth-century

Puerto Rico was one of paradox. As it established close to fifty parish
churches, and thus its physical proximity to the faithful, it became more
jsuspicious of criollos as potential supporters of autonomy, even indepen-
dence, and some exploited parishioners financially as moneylenders, slave
owners, or landholders. It was also suspicious of popular religious practices,
even while it tolerated their manifestations and engaged in more theatrical
public demonstrations of devotion.
The formal creation of parishes and their attendant liturgical and de-
votional activities provided a forum for parishioners’ sense of religious
community, as attested to by brotherhoods and public recitations of the
rosary, and this sense of religious community intermingled with awareness
of social community.
By the 1870s and 1880s, the church was facing a growing number of het-
erodoxies, forced to share the public ideological space with them.
 5


Challenges to Orthodoxy, 1870–1900

The last third of the nineteenth century saw the Catholic church’s ideolog-
ical supremacy in Puerto Rico begin to erode. As population increased from
731,648 in the 1877 census to 894,302 twenty years later,1 it also became more
closely interwoven, with a postal service starting in 1866 and telegraphic
lines in the 1870s linking people across the island and with Europe and the
Americas.2 The population diversified: alongside migrants from various
regions of Spain, French and Italian immigrants, nominally Catholic,
brought different ways of thinking and living. The French seemed indif-
ferent to religion, even critical of the clergy, dogmas, and church rites.
Young Puerto Ricans returning from studies abroad brought with them
books and newspapers that could spread notions of liberalism questioning
religious beliefs.3 Commerce brought not only foreign goods, but also new
ideas in Spanish- and English-language publications.4 Freemasonry and
Protestantism also challenged the church’s intellectual domination.
Nationalists included the liberal claim for freedom of religion in their
political demands. In November 1867, Ramón Emeterio Betances, who was
to lead the Grito de Lares insurrection the following year, defined the “Ten
Commandments of Free Men” in a proclamation enumerating the condi-
tions Spain needed to meet to keep the loyalty of Puerto Ricans: “libertad
50 communities of the soul

de cultos” (freedom of religion) came third, after abolition of slavery and

the right to vote all taxes.5 In 1869, under the new Spanish constitution, they
would get their wishes, if only for a few years.
These challenges provoked reactions from both church and state. In 1875,
the governor, General José Laureano Sanz y Posse, forbade “any attack on
morals and religion, or on the sacred persons of authority in the Church,”
aiming specifically at the press. Eight years later, a tribunal in Ponce con-
demned the author of an article considered offensive to the church to a six-
month jail term.6

the spanish republic and

re lig ious liber alizat ion

The 1869 Spanish constitution, the product of the “Glorious” revolution of

September 1868, brought constitutional monarchy to Spain. It guaranteed
freedom of religion “without any limits but the universal rules of morals
and law.” This was restricted in 1875 after the return of the monarchy the
previous year: freedom was replaced by “tolerance.”7 Even under the Span-
ish constitutional reform of 1897, Catholicism remained the state religion,
and article 11, while it protected the free expression of religious opinion and
the practice of faiths other than Catholicism, also required respect for
Christian morality.8
The Spanish government under the constitution of 1869 made changes
to the Real Cédula of 1858 and made municipal governments paymasters
for the clergy. This was reversed two years later and overturned again in
1873.9 Later in the 1870s, the Puerto Rican church’s property – estimated at
400,000 pesos – was seized by the crown and used to compensate slave-
holders for the abolition of slavery in 1873.10 Part of the Catholic clergy op-
posed abolition. A Puerto Rican elected to the Spanish Cortes (parliament)
in 1869, the Franciscan Juan Antonio Puig y Monserrat, argued against abo-
lition, while the island’s liberal representatives argued in favour. Some
members of the clergy themselves owned slaves.11 Puig y Monserrat’s con-
servative views helped him in 1875 become bishop of San Juan, a post he
would occupy for nearly twenty years.12
The church’s social hegemony was challenged on other fronts as well.
Civil marriage, recognized in Spain briefly in the early 1870s, was allowed
Challenges to Orthodoxy, 1870–1900 51

in Puerto Rico in the 1880s.13 At the end of the century, under US rule, di-
vorce was permitted, and even priests could marry.14 Earlier, in 1875, the
governor, General Sanz y Posse, asked municipalities to establish cemeteries
outside the Catholic cemetery “for those persons who would die outside
the Catholic faith.” The population already counted some Protestants and
Freemasons; a decade later the curate of San Germán refused to bury in the
Catholic cemetery a man reputed to be a Freemason.15
Puerto Rican clerics could be touchy about public challenges to their
privileges and authority. In 1871, the parish priest of Vega Baja denounced
to the local government a man who had not knelt when a Corpus Christi
procession passed in front of his house.16 The man, Manuel Fernández
Juncos, was a poet and journalist who later founded many newspapers of
a progressive bent and became a prominent politician as well as a Free-
mason.17 The priest was probably aware of his political ideas and sought
to harass him. In 1887, a parish priest complained to the bishop that some
people did not remove their hats when he passed by them, and that some
stores did not close during religious processions or during Sunday Mass.18
These were but incidents in the mounting challenges the rise of liberal
thought was bringing the church. Liberals claimed to be governed by reason
and science. They believed in human rights for everyone and claimed the
right to free expression. Liberal principles were the foundation for Betances’s
“Ten Commandments of Free Men,” which included, besides freedom of
religion and the abolition of slavery, freedom of speech, of the press, and
of commerce, the right of assembly, and the inviolability of citizens.19
Publications of all sorts were proliferating, many of them espousing lib-
eral principles. Between 1870 and 1874, 45 periodicals were launched, and
410 between 1880 and 1898; 318 books were published between 1874 and 1898.
All these publications faced the continuing imposition of censorship. Read-
ing rooms, where this new printed material could be consulted, appeared
across the island.20
The Catholic hierarchy resisted liberalism with its own printed medium.
In 1859, it launched the Boletín Eclesiástico, the church’s combative voice. It
not only disseminated news and views from the local hierarchy and from
Rome, but also challenged freedom of the press, the rationalism of Enlight-
enment thought, Freemasonry, the labour movement, and socialism. It de-
fended censure, absolute monarchy, the Spanish colonial regime, and the
52 communities of the soul

temporal power of the pope. Locally, it fought against civil marriage and
the burial of non-Catholics in parish cemeteries.21

weakness of the spanish clerg y

Nineteenth-century Spain recognized the weakness of Catholic priests in

its remaining colonies. In the 1860s, it allowed Augustinian, Dominican,
Franciscan, and Jesuit orders “to establish a small number of houses to train
priests for Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.”22 In the next decade,
the bishop of Puerto Rico suggested to the local governor mandating Jesuits
to carry out Christianizing missions in rural areas23 since Spanish secular
clerics lacked formal training in pastoral work. As a specialist on the Span-
ish church put it, many parish priests “resorted to the time-honoured cus-
tom of lifting their discourses from printed collections of sermons, a device
that often left simple rural congregations confounded before ‘the pompous
language’ employed. Another cleric with years of pastoral experience in
southern Spain believed … that some parish priests avoided giving many
sermons on the grounds that it was too exhausting for their parishioners
to hear the same sermon over again.”24 Priests used the catechism to teach
the rudiments of the faith by rote, but most of the ones in use, even as late
as 1900, had been written in the seventeenth century.25
Priests were not always good examples of adherence to the church’s pre-
cepts. Priests with mistresses “had formed part of the social history of the
Spanish clergy for centuries despite repeated ecclesiastical censure.” Polit-
ically, regular clergymen in Spain were reputed to constitute a “‘redoubt of
integrism,’ by which is meant a fundamental opposition to the secular and,
such as it was, pluralistic society created by liberalism.”26

p opul ar re lig ious pr ac t ices in spain

Late-century Spain continued to witness manifestations of popular reli-

gion, particularly in small towns and rural areas. These devotions, of course,
were practised in Puerto Rico as well, reinforced with the arrival of penin-
sulares. Belief in magic, witchcraft, the power of the dead, holy patrons, and
the supernatural virtues of local shrines “served as a vehicle for the expres-
Challenges to Orthodoxy, 1870–1900 53

sion of local patterns of sociability.” Even in cities, traditional community

ceremonies, such as Holy Week processions, continued, taking on the sec-
ular character of tourist attractions.27
Attendance at Sunday Mass and the taking of the Eucharist became more
prevalent in Spain during this period. Veneration of the exposed Eucharist
included benedictions and adoration, and brotherhoods were dedicated to
the cult of the Eucharist, including that of the Nocturnal Adoration.28
Devotion to the Virgin Mary expanded and took many local forms: the
Immaculate Virgin, the Virgin of the dolores (pains), of soledad (solitude),
del pilar (of the pillar), of merced (mercy), and del Carmen (of Mount Car-
mel). The rosary was recited three times daily, particularly during the
month before Christmas. May became the month of Mary, borrowing an
Italian custom. Young women could join the Daughters of Mary, and there
were brotherhoods dedicated to the Heart of Mary.29

the first protestant inst itut ions

Protestantism reached Puerto Rico a few decades before the American

conquest. In 1867, the Catholic Boletín Eclesiástico published a priestly de-
nunciation of Protestant publications arriving from the United States.
Protestantism it derided as lacking in symbols, its articles of faith so change-
able as to be meaningless.30 Some Protestants, whether visiting or resident,
lived in Ponce and the island of Vieques before their religion was officially
allowed on the island.31 After Spain granted liberty of religion within its
empire in 1869, Protestant churches began to appear, notably the Anglican
church in Ponce. Its first church building was open to “the public” in 1874;
it served the English-speaking mercantile community in the island’s main
trading centre.32 The minister began spreading Protestant notions in the
countryside, largely devoid of Catholic clergy. He distributed leaflets and
Protestant Bibles translated into Spanish,33 even though the 1860 census
showed less than 10 per cent of the population literate.34
Lay Protestants also attempted to convert people. In Aguadilla in 1880,
a Protestant landowner named Hellinger converted one of his friends, giv-
ing rise to a group named Los Bíblicos, who would later find common
ground with newly arrived Presbyterians.35
54 communities of the soul

freemasons, spir it ists, and e s p ir it i stas

The gradual liberalization of the Spanish state was extending to Puerto

Rican society. Freemasons of Spanish obedience (there were also Freema-
sons of French obedience in the west-coast town of Mayagüez, including
a priest, from 1821 to 1841),36 organized lodges throughout the island in the
1880s and 1890s.37
Masonic lodges were associations dedicated to personal development,
ethical behaviour, social reform, ideas of freedom, tolerance, and accep-
tance of all human beings, progress, enlightenment, charitable works, and
of course mutual financial and social assistance.38 They believed in a Su-
perior Being as the “Grand Architect of the Universe” but eschewed further
religious dogma. They formed part of the wider liberal challenge to the es-
tablished religious and political order in Spain and on the island.39 Masonic
Lodges grew rapidly in numbers, so that in 1884 they were able to form the
Provincial Grand Lodge of Puerto Rico, which became the Sovereign Grand
Lodge of Puerto Rico the following year.40
Some Freemasons arrived from Spain as civil servants and would make
up the majority of the Puerto Rican cabinet when Spain granted autonomy
in 1897.41 Eighty-six lodges were established between 1871 and 1900, and
1,832 members have been identified: more than two-thirds were native-
born, most of the rest coming from Spain. But three-quarters of lodges did
not last five years. Freemasons came from all classes of society, but mainly
from the upper tiers of industrialists, civil servants, and merchants. They
welcomed people from different countries, regardless of race or colour.42
Freemasons were occasionally the target of the local government, such
as those members of the San Germán lodge who were arrested in 1874 for
being Freemasons; they were released two years later by the Spanish gov-
ernment at the urging of the British prime minister. Opponents of the
Freemasons sought to tar them as separatists,43 perhaps not without cause,
at least for the earlier lodges in San Juan. In 1865, the Boletín Eclesiástico an-
grily claimed Freemasonry was an anti-Catholic secret society that tolerated
barbaric customs such as cannibalism. In 1883, a Ponce Freemason was
condemned to six months in jail for having published an article considered
offensive to the church. Freemasons could be barred from the Catholic
Challenges to Orthodoxy, 1870–1900 55

sacraments and burial in consecrated ground. They were blamed for the
1899 San Ciriaco hurricane that devastated the island.44
Freemasons published a newspaper in Ponce in 188045 and another one
in Mayagüez, La Adelphia, which was condemned by the state and sus-
pended publication in 1884.46 These were part of the efflorescence of peri-
odical publications from the 1870s on.47 Freemasons also helped create
schools and libraries.48 Antagonism persisted from the Catholic church and
local authorities – in 1893, for example, the curate of Yacuboa, on the south-
eastern edge of the island, refused baptism to children of Freemasons, while
in Guayama, in the south, civil authorities ordered the closing of a play be-
cause the director was a Freemason.49 Freemasonry would continue to grow
after 1900 and would boast about 3,000 members between 1900 and 1930.
Lodges gradually changed their allegiance from Spain to the United States.50
Challenges to Catholic orthodoxy arose also from adherents of spiritism,
an intellectual movement inspired by a Frenchman under the nom de
plume Allan Kardec, who sought to bridge “science, philosophy, and religion
into a new way of looking at life, the afterlife, and the world around us –
both visible and invisible.”51 It was one of the many spiritual movements
of the mid-nineteenth century that featured “séances” of speaking spirits,
table-turning, and mediums through whom one communicated with the
unseen world. Kardec was a polymath who had an interest in phrenology,
magnetism, clairvoyance, and hypnosis; he learned of the ties between the
seen and the unseen worlds through two young female mediums of his
acquaintance.52 In 1857, he published Le livre des esprits, which put on paper
what the spirits had conveyed to him about the links between science and
religion, knowledge which, he noted in the preface to the revised edition,
had been communicated to others before him, notably by “the most emi-
nent thinkers of ancient and modern times.”53
Kardec’s ideas spread swiftly to Spain – where his books were burned
by order of the bishop of Barcelona in 1861 – and to Latin America.54 Al-
ready in San Juan in 1856, “séances” were the rage among men of judgment
and imagination, noted a popular magazine. Three years later, the Boletín
Eclesiástico condemned spiritism along with Protestantism and Free-
masonry.55 Secret groups of spiritists formed in Mayagüez (a centre of en-
lightenment, it seems) in the early 1870s – in 1871 according to some, in
56 communities of the soul

1875 according to another source – and bookstores in San Juan sold Kardec’s
works in 1873.56 The previous year, a Puerto Rican deputy to the Spanish
Cortes sought to replace metaphysics with spiritism in the secondary-
school curriculum.57
The early adherents to Kardec’s philosophy in Puerto Rico, as in Cuba,
were from the literate middle class58 that also turned to Freemasonry and
to anti-clericalism. They challenged the church’s efforts to end common-
law unions as an intrusion of religion into civil affairs.59 Politically, they
tended also to oppose local authorities’ repression of ideas.60
Despite the church’s opposition to “heterodoxy” – it proscribed Kardec’s
books in 187461 – the 1880s saw spiritism burgeon in the island’s press and
in the formation of spiritist societies.62 In 1888, a delegation from Mayagüez
took part in the first international congress of spiritists in Barcelona. Puerto
Rican spiritists promoted social and political reforms and established hos-
pitals, hospices, and medical clinics, while some advocated independence.63
This middle-class, intellectual form of spiritism, with its belief in the al-
liance between faith and science, was amalgamated by the “urban and rural
lower classes” with native healing systems to give rise to espiritismo, a wide-
spread form of syncretism.64 This form of spiritism drew also from popular
Catholic rituals that relied on direct contact with saints and guardian angels
to obtain favours,65 forming a “community healing system.”66
Historians have found in the Puerto Rican press of this era some man-
ifestations of this Indigenous spiritism. In October 1880, a group of persons
“of different sexes, colour, condition, and age” – this mixture by itself a
challenge to the established order – carried out an “unspeakable parody of
a procession” in Río Piedras, a suburb of San Juan, for which they were ar-
rested, since this was not their first offence, noted the conservative Boletín
Mercantil. Their leader claimed the group had been invested with a sacred
apostolate by St Augustine.67 Four years later, El Imparcial, a Mayagüez
newspaper, reported that eight persons were arrested in Río Grande, east
of San Juan, for making curious gestures and calling themselves “espiritis-
tas”; the paper commented sarcastically that if this was indeed a crime, then
the crime rate would soar.68
The popularity of both forms of spiritism, “scientific” and “Indigenous,”
compelled the Catholic hierarchy to redouble its efforts to preserve its hege-
mony. It mobilized its parish priests, preachers, writers, periodicals, as well
Challenges to Orthodoxy, 1870–1900 57

as the more notable among its flock, to denounce heterodoxy, but it failed
in driving out spiritism from the island.69

Political and constitutional changes in Spain had lessened somewhat the

Catholic church’s official status and put it on the ideological defensive. Its
clerical forces remained ill-equipped to improve popular religious prac-
tices. Nevertheless, formal popular devotions became more widespread,
and this pattern could be observed in Puerto Rico as well.
On the island, religious heterodoxy became more visible.70 Besides many
intellectuals’ anti-clericalism,71 the burgeoning of Freemasonry and of the
various forms of spiritism offered alternative communities of the soul.
Protestantism broadened this offer, though attracting adherents mainly
from the merchants of Ponce and immigrant workers in Vieques.
The US invasion of 1898 would accelerate this trend towards religious
pluralism on the island.
 6


American Dominion, 1898–1930

Puerto Rico’s abrupt change of empire in 1898 transformed the status of

the island’s Catholic faith. The church lost its state protection and its
meagre financial support. Its links with its flock continued to weaken, as
Spanish-born priests returned home, forcing recruitment of American
candidates, even more culturally removed from their parishioners than the
ones they replaced. The church’s role in public education ended, and it had
to establish Catholic schools to retain some influence in educating the
young. In the field, its weak presence created a void that lay preachers, both
male and female, undertook to fill, with some success.

the us goal of protestant conversion

With its conquest of Puerto Rico, the United States had to govern a people
culturally alien to it both in language and in religion. The US government
appointed a special commissioner, Henry K. Carroll, to report on the “civil,
industrial, financial, and social conditions” on the island. After he toured
Puerto Rico and met with inhabitants of all classes, Carroll’s voluminous
report of 6 October 1899 recommended that the “Constitution and laws of
the United States be extended to Porto [sic] Rico” and that “congregations
using church edifices for public worship shall not be disturbed in the use
American Dominion, 1898–1930 59

thereof until the question of legal title thereto is settled.” The application
of the US constitution and laws would be welcome, he argued, as “people
seem to be entirely in accord with the American principle of separation of
church and state, and complete religious liberty.”1 The Treaty of Paris that
ended the Spanish-American war in 1898 guaranteed freedom of religion
to inhabitants of the ceded territories.2
The principle of liberty of religion did not extend to education. Carroll,
who was a Methodist minister, recommended that “the governor-general
and legislature of Porto Rico be required to make provision for universal
and obligatory education in a system of free public schools, in which the
English language shall be taught.”3 Language was to be the instrument of
assimilation into US culture, and removing the teaching of Catholicism in
public schools would facilitate Protestant missionary work. The US military
administration, which ruled the island for two years and retained influence
over its affairs until the 1930s,4 supported the drive to Protestantism. In-
deed, the mandate given to Victor S. Clark as head (1899–1900) of the In-
sular Board of Education for Puerto Rico5 stated that “an education which
proposes a change to the native tongue implies a change of religion and the
complete transformation of the body of traditions of the people.”6 The end
of Spanish rule terminated state salaries to Catholic priests, leaving the re-
maining incumbents to rely on parishioners.7 Residents feared that, as
Spain had imposed Catholicism, the United States would impose Protes-
tantism, according to the island’s bishop, James Hubert Blenk, in his 1905
Report on the Diocese of Puerto Rico to the Vatican.8 The institution of civil
marriage and divorce during military rule could begin this process. Some
members of the liberal elite welcomed the chance to constrain the church
by proposing in the legislature, in 1900, suppression of the Sisters of Charity,
prohibition of processions and other religious activities in public spaces,
and transfer to the government of the registers of baptisms, marriages, and
deaths kept by parish priests. The proposal did not become law.9

the church’s new situat ion

The tensions between liberals and orthodox Catholics brewing since the
1870s came to the fore in the months following the conquest. In October
1898 in Juana Díaz, on the south side of the island, the Sisters of Charity,
who ran a school for poor children, asked the city to pay their wages, not
60 communities of the soul

received since June. The city refused, while it supported a proposal to open
a lay high school. In San Germán, the parish priests, who were Spanish, fled
the city for fear the arrival of the Americans would embolden the locals
who hated Spaniards, especially priests. Elsewhere, secular priests replaced
the Spanish-born regular clerics who had returned to Spain. When Bishop
Blenk arrived in 1899, he noted that thirty-four parishes lacked priests,
while many clerics who remained did not have appropriate training or ad-
equate personal discipline. At least one priest and over one hundred male
and female religious made a declaration of Spanish nationality before
municipal authorities, in order to be able to return to Spain. Three of the
four Catholic orders left before 1901, now unsupported by the Spanish state.
Most female religious orders, however, remained, boasting a greater pro-
portion of island-born members; their charitable work was appreciated
and supported locally.10

The Church’s Ambiguous Reaction to US Dominion

In his study of the Catholic church and Americanization until 1930, Samuel
Silva Gotay argues that the church was involved in the process, though not
always deliberately. Its top hierarchy was American: every bishop from 1899
to 1960, except for one from 1921 to 1925, was American. The hierarchy pur-
sued the same process of Americanization that was reshaping the Catholic
church on the mainland. During the Spanish-American War, US Catholic
bishops proclaimed their allegiance to the United States, insisting that “no
true American Catholic should dare support the Spanish side because Spain
was a Catholic country.”11 The US hierarchy engaged in what Stevens Arroyo
has labelled “pious colonialism,” or colonialism through Catholic institu-
tions.12 After 1900, the church established a network of private Catholic
schools on the island to teach English and US culture, but it neglected to
cultivate native vocations. Among Catholic clerics, though not among lead-
ers, there was strong support for autonomy or independence, which equated
being Puerto Rican with being Catholic.13 We may thus observe some am-
biguity about the US dominion within the ranks of the island’s church.
The laity also resisted the new order and developed a countervailing em-
phasis on hispanidad (Hispanic identity). An Asociación de Católicos was
formed in 1899 in Ponce, under the inspiration of the Paulist fathers, who
had charge of the city’s Virgen de Guadalupe parish. The association
American Dominion, 1898–1930 61

launched its own periodical, El Ideal Católico, in August 1899. It soon spread
to San Juan and other localities. The association was made up largely of
professionals – doctors and lawyers – both Puerto Rican- and Spanish-
born. In 1900, El Ideal Católico decried the presence of American Protestant
ministers and the construction of Protestant churches all over the island as
American money flooded in after the conquest; without these resources, it
claimed, there would be no Protestantism on the island.14
Ambiguity could surface in the same person at different times. In 1899,
El Ideal Católico reported that, on the day of his meeting with the US pres-
ident, recently appointed Bishop Blenk stated that “soon the Americaniza-
tion of the island would become a fact.” Yet some years later, in 1913, Blenk,
by then bishop of New Orleans, wrote to an independentist friend in Puerto
Rico to congratulate him on his efforts to achieve his ideals and wished him
God’s help in pursuing his “beautiful and justified ideals.” When this letter
became public knowledge, Bishop Jones, who succeeded Bishop Blenk in
1907, reaffirmed, through his diocesan publication, the church’s non-
political stance, while condemning the independence movement as “ill-
advised.” In the same year, during the four hundredth anniversary of the
foundation of the diocese and the transfer of the remains of Spanish ex-
plorer and conquistador Ponce de León to San Juan, many speeches were
filled with declarations of hispanidad, leading Archbishop John Farley of
New York, who had attended the event, to stand against Puerto Rican in-
dependence in an interview with the New York Times.15
Defence of the faith and defence of the nation and of hispanidad were
particularly salient in Ponce, where liberals controlled the local adminis-
tration and were representatives to the island’s Chamber of Delegates.16 But
the Catholic hierarchy did not tolerate overt political opposition. Thus, in
Vieques, when the local parish priest took up the fight against liberals, athe-
ists, and opponents of religion by attempting to create a political party, he
was rebuked by his bishop.17

