Jesuits

The Society of Jesus, Compañía de Jesús in Spanish, popularly known as the Jesuits, is a Roman Catholic religious order of men founded by the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola in the sixteenth century. In 1534 Ignatius and six companions studying in Paris vowed themselves to poverty, chastity, and work in the Holy Land. In 1540 the Roman Catholic Church approved the establishment of the group as a religious order.

PURPOSE

The purpose of the group was the salvation of their own souls and that of their neighbors. Members include ordained priests, who take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, plus an additional vow of special obedience to the pope, or spiritual coadjutors, priests who take the three vows but not that of obedience to the pope, and lay brothers, who perform tasks for which the priesthood is not needed. Candidates for the priesthood, called scholastics, are also members of the Jesuits.

ORGANIZATION

The Jesuits are highly centralized. A superior general in Rome is the head of the order. Geographic units headed by provincials report to the central office in Rome, and each house or residence, headed by a rector or superior, reports to the provincial. Required written correspondence between a local superior and provincial, and between provincial and the superior general assure a tighly knit bond and a continual flow of information and directives in both directions. Many of these documents dating from the sixteenth century are preserved in the central Jesuit archives in Rome.

The Society of Jesus grew rapidly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1556, at the death of Ignatius Loyola, there were 936 members. In 1626 there were 15,544. In Counter-Reformation Europe, Jesuits founded colleges, wrote theological and philosophical treatises, preached itinerant missions, and were influential at the Council of Trent (1545), thus gaining reputations for superior intellect, theological knowledge, and moral probity.

From the early days of the Jesuits, foreign missions were given high priority. The sixteenth century witnessed the expansion of Europe, and the church saw the opportunity to convert vast numbers of souls to Christianity. Jesuits were sent to the Portuguese colonies of West Africa, Francis Xavier began the evangelization of India (1541), and in 1549 Manuel da Nóbrega began mission work in Brazil. The first Jesuits arrived in French Canada in 1611.

MISSIONS IN LATIN AMERICA

Jesuit mission work in Latin America had a relatively late start. The Spanish king, Philip II (1527–1598), hesitated to send the Jesuits to his domains in the New World. The Dominicans (Hispaniola) and Franciscans (Mexico) had preceded the Jesuits, and the danger of rivalry and jurisdictional disputes made the king uneasy. In addition, the Jesuits, based in Rome, had a certain independence that did not sit well with the king. Nevertheless, because they were well trained and well organized, they were permitted to establish missions in America.

Florida was the first American mission field of the Jesuits. Between 1565 and 1571 the Jesuits worked with the Indians on the shores of eastern and western Florida. Few converts were made, but the Jesuits acquired valuable lessons about the importance of learning the Indian languages and customs, establishing a solid economic base apart from the promises of king and conquistadores, and formulating clear goals for a mission area. These were lessons they carried with them to future mission experiences in America.

The Jesuits left Florida in 1571 and joined a group of Jesuits sent to Mexico in 1572. In Mexico the Jesuits established residences in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara, and later founded colleges in other major towns. Indian and Spanish parishioners were served, and the northern and western frontiers witnessed major Jesuit mission activity. In 1582 Jesuits arrived in Guatemala. In 1568, three decades after Pizarro conquered the Incas, and when there were already 2,500 Spanish settlers in Peru, five Jesuits arrived in Lima. The pattern of establishing a college, residences, and missions for the Indians was followed. In 1585 the Jesuits entered Tucumán, in present-day Argentina, and the following year they traveled north from Lima to Quito. By 1593 a Jesuit house was established in Chile. In the Jesuit expansion north and south, the major focus of their labor was the urban college or university.

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

The models for the Jesuit colleges founded in Latin America were those of Europe. The college was the spearhead of Jesuit strategy during the Counter-Reformation in Germany, France, and Poland. Indoctrinating young Catholic minds to be wary of the pitfalls of Protestantism was a primary goal. Solid classical learning was another. In Latin America as well, the college was viewed as an instrument for Catholic and secular education. It was also seen as an ideal vehicle for proselytizing. The college always had a church attached to it, and the pulpit served as a powerful means of instruction and persuasion. Itinerant missions that swept through the countryside, exhorting the old faithful and encouraging the new, were initiated in the college. Social works of mercy that encompassed the surrounding neighborhood were also based in the college. So the college was not solely an educational institution; it was supposed to be a storehouse of energy that radiated outward, incorporating numerous ministries and housing Jesuits engaged in a variety of activities.

