The religious orders and the crisis in the nomination of bishops in Castile under Philip IV (1621-1665)

The seventeenth-century Spanish Church stood out among other Catholic countries of western Europe on account of the high percentage of members of the religious orders —especially Dominicans— recruited as bishops. While their authority as preachers and theologians, schooled in the post-Tridentine tradition, made them eminently suitable candidates for office, they had little of the secular experience regarded as a fundamental requirement of an episcopate that worked in close alliance with the state. The political and fiscal pressures placed on this alliance under Philip IV prompted an unprecedented crisis in the preferment of candidates to Castilian bishoprics, which resulted in the rise of the religious orders in the career of bishop.