Los santos

Even as Christianized Indians adopted and adapted the new faith, priests in the Americas continued to find ways of expressing the faith in simple terms. Often evangelizers turned to sacramentals - holy water, candles, and rosaries - as ways of instructing the Indians. The extra income from sales that such items generated for the priest was undoubtably an attractive feature, but underlying the use of tangible reminders of the faith as instructive devices was the belief that the Indians were too unsophisticated to understand the abstract concepts of Christianity. Likewise, the cult of saints was deemed an easy way for the priests to tie the new faith to old patterns, thereby linking Catholicism more closely to the world of the Indians. This path, however, was reluctantly pursued by the priests whose initial goal was the complete obliteration of pre-Hispanic religions - which proved impossible. Instead, various saints gradually replaced the gods of the Americas; for example, the patron saint of pregnant women, St. Anne, replaced a goddess of fertility. However, the priests emphasized that the saints were subordinate to the Triune God of Christianity, a concept often lost on the Indians. The saints, however, were quite significant in their own right to the peoples of the Indies; in fact, the calendar of saints' days and the corresponding celebrations were more central in the yearly religious cycle of many a New World community than was the liturgical calendar. Some scholars argue that in addition to the equating of saints with bygone gods, the role of the Catholic saints in the Americas derives from two distinct European roots: First, veneration of saints had long been part of popular Catholicism in Spain and undoubtably crossed the Atlanic Ocean with the multitude of Spanish commoners. Second, increasingly in response to the Protestant Reformation taking place in Europe, the church hierarchy, including the missionaries who came to the New World, emphasized the non-Protestant elements of Roman Catholicism, and among those was the cult of saints. from OE González & JL González, Christianity In Latin America: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 58. (underlining mine)