A catechism is a summary or exposition of doctrine and serves as a learning introduction to the Sacraments traditionally used in catechesis, or Christian religious teaching of children and adult converts. Catechisms are doctrinal manuals – often in the form of questions followed by answers to be memorised – a format that has been used in non-religious or secular contexts as well. According to Norman DeWitt, the early Christians appropriated this practice from the Epicureans, a school whose founder Epicurus had instructed to keep summaries of the teachings for easy learning. The term catechumen refers to the designated recipient of the catechetical work or instruction. In the Catholic Church, catechumens are those who are preparing to receive the Sacrament of Baptism. Traditionally, they would be placed separately during Holy Mass from those who had been baptized, and would be dismissed from the liturgical assembly before the Profession of Faith and General Intercessions.
The Nahua are an Indigenous group of Mesoamerican people inhabiting the western and central areas of present-day El Salvador. They speak the Nawat language, which belongs to the Nahuan language branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. There are very few speakers of the language left, which is a reason for the current efforts being made to revitalize it.
Bernardino de Sahagún, OFM was a Franciscan friar, missionary priest and pioneering ethnographer who participated in the Catholic evangelization of colonial New Spain. Born in Sahagún, Spain, in 1499, he journeyed to New Spain in 1529. He learned Nahuatl and spent more than 50 years in the study of Aztec beliefs, culture and history. Though he was primarily devoted to his missionary task, his extraordinary work documenting indigenous worldview and culture has earned him the title as “the first anthropologist." He also contributed to the description of Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztec Empire. He translated the Psalms, the Gospels, and a catechism into Nahuatl.
The Mexican Inquisition was an extension of the Spanish Inquisition into New Spain. The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was not only a political event for the Spanish, but a religious event as well. In the early 16th century, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition were in full force in most of Europe. The Catholic Monarchs of Castile and Aragon had just conquered the last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Granada, giving them special status within the Roman Catholic realm, including great liberties in the conversion of the native peoples of Mesoamerica. When the Inquisition was brought to the New World, it was employed for many of the same reasons and against the same social groups as suffered in Europe itself, minus the Indigenous to a large extent. Almost all of the events associated with the official establishment of the Palace of the Inquisition occurred in Mexico City, where the Holy Office had its own major building. The official period of the Inquisition lasted from 1571 to 1820, with an unknown number of individuals prosecuted.
Pieter van der Moere, also known as Brother Pedro de Gante or Pedro de Mura was a Franciscan missionary in sixteenth century Mexico. Born in Geraardsbergen in present-day Belgium, he was of Flemish descent. Since Flanders, like Spain, belonged to the Habsburg Empire and he was a relative of King Charles V, he was allowed to travel to the colonies of New Spain as one of a group of Franciscan friars. Gante's group in fact arrived before the 12 Franciscans normally thought of as the first friars in New Spain. In Mexico he spent his life as a missionary, indoctrinating the indigenous population in Christian catechism and dogma. He learned Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, and composed a Christian "doctrina". One of his most significant contributions to Mexico was the creation of the School of San Jose de los Naturales. This was the first school set up by Europeans in the Americas.
The Florentine Codex is a 16th-century ethnographic research study in Mesoamerica by the Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún originally titled it: La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España. After a translation mistake, it was given the name Historia general de las Cosas de Nueva España. The best-preserved manuscript is commonly referred to as the Florentine Codex, as the codex is held in the Laurentian Library of Florence, Italy.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing.
Testerian is a pictorial writing system that was used until the 19th century to teach Christian doctrine to the indigenous peoples of Mexico, who were unfamiliar with alphabetic writing systems. Its invention is attributed to Jacobo de Testera, a Franciscan who arrived in Mexico in 1529.
Francisco Pareja, OFM was a Franciscan missionary in Spanish Florida, where he was primarily assigned to Mission San Juan del Puerto. The Spaniard became a spokesman for the Franciscan community to the Spanish and colonial governments, was a leader among the missionaries, and served as custodio for the community in Florida. After the Franciscan organization was promoted to a provincia (province), Pareja was elected by his fellow missionaries as provincial in 1616.
Juan de Tecto was a Flemish missionary to the New World.
A Tree of Life is a type of Mexican pottery sculpture traditional in central Mexico, especially in the municipality of State of Mexico. Originally the sculptures depicted the Biblical story of creation, as an aid for teaching it to natives in the early colonial period. The fashioning of the trees in a terracotta sculpture began in Izúcar de Matamoros, Puebla but today the craft is most closely identified with Metepec. Traditionally, these sculptures are supposed to consist of certain biblical images, such as Adam and Eve, but recently there have been trees created with themes completely unrelated to the Bible.
Fray Jacobo de Testera or Jacobo de Tastera was a Franciscan Friar of the 16th century who worked as a missionary to the indigenous peoples of New Spain. Born into a noble family in Bayonne, France he entered the Franciscan order around 1500 and went to Seville where he eventually became palace priest of Charles V. In 1527 he was recruited by Fray Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo to go to Mexico where he arrived in 1529.
The Doctrina Christiana were two early books on the catechism of the Catholic Church, both published 1593 in Manila, Philippines. These are two of the earliest printed books in the Philippines.
Teotlalpan was the pre-Columbian name of a region in the north of Valley of Mexico comprising what is today the Mezquital Valley in the state of Hidalgo and adjacent areas in the State of Mexico. The region was one of two regions settled by Otomí people, the other being the region around Jilotepec and Tula, Hidalgo. In the 18th century the name of the main part of the region came to be known as Mezquital.
Indochristian art, is a type of Latin American art that combines European colonial influences with Indigenous artistic styles and traditions.
Mesoamerican codices are manuscripts that present traits of the Mesoamerican indigenous pictoric tradition, either in content, style, or in regards to their symbolic conventions. The unambiguous presence of Mesoamerican writing systems in some of these documents is also an important, but not defining, characteristic, for Mesoamerican codices can comprise pure pictorials, native cartographies with no traces of glyphs on them, or colonial alphabetic texts with indigenous illustrations. Perhaps the best-known examples among such documents are Aztec codices, Maya codices, and Mixtec codices, but other cultures such as the Tlaxcaltec, the Purépecha, the Otomi, the Zapotecs, and the Cuicatecs, are creators of equally relevant manuscripts. The destruction of Mesoamerican civilizations resulted in only about twenty known pre-Columbian codices surviving to modern times.
The Historical Complex of the Great Convention is a colonial construction located in Ocaña, Colombia. It consists of the temple of San Francisco, the adjacent convent and the square of the Gran Convención. Its construction began in 1584 by the Franciscan religious order. The complex has a museum with historical artifacts. The Historical Complex is a property of cultural interest of national character.
The history of the Nahuatl, Aztec or Mexicano language can be traced back to the time when Teotihuacan flourished. From the 4th century AD to the present, the journey and development of the language and its dialect varieties have gone through a large number of periods and processes, the language being used by various peoples, civilizations and states throughout the history of the cultural area of Mesoamerica.
José Gregorio Castro Miranda, O.F.M., was a Roman Catholic prelate who was Bishop of Cuzco from 1910 to 1917. He mainly worked to integrate the local indigenous population to the church's teachings by translating prayers and church music to Quechua.