The Rise of Catholic Personnel

There were 137 parish priests in Puerto Rico at the US conquest. Of the
eighty-six parishes, only thirty-four had a curate.18 The newly arriving
Bishop Blenk set out to recruit priests from regular orders abroad. These
men, of whom he was one, were better trained and led a more austere life
62 communities of the soul

than secular clergy. Augustinian fathers arrived from Spain in 1901, Amer-
ican Redemptorists in 1902, Dominicans from Holland in 1904, and Ca-
puchins from Spain in 1905. The last were replaced in 1929 by Capuchins
from the United States.19 In Mayagüez, the Redemptorists restored the
parish church and equipped two schools as well as convents and chapels.
The American Catholic Church Extension Society helped to finance mis-
sionary work and the local church, as it sought to slow the growth of Protes-
tantism.20 All the teaching orders recruited by Bishop Blenk came from the
United States.21
Bishop Jones continued relying on foreign regular orders. By 1920, he
had assigned eleven parishes to regular clerics, including parishes in San
Juan, in Río Piedras, Santurce, and Guaynabo, three suburbs of the capital,
and in Caguas, about thirty kilometres (twenty miles) south of San Juan.
The Dominicans were assigned the parishes of Yauco, Guánica, on the south
side of the island, and Isabela, Cataño, and Palo Seco, on the north side. In
1920, Bishop Jones assigned the parishes of the islands of Culebra and
Vieques to Carmelite Fathers. In all, foreign regular orders ministered to a
third of the island’s parishes. By 1930, there were nineteen religious orders
in Puerto Rico, all from abroad: thirteen from the United States, five from
Spain, and one from Holland.22
The bishops’ reliance on foreign clergy for Puerto Rico, like Spain’s use
of metropolitan rather than local clergy there, soon drew criticism. In Au-
gust 1909, the newspaper La Democracia accused the church of having put
regular clergymen from the United States in the island’s better parishes.
This group was “totally foreign” and diminished the role of the island-born,
“to whom belongs by rights the spiritual direction” of Puerto Ricans.23
The Sacred Heart nuns were the first US female missionaries invited by
Archbishop Blenk. They arrived in San Juan in 1902. They looked after deaf
children in San Juan, then in Cayey, south of Caguas, in Aguadilla, and in
the Santurce suburb of San Juan. They visited from house to house and
from hovel to hovel, getting people to receive the sacraments and confir-
mation on the bishop’s visit.24
Six Dominican nuns from Amityville, ny, arrived in 1910 at the bishop’s
request. They established schools in Comerío and Yauco on the island’s
south side, in San Juan and in Cataño, across the bay from the capital.25 By
1917, there were eleven female religious institutions in San Juan, five each
American Dominion, 1898–1930 63

in Mayagüez and in Ponce, two each in Arecibo, Río Piedras, San Germán,
and Yauco, and one each in Caguas, Manatí, on the island’s north side, and
Vega Baja.26 The Puerto Rican synod of 1917 reported 308 female religious
and thirty-five males.27 The Sisters of St Joseph, from New York, arrived in
1930. They opened a school in San Juan, travelled with their own car to visit
rural areas, established a dispensary for children in Ponce, and performed
numerous baptisms.28
As under Spanish rule, so in 1925: the majority of Catholic priests were
of foreign origin; only twelve of the more than 150 priests were Puerto
Ricans.29 This Catholic clergy could not be as close to the people as would
be their native-born Protestant counterparts.

re lig ion and educat i on

For Catholics as for Protestants, primary and secondary denominational

schools were the main channel for delivering religious instruction. For the
first time, the Catholic church was excluded from public schools run by the
island’s new Department of Education, which would henceforth propel
Protestant values. In a joint letter to the US war secretary in September
1899, Archbishop Chapelle of New Orleans, the apostolic delegate to Puerto
Rico, and the island’s new bishop, James Hubert Blenk, opposed the pres-
ence of schoolteachers from the United States. The church fought in vain
against the removal of religious instruction from public schools. El Ideal
Católico of May 1901 complained that it was a veritable anomaly that Puerto
Rican Catholic taxpayers paid for public schools while school regulations
were written and enforced by Protestant employees. Catholics were aware
that Protestant missionaries were the “most arduous defenders” of public
education. Protestant support for the system would continue well into the
twentieth century. In 1907, El Ideal Católico reaffirmed the prohibition
against Catholic parents sending their children to public schools.30
From 1898 to 1917, public schools taught in English, except for Spanish
instruction. This was a failure, as a report noted in 1926. “General advance-
ment was being severely handicapped” while “progress in spoken English
was not as satisfactory as had been expected.”31
The solution chosen was to create private Catholic schools. Three of the
female religious orders Bishop Jones imported to establish schools did their
64 communities of the soul

teaching in English. Local authorities required this. These orders did not
aim to “Americanize” students, but their members found it difficult to learn
Spanish and to adapt to the local culture. Parish schools created to fight the
public system’s Protestant influence and proselytism ended up “in a sense
less of an Americanizing influence than the public-school system,” argues
one scholar.32
But not by much. Private Catholic schools had both social-class and cul-
tural features. By 1917, when the first Catholic synod under American rule
gathered, there were twenty-four new Catholic private schools, the majority
established by American congregations, resulting in Catholic education for
wealthier people, and an environment that in effect Americanized their
children. Most Catholic schools taught in English in the later grades, in-
cluding religious instruction.33
This adhered to the policy for public schools, which introduced English-
only instruction in the primary grades. In 1922, the new commissioner of
education, Juan B. Huyke, a Puerto Rican Protestant and member of the
annexationist Union Party, decreed that English would be the language of
instruction starting in the fourth grade, a year earlier than before. Speaking
Spanish in the later grades was prohibited. The commissioner had sent 427
students to the United States to learn the English language and American
customs so that they would introduce these to the island.34 Still, in the early
1920s there were fewer than one hundred teachers from the mainland, and
1,900 Puerto Rican teachers.35
In the 1930s, the bishop of Ponce, Aloysius Joseph Willinger, continued
the fight for Catholic education and for religious instruction in public
schools, reminding parents that their children were obligated to attend
Catholic schools.36

for mal and infor mal re lig ious pr ac t ices

During the 1900s and 1910s, Catholic religious orders the world over un-
derwent greater centralization and the Vatican exercised tighter oversight,
so that religious practices among the regular orders in Puerto Rico came
to resemble those followed in New York, Paris, or Mexico City.37 But the
tension persisted between what the hierarchy deemed proper and what the
American Dominion, 1898–1930 65

laity practised. The Puerto Rican synod of 1917 declared that ex votos such
as picture frames or similar objects left in churches as thanks for avoiding
danger or regaining health represented “something false, indecorous or su-
perstitious” and needed to be removed.38
Yet the Catholic hierarchy mobilized traditionally popular pilgrimages
to Hormigueros, on the south-west side of the island, to honour the Virgin
of Monserrate. Bishop Blenk organized a great celebration in Hormi-
gueros for the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of the dogma of
the Immaculate Conception in 1904. This religious ritual was seized upon
by a local priest, who wrote in El Ideal Católico to urge readers to go to
Hormigueros “for God and country,” turning the pilgrimage into a na-
tionalist symbol.39
Popular devotion to the Virgin Mary was reinforced in 1917 when Re-
demptorist Fathers convinced the synod to promote the cult of the Virgin
of Perpetual Help.40

t h e ten u o u s l i n k b et we e n
church and pe ople

Church and people remained physically distant between 1898 and 1930. In
1899, a Protestant missionary noted “with some amazement” that there were
no church buildings in rural areas. By the later 1940s, nearly two in five rural
families lived more than five kilometres (three miles) from a church.41
Some Puerto Ricans maintained more than physical distance from the
church. In 1900, an anti-clerical feminist published a tirade against the
church in a Mayagüez periodical, criticizing the church’s economic power,
papal infallibility, and compulsory priestly celibacy. In response, the Ideal
Católico accused the author of being inspired by Satan and denied her the
right to take part in public debate because such forums were reserved to
men.42 In 1901, Cayetano Coll y Toste, a liberal member of the cabinet and
of the Chamber of Delegates who would become the island’s official his-
torian, declared during a discussion in the chamber that he was not a
Catholic, which earned him a reprimand from the Boletín Eclesiástico. The
same year, a resident of Utuado wrote to the newspapers to have the ring-
ing of church bells prohibited. In Aguadilla, some residents complained
66 communities of the soul

that the church required young people to attend the procession in honour
of the parish’s patron saint, St Charles Borromeo, instead of school; the
residents asked the attorney general to prohibit the procession, which he
refused to do. Between 1904–5 and 1912, 179 marriages were recorded in the
island’s civil register, sixty-nine of them civil and thirty-seven Protestant,
leaving Catholic unions at seventy-three, or less than 40 per cent.43

r ise and decline of spir it ism

As had happened in the 1880s and 1890s, many Puerto Ricans continued to
look beyond the formal church to fathom their place in the world. Spiritism
provided some of this understanding. Spiritists believed in God as a
supreme intelligence of infinite size, in the eternal life of the soul, in rein-
carnation, in the virtue of doing good and in the price to pay for bad be-
haviour, in Christ as an immensely evolved spirit, but not in the devil or
in Hell, as these would negate the supreme goodness of God.44 In 1903, some
spiritist leaders set up the Spiritist Federation of Puerto Rico to better or-
ganize the island’s groups of adherents, who proposed programs of social
action, such as abolition of the death penalty. Spiritists organized their own
institutions of social welfare, opening health clinics and hospitals for the
poor, which helped spread their influence.45
Spiritists believed men and women should be equal in the family. In 1899,
some female spiritists launched El Iris de Paz, a periodical devoted to “social
feminism” that lasted until 1912. It advocated marriage as a union based on
love and spiritual and intellectual affinity. It criticized orthodox Catholic
women for being submissive to the church’s traditional views on the role
of women. Women made up to a quarter of the delegates to the annual
meetings of the Spiritist Federation of Puerto Rico. Their feminist positions
brought them into open conflict with traditional Catholic stances espoused
by El Ideal Católico, which announced in 1901 that the hierarchy had for-
bidden the reading of El Iris de Paz.46
Spiritism spread to rural areas, where its rituals had more appeal than its
“scientific” character. It became a complement to folk Catholicism, which
viewed nature as endowed with supernatural powers to be channelled for
everyday life. It added to the cult of the saints, to the belief in waters with
magical powers to cure sickness, prevent hunger, and avoid death.47
American Dominion, 1898–1930 67

The most visible and publicized instance of popular faith healing asso-
ciated with spiritism was Julia Vázquez of San Lorenzo, nicknamed The
Samaritan (for the New Testament figure who saved a stranger), who at-
tained media fame for healing with water. Thousands of pilgrims, “mostly
latter-day jíbaros (subsistence farmers),” travelled to San Lorenzo in the
spring and summer of 1922 to be healed by The Samaritan.48
Julia Vázquez was “a poor woman of colour” who drew thick crowds on
Thursdays and Fridays, “the days that Vázquez’s spirit guides had desig-
nated for her public work.” She gave her patients agua fluidizada, a practice
well known to spiritists everywhere and familiar to Puerto Ricans at least
since the 1890s. The Samaritan took spring water and “magnetized” it dur-
ing her communications with her spirit guide. Followers took the water
home and used it much as Catholics used holy water, by drinking it or ap-
plying it to their body. The Samaritan did not only cure; her work was “also
an intervention in favour of moral regeneration and spiritual advancement
for society.”49
Her story filled the newspapers and was made into a blockbuster movie
that premièred in San Juan in July 1922 to a sold-out audience. “The media’s
and the public’s interests owed a good deal to the intervention of the group
of spiritists that included several federation leaders who orchestrated a skill-
ful propaganda campaign in La Samaritana’s favour”50 (see figure 6.1).
Spiritism in the 1930s lost ground to the growing awareness of natural
and social sciences with clinical and social-welfare applications. “However,
the substance of the movement persisted in the highly syncretic practices
of the folk.”51

prophets from the pueblos

These “syncretic practices” were encouraged and strengthened with the

spontaneous appearance, soon after the American conquest, of popular lay
preachers in the rural areas of the island. The best-known of these were the
Cheos brothers. Some scholars have attributed their rise to insecurities en-
gendered by the change of empire,52 but this seems a bit facile, as there were
quite a few predecessors, some before 1898, whose reasons for their missions
remain obscure.53
68 communities of the soul

Figure 6.1 The crowd in San Lorenzo. Puerto Rico Ilustrado, 2 September 1922.

The First Female Preachers

The first lay preacher to be mentioned by scholars studying this phe-

nomenon was Sister Eudosia, a nineteen-year-old from Quebradillas, on
the north-western edge of the island, who began preaching from her porch
on 15 August 1898, two days after news of the US-Spanish armistice reached
the island.54 She preached until her death three years later, reciting the
rosary and making prophecies. According to a clerical student of lay preach-
ers, she laid the basis for the advent of the Cheos brothers by converting a
farmer, Eusebio Quiles, to preach locally.55
A better-known predecessor to the Cheos brothers was Madre Elenita,
from the San Lorenzo area, southeast of Caguas. She began preaching in
1899 in San Lorenzo, and then Caguas, Cayey, Arroyo, Patillas, Guayama,
and Yacuboa, until her death in 1909 (see figure 6.2). She preached against
common-law unions, immorality, and the lax Catholicism of the peasants.
She warned them against the religion of the new political regime, drew
Figure 6.2 Madre Elenita’s preaching territory, 1899–1909.
70 communities of the soul

them to the practice of the sacraments, prophesied, and made miracles, ac-
cording to Catholic witnesses. She drew up to 5,000 followers from all areas
of the island and was considered by some of them an incarnation of the
Virgin Mary. She fostered the transformation of common-law unions in
the region into formal Catholic marriages.56
In March 1901, during Sunday Mass in Quebradillas, a young woman
named Juana interrupted the sermon and began preaching for the Arch-
angel Gabriel. The parish priest stopped her, but she preached after Mass
for more than one hour and a half to a large crowd. This was reported by
El Ideal Católico.57 She was said to be a shy person who spoke little in private
but preached magnificently.58 She later married a member of the Cheos.
As one scholar has remarked, “The role of the intermediaries, those who
bridged the gaps between the church and Catholic practice, was gendered
female at the outset.” They were missionaries who “traveled to lead devo-
tions in the countryside” and whose predications were reminiscent of
those of the Capuchins. In their emphasis on the sacraments and their de-
votion to the Virgin, they complemented and extended the reach of the
official church.59

The Cheos and Cheas

The Cheos Brothers (founders José de Los Santos Morales and José Ro-
dríguez Medina shared the same first name, often rendered as “Cheo” in
Puerto Rican vernacular) are the longest-lasting exemplar of lay preaching
on the island. Their formal association, the Congregation of St John the
Evangelist, was recognized by the Catholic church in 1927 and still exists
today. Morales came from a farming family of Arecibo. He began preaching
in January 1902, when he was only eighteen. Medina was five years older
and commenced preaching in Utuado in 1903. They soon joined forces and
spent several weeks preaching in Ponce. They drew crowds of sugar-cane
workers who abandoned the harvest to hear them. The cane fields’ owners
complained to the police, who arrested the two preachers. Popular pressure
led to their release on condition that they exhort their followers back to
work and that they no longer preach during harvesting season.60 This il-
lustrates at once the strong appeal of the Cheos’ preaching and their uneasy
but usually compliant relationship with the authorities.
American Dominion, 1898–1930 71

The Cheos led a “vast rural movement of poor laypersons, illiterate for
the most part, who took into their own hands the predication of the
Gospels to effect the conversion and the moral reconstruction of the rural
areas and local communities in Puerto Rico, particularly where there had
never, or seldom, been a priest.”61 They usually began their predication by
invoking the protection of the saints, and denounced Protestantism,
spiritism, superstition, Freemasonry, dancing, drinking, fornication, and
adultery. They urged their followers to go to confession, attend Mass, and
follow the Ten Commandments. They were fond of statues and crosses.62
They set up their headquarters in Jayuya, in the mountainous interior of
the island,63 by building a chapel. They built chapels throughout the area
to hold meetings and to preach, and to receive the sacraments from a priest
on the feast day of the patron saint: by 1933 there were over thirty such
chapels64 (see figure 6.3).
The Catholic clergy at first viewed the Cheos preachers with some trep-
idation. In 1906, El Ideal Católico condemned them as being sent by the
devil. A parish priest in Ponce wrote of them in 1909 that they were a bunch
of espiritistas, crazies or fanatics who would preach for three to four hours
to followers who mistook them for demi-gods and who obeyed them like
docile little lambs. Still, he recognized that they had provoked an extraor-
dinary increase in marriages and baptisms. In 1913, the Cheos sought Bishop
Jones’s blessing for their chapel in Jayuya, to be dedicated to St John the
Evangelist and under the administration of nearby Utuado’s Capuchin fa-
thers. The bishop agreed to the blessing but declined to carry it out per-
sonally. In 1915, the Utuado parish priest reported favourably on the Cheos’
positive influence on the peasants’ behaviour.
In 1918, the Vatican officially blessed the Cheos movement and recog-
nized its orthodoxy. The Cheos Roman Catholic Evangelistic Association
of St John the Evangelist was formally established under canon law and put
under the authority of the newly created bishopric of Ponce.65
The appearance of Protestant preachers in Puerto Rico after the Amer-
ican conquest has been said to have been one inspiration for the Cheos,
who have been portrayed as a resistance movement against Americaniza-
tion.66 But the Cheos movement displayed notable elements of continuity
with popular island religion. The “missionary” phenomenon, where “gifted
priests preached intensively for a few days and then offered the sacraments
Figure 6.3 Approximate area of Cheos activity, 1902–1930s.
American Dominion, 1898–1930 73

to those congregated at the designated site,” dated from the second half of
the nineteenth century.67 Devotion to the saints, as Agosto Cintrón noted,
was long ingrained in the island’s popular religious practice.68 The Cheos
walked in the steps of previous lay preachers, many of them women, as we
saw above, who had drawn large crowds. They drew on the same themes,
urging their followers to keep away from spiritism and Freemasonry, as well
as Protestantism, and exhorting them to lead a more moral life and frequent
the sacraments.
The Cheos acknowledged the influence of Madre Elenita. One of their
members moved to San Lorenzo to become acquainted with her. The first
retreat organized by Morales was held on the land given to the Cheos by
Madre Elenita on the Sacred Mountain, originally Montaña de la Santa69
(i.e., Madre Elenita), near San Lorenzo, which site is still a Cheos centre.
The Cheos welcomed female preachers – another major departure from
Catholic tradition – if they remained obedient to the leadership.
Women were indeed prominent as preachers within the Cheos move-
ment. José Morales’s first wife, Micaela Reyes, preached in the local chapel
and took care of visiting pilgrims, “particularly when her husband was away
preaching elsewhere on the island.”70 They had married in 1907, before
which she had been a “secular missionary.” Maria Lamberty Orana was an
independent lay preacher in Adjuntas, between Ponce and Arecibo, where
she met the Cheos leaders; she would later marry Pedro Laboy Torres, who
became the second president of the Cheos brothers. Juanita, the wife of one
of José Morales’s earliest collaborators in predication, Gregorio Rodríguez,
also became a preacher; she had been inspired by Sister Eudosia.71
Eugenia Torres had a remarkable career. Known as Hermana Geña, she
began preaching at fourteen after attending a predication by José Morales,
and she preached in Ponce, Peñuelas, west of Ponce, San Lorenzo, Caguas,
and nearby Cidra until her death in 1974. She was said to be beautiful, with
gentle manners and admirable eloquence. When she married, the Cheos
leadership ordered her to end her preaching. She left her husband and her
children and moved to Ponce, where she worked at the hospice for the
blind. When her husband died, she placed her children in an orphanage
and took up preaching, “free again.” She built a house, a chapel, and a build-
ing in which to conduct retreats in Cidra. Significantly, her resumption of
74 communities of the soul

preaching was allowed not only by José Morales, but by the bishop of San
Juan, Edwin Vincent Byrne.72
Eugenia Torres told the story of a timid eight-year-old girl, Gumersinda
Ríos, from Camuy, west of Arecibo, whose father brought her to a Cheos
meeting in Jayuya and who began preaching standing on a table on which
José Morales had set her because of her short height. Torres recalled that
she heard from the child the explanation of the Holy Rosary and the
panegyric of St Dominic de Guzmán, the thirteenth-century founder of
the Dominican Order. Ríos was with the Cheos for three years, then fell ill
and died.73
The female preachers associated with the Cheos had some competition
from Protestant counterparts. In Mayagüez, a North American woman ran
the Presbyterian Missionary School, which produced the female mission-
aries Esperanza Ruiz and Lolita Benavent.74 The Protestant missionary ef-
fort in Puerto Rico soon grew into a large-scale enterprise.

