Quito does not put its faith in small locks and keys. Many a shop containing hardly $100 worth of goods has a half-dozen padlocks and interior bolts
When we asked permission to climb to the tower for a view of the town, however, the monk gave us a quick, sidelong glance and regretted that the Father Superior no longer permitted it. My companions exchanged winks, but found no opportunity to enlighten me until we had taken our ceremonious leave. Once outside I learned—to my astonishment—that not merely foreigners resent having each night’s sleep broken up into a series of detached naps by the unearthly din of Quito’s church-bells. A few months before, several young men of the well-to-do class had formed a conspiracy to taste the unknown luxury of one night of unbroken slumber. Gaining admission on various pretexts to all the church-towers of the city, the conspirators had stolen the badajos—clappers, I believe we call them in English—and got rid of them so effectually that few were ever discovered. The priests were distracted—until their faithful henchmen of the masses had replaced the pilfered property with pieces of railroad iron. Since then the church-towers had been closed to the educated youth of the city.
Not far from San Francisco rises the florid façade of “La Compañía.” The Jesuits reached the present capital of Ecuador a bit later than many of their competitors, but they quickly overcame the handicap. They established the first boticas, or drug-stores, and brooked no competition. Besides enormous tracts of the most fertile land in the colony, they were granted a monopoly of cattle-breeding and, being free from taxes and the necessity of paying the King’s share, and holding the Indians in virtual slavery at less than a nominal wage, most of which returned to their coffers in the form of church tithes and levies, they easily choked private competition and soon outdistanced in wealth even the Franciscans. Their expulsion from Spanish soil greatly reduced their power and holdings. To-day, what was once a part of their monastery is occupied by the University and the National Library, but they are still scarcely cramped for space. An Alsatian Jesuit, of an esthetical cast of countenance in striking contrast to his Ecuadorian brothers, led me fearlessly even into the belfry. He was a plainspoken man, for all his astuteness—or perhaps by reason of it—and openly bewailed the immorality of the native friars and what he called the “silly superstitions” of the people. The dormitories of the boarding-school within the monastery were divided into small cells by low wooden partitions covered with chicken-wire, like the ten-cent lodging-houses of Chicago. Before I had time to put a question, the Alsatian explained:
“In these countries we must keep the boys locked in their own rooms at night, for morality’s sake.”
It is more than unusual in Latin-America, but at least one enterprising pupil found it possible to “work his way” through the colegio of the Jesuit Fathers of Quito. His fame was still green among the gilded youths of the city. By the rules of the institution each student is required to go to confession once a week. The enterprising lad long relieved his comrades of the unpleasant formality by impersonating each in turn before the perforated disk—at the equivalent of fifty cents a head.
Merced, Corazon, Buen Pastor, San Augustín, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Carmen Antigua, Carmen Moderno, San Juan ... to name all the orders that occupy huge spaces within the city of Quito would be like writing an ecclesiastical directory. Down at the end of the calle Flores the Dominicans dwell in a monastery little less extensive than that of the Franciscans. Their wealth may be surmised from the fact that in colonial days they held the monopoly of supplying all liquor used in “divine worship” throughout the colony. In the center of the Plaza Santo Domingo is a statue of Sucre, companion of Bolívar in the wars of Spanish-American independence,—a splendid bronze of an imaginary Hercules that should be set up in some gymnasium as a model—concerning which there runs a tale suggestive of local conditions. Soon after its erection an Indian living far up the mountainside above the suburb of Guarico lost his pig. He tried every known means of recovering the animal,—prayed to every available saint with any reputation for miracles, squandered his meager substance in burning candles before every shrine in Quito, and purchased many a priestly prayer. All in vain; the pig was not to be found. At length a quiteño—whether a wag or a sincere believer is not reported—whispered to the distracted Indian that the most powerful saint of all was the new one in the Plaza Santo Domingo. The credulous fellow lost no time on his way to the square, where he knelt with a lighted candle on either side of him before the pedestal of the Hero of Ayacucho. When he looked up from his first invocation he noted that the statue was pointing to the battlefield on which its original defeated the Spaniards, far up the slope of Pichincha, which chanced also to be the location of the Indian’s hut. He hurried homeward and, sure enough, found the pig in a hollow not far from his dwelling. Since then “Saint Sucre” has had a great vogue with the Indian populace of Quito.
