Abstract
This article focuses on the career of the Jesuit priest, Constantino Bayle, as a historian of Spanish Catholic missions and promoter of state-sponsored arrangements that institutionalized nationalist religious historiography. He encoded religious nationalism and racist categories in academic discourse and terminology, elevating in this way racist assumptions and renewed imperialist aspirations to the level of official historiography. The article traces Bayle’s early career as an Americanista at the Spanish Catholic periodical, Razón y Fe. Bayle was an ardent supporter of Francisco Franco’s military uprising of 1936. He was an apologist for Falange Española who defended its Catholic character. Alongside other Jesuits, he was responsible for forging a Spanish school of missiology that was predicated upon the tenets of Spanish national Catholicism and that was meant to rival analogous Protestant and Roman Catholic historiographic projects. Central to this culturalist endeavor were the notions of Hispanidad and Raza Hispanica.
Introduction: A case study in religious nationalism
The career of the Jesuit priest Constantino Bayle provides an interesting case study in religious nationalism in early twentieth-century Europe. In particular, this article focuses on his trajectory as a historian of Spanish Catholic missions and promoter of state-sponsored arrangements that institutionalized nationalist religious historiography. Bayle encoded religious nationalism in academic discourse and terminology, elevating in this way related racist assumptions and renewed imperialist aspirations to the level of official historiography of Spanish missions. In fact, in 1929 he used the phrase “Spanish missional historiology” (“historiología missional [sic] española”) to describe his endeavor as a historian of Spanish Catholic missions. The chief trait of this historiographic enterprise was a synthesis of national-Catholic ideas, the tenets of 19th century positivistic historiography, and reliance on the tools and methods of modern philology.
Bayle’s “Spanish missional historiology” was a specifically Jesuit intellectual project that originated among the staff writers of the periodical Razón y fe. The Jesuits who staffed Razón y fe forged a religious-nationalist perspective on the history of Spanish Catholic missions. Figures who contributed to this project in addition to Bayle were Hilarión Gil (1873–1928) and Pedro Leturia Mendía (1891–1955). Bayle, however, stood out among them in the long term due to his efforts to institutionalize this perspective in the Francoist regime. His focus on the missionary history of Spain was informed by the larger culturalist project known as Hispanismo. Fredrick B. Pike as well as Diana Arbaiza date Hispanismo to the period between 1892 and 1936 (Pike 1971; Arbaiza 2020). Pike (1971, 1) posits that Hispanismo was an “unassailable faith in the existence of a transatlantic Hispanic family, community, or raza (race).” Arbaiza (2020, 8) described Peninsular Hispanismo as a “manifestation of Spanish nationalism inextricably linked to the idea of empire that absorbed the cultural specificities of the former colonies as well as those of Iberian communities.” As it will be seen, Bayle’s writings were predicated upon a national-Catholic reading of Spain’s former imperial glory as well as a racist conception of Hispanidad that was anchored in the putative existence of the “Hispanic race” (“raza Hispánica”).
Furthermore, Bayle’s conception of the “Hispanic race” was consistent with 19th and early 20th century Spanish racial thought. Joshua Goode (2009, 9‐10) has underscored how the idea of mixture and fusion of peoples was a common assumption of varied representations of the Spanish race among Spanish intellectuals of the period. Bayle shared this understanding of the Spanish race as a fusion of peoples and applied it to his interpretation of the Latin American mestizo. The fusion of Spaniards and Indians that led to the birth of the mestizo allowed him to assert the essential unity of Hispanidad on both sides of the Atlantic.
The present article explores three stages of Bayle’s work by tracing and closely analyzing his contributions in the form of shorter articles in trade and scholarly periodicals as well as some of his larger works. By the time of his death in 1953, Constantino Bayle was the author or editor of over 41 books as well as 206 articles (Mateos 1953a, 1953b). 1 The present study uses publication history as a descriptive tool that facilitates the empirical grounding of intellectual history. In the case at hand, publication history allows us to trace Bayle’s transformation from commentator of Latin American “current affairs” to architect of a new state-sponsored specialized discourse that found legitimacy for the Francoist regime in Spain’s colonial past and as agent of the spread of Catholicism. Based on his publication history, Bayle’s intellectual trajectory can be organized into three distinctive moments. First, in his early career Bayle had a generalist approach to “American studies,” always underscored by his apologetic drive on behalf of Spanish imperialism. His attraction to colonial Latin America evolved against the backdrop of an increasing interest in “estudios americanos” among Spanish scholars, the Spanish equivalent of “Latin American studies” in the Anglo-American world.
Second, the Vatican Missionary Exposition of 1925 energized Catholic interest in world missions. In Spain, this was paired with the spread and popular appeal of the Catholic missionary movement, which reached a high point during the 1929 Missionary Exposition of Barcelona. In the years following 1929, Bayle turned his attention to a more specialized focus on historical missiology as he also became an apologist for Falange Española. In fact, it was in 1929, in a review of the Missionary Exposition of Barcelona that he enunciated the notion of “historiología missional [sic] española” (Bayle 1920, 156). As part of this specialized historiographic project, he developed and coined several unique concepts that he imagined as capturing the historical trajectory of Spanish missionary work. Among these concepts were the notion of the Spanish “missional state” (“estado misional”) and its concomitant “missional policy” (“política misional”) and “missional method” (“método misional”). Bayle devised this terminology between 1929 and 1936, as the country successively experienced the collapse of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the establishment of the Second Republic, and the nationalist uprising of 1936. His reading of early modern Spanish imperialism through the exclusive lenses of Catholic missions was a projection into the past of the political aspirations of national Catholicism in the 1930s.
The third moment of Bayle’s career was marked by the institutionalization of his historiographic project in the 1940s under Francisco Franco’s (r. 1939–1973/75) patronage. It was during this decade that the specialized study of Spanish Catholic missions flourished, claiming for itself a “scientific” character that was made possible by its status as an “official” intellectual endeavor. In effect, he contributed to the formation of state-sponsored culturalist institutions that at the time had a decidedly propagandistic character. At the heart of these cultural initiatives was the single-minded objective of vindicating what he called the early modern “Spanish missional policy” and its implementation throughout the early modern Spanish world.
