Blas Valera - The Priest

The Priest

His priestly vocation made him travel to Lima when he was still a teenager. When he was 17, he joined the Compañía de Jesús (Society of Jesus), where he gave excessive samples of his top intelligence since he began his priestly studies.

But at the same time he was preparing for the religious ministry, his love for the Peruvian history was also growing and, in his insistence of knowing about Peruvian past better, he devoted himself to the study of native languages. He became the biggest authority of his time in this subject.

This skill made that people entrusted him missions in which his linguistic knowledge was necessary, which simultaneously allowed him to keep on increasing his data gathering, collecting information from the authentic sources of all the places he was visiting.

Valera was a special case in those times: a bilingual mestizo and well-educated. He was entrusted with the compilation of news from the pre-Hispanic civilization, but the suspicions that his sympathies towards the Inca culture raised made that the Compañía closed the access of mestizos in the order and they supposed a negative opinion of him.

Because of his knowledge of native languages, he was a valuable collaborator of father José de Acosta, who prepared the first catechisms in Quechua and Aymara. These catechisms deserved the approval of Toribio de Mogrovejo.

On the other hand, there are evidences that Valera was accused of heresy because he include some favourable comments to the Inca Empire. He was shut in by the Jesuits for a brief period.