Das Konzil als Autorisierungsinstanz

Abstract

Legal Historians are usually interested in Church Councils because of their function as the institutional setting for the production of canons, one of the major sources of the history of canon law. Nonetheless, Church Councils were also important places of communication about law and politics, an important function which often did not find any expression in the normative framework enacted by these assemblies. Taking a petition submitted by a group of mestizos from the Viceroyalty of Peru as a starting point, this article tries to analyze the way this growing interest group tried to perceive its goal – the admission to the ordination of priesthood – by making strategic use of the procedures and communication structures the Council offered for the resolution of disputes that had arisen in the Church Province. Looking carefully at the steps taken in what the mestizos themselves called a »process«, it can be shown that the Council did not only take its own decision on the matter of sacramental law, but that it was also employed by the petitioners to validate their arguments and thus prepare a submission to the King. By introducing their own arguments into the process, they transformed them into »proofs« that finally served as arguments for reaching their main goal, the revocation of a Royal Decree prohibiting their ordination, dictated by the Crown in 1578 and revoked ten years later, making explicit mention of the arguments collected before the council. This case study, based on material from the Archive of the Indies, thus not only shows how deeply intertwined secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions were in the Indies, but also gives an insight into communication about law and legal culture in an important centre of the polycentric Spanish monarchy.

Keywords

• MPIeR