The Catholic Church has seen early attempts…

The Catholic Church has seen early attempts at conversion in the Caribbean islands by Spanish friars, particularly mendicant orders, during the Age of Discovery.

Cortés makes a request to the Spanish monarch to send Franciscan and Dominican friars to Mexico to begin the daunting work of converting vast populations indigenous to Christianity.

In his fourth letter to the king, Cortés pleaded for friars rather than diocesan or secular priests because those clerics were in his view a serious danger to the Indians' conversion.

He wishes the mendicants to be the main evangelists.

Mendicant friars do not usually have full priestly powers to perform all the sacraments needed for conversion of the Indians and growth of the neophytes in the Christian faith, so Cortés lays out a solution to this to the king:

     Your Majesty should likewise beseech His Holiness [the pope] to grant these powers to the two principal persons in the religious orders that are to come here, and that they should be his delegates, one from the Order of St. Francis and the other from the Order of St. Dominic.

     They should bring the most extensive powers Your Majesty is able to obtain, for, because these lands are so far from the Church of Rome, and we, the Christians who now reside here and shall do so in the future, are so far from the proper remedies of our consciences and, as we are human, so subject to sin, it is essential that His Holiness should be generous with us and grant to these persons most extensive powers, to be handed down to persons actually in residence here whether it be given to the general of each order or to his provincials.