The US conquest of Puerto Rico transformed the Catholic church’s legal

and social status on the island. The church lost the state’s protection and
financial support, ending its official presence in state education. The church
lost many of its few priests and had to seek replacements mainly among
the foreign Catholic clergy of the United States. The church reacted with
some ambivalence to the new political order, some of its members accepting
Americanization, others equating Catholicism with hispanidad and resist-
ing cultural change.
The church’s links with its laity remained thin. Popular religious prac-
tices, such as processions and pilgrimages, continued under its auspices.
But it could not contain the rise of spiritism and other forms of faith
healing. Its institutional weakness and its remoteness from parishioners
outside the main centres prompted the rise of lay preachers, many of them
women, who drew substantial followings as they attempted to resist new
forms of religion and bring the common folk back to an orthodox practice
of Catholicism.
 7


Protestantism, 1898–1960

Besides losing official status and seeing many of its priests replaced by
Americans, the Catholic church in Puerto Rico after 1898 faced a well-
organized and -financed invasion by several US Protestant denominations
intent on converting islanders to their faith and to American values. Protes-
tant missionaries, educators, and health and social workers spread out
around the island seeking sustained interaction with the inhabitants. Under
the American principle of the separation of church and state, all Christian
churches and other religions could now compete on an equal footing.

a ter r itory div i ded: ar r ival of the

histor ical protestant denominat ions

Even before the Spanish-American war ended, representatives of the US

“historical” Protestant denominations (Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal,
Methodist, and Presbyterian) met in New York to apportion Puerto Rico
among themselves. Protestant missionary groups met on 13 July 1898, nearly
two weeks before US troops landed on the island. The following year, a map
was drawn up to formalize the agreement among Baptists, the Christian
76 communities of the soul

Alliance, the Church of Christ, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ,

Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and United Brethren. The Episco-
palians rejected the zone system and ministered to the whole island (see
figure 7.1).1
In 1905, a new map granted territory to Adventists, the Christian Alliance,
Episcopalians, and Lutherans, allowing more than one denomination in
twelve municipalities. The larger cities were open to all participating
groups, and denominations that first began missionary work in munici-
palities with not more than 7,500 people could be exclusive there. These
concords would be revised in the light of increasing population and ur-
banization (see figure 7.2).2
Protestant missionaries arrived with the American army. The US Protes-
tant Episcopal Church set up a commission to study missionary work
within the framework of a military chaplaincy and took over existing Epis-
copal churches in Ponce and Vieques. By the end of October 1898, a North
American Baptist missionary to Mexico visited the island and began
preaching in Spanish in Ponce, in Río Piedras, and elsewhere, to Catholic
objections. Some months later arrived a US Baptist preacher. In the autumn
of 1899, a young Lutheran pastor started to preach in San Juan: he gave En-
glish classes but needed a translator for sermons in Spanish. At about the
same time Congregational teachers set up Protestant denominational
schools. The Disciples of Christ sent a pastor to assess the situation; he was
then appointed missionary to the island. The Methodists, as well, appointed
missionaries, who began by preaching to Americans and later in Spanish
to the locals. The Christian Alliance, the Christian Church of Jesus Christ,
the Christian Church of the United States, the Methodists, the Seventh Day
Adventists, and the United Brethren all did likewise.3

the deve lopment of

puerto r ican protestant ism

Protestant missionaries had some immediate successes. They established

schools so that children could learn to write and read the Bible, the founda-
tion of Protestant preaching. They also engaged in social-welfare work, open-
ing orphanages and hospitals for their flock. Protestant clergymen were aided
Figure 7.1 Division of Mission Fields in Puerto Rico, 1899.
Figure 7.2 Municipalities with more than one active Protestant denomination, 1905.
Protestantism, 1898–1960 79

by their wives and children, a major difference with Catholic priests. Protes-
tants introduced new institutions, values, and forms of religious practice,
creating a religious and cultural shockwave across the island.4
These newcomers posed a highly visible challenge to the Catholic hier-
archy. The first Episcopal church was named for John the Baptist (the is-
land’s patron saint, who gave his name to the capital) and was located across
from the Catholic cathedral, next to the old Carmelite convent (today’s El
Convento hotel). That parish was soon headed by a bishop and boasted
three parochial schools, for Americans in the capital and the Black popu-
lation of the city’s Puerta de Tierra neighbourhood. Episcopalians ex-
panded to Ponce and Mayagüez. By 1912, they had four churches in the San
Juan area, one in Mayagüez, four primary schools, and nine missionary
centres in rural areas.5
The Lutherans formally arrived in San Juan in 1900. They established a
Spanish-language parish, St Paul, and another parish and a school, in 1903,
in Cataño. From there, they spread to Bayamón, Monacillo, a suburb of
San Juan, Palo Seco, Toa Baja, Dorado, and other places. The Baptists,
for their part, set up their first parish in Río Piedras, from which they
expanded their preaching to Caguas, Ponce, Yauco, Guánica, Carolina,
Trujillo Alto, Río Grande, Gurabo, Aguas Buenas, and Cidra (see map of
Puerto Rico municipalities). In each of their parishes they appointed lay
pastors to promote local membership. On the south side of the island in
Ponce were the Baptist headquarters, where a seminary was established
in 1906, and Baptist preachers travelled northward to preach in Coamo,
Orocovis, and Barranquitas. By 1910, Baptists had set up forty-two churches
in twenty-two municipalities, sixty-nine preaching centres, and fifty-six
Sunday schools.6
The Congregationalists organized their first church in Fajardo in 1901.
From there missionaries covered Luquillo, Naguabo, Ceiba, Humacao, Las
Piedras, and Yabucoa, following the terms of the 1899 division. They fo-
cused on health services for Humacao and neighbouring towns.7
Methodists, too, arrived soon after the conquest. Their first churches
were opened in the San Juan area in 1900 and in Arecibo two years later.
The first Puerto Rican Methodist minister, Juan Vázquez of Arecibo,
preached in Hatillo, Camuy, Jayuya, Utuado, in the southeast in Guayama,
Arroyo, Maunabo, and Patillas, and on the islands of Vieques and Culebra.
80 communities of the soul

Methodists also catered to English-speaking Protestants in the metropoli-

tan area. By 1912, they had set up fourteen churches, a rest home for mis-
sionaries in Aibonito, and two orphanages. They focused on education and
on night schooling for adults.8
Presbyterian missions were shaped by their US female missionaries. To
achieve “an effective, rapid, symmetrical, and inclusive transformation of
the intellectual, social, and moral character of Puerto Rico,” they intended
to emphasize their members’ medical and educational work. Their territory
was the west of the island: they set up their first parish in Mayagüez in 1902
and expanded to nearby municipalities such as Hormigueros, San Germán,
Sabana Grande, and Cabo Rojo. They also set up parishes in Aguadilla and
Santurce. Presbyterians founded a Polytechnic Institute (later the Univer-
sidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico), a hospital in Condado (now the Ash-
ford Medical Center), and a nursing school.9
The Pentecostal church arrived in 1916. An evangelical denomination,
it appealed to the poorer segments of society with its informal religious
rites, its emphasis on possession by the Holy Spirit, and its adoption of
the language and music of popular culture.10 It was the precursor of many
evangelical denominations that would later find numerous adherents on
the island. Its social characteristics and its stress on preaching and on in-
formality appealed to the sorts of people attracted to the many lay preachers
exemplified by the Cheos brothers.
By and large, however, in the early twentieth century Protestantism
increasingly appealed to merchants, professionals, and public servants,
particularly in education.11

p rote sta n t b e l i e f s

Whatever their denomination, Protestants shared some basic beliefs that

contrasted sharply with Puerto Rico’s Spanish-inflected Catholicism. They
considered the Bible the only authoritative source on revelation, historically
a rejection of the Catholic hierarchy’s self-attributed authority in the mat-
ter. Their appropriation of the Bible was essential to their religion of per-
sonal conscience. The “libre examen” (unsupervised study) of the Bible, to
Protestantism, 1898–1960 81

support and understand one’s beliefs, turned into a sort of individual right
that came before everything else. For Protestants, Jesus Christ was the only
head of the church and the only saviour and mediator between God and
mankind by his sacrifice on the Cross. Salvation was possible only through
faith in the loving and salutary power of Jesus Christ and never by church-
administered sacraments, indulgences, or good works. All the faithful were
part of the universal priesthood, and, as a consequence, life in common
congregations was sacred.12 These communities of the soul tended towards
an egalitarian rather than a hierarchical structure.
Protestant preachers took this “good news” to all parts of the island, in
the fields and in the mountains, on horseback and later by car. They tried
to revisit the same places– perhaps the house of a recent convert – and es-
tablished Bible schools. They became known as la gente que predica (the
people who preach), in implicit contrast to Catholic clergymen, usually
content to let their flock come to them in parish churches.13

emph asis on educat i on

The Bible’s central role in Protestantism required education of the flock.

Protestants became influential in public education as well as in denomina-
tional schools. Victor S. Clark, appointed in 1899 to head the Insular Board
of Education, and director of public instruction 1900–02, was a Protestant
pastor and educator.14 The early leaders of the University of Puerto Rico,
in the 1920s, were Protestant Puerto Ricans.15 Until 1948, all secretaries of
education, first Americans and then Puerto Ricans, were Protestants. “Fur-
thermore, in many of the public schools the position of principal fell to
Protestant ministers’ wives.”16 Holidays honoured persons and events cel-
ebrated during US school holidays such as Washington’s birthday (22
February), but excluded the most popular religious holiday on the island
(Three Kings’ Day, 6 January). Pupils nevertheless stayed away from school
on that day, as Commissioner of Education Edwin G. Dexter recognized in
a 1907 circular letter. “You are at liberty then to let it be generally known
that that day will be taken by the teachers to fill out their registers and to
arrange in the way that seems best for the general opening of the schools
on the next day.”17
82 communities of the soul

In the 1900s and 1910s, Protestants created three kinds of schools. First,
elementary and vocational schools were private denominational institu-
tions to complement the public system. In 1910, there were thirty-five such,
with 3,116 children, but only thirteen by 1915. The “general policy had been
to establish such schools where there were no schools of the Department
of Public Instruction.”18
Second, Sunday schools, held after the weekly service, provided “recre-
ation and entertainment in education and culture, religious reflection upon
one’s personal development that took place in groups so that their members
examined their behaviour and the possibility of changing it. This contrasted
with the teaching of the Catholic Church and the repetition of the Rosary
at home and during the feast days of the religious calendar.”19
Third, at summer retreats, “youth from various towns attended training
in sport, recreational, and religious activities, producing not only genera-
tions of faithful with solid religious convictions grounded in the history
of Protestantism … and with a complete Biblical arsenal on which to base
their faith, but also generations of young people strongly united by frater-
nal links.” These efforts aimed consciously to create a “new man” – or
woman – fashioned by the North American Protestant socio-economic,
political, and cultural ethic.20

behav iour al nor ms

Protestantism shaped adherents’ daily life much more than Catholicism

did its followers’. “Daily life of Protestants in these years was dominated by
programs of their church: Biblical school on Sundays from 9 to 11 in the
morning; meetings of committee or choir practice afterwards; visits to the
sick in the afternoon; predication in the evening; prayers on Monday
evenings, home devotions on Tuesdays and Wednesday evenings; choir
practice Wednesdays or Thursdays; and men’s, women’s and youth group
meetings on Friday evenings. Life within the congregation was a form of
family life where one’s problems were shared with all.”21 These activities
drew strength from and strengthened the congregations that formed com-
munities of the soul.
One pillar of that strength was the active role of women. From the out-
set, women took part in committees, commissions, and boards of directors;
Protestantism, 1898–1960 83

they had voting rights within the congregation and in denominational

conventions. They taught in Bible schools and directed prayers. They were
numerous among the missionaries, doctors, teachers, social workers, and
social reformers. It was stressed from the outset that Protestant Puerto
Rican women attend school, and that classes be mixed.22
Protestants had no recourse such as Catholic confession to amend the
flaws in their behaviour. As candidates for membership in a Baptist con-
gregation, for instance, Puerto Ricans had to “relinquish their old religious
practices, drinking, smoking, dancing, cockfighting, betting; they had to
lead a strict marital and family life, they had to behave in an exemplary
fashion at work, not engage in fighting, and take part in the life of the
Church, including all its prayer meetings, its Bible classes, its youth, ladies’
and men’s groups, as well as visiting the sick and to speak of the Gospel to
their relatives and neighbours.” Belonging to – and remaining in – a Protes-
tant denomination required submission to tight forms of social control.
This was reinforced by an inclination to find a marital spouse within the
religious community.23

g rowth of numbers

With their schools, hospitals, medical clinics, orphanages, and social work-
ers, Protestant missionaries to Puerto Rico confronted the poverty, illiter-
acy, ignorance, and ill health that plagued the island. Thus, they ministered
to bodies as well as to souls in their efforts to “Americanize” and “modern-
ize” mentalities. A good example was the Presbyterian Aguadilla Neigh-
bourhood House, “which offered a school for poor children whose mothers
worked, a dispensary, social work, a cooperative craft workshop for needle-
work, and evening classes for adults.”24
The everyday evidence of Protestant care for the population translated
into a rapid rise in membership. There were 8,000 adherents in “full com-
munion” in 1905, 13,255 in 1910, and 13,250 in 1915. In 1905 already, there were
ninety-one organized churches; in 1930, there were 199, with nearly 20,000
members.25 Yet this was still a tiny minority of the total population, given
as a million and a half in the US census.26
Protestants in 1930 belonged to ten denominations. While they had begun
to work together in 1898 by dividing up the island’s territory, they attempted
84 communities of the soul

to move to some form of inter-denominational structure by the 1910s. They

merged some of their theological schools into the United Evangelical Sem-
inary in 1916. By 1919 the Evangelical Seminary opened in Río Piedras, across
the street from the campus of the University of Puerto Rico.27

the g rowth of evangelical

protestant ism, 1930–60

The social conventions at the heart of the Pentecostal churches that chal-
lenged “historical” Protestant churches for the faith of ordinary Puerto
Ricans were more in tune with the “folk” practices of sociability and com-
munity self-help than were mainline Protestantism or authoritarian
Catholicism. As Nélida Agosto Cintrón argues, in traditional society, par-
ticularly rural areas, orthodox Catholicism was perceived as mainly a
women’s affair, and for the rich and white.28 The Pentecostal fostering of
democratic participation was attractive to the faithful: each congregation
chose its own pastor, and not so much for formal training as for strength
of faith, religious eloquence, and a socio-economic situation similar to
members’. In this community of sociability, every member was responsi-
ble for his or her own salvation as well as for the sustenance of the others,
and women helped make decisions and recruit new members. Congre-
gants built their own church physically and metaphorically, as in Barran-
quitas, where they were the “only church organization in town which
[was] entirely supported by contributions of the local membership.”29 For
the first time in Puerto Rico, people gained a sense of owning their reli-
gious institutions.30
As in other Protestant denominations, one was expected to behave ac-
cording to the community’s norms and eschew bad habits such as drink-
ing, gambling, or adultery – the price to pay for the feeling of belonging
and solidarity.31
The story of Don Taso, a cane worker born in the 1900s in the barrio Jauca
of Santa Isabel, on the south coast, gives a striking example of wives’ role in
recruiting husbands, as much to control behaviour as to firm up faith. In
the account he gave to anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz in the late 1940s and
in 1952, Taso’s conversion to Pentecostalism was the culminating point.32 His
narrative, and his wife’s, offer a detailed description of conversions.
Protestantism, 1898–1960 85

In 1950, Taso’s eldest daughter attended an evangelization campaign held

in Ponce by Brother Osborne, an American Pentecostal preacher, and told
her parents of the cures he wrought. Taso’s wife, Elizabeth, was next to at-
tend, with her husband’s permission. On her return Elizabeth also re-
counted cures and urged Taso to attend, knowing about his recurrent groin
pain with incapacitating flare-ups. Taso finally decided to go to a Ponce
meeting, where he felt an ecstasy and was cured but did not join on the
spot, probably wanting to see whether his cure would last. His wife then
made her own confession of faith, after trying the idea out on Taso. He later
accompanied her to a local service and made his own profession of faith,
enjoying the preaching and the hymns. Together they attended a night vigil
in a neighbouring community where Elizabeth received the blessing. Taso
received his own some days later, speaking in tongues and being infused
with joy. The blessing is the first step in joining the church; on probation
one learns the scriptures and “what one must do and what one must not
do.” In time the joy and thrill of the blessing decreased somewhat; Taso
likened it to the passing of the intensity of falling in love.33
The Pentecostal dos and don’ts transformed the couple’s daily lives and
interactions. As Mintz summarizes it, Taso’s conversion “required the de-
liberate surrender of certain prerogatives that seem to be tied to valued be-
haviour for males in his group: swearing, drinking alcoholic beverages,
dancing, gambling, fornication, acquiring compadres, consensual union,
delegating religious activity (if any) to one’s wife, giving vent to violence
in word or deed when the subculture’s values for the individual are threat-
ened, and non-deferral of gratification.” It also required his wife to change
behaviour, especially her fits of jealousy.34 Conversion improved both their
lives, as Taso acknowledged, and made them adhere to the values of “self-
advancement in Western society”: the deferral of gratification and the ac-
cumulation of capital for purposes other than gratification.35

so cial funct ions of

pentecostal communit ies

Agosto Cintrón argues that Pentecostal communities in the island’s interior

replaced the informal communities of the haciendas, or large farms with
tenant labour, that had given way after 1900 to large-scale sugar planta-
86 communities of the soul

tions.36 This explanation for Pentecostalism’s growth can be extended to

the Depression era. Peasant or working-class Puerto Ricans could become
Pentecostal ministers. The easy-going Pentecostal organization and reli-
gious practices made it attractive to the “poor and the marginalized.” In
Santa Isabel, in the 1940s, for instance, the cleavage between the Catholic
and Protestant churches and the Pentecostal congregation was “quite no-
ticeable … The Pentecostal church concentrates on the poorer people.”37
The Pentecostal churches, proliferating in the 1930s and 1940s, also at-
tracted Protestants expelled from other denominations because of their
charismatic expressions of faith or put off by the rigidity of their Protestant
pastor, as happened in Comerío in the early 1930s.38 But even mainstream
Protestantism grew, and, if Comerío is typical, its members were more ac-
tive and present in their church than Catholics; it also saw proportionately
more men participate than the Catholic church.39
Some residents of Comerío left the Catholic church because the local
priest charged fees for baptisms and weddings. One witness was distraught
because his baby was sick and in danger of dying without being baptized.
Others claimed that priests had refused to baptize illegitimate children,
although the priests claimed to have baptized 125 illegitimate children in
1934. Be that as it may, there was now religious competition in Comerío
as all over the island.40 Initially in Comerío, people left the Catholic church
for the Methodist because it was the earliest Protestant denomination in
the community. But the Methodists saw some desertion from their ranks
to the Pentecostal and the spiritists, showing, as one sociologist noted, “a
tendency to individualize religious beliefs” and to “shop around” for a re-
ligious community.41
In Barranquitas, west of Comerío, Protestantism took many forms. The
Baptists, granted the area at conquest, had a church building and “an im-
posing high school.” Two Mennonite communities were recruiting and
renowned for their “good works,” especially “dental, medical, and eye clinics
where they treat many people free and charge nominal fees to others.” A
small congregation of Pentecostals held nightly meetings “where they sing,
play music, etc.” But they were outnumbered by the Espiritistas, who met
twice weekly.42
Protestantism, 1898–1960 87

The advent of Protestantism in Puerto Rico after 1898 was a deliberate,

systematic enterprise. It gave islanders a new experience of religion as
community-building and mutual assistance. Evangelical denominations
created communities that were close to the people and drew their legiti-
macy from the community rather than some hierarchy. It did not frown
on an instrumental conception of religion. It accorded well with Puerto
Rican popular cultural norms.
While Protestantism in its many forms took root, the Catholic church
faced difficulties both with its manpower and with the social distance be-
tween clergy and faithful. This would make for long and arduous com-
petition with Protestantism.
 8


The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70

an a m er i c a n i zed catholi c church

At the time of the conquest, only 21 per cent of Catholic priests were
island-born. By one estimate, that figure had declined to 9 per cent in 1960.1
Catholic clergy was increasingly made up of “young American priests who
speak Spanish.”2 This was similar to the situation in Latin America.3
A celebrated study of Puerto Rico in the late 1940s, directed by anthro-
pologist Julian H. Steward of Columbia University, noted that the Catholic
church was sustained financially by “donations received from the North
American Church, from individual donors outside the small local parishes,”
and from returns on investments in real estate. Poorer communities had
limited financial resources, and if the parish priest had income of his own
from outside the church, this appeared to limit his sacramental influence
over his parishioners. The church’s reliance on outside revenue and on the
financial support of local elites put it at risk of remaining an upper-class
institution with little interest in “average” Puerto Ricans. In Santa Isabel
east of Ponce, for instance, labourers saw Catholicism as the religion of “the
upper class of hacienda owners and large merchants.”4
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 89

The “average” Puerto Rican had little interest in the church as well, if
Comerío can illustrate again. In the 1930s, more than half of the Comerío
parish revenue came from outside the island. According to a local priest,
“no one in town gives tithes and the largest donations are from seven to
eight dollars annually. We receive about 400 dollars from baptisms. Col-
lections from ordinary Sunday services are from three to four dollars. It is
customary for the poor, as well as for many of those having more money,
to put a silver or nickel coin in the collection box and take out change, when
they do not have a smaller amount.” The costs of annual religious festivals
were borne by collections from brotherhoods and other religious societies.
The local church spent $800 over the year for its activities. The local
Methodist congregation, by contrast, spent $2,000 a year in religious work;
two-thirds of the funds also came from the United States.5
The number of priests available to minister to the island’s mainly
Catholic population was small. In 1933, for instance, the diocese of San Juan
had 126 priests (including the bishop) for 900,000 Catholics, or one priest
for every 7,143 members. In Ponce, seventy-three priests (also including
the bishop) ministered to 650,000 parishioners, or one for every 8,904
Catholics.6 In the 1960s, it was estimated that the island had one priest for
every 6,000 or 7,000 people, with only about 20 per cent being native Puerto
Ricans.7 By 1980, the ratio of priests to population declined to 1:8,000,8 not
that much better than the Dominican Republic’s 1960 ratio of 1:11,000, one
of Latin America’s worst.9 By comparison, the ratio of priests to Catholics
in Quebec in 1962 was 1:586, or 11 times more than in Puerto Rico.10
The Catholic church considered education the foundation of moral
conduct. It had not been able to counter the public-school system’s refusal
to teach Catholic beliefs to its charges, but anyway in 1931 only about half
of the island’s children attended school.11 Private Catholic schools became
popular among better-off families, who deemed them of better quality;
they also taught English, believed necessary for advancement. By the
1970s, parochial schools were “bursting at the seams” as the demand ex-
ceeded the supply.12
90 communities of the soul

re lig ion and the puerto r ican ident it y

For anthropologist Sidney Mintz, Catholic ideology in Puerto Rico was

“less expressed as an aspect of religiosity than as an aspect of national char-
acter.” Beliefs and behaviour were defined with reference to Catholicism.
Marriage or common-law unions, receiving or not receiving the sacra-
ments, the belief in the supernatural powers of objects of veneration (holy
images, statues, sites of “miracles”), the veneration of Mary as a saintly
mother, and the division of women into saints or temptress “Eves,” the pub-
lic character of penance, the double sexual standard, all these were, for
Mintz, signs of the cultural, rather than religious, character of Catholicism
in Puerto Rico.13 Even the evening recitation of the rosary has been viewed
as a bond of national unity.14
Jorge Duany argues that these practices were common to Latin American
popular religion,15 but that does not mean that Catholicism was not part
of the Puerto Rican identity, as it was, for example, until the 1960s of iden-
tity in Quebec, where Catholicism was the dominant religion, and where
Catholic clergy controlled education, health and welfare, and exercised
close control over the behaviour of its flock.16

catholic re lig ious pr ac t i ce

Charles C. Rogler’s sociological study of Comerío in the early 1930s provides

some insight into popular Catholic religious practice. Out of about 14,000
baptized Catholics, the local parish priest estimated that 2,000 were “de-
vout,” attending services regularly. But Sunday Mass attracted about 400
people, or 3 per cent of the formally Catholic population. The priest also
estimated that “the poor are more devout in their religious conduct than
are the wealthier classes.” Women made up 80 per cent of Sunday Mass at-
tendance. Men, particularly of the upper class, considered religion to be
“cosa de mujer,” a woman’s thing. Inside the church, “the women of the
upper class customarily sit in a group on the front benches on the left-hand
side … If the seats are full and a woman of the upper class enters, she will
be given a seat by a member of the lower class.”17
About 19 per cent of couples were in common-law unions, a rate lower
than in the surrounding countryside. Consensual unions were “poor men’s
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 91

marriages”: church services and weddings were too expensive for many.
The lack of a formal church wedding did not affect couples’ fidelity or their
devotion to their children, which the sociologist observed was the same as
for married couples. Birth and death rates were high, as was poverty.18
Sexual morality was very traditional. Women, whether single or married,
were expected to be chaste: brides were to be virgins, and wives were to be
faithful to their husbands, especially among the upper ranks of society.
Men, however, could enjoy “sex freedom” within or outside their social
class. These values were strongly internalized by men, but also by women,
only half of whom thought men should be bound by the sexual norms im-
posed on women. This applied as well to the use of birth control: poor
women, who bore on average seven children, had little knowledge of or ac-
cess to birth control and believed that pregnancies were the will of God.19
Almost everyone in Comerío believed in the afterlife. “Even those who
have committed major sins believe they will ultimately be forgiven and will
find their everlasting resting place in heaven.” There they would meet their
departed friends and relatives, to whom the upper class bade farewell at
death with solemnity, while the lower classes made more of a joyous occa-
sion of it. with “eating and drinking and general merriment.” Catholics also
venerated the saints, particularly the parish’s patron saint; this veneration
was “the most holy, most aesthetic, most dramatic, and most ostentatious
of all Catholic religious patterns in the community.” Upper-class women
believed the saints to be “intermediaries between us and God. They must
be respected.”20
Not so keen on veneration of the saints was the Catholic hierarchy, par-
ticularly priests of American origin, who saw the veneration of saints’ stat-
ues as superstition.21 But the practice continued well into the 1960s, at least
among rural families, who held their own religious ceremonies such as
recitation of the rosary and wakes where “the rosary is recited for nine con-
secutive evenings after a death.” So did the practice of promesa: entering
into a “contract” with a saint for curing sickness or to “bring a good harvest,
or ensure business success”; in exchange, the supplicant would recite the
rosary, wear special clothing, or attend Mass for a specified number of
times. Failure to fulfil such a contract was said to entail eventual punish-
ment, and, if the contract was not honoured before one’s death, one’s soul
might be “compelled to wander until the obligation is redeemed.”22
92 communities of the soul

