Jennifer Scheper Hughes details the Roman Catholic Church’s transformation in the Americas following an unidentified epidemic, and how Indigenous Mexicans rebuilt it in the aftermath
During the first century of American colonization, as many as 20 million people in Mexico perished from disease, violence, and exploitation. Jennifer Scheper Hughes, a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside, examines this period from historical and theological perspectives in her new book, “The Church of the Dead: The Epidemic of 1576 and the Birth of Christianity in the Americas.”
In 1576, a catastrophic epidemic claimed almost 2 million lives and simultaneously left the colonial church in ruins. In the crisis and its aftermath, Spanish missionaries and surviving Indigenous communities asserted radically different visions for the future of Christianity.
“Thinking about the church in Mexico is important,” Hughes said. “It predates by a century the arrival of the Puritans to New England. Mexican Catholicism is the oldest form of Christianity in the hemisphere.”
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