Iglesia de La Merced, Antigua Guatemala

In 1754, by virtue of a Royal Decree part of the Bourbon Reforms, all the parishes of the regular orders were transferred to the secular clergy.

In 1765 the Bourbon reforms of the Spanish Crown were published, which sought to recover the royal power over the colonies and increase tax collection. With these reforms, estancos were created to control the production of intoxicating beverages, tobacco, the gunpowder, the cards and the patio de roosters. The royal hacienda auctioned the estanco annually and an individual bought it, thus becoming the owner of the monopoly of a certain product. That same year four sub-delegations of the Royal Treasury were created in San Salvador, Ciudad Real, Comayagua and León and the administrative political structure of the Kingdom of Guatemala changed to fifteen provinces.

In addition to this administrative redistribution, the Spanish crown established a policy aimed at reducing the power of the Catholic Church, which until then was practically absolute over the Spanish vassals. The church's diminution policy was based on the Enlightenment and had six main points:

Image of La Merced in 1875. The church is in good condition, after having withstood the earthquakes of 1773. Photograph by Eadweard Muybridge.

Iglesia de La Merced in 1910.

Church of La Merced in 1943.[3]

1. Decline of the Jesuit cultural legacy
2. Trend towards a lay and secularized culture
3. Decidedly rationalist attitude, of Cartesian heritage
4. Evaluation of natural science over religious dogma
5. A critique of the role of the Church within society and its derived organizations, especially the brotherhoods.
6. Promotion of regalism.

In 1773, the city of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala was destroyed by the 1773 Guatemala earthquake ("Santa Marta earthquakes"); but as the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes -or "Oratorio de la Merced", as it was known in the 19th century- was not it suffered major damage because it was practically new, it was still open for worship, conserving its images and altarpieces.

One of the measures taken by the president of the Audiencia, Martín de Mayorga, to force the transfer of the city and weaken the ecclesiastical power was the sending of the most important sculpture in the city. For this reason, in 1778 he ordered the transfer of the Jesús Nazareno de la Merced, along with the image of the Virgin, to force the Mercedarians to move. The transfer was painful, because the indigenous people in charge of the work took a long time to pick it up and the Antiguan parishioners prayed and wept for the loss of the image while they waited. When Jesús de la Merced left in a box, the people accompanied him to the Ánimas sentry box on the outskirts of the city; a devotee carried the cross of the image to San Lucas, a town that is fifteen kilometers from the Mercedarian convent in Antigua Guatemala.25 After stopping in San Lucas Sacatepéquez and Mixco, the images finally arrived in Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción by night, and the Christ was received by the Franciscan friars and then by the Mercedarians, to be deposited in a wooden frame on the land where the Mercedarian church of the new city was to be built. Martín de Mayorga came to see the image, thus concluding the most difficult episode of the transfer of the city. In 1801, the confraternity of Jesús Nazareno de la Merced moved the altarpiece of the image to the new city, although the church had not yet been built. Until 1813, when the Mercedarian church was inaugurated in the new city, the rest of the altarpieces were sent to Nueva Guatemala, but the old church continued to function as a parish.

Meanwhile, the city of Santiago began to be called the "ruined Guatemala", "Santiago de Guatemala antiguo" and the "old city". It was abandoned by all the royal and municipal authorities, and in 1784 by the last two parishes: Candelaria and Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, also remaining without ecclesiastical authorities. A few years later, Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy authorized the operation of three parishes interim that bore the name of their predecessors: "San Sebastián", "Candelaria" and "Los Remedios", where the largest number of religious art works that remained in Antigua Guatemala was kept. After the independence of 1821, it recovered the category of city and was named as the head of the department of Sacatepéquez. Late in the 19th century, the parish of San Sebastián had to be transferred to the Mercedarian church, where it has been ever since.

This is the first Jesús Nazareno of la Merced. Due to his enormous following the Spanish authorities forced La Merced friars to move it to the new capital in 1778.

In 1776, the capital was transferred to the city of Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción after the Santa Marta earthquakes of 1773 ruined the city of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala for the third time in the same century and the civil authorities used that as an excuse to weaken the ecclesiastical authorities —following the recommendations of the Bourbon reforms undertaken by the Spanish crown in the second half of the 18th century— forcing the regular orders to move from their majestic convents to fragile temporary structures in the new city.[4]

Procession of the second Jesús Nazareno de la Merced in 1934.

After the forced transfer of the Mercedarian Jesus Nazareno in 1778 to Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción (Guatemala City) so that the residents of that neighborhood would move to the new capital along with their venerated image, the church of La Merced did not have a Nazarene image; On the other hand, to avoid a repetition of the violent riots in the new city, the authorities decided to leave the image of Jesús Nazareno from the hermitage of San Jerónimo, in the Mulato neighborhood of Antigua Guatemala. This image was transferred to the parish of San Sebastián in 1804 and then, definitively, to the Iglesia de la Merced, where it has been since then and where it has become the most symbolic of Holy Week in Antigua Guatemala. Formerly it was believed that the image of Jesús Nazareno was originally from the Ermita de la Santa Cruz, but modern investigations showed that it came from the Ermita de San Jerónimo.

"Visiting the places where Saint Brother Pedro walked and knowing his legacy such as social works, is part of the learning of the pilgrimage. The “Pilgrim Route” allows one to experience a different way of getting to know Antigua Guatemala”.

The Church of Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes is one of the stages of the Brother Pedro Commemorative Tourist Route, which allows a tour of the sights of La Antigua Guatemala through the life and work of Brother Pedro.35

This route includes -among others- visits to Pedro Armengol's looms, the monument to Brother Pedro and the Arch del Matasanos, the Hospital Real de Santiago, tomb of Brother Pedro in the Church of San Francisco and the Convent of la Compañía de Jesus.