Another sociological study, conducted between July 1947 and January

1948, asked respondents about the place of religion in their life. The ma-
jority indicated that religion was important, but not the most important
thing. Another third reported being religious “in their own way,” while less
than 1 per cent opposed or strongly opposed religion. More than 80 per
cent of respondents identified as Roman Catholic, and a further 3 per cent
as Roman Catholic and spiritist.23
These forms of religious identity did not translate into strong commu-
nal religious practice. The majority indicated that they attended religious
services “occasionally,” i.e., less than once a month. A quarter of males and
15 per cent of females declared never attending. This behaviour was more
pronounced in larger cities and with older respondents. Nearly a quarter
of men and women in an active union were in a consensual union or con-
cubinage, and a majority of respondents agreed that couples in difficult
economic situations had the right to limit the size of their family; for a fur-
ther 13 per cent, all couples had the right to limit the size of their family.24
The celebrated sociological survey from the later 1940s, The People of
Puerto Rico, included a detailed ethnographic examination of four pseudony-
mous communities selected for their diverse economic situations and later
identified as Barranquitas and Ciales in the interior, Barceloneta on the
north coast, and Santa Isabel in the south.25 Although the study’s four com-
munity monographs emphasized different aspects of religion – entitling
the relevant sections “Religion” (twice), “Religion and Magic,” and “Religion
and the Supernatural” with a distinct section for “Magical Practices” – their
observations were similar.26
The people of Barranquitas considered themselves “muy católicos,” but
their everyday life exhibited selective observance. About half of married
people had civil or common-law unions. Birth control was frequent. Reli-
gious practice was a social occasion for the women, while men sought
“their amusements in less formal ways and on more numerous occasions.”
Men’s church attendance was low. The parish priest, who, unlike Protestant
pastors, did not do much ministering outside the church, decried immoral
behaviour, birth control, superstition, belief in ghosts, and spiritism. Ven-
eration of the saints and the Holy Virgin was widespread. In rural areas,
where priests seldom visited, residents took religion into their own hands
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 93

to celebrate wakes and births in private homes. A small number of Protes-

tants and devotees of spiritism lived in the urban parts of the community.27
The situation observed in Ciales was similar. Most of the population was
nominally Catholic, “if not in practice.” Protestants numbered fewer than
two hundred. The church was an “organization to which they may have re-
course at special and extraordinary times,” and the priest “maintains but
little contact with his flock.” The church’s three Sunday Masses attracted
different clienteles by geography and class: the first Mass was for “the rural
and the devout,” while the two later services attracted upper-class members,
especially women. In rural parts of the parish, veneration of the saints was
the “dominant form of religious expression.” Wakes, public recitations of
the rosary, and promesas were common. The instrumental character of re-
ligion was also visible in the prevalence of spiritism, to which people turned
“only when their personal security is threatened.”28
The situation was also much the same in Barceloneta. The parish priest
there – from the United States – remarked that his parishioners saw them-
selves as Catholic “because they were baptized” but admitted their igno-
rance of church doctrine and their lack of church attendance. Yet there too,
the cult of the saints and the custom of promesas were evident to the an-
thropologist. She also noted the interest in magical practices, devoting sev-
eral pages to it, and included spiritism under that heading. The Barceloneta
study also noted a few Evangelicals and Pentecostals.29
In Santa Isabel, working-class people were “nominally Catholic.” Bap-
tized and to be buried as such, they occasionally went to Mass, had pictures
of the saints in their homes, but “rarely marry by Catholic ceremony” and
seldom went to confession or received communion. They made fun of the
parish priest for his dress and “Spanish accent” and viewed Catholicism as
“the church of the rich.” A small minority, mainly middle class in the urban
part of the community, adhered to established Protestant churches or to
Pentecostalism.30
Some of the religious customs described in the four community mono-
graphs are noted by later observers. For example, “in Puerto Rico as in
Latin American countries, religious baptism of the children is a social event
having little to do with the religious background of their parents in many
of the cases.” Marriages, while “important social events,” were “a discrim-
94 communities of the soul

inatory index of profession of faith,”31 signalling adherence to Catholic

precepts. Rural families continued to venerate santos and crosses in their
homes and carried on the tradition of wakes, public recitations of the
rosary, and promesas.32 Promesas often pertained to the wearing of hábitos,
special white clothing that marked the wearer publicly. One scholar noted
that this practice extended to non-practising Catholics and was part of
popular religion in Puerto Rico.33 Spiritism, too, continued to draw adher-
ents, more as a supplement to Catholicism than as an alternative.34
Another student of folk culture in the later 1940s conducted interviews
with nearly 1,700 participants in over sixty communities. His 1952 publi-
cation recorded the popular practice of Catholicism, Catholic popular ex-
pressions of belief such as the veneration of saints, the feasts of the cross,
the sung rosaries, and Christmas celebrations and songs. The author tran-
scribed sixty-six folk prayers to obtain all kinds of favours from various
saints or members of the Holy Family, as well as popular spiritist practices.35
A similar study, conducted in 1958, noted that among the favours sought
were prosperity, winning the lottery, or gaining the interest of a man,36 all
examples of a very instrumental conception of religious practice that had
Spanish antecedents.37
Among the popular expressions of faith reported in the 1952 study were
the stories of the apparition of the Virgin of Monserrate in Hormigueros,
a popular story involving a late-sixteenth-century landowner (a basket
weaver in the oral tradition compiled in the 1940s) of Catalan origin en-
countering a wild bull and praying to the Virgin for the bull to be stopped
in its tracks; the Virgin appeared and the bull was duly stopped.38 The
Hormigueros shrine was built by the landowner in gratitude to the Virgin
and led to the creation of the town.39 In recounting her youth in Moca, near
Aguadilla, in the early 1950s, Ana Maria Díaz Stevens gives a vivid account
of family and communal religious practices of people seldom able to attend
services, which required a “three to four hour expedition,” sometimes after
obtaining a ride to public transportation on an oxcart. She labelled this
form of Catholic practice “Oxcart Catholicism.”40
Marian devotion reached a fever pitch in Puerto Rico in 1953. On 25 May,
the expectation of an apparition by the Virgin Mary in Barrio Rincón of
Sabana Grande, east of San Germán, drew 100,000–150,000 pilgrims –
roughly one-sixth of the island’s adults – from “all parts of Puerto Rico and
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 95

from such other far off places as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba,
Miami and New York.” The Virgin was said to have appeared to primary-
grade children in Barrio Rincón as they had gone to fetch some water at a
well near their school, and to have announced that she would appear again
on 25 May. No apparition was forthcoming, but many visitors claimed to
have witnessed miracle cures.41
The idea of Marian apparitions was very much in the air. The movie The
Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (Warner Brothers, 1952) was playing on the
island, though not in Sabana Grande, and attracted a lot of viewers.42 Dur-
ing May, radio and television frenetically covered the apparitions and the
expectation of more, as well as stories of cures by faith. It was also a time
for sociological assessment: “The pilgrims represented every one of the
major categories of the population – though the proportionate represen-
tation could not be ascertained,” and “the vast majority of the crowd be-
lieved, to one degree or another, in the events as reported.” Many hoped to
be cured with “water from the well blessed by the Virgin.”43
Through sermons and in print, the Catholic hierarchy expressed doubts
about the apparitions and the “miracles.”44 The church’s dim view of pop-
ular religious practices needed better spokespeople, as the practices obvi-
ously retained their appeal. During our 2011 visit to the site of the Virgen
del Pozo apparition, a letter by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Benedict XVI) in
his quality as Prefect of the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith re-
lieved the faithful of their obligations towards any promesa they made to
obtain a favour from the Virgin or from a saint.
Government, too, sought to channel popular behaviour. In the spring of
1953, it posted signs throughout Barrio Rincón warning that, as the water
from the well near the children’s school did not come from “water plants
controlled by the Health Department,” it should be boiled before being
drunk, to which one pilgrim remarked sarcastically that “what they should
do is put water from the well in the aqueduct.”45 Today, the well is enclosed
by a small fence, so that one cannot drink from it. Instead, a pipe carrying
government water is offered as a substitute, which some visitors use as such
(see figure 8.1).
The sorts of popular religious practice observed in 1940s fieldwork and
around the apparitions of 1953 attracted attention in the 1960s. The residents
of Loíza, east of San Juan, considered themselves either “folk” Catholics,
96 communities of the soul

Figure 8.1 A pilgrim taking water from the government pipe below the
Virgen del Pozo, Sabana Grande, March 2011.

“who emphasize baptism, promesas, the saint cult, novenas, and the cere-
monial cycle,” or formal adherents who attend Sunday Mass and “conform
to church teachings.” Women were much more numerous at Sunday Mass
than men and made the Daughters of Mary the largest religious association
in the parish. Still one in five marital unions was common-law. Loíza was
also the home of 523 Pentecostals, who formed nine congregations and rep-
resented 80 per cent of local Protestants.46
Catholicism remained dominant in the 1960s. A 1962 island-wide sample
put the proportion of Catholics at 77.1 per cent, Protestants at 17.5 per cent,
and 3.8 per cent “without religion.” A survey of a Bayamón neighbourhood
in the same period had an almost identical breakdown.47
By the 1970s Sunday church attendance seemed higher among Catholics.
“In some places it may be as high as 30 per cent,” noted one observer; “as
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 97

people move from the interior into more populated areas, it takes time and
patience to make them realize their duty to assist at Holy Mass every Sun-
day.” The same commentator also saw “a great upsurge” in consecrated mar-
riages. Public processions for recitation of the rosary, veneration of the
saints, promesas, and the wearing of hábitos, which “at times … are mixed
up with superstitious beliefs and hopes,” remained common practice.48

nat i onalism and p olit ical ac t i on

Perhaps some of the resurgence in the orthodox practice of Catholicism

had to do with its being defined as an integral component of puertor-
riqueñidad, the expression of Puerto Rican national identity propounded
by Luis Muñoz Marín and the Popular Democratic Party he founded in
1938 and that propelled him to be the island’s first elected governor in 1948.
Muñoz Marín, wrote literary critic Luis O. Zayas Micheli, “injected a moral
and religious direction to his Popular Democratic Party.” He defined
Puerto Ricans as religious and Catholic, whence emerged their sense of
nation, with both inextricably intertwined. From a more radical perspec-
tive, Pedro Albizu Campos, the brilliant Ponce mulatto who obtained a
law degree from Harvard University in 1922, returned to his hometown to
practise labour law, and became leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist
Party in 1930, defined Catholicism as an integral part of the national iden-
tity that had to be defended against American imperialism through inde-
pendence, a struggle that turned violent between the 1930s and the 1950s.49
As this sentiment developed, it paradoxically highlighted the Catholic hi-
erarchy’s “foreign” origins.50
The Catholic church became more distant from Puerto Ricans as it came
to oppose the highly popular Muñoz Marín. Their confrontation began be-
fore he even entered politics. In 1922, when twenty-four years old, using a
pseudonym, he proposed birth control as a means of combating poverty
in his father’s newspaper, La Democracia, and in 1923 he did the same under
his own name in a different publication. Bishop Jorge José Caruana an-
swered that birth control was “race suicide” and a mortal sin and that the
topic ought not to be discussed in public. Birth control was also illegal
under US and Puerto Rican law.51 During the New Deal beginning in 1933
98 communities of the soul

under President Franklin Roosevelt, Puerto Rico began to offer birth-

control information, over the protests of the US and Puerto Rican Catholic
hierarchy. Five years later, the legislature authorized the Health Department
to offer birth control throughout its health clinics, as well as eugenic mea-
sures to sterilize feeble-minded or sick women.52 These programs were pop-
ular. In the 1940s, 7 per cent of women were sterilized, and in the 1950s,
public hospitals carried out 6,317 sterilizations and distributed 300,000 con-
traceptive devices.53
The Puerto Rican constitution, overwhelmingly approved in a referen-
dum in March 1952 under the aegis of Muñoz Marín, enshrined the right
to “non-sectarian public education” and provided for the “complete sepa-
ration of church and state,” prohibiting use of public funds for private
schools. The US Congress then amended it, notably to exempt students
in private schools from compulsory public-school attendance, and the
amendments were approved during a referendum held with the election
of November 1952.54 During the election campaign, the bishop of Ponce,
James Edward McManus, issued a leaflet stating that Muñoz Marín’s Pop-
ular Democratic Party (ppd) had been “the enemy of Catholic ideals for
many years” and that to vote for it was a mortal sin that would entail ex-
communication. The bishop commented privately on the fact that the gov-
ernor had lived in “concubinage” for many years and thus lacked the moral
authority for his office. Despite its bishop’s condemnation, Ponce voted
nearly 60 per cent for the ppd.55 Some ppd supporters dressed up in cas-
socks to celebrate their victory and mockingly recited the rosary for the
souls of the losers.56
The church again condemned the ppd in the next election. In 1960,
besides calling a vote for the ppd a sin, since the party “permitted legally
the practice of birth control, divorce, and eugenic sterilization, as well as
encouraging common-law marriages,”57 it launched the Partido Acción
Cristiana, composed mainly of upper-middle-class professionals, business
people, and intellectuals. The party drew only 6.6 per cent of the votes.58
As the ppd argued in each election, a vote against the church was not a
vote against the Catholic faith, but against clerics who stepped out of their
religious duties.59
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 99

the church confronts

liber at ion theolo g y

In the 1960s, liberation theology, a Latin American movement that sought

to return to the core of Jesus’ message, the defence of the poor against op-
pression, arrived in Puerto Rico’s Catholic church.60 In Comerío, Domini-
cans trained in Holland, a locus of theological innovation, and who
ministered to the local parish, rejuvenated liturgical practices. They said
Mass in the vernacular and borrowed from Latin America the practice of
singing the liturgy to local folk music. The local version,61 composed by
one of the Dominican fathers, William Loperena, a noted Puerto Rican mu-
sicologist, was called the Misa Jíbara.62 Moreover, the Dominicans shared
pastoral work with the local Methodist minister. They also used US federal
funds to produce local arts and crafts and thus help preserve folk culture
and put together programs for industrial and agricultural workers.
The Comerío clergy was also known to favour independence for Puerto
Rico, and Loperena, for one, did not hide his support for the Puerto Rican
Socialist Party, which favoured armed revolution to overthrow US rule.
When Rafael Grovas Felix, the bishop of the new diocese of Caguas (1965)
visited Comerío to seek donations for his new see, the parish refused to
contribute because of extreme poverty. He was also told that Christ would
not have wanted the bishop to live in a palace apart from his humble flock.63
In a sermon for Three Kings’ Day 1970, Loperena argued that, as Jesus
allowed the Three Kings to come to him without prior declarations of faith,
so should the congregation welcome, in a similar manner, Cuban revolu-
tionary leader Che Guevara, should he now enter the church to pray. That
was the last straw for many conservative Catholics, who viewed the com-
parison between the Three Kings and Che Guevara as heresy. In the sum-
mer of 1971, the bishop ordered the Dominicans to leave Comerío. The
Comerío faithful sided with their clergy and simply closed the church. They
even demanded explanations from the bishop, in vain. When the bishop of
Ponce suspended the Dominicans from their Yauco parish for the same rea-
sons, parishioners there also closed their church.64
Ironically, Grovas Felix was responsible for Antulio Parrilla Bonilla’s
being consecrated bishop. Parrilla Bonilla would become the most persis-
tent proponent of liberation theology among Catholics in Puerto Rico, as
100 communities of the soul

well as an opponent of American colonialism, an advocate of indepen-

dence, a socialist, an activist against the Vietnam War and the military draft,
a protester against the US navy’s use of the island of Vieques for military
training, and an active proponent of the cooperative movement.
Born in San Lorenzo in 1919 into a large lower-middle-class family (his
father was a mason and store owner), Parrilla Bonilla did his secondary
schooling in Caguas and worked in the sugar-cane industry as a weigh-
scale operator. In 1939, he moved to New York, where he did odd jobs, then
returned to undertake a degree in commerce at the University of Puerto
Rico. He was drafted by the US army in 1943 before he could complete his
studies and was deployed in Panama as a radar technician. By then he was
already an advocate of socialism and of Puerto Rican independence. Some
of his army comrades in Panama were devout Catholics, and he “converted”
to Catholicism after reading about St Theresa de Jesus. Upon his return to
Puerto Rico he decided to enter the priesthood. He received his seminary
training in Maryland from 1946 to 1952, and later joined the Jesuit order
and did his Jesuit novitiate in Havana, Cuba, from 1957 to 1959. He had been
encouraged by Pedro Albizu Campos to join a regular order to “escape the
jurisdiction of the North American prelates in Puerto Rico.”65 He took his
vows in September 1959 and was assigned to a Puerto Rican parish in lower
eastern Manhattan. In 1960, he was transferred to the parish of St Ignatius
of Loyola in Río Piedras. The following year, disappointed by his superior’s
lack of pastoral experience, he asked his bishop for another assignment and
was put in charge of the archdiocese’s Office of Catholic Social Action,
which he led until 1965, when Bishop Grovas, as a condition for accepting
the new see of Caguas, requested that Parrilla Bonilla be named his auxiliary
bishop. Parrilla Bonilla was consecrated bishop in August 1965.66
In July 1966, however, Grovas requested that his colleague leave his dio-
cese. According to the archbishop of San Juan, Luis Aponte Martínez, both
men were strong-willed independentistas, but with divergent views about
pastoral work.67
Parrilla Bonilla retained his title of bishop, and in 1966 the Puerto Rican
conference of bishops offered him the rectorship of the Ponce joint dioce-
san seminary, troubled by bad administration and poor candidates. In 1967,
he merged the Ponce seminary with the Jesuit seminary of Aibonito and
left the direction of the new institution to the Jesuits. He sought missionary
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 101

work in Guatemala but was not accepted by its archbishop. The leader of
the Puerto Rican Independence Party, Gilberto Concepción de Gracia, con-
vinced him in 1968 that he should help the island’s people in their fight for
freedom and justice rather than do missionary work in some other country.
The archbishop of San Juan suggested to him that he return as head of the
Apostolate of Social Work, but Parrilla Bonilla requested to be made aux-
iliary bishop of San Juan, presumably to have some latitude in his work;
the archbishop refused. In his account of this episode, Parrilla Bonilla made
clear that he did not expect the archbishop would have supported his social
and political positions. Instead, in 1968 Parrilla Bonilla found a teaching
position at the Institute of Cooperation at the University of Puerto Rico in
Río Piedras, while he assisted with pastoral work in local parishes. He also
helped in ministry work at the Hormigueros basilica.68
It became clear, in 1971, that Parrilla Bonilla could expect little support
from the island’s conference of bishops, which stopped inviting him to its
reunions. Without a formal church appointment and material support,
he joined and became head of the John XXIII Social Center, in Río Piedras,
which disseminated the late pope’s ideals on social justice and human
rights and worked for rejuvenation of the church along the lines set out
by him and the Vatican II Council. Parrilla Bonilla worked tirelessly to
this end: he wrote newspaper articles, gave conferences in Puerto Rico
and abroad, built a library, created a comunidad de base – a local group of
clergy and faithful doing religious education, pastoral and social work
among the poor, somewhat like the work of Protestant Evangelical com-
munities – fostered cooperative movements, denounced capitalism, colo-
nialism, and imperialism, participated in the International Conference of
Solidarity with Puerto Rican independence, helped migrants, offered sup-
port to conscientious objectors, all the while providing pastoral services
at the Center and elsewhere. He did not shy from linking the Catholic hi-
erarchy in Puerto Rico to the US oppressor and its threat to the survival
of the Puerto Rican nation.69
Perhaps the most famous of his public stands occurred in 1979, when he
took part, with other religious figures and with independentist leaders, in
ecumenical prayers for local fishermen on a Vieques beach. This was a way
of confronting the presence on the island of the navy, which had declared
the beach off-limits because of its live-munitions exercises. Twenty-three
102 communities of the soul

demonstrators were arrested. The confrontation made front-page news,

which highlighted the presence of a bishop and of a reverend among those
arrested. Parrilla Bonilla was the first to appear before a federal judge, who
gave him a one-year suspended sentence and a $500 fine, which he refused
to pay. A newspaper article suggested that the bishop perhaps thought him-
self above the law because of his clerical title, to which he replied that trans-
gressing an unjust law was not an ecclesiastical privilege but the moral duty
of any man of conscience.70
Puerto Rico boasted other strong-willed liberation theologians in the
1960s and 1970s. In Los católicos rebeldes en Puerto Rico durante la guerra
fría, José Enrique Laboy Gómez catalogues the actions of the Jesuit Sal-
vador Freixedo, the author of Mi Iglesia duerme (My Church Is Asleep), a
virulent 1969 denunciation of the church’s inaction against the island’s se-
vere social and economic problems. Laboy Gómez also recounts the stances
of other Jesuits and Dominicans, Trinitarian priests, nuns of the Good
Shepherd and of the Sacred Heart, Carmelite nuns, and missionaries of
the Holy Trinity.71
Liberation theology led two female orders to work with the poor rather
than educate the daughters of the local bourgeoisie. In 1970, the Sisters of
the Sacred Heart, inspired by personal training in Latin American liberation
theology, decided to close their prosperous Santurce boarding school in
order to concentrate on aiding the poor. The Carmelites’ Vedruna school,
in Guaynabo, suffered the same fate in 1977, for the same reasons.72
The Catholic hierarchy responded with vigour to liberation theology.
Laboy Gómez’s last chapter, “Persecutions against radical Catholic groups
in Puerto Rico,” runs to eighty pages.73 Father Loperena was demoted from
his post; the bishop of Ponce prohibited the singing of Loperena’s Misa
Jíbara and instead reinforced traditional Spanish hymn music.74 The bishop
closed the Ponce seminary, where seminarians had post-Vatican II hopes
of more collegial decision-making. The Catholic hierarchy stuck to its
pre-Vatican II ways and practices.75 Suspended from his pastoral duties,
the Jesuit Freixedo eventually left the priesthood. In 1976, the archbishop
of San Juan, Luis Aponte Martínez, rebuked the Carmelites for closing their
Guaynabo school and arranged for the local parish to take it over. The hi-
erarchy had the support of influential conservative Catholics, the local
The Catholic Church and the State, 1930–70 103

police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and, in some cases, it seems, of

the Central Intelligence Agency.76
In 1960s Puerto Rico, liberation theology was not exclusive to the
Catholic church. The Evangelical Seminary in Río Piedras, just across from
the University of Puerto Rico, was also host to this movement,77 which was
soon denounced as leftist political subversion led by Baptist minister
Samuel Silva Gotay.78 Silva Gotay was working for “rejuvenation” of Evan-
gelical practice through active political stances in favour of decolonization
and against the excesses of capitalism. He was accused of being a tool of
Cuba’s Fidel Castro-style communism and was forced out of the ministry.79
Silva Gotay went on to an examination of Latin American liberation the-
ology (published 1981), and in 2014 he received an honorary doctorate from
the Evangelical Seminary.80

In the mid-twentieth century, even with help from US Catholics, the church
in Puerto Rico responded poorly to the spread of Protestantism, particu-
larly Evangelical. It failed to change the communal religious practices of
“nominal” Catholics. Its sparse and mostly US-origin secular clergy did not
help breach its social and physical distance with the laity. The church
aligned with the most conservative parts of society and its forceful putdown
of progressive elements confirmed this alignment. In the following years,
the Catholic church would also face two other monotheist religions, the
Jewish and Muslin faiths, as well as forms of Christian worship over which
it had little control.
 9


Varieties of Monotheism: Protestants, Jews,

and Muslims in the Late 20th Century

The Catholic church of Puerto Rico in the late twentieth and early twenty-
first centuries continued to face challenges to its religious hegemony. A 2017
compilation of “all religious groups in Puerto Rico” by the Latin American
Socio-Religious Studies Program (prolades by its Spanish acronym)
identified 126 such groups, from the Eastern Orthodox to the “marginal
Christian,” Buddhist, Hindu, Animist, and “psychic-New Age.” Though an
undercount (only one Jewish and two Muslim communities), it suggests the
diversity of religious affiliations today.1 The most socially visible affiliations,
by date of earliest appearance, were Evangelical Protestantism, Judaism,
and Islam. Their new communities of the soul would increasingly challenge
the concept of Catholicism as a foundation of Puerto Rican identity.

