IN

Il papato, la Spagna e il Nuovo Mondo

Autore: Francesca Cantù
In: I libri di Viella. 153
Abstract

In 1553, a letter sent to pope Julius III by a number of caciques of the New Kingdom of Granada established a group of indigenous chiefs as unexpected interlocutors of Rome in the delicate and controversial question of the naming of an apostolic envoy to the Americas. The New World, offering itself to the evangelizing mission of the Catholic Church, opened a new scenario wherein the teleological-juridical debate around the legitimacy of Spanish titles of possession through Alexander VI’s bulls of concession was intertwined with that of the temporal and spiritual power of the Roman pontificate and its rights of jurisdiction over the American territories and native peoples. The emphatic defense by the Spanish crown of the Patronato Regio over the American Church and recurring attempts to impose the primacy of spiritual objectives and ecclesiastical government by the Papacy constituted a area of continual dispute between the Spanish monarchy and the Holy See, in time rendering insoluble the problem of the institution of an American nunciature.