The three moments of Constantino Bayle’s intellectual trajectory as just outlined provide the structure for this article. In the end, it will be shown that the creation of an official, state-sponsored, nationalist Catholic missiology was his most consequential accomplishment. The official character of Bayle’s “Spanish missional historiology” provided the Francoist regime with a historiography that glorified early modern Spanish imperialism and Catholic missions while passing as “scientific.” Wedded as it was with positivistic historiography and modern philology, “Spanish missional historiology” was fitted with a veneer of academic respectability that for long shielded it from scholarly scrutiny. The new official historiography of missions embodied the principles articulated by Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), when he emphasized the importance of “documentary research” (“urkundliche Forschung”), calling it the “historical principle” (Kessel 1954, 302). Like Ranke, who was convinced that the golden standard of historical inquiry is for it to be “documentary” (urkundlicher) and “exact” (genauer) research, the new “missional historiology” became a “documentary” historiography that masked its racist assumptions with supposed academic rigor (298). A consequence of this historiographic masking, as it will be seen, is that many Latin Americanist have drawn upon the literature produced under the aegis of Spanish missional historiology without realizing its racist underpinnings.
Constantino Bayle as Americanista
Born in 1882, Bayle entered the Society of Jesus in 1902 after studying at the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas (Mateos 1953a, 1953b). He went to Ecuador in 1904, where he remained for 7 years. After returning to Spain, he continued his studies in Tortosa and was ordained to the priesthood in 1914. His career took a new direction in 1919, when he moved to Madrid and joined the editorial board of Razón y fe. A few years later, Miguel Primo de Rivera took control of the Spanish government in the coup of September 23, 1923. Hence, Bayle’s early years in the periodical were shaped by the downfall of parliamentary government and the onset of a military dictatorship. He fulfilled different administrative roles in Razón y fe and continued to be a frequent contributor in the years leading to and after the Spanish Civil War and until his death in 1953.
Founded in 1901 by Spanish Jesuits, Razón y fe was dedicated from its inception to the creation, cultivation, and promotion of a literary culture entrenched in the ideals of Spanish national Catholicism. The review was the brainchild of Luis Martín García, S.J. (1846–1906), future Superior General of the Society of Jesus (1892–1906), but still provincial of Castile when he first conceived the project (Eguiluz Ortuzar 1982, 44). In the 1901 inaugural statement of intentions, the editors of Razón y fe cited Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Immortale Dei (1885), as well as the examples of Catholics in the United States, Chile, and Germany who at the time were using the printing press to counteract the spread of liberalism (Anon. 1901, 3‐4; Eguiluz Ortuzar 1982, 34). Moreover, they alluded to the bonds that united “Catholics of the Spanish race” across the Atlantic; bonds that included “identical blood, identical religion, and identical language” (Anon. 1901, 4). The editors of Razón y fe sought to approach the world of learning, literature, and science grounded in a fundamentally Catholic sense of Spanish cultural and racial identity. The general course of the country after the Civil War reinforced and even rewarded the agenda that the founders of Razón y fe set for the review in 1901.
Razón y fe functioned as a hub for diverse publishing endeavors associated with the Society of Jesus. One of them was the review Estudios eclesiásticos, which was founded in 1922 and was specialized in theology and ecclesiastical history (Sanz de Diego 2012). While Bayle was mostly devoted to Razón y fe in the 1920s, other Jesuits participated in both periodicals. Among them were Pedro Leturia Mendía, Antonio Pérez Goyena (1863–1962), and Camilo María Abad Puente (1878–1969). All of them had distinguished careers as scholars. Leturia was cofounder of Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu and led the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu from 1932 to 1947 (Sanz de Diego 2011–2013). Pérez Goyena became a prolific historian of Navarre, and Abad Puente published multiple works dealing with early modern ascetic theology (Anon. 1990; Martínez de la Escalera 2011–2013).
Another consequential figure in Razón y fe was Hilarión Gil (1873–1928) (Rodríguez de Coro 2011–2013; Santos 1961, 1977, 792–793). Gil became the director of Razón y fe in 1919 and remained at the helm of the periodical until 1927. He specialized in ecclesiastical history and missiology, which he studied in Innsbruck and Vienna between 1906 and 1908. In 1914, he founded the review El siglo de las misiones with the aim of promoting a renewal of interest in mission studies. Gil (1916) wrote short articles on missions for Razón y fe and some of his talks on the same subject were published in The Queen’s Work, a periodical of the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus, and republished in 1916 in Techny, Illinois as The Hour of God in the Foreign Missions. A version of this work was later published in Spanish as La hora de Dios en la conversión de los infields in 1923 (Gil 1923). In his speech at the at the 1929 Congreso Nacional de Misiones held in Barcelona, the bishop of Vitoria, Mateo Múgica Urrestarazu (1870–1968), identified Gil as one of the promoters of the recent renaissance of mission studies in Spain (Leturia 1929, 99).
Constantino Bayle: Publication history in Razón y Fe (1920–1953).
In the years leading to 1929, he explored a plethora of themes, most of them related to Latin America. Looking back, his friend and collaborator Francisco Mateos, S.J., suggested that Bayle’s time in Ecuador aroused in him a deep interest for “American Studies” (“estudios americanos”) (Mateos 1953a, 193). The great majority of articles he published in Razón y fe on or before 1929 fell under this category. Bayle formed part of a broader intellectual movement in Spain that was devoted to the study of Latin America. Interestingly, a parallel development was taking place around the same time in the United States. As Ricardo Donato Salvatore (2016, 18) has pointed out, “between the Spanish-American War (1898) and President D. Roosevelt’s declaration of the Good Neighbor Policy (1933), South America became the object of scholarly interest and study in the United States.”