evangelical protestant ism

Since the 1960s, Protestantism, especially in its evangelical form, has grown
in Puerto Rico as elsewhere in Latin America.2 In the mid-1960s, Protestant
communities on the island were said to number over 500 and to have close
Varieties of Monotheism 105

to 250,000 members, or about 10 per cent of the island’s residents.3 By 1985,

this proportion had risen to 27 per cent, the highest in the Spanish-speaking
Caribbean and Latin America.4 In 2008, Protestants were estimated to make
up 30 per cent of the island’s people,5 and in 2014, 33 per cent, according
to the Pew Research Center, second only to Catholicism, at 56 per cent.6
Protestantism’s attraction in Latin America has been linked to socio-
economic changes that have increased social fluidity and redefined per-
sonal and social identity. Pentecostalism is “quick and easy” to adopt. It
requires no long initiation or training, is simple to understand, allows in-
dividuals to immediately believe in themselves, and retains the “magical”
aspect of religion that characterized popular Catholic practices. Its minis-
ters are locals, its practitioners are usually poor or middle-class persons
who have experienced social or geographical dislocation, and it focuses on
concrete problems such as lack of work, family tensions, alcoholism, or
drug consumption.7 Across Latin America, Pentecostalism was the domi-
nant form of Protestantism.8 In Puerto Rico, half of the 1,700 respondents
to the 2014 Pew survey who answered the question about being Protestant
defined themselves as Pentecostal. Overall, one-fifth of all respondents de-
scribed themselves as Pentecostal, with eighty-two of them stating they be-
longed to a Protestant church other than Pentecostal.9
Pentecostalism brings together old and new. A renowned sociologist of
religion remarks that “it unites the ancient layers of solidarity with the kinds
of expansive organizational principles recommended by specialists in
church growth. And the Pentecostal preference for stories, for gesture and
oratory, belongs simultaneously to pre-literate and to post-literate society.”
He also notes the similarities between Caribbean cultural practices and
those of Pentecostalism: orality, informality, spontaneity, and flexibility,
traits observed in Haitian Pentecostalism, for example.10
In Puerto Rico, Pentecostal congregations have also been viewed as recre-
ating old social links and relationships, which had disappeared with the
haciendas, where the jíbaros had lived and worked.11 A sentiment of com-
munal solidarity was surely comforting, but may not indicate a desire to
return to earlier forms of social organization. Pentecostal congregations
were largely free of the hierarchy and exploitation characteristic of hacien-
das and strove to provide communal help not only for the soul but also for
the body.
106 communities of the soul

Pentecostalism has been linked to Americanization, as it “serves to

maintain a socio-cultural system which though dynamic is becoming less
Puerto Rican and more American” by its advocacy of “‘good’ work habits,
puritanical standards, and relatively conservative social and political
views.” By aiming to improve members’ social and economic situation, it
also seeks to compensate for the failure of “modern” society to do so.12 In
Loíza, for example, “techno-economic changes have been primarily re-
sponsible for the emergence of a class system – i.e., groupings of individ-
uals who share the same life chances – which is quickly replacing the
traditional status groupings.”13
Protestantism in general may also serve as a way station to middle-class
propriety: some adherents, on joining the middle class, return to the
Catholic church favoured by the affluent elite. Religious affiliation could
sometimes be an instrument of social ascension.14
Women’s place in religious communities, Protestant as well as Catholic,
was central. They made up the majority of respondents to the Pew survey
who affiliated with a religion; two-thirds of Protestants were women.15
More women than men (81 per cent against 70) declared religion very im-
portant in their lives.16 Two-thirds of women, against only one-third of
men, whether Catholic or Protestant, reported giving a percentage of their
income to the church.17 The same difference was observed for frequency of
prayer: three-quarters of women prayed at least once a day, compared to
only three in five men. Inversely, of the sixty respondents who said they
never prayed, two-thirds were men.18
Conversion is a substantial phenomenon among Puerto Rican Chris-
tians. The Pew survey reported that 22 per cent of Puerto Ricans were no
longer members of their childhood religion; 38 per cent of Protestants had
been raised as Catholics. Among the reasons cited for conversion were a
greater personal connection with God (70 per cent of converts), style of
worship (63 per cent), and more help for members (41 per cent). More than
half of Protestants, versus 17 per cent of Catholics, gave a percentage of their
income to the church.19
Women are central in the conversion from nominal Catholicism to active
Protestantism, as they usually convert first (as with Taso’s wife, in chapter
7) and become very active in liturgy.20 The use of native clergy and of local
popular music gives evangelical Protestantism a Puerto Rican identity.21
“Through their informal visits and contacts, Puerto Rican Protestant min-
Varieties of Monotheism 107

isters have achieved the kind of close relationship with the people envied
but never known by the Catholic priests.”22
Loíza may again illustrate the Pentecostal sense of community. Members
“frequently see each other during the course of the day, whether it be to
visit the home of a sick ‘brother,’ to proselytize, to conduct a prayer vigil,
or to perform some other social or religious function.”23 Acceptance re-
quired an “extended probationary period during which the newcomer has
something specific to aim for: a personal experience of the Spirit.”24 This
hardly impeded membership, as in 1979 there were an estimated 225,000
island Pentecostals.25
To join the community, one had to declare one’s faith, which included
Christian beliefs and specific Pentecostal articles, such as baptism “subse-
quent to a clean heart” through immersion, and the speaking of tongues.
Candidates could attend religious services practically every day of the week:
women conducted the service on Monday, the Youth League did Tuesday,
and the Men’s Society Wednesday, while Thursdays and Fridays were for
visiting homes of “delinquent members or ‘interested’ individuals who ei-
ther specifically ask for a service or who politely acquiesce to a communi-
cant’s request.” Services began with a devotional component of “prayers,
hymns, Bible readings, solos, testimonials, ‘sermonettes,’ collection of vol-
untary contributions, and discussion of church business.” The “mensaje,”
or sermon, was not reserved to the local pastor; it could be given by a “guest
preacher, or some designated member of the congregation.” Services at the
homes of recently deceased members resembled traditional folk Catholic
wakes, but without alcohol. Syncretism, however, had its limits: spiritism
was “vehemently denounced” as the handiwork of the devil.26
Membership required an official marriage. To take Loíza as an example
again, member couples were all wedded “either at a Pentecostal or civil
ceremony.” Extramarital sex was forbidden and, when recurrent, provoked
expulsion. As well, divorce was allowed only on grounds of adultery. Be-
havioural prescriptions were not always followed regularly, as some men
converted to please a prospective wife, only to return to the cafés, the “street,”
and extramarital activities after marriage. Women were held to their tradi-
tional role of “inconspicuous, modest, and faithful” wives.27
Other forms of revivalist folk religious practice were manifest. One was
the Prophets movement, a “uniquely Puerto Rican folk religion.” A Caguas
group, the Cilicia Temple, attracted anthropological study in the early 1960s.
108 communities of the soul

The group drew on North American fundamentalist Protestantism, Puerto

Rican spiritism, Catholicism, and lower-class Puerto Rican folk culture. Its
particularity lay in the ceremonial wearing of veils by its female members,
prophesying, and faith healing by “anointing with olive oil, exhortative
prayer, laying on of the hands, and massaging.” Besides bodily healing, this
procedure was said to protect from evil spirits. Ceremonies were marked
by informality and “spontaneous and total audience participation coupled
with a high degree of emotionalism,” with singing or music playing.28
Cilicia Temple members numbered in the forties, and the men belonged
to the “urban proletariat” of non-farm wage earners, most of them earning
between $100 and $200 a month. The group required a very strict way of
life: no “smoking or using tobacco; drinking alcoholic beverages, forni-
cation out of wedlock, attending or participating in athletic events; gam-
bling or attending cockfights; strolling in the town recreation plaza for
social purposes; dancing or attending parties; and such feminine practices
as the use of artificial beauty aids (i.e., cosmetics, padded brassieres, styl-
ized hairdos, etc.) and wearing provocative clothing.” Structurally, it con-
stituted a “spiritual community of equals” where everyone had a role in
religious ceremonies.29
As the anthropological study noted, “Cilicia can be conceived of as a
socio-religious sub-system within the framework of the larger social sys-
tem – with its own set of values, norms, status and roles, and behaviour
patterns competing with and to some extent replacing those of the larger
social system in the lives of individual members.”30 The remark may apply
to most Evangelical congregations in Puerto Rico: sociologically, their ap-
peal is a sense at once of distinctiveness from the wider society and of com-
munity within the congregation. They answer needs that the Catholic
church is weakly set up to address. We see in the next chapter other forms
of religious practice that developed to attract popular attention.

jew ish communit ies

Jewish communities emerged in the twentieth century in Puerto Rico, said

to be the only Caribbean island with congregations representing the three
main strands of Judaism. Adherents now number an estimated 1,500.31 The
Spanish crown, which had expelled Jews from Spain in 1492, forbade non-
Varieties of Monotheism 109

Catholic immigration to its colonies until 1870, and even after that date the
local Catholic church frowned on it. Nevertheless, some “converted” Jews
are known to have lived on the island from 1519 onwards.32 Some settled in
the mountainous areas, practised their former religion in secret, and had
to profess to be Roman Catholics in public.33 Others were traders: in the
first half of the nineteenth century; for example, Ponce had Jews from
Curaçao.34 Some traders came from the nearby island of St Thomas, such
as Isaac Louis Jacob Bravo, who had to “convert” to Catholicism in order
to marry a Catholic. He was a respected member of the Mayagüez commu-
nity and a friend of Puerto Rican nationalists Ramón Emeterio Betances
and José de Diego.35 Other Jews were living in Guayanilla, on the south
shore, in Aguadilla, and in Mayagüez.36 A few took part in the 1868 Grito
de Lares insurrection and were executed by the Spanish authorities.37
The 1898 census noted the presence of American Jews in Ponce.38
The first sizable presence occurred in the wake of the US conquest, as
Jewish-American servicemen remained on the island. They formed “the
core of a nascent Jewish community in the southern town of Ponce. Colonel
Noah Shepard served as an unofficial leader of this group, and Rabbi
Adolph Spiegel, who had served in the US forces, remained in Ponce for
several years. Many of these Jewish former servicemen worked in Puerto
Rico’s administration, helping to create its legal code and court system, and
worked in public health to help eradicate tropical diseases from the is-
land.”39 Almost immediately the Jewish newcomers became involved in im-
proving the island’s legal, social, and health conditions.
US immigration restrictions in the 1920s impelled many eastern Euro-
pean Jews to consider Cuba and Puerto Rico as way stations into the main-
land, and some eventually settled on the islands. In Puerto Rico, Jewish
entrepreneurs operated tobacco manufacturing companies, made furni-
ture, sold food and supplies, and ran diamond and leather-good factories,
“mostly in Caguas and Cayey.” A number worked as doctors, members of
medical faculties, and public-health advocates. The first Jewish community
centre and synagogue date from this period.40 By 1940, there were “only 150
known Jews in Puerto Rico.” Jewish refugees from Nazism opened a com-
munity centre in 1942 in the Hato Rey district of San Juan. In 1954, the Con-
servative Shaare Zedek (Gates of Justice) synagogue was established in San
Juan’s Miramar neighbourhood.41
110 communities of the soul

After 1945, Puerto Rico industrialized on a large scale, as the island’s Op-
eration Bootstrap provided incentives for investment in local industries.
American Jews took a notable part in the process, launching factories mak-
ing mahogany furniture, leather goods, bedding, underwear, and cigars and
setting up the first supermarket chain, Pueblo. The 1960s saw Jewish invest-
ment in tourism, particularly in large seaside hotels.42
Fidel Castro’s 1959 Communist revolution in Cuba prompted another
wave of Jewish immigration. A number of Cuban Jews transplanted their
businesses, in commerce, residential construction, and banking. Many of
these immigrants were Orthodox or Conservative. From this time on, the
island’s Jewish community (mainly in and around San Juan) increasingly
took on a Spanish flavour. During the next decades, more Spanish-speaking
Jews arrived from Argentina and, to a lesser extent, Colombia.43
Like most other religious groups in Puerto Rico, the three synagogues
sustain communities of the body and of the soul. The oldest, the Conser-
vative Shaare Zedeck, has its synagogue and community centre in Miramar.
It is housed in a large private residence acquired in 1953 and remodelled
twice since. Besides the synagogue, the compound – the Jewish Community
Center of Puerto Rico, created in 1942 – includes a Hebrew school, a library,
a kosher store, administrative offices, meeting rooms, a children’s play area,
and a ballroom.44 The Conservative synagogue has about two dozen per-
sons for Friday services and about forty on Saturdays. Services are held in
English or Spanish; the community is now mainly Spanish-speaking. In re-
cent years, members of this congregation have suffered from the island’s
economic difficulties, and their numbers were declining even before Hur-
ricane Maria and the government’s financial difficulties.45
The Reform community, Beth Shalom (House of Peace), was constituted
in 1967 and established a centre a year later, across the street from Shaare
Zedeck. In 1972, it purchased a building in Santurce, which it converted into
a synagogue. It has boasted a series of distinguished rabbis, mainly from
the United States.46 It provides “spiritual and educational activities” to a
“diverse, multigenerational, multicultural, inclusive community with an
emphasis on social justice, education and dynamic experiences in Judaism.”
It is financed by a “combination of dues, donations, school fees and
fundraising programming,”47 but, like the Conservative congregation, it
struggles financially with the exodus of some members to the mainland,
Varieties of Monotheism 111

for which recent converts, now the bulk of the community, have not com-
pletely compensated. Between twenty and thirty persons attend the Friday
services and about sixty on Saturdays, and Hebrew, Spanish, and English
are used.48
The third Jewish congregation is Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch. It runs
the Rohr Jewish Center in the Isla Verde district of Carolina, east of San
Juan, close to the airport, major tourist hotels, and beaches. Chabad of
Puerto Rico was founded in 1999 by Rabbi Mendel Zarchi, originally from
Brooklyn, ny, and his wife, Rachel.49 Zarchi is now the longest-serving
rabbi on the island. In the first years, Chabad-Lubavitch conducted services
in rented facilities. It began construction in 2013 of its new quarters,50 in-
augurated in August 2016. It provides education in Hebrew and the Torah,
sells kosher food, and offers community services. The congregation is com-
posed of about seventy families of Puerto Rican, American, or Israeli back-
ground. It also welcomes thousands of visitors from the United States and
the Caribbean each year.51
Shabbat services there draw from thirty to sixty people. When I attended
a service in early 2019, I counted about thirty men (a traditional partition
separated the women from the men), and more than sixty men, women,
and children attended the Kiddush lunch afterwards. The service was con-
ducted in Hebrew, with some English. The community appears well estab-
lished, and Rabbi Zarchi is optimistic for the future of both his community
and Puerto Rico in general.52
The Holocaust monument installed in 2012 in front of the Capitol build-
ing, on Avenida de la Constitución, is a symbol at once of the cooperation
among the three Jewish communities of San Juan, who commissioned and
paid for it, and of the open attitude and generosity of the officials who sup-
plied the site. It is, according to Rabbi Norman Patz, who has studied Holo-
caust monuments across the world, one of the most remarkable. Its curved
sheet of steel represents a torn fragment of a Torah scroll, which on its left
side twists into a chimney recalling the smokestack of a crematory oven.
The flame-shaped Hebrew letters at the top mean “remember,” while the
cut-out silhouette of a family at the bottom personifies the victims of the
Holocaust and the descendants they did not have. The inscription reads,
in Spanish and English, “Let six million candles glow against the darkness
of these unfinished lives” (see figure 9.1).
112 communities of the soul

Figure 9.1 The Holocaust monument in front of Puerto Rico’s Capitol,

on Avenida de la Constitución, San Juan, 2019.

To the right of the monument, one finds the “Path of the Righteous,” a
serpentine alley with plaques commemorating non-Jews, including Oskar
Schindler, who helped save Jews during the Second World War. To the left,
a series of plaques in a curved space honours Puerto Ricans killed in the
terrorist attack on Israel’s Lod (now Ben Gurion) airport in 1972. The site
thus remembers Jews and non-Jews, from Puerto Rico and elsewhere, sym-
bolizing the bonds between them.53

isl amic communit ies

It is said that the first Muslims reached the island with European explor-
ers, but too few to form communities. Muslim Spaniards – merchants,
slaves, explorers – arrived in the Caribbean.54 West African slaves brought
to Puerto Rico to work in sugar-cane plantations in the sixteenth and
Varieties of Monotheism 113

seventeenth centuries hailed from Muslim regions of Africa, despite the

crown’s repeated attempts to keep them out. But the prohibition of non-
Catholic religions prevented Muslims from passing on their faith to their
island descendants.55
It was not until after 1945 that a number of Muslims settled in Puerto
Rico. The Muslims of Río Piedras grew from Palestinian families who
arrived from various parts of Latin America, where they had moved fol-
lowing Jewish settlers’ 1948 displacement of Palestinians. Others came
from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, or Africa. Many were merchants or
traders in clothes, textiles, and jewellery, or ran pharmacies and restau-
rants. By 2013, Muslim Puerto Ricans included doctors, engineers, and
university professors.56
Estimates vary of the number of Muslims today. In 2008, El Nuevo Día
reported about 5,000 members, mostly immigrants from Palestine, Egypt,
Lebanon, and Syria.57 One scholar also estimated 5,000 for 2010.58 The
American Community Survey of 2012 suggested 2,528, which the imam of
the Montehiedra mosque rounded up to 3,000.59 The same cleric put the
2015 figure at 3,500, 500 of them Puerto Rican converts.60 These variations
in estimates are quite understandable, given Muslims’ geographical mobil-
ity on the island and with the mainland.
A 2010 survey detailed eight mosques or Islamic centres. The oldest was
set up formally in Río Piedras in 1981 in a converted three-storey dwelling.
A second was established in Ponce in 1987, with two hundred places for
men and twenty for women. A 2012 observer noted that the Friday service
there attracted only one-fifth of capacity.61 A large mosque was opened in
Vega Alta, on a hill not far from the main highway, in 1992: it has room for
1,200 men and 120 women. A small one was set up in Jayuya, in the moun-
tainous centre of the island, the following year. Fajardo and Hatillo
mosques were established in 1995 and 1998, respectively, Fajardo’s with fifty
places for men and fifteen for women, and Hatillo’s with room for two hun-
dred men and thirty women. A small centre was set up in Aguadilla in 2002,
and a centre on a large piece of land in the Montehiedra suburb of San Juan
in 2007, for four hundred men and fifty women.62 A different source men-
tions that in 2011 Loíza had a small mosque, for twenty people.63 In 2015,
the imam at the Montehiedra mosque mentioned two mosques in the San
Juan area, Río Piedras and Montehiedra, as well as eight elsewhere on the
114 communities of the soul

island, in Aibonito, Fajardo, Hatillo, Jayuya, Moca, Ponce, Vega Alta, and
Yauco. Moca and Aibonito were not on the 2010 survey, while Aguadilla
and Loíza no longer appeared to have a mosque.64 Again, population mo-
bility may explain the varying numbers of mosques during the period, but
it is striking how Muslims established a presence across the island.
During a Friday prayer ceremony in Río Piedras in 2015, I counted more
than sixty men, from youngsters to elderly men. (Women were in a separate
room.) Prayers and sermons were conducted in Arabic; the imam was a
scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, who did not appear to speak either Spanish
or English. In early 2019, the young imam of Montehiedra estimated about
seventy attendees at Friday prayers, and Vega Alta’s imam about twenty.65
Puerto Rico’s Islamic centres are Sunni,66 but there are also Shias, mys-
tical Sufis, and a proselytizing Ahmadi community.67 Weekend schools in
some of the Islamic centres teach Arabic and Islam to young Muslims.
As happened to the Jewish community and Puerto Rico in general, for
Muslims the deteriorating economic situation has somewhat reduced num-
bers,68 which loss converts are not likely to make up for. The Muslim com-
munities are at once closed and bound by the Arabic language, and open
and well integrated into local neighbourhoods. Most members look like
other islanders; they speak Spanish as natives and interact daily with their
neighbours. Their relative invisibility ensures that they are not feared or
branded as radical Islamists, as those I spoke to attested, and as did the two
imams I interviewed in early 2019.69
But this is perhaps an overly rosy picture painted for the sake of appear-
ances. Some Puerto Rican converts to Islam (or “reverts,” as some call them-
selves, in the belief that they are returning to their ancestors’ faith) have a
hard time finding acceptance both among Arab Muslim settlers and among
the general population. Some Arab Muslims view the island as degenerate
because of the drinking, singing, dancing, and general gregariousness; they
are contemptuous of converts who retain some of these cultural practices,
so some of the latter feel like second-class Muslims. Ordinary Puerto Ri-
cans, unaware of local Islamic communities, are wont to consider Muslim
converts as foreigners, not “real” Puerto Ricans. Converts tend to avoid
mosques, teach themselves Islam, and home school their children. To de-
velop their identity as Puerto Rican Muslims, they learn about the Muslim
presence on the island, which antedates the arrival of sizable numbers of
Varieties of Monotheism 115

Arab migrants since the 1950s.70 This is their way of making Islam indige-
nous to Puerto Rico.
The story of antiques dealer Irso Reyes may illustrate the ambiguous re-
lationship between Muslim converts and their relatives and neighbours.
Reyes began to investigate Islam as a religion in the wake of the terrorist
attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States. He was attempting to give
meaning to his spiritual life. As a Muslim convert, Reyes was labelled a ter-
rorist by his neighbours. But converting to Islam led him to abandon drink-
ing, stop wearing fancy clothing, stop “thieving,” and marry the woman he
was living with. His parents, who had been ashamed of his conversion, now
loved him “madly.” The story of Reyes’s post-conversion behavioural trans-
formation parallels that of Taso (see chapter 7).
Another convert, an anthropologist and computer engineer, also re-
ported her family’s shame at her conversion. Her husband told of his lead-
ing classes on the Qur’an in his garage, stressing that the mistreatment of
women was an Arabic cultural tradition rather than a Muslim one. These
converts, interviewed by El Nuevo Día, insisted that what mattered was to
follow the five pillars of Sunni Islam – faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and the
pilgrimage to Mecca – and be “buenos musulmanes puertorriqueños” (good
Muslim Puerto Ricans).71

In the second half of the twentieth century, religion in Puerto Rico became
even more diversified, but the three forms of monotheism examined in this
chapter were simultaneously acquiring specifically Puerto Rican “colour,”
as more and more of their members came from the dominant island cul-
ture. The need to insert these new religious forms into Puerto Rican culture
was also manifest, and what it means to be “Puerto Rican” was broadening
to encompass religious diversity. This efflorescence of religious practices
seems not to have caused the kind of social friction it has elsewhere in the
world. Indeed, non-institutional forms of religious practice have also flow-
ered, as we see in the next chapter.
 10


Non-Institutional Forms of Religious

Practice in the Late 20th Century

Since the 1960s, two trends have continued to shape religious practice in
Puerto Rico. The first is the Catholic church’s ambiguous, or conflicted,
role within society. For some authors, the church was the site of “the con-
tradictions, the dichotomy, the crises which the unequal relationship be-
tween two societies [Puerto Rico and the United States] produces in the
dominated one.”1 The church was thus a sort of microcosm of Puerto Rican
society. For other writers, the church’s siding with the political status quo,
making it “antiindependentista” and “antipuertorriqueña,” ensured its de-
cline even as the independence movement itself was losing steam. The rise
of messianic movements drawing the faithful away from the church was a
sign of profound and widespread social changes.2
The second trend, examined in this chapter, is the persistence of popular
forms of religious practices not apart from, but alongside formal religious
structures. This trend is hard to reconcile with the anomie interpretation
of religious behaviour that grounds analysis of the first trend. Popular de-
votions and ritualistic practices survived even as society became better ed-
Non-Institutional Forms of Religious Practice 117

ucated and better off. An international survey indicated the highest level
of religious belief in all of Latin America.3 According to Jorge Duany’s 1998
assessment, popular Catholicism, in its veneration of iconographic objects,
in everyday speech, and in oral tradition, maintained a strong influence on
the Puerto Rican mind. It articulated basic Christian values such as equality,
reciprocity, and justice, even though it might deviate from orthodox doc-
trine. As with other religious traditions, it was concerned with the imme-
diate problems of the dispossessed in society, namely poverty and illness.4
Traditional religious belief was grounded in popular devotions and prac-
tices sustained by great interest in religious shrines and the attractive force
of apparitions, but also by radio and television. This mingling of old and
new in popular religious practice is characteristic of the island.
Some Puerto Ricans also engaged in rituals derived from African religion
such as santería and brujería (withcraft) and found the appropriate artefacts
in botánicas, drugstore-like shops that sold such products and dispensed
advice. Spiritism, which had arrived in the nineteenth century, continued.
This all attests to the growing diversity of religious practices.

p op u l a r ch r i st i ani t y

In the 1970s, about fifty Cheos brothers continued to foster popular piety
in the mountainsides. Some were married, some were single, some even
took the vow of celibacy. They were campesinos (peasants) “trained to give
the basic and necessary instructions for the receiving of the sacraments.”5
They also visited homes, led people in reciting the rosary, and generally
were “at the service of any priest who may want them to work, for any
length of time desired.” They were firmly under the guidance of the clergy
and received “an intensive training course.”6 They perpetuated a tradition
of lay involvement in the church among residents of the island’s interior.
As well, one of the children who had seen the Virgin at Sabana Grande in
1953 began “his messianic mission” in the 1980s and, by 1990, had recruited
more than 400,000 devout followers of the Virgin.7
In mid-1986, a survey on devotion to Mary was mailed to various places
in Puerto Rico. Out of 500 questionnaires sent, 172 responses were received.
Respondents were asked the preferred name they used for the Virgin Mary.
118 communities of the soul

