Heresy, Real and Alleged, in Peru: An Aspect of the Conservative-Liberal Struggle, 1830-1875
Year: 1967
Type: article
Abstract: OR APPROXIMATELY twenty years following the attainment of independence in 1821, Peruvian liberals concerned themselves mainly with political considerations. Opposing monarchical schemes, they urged the establishment of democratic institutions and the extension of suffrage. They also backed federalism while attacking the evils of centralized authority and pointed out the apparent dangers to individual liberty from large standing armies. For the liberals parliamentary supremacy over the executive was a political panacea.' These liberals did not totally ignore theological issues. Some of them departed slightly from prevailing Catholic orthodoxy by advancing Jansenist-tinged interpretations of grace and espousing deistic views that left little if any room for Providence in the determining of human events. Moreover, such prominent early nineteenthcentury liberal clergymen as Francisco Javier de Luna Pizarro,2 Mariano Jose de Arce,3 and Juan Gualberto Valdivia,4 feeling that * The author is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. 1 There is no genuinely satisfactory intellectual history of Peru that deals adequately with nineteenth-century liberalism. A useful survey, however, is Raaul Ferrero Rebagliati, El liberalismo peruano: contribuciton a nua historia de las ideas (Lima, 1958). Also helpful are two studies by Jorge Guillermo Leguia, a historian who died in 1934 at the age of thirty-six, virtually at the beginning of a promising career: Homnbres e ideas en el Peri& (Santiago de Chile, 1941) and Estutdios hist6ricos (Lima, 1939). The latter work includes valuable biographical studies of Francisco de Paula Gonza'lez Vigil, Bartolome Herrera, and Jos6 Gklvez Egusquiza. 2 The best biographical study of Luna Pizarro (1780-1855), the priest-politician who was the main spirit of Peruvian liberalism from approximately 1822 to 1835 is Julio Altmans Smyth, D. Francisco Javier de Luna Pizarro (Lima, 1931). Considerable material on Luna Pizarro as well as the Peruvian clergy in general during the first half of the nineteenth century is found in R. M. Taurel, Obras selectas del clero contemporaneo del Peru' (5 vols., Paris, 1853). Taurel, a conservative French Jesuit, spent considerable time in Peru. 'A useful study on Arce (1781-1851), a rather typical figure of the Peruvian clergy in that during the early nineteenth century he was a daring proponent of liberal ideas whereas by the 1840s he had become like Luna Pizarro a staunch conservative, is Rafil Porras Barrenechea, Mariano Jos6 de Arce (Lima, 1927). 4Valdivia (1796-1884), a colorful priest who in his youth embraced liberal
Author: Fredrick B. Pike
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2319730632