The Jesuits, 1534-1921

This literary war crossed the ocean to the French possessions of Canada, and much of the religious trouble that disturbed the colony from the beginning may be traced to the editorial activity of the Jansenists of France. Thus, when Brébeuf, Charles Lalemant and Massé came up the St. Lawrence, after a terrible voyage across the Atlantic, they were actually forbidden to land. The pamphlet known as "Anti-Coton" had been distributed and read by the few colonists who were then on the Rock of Quebec, and they would have nothing to do with the associates of a man who like Coton, was represented as rejoicing in the assassination of Henry IV. It did not matter that Father Coton and the king were not only intimate but most affectionate friends, and that assassination in such circumstances would be inconceivable; that it was asserted in print was enough to cause these three glorious men, who were coming to die for the Catholic Faith and for France, to be forbidden to land at Quebec. This anti-Coton manifestation in the early days of the colony was only a prelude to the antagonism that runs all through early Canadian history. It was kept up by a clique of writers in France, chief of whom were the Jansenist Abbés Bernou and Renaudot. Their contributions may be found in the voluminous collection known as Margry's "Découvertes," which Parkman induced the United States government to print in the language in which they were written. They teem with the worst kind of libels against the Society. Some of them pretend to have been written in America, but are so grotesque that the forgery is palpable. Indeed, among them is a letter from Bernou to Renaudot which says: "Get La Salle to give me some points and I will write the Relation."

The missionary labors of de Nobili, de Britto, Beschi and others in Madura, a dependency of the ecclesiastical province of Malabar, had been so successful that they evoked considerable literary fury, both inside and outside the Church, chiefly with regard to the liceity of certain rites or customs which the natives had been allowed to retain after baptism. In 1623 Gregory XV had decided that they could be permitted provisionally, and the practice was, therefore, continued by Beschi, Bouchet and others who had extended their apostolic work into Pondicherry and the Carnatic. But about the year 1700 the question was again mooted, in consequence of the transfer of the Pondicherry territory to the exclusive care of the Jesuits. The Capuchins who were affected by the arrangement appealed to Rome, adding also a protest against the Rites. The first part of the charge was not admitted, but the latter was handed over for examination to de Tournon, who was titular Patriarch of Antioch.

As soon as he arrived at Pondicherry, without going into the interior of the country, he took the testimony of the Capuchins, questioned the Jesuits only cursorily, and also a few natives through interpreters. He then condemned the Rites and forbade the missionaries under heavy penalties to allow them. His decree was made known to the Jesuit superior only three days before he left the place, and hence there was no possibility of enlightening him. The Pope then ordered de Tournon's verdict to be carried out, qualifying it, however, by adding "in so far as the Divine glory and the salvation of souls would permit." The missionaries protested without avail, and the question was discussed by two successive pontiffs. Finally, Innocent XIII insisted on de Tournon's decree being obeyed in all its details, but it is doubtful if the document ever reached the missions. Benedict XIII reopened the question later, and ruled upon each article of de Tournon's decision, and a Brief was issued to that effect in 1734.

Into this question the Jansenists of France injected themselves so vigorously that even the bibliography for and against the Rites is bewildering in its extent. One contribution consists of eight volumes in French and seven in Italian. In his history of Jansenism in "The Catholic Encyclopedia" Dr. Forget of the University of Louvain says: "The sectaries [in the middle of the eighteenth century] began to detach themselves from the primitive heresy, but they retained unabated the spirit of insubordination and schism, the spirit of opposition to Rome, and above all a mortal hatred of the Jesuits. They had vowed the ruin of that order, which they always found blocking their way, and in order to attain their end they successively induced Catholic princes and ministers in Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Duchy of Parma, and elsewhere to join hands with the worst leaders of impiety and philosophism." Besides the Jansenists, "every Protestant writer of distinction with two or three exceptions," says Marshall (Christian Missions, I, 226), "has ascribed the success of the mission of Madura and its wonderful results to a guilty connivance with pagan superstition. La Croze, Geddes, Hough and other writers of their class in a long succession luxuriate in language of which we need not offer a specimen, and direct against de Nobili and his successors charges of forgery, imposture, superstition, idolatry, and various other crimes."