“Our Lady of Perpetual Succour” was the most popular. Not all respondents
were Catholics, but of the eighty-five who answered the question on weekly
attendance at church, four out of five declared weekly or daily.8
Celebrations of the Holy Cross (fiesta de Cruz), or novenas, held for the
nine days, usually in May, between Ascension and Pentecost, remained pop-
ular well into the late twentieth century. Novenas took place mostly in pri-
vate houses in cities, with a home altar bearing a crucifix and an image of
the Virgin, the events accompanied by popular music and sung rosaries.9
In San Juan, novenas attracted many people, but the Catholic clergy stayed
away, except perhaps to offer a Mass before they began. People of all ages
took part in the singing wakes of the novenas, a festive social occasion as
much as a religious observance.
In Manatí, west of San Juan, one man organized the fiesta de Cruz in his
own home, obtaining the city’s permission to close off part of the street for
the nine days. The whole neighbourhood assisted in decorating the altar
and in preparing refreshments, sandwiches, and sweets. The gatherings
were a major event, drawing older people, who were seated, and youngsters,
who tended the kiosks where everything was free. One observer noticed
strong religious devotion, even though the local priest considered the fiesta
a “pagan celebration.”10
In Loíza, where many residents are descended from slaves, the feast of
Santiago (St James the Apostle, of Compostela), on 25 July, also affirmed
popular will in religious matters, as the official patron saint is St Patrick.
The Santiago feast runs over ten days, with three days of processions in
honour of each of the town’s three statues of St James. St James was invoked
in Spain in the fight against the Moors, and in the New World Spanish set-
tlers enlisted his help to repel attacks by the natives or by English invaders.
St James also helps repel other forms of attack, such as physical illness. The
occasion has a carnival-like atmosphere, with four masked and costumed
characters: the Caballero, who stands for St James; the Vejigante, a grotesque
stand-in for the evil Moors; an old man; and the loca (crazy woman), im-
personated by men dressed in drag; younger participants evoke characters
from “popular science fiction, war, and horror movies.”11 As a response to
the attraction of local Baptist and Pentecostal congregations, the Catholic
church created the parish of Santiago Apóstol in 1971.12
Non-Institutional Forms of Religious Practice 119

In Aguadilla, each July, local fishermen organize a procession in honour

of the Virgen del Carmen over the waters of the bay to be blessed with good
luck and be protected at sea. It is considered bad luck to swear while at sea.13
The practice of making promesas to the Virgin or to the saints continues.
It is considered a sacred undertaking, and failure to carry it out can con-
demn a person to purgatory. If a person becomes ill or dies before executing
the promesa, the family must do so. In the same vein, the Velorio de Reyes,
or the wake before Three Kings’ Day, remains a notable form of devotion
in rural areas; it consists of a sung rosary as thanks for favours obtained
from God, the Virgin Mary, or the Three Kings.14
Religious shrines continued to draw visitors and gain in status. The
church of Our Virgin of Monserrate, in Hormigueros, was recognized by
the pope in 1998 as a minor basilica, acknowledging a miracle there and its
many visitors (see chapter 8). The church is situated on top of a hill with
narrow streets, full of shops, bars, and restaurants that cater to visitors, and,
within the church, statues of the Holy Virgin and her child are both dark-
skinned, as elsewhere in Latin America (see figure 10.1). In Puerto Rico, the
“Black Madonna” of Monserrate “is the most common theme of all the san-
tos or native carved wooden images of all times”15 and symbolizes integra-
tion of “native people of colour into Catholic society.”16
Apparitions, as well, still made local news. El Mundo of 17 May 1978 re-
ported on an apparition of the Virgin Mary in Lares. On 18–20 April 1986,
the island’s press reported an apparition of the Virgin in Naranjito, in the
island’s interior.17
As centuries-old popular religious beliefs and practices persisted, mod-
ern technology provided new means of diffusion. In 1917, the Redemptorist
fathers had launched a monthly publication, El Mensajero del Perpetuo So-
corro, which linked groups of Marian devotees. After 1945, this devotion
took to the airwaves.18 From the 1930s on, the Catholic church used radio
to transmit religious programs. It was joined, on radio station wnel, by
the Evangelicals, who bought airtime and were required to submit their
sermons for vetting a week ahead, to ensure no prejudice to the Catholic
church. By 1940, one of every seven households in Puerto Rico owned at
least one radio, placing most islanders in contact with “city values.” By 1948,
eighteen Protestant radio programs were aired weekly, with producers pay-
 Figure 10.1 Statue of the Vírgen de Monserrate, Hormigueros basilica,
10 February 2008.

ing the broadcasters. The first entirely religious radio station opened in
Vieques in December 1956, broadcasting in English and Spanish. The first
Spanish-only religious station began in 1974 with financial support from
the island’s Evangelical communities; three more opened in 1982. The
Non-Institutional Forms of Religious Practice 121

Catholic response came the following year, with mainly music on the fm
band, talk radio on the am band, short religious “commercials,” and reli-
gious programs only on Saturdays and Sundays. A survey of listeners
showed that religious radio filled an emotional need for some people and
served rather to comfort and strengthen their beliefs and attitudes than to
change them.19
In October 2018, a guide to licensed radio stations in Puerto Rico listed
twenty-four Spanish-language religious stations among the 133 outlets.20
A similar listing labelled thirteen of the island’s thirty-six tv stations as re-
ligious.21 Religious broadcasting also turned to podcasting, creating the
most podcasts from 2013 to the end of 2017.22

p op u l a r fa ith heali ng

“Unorthodox” religious practices and beliefs also persisted as the twentieth

century wound down. Santería became more visible with the arrival in the
1960s of Cuban exiles.23 Field research in the 1970s showed that santería
“priests” were men and women of average education and social class, who
remained Catholics.24 This fusing of Catholicism and African-inspired be-
liefs, practised among Taíno centuries earlier, might confuse theologians,
but it resembles additional term insurance on top of regular life insurance,
answering specific needs not covered by the latter. Most practitioners
looked for it to give meaning to their life, to answer the call of the saints,
or to solve health problems, the last being the most cited reason for join-
ing.25 Among the divinities of santería were Shangó, god of manhood,
storms, and the sun; Yemeya, goddess of the seas; Obatala, master of purity
and intelligence; Eleguá, master of man’s destiny; and Oshún, god of arts
and passions. (In Cuba, these deities were also given names of the Virgin
or of the saints.) Santeros believed in reincarnation and in communicating
with the dead. Initiation into the rites was expensive, estimated at $1,500.26
Botánicas are shops that sell “books, candles, and the many paraphernalia
relating to Santería and Espiritismo.”27 They exist all over the island, par-
ticularly in the north (see figure 10.2). In August 2018, a Yellow Pages–like
web site dedicated to small and medium businesses listed sixty-one,28 and
another thirty-seven.29 Eighteen appeared on both sites, for a net total of
eighty. Many bear the names of saints, while others’ hint at African origins
Figure 10.2 Number of botánicas advertising in Yellow Pages–like web sites, by municipality, 9 August 2018.
Non-Institutional Forms of Religious Practice 123

(Yoruba) or mysterious powers (La Milagrosa, El Gran Poder, Simple Solu-

tion, La Fuente, La Gitana). Some have their own web site, while others
manage Facebook pages or produce YouTube videos, as a Google search on
www.google.com.pr for “botánica puerto rico” will reveal. Even as they sup-
port traditional healing practices, botánicas have adopted contemporary
channels of communication.
Belief in witches continued well into the twentieth century, particularly
in the island’s interior. Over five hundred interviews conducted from 1968
to 1974 and again in 1987 gathered numerous, richly detailed stories from
informants across the island, but especially from old people living in the
interior. Most respondents appeared to believe in witches, but even those
who did not could recall the stories told by their parents and what they
used to do to protect themselves. Witches were usually depicted as old
women, ugly, obnoxious, dishevelled, and thin. They flew at night on their
broomsticks, especially on Tuesdays and Fridays, to go and play tricks on
people, changing shape into animals or children, stealing small sums of
money, gathering together to provoke heavy rainfalls that would damage
crops, or tricking sailors into running their boats aground. The stories col-
lected included descriptions of witches’ practices to cause illness or death,
to cause other forms of mischief, and formulas to make someone fall in
love; they also explained how to recognize and catch witches, methods to
defend oneself from their evil spells, and ways to cancel spells.30
Another way to defend oneself from physical illness or psychological
problems is to see a curandero, or traditional folk healer, who will take a
holistic approach to help effect a cure: herbs, massage, counselling, and
prayer. Curanderismo is a widespread Latino traditional healing system that
is still practised in Puerto Rico, though perhaps in danger of extinction.31
Spiritism, too, retained its attraction, keeping up the belief in the spirit
world and adapting its flexible beliefs and practices to the current day.32 It
shared the homegrown, eclectic, and syncretic character of botánicas, san-
tería, and brujería, and was often conflated with these practices. One scholar
noted, with apparent disdain for its practitioners, that “its eclectic sponge-
like quality is perhaps its greatest asset in the struggle to survive among so
many competing religions; it seems to attach to its system, and popularize
for its adherents, whatever social and philosophical new ideas have greatest
124 communities of the soul

current appeal to some of the more troubled segments of Puerto Rican so-
ciety.”33 Another observer has described espiritismo as a “community heal-
ing system” and an “important mental health resource for Puerto Ricans.”34
The People of Puerto Rico collective study of four communities in the late
1940s noted that “the great majority of spiritualists remain formally within
the body of the Catholic church. Spiritism is especially characteristic of
those middle and upper-class people who seem unwilling to lose their social
status as Catholics by associating themselves publicly with beliefs often
characterized as lower class or ascribed to country people.”35 The sociolo-
gists who visited Barceloneta in the 1940s noted magic everywhere and that
“many [rural] persons claim to be both Catholics and spiritualists, or
Protestants and spiritualists.”36 In Ciales, spiritism was prevalent among
“the agricultural workers and small farmers, who live in the context of dis-
solving traditional ties, as in Sabana; the town lower class; and elements of
the new middle class whose background and motivation are similar to those
which Protestantism reaches.”37
In the early 1950s, spiritist leaflets could be purchased for between
twenty-five and fifty cents in convenience stores, newsstands, public mar-
kets, and libraries, where they accounted for a large proportion of sales.38
In the late 1950s, over a third of respondents in a follow-up study of
Barceloneta saw spiritism as pervasive within the older generation and per-
ceived a “resurgence among all social classes,” although the author proffers
no evidence for the “resurgence” other than his observations during the
1940s and in 1959–61.39 The work offers a useful description of spiritist
mediums’ healing “séances” and explains spiritism’s popularity as “a sign
of collective insecurity provoked by confused and unreliable situations in
the structure of communal existence” brought about by US colonization.40
Socio-economic factors also helped explain the prevalence of spiritism
among Puerto Rican communities in the United States. Studies of such
communities in New York noted that from 30 to 80 per cent of interviewees
had recourse to a medium for various emotional and physical problems.41
Poverty, lack of education, and social discrimination deterred access to
orthodox health care, as an anthropological study of a Puerto Rican neigh-
bourhood in the Bronx documented; approximately half of the seventy-
nine households and half the adults in the sample were adherents of
spiritism.42 Spiritist centros, where mediums performed healing rituals,
Non-Institutional Forms of Religious Practice 125

facilitated social interaction and mutual assistance. “For many members,

the centro becomes the focus of social activity in their lives.”43 Respondents
used spiritist healing as a form of short-term therapy “during crisis or
transitional periods.” Problems included difficult relationships within the
family or on the job, “the death of a close relative; life transitions (puberty,
menopause, and terminal illness); vague anxiety manifested in mania,
nightmares, and the like; and physical complaints for which the person
has not received satisfactory medical attention.” Spiritism also provided a
form of social identity that facilitated social links with newcomers,44 much
as belonging to the Knights of Columbus did in upper-class Catholic
circles. The community’s spiritism included both Kardacian and santería
practices, which varied across centros, although most respondents saw
little difference, as they “had at one time or another consulted mediums
of both persuasions.”45
An anthropological study of Loíza in 1964 noted that “spiritualism like
Pentecostalism or, for that matter, conversion to any of the different Protes-
tant churches, is one of a number of alternatives which a person may choose
when confronted with a serious problem.” A local spiritist, female as most
spiritist mediums were, became known for her curative powers and con-
ducted home “séances” and gave private consultations. She also warned her
customers against envidia, envy felt by others that was linked to witchcraft,
fear of which was “not uncommon” in the community.46

Belief in the transformative powers of religion, whether it be apparitions

of the Virgin, the effectiveness of promesas, the speaking in tongues of Pen-
tecostal converts, or the healing power of herbal potions and of spiritist
“séances,” continued to demonstrate, among late-twentieth-century Puerto
Ricans, a utilitarian form of syncretism with little formal theology. Com-
munities of the soul continued to provide succour even as they became
more numerous and offered a broader range of possible affinity.
 1


Conclusion

From time immemorial, religion has been a fundamental part of Puerto

Rican society. The Taíno conceived of the physical world and of its inhab-
itants in religious terms. The gods had created the material world and the
supernatural world, and the gods affected daily life. Interactions with the
gods served to heal and protect. The social fabric was interwoven with re-
ligious significance. In Spain at the time of the conquest of Puerto Rico,
and for centuries afterward, popular religion exhibited similar traits: it con-
ceived of the world as having been created by God, who could be seen at
work in nature and among humans. Spaniards asked Jesus, Mary, and all
the saints to negotiate with God in their favour. In Spain, however, formal
Catholicism imposed a hierarchical and authoritarian framework on reli-
gious practice that commingled with the state to delineate the bounds of
proper thought and behaviour. Authority, both religious and secular, was
conceived as emanating from God’s will.
This was the basis on which Spain established its state religion in the New
World. Various theological positions were used to justify the treatment of
natives and of the slaves brought over from Africa. There was divergence
about the means to convert these groups, but not on that objective. Spain
constituted Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles as a bishopric under the di-
Conclusion 127

rect control of the monarchy. Regular clergy was mobilized to serve the
small settler communities on the shores of the island and to carry out mis-
sionary work in the interior. Among the settler communities, popular re-
ligion retained the characteristics it exhibited in Spain: an instrumental
concept of the supernatural marked popular religious practices. As in
Spain, formal Catholic rites were practised unevenly, and the scarcity of
priests meant little social control over the criollo population.
The nineteenth century saw little increase in the church’s power. The
number of parishes rose as population grew around the island and pro-
gressively into its interior. The building of churches was a community ef-
fort financed in part by municipal and state subsidies. But this visible
appropriation of public space – the churches anchored the plazas in the
centre of town – did not expand the church’s control over social space. In
fact, the hierarchy, mostly loyal to the imperial government that supplied
it with funds and personnel, grew doubtful about criollo allegiance to the
monarchy and relied more and more on peninsular clergy. The peninsu-
lares did not share their parishioners’ criollo culture, and they sometimes
exploited them in league with merchants and landowners from Spain.
Furthermore, parish priests’ behaviour sometimes deviated markedly from
Catholic norms. Social distance between clergy and laity grew, com-
pounded by the physical distance between settlements and parish churches,
reducing lay frequenting of sacraments: attending Mass could be sporadic,
and common-law unions frequent, because of steep wedding fees. Baptism,
which signified the joining of the community of Christians, and the burial
ceremony, which marked the passing to the community of departed souls,
were the only inescapable sacraments. Yet there was ardour in popular
manifestations of devotion such as erecting domestic altars to the saints,
reciting the rosary in public, taking part in the activities of cofradías, and
attending public celebrations for the Three Kings’ holidays or for a patron
saint. Private recitations of the rosary and the making of promesas to the
Virgin Mary or to a saint in exchange for a favour remained as instrumen-
tal religious practices.
Spain’s transition to parliamentary monarchy in the nineteenth century
challenged the Catholic church in Puerto Rico. Financial support from the
state fluctuated with the constitutional changes in Spain. Church properties
on the island were confiscated to reimburse slave-owners for the abolition
128 communities of the soul

of slavery. Earlier in the century a cash-starved government seized the re-

ligious orders’ monasteries. The Puerto Rican church’s control over all legal
marriages was lost as civil unions were allowed in the 1880s; its control over
burials was also challenged by the authorized presence of non-Catholics
on the island.
During the same period, the Catholic church confronted ideological
challenges from anti-clerical and liberal thought and from the arrival of
other forms of worship. Nationalists were inspired by liberal movements
in Europe and by the Latin American push for independence in the early
nineteenth century. They rejected Spanish domination over the colony and
church domination of its inhabitants. They took to the printing press to
publish books and articles, to the consternation of ecclesiastical authorities
who replied in kind. Protestant parishes were established in Ponce and in
Vieques, and Protestant missionaries began to proselytize. Freemasons and
spiritists also challenged the Catholic church’s religious hegemony.
These challenges were compounded by the US conquest in 1898 and the
separation of church and state that the conquerors imposed. Catholicism
could no longer be taught in public schools, and the state would no longer
support the church financially. Most of the Spanish-born regular priests
returned to Spain. The church had to rely on US regular orders to replenish
its ranks, including the position of bishop. Of a different culture, and some-
times language, this new clergy could only increase the social distance with
the flock that had developed over the previous century.
American and Puerto Rican Protestants ran the island’s new adminis-
tration, but popular religious practice continued the customs of previous
centuries. The weakness of the Catholic church allowed the appearance of
spontaneous lay Catholic preachers, who aimed at keeping Puerto Ricans
away from non-Catholic religious practices and bringing them back to a
life closer to the precepts of the church.
The conquerors expected that Americanization would convert islanders
to Protestantism. US Protestant denominations saw Puerto Rico as new
territory to evangelize. They divided up the island and set up congrega-
tions, schools, hospitals, and welfare institutions across the island. These
early congregations belonged to the “historical” Protestant denominations,
but they were joined in 1916 by Pentecostals, who would later in the cen-
tury become the largest Protestant church. Protestantism placed religious
Conclusion 129

practice firmly in the hands of the individual, who had to study the Bible
and participate in his or her congregation’s instructional, devotional, and
social activities in order to be considered a member of the community.
Some Protestant communities imposed tight social control over members,
cutting them away from the larger culture and instilling in them a new
social identity.
From the 1930s to the early 1970s, the Catholic church continued to con-
tend with the problems it had faced earlier in the century. It relied on US
Catholics for manpower and financial resources and received little of either.
The ratio of priests to population remained low. Catholicism was perceived
as the religion of the upper classes, particularly of women. The church’s
opposition to Luis Muñoz Marín, the charismatic founder of the Popular
Democratic Party and governor 1949–65, cemented this impression in the
population. Sociological studies of the 1940s and 1950s attested to the con-
tinued distance between the Catholic clergy and its flock, infrequent sacra-
ments, as well as the persistence of popular religious practices and their
strong communal nature. The church had little influence over these prac-
tices. In the 1960s, it by and large failed to keep up with the changing times,
when being a Christian increasingly meant fighting for the poor and un-
educated and challenging the institutions of oppression such as capitalism
and imperialism. It repressed the manifestations of liberation theology
among its clergy.
The Catholic church also failed to check the rise of other creeds. By 2014,
a third of Puerto Ricans identified as Protestants, and more than half of
those considered themselves Pentecostals. Jewish communities, present
since the Second World War, built synagogues and community centres in
the San Juan area. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Islamic com-
munities took root along the northern part of the island, in numbers
greater than the Jews. Rites of faith healing, whether of African or European
origin, continued to attract those who needed help with their problems.
The Catholic church maintains a strong institutional presence across the
island. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, reports an anthropol-
ogist, it conducted ministries in “hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, or-
phanages, shelters, and homes for unwed mothers.” More formally, it
sustained chapels in hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, the airport in Car-
olina, and even police stations.1
130 communities of the soul

But the Catholic church is in difficulty. The archdiocese of San Juan has
sought bankruptcy protection for failure to properly fund its Catholic
school teachers’ pensions.2 More significantly, the proportion of Puerto Ri-
cans who describe themselves as Catholic decreased from 70 to 56 per cent
between 2010 and 2014. Younger islanders look for spiritual inspiration
more in social causes than in traditional religious belief.3 They are part of
a trend among Latin Americans.4 In 2019, there were calls to perpetuate the
tradition to visit seven churches during Holy Week,5 and the major San
Juan newspaper, El Nuevo Día, saw fit to emphasize that the tradition re-
mained strong despite secularization.6 But it also reported, on Easter Mon-
day, that police had arrested 428 persons during Holy Week for drunkenness
and drug use,7 underlining how religious celebrations were also occasions
for social revelry.