Large Latin American cities such as Lima, Mexico City, and Córdoba, in Argentina, had colleges with thirty or forty Jesuits. Smaller ones, such as those in Cuenca or Latacunga, in Ecuador, had only four or five. Colleges charged their students no tuition. Financial support came from a complex of farms and estates that each college had to possess as an endowment before being allowed to open. The larger the college, the greater the number of students and Jesuits to be provided for, and the more extensive the estates and farms necessary to provide for them. Large sugar plantations and vineyards on the coast of Peru supported the college in Lima. Sheep farms and associated textile mills were the financial mainstay of the college of Quito, and cattle ranches and farms supplied the Jesuit college in Mexico City with most of its income. Many documents dealing with Jesuit landholdings and agrarian operations are extant, and shed a great deal of light on colonial Latin American rural society and development.

The Jesuits ran eight universities in colonial Latin America. The most famous were Córdoba in Argentina, San Pablo in Lima, and that of Mexico City. A university was a prestigious institution that could confer doctoral degrees. The universities and colleges were a focus of cultural life as well. Philosophical disputations, theater, panegyrics, processions, and degree conferrals added colorful pageantry to colonial life. In 1767 the Jesuits staffed more than thirty-five colleges throughout Latin America.

Brazil had no Jesuit universities, but by 1578 the college in Bahia was conferring master's degrees, and mission work focused on trying to settle surrounding Indians in fixed towns called Aldeias. Financial support was provided by sugar plantations.

EVANGELIZATION

The frontier of the Latin American world beckoned the Jesuit missionary. In 1594 Jesuits began evangelizing Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico. The mission to the Mainas Indians along the Marañón River in Peru was begun in 1639 by three Jesuits, and the Moxos Indians were evangelized in 1668. The Indians of Pimería Alta, in northwestern Mexico (Arizona), were evangelized by Eusebio Kino, who also showed that California was not an island (as hitherto had been believed). The Jesuit missions of Baja California operated from 1697 to 1767. During this time fifty-nine Jesuits established a chain of mission farms, villages, and ranches from Cabo San Lucas to the present international border. Jesuits stationed in the Andean regions of Cuzco and La Paz (Bolivia) evangelized the Altiplano.

Jesuits in Brazil traveled up the Amazon and thrust their way into the interior by the end of the sixteenth century. The order founded almost 400 missions in their 200-year history in Brazil. António Vieira became the Indians' most eloquent spokesman, charging Portuguese colonists with killing over two million Indians in their quest for workers and slaves. By the seventeenth century over 258 Jesuits had been sent to Portuguese Brazil. Labor in the mission village was organized for the benefit of the religious order, the crown, or the colonists. In 1757 a royal decree freed Indian villages from missionary control.

THE REDUCTIONS OF PARAGUAY

The most famous of the Jesuit missions in Latin America were the reductions in northern Argentina and Paraguay. The term "reduction" comes from the Spanish noun reducción, the closest English meaning of which is "reservation." The first reductions were begun by the Franciscans, but the prototype of the Jesuit reductions was probably the Jesuit mission of Juli, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. The reductions were self-sufficient Guarani Indian settlements. No Spaniards other than missionaries were permitted to enter a reduction. The "corrupting influence" of merchants or settlers was to be kept far from the neophytes. Isolation and indoctrination were the hallmarks of the reductions. A major project of the reductions was Yerba Mate, a tea that when boiled provided a tasty and popular beverage. Indians who sold reduction tea in Buenos Aires received low prices from Buenos Aires middlemen, so the Jesuits took over the sale and eventually the distribution of the tea, which became known as Jesuit tea. As a result, the order was criticized for operating an extensive commercial enterprise.

The reductions protected the Indians from the slave-raiding Bandeirantes, who periodically attacked the missions from São Paulo, Brazil. These villages allowed the missionaries to indoctrinate the Indians on a regular basis. Reduction town planning included elaborately constructed chur-ches, the ruins of which still survive as tourist attractions.

In 1750 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Limits that transferred some of the missions to Brazilian territory. The Jesuits and Indians protested with armed resistance, but to no avail.