It would be out of place to enumerate the many proofs, from personal experiences to matters of common knowledge, from national literature to frequent notorious scandals, of the moral laxity of the quiteño priesthood. Whatever they may be elsewhere, celibacy and the confessional are undeniably ill-chosen institutions for a race of Ecuadorian caliber. The non-Catholic would not dream of berating the churchmen in any such terms as those which frequently fall from the lips of educated men of Quito. More than once I have heard a devout quiteña mother bewail the fact that she dare not send her daughter to confession, though convinced that the ceremony was requisite to the saving of her soul. One looks in vain for any connection whatever between religion and morality in this typical Andean capital. The sanctimonious old beatas, wrapped in their black mantos, who haunt the churches and accompany every religious procession with tears of hysterical ecstasy coursing down their cheeks are not infrequently procurers and go-betweens of the human vultures that dwell in, as well as out of, the monasteries. The street-walkers of Quito are almost all fervent mass-goers. Scores of the same faces that peer invitingly out upon the passerby at night may be seen next morning kneeling on the pavement of the cathedral or walking on their knees around the entire circle of plaster saints, reciting a prayer formula before each. Nor is this hypocrisy. These victims see no incongruity between the evening’s doings and the morning’s occupation. To the masses, religion is a mixture of idol worship and the performance of fixed ceremonies, wholly divorced from their personal actions. The sins of daily life are wiped out by a quarter-hour in the confessional; absolution is granted for the payment of a fee and the performance of a set devotion. The brain cells where real morality might find a foothold are packed with absurd catechisms that leave no room for it; and of religion there remains nothing but unthinking costumbre and unreasoning fanaticism.
Quito has been called the most fanatical town of South America. Among a score like it, the present archbishop tells the following story in his “History of Ecuador.” About two hundred years ago some one broke into one of the churches and stole the sacred wafers, together with the gold ciborium in which they were kept. A few days later the stolen property was found lying in the refuse of a ditch. Amid great weeping, a procession of the entire population bore the sacred emblem back to its church. For weeks the whole town dressed in deepest mourning; the audiencia gave all its attention and the police force all its efforts to running down those “vile traitors, bestial swine, and venial sinners,” as the gentle archbishop calls them, leaving little misdemeanors like robbery and murder to look after themselves. Not a clue was uncovered. At length a famous Jesuit of the time preached a sermon that lashed the populace into such fervor that the congregation poured forth into the streets beating themselves with chains and scourges, most of them, men and women, naked to the waist—I am quoting the archbishop—in a procession and religious fury that lasted from eight at night until two in the morning. A scapegoat was imperative. The officers of the audiencia, in peril of being themselves forced to assume that rôle, redoubled their efforts, and at length found, some distance south of the city, three Indians and a half-caste who were reputed to have confessed to the nefarious crime. The four miscreants were brought back to the city, kicked about the streets by the populace, trussed up in chains in the church while the priest preached a four-hour sermon on “the most atrocious crime in the history of Quito,” and were finally hanged, drawn, and quartered, and hung up, still dripping with blood, in sixteen parts of the town. The priests and their followers dug up a potful of earth where the holy wafers had been found, and deposited it in a heavy vase of solid gold that is still one of the precious relics of the cathedral. Then they caused to be erected over the spot the chapel of Jerusalem, where it stands to this day. “And,” adds the archbishop, “no fiel [faithful one] will deny that they met their just fate for so vile and unprecedented a sacrilege.”