However, the origins of the field of “American Studies” (“estudios americanos”) can be traced further back in Spanish history. Palmira Vélez (2007, 21) has argued that the “academic beginnings” of Americanist historiography in Spain are to be found in the creation of the Real Academia de la Historia (Royal Academy of History) in 1738 and the inauguration in 1755 of the post of “Chronicler of the Indies” (“cronista de Indias”) as an office within the Academia. Vélez (2007, 187‐188) also maintains that Americanist historiography fully matured into a university-based academic discipline in the early decades of the 20th century. It is within this historiographic framework that Vélez (425) characterizes Bayle as a representative “model” of the conservative account of the conquest.
Bayle’s interests during his first decade with Razón y fe were not neatly circumscribed, but they show that to a large extent Bayle fashioned himself as a commentator on Latin American “affairs.” He published 70 essays during the period 1920–1929, 63 of them in Razón y fe. Together they demonstrate the scope of Americanist themes he handled at this early stage of his career. Moreover, they show how national Catholicism guided his historical analysis. The type of essays that he wrote include opinion pieces; reviews of events, such as conferences and large social gatherings mostly related to “American studies” or missions; and historical essays. Other contributions included fragments or portions of primary source material that he edited for publication in the periodical. Lastly, he was responsible as well for writing a regular section devoted to Catholic news from around the world.
The articles that he published on or before 1929 dealt mostly with themes related to “American studies,” broadly conceived. Three of these essays dealt with Magellan, his companions, and the exploration of what became known as the Strait of Magellan (Bayle 1920, 291‐307; 1921a, 53‐67; 1921b, 262‐270). In one opinion piece he praised the 19th century Ecuadorian dictator, Gabriel García Moreno (1821–1875), who endorsed a concordat with Rome and introduced a number of reforms that privileged the Roman Catholic Church (Bayle 1921c, 25‐38). Other essays dealt with more general aspects of contemporary Latin American culture and society, including reviews of the II Congreso de Geografía e Historia Hispanoamericanas that was held in 1921 and an opinion piece on the oil business in Colombia (Bayle 1921d, 206‐215; 1923b, 125‐128).
Some of Bayle’s published articles followed a thematic trajectory parallel to his contributions in the series Colección grandezas españolas. These articles as well as the volumes in the series were of profound Carlylesque inspiration and delved on the “great men” of Spanish expansionism. Colección grandezas españolas was published by Razón y fe and its ideological leanings were decisively along the lines of national Catholicism. The series was intended to bring attention to all the “great” people “produced” in Spain, including “kings, conquerors, rulers, writers, artists, and saints” as well as “great deeds” performed by the Spanish people. The series had a strong popular orientation, and it was part of the larger project of cultivating a literary culture in harmony with Catholic conservatism. In fact, the editorial project was explicitly predicated upon the premise that Spain was a Catholic country and that Catholicism “has always been the nerve” of Spain’s history (Bayle 1921e).
Paradoxically, Bayle’s first contribution to this series, the second volume in the collection, was dedicated to the Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521). The volume was published in 1921 (Bayle 1921e). Hence, the decision to publish a biographical work on the leading Portuguese navigator of the age of exploration was most likely made in light of the four-hundredth anniversary of Magellan’s death. Nevertheless, it also gave him the opportunity to call attention to Castilian protagonism behind the first circumnavigation of the globe. Bayle contributed a total of six volumes to the series between 1921 and 1928; most of them featured the lives of Spanish explorers and conquistadors: Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519), Alonso de Hojeda (1468–1515), Hernando de Soto (1496/97–1542), and Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (1519–1574) (Bayle 1923f; 1925b, 1928d, 1928e). The only exception was a volume dedicated to St Teresa de Jesús published in 1922 (Bayle 1922d). In addition, he wrote essays for Razón y fe dealing with Christopher Columbus and Menéndez de Avilés (Bayle 1923c, 1924). He also examined the transatlantic migration of the devotion of the Virgen de Guadalupe of Extremadura, another important variation on the theme of Spanish imperialism (Bayle 1928c).
In 1927, he gave considerable attention to the figure of Pedro Bohórquez, also known as the Inca Andaluz, to whom Bayle dedicated a four-part article (Bayle 1927a, 1927b, 1927c, 1927d). Bohórquez was a seventeenth-century adventurer in the region of Tucumán who led, until he was beheaded, the Calchaquí Indians in their uprisings against Spanish rule. Bayle’s multi-part article consisted of his own commentary, editorial notes, and edited text of an original source related to Bohórquez’s life. Bayle’s interest in Bohórquez could seem capricious. However, in consilience with his national-Catholic historiography, he dismissed Bohórquez as a charlatan, described his deeds as “comical,” and appeared perplexed by Bohórquez’s ability to bamboozle his followers (Bayle 1927a, 49‐58).
Bayle considered himself an informed observer of Catholicism in Latin America. In a series of essays published in 1922, he offered to the readership of Razón y fe his diagnostic of the situation of Roman Catholicism in the region. The essays dealt with what he called the “religious problem” of the region and they displayed the sprouting national-Catholic missiological approach that he would continue cultivating the next decade. He saw the criollo population of the region as united in a common bond of language, religion, and race.
In the essay, “El problema religioso en América,” he provided the purported religious backdrop against which he thought the advent of Protestant missions to the region had to be understood (Bayle 1922a, 137). His intention in this essay was to demonstrate that the nations of “Spanish America” affirmed their character as Roman Catholic countries from their very beginning as independent republics. He questioned the distinctive existence of the nations in the region and argued, instead, that throughout “Spanish America” there was a “single nationality, a single moral people, of identical Spanish stock” (137). Thus, he maintained that the political divisions that shaped “Spanish America” were purely “superficial.” He explicitly excluded the indigenous peoples of “Spanish America” from the common racial bond that, in his view, characterized the region. Drawing on a biological analogy, he claimed that even if the “political artery” joining countries in the region with the “motherland” had been severed a hundred years earlier, their racial character remained the same (137). According to Bayle, the religion of the Spanish settlers was as robust as it was in Spain. The colonies were well governed; hardly any real wars ever happened, leading him to describe the region as “patriarchally peaceful” (139). Perhaps of greater importance, the leaders of the newly independent countries could have been “anti-Spain” (antiespañol) but the people never broke with the Catholic Church (145).