"There is one name," continues the same writer, "which invariably occurs in the writings referred to; one witness whom they all quote and to whom the whole history is to be traced. That witness is Father Norbert, ex-Capuchin and ex-missionary of India." In a work published by this person in 1744, all the fables which have since been repeated as grave historical facts are found. He is quoted, apparently without suspicion, by Dr. Grant in his "Bampton Lectures," yet a very little inquiry and even a reference to so common a book, as the "Biographie universelle" would have revealed to him the real character of the witness by whose help he has not feared to defame some of the most heroic and evangelical men who ever devoted their lives to the service of God, and the salvation of their fellow creatures.

"Norbert," says Marshall, "was one of those ordinary missionaries who had utterly failed to convert the Hindoo by the usual methods, and who was as incapable of imitating the terrible austerities by which the Jesuits prepared their success, as he was of rejoicing in triumphs of which he had no share. Stung with mortal jealousy and yielding to the suggestions of a malice which amounted almost to frenzy, he attacked the Jesuits with fury even from the pulpit. The civil power was forced to interfere, and Dupleix, the Governor of Pondicherry, though he had been his friend, put him on board ship and sent him to America. There he spent two years less occupied in the work of the missions than in planning schemes to revenge himself on the Jesuits. The publication of the mendacious work in which he treated the Society of Jesus as a band of malefactors was prohibited by the authorities; but he quitted Rome and printed it secretly.

"Condemned by his Order, though he affected to vindicate it from the injuries of the Jesuits, he fled to Holland and thence to England, in both of which countries he found congenial spirits. In the latter, he established first a candle and afterwards a carpet factory, under the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland. Thence he wandered into Germany, and subsequently, having obtained his secularization and put off the religious habit which he had defiled, he went to Portugal. Here remorse seems to have overtaken him and he was permitted by an excess of charity to assume once more the habit of a Capuchin, which he a second time laid aside. Finally, after having attempted to deceive the Sovereign Pontiff, he died in a wretched condition in an obscure village of France." The "Biographie universelle" gives some more details which are useful as a matter of history. After Benedict XIV had forbidden Norbert to print his book, he brought it out either at Lucca or Avignon; in England he assumed his old name of Peter Parisot; when he landed in Germany he was known as Curel, and when in France his pen-name was Abbé Platel. According to the "Biographie," "Norbert was dull and heavy, without talent or style and would have been incapable of writing a single page if he were not actuated by hate. All of his works have passed into oblivion."

Americans have not been troubled to any extent by such publications, except, perhaps in one instance, when a certain R. W. Thompson, who had been Secretary of the Navy, though he lived 1000 miles from the sea, warned his fellow-countrymen in 1894 that the one danger for the Constitution of the United States was the teaching of the Jesuits. Even the Church is in peril, because "their system of moral theology is irreconcilable with the Roman Catholic religion." "I refrain from discussing it," he says, "because that has been sufficiently done by Pascal and Paul Bert." No one was excessively alarmed by the "Footprints of the Jesuits."

CHAPTER X

THE TWO AMERICAS

1567-1673

Chile and Peru – Valdivia – Peruvian Bark – Paraguay Reductions – Father Fields – Emigration from Brazil – Social and religious prosperity of the Reductions – Martyrdom of twenty-nine missionaries – Reductions in Colombia – Peter Claver – French West Indies – St. Kitts – Irish Exiles – Father Bath or Destriches – Montserrat – Emigration to Guadeloupe – Other Islands – Guiana – Mexico – Lower California – The Pious Fund – The Philippines – Canada Missions – Brébeuf, Jogues, Le Moyne, Marquette – Maryland – White – Lewger.

