From 1620 to 1670, four archbishops of Lima attempted to enforce ecclesiastical legislation that aimed at establishing a powerful homogenous institution. Nevertheless, parish priests’ particular interests and conflicts between them and their parishioners appeared as reasons for the failure of the archbishops’ project for the centralization of the church. Other important reasons for this failure are the distances between the settlement of the parishes and their poorly-defined jurisdictions, which complicated the priests’ administration and the church's inability to establish a long-term system of control over the activities of the parish priests. Thus, I present a central church that looked forward to connecting with the local church; but within this project, these issues appeared as obstacles for the implementation of such centralization. Even with the political effort that the archbishops placed on increasing their power in rural areas during the period between 1620 and 1670, the church remained a weak institution.