However, according to Bayle, the new countries were not skilled and experienced in the art of self-governance. Consequently, the predominance of Roman Catholicism in Latin American countries was no longer uncontested. The open circulation of books as well as the free press brought with it the dissemination of political liberalism and other philosophical currents associated with the Enlightenment (143). Of greater concern for Bayle, new religious movements and tendencies gained a foothold among the political elites. Bayle singled out the spread of anti-clericalism in Mexico and the growth of freemasonry in South America (146). Despite the “apostatizing” of the political elites, the people remained faithful to the unchanging “character of the race” because the “religious element” is the most “intimate” aspect of the race (147). Catholicism, he argued, was the foundation of the civilization of Latin America, “the soul of its soul.” Catholicism, moreover, was the purest expression of Spain to be taken to the Americas and to remain there (Bayle 1922b, 410).
In a related subsequent article, “La cuestión religiosa en América,” he offered an overview of the “official” situation of Roman Catholicism in the region (410). He commented on the religious arrangements codified in the constitutions of all countries from Mexico to Argentina. Bayle focused his examination of Latin American political systems on three main points of comparison: religious freedom, marriage, and religious education. He concluded that the “official” situation of Roman Catholicism had deteriorated throughout the region in the absence of Spain’s “tutelage” (410). He took special issue with Uruguay, a country that owed its “social foundation like no other” to the labors of the missionaries (422). Bayle was alluding to the missionary work of his own order, the Society of Jesus, in Uruguay.
In a third essay dedicated to the same subject, Bayle outlined some of the chief trends contributing to the erosion of Roman Catholicism in Latin American countries (Bayle 1922c). First, he took aim at the rise and dominance of the laity. His attack on the laity mirrored the consolidation of clericalism as a response to the growing laicization of European society. He charged that Protestants and rationalists had infiltrated primary level educational institutions and that public non-sectarian schools had become centers for the formation of anti-Catholics (274–275). Roman Catholic schools, in contrast, were bastions of religious conservatism. He argued that they were responsible for the “preservation of the faith in a reduced but choice core group of men, generally from the principal leading classes” (274–275). As bad as the rise of the laity and the supposedly eroding influence of public non-sectarian schools, was the institution of civil marriage, or as he called it “laical marriage” (276). He argued that civil marriage was so out of reach, due to bureaucratic requirements, that many people opted for common-law unions, or cohabitation (“amancebamiento”) (276). Bayle concluded by lamenting the dearth of priests throughout the region, which made it impossible for the Church to minister to Catholics in remote areas. He proposed the use of Peninsular clergy to supply the need. His proposal amounted not to a reproduction of the sixteenth-century colonial model of missionary work but to the creation of a neo-colonial church.
Bayle relied on a hierarchical and racialized filter for his diagnostic of the situation of Roman Catholicism in Latin America. He viewed the religious, racial, and linguistic legacy of Spanish colonialism as the cultural bedrock of the region. He had nothing but contempt for the indigenous peoples of Latin America and the descendants of former Africans slaves. In fact, he did not measure the strength of Roman Catholicism in the region by the numbers of indigenes and blacks who remained Catholic. Instead, he measured the vibrancy of Catholicism with its persistence among whites, who were, according to Bayle, more fitting to “represent the people” (283).
If Bayle was concerned about the situation of Roman Catholicism in Latin America, it was probably because he was also concerned about the situation at home. In a run of articles published in 1925–26, Bayle commented on the unfolding crisis of Catholicism in Mexico for the Razón y fe readership. He saw the situation in Mexico as an instance of the erosion of the Spanish Catholic heritage in Latin America. In 1924, Plutarco Elías Calles was elected to the presidency of Mexico. Calles counted upon the support of the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), a federation of labor unions with strong anti-clerical stances. In 1925, Calles heeded the proposal of Luis Morones Negrete, head of the CROM, for the creation of a national Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church (Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana), independent from the Vatican (Meyer 2008, 34; Buford 1971, 140). In addition, Calles adopted a series of anti-Catholic measures that provoked the mobilization of Catholics and led to the onset of the Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929) (Wilkie 1966, 216).
In his two-part article, “¿Qué pasa en Méjico?” Bayle railed against President Calles and the anti-Catholic policies of the Mexican government. In the first part of the article, he took aim at the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church, especially its founder, the former Roman Catholic priest José Joaquín Pérez Budar (Bayle 1925a; Ramírez Rancaño 2002). He dismissed the new church as a schismatic entity, the result of Calles’ delusional nationalism. He even suggested that to be more “independent from Rome and more nationalist,” it should “reestablish human sacrifices” (Bayle 1925a, 427).
In the follow up piece, he quoted extensively from news reports that appeared in the Mexican press—in newspapers such as El Faro (Mexico City), El País (Mexico City), Excelsior (Mexico City), and La Opinión (Puebla)—as well as the North American press—for example, America (New York). While he understood that the recent persecution of Catholics was rooted in the Mexican Constitution of 1917, he could not understand why Calles had decided to implement the relevant constitutional provisions with such belligerence. The only possible answer to this question, in his mind, was the existence of an anti-Catholic conspiracy involving the post-revolutionary leadership of the country. He also argued that further evidence of this was the leniency with which different levels of Mexican government treated Protestant missionaries, allowing foreign Protestant missionaries to stay in the country while foreign Catholic clergy were systematically deported (Bayle 1926b).
For Bayle, Latin America was the battleground of an international religious conflict that pitted Catholic, Protestant, and Communist/atheist countries against each other. He viewed the United States as a Protestant country and blamed it for supporting President Calles as well as for enabling his hostile treatment of Catholics (Bayle 1926d, 433‐434). Interestingly, he also claimed that President Calles was following the economic and religious policies of Bolshevik Russia (428, 434). In this scenario, Bayle argued, Spain stood to lose if it did not get involved. After all, he maintained, most of the priests and nuns that had been expelled from Mexico where from Spain. More importantly, Bayle was calling for a policy of religious interventionism based on the shared religious and cultural heritage that existed between Spain and the Catholic people of Mexico. The “tyrant,” he contended, imperiled “the most legitimate glory” that Spain still had in Latin America; namely, the “religion of Christ that was there established by us” (Bayle 1926c, 328). He praised the “martyrs” of Mexico, mostly members of the Liga Nacional. In the end, however, he viewed the persecution of Catholics in Mexico through the lenses of Spanish national Catholicism.