In 1567 Philip II asked for twenty Jesuits to evangelize Peru. The request was granted, and in the Lent of 1568 the first band arrived at Callao and made its way to Lima. They were so cordially welcomed, says Astrain, that the provincial found it necessary to warn his men that much would have to be done to live up to the public expectation. Means were immediately put at their disposal, and they set to work at the erection of a college. While the college was being built they heard confessions, visited the jails and hospitals, gave lectures on canon law to the priests of the cathedral, and started their great training school on Lake Titicaca, to which we have already referred. There the novices were set to learn the native languages to prepare them for their future work. For the moment the population of the city also gave them plenty to do. It was made up of three classes of people: negroes, half-breeds, and wealthy Spaniards. Father López looked after the negroes, and by degrees succeeded in putting a stop to their orgies and indecent dances. Others were, meantime, taking care of the whites and mestizos. The usual Jesuit sodalities were put in working order, and soon it was a common thing to see the young fashionables of the city laying aside their cloaks and swords, and helping the sick in the hospitals, going around to the huts of the poor or visiting criminals in the jails.

A new detachment of missionaries arrived in the following year with the Viceroy Toledo, who evidently took to them too kindly on the way over, for besides their normal duties, he wanted them to assume the office of parish priests, and he immediately wrote to Philip II to that effect. They refused, of course, with the consequence of an unpleasant state of feeling in their regard on the part of the authorities. Indeed, the pressure became so great that the superior finally yielded to a certain extent, and even assigned some of his professed to the work, but he was promptly summoned to Europe for his weakness. Meantime novices came swarming in, among them Bernardin d'Acosta, whose virtues merited for him, later on, a place in the "Menology." There was also little Oviando, called the Stanislaus of Peru. He was an abandoned child whose parents had come out to America and had lost him or had died, and he was begging his bread in the streets of Lima when the Fathers picked him up. They sent him to the college and helped him to become a saint.

The great man of Peru and, subsequently, of Chile, was Father Luis de Valdivia, who was hailed by both Indians and whites as "the apostle, pacificator and liberator of Peru." The Indians had fascinated him, and he learned their language in a month or so. When he saw that the only difficulty in making them Christians was the slavery to which they were subjected, coupled with the immorality of their Spanish masters, he got himself named as the representative of the colonial authorities, and started to Spain to lay before Philip III the degraded condition of his overseas possessions. The king received him cordially, enacted the most stringent laws against the abuses, and appointed him royal visitor and administrator of Chile, where similar disorders were complained of. He also wanted to make him a bishop, but Valdivia refused. Returning to Peru from Spain, he gave 10,000 Indians their freedom. When that got abroad among the savages, all the tribes that were then in rebellion immediately came to terms, and on December 8, 1612, the grand chief Utablame, with sixty caciques and a half-a-score of pagan priests, all of them wearing wreaths of sea-weed on their heads, and holding green branches in their hands, descended from their fastnesses and the grand chief, their spokesman, addressed Valdivia as follows: "It is not fear that makes me accept the peace. Since my boyhood I have not ceased to defy the Spaniards, and I have withstood sixteen governors one after another. I yield now only to you, good and great Father, and to the King of Spain, because of the benefits you have bestowed upon me and my people."

In spite of the difficulties and dangers of the work, as well as the calumnies of the slave-hunters and even the wrong impressions of some of his brethren, Valdivia succeeded in establishing four great central Indian missions, which evoked the commendation of successive kings of Spain. Before Valdivia went to Chile, Viga, who had been there since 1593, had already compiled a dictionary and grammar in Araucanian, and Valdivia followed his example by writing other books to facilitate the work of the missionaries. The colleges founded at Arauco and also at Valdivia – a town named not after the missionary, but to honor his namesake, the governor of the province – furnished a base of operations among the Araucanian savages, a fierce and, for a long time, indomitable people, who were united against the Spaniards in a league composed of forty different tribes. The work among them was slow and hard, and three of the priests were killed by them in the wilderness. Their success also aroused the colonists to fury, and a war of extermination of the Indians was resolved upon, but Valdivia opposed it, and not only succeeded in getting the Araucanians to agree to terms of peace, but brought in the Guagas, and persuaded them to lay down their arms. The great missionary was eighty-two years of age when called to his reward.

The famous Peruvian bark was brought to Europe about this time, but it was regarded with extreme suspicion because of its sponsors, and the wildest stories were told of it. Medical treatises teemed with discussions about its properties, some condemning, others commending it. Von Humboldt says: "It almost goes without saying that, among Protestant physicians, hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance were at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or evil effected by the drug." The illustrious physician, Bado, gave as his opinion that "it was more precious than all the gold and silver which the Spaniards obtained in South America."

