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Símbolo católico indiano
Luis Jerónimo de Oré was born in Huamanga, in the current city of Ayacucho in Peru. He was intellectually trained at the University of San Marcos in Lima, where he studied theology, but built his experience on the field, as an itinerant missionary. Oré catechized various Andean populations, traveled to Spain and Italy, trained priests to carry out missions in Florida, lived in North America and Cuba, and was appointed bishop of Concepción, in present-day Chile, where he died.
He composed numerous Quechua hymns in praise of the Virgin Mary and on various aspects of Catholic dogma, which he published in his Símbolo. As Raquel Chang-Rodríguez points out, the composition of these songs or hymns obeyed both the author’s convictions and the new instructions, taken from the Council of Trent and the Limean Councils, to carry out the missionary work.
Thus, Oré’s work is structured around two thematically heterogeneous axes: the first consists of an exposition of the nature of God and the history of Peru; while the second is made up of various songs and prayers in Quechua and Aymara, sometimes glossed in Latin or sometimes with an introduction in Spanish, whose explicit objective is the evangelization of the indigenous people.
Daphne Cornejo
Proyecto Estudios Indianos