I draw from this short history of religion in Puerto Rico two major themes
that run through this rich and diverse experience. The first is an instru-
mental conception of religion. At the level of belief, the sacred serves as an
explanation of the unknown: where does one’s society come from, how to
account for the forces of nature, how to understand the afflictions one en-
counters, where does one go after life on this planet? In everyday life, reli-
gion provides the framework and strategies for making bargains with the
supernatural (from cemís to deities to saints) to overcome the problems of
one’s life. This was evident among Spanish Catholics when Spain first col-
onized Puerto Rico. On the island, religious beliefs and practices were re-
fashioned in a syncretic way, taking symbols and customs from Taíno,
Yoruba, Christian, and “scientific” (spiritist) sources and mixing them into
individual or collective combinations that could fluctuate as need and cir-
cumstances changed.
The second theme that I draw from this historical survey is the shaping
of religion by informal communities of the soul. In Puerto Rico, we can
speak of religion of the people, by the people, for the people. From the out-
set, religious practice has been shaped more by local people than by formal
hierarchies. Among the Taíno, for example, the behiques remained inter-
mediaries with supernatural powers only as long as the community recog-
nized that status. The hierarchical structure that the Spanish Catholic
church instituted on the island held little power outside of the major cities,
Conclusion 131

and in rural areas people developed their own forms of worship, deriving
individual practices from collective forms of devotion. Protestantism, es-
pecially in its Pentecostal guise, rested on informal communities of adher-
ents who chose their own pastor for his involvement in the community as
well as his spiritual eloquence.
As someone from Quebec, where Christian religious practice has become
essentially invisible in the public sphere, I am struck by the persistence of
collective and individual religious practice in contemporary Puerto Rico.
I notice it among my friends and relatives on the island, but also when vis-
iting shrines, synagogues, and mosques, or churches on patron saints’ feast
days. Turning on the tv or the radio, one encounters a multitude of stations
dedicated to religion.
In these early decades of the twenty-first century, then, religious life in
Puerto Rico remains vibrant in increasingly diverse forms. The island’s need
for community does not abate, even with the existence of social media, as
the response to Hurricane Maria has revealed, when local populations bent
on self-help set up food-producing cooperatives and community improve-
ment groups.8 Religion, in its multiple embodiments, will continue to fulfil
the need for spiritual community.
 1


Notes

preface

1 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 51, 56, 40, 43, 14.
2 My cv is available at https://igartua.uqam.ca.
3 Igartua, “Quebec and Puerto Rico,” 34–61.
4 See as examples the varying definitions in the French, English, and Spanish
definitions of religion in Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion; https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Religi%C3%B3n. On the 26 September 2018 access date, the first two
announced no scholarly consensus on definition, a conclusion the third
denied.
5 Anderson, Imagined Communities.
6 See for instance Picó, Historia general de Puerto Rico; Scarano, Puerto Rico.
7 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 14.
8 Juan F. Caraballo Resto interview.
9 Diaz Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism.
10 Rafael L. López Valdés, email, 21 February 2020. See López Valdés and Ale-
gría, Pardos y morenos esclavos y libres en Cuba. Professor López Valdés has
been teaching a course on Afro-Caribbean religions at San Juan’s Centro
134 n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 – 7

de estudios avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe (https://ceaprc.edu/wp-

content/uploads/2019/10/programacion-de-cursos-agosto-2018-primer-
semestre-2018-2019.pdf, accessed 24 June 2020).

chapter one

1 There is some scholarly argument about the proper use of the word
“Taíno.” William Keegan, in “The ‘Classic’ Taíno,” 71, sees a cultural distinc-
tion between the “contact-period peoples of Hispaniola and the Turks and
Caicos Islands,” whom he labels “Taíno,” and suggests lower-case “taíno” for
all the Indigenous people of the Greater Antilles and Bahamas, because of
the “enormous cultural diversity.” But he concludes, “If we recognize that
culture is chaotic, and its configuration is always changing, then ‘Taino’ is
just a name that needs to be more specifically defined in each use.” I use
it here to refer to the Taíno of Puerto Rico. Elsewhere Keegan stresses the
use of the singular to refer to the Taíno as a people, a usage he adopted as
co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology and which
I also adopt here.
2 Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.
3 Stevens Arroyo, “Indigenous Elements,” 100; Schroeder et al., “Origins and
Genetic Legacies.”
4 Curet and Stringer, Tibes Indigenous Ceremonial Center.
5 Keegan, “‘Classic’ Taíno,” 71; Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols, 216.
6 Keegan, “‘Classic’ Taíno,” 79, citing Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols.
7 Stevens Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua, 252.
8 Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols, 53.
9 Stevens Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua, 252.
10 Ibid.
11 Pané and Arrom, An Account, 13–14.
12 Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols, 133.
13 Pané and Arrom, An Account, 6.
14 Ibid., 17.
15 Stevens Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua, 243.
16 Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols, 59.
17 Pané and Arrom, An Account, 25–6.
18 Ibid., 64.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 – 1 4 135

19 Loubser, “The Ball-court Petroglyph Boulders,” 323–44.

20 Stevens Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua.
21 Ibid., 238.
22 Ibid., 237.
23 Oliver, “Proto-Taíno Monumental Cemís,” 251.
24 For pictures of cemís, see https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.36441
3276905037.96153.142131005799933&type=3] (accessed 17 February 2016).
25 Keegan and Florida Museum, Taíno Indian Myth and Practice, 61.
26 Pané and Arrom, An Account, 61, 57, 59, 22.
27 Ibid., 21–5.
28 Keegan, Taíno Indian Myth and Practice, 69.
29 Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols, 14.
30 Anderson-Córdoba, “The Aftermath of Conquest,” 347–8. The census of
1530 counted only the Taíno living within the Spanish settlements, not
people living by themselves in the mountains, who were beyond the reach
of the census takers. See Stevens Arroyo, “Indigenous Elements,” 105.
31 Stevens Arroyo, “Indigenous Elements,” 96; Abbad y Lasierra and Acosta,
Historia geográfica, civil y natural, 122.
32 Schroeder et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacies.”
33 On the debate about Taíno revivalism, see Curet, “Indigenous Revival,”
206–47.
34 Stevens Arroyo, Cave of the Jagua, 254–5.
35 Oliver, Caciques and Cemí Idols, 228.
36 Ibid., 253.
37 Vidal, Oraciones, conjuros y ensalmo, 82.

chapter two

1 There did not appear to be a hierarchy of caciques in Puerto Rico; rather

each exercised power over a given territory. In Spain, of course, the king
held sway over the whole kingdom and had military and administrative
subordinates in each province.
2 Martínez, “El clero ante la crisis,” 2.
3 Ibid.
4 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 53.
5 Ibid., 130, 131, 135.
136 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 4 – 2 3

6 Ibid., 12–16.
7 Ibid., 14, 23.
8 Ibid., 38–42.
9 Ibid., 7, 13–24, 26.
10 Stevens Arroyo, “The Inter-Atlantic Paradigm,” 515, 520–41.
11 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 101.
12 Hanke, Spanish Struggle for Justice, 17–24.
13 Ibid., 21.
14 Ibid., 21, 56, 74–5, 87–92, 122–8, 150–3.
15 Ibid., 8–10, 12, 46.
16 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 109.
17 Stevens Arroyo, “Indigenous Elements,” 96, 99, 100, 109.
18 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 65–6.
19 Ibid., 59.
20 Ibid., 69.
21 Ibid., 71.
22 Ibid., 72–3, 77.
23 Deleito y Piñuela, La vida religiosa española, 86, 91, 93.
24 Ibid., 91.
25 Ibid., 96.
26 Ibid., 106, 113, 130.
27 Sarrailh, “La crise spirituelle et économique,” 5, 12, 13.
28 Peña Díaz, “Tolerar la costumbre,” 777–806; López Muñoz, “La fiesta reli-
giosa,” 239–78.
29 Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 5, 178.
30 Ibid., 44–6.
31 Ibid., 175–6, 31, 125.
32 Ibid., 46.
33 Ibid., 35, 56, 97.
34 Ibid., 75, 46.
35 Ibid., 175.
36 Ibid., 46, 88, 103.
37 Ibid., 182, 186.
38 Arias de Saavedra Alías and López-Guadalupe Muñoz, “Las cofradías,” 205,
217, 219, 228.
39 Deleito y Piñuela, La vida religiosa española, 186–90.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 3 – 3 0 137

40 Ibid., 196–200.
41 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 93.
42 Deleito y Piñuela, La vida religiosa española, 217, 254.
43 Ibid., 239–47.
44 Ibid., 262, 265, 270–4.
45 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 80, 84–5.
46 Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 167.
47 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 80–2.

chapter three

1 Scarano, Puerto Rico, 124–31.

2 Ibid., 130.
3 Dussel and Comisión de Estudios, Historia general de la Iglesia, 349.
4 Meier, “La historia de las diócesis de Santo Domingo,” 108.
5 Dussel and Comisión de Estudios, Historia general de la Iglesia, 497.
6 Rodríguez León, “Introducción,” xxxii.
7 Sued Badillo and López Cantos, Puerto Rico negro, 152, 163.
8 Meier, “La historia de las diócesis” 149–51.
9 Rafael L. López Valdés, email, 21 February 2020.
10 Brau, Ensayos, 141.
11 Dussel and Comisión de Estudios, Historia general de la Iglesia, 622–3.
12 Ibid., 573, 580–90.
13 Ibid., 598–606.
14 Arias de Saavedra Alías and López-Guadalupe Muñoz, “Las cofradías,”
189–232.
15 David M. Cheney, “Hierarchy of the Catholic Church,”
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dsjpr.html (accessed 1 October
2018).
16 Torres y Vargas, Vidal, and Stevens Arroyo, Report on the Island & Diocese
of Puerto Rico, 135–53.
17 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia en Puerto Rico, 214–19.
18 Meier, “La historia de las diócesis,” 143.
19 Dussel and Comisión de Estudios, Historia general, 467.
20 Cuesta Mendoza, Historia eclesiástica, 50.
21 Perea, Historia de Puerto Rico, 192.
138 n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 0 – 3

22 Stevens Arroyo, “Understanding the Work of Diego De Torres y Vargas,” 22.

23 Melgarejo, “Memoria y descripción,” 88.
24 Stevens Arroyo, “Understanding,” 22.
25 Meier, “La historia de las diócesis,” 96.
26 Diaz Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 40.
27 Perea, Historia de Puerto Rico, 98–9.
28 Torres y Vargas and Stevens Arroyo, Report, 82.
29 Cuesta Mendoza, Historia eclesiástica, 218.
30 Ibid., 224.
31 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 53, 104.
32 Ibid., 100, 107, 129–30.
33 Rodríguez León, “Introducción,” lxi.
34 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 140, 277.
35 López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 19, 24.
36 Carroll, Report on the Island of Porto Rico, 656. The American administra-
tion’s misspelling of the island’s name would continue until Congress for-
mally restored the Spanish spelling in 1932. See https://history.house.gov/
Exhibitions-and-Publications/HAIC/Historical-Essays/Foreign-Domes-
tic/Crafting-Identity (accessed 17 December 2020).
37 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 133.
38 López de Haro, Constituciones sinodales, 7. Quotations from Spanish-
language sources are the author’s translations.
39 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 303; López de Haro, Sínodo de San
Juan, xvi, 62.
40 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 104, 130.
41 López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 10.
42 López de Haro, Sínodo de San Juan, 33.
43 Picó, Historia general, 176.
44 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 66, 73.
45 Rodríguez León, “Introducción,” xxii.
46 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 280.
47 López de Haro, Sínodo de San Juan, 53.
48 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 81, 84, 123.
49 Rodríguez León, “Introducción,” xxxvii.
50 Ibid., xxxiv, xxxv.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 3 – 7 139

51 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 193.

52 López de Haro, Sínodo de San Juan, xl, 66. A real was one-eighth of the
peso, or Spanish dollar, in which the bishop’s salary was denominated.
In the eighteenth century, the daily wage for a master mason was eighteen
reales. See López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 60. On the history of
the peso, see Pond, “The Spanish Dollar.”
53 López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 62.
54 Zayas Micheli, Catolicismo popular, 42; Meier, “La historia de las diócesis,”
50-1.
55 Cuesta Mendoza, Historia eclesiástica, 254–5.
56 Diócesis de Mayagüez, “Basílica Ntra. Sra. de la Monserrate,” Diócesis de
Mayagüez, http://www.diocesisdemayaguez.org/index.php/directorio/
parroquias-y-misas/18-basilica-ntra-sra-de-la-monserrate (accessed
16 December 2019).
57 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 255.
58 López de Haro, Sínodo de San Juan, 67.
59 Reichard de Cancio, Temas y Temitas, 148–9; López Cantos, La religiosidad
popular, 40, 42.
60 Abbad y Lasierra and Acosta, Historia geográfica, 407–8.
61 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 145–6.
62 Torres y Vargas and Stevens Arroyo, Report, 139.
63 Rodríguez León, “Introducción,” liii.
64 Torres y Vargas and Stevens Arroyo, Report, 211, 213.
65 López de Haro, Constituciones sinodales, 91–2.
66 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 81, 108–9.
67 López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 32.
68 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 190.
69 López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 35.
70 Brau, Historia de Puerto Rico, 158.
71 Cuesta Mendoza, Historia eclesiástica, 285.
72 Campo Lacasa, Historia de la Iglesia, 130.
73 Camaño-Dones, “La sociedad colonial,” 217, 222–3.
74 López Cantos, La religiosidad popular, 21.
140 n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 9 – 4 5

chapter four

1 Congreso de los Deputados, “Constitución de 1812,” Congreso de los

Deputados, http://www.congreso.es/portal/page/portal/Congreso/
Congreso/Hist_Normas/ConstEsp1812_1978/Const1812 9 (accessed
17 December 2019).
2 Martínez Tornero, Carlos III y los bienes de los jesuítas, 162.
3 Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 110.
4 Ibid., 113, 116–17, 133, 135.
5 Ibid., 159, 163, 168, 200.
6 Ibid., 218–20, 212.
7 Ibid., 181, 232–5.
8 Ibid., 236–40, 253.
9 Andrés-Gallego and Pazos, Histoire religieuse de l’Espagne, 57–8.
10 Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 199, 181–2, 174.
11 I take the start of building a church as launching a formal Catholic com-
munity. The data in the graph indicate either the start of construction or, if
that is not available, the first mention of a parish church. Ermitas (chapels)
were excluded from the data.
12 Scarano, Puerto Rico, 266.
13 Martín Ramos, Las comunicaciones, table 1.
14 Ibid., 281, 252.
15 Picó, Libertad y servidumbre, 136.
16 García Leduc, ¡La pesada carga!, 53, 55, 69, 75, 85, 97–8, 109, 115, 124.
17 Carroll, Report on the Island of Porto Rico, 22.
18 Hernández García, “Una columna fortísima,” 552.
19 García Leduc, ¡La pesada carga!, 137.
20 Carroll, Report, 28.
21 Rodríguez Pérez, “La obra de los Hermanos Cheo,” 39, 161, 167.
22 Carroll, Report, 29.
23 Ibid., 10.
24 Silva Gotay, Catolicismo y política, 240; and La iglesia católica, 104.
25 Hamelin, Le XXe siècle, 2:124.
26 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1970], 40.
27 Scarano, Puerto Rico, 296–7.
28 Hernández García, “Una columna fortísima,” 546.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 4 5 – 9 141

29 García Leduc, “Proyección social,” 23–5.

30 Ortiz Diaz, “La manifestación anticlerical,” 176–9.
31 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1970], 89.
32 García Leduc, “Proyección social,” 19.
33 Salcedo Chirinos, “Estragos tropicales de la lujuria,” 47–50; Hernández
García, “Una columna fortísima,” 548.
34 Agosto Cintrón, Religión y cambio social, 39–40.
35 Ortiz Diaz, “La manifestación anticlerical,” 184.
36 García Leduc, ¡La pesada carga!, 265.
37 Picó, Libertad y servidumbre, 134.
38 Gagnon and Lebel-Gagnon, “Le milieu d’origine du clergé québécois.”
39 Connolly, Priests and People in Pre-Famine Ireland, 59–69.
40 Picó, Libertad y servidumbre, 136.
41 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1970], 496.
42 Picó, Libertad y servidumbre, 136–7.
43 García Leduc, ¡La pesada carga!, 230.
44 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 50.
45 Steward, The People of Puerto Rico, 60.
46 Picó, “La religiosidad popular,” 157.
47 Reichard de Cancio, “Desarollo de la religión popular católica.”
48 Duany, “La religiosidad popular,” 168.
49 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 79.
50 Ibid., 126–7.
51 Valle Atiles, El campesino puertorriqueño, 127–9.
52 Juan Torres Rivera, “Las Fiestas de Cruz. Letras y midis,” http://www.
puertadetierra.info/eventos/FdeCrz/fiesta_cruz/fiestas_de_cruz.htm
(accessed 30 January 2017).
53 Picó, “La religiosidad popular,” 159.
54 Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 232.

chapter five

1 Martín Ramos, Las comunicaciones, Estadillo no. 1.

2 Ibid., 252–67.
3 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1970], 69–70.
4 Romero López, “La reducción de la influencia,” 54.
142 n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 0 – 4

5 Wagenheim, El grito de Lares, 135.

6 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 417, 863.
7 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 84–8.
8 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1964], 513.
9 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1970], 112–13, 239, 359.
10 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 664.
11 Ortiz Diaz, “La manifestación anticlerical,” 174, 184.
12 Partsch, La crisis de 1898, 22.
13 García Leduc, ¡La pesada carga!, 246.
14 Romero López, “La reducción de la influencia,” 259–63.
15 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 861, 864.
16 Ibid., 859.
17 Edward Camareno Jr, “Manuel Fernández-Juncos Masonic Hero of Puerto
Rico,” http://srjarchives.tripod.com/1998-09/CAMARENO.HTM (accessed
20 February 2017); Grupo Editorial eprl, “Fernández Juncos, Manuel.”
18 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 140.
19 Wagenheim, El grito de Lares, 135.
20 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 131–9, 157–60.
21 Ibid., 114, 119, 123, 125.
22 Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 212.
23 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1970], 364.
24 Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 210.
25 Ibid., 260.
26 Ibid., 212, 219.
27 Ibid., 267–70.
28 Jiménez Duque, La espiritualidad en el siglo XIX, 145–9.
29 Ibid., 155–7.
30 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 852.
31 Martínez-Fernández, “Crypto-Protestants and Pseudo-Catholics,” 347–65.
32 Silva Gotay, “Puerto Rico,” 728.
33 Reichard de Cancio, “Desarollo.”
34 Carroll, Report on the Island of Porto Rico, 33, 200.
35 Reichard de Cancio, “Desarollo.”
36 Ayala, “La masoneria de obediencia francesa,” 65–82.
37 Ayala, La masonería de obediencia española, 15.
38 Ibid.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 4 – 7 143

39 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 140–2.

40 García Leduc, Intolerancia y heterodoxias, 109.
41 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 141.
42 Ayala, La masonería de obediencia española, 277–84, 268, 257, 264–5.
43 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 860.
44 Ayala, La masonería de obediencia española, 32, 152–3, 162, 167, 157.
45 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 159.
46 Romero López, “La reducción de la influencia,” 136.
47 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 157–9; Romero López, “La reducción de
la influencia,” 54.
48 Ayala, La masonería de obediencia española, 142.
49 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1964], 336.
50 García Leduc, Intolerancia y heterodoxias, 118.
51 Daniel Assisi, “Allan Kardec – The Codifier of Spiritism,” http://www.
allankardec.org (accessed 4 July 2017).
52 Blackwell, “Translator’s Preface,” 11–14.
53 Kardec, Spiritualist Philosophy, 24.
54 Koss, “El porqué de los cultos religiosos,” 66.
55 Koss, “Religion and Science Divinely Related,” 31.
56 Koss, “El porqué de los cultos religiosos,” 66; Cruz Monclova, Historia
de Puerto Rico [1957], 855.
57 Koss, “Religion and Science,” 31.
58 Fernández Olmos, Creole Religions of the Caribbean, 177.
59 Román, Governing Spirits, 77.
60 Koss, “El porqué de los cultos religiosos,” 68–9.
61 Silva Gotay, Soldado católico, 143.
62 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 855–6.
63 Koss, “El porqué de los cultos religiosos,” 68–9.
64 Fernández Olmos, Creole Religions, 186–7.
65 Koss, “Religion and Science,” 188.
66 Fernández Olmos, Creole Religions, 187.
67 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1957], 861–2.
68 Cruz Monclova, Historia de Puerto Rico [1964], 337.
69 Ibid., 334.
70 García Leduc, Intolerancia y heterodoxias.
71 Ortiz Diaz, “La manifestación anticlerical.”
144 n o t e s t o pa g e s 5 9 – 6 4

chapter six

1Carroll, Report on the Island of Porto Rico, 7–8, 63–4, 31.

2Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica de Puerto Rico, 69.
3Carroll, Report, 65.
4Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 78, 242.
5Clark et al., Porto Rico and Its Problems, 72.
6Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 129.
7Partsch, La crisis de 1898, 59.
8Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 101.
9Romero López, “La reducción de la influencia,” 246; Partsch, La crisis, 98.
10 Partsch, La crisis, 60–1, 50, 10, 81, 71, 74.
11Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 188.
12 Stevens Arroyo, “Pious Colonialism,” 57–82.
13 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 323–4.
14 Ibid., 152.
15 Ibid., 219–21.
16 Pérez Rivera, “La Asociación de Católicos de Ponce,” 55–70.
17 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 217.
18 Ibid., 104.
19 Partsch, La crisis, 81–2, 157.
20 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 166, 161.
21 Partsch, La crisis, 95.
22 Ibid., 104, 139.
23 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 227.
24 Ibid., 165.
25 Ibid., 168.
26 Ibid., 169–73.
27 Partsch, La crisis, 139.
28 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 165; Partsch, La crisis, 129.
29 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 300.
30 Ibid., 120–1, 134, 139, 135, 210.
31 Columbia University Teachers College and University of Puerto Rico, A
Survey of the Public Educational System, 23–4.
32 Partsch, La crisis, 115–17.
33 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 144, 272.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 4 – 7 3 145

34 Ibid., 274, 271.

35 Columbia University Teachers College and University of Puerto Rico,
Survey, 21.
36 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 289.
37 Partsch, La crisis, 146.
38 Jones, Sínodo diocesano, 39.
39 Pérez Rivera, “La Asociación,” 60–2.
40 Jones, Sínodo diocesano, 37; Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 149.
41 Fenton, Understanding the Religious Background of the Puerto Rican, 2: 4.
42 Herzig Shannon, El Iris de Paz, 89–90.
43 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 118, 155, 125.
44 Rodríguez Escudero, Historia del espiritismo, 6–7.
45 Herzig Shannon, El Iris de Paz, 72.
46 Ibid., 107, 49, 92.
47 Agosto Cintrón, Religión y cambio social, 43.
48 Román, Governing Spirits, 112.
49 Ibid., 114, 116; see also Román, “Spiritists versus Spirit-mongers.”
50 Román, Governing Spirits, 113, 115.
51 Koss, “Religion and Science Divinely Related,” 37–8.
52 Agosto Cintrón, Religión y cambio social, 12.
53 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 179.
54 Román, Governing Spirits, 78.
55 Santaella Rivera, Historia de los Hermanos Cheos, 49.
56 Reichard de Cancio, “Desarollo de la religión popular católica”; Silva Gotay,
La iglesia católica, 175–8.
57 Rodríguez Pérez, “La obra de los Hermanos Cheo,” 64–6.
58 Santaella Rivera, Historia, 56.
59 Román, Governing Spirits, 78, 54.
60 Rodríguez Pérez, “La obra,” 71–2; Santaella Rivera, Historia, 77–83.
61 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 178.
62 Rodríguez Pérez, “La obra,” 118, 92.
63 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 79.
64 Rodríguez Pérez, “La obra,” 131–2.
65 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 181–4.
66 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 61, 74, 77, 80.
67 Román, Governing Spirits, 54.
146 n o t e s t o pa g e s 7 3 – 8 2

68 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 80.

69 “Mystical Mountain in San Lorenzo,” El Nuevo Día, 30 March 2012; Rod-
ríguez Pérez, “La obra,” 68, 133; Congregación misionera de San Juan Evan-
gelista Hermanos Cheos, “Consagración a María en la Montaña Santa
en San Lorenzo, pr 2010,” http://www.hermanoscheos.org/consagracio
acuten-a-mariacutea-en-la-montantildea-santa-en-san-lorenzo-pr-2010
.html (accessed 24 October 2017).
70 Santaella Rivera, Historia, 163.
71 Rodríguez Pérez, “La obra,” 74, 72, 77, 75.
72 Ibid., 77–8, 156–7, 170; Román, Governing Spirits, 78–9.
73 Santaella Rivera, Historia, 161–2.
74 Reichard de Cancio, “Desarollo.”

chapter seven

1 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo y política, 112–14; Macfee, “To-day in Porto

Rico,” 583.
2 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo, 112–14.
3 Ibid., 116–19.
4 Ibid., 120.
5 Ibid., 121–2.
6 Ibid., 123–7.
7 Ibid., 128.
8 Ibid., 131–3.
9 Ibid., 134–7.
10 Ibid., 144–5.
11 Agosto Cintrón, Religión y cambio social, 137.
12 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo, 150–65.
13 Ibid., 174, 149.
14 Linde and Friend, “Victor S. Clark Papers.”
15 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo, 200, 246.
16 Díaz Stevens, “Aspects of the Puerto Rican Religious Experience,” 160.
17 Negrón de Montilla, Americanization in Puerto Rico, 121–2.
18 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo, 184–5.
19 Ibid., 214.
20 Ibid., 232, 259.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 2 – 9 147

21 Ibid., 234.
22 Ibid., 228.
23 Ibid., 175, 234.
24 Ibid., 196, 209–10.
25 Ibid., 183–7.
26 United States, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States:
1930. Population, 1:1251.
27 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo, 257; Universidad de Puerto Rico, “Historia de
la upr,” http://www.upr.edu/historia/ (accessed 7 December 2017).
28 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 38, 114.
29 Manners, “Tabara,” 127.
30 Silva Gotay, Protestantismo, 260, 263.
31 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 13–14, 99–114.
32 Mintz, Worker in the Cane, 248.
33 Ibid., 211–24.
34 Ibid., 216, 250, 264.
35 Ibid., 266.
36 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 105.
37 Mintz, “Cañamelar,” 409.
38 Agosto Cintrón, Religión, 107, 152–5; Rogler, Comerío, 133, 135.
39 Rogler, Comerío, 139, 142.
40 Ibid., 134.
41 Ibid., 133.
42 Manners, “Tabara,” 127.

chapter eight

1 Coleson, “La puertorriqueñización del protestantismo,” 41.

2 Padilla Seda, “Nocorá,” 303.
3 Martin, Tongues of Fire, 58.
4 Steward, The People of Puerto Rico, 85, 475.
5 Rogler, Comerío, 131.
6 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica de Puerto Rico, 174.
7 Fenton, Understanding the Religious Background of the Puerto Rican, 2:4.
8 Loebach, “Problems,” 2:2.
9 Wipfler, “La Iglesia católica y la dictadura de Trujillo,” 369.
148 n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 9 – 9 5

