Chapter 4 charts the provision and/or absence of instruction in Catholicism in the cultural worlds of the Pacific, which the bishops of Popayán framed as “spiritual pasture.” It begins with an analysis of the patterns of baptism and godparentage in the small city of Cartago, far from the gold mines where enslaved labourers shored up the white elite. The chapter examines two controversies that divided the mine and slave-owning elite and the upper echelons of the Church for decades; first, a debate over the stipend system in which slaveholders had to pay itinerant clergy to travel to the mines to administer the sacraments, and second, over mineros allowing enslaved people to work on holy days, despite myriad laws and papal bulls outlawing it. Ultimately, the remoteness of the mines from towns, and the disinterest of whites in settling there, meant that enslavers continued the long-held custom of enslaved people labouring on holy days and saving up gold dust to pacify them. Condemned by the bishops as “spiritual abandonment,” the custom helped to create conditions for the growth of the large free black population and perhaps the practice of their own religions that largely remain outside of view.