El sacramento olvidado: la confirmación en la archidiócesis de Santiago, fines del XVI a 1833

Abstract

Confirmation is the sacrament to which the Catholic Church gave less importance in the Counter-Reformation by not considering it necessary for salvation and entrusting it only to bishops. This has generated the idea of a general careless in its fulfilment, so in this paper we study the real application of this sacrament in the archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela, the third in importance of the Crown of Castile, very populated and large, making it difficult to visit by the archbishops. For this purpose we use normative texts and above all, hundreds of confirmed lists, which has allowed us to date, measure and diagnose the attention to this sacrament and in a special way, analyse the important changes occurred in the transit of the Early Modern Age to the Contemporary Age, when the capacity of the confirmation to reaffirm an episcopal power in crisis was perceived.