Bayle and the racist underpinnings of national-catholic historical missiology
After 1929, Bayle slowly turned away from a “generalist” view of Latin America and adopted a more specialized focus on the history of Spanish Catholic missions during the colonial period. A factor that spurred this narrowing of interests can perhaps be found in his growing apprehension toward North American Protestant missions in Latin America. He perceived this as a foreign intrusion that undermined the religious hold that Roman Catholicism had in the region, even if beleaguered by the secularist tendencies of liberal political elites.
Bayle’s interest in the incursion of North American Protestant missions in Latin America can be traced back to a string of articles published in Razón y fe between 1923 and 1924: “El protestantismo en la América Española.” The four articles that he devoted to this subject were a rejoinder against the report, Christian Work in Latin America. The multivolume report consisted of the proceedings of the Congress on Christian Work in Latin America, held in Panama in 1916 and organized by the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America (CCLA). The CCLA was a Protestant umbrella organization that brought together North American missionary agencies active throughout Latin America (CCLA 1917; Roldán-Figueroa 1998). The CCLA was a response to the World Missionary Conference, celebrated in 1910 in Edinburgh, which did not feature discussions of Latin America, in deference to the Roman Catholic Church (Cardoza-Orlandi 1999). Bayle (1923d) referred to the report and quoted it profusely throughout his first article in the series. Interestingly, he collected information for these essays by means of a short questionnaire that he forwarded to Roman Catholic diocesan clergy throughout the region (Bayle 1923d, 432n1). The CCLA used a similar methodology for many of the subsections gathered in the report.
Bayle was well acquainted with the views of Anglo-American missiologists. He criticized the opinions of leading figures of the North American missionary movement, such as Harlan P. Beach (1854–1933), Robert Elliott Speer (1867–1947), and Charles Henry Robinson (1861–1925). In addition to his familiarity with the CCLA, he was aware of other missionary agencies, including the Evangelical Union of South America. He zeroed in on the anti-Catholic prejudices with which many of these figures approached Latin American Christianity.
The second article in the series reveals how imbued Bayle had become in the history of Protestant missions in the region. In the piece, he first glossed over the history of the Protestant presence in the lands under Spanish imperial rule. He then focused his attention on the stories of James Thompson (1788–1854), Allan Gardiner (1794–1851), and David Trumbull (1819–1889), nineteenth-century travelers and missionaries who traversed South America. He treated these as episodes in the failed Protestant “conquest” of Latin America. Yet, Bayle felt that the recently held “Congress of Panama” marked an important turning point because the different missionary societies were now united in a concerted effort for the “conquest of the peoples who were the children of Spain” (Bayle 1923e, 152).
He immersed himself in the study of North America Protestant missions, learning from their organizations and methodology. He acknowledged as much in the first of two articles he published in 1928 on the same subject: “Whoever have had curiosity or patience to read my previous articles about the evangelization of Hispanic America by the apostles of the dollar, must have noted that all the sources of information were theirs, the Protestants.” “I purposefully drank in them,” he emphasized (Bayle 1928a, 209; 1928b). By 1928, however, he had a more articulated idea of what was at stake from the perspective of Spanish Catholicism. Protestant missionaries coming from the United States could only make progress in Latin America by dismantling and writing off the Spanish heritage of Spanish-speaking countries in the region. As he put it: “America’s past is Spain; anything that attempts to sunder this past, or to leave it out, is going directly against the union that is so much needed between those who are near and those who are far” (Bayle 1928a, 209).
Bayle’s interventions with contemporary events in Latin America and Protestant missions in the region pointed to an unavoidable conclusion: a more systematic study of the history of Spain’s missionary activity in the America’s was needed. But this was not a disinterested, critical study of Spanish expansionism and the role of Catholic missionaries in the conquest. To the contrary, the Jesuit project, as well as that of other mission leaders of the period, was a culturalist one. The concern was with the role of Spanish missionaries in the spread of Roman Catholicism and laying the foundations of a cultural entity that transcended time and spatial location—that is, the laying of the foundations of Hispanidad, or “Spanishness.” This was the aim of national-Catholic missiology as it emerged from the 1920s into the 1930s. Race formed part of this culturalist project, which was in the last analysis an amalgam of cultural and biological attributes. As Bayle (1922a, 147) explained in 1922, the “religious element” is the most “intimate” aspect of the race.
There was a larger context for the emergence of the national-Catholic historical missiology project. First, there was the revival of interest in Catholic missions that occurred under Pope Pius XI. The Pope organized the Vatican Mission Exposition of 1925 to promote Catholic missions after the Great War. Another movement that contributed to a renewed interest in Catholic missions throughout Europe was the Missionary Union of Clergy and Religious, which Paolo Manna (1872–1952) founded in 1916. The Spanish chapter of the Missionary Union of Clergy was established in 1921, which in turn created the Asociación para el Fomento de Estudios Misiologicos en España (Association for the Promotion of Missiological Studies in Spain) with the aim of cultivating more systematic studies of missions (Santos Hernández 1961, 167).
These initiatives led to the organization of popular congresses on missions that were held in Burgos (1921) and Pamplona (1922). In 1929, religious leaders organized a pavilion devoted to missions during the International Exposition of Barcelona. Organized and erected by the local Unión Misional Diocesana de Barcelona (Diocesan Missionary Union of Barcelona), the Pabellón de las Misiones was indicative of the persistent popular interest in oversees missions (Benavides Vázquez 2016, 23). Among the activities associated with the pavilion was the Congreso Nacional de Misiones (National Missionary Congress). Bayle wrote review articles about both the Vatican Mission Exposition of 1925 and the Pabellón de las Misiones of 1929.