It was in 1586, eighteen years after their arrival in Peru, that the work of the Jesuits in Paraguay was inaugurated. Francisco de Victoria, Dominican Bishop of Tucumán had invited them to his diocese, which lay east of the Andes, and his brother in religion, Alonso Guerra, Bishop of Asunción, which was on the Rio de la Plata or Paraná River, also summoned them to his aid, both for the whites and Indians of his flock. They obeyed, and without delay colleges, residences, and retreats for the Spiritual Exercises were instituted in Santiago del Estero, Asunción, Córdoba, Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Tarija, Salta, Tucumán, Santa Fe and elsewhere. These were for the civilized portion of the community, while a new system was devised to save the Indians from their white oppressors. These poor wretches knew the colonists only as slave-dealers and butchers; hence, every attempt to teach them a religion which the whites were alleged to follow was futile.

On the other hand, when it was represented to the authorities that Indian slavery had to cease before the natives could be pacified, angry protests were heard on all sides, even from some of the resident priests who maintained that the proper thing for a savage was to be a Spaniard's slave. The missionaries took the matter in their own hands, as they had done in Peru. They went to Spain and applied for royal protection. They obtained what they wanted, so without waiting for the edict to arrive, began their work by plunging into the woods, where cougars, pumas, serpents and savages met them at every step. But this vigorous act only enraged the colonists the more, and the inhuman method of cutting off the missionaries' food-supplies was resorted to in order to force them into submission.

In this group of heroic apostles there was, curiously enough, an Irish Jesuit whom Crétineau-Joly calls Tom Filds, which is probably a Spanish or French attempt at phonetics for Tom Fields, or O'Fihily, or O'Fealy, a Limerick exile. Paraguay was the second field of his missionary labors, for he had previously been associated with the Venerable José Anchieta in the forests of Brazil. He had left Ireland when very young, and after studying at Paris, Douay and Louvain, had gone to Rome to begin his novitiate. Six months of trial were sufficient to prove the solidity of his virtue, and he then walked all the way from Rome to Lisbon, to take ship for America. He reached the Bay of All Saints in 1577, and spent ten years in the wilderness, with sufferings, privations and danger of death at every step. From thence he was sent to Paraguay, but was captured by pirates at the mouth of the Rio Plata, and then, loaded with chains, he and his companion, Manuel de Ortega were cast adrift in a battered hulk which drifted ashore at Buenos Aires, where their help as missionaries was gladly welcomed. He was at Asunción when the plague broke out, and the way in which he faced his duty won "Father Tom" as great a reputation among the white men as he had already acquired among his copper-colored brethren. When the plague was over, he again became a forest ranger, and in 1602 found himself all alone among the Indians, his companion, Father de Ortega, having been cited before the Inquisition on some ridiculous charge or other. O'Fealy finally died at Asunción on May 8, 1624, at the good old age of seventy-eight, after fifty hard years as a South American missionary – ten in Brazil and forty in Paraguay.

These journeys among the wandering tribes in the wilderness gave occasion, it is true, for extraordinary heroism, and saved many a soul, but the results were far from being in proportion to the energy expended. Hence, at the suggestion of Father Aquaviva, the missionaries all met at Saca, far out under the Andes, and determined to gather the Indians together in separate colonies which no white man, except the government officials, would be allowed to enter. Such was the origin of the "Paraguay Reductions," which have won such enthusiastic admiration from writers like Chateaubriand, Buffon, de Maistre, Haller, Montesquieu, Robertson, Mackintosh, Howitt, Marshall, Muratori, Charlevoix, Schirmbeck, Grasset, Kobler, du Graty, Gothain, and even Voltaire. The most recent eulogist of all is Cunninghame-Graham in his "Vanished Arcadia." The villages in which these converted Indians lived were called "reductions," because the natives had been brought back (re, ducir) from the wilds and forests by the preaching of the missionaries to live there in organized communities under Christian laws.

