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Biography

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Pedro de Gante, born Pieter van der Moere, was a Flemish Franciscan lay brother who became one of the principal missionaries and educators in sixteenth-century New Spain. He was born in Geraardsbergen, also known as Grammont, in the County of Flanders in the Low Countries, in the late fifteenth century. He entered the Franciscan convent at Ghent and thereafter was known in the Spanish world as Pedro de Gante, Peter of Ghent. A long-standing tradition maintained that he was related to the Habsburg dynasty and therefore a kinsman of the Emperor Charles V, although historians have not established the precise nature of any such kinship. Formed in the religious and humanist culture of the late medieval Netherlands, he volunteered for missionary work in the newly conquered territories of Mexico.

In 1523 he crossed the Atlantic with two other Flemish Franciscans, Juan de Tecto and Juan de Aora. The three arrived in New Spain a year before the twelve Spanish Franciscans under Martín de Valencia who are conventionally called the Twelve Apostles of Mexico. They began their work in the former Acolhua capital of Texcoco, where Pedro started to learn Nahuatl, the principal language of the Valley of Mexico. Juan de Tecto and Juan de Aora died within a few years of arrival. Pedro then transferred his activity to Mexico City and created a school for indigenous youth in connection with the Franciscan convent of San Francisco. That school, San José de los Naturales, became one of the first permanent educational institutions in the Americas.

There Pedro taught literacy, Christian doctrine, liturgical music, painting, sculpture, and practical crafts. He relied heavily on images, Nahuatl songs, and religious dramas so that students who knew neither Spanish nor Latin could grasp the new teaching. Graduates of the school served as artisans, musicians, and catechists in other towns. Pedro remained a lay brother all his life and never received priestly ordination. Later writers reported that he refused elevation to high office, including the episcopate, in order to stay among the indigenous population. He addressed letters to Charles V and to Philip II in which he described his educational work and appealed for better treatment of native peoples. He is associated with pictorial catechisms and other visual teaching aids that circulated in central Mexico.

Pedro de Gante continued this labor for nearly half a century, through the epidemics and social upheavals that marked the mid-sixteenth century in the Valley of Mexico. He died in Mexico City in 1572. The Catholic Church has not beatified or canonized him, and he has no feast day in the general Roman calendar. He is nevertheless remembered in Mexican historical tradition as a foundational teacher and as a missionary who devoted himself to indigenous education rather than to an ecclesiastical career.

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