The trajectories of Gil, Leturia, and Bayle reveal that the Jesuits gathered around Razón y fe played a critical role in bringing the project of national-Catholic historical missiology to fruition. Leturia voiced this aim in a piece he published in Razón y fe in 1929, “Necesidad de fomentar el estudio histórico de las misiones en España” (Leturia 1929). The piece was the transcription of his speech at the Congreso Nacional de Misiones. Leturia opened by alluding to the generalized aspiration of creating a national research institute dedicated to the “scientific” study of missions. He echoed Bishop Mugica y Urrestarazu in attributing the idea to Gil, who had died the previous year (Leturia 1929, 97‐98). Leturia (1929, 108) also claimed that just like international law, the scientific study of mission originated in sixteenth-century Spain.
Equally important to understand Bayle’s interest in Protestant missions in Latin America was the hardening of his political views. Anti-clerical sentiments exploded under the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939), starting with the burning of convents in May 1931. In 1933, José Antonio Primo de Rivera founded the Falange Española (“Spanish Phalanx”). The next year, Falange Española merged with Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (Juntas of the National Syndicalist Offensive) and issued a political program that consisted of 27 points revolving around the idea of a “national-syndicalist state” (“estado nacionalsindicalista”) with a clear imperialist projection. The manifesto, published as “El programa de Falange Española de las J. O. N. S.,” called for the abolition of political parties, rejected capitalism as well as Marxism, and beckoned for a national economic plan that prioritized the strengthening of rural areas and agriculture. The “Program” also rejected clericalism and asserted the preeminence of the national-syndicalist state over the Church (JONS 1934). Item number 25 in the “Program,” was problematic to many conservative Catholics who found the Church-State arrangement objectionable and accused Falange Española of advocating a sort of “pantheistic statism” (“panteísmo estatal”) (Sesma Landrin 2012, 58).
However, in April 1937, Franco, who was already the commander in chief of the military rebellion, took over Falange Española and turned it into the official party of the Nationalist regime. Later that year, the September issue of Razón y fe featured an article by Bayle (1937) in which he defended Falange Española, “El espíritu genuino de Falange Española, ¿es católico?” He asserted that Falange Española was a national movement that gave expression to the “Spanish genius” and reflected the country’s traditional Catholic fervor. While he rejected the notion that Falange Española was just another “imported” ideology, he did not shy away from declaring that in essence all Falangists were Fascists (Bayle 1937, 236, 238). He narrowed his interest to answering just one question, “Is the Falange, in itself, Catholic?” From the outset, he answered the question in the affirmative without any hesitation while denying the charge of pantheistic statism (242). He then marshalled official pronouncements, speeches, opinion pieces published in newspapers, and anecdotes of personal exchanges with founding figures of the movement in support of his conclusion. In the long term, Bayle molded his historiographic project around the political ideals of Falange Española and turned his historical research into a tool of the Nationalist regime.
Constantino Bayle: Publication history in Razón y Fe and De Rebus Hispaniae (1920–1953).
From 1930 to 1936, he took time to systematize his national-Catholic historiographical approach to Spanish missions. Vélez observes that his works of the 1930s, España en Indias (1934) and Expansión misional de España (1936), already anticipated some of the key topics of Spanish national-Catholic historiography (Vélez 2007, 425; Bayle 1934; Bayle 1936). Bayle, according to Vélez (2007, 425), advanced the idea that Spain’s work in the Americas was “a collective work, of the Spanish people, headed by the crown” and a consequence of the providential election of the Spanish people for this task. Lastly, she underscores Bayle’s reliance on the notion of the supposed “inferiority” and “indolence” of the American indigenes to justify the conquest (425).
However, as we have seen, Bayle was already firmly committed to a national-Catholic approach to Americanista studies in the 1920s, prior to the publication of his leading works of the 1930s upon which Vélez focuses her discussion. Moreover, what changed in the 1930s is that he turned his attention to the specialized study of historical missiology, and not just a historiography of the conquest. Indeed, this coincided with a shift in terminology among Spanish scholars of missions that, according to Ángel Santos, occurred around 1929 (Santos 1961, 206). The shift consisted in the increasing disuse of the phrase “ciencia de las misiones” (“science of missions”) and the growing popularity of “misiología,” and later “misionología.” Bayle’s two works España en Indias (1934) and Expansión misional de España (1936), then, signal the beginning in Spain of a national-Catholic historical missiology that sought to rival Protestant Anglo-American accounts of Christian expansion in the Americas. The new national-Catholic historical missiology also sought to challenge Roman Catholic accounts that corresponded with national historiographies of other European countries, which were perceived as prejudiced against Spain. A cornerstone of the new national-Catholic historical missiology was the idea of the racial superiority of Spanish people. The idea was the linchpin of claims that were meant to set Spain apart from other European nations.
Bayle finished writing España en Indias in 1933. The work was meant to dispel the charge of cruelty that was leveled against Spain over several centuries starting, according to Bayle, with Bartolomé de las Casas. España en Indias was among the earliest of a long list of anti-Lascasian works published in Spain in the 20th century, the best-known of them being Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1963), El Padre las Casas, su doble personalidad. Bayle, however, expressly wrote the book as a rejoinder against Cesare Carminati whose Compendio di missiologia had become a standard text in Catholic mission studies. According to Bayle it was the bishop of Vitoria, Mateo Mugica y Urrestarazu, who called his attention to a passage from Carminati’s work and invited Bayle to write a response (Bayle 1934, 30). In the passage in question, (Carminati 1929, 123) referred to the Spaniards who participated in the conquest and colonization declaring, “Perhaps no one ever bore the name of Christian and Catholic so unworthily as the conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula They were the exploiters, the ruthless hoarders, the exterminators of the poor indies.” 3
Bayle used the category of race to explain away the brutality of the Spanish conquest. He relied on the notion of the “slave race,” or the idea that some races are naturally weak and, therefore, instinctively surrender to stronger races. As a consequence of this relation, members of the stronger race are prone to act with brutality finding no resistance or opposition to their exercise of power. In the case of the Spanish conquest, Bayle argued, the weaker Indian race surrenders to the racially superior Spaniards, who ruled over them without restrains. Hence, he absolved the conquistadors of responsibility for whatsoever level of brutality they might have inflicted on the Indians as it was inevitable for them to act according to their nature in the absence of opposition. To the contrary, if there was anyone to blame, it would be the Indians themselves (Bayle 1934, 39).
