Twisted Catholicism in Old Mexico

Posted on September 28, 2007 in Reading Sexuality Strange

From Carlos Fuentes The Buried Mirror:

The Mexican author Fernando Benitez, in a delightful book called Demons in the Convent, recounts many of the “hallucinating fictions” that gave Latin American societies, along with their libertine practices, the corresponding, repressive eroticism. The archibishop of Mexico City in [[Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz|Sor Juana’s]] time, Aguiar y Seijas, so detested women that he would not permit them to be in his presence, and if by accident he ran into one, he would immediately cover his face and hands. His hatred of water (another Spanish Catholic phobia) was equally fervent. His general fury was assited by the fact that he walked on crutches, with which he would strike out when crossed — as the poet [[Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora]], a friend and protector of Sor Juana, discovered when the archbishop broke his glasses and cut his face in a theological dispute. Aguiar also managed to supress cockfights, gambling, novels, and of course, when possible, women.

In a time presided over by such an uncompromising prelate, minor but crusading puritans were quick to act. A certain Father Barcia, towards the end of the seventeenth century, decided to gather up all the women in Mexico City and send them to the Convent of Belen, so they would never again go out or be seen by any man. Not surprisingly, Father Barcia only managed to round up a great number of prostitutes, actresses, and circus performers. But once he had jailed them in the convent, their lovers tried to free them and murder Barcia. The men besieged the convent, and when the women fled, telling the good Father that if this was heaven, they preferred hell, he went mad and tried to commit suicide by inserting suppositories containing holy water into his rectum.

This was also an age dominated by the triple tension of outlawed sex, the ideal of espousing an adult Christ, and the ideal of a virgin motherhood, which drove many Mexican nuns to blindfold themselves in an effort to convey their desire to be dumb and blind, to lick the paving stones of their cells until they formed a cross with saliva, to be flogged by their servant girls, and to smear themselves with their own menstrual blood. Monks and priests, too, says Benitez, liked to be whipped and kicked like [[San Juan de la Cruz]], for in this they saw a compensation for Christ’s suffering on [[Calvary]].