When the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish domains in 1767, government officials immediately repossessed the reductions, expecting to find mines of precious metals and hoards of silver and gold. Nothing was found. Eventually the mission Indians drifted into the mainstream of colonial agrarian society. The charge that the Jesuits had made the Indians thoroughly docile and helplessly dependent was untrue; many Guaraní took up trades in urban centers.

CRITICISM

Animosity and resentment had built up against the Jesuits during the two hundred years that they worked in Latin America. The network of colleges, estates, and slaves working on the estates created a political and economic force unrivaled by colonial economic groups. The Jesuits' economically integrated institutions were able to withstand the wild fluctuations of the colonial economic climate. Those of laypersons could not. Large estates and ostentatious construction fueled rumors of wealth and power. The European Bourbon monarchs, who resented the Jesuits for their own reasons, were confirmed in their wildest suspicions.

A propaganda campaign waged by the prime minister of Portugal, José de Carvalho, Marqués of Pombal, convinced the king that the Jesuits were subverting royal authority and using the missions as economic benefices. In 1759, six hundred Jesuits were expelled from their colleges and missions in Brazil and from the other Portuguese domains. Eventually this was followed by their expulsion from the Spanish domains in 1767, and the order was suppressed in 1773.

EXPULSION

Over 2,000 college, mission, and parish personnel gathered in port cities (the sick and infirm remained) and were exiled to Italy. Jesuit estates, houses, movable property, and real estate were auctioned off by a committee of temporalidades (tangible possessions), and the income went to the crown. Schools and colleges were staffed by other religious orders. However, the academic quality of the universities and colleges suffered enormously, Indian missions collapsed, and the cultural and economic life of the region declined. Indian protests and revolts occurred in Mexico and Brazil.

RESTORED SOCIETY

In 1814 the Society of Jesus was restored by the papacy, but Jesuits did not return to Latin America until the middle of the nineteenth century. By then the independence movement and political upheavals had changed the educational and economic structures so the Jesuits never regained the influence that they had enjoyed in education, economics, and politics.

After the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Jesuits in Latin America began to choose what was called the "option for the poor," associating themselves with many of the rural land-reform movements and the creation of Christian base communities (comunidades de base). These movements were often locally opposed, and Jesuits were accused of being Communist sympathizers. Liberation theology was another movement that individual Jesuits supported. Jesuit theologians and writers such as Juan Luis Segundo and Gustavo Gutiérrez proposed the Bible as a vehicle for political and individual liberation from oppression. Many Jesuits today in Latin America are in the forefront of economic and theological reforms.

See alsoCatholic Church: The Colonial Period; Catholic Church: The Modern Period; Universities: Colonial Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Peter Masten Dunne, Pioneer Black Robes on the West Coast (1940).

Magnus Mörner, The Economic and Political Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata Region: The Hapsburg Era (1953).

Guillermo Furlong Cardiff, Misiones y sus pueblos de Guaraníes (1962).

C. R. Boxer, The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (1965).

Magnus Mörner, The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America (1965).

Luis Martín, The Intellectual Conquest of Peru: The Jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568–1767 (1968).

Juan Luis Segundo, The Liberation of Theology, translated by John Drury (1976).

Herman Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucía, 1576–1767 (1980).

Nicholas P. Cushner, Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600–1767 (1980); Farm and Factory: The Jesuits and the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in Colonial Quito, 1600–1767 (1982); Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina, 1650–1767 (1983).

Dauril Alden, "Sugar Planters by Necessity, Not Choice: The Role of the Jesuits in the Sugar Cane Industry of Colonial Brazil," in The Church and Society in Latin America, edited by Jeffrey A. Cole (1984), pp. 139-170.

Additional Bibliography

Castelnau-L'Estoile, Charlotte de. Les ouvriers d'une vigne stérile: Les jésuites et la conversion des Indiens au Brésil, 1580–1620. Lisbonne: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris: Centre culturel Calouste Gulbenkian; Lisbonne: Commission nationale pour les commémorations des découvertes portugaises, 2000.

Cohen, Thomas M. The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Flores, Moacyr. Reduções jesuíticas dos guaranis. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 1997.

Millones Figueroa, Luis, and Domingo Ledezma. El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2005.

Negro Tua, Sandra, and Manuel M. Marzal. Esclavitud, economía y evangelización: Las haciendas jesuitas en la América virreinal. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cató lica del Perú, Fondo Editorial, 2005.

Santos Hernández, Angel. Los Jesuitas en América. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.

                                    Nicholas P. Cushner