Bayle (140) treated all indigenous groups as a single race. He represented them as a passive and malleable race, subject to the handling and manipulation of Spanish conquistadors and missionaries (122). He spoke of the “entrepreneur spirit of the race” and portrayed the conquest as a momentous achievement that had the consequence of lifting the entire Spanish race (172‐173, 408). He imagined a hierarchy of races, with most Indians—with the exception of those of Mexico and Peru—at the bottom, “Africans” slightly above them, and the Spaniards at the very apex (372).
For Bayle, moreover, the conquest led to the emergence of a new group of people that would eventually play a crucial role in the destinies of the American lands formerly ruled by Spain: the mestizo. Bayle’s racist interpretation of the Latin American mestizo was based upon a biological analogy drawn from animal husbandry and the practice of animal improvement. According to the principles of animal improvement current since the 1800s, certain animal traits could be perfected and made superior (Matz 2011). He used the phrase “mejorar la raza” (“to improve the race”) while commenting on the introduction of sheep husbandry to Mexico by the Spaniards (Bayle 1934, 229). He asserted that “mestizaje,” or the mixing of Indians and Spaniards, contributed to the eventual undermining of the Indian race while providing the core “improved” racial stock of the new Latin American republics. Bayle lacked precision on this point as in many others, unable to reconcile the fact of the survival of indigenous groups with his assertion about the consequences of “mestizaje.” Yet, for him “mestizaje” was a zero-sum game in which each new mestizo represented the loss of an Indian (149). Indeed, this was in his view what set the Spanish colonization of the Americas apart from other similar processes of colonial expansion. Not only were the Indians “preserved, and became Christians,” but they were “fused with the conquering race.” Together they formed the “mixed population, which is the social and ethnic foundation of the Hispanic republics” (445).
Bayle dedicated the last chapter of the book to develop a more original thesis. He argued that Spain always approached the evangelization of the lands under its rule as a “missionary state.” He traced the origin of the missional character of the Spanish state to the last will and testament of Queen Isabella I. In her testament, she declared that her intention in assuming the responsibilities conferred upon the throne by Pope Alexander VI was to “induce and bring the people [of the Indies] and convert them” to the Catholic faith (385). The Spanish monarchy was, according to Bayle (386), consistent with this legacy right up until the Spanish–American wars of independence.
In formulating the notion of the Spanish “missional state,” Bayle mirrored the developing political doctrines of the different nationalist organizations that coalesced to form Falange Española (González Cuevas 2000, 319‐329). Bayle’s concept of the “missional state” consisted of several crucial ideas. First was the conception of Catholic missions as a collective enterprise or as collective action. Second, he conceived Catholic missions as collective action that was coordinated, sponsored, and promoted by the Spanish crown as a unitary political entity (Bayle 1934, 387). Lastly, he imagined that the Spanish people were integrally incorporated by the Spanish crown into an organic unity of purpose (390–91). Bayle’s concept of the “missional state” set his national-Catholic historical missiology project apart from other similar historiographic projects, Protestant or Catholic, due to Spain’s unique role in the conquest.
In 1936, the same year as the outbreak of the Civil War, he published one of the most emblematic books of his national-Catholic historical missiology, Expansión misional de España. The book integrated the theme of imperialist expansion that characterized his early writings. Yet, it also incorporated the kind of specialized focus on historical missiology that would characterize his later historiographic and institution-building work of the 1940s. Moreover, he developed a new technical perspective on the history of Spanish expansionism. For Bayle what transpired in the 15th and 16th century was not mere political or economic expansionism, but specifically missional expansionism.
Interestingly, Bayle made a more systematic use of the category of race in this new interpretation of Spanish global missionary expansion in the early modern period. He did not merely rely on the notion of the supposed inferiority of the American indigenes as Vélez suggested. Instead, he approached the study of Spanish missions in the colonial period with a more intricate perspective on Spanish racial superiority as well as the racial inferiority of the groups subject to Spanish rule. Although he did not fully articulate or endorse a specific racist theory, the category of race provided a third interpretative lens, alongside nation and religion, that helped him filter, organize, and interpret the history of peripheral Catholicism in the early modern Spanish world.
The category of race was not incidental in Bayle’s view of Spanish missional expansionism. To the contrary, the category of race was central to the way he conceived this process, which was providentially guided. He was not thinking simply of the missional expansion of Catholicism and Spain. Instead, he was thinking of the missional expansion of the Spanish race, which he regarded as a unitary and essentialist reality.
Bayle (1936, 20) claimed that Spain inaugurated the modern missionary era. He referred to Isabel and Ferdinando as “missionary rulers” (7). Bayle (7) suggested that the emblems and standards of the Castilian crown always symbolized the strength and devotion of the realm and he called these the “ideals of the race.” Moreover, he advanced the notion that the “apostolic spirit” was at home among the “people hardened by fighting for their faith and spreading the limits of Christianity with crusading ardor for seven centuries.” In Spain, the “marrow of the race” was “steeped” in this “apostolic” and crusading spirit (20). Missionaries like Francis Xavier embodied the “evangelizing spirit of the race” (73).
He interpreted both missionary triumphs and failures through the category of race. Spanish missionaries found in the Americas that a multitude of idolatrous people and idolatry went hand in hand with drunkenness. Such vices weakened the indigenous people of the Americas. In fact, he posited that such vices “diminished” their race (147). Nevertheless, missionaries belonged to the “conquering race” (156). Their great contribution was to erect churches and schools and through their actions they “elevated the race” of their disciples (187).
