Propaganda fide: Training Franciscan missionaries in New Spain

This dissertation focuses on the Franciscan Colleges for the Propagation of the Faith (colegios de propaganda fide), a unique institution dedicated exclusively to training missionaries in the early modern Hispanic world. Founded in the late seventeenth century, the colleges reinvigorated the Franciscan missionary enterprise in the Americas as well as in Spain in the following two centuries. Under the Spanish Monarchy, the Franciscans established a network of twelve apostolic colleges on Iberian soil and seventeen in North and South America.;Through their systematic missionary activities, the colleges worked as a parallel Franciscan trans-Atlantic organization which, along with the Jesuits, fuelled Spanish imperial expansion to remote areas on the fringes of the empire. The aim of the new institution was to train spiritually and intellectually missionaries who laboured among Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic and among non-believers beyond the frontiers of the Spanish empire. Thus, this study is an important contribution to the little known role that the Franciscans played in the Spanish Atlantic imperial networks in the age of enlightenment. Furthermore, by concentrating on Franciscan missionaries, this dissertation reveals the subtleties of religious and cultural expansion in both early modern Europe and colonial Spanish America.;This study approaches the missionary instruction of the friars by centering on three pivotal aspects of the training program: the recruitment of the Franciscan friars, the daily life inside the colleges, and the missions that the friars preached to the Catholics in New Spain. First, the dissertation explores the institutional history of the colleges for the propagation of the faith, to focus on the internal organization of the College of Queretaro, the first one founded in 1683. It also analyzes the recruiting process through which the colleges examined and purged new members for the missionary enterprise. This work further describes the daily life inside the community, with an emphasis on the missionary training in the college classroom. Last, this work turns to the popular missions---the evangelical ministry of the missionaries to the faithful---the backdrop of the frontier missions.