Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A History of the Church in Venezuela, 1810-1930
Within the church itself there prevailed the decentralization and factionalism so characteristic of Venemy. The institution was not able to control its own organization. Throughout the Span ish colonial church there were, indeed, bitter conflicts between the regular and secular clergy, but in Venezuela divisions occurred fre quently within' the separate orders and between the units of the secular organization. Such dissensions naturally lessened the political and social effectiveness of the institution. The relative neglect of this region by Spain and the poverty of Venezuela affected the church adversely; its personnel was always inadequate and its wealth was never equal to that of the Church in Mexico, in Peru, nor even in Colombia. But these conditions did not prevent the church in Ven ezuela from being the most effective Civilizing agent throughout the colonial period. This judgment may be made of its work both among the native peoples, whose nomadic habits made them so diffi cult to subdue, and in the Spanish towns, where the political am bitions of the creoles and the introduction of rationalistic philosophy in the eighteenth century threatened its control. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.