Bayle was convinced that the Castilian crown had contributed to the improvement of “indian, black, mestizo, and mulato” people who now stood on an equal footing with the “Castilian race” (193). In short, this was the great civilizing work of the Castilian race, which was evident everywhere in the Americas. Indeed, Bayle asserted that in the Americas those who stood out in the sciences, arts, and politics, were “either full-blooded Spaniards or they have a good amount of Spanish blood” (215). In contrast, the Spanish presence in the Philippines was scarce. “The Filipino people,” he remarked, “is precisely that, Filipino.” If they can rule themselves, if there are doctors and learned people among them, it is because Spain “elevated” them (215).
In spite of his racist views, Bayle became well known abroad as a historian of Spanish colonialism. The writings that he produced in the 1930s and 1940s dominated the eventual reception of his corpus. His long-term impact on Latin Americanist scholarship was mostly due to his adherence to a paradigm of documentary historiography founded upon the methods of the humanistic discipline of philology. This model of documentary historiography bracketed out the racist and neo-imperialist underpinnings of Bayle’s conception of “Spanish missional historiology” by representing itself as an “objective,” “scientific,” and “document-based” form of scholarship. The philological orientation of his works masked their ideological function of being in service to the Francoist regime.
Indeed, his endeavors led to the production of repristinated editions of early modern texts, many of them previously unpublished. In fact, Latin Americanists have continued to cite his later works until very recently. Peter Bakewell viewed with high regard Bayle’s research on the colonial institution of the cabildo (Bakewell 2002, 81n1). Rolena Adorno (2000, liv) succinctly noted the relevance of Bayle’s 1936 edition of Martín de Murúa, Historia del origen y genealogía real de los reyes Incas del Perú. In her own, Spanish King of the Incas, the late Argentinian historian Ana María Lorandi (2005, 102) cited and referenced Bayle’s articles dealing with Pedro Bohórquez. Lastly, Mauricio Novoa (2016, 18, 25) in his book The Protectors of Indians in the Royal Audience of Lima alluded to Bayle’s studies of the institution of the protector del indio. Interestingly, Latin Americanists have engaged Bayle’s repristinated sources of the colonial period on account of his qualities as a philologist without taking note of the racist ideology that he espoused.
Bayle and the institutionalization of National-Catholic Missiology
Constantino Bayle: Publication history in trade and scholarly periodicals (1920–1953).
From 1940 to 1953, Bayle worked arduously in giving institutional form to a field of studies he had shaped and defined. His efforts panned out within the context of new post-Civil War bureaucratic formations. Especially important was the creation in 1939 of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Higher Council of Scientific Research), a national entity dedicated to the “restoration of the classic and Christian unity of the sciences.” The CSIC was conceived as a brand-new central government agency tasked with coordinating and facilitating research in specialized fields in the liberal arts and the natural sciences (Boletín oficial del estado 1939). In 1940, the Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo de Historia Hispano-Americana (Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo Center for the History of Hispanic-America) was created as a division of the CSIC (Boletín oficial del estado 1940a). The director of the newly created research center was Antonio Ballesteros-Beretta. The research focus of the Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo was summarized in the inaugurating issue of its official journal, Revista de Indias, as that of promoting studies of American history (Ballesteros-Beretta 1940; Blasco Gil and Mancebo 2010, 123). In line with his life-long interest in “estudios americanos,” Bayle figured as a member of the journal’s editorial board right at its inception in 1940 (Revista de Indias 1940).
Undergirding the ideological orientation of Revista de Indias was the larger culturalist project of restoring “Spanishness,” or “Hispanidad.” For many, this culturalist project remains associated with Ramiro de Maeztu (1875–1936), author of En defensa de la hispanidad (1934) (Maeztu 1934). However, Bayle was also known in the 1940s as an advocate of this culturalist vision, which he was already defending in the 1920s. Indeed, writing in 1943, Alfredo Sánchez-Bella Carswell listed both Bayle and Maeztu as intellectuals who had been “vindicating” Spain’s “missional politics” (“política misional”) (Sánchez-Bella Carswell 1943, 181). In his introduction to the new journal, Ballesteros-Beretta (1940, 6) described “Hispanidad” as an “essential unity of beliefs, language, and customs” and a link between Spain and Latin America that rested on a “historical core of culture and civilization.”
Bayle also occupied administrative roles in the CSIC and other state-run culturalist agencies. In 1940, he was appointed to the administrative body (as “vocal”) of the CSIC’s Patronato Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (Boletín oficial del estado 1940b). In 1941, he was a member of the Consejo de la Hispanidad within the Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores (Ministry of Exterior Affairs) (Boletín oficial del estado 1941b). In that year, he also formed part of the administration of the Museo de América in representation of the Consejo Superior de Misiones (Higher Council of Missions), a division of the Ministry of Exterior Affairs where he was a permanent advisor (Boletín oficial del estado 1941a). In 1946, he was appointed to the administrative council of the CSIC (Boletín oficial del estado 1946).
Moreover, the crowning achievement of national-Catholic missiology was the creation of the Instituto Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo de Misionología Española. The research institute began as the “Department of Missions” (“Sección de Misiones”), a subdivision of the Instituto Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. In 1946, the department was elevated to a higher institutional status within the CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas 1946). The new research institute marked the beginning of national-Catholic missiology as an official discipline at the service of the Nationalist regime. As the legal decree that established the new entity stated, the work of making known Spain’s arduous labor in the evangelization of Latin America is to “make history and to make the fatherland” (“patria”) (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas 1946). Bayle headed for many years the center’s review, Missionalia hispanica.
Conclusion
Bayle’s Spanish missional historiology brought together the aspirations of the Jesuits that labored together in Razón y fe, especially the views of Hilarión Gil and Pedro Leturia. However, it was Constantino Bayle who endeavored to institutionalize this historiographical project under the guise of scientific historiography. He drew upon larger intellectual trends of the period. In particular, he applied the view of the Hispanic race as a fusion of peoples to the interpretation of the Latin American mestizo. The way that he combined this interpretation of the mestizo with the specialized focus on mission history resulted in a unique brand of Hispanismo. Future research on this topic ought to compare how other missiologists of the period crafted similar histories of Spanish Catholic missions. Of great interest is how these histories were narrated from the perspective of other missionary religious orders who were active in the 16th century.