The first reduction was begun in 1609, in the province of Guayará, approximately the present Brazilian territory of Paraná. In 1610 another was inaugurated on the Rio Paranapanema; in 1611 the Reduction of San Ignacio-miní, and, between that year and 1630, eleven others with a total population of about 10,000 Indians. The savages flocked to them from all quarters, for these reservations afforded the only protection from the organized bands of man-hunters who scoured the country – the Mamelukes, as they were called because of their relentless ferocity. They were also described as "Paulistas," probably because they generally foregathered in the district of lower Brazil, known as St. Paul. These wretches, half-breeds or the offscourings of every race, made light of royal decrees or the angry fulminations of helpless governors, and when they could find no victims in the forests, did not hesitate to attack the Reductions themselves. These raids began in 1618. In 1630 alone, according to Huonder (in the Catholic Encyclopedia) no less than 30,000 Indians were either murdered or carried off into slavery in what is now the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.

This led to the great exodus. Father Simon Maceta abandoned the northern or Guayará mission altogether, and taking the survivors of the massacres, along with the Indians who were every day hurrying in from the forests, led them to the stations on the Paraná and Uruguay. It was a difficult journey, and only 12,000 reached their destination, but they served to reinforce the population already there, and in 1648 the Governor of Buenos Aires reported that in nineteen Reductions there was a population of 30,548; by 1677 it had risen to 58,118. He found also that they had determined to live no longer as sheep, waiting to be devoured by the first human wolves that might descend on them, but were fully armed and disciplined by their Jesuit preceptors. Indeed, in 1640 ten years after the Guaraní massacre, they could put a well-trained army in the field, not only against the Mamelukes, but against the Portuguese, who, from time to time, attempted an invasion of Spanish territory from Brazil. This military formation was not only permitted but encouraged by the king. He repeatedly sent the Indians muskets and ammunition, and later they built an armory themselves, and made their own powder. They had their regular drills and sham battles, with both infantry and cavalry, which did splendid service year after year in repelling invasions and suppressing rebellions. Nor did they ever cost the crown a penny for such services. Loyalty to the king was inculcated, and Philip V declared in a famous decree that he had no more faithful subjects than the Indians of Paraguay.

The Indians of the Reductions were taught all the trades, and became carpenters, joiners, painters, sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, tailors, weavers, dyers, bakers, butchers, tanners etc., and their artistic ability is still seen in the ruins of the missions. They were also cultivators and herdsmen, and some of the stations could count as many as 30,000 sheep and 100,000 head of cattle. They built fine roads leading to the other Reductions, and, on the great waterways of the Paraná alone, as many as 2000 boats were employed transporting the merchandise of the various centres. They were, above all, taught their religion, and their morals were so pure that the Bishop of Buenos Aires wrote to the king that he thought no mortal sin was ever committed in the Reductions. The churches occupied the central place in the villages, and their ruins show what architectural works these men of the forest were capable of accomplishing. The streets were laid out in parallel lines, and the principal ones were paved. In course of time the primitive huts were replaced by solid stone houses with tiled roofs, and were so constructed that connecting verandas enabled the people to walk from house to house, under shelter, from one end to the other of the settlement.

The Reductions extended as far as Bolivia on one side, and to northern Patagonia on the other, and from the Atlantic to the Andes. Altogether there were about a hundred of them, and as their formation required the subduing and transforming of the wildest type of savage into a civilized man, it is not surprising that in effecting this stupendous result as many as twenty-nine Jesuits suffered death by martyrdom.

In 1598 the Jesuits Medrano and Figuero were in Nueva Granada or what is now called The United States of Colombia. They also buried themselves in the forests, after having done their best to reform the morals of the colonists at Bogotá. Not that they had abandoned the city; on the contrary, they established a college there in 1604, and others later in Pamplona, Mérida and Honda. At first the natives fled from them in terror, but little by little, the presents which these strange white men pressed on them won their confidence, and helped to persuade them to settle in Reductions. Three of the Fathers lost their lives in that work, devoured by cougars or stung by venomous serpents. Unfortunately, the bishop was persuaded that the Indian settlements were merely mercantile establishments gotten up by the Jesuits for money-making, and all the fruit of many years of dangers and hardships was taken out of their hands and given to others.