10 Hamelin, Le XXe siècle, 2:162.

11 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 318.
12 Loebach, “Problems,” 2:2.
13 Mintz, “Puerto Rico,” 424.
14 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 198.
15 Duany, “La religiosidad popular,” 165.
16 Hamelin, Le XXe siècle, 2:109–89.
17 Rogler, Comerío, 138, 140–1, 32.
18 Ibid., 81–2, 20, 66.
19 Ibid., 73–5, 77, 90.
20 Ibid., 157, 35, 158, 147–8.
21 Agosto Cintrón, Religión y cambio social, 87.
22 Fenton, Understanding, 2:6, 8.
23 Hatt, Backgrounds of Human Fertility, 41, 38.
24 Ibid., 29, 200, 260, 47, 79.
25 Silverman, “Introduction,” 181.
26 Manners, “Tabara,” 126; Wolf, “San José,” 242; Mintz, “Cañamelar,” 406;
Padilla Seda, “Nocorá,” 303, 305.
27 Manners, “Tabara,” 126–9, 149–50.
28 Wolf, “San José,” 242–4, 214–15, 245.
29 Padilla Seda, “Nocorá,” 303–8.
30 Mintz, “Cañamelar,” 406–9; Mintz, Worker in the Cane, 247.
31 Baselga, “Cultural Change and Protestantism,” 113, 116.
32 Fenton, Understanding, 2:6–8.
33 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 168–9.
34 Fenton, Understanding, 2:9.
35 Garrido, Esoteria y fervor populares, 43–195, 219, 38.
36 Vidal, Oraciones, conjuros y ensalmo, 72–82.
37 Deleito y Piñuela, La vida religiosa española, 273–4.
38 Garrido, Esoteria, 79.
39 Davila, “Santuario de la Monserrate de Hormigueros,” 3.
40 Diaz Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 6–8.
41 Tumin and Feldman, “The Miracle at Sabana Grande,” 355–7, 366, 361, 363.
42 Román, Governing Spirits, 166, 168.
43 Tumin and Feldman, “Miracle,” 359–61.
44 Ibid., 366.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 9 5 – 1 0 2 149

45 Román, Governing Spirits, 175.

46 LaRuffa, San Cipriano, 73, 29, 89.
47 Baselga, “Cultural Change and Protestantism,” 114, 133–5.
48 Loebach, “Problems,” 2:3–4.
49 Stevens Arroyo, “The Catholic Worldview,” 53–73; Buxeda Díaz, “Iglesias
y modernidad,” 130.
50 Zayas Micheli, Catolicismo popular, 190, 197.
51 Silva Gotay, Catolicismo y política, 424–5.
52 Silva Gotay, La iglesia católica, 290–1.
53 Buxeda Díaz, “Iglesias y modernidad,” 167–8.
54 Malavet, America’s Colony, 44.
55 Archivo de las Elecciones en Puerto Rico, “Escrutinio de las Elecciones
Generales del 4 de noviembre de 1952: Resultados para candidatos a gober-
nador del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico,” http://electionspuertori
co.org/archivo/1952.html (accessed 15 October 2018).
56 Zayas Micheli, Catolicismo popular, 124–5.
57 Ocampo, Puerto Rico, 4:37.
58 Archivo de las Elecciones en Puerto Rico, “Escrutinio de las Elecciones
Generales del 4 de noviembre de 1960: Resultados para Candidatos a Gob-
ernador del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico,” http://electionspuer-
torico.org/archivo/1960.html (accessed 15 October 2018).
59 Zayas Micheli, Catolicismo popular, 128.
60 Laboy Gómez, Los católicos rebeldes; Silva Gotay, El pensamiento cristiano
revolucionario.
61 Díaz Stevens, “La Misa Jíbara,” 149.
62 For a recent celebration of the Misa Jíbara, see https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=agvqrdWNsN0 (accessed 3 October 2018).
63 Díaz Stevens, “La Misa Jíbara,” 153.
64 Ibid., 152–5.
65 Stevens Arroyo, “The Catholic Worldview,” 73.
66 Santiago Santana, Antulio Parrilla Bonilla, 25–44.
67 Ibid., 53–5.
68 Ibid., 56–72.
69 Ibid., 63, 362, 377–407, 360, 410, 415.
70 Ibid., 343–7; Silva Gotay, “Desarrollo de la dimensión religiosa del nacional-
ismo.”
150 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 2 – 6

71 Laboy Gómez, Los católicos rebeldes, 98–188.

72 Ibid., 189–98.
73 Ibid., 229–310.
74 Díaz Stevens, “La Misa Jíbara,” 157.
75 Ibid., 156.
76 Laboy Gómez, Los católicos rebeldes, 241–3, 220, 291–2, 232.
77 Silva Gotay, “Desarrollo.”
78 Buxeda Díaz, “Iglesias,” 196, 202.
79 Sáez, Entre Cristo y Che Guevara, 35, 41, 143.
80 Silva Gotay, El pensamiento cristiano revolucionario; Luis Rivera Pagán,
“Samuel Silva Gotay: Un doctorado honoris causa muy merecido,”
https://mgrafias.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/samuel-silva-gotay-un-
doctorado-honoris-causa-muy-merecido (accessed 4 May 2018).

chapter nine

1 prolades, rita Database of Puerto Rico, http://prolades.com/cra/

regions/caribe/pri/rita_dbase_prico.htm (accessed 10 October 2018).
2 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 4.
3 Scott Cook, “The Prophets,” 20.
4 Bastian, “Metamorphosis,” 41.
5 Clifton L. Holland, Table of Estimated Size of the Protestant Movement in
Puerto Rico, 2000, http://prolades.com/cra/regions/caribe/pri/pri-tbl-prot_
2000.pdf (accessed 28 May 2018).
6 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 14.
7 Uribe, Les transformations du christianisme, 93, 120, 189, 172.
8 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 8.
9 My calculations of Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America Dataset.
Variables qprot, q28a, q28a by qpot.
10 Martin, Tongues of Fire, 282, 133.
11 Agosto Cintrón, Religión y cambio social, 105, 111.
12 Ibid., 98.
13 LaRuffa, San Cipriano, 142, 129.
14 Baselga, “Cultural Change and Protestantism,” 182.
15 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America Dataset, qcurrelrec by q73.
16 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 42.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 6 – 9 151

17 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America Dataset, q67a by q73 by

qcurrelrec.
18 Ibid., q58 by q73.
19 Bell and Sahgal, Religion in Latin America, 31, 34, 38, 49.
20 Uribe, Les transformations, 160.
21 Duany, “La religiosidad popular,” 174.
22 Fenton, Understanding the Religious Background of the Puerto Rican, 3:6.
23 LaRuffa, San Cipriano, 105.
24 Fenton, Understanding, 3:15.
25 LaRuffa, “Pentecostalism,” 51.
26 LaRuffa, San Cipriano, 114–15, 118–19, 106.
27 Ibid., 104–6.
28 Scott Cook, “The Prophets,” 21, 30.
29 Ibid., 21, 27, 24–5, 30.
30 Ibid., 25.
31 Jewish Virtual Library, “Puerto Rico Virtual Jewish History Tour,” Ameri-
can-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org
/puerto-rico-virtual-jewish-history-tour (accessed 16 November 2017);
interview with Diego Mendelbaum.
32 Museo de San Juan, Los Judios en Puerto Rico/Jews in Puerto Rico, 10–11.
33 Harry A. Ezratti, “Crypto Jews in Puerto Rico Welcomed by Reform Com-
munity,” Society for Crypto Judaic Studies, https://cryptojews.com/2018/07/
crypto-jews-in-puerto-rico-welcomed-by-reform-community (accessed
29 December 2019).
34 Fernando Picó, “Rastros rayados.”
35 Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto Rico, 11–12.
36 Yvette Alt Miller, “Jews and Puerto Rico: 7 Facts,” http://www.aish.com
/jw/s/Jews-and-Puerto-Rico-7-Facts.html (accessed 16 November 2017).
37 Ursula Acosta, “The Brugman Family: Translation of an Excerpt from
‘Puerto Rico y Curazao,’” http://home.coqui.net/uahorm/brugman.html
(accessed 23 February 2015).
38 Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto Rico, 14.
39 Miller, “Jews and Puerto Rico: 7 Facts”; Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto
Rico, 14–15.
40 Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto Rico, 22–5, 17.
41 Román Vádiz, “The Development of the Jewish Community,” 51, 69–70, 74.
152 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 0 – 1 3

42 Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto Rico, 34–5, 41.

43 Ibid., 43, 48; interview with Diego Mendelbaum.
44 Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto Rico, 56–65.
45 Interview with Diego Mendelbaum.
46 Museo de San Juan, Jews in Puerto Rico, 66–7; Temple Beth Shalom, “The
Beginning of Our Synagogue,” https://tbspr.org/beginnings (accessed
12 February 2019).
47 “Welcome, Shalom, Bienvenidos,” https://tbspr.org/about (accessed
12 February 2019).
48 Interview with Rabbi Norman Patz.
49 Chabad.org, “Chabad Lubavitch of Puerto Rico – Carolina, Puerto Rico,”
https://www.chabad.org/centers/default_cdo/aid/118318/jewish/Chabad-
Lubavitch-of-Puerto-Rico.htm (accessed 28 May 2018); Zarchi, “About Us –
Chabad of Puerto Rico,” http://www.chabadpr.com (accessed 28 May 2018).
50 Chabad of Puerto Rico, “Construction Update – Chabad of Puerto Rico
Building Campaign,” Chabad of Puerto Rico, https://www.caribbeanjewish
center.com/construction-updates (accessed 12 March 2019).
51 Interview with Rabbi Mendel Zarchi.
52 Ibid.
53 Patz, “In Memory of the Six Million,” 23–5.
54 Chitwood, “On Eid 2017, a Peek into the Lives of Puerto Rican Muslims,”
Shia News Association, http://en.shafaqna.com/on-eid-2017-a-peek-into-
the-lives-of-puerto-rican-muslims (accessed 25 February 2019). See also
Karoline P. Cook, Forbidden Passages.
55 Ramadan-Santiago, “Introduction of Islam,” 1–5.
56 “Del oriente al Caribe: Árabes han hecho de Borinquen su hogar desde
finales del siglo XIX,” El Nuevo Día, 8 November 2013.
57 “Boricuas en el islam,” El Nuevo Día, 27 September 2008.
58 Houssain Kettani, “Muslims in Puerto Rico | Arab News,” http://www.arab
news.com/muslims-puerto-rico (accessed 13 March 2015).
59 “Del oriente al Caribe: Árabes han hecho de Borinquen su hogar desde
finales del siglo XIX,” El Nuevo Día, 8 November 2013.
60 Lavarado León, Gerardo E. “Comunidad musulmana en Puerto Rico es
la más grande del Caribe,” Islam España, 7 December 2015.
61 Houssain Kettani, “Muslims in Puerto Rico.”
62 Muslimah Boricua, “A Database of Islamic Centers and Masajid in Puerto
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 3 – 1 9 153

Rico,” https://muslimahpr.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/a-database-of-
islamic-centers-and-masajid-in-puerto-rico (25 February 2019).
63 Houssain Kettani, “Muslims in Puerto Rico.”
64 Lavarado León, “Comunidad musulmana en Puerto Rico.”
65 Interview with Imam Nabil El Fallah; interview with Imam Yunus Fasasi.
66 Salatomatic, “Salatomatic: The Most Comprehensive Guide to Mosques
and Islamic Schools,” https://www.salatomatic.com/reg/1sRmJKDkj5
(accessed 25 February 2019).
67 Interview with Juan F. Caraballo Resto.
68 Interview with Imam Nabil El Fallah.
69 Ibid.; interview with Imam Yunus Fasasi.
70 Juan F. Caraballo Resto, Islam in the Caribbean, or Caribbean Islam: Is There
a Difference?, podcast audio, 2:04:32, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
bznsXQydYac&list=PLbZeolDzN_Qe00xCNO4aPCxR__XNEpL_H&index
=3&t=0s (accessed 12 April 2019).
71 “Boricuas en el islam,” El Nuevo Día, 27 September 2008.

chapter ten

1 Julián de Nieves, The Catholic Church in Colonial Puerto Rico, 1–2.

2 Zayas Micheli, Catolicismo popular, 12, 79.
3 Uribe, Les transformations du christianisme, 168.
4 Duany, “La religiosidad popular,” 171.
5 Alvarez, “The Puerto Rican Family,” 2:16.
6 Loebach, “Problems,” 2:3.
7 Zayas Micheli, Catolicismo popular, 112.
8 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 267, 272–4.
9 Reichard de Cancio, Temas y Temitas, 151.
10 Valle Ferrer, Fiestas de Cruz, 18–19, 21–2.
11 Zaragoza, “The Santiago Apóstol of Loíza,” 125–30.
12 Hernández Hiraldo, Black Puerto Rican Identity, 43, 110–11.
13 Robles Álvarez, La marejada de los muertos, 14, 39.
14 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 162, and Temas y Temitas, 147.
15 Diaz Stevens, Oxcart Catholicism, 47–8.
16 Stevens Arroyo, “The Inter-Atlantic Paradigm,” 539.
17 Reichard de Cancio, Puerto Rico, 256.
154 n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 1 9 – 2 5

18 Ibid., 149.
19 Montes Mock, “Radio religiosa,” 47–8, 51, 61, 78, 94, 108, 124, 135, 231.
20 Stiening, “Streaming Radio Stations by State,” at https://streamingradio
guide.com/radio-station-list-by-state.php?state=pr (accessed 16 October
2018).
21 Streema, “Puerto Rico tv Stations,” https://streema.com/tv/country/
Puerto_Rico (accessed 16 October 2018).
22 Enrique Vargas, “Podcasting in Puerto Rico: pasado, presente y futuro,”
Centro – Center for Puerto Rican Studies Hunter College cuny, https://
centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/centrovoices/current-affairs/podcasting-
en-puerto-rico-pasado-presente-y-futuro (accessed 5 April 2019).
23 López Sierra, “Construcción,” 205.
24 Duany, “La religiosidad popular,” 180.
25 López Sierra, “Construcción,” 206.
26 Pérez, Estudio etnográfico de la santería afro-cubana, 5–10.
27 Mitchell, Crucial Issues in Caribbean Religions, 132.
28 “Botánicas/Esoterismo, tiendas de,” Directorio de pr.com, https://www.di
rectoriodepr.com/categorias/categ-botanica.html (accessed 9 August 2018).
29 “Botanica,” SuperPagespr.com, http://superpagespr.com/Searchpg.aspx?
nombre=Bot%C3%A1nica (accessed 9 August 2018).
30 Vidal, Tradiciones, xii–xiii, 3, 27–39, 157–63.
31 Sanchez, “Examination”; Jessica Ríos Viner, “Las curanderas: sanadoras
en peligro de extinción,” El Nuevo Día, 2 April 2017.
32 Fenton, Understanding the Religious Background of the Puerto Rican, 2:9.
33 Koss, “Religion and Science Divinely Related,” 43.
34 Fernández Olmos, Creole Religions of the Caribbean, 186–7.
35 Steward, The People of Puerto Rico, 88.
36 Padilla Seda, “Nocorá,” 303, 306.
37 Wolf, “San José,” 245.
38 Garrido, Esoteria y fervor populares, 38.
39 Seda, Social Change and Personality, xxv, 46, 135.
40 Ibid., 140, 146.
41 Duany, “La religiosidad popular,” 176.
42 Harwood, Rx: Spiritist as Needed, 28, 30.
43 Ibid., 55.
44 Ibid., 183–4.
n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 2 5 – 3 1 155

45 Ibid., 51.
46 LaRuffa, San Cipriano, 80–3.

conclusion

1 Hernández Hiraldo, Black Puerto Rican Identity, 121.

2 Alex Figueroa Cancel, “Tribunal reconoce complejidad del caso de quiebra
de la Arquidiócesis de San Juan,” El Nuevo Día, 1 March 2019.
3 Keila López Alicea, “Los jóvenes boricuas cambian las maneras de vivir la
fe,” El Nuevo Día, 19 April 2019.
4 wgsn, “La transformación de la fe,” El Nuevo Día, 21 April 2019.
5 Marga Parés Arroyo, “Católicos mantienen viva la devoción en la Semana
Santa,” El Nuevo Día, 20 April 2019.
6 Agencia efe, “Las procesiones de Semana Santa se mantienen vivas en
Puerto Rico,” El Nuevo Día, 10 April 2019.
7 “La Policía arresta a 428 personas en la Semana Santa por embriaguez y
droga,” El Nuevo Día, 22 April 2019.
8 Klein, The Battle for Paradise, 65–78.
 1


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 1


Index

Ache, Elena. See Elenita, Madre caciques, 10

African slaves, efforts at conversion, 28 Caraballo Resto, Juan F., xv
Agosto Cintrón, Nélida, 84, 85 Carroll, Henry K., 31–2, 58–9
Albizu Campos, Pedro, 97, 100 Caruana, Jorge José (bishop), 97
Arizmendi de La Torre, Juan Alejo de Catholic church: excluded from public
(bishop), 45 schools, 59, 63; influence over Spaniards,
Asociación de Católicos, 60 18; property seized by the state, 50; rev-
auto-da-fé, of Black women, 28 enues in Spain, 14; treatment of Ameri-
can natives, 16; twenty-first century,
Baptist church, 76, 79 129–30
Barceloneta, 92, 93, 124 Catholic clergy: in Puerto Rico, sixteenth–
Barranquitas, 84, 86, 92 eighteenth centuries, 30–1; in Spain,
Bastidas y Rodríguez de Romera, Rodrigo 18–20
de (bishop), 30 Catholic priests, twentieth century num-
behiques, 9–10 bers of, 89
Betances, Ramon Emeterio, 49, 51 Catholic private schools, 63–4, 89
Beth Shalom synagogue, 110–11 Catholic seminary, 42
birth control, 91, 97 Catholicism, as state religion in Spain, 13
Blenk, James Huber (bishop), 59–63, 65 cemís, 6, 7, 8–9
Boletín Eclesiástico, 51, 54, 55 Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue, 111
Boletín Mercantil, 56 Cheos, 70–4, 117
botánicas, 117, 121–3 Christian, William A., Jr, 21
brotherhoods, 22, 29, 35–6, 53 Christian Alliance, 76
Christian Church of Jesus Christ, 76
172 index

Christian Church of the United States, 76 Ingoli, Francesco (cardinal), 27

church attendance, 33, 96–7 Islam. See Muslim communities
Ciales, 93, 124
Cilicia Temple, 107–8 Jacob Bravo, Isaac Louis, 109
civil marriages, 50–1, 66 James, Saint (the apostle), 118
cofradías. See brotherhoods Jewish communities, 108–12
Coll y Toste, Cayetano, 65 Jewish Community Center of Puerto Rico,
Comerío, 86, 89, 90–1, 99 110
common-law unions. See marriage Jewish population, 109
Concepción de Gracia, Gilberto, 101 Jews, in Spain, 14, 15
Congregational church, 76, 79 Jones, William Ambrose (bishop), 61–2, 71
constitution, Puerto Rico (1952), 98 Juana, preacher, 70
conversion, religious, 106
creation myths, 4 Kardec, Allan, 55
curanderismo, 123 Keegan, William F., 134n1

Dominican order, 30 Laboy Gómez, José Enrique, 102

Don Taso. See Zayas, Taso Laboy Torres, Pedro, 73
Duany, Jorge, 90, 117 Lamberty Orana, Maria, 73
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 17
El Ideal Católico, 61, 63, 65–6, 70, 71 liberal principles, 51, 54
El Iris de Paz, 66 liberalism, in Spain, 38–40
El Mundo, 119 liberation theology, 99, 102–3
Elenita, Madre, 68, 73 Loíza, 95–6, 106–7, 113–14, 118, 125
Episcopal church, 76, 79 Loperena, William (Dominican priest),
espiritismo, 56, 121, 124 99, 102
Eudosia, Sister, 68 López de Haro, Damián (bishop), 32, 33
Evangelical Seminary, 84, 103 Los Santos Morales, José de, 70
Lutheran church, 76, 79
faith healing, 121
female preachers, 68–70 Manso, Alonso (bishop), 26–7, 30
Fernández Juncos, Manuel, 51 Marian devotion. See Virgin Mary: cult of;
Franciscan order, 17, 30 Virgin of Monserrate (Puerto Rico)
fraternities. See brotherhoods marriage, 33, 47, 50, 66, 91, 93–4
Freemasons, 41, 54–5, 128 Masonic lodges. See Freemasons
funeral services, 33–4 McManus, James Edward (bishop), 98
Mendieta, Geronimo de, 17
Geña, Hermana, 73–4 Methodist church, 75, 79–80
González, Gerardo, 34 Mintz, Sidney W., 84, 85, 90
González de Mendoza, Dionisio (bishop), Misa Jíbara, 99, 102
42 Montesinos, Antonio de, 16
Grovas Felix, Rafael (bishop), 99, 100 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 97, 98, 129
Muslim communities, 112–15
Holocaust monument, San Juan, 111–12 Muslim population, 113
Holy Cross, cult of, 118 Muslims, expulsion from Spain, 15
Hormigueros shrine, 34, 65, 94, 119–20
index 173

Oliver, José R., 6, 8 Reyes, Irso, 115

Reyes, Micaela, 73
Pané, Ramón (friar), 4, 6, 9 Ríos, Gumersinda, 74
parish creation, 29, 42–4 Rodríguez Medina, José, 70
Parrilla Bonilla, Antulio (bishop), 99–102 Roman Catholic church. See Catholic
Partido Acción Cristiana, 98 church
Patrick, Saint, 35
Patronato Real, 27 Sabana Grande, 94–5
Patz, Norman (rabbi), 111 Sacred Heart nuns, 62, 102
Pentecostal church, 80, 84–6, 105–6 saints, devotion to, 21–2, 23, 35, 73, 91–4
Perpiñá e Pibernat, Juan (ecclesiastical Salamanca Polanco, Diego de (bishop),
governor), 31–2 30, 31
Picó, Fernando, 46–8 The Samaritan. See Vázquez, Julia
Ponce de León, Juan, 26 Santa Isabel, 86, 88, 93
popular religion, Spain. See religious prac- santería, 121
tices: in Spain Seventh Day Adventists, 76
population, nineteenth-century Puerto Shaare Zedek synagogue, 109, 110
Rico, 42, 45, 49 Shepard, Noah, 109
Presbyterian church, 75, 76, 80 Silva Gotay, Samuel, 60, 103
prolades (Latin American Socio- Sisters of Charity, 59
Religious Studies Program), 104 Spanish clergy, nineteenth century, 52
Prophets movement. See Cilicia Temple Spanish constitution, 39, 50
prostitution, 36–7 Spanish crown, control over the church
Protestant behavioural norms, 82–3 in the Americas, 16, 27, 30
Protestant beliefs, 80–1 Spanish priests, opinion of Puerto Ricans,
Protestant denominations, 75 46
Protestant education, 81–2 Spiegel, Adolph (rabbi), 109
Protestantism: beginnings, 53; in public spiritism, 55–6, 66–7, 93–4, 117, 123–5
schools, 59, 81 St James the Apostle. See James, Saint (the
Protestants: numbers of, 83–4; in Spain, 15 apostle)
Protestant women, 82–3 St Patrick. See Patrick, Saint
Puerto Rican priests: salary, 40, 42, 59; Stevens Arroyo, Antonio M., 5, 8, 11, 16, 31,
under suspicion, 45–6 60
Steward, Julian H., 88
Ramos, Nicolas de (bishop), 28 superstition, in Spain, 22–4
regular orders, recruited from the United syncretism, 11
States, 61–2 synod of 1645, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36
religion: in contemporary Puerto Rican synod of 1917, 63, 65
society, xiii; definition, xiv
religious practices: definition, xiv–xv; in Taíno, 5–11, 17–8, 26
Latin America, 28–9; in Puerto Rico, Torres, Eugenia. See Geña, Hermana
nineteenth century, 46–8, in Spain, 20–2,
40–1, 52–3. See also Barceloneta; Barran- Vázquez, Julia, 67
quitas; Ciales; Comerío; Loíza; Santa Velorio de Reyes, 119
Isabel Virgin Mary: apparition in Lares, Naran-
religious programs, radio and television, jito, 119; apparition in Sabana Grande,
119–21 94–5; cult of, Latin America, 29; cult of,
174 index

Puerto Rico, 34–5, 47, 53, 65, 117–18; cult Zarchi, Mendel (rabbi), 111
of, Spain, 22; parish names, 42 Zarchi, Rachel, 111
Virgin of Monserrate (Puerto Rico), 42, 65, Zayas, Taso, 84–5
94, 119, 120 Zayas Micheli, Luis O., 97
Virgin of Montserrat (Spain), 21, 34

Willinger, Aloysius Joseph (bishop), 64

witches, 23, 123
women in religious communities, 106