GOD"S MESSENGERS IN THE NEW WORLD:
EARLY 16TH CENTURY SPANISH FRIARS IN AMERICA AND JESUIT MISSIONARIES IN HISPANIC AMERICA, BRAZIL AND NEW FRANCE
Unfair accusations are often made of the Spanish missionary efforts in America as merely a hypocritical justification for the conquests.
The truth is that rather than collaborate with the conquistadors the friars were more often in conflict with them and their methods.
Of the Spanish Requerimiento, the royal document that outlined the Christian faith and gave the Indians a chance to embrace the "one true faith", which was carried into battle by every conquistador and read allowed to the natives before commencing the massacre, the great humanitarian priest Bartolome de las Casas said he didn"t know whether to laugh or to weep.
For the Spanish missionaries their role in the New World enterprise was a sacred duty of conversion by spreading the holy word to the heathen Indians, and although they recognised that collaboration with their military countrymen was sometimes a necessary expediency to save souls before their eternal damnation after the battle, Christian Indians who continued to live after the conquest were a symbol of God"s triumph over the temporal slaughter of the damned.
The first priest to openly condemn the Spanish colonists was the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos, an early missionary who arrived with Columbus on his third voyage.
During a sermon in 1511 he accused the colonists on Hispaniola of murder, rapine and the unlawful enslavement of the Indians and threatened to excommunicate them for their sins.
His letters to the crown prompted the Spanish King Ferdinand to issue the Laws of Burgos, which outlawed slavery but condoned the encomienda, a land grant system that enabled Indian labour to prevail under the patronage of the Spanish grandee responsible for the secular and spiritual welfare of those natives assigned to him on his property.
The encomienda, however, remained crown lands, which was granted to the encomendero only as usufruct privilege.
For the Indians who lived on that land prior to the conquest it continued to be their homelands but under the protection of the Spanish crown.
However, on the borderlands, far from the watchful eye of the friars and the colonial judicial bodies of the audiencia, the encomienda was subject to unwritten frontier laws resulting in widespread abuse and illegal slavery.
One man who was deeply influenced by Montesinos" arguments was a later fellow Dominican Bartolome de las Casas (1474-1566), who came to Hispaniola in 1504 and six years later became the first priest to be ordained in the New World.
In the next year he accompanied Diego Velazquez on the conquest of Cuba and accepted an encomienda as reward for his part in the enterprise.
But Montesinos" stinging words struck him to the core and in 1514 he underwent a revelation that resulted in the renunciation of his encomienda and preaching a sermon that condemned the system.
From that moment on Las Casas devoted the rest of his life to the cause of saving the Indians from Spanish avarice and cruelty.
Two years after his revelation his letters of protest to the crown earned him the official title of "protector of the Indians", which gave him royal sanction to protect him against the hostility of the colonists, who were the main targets of his eloquent sermons.
In 1522 he entered the Dominican order and stepped up his campaign against the Spanish colonials, culminating in his publication, History of the Indies1, a savage indictment of the conquest, which he wrote in 1527.
To prove that Indians could be converted through kindness, he took a party of Dominicans into the wilderness of Guatemala in 1536 to confront a tribe of Indians that had resisted every effort by the Spanish military to subdue and within two years brought the entire tribe to Christianity without shedding one drop of blood.
After writing his most damning work, Relation of the Destruction of the Indies2 in 1540, which was largely responsible for the crown introducing the New Laws of the Indies in 1542 to curb colonial atrocities, Las Casas was given the bishopric of Chiapas.
The New Laws were immensely unpopular among Spain"s American colonists, resulting in threats of revolt in New Spain (Mexico), and a civil war in Peru.
The crux of the controversy was the reduction of the encomienda, for the laws forbade any new encomienda grants, refused encomenderos to bequeath their grants to their heirs, and ordered all ecclesiastics to relinquish their encomiendas.
In addition, the prior laws against enslavement of the Indians were strengthened with a penalty of a long gaol term (virtually a death sentence).
Whereas the Laws of Burgos had permitted enslavement as punishment for defiant or rebellious Indians, the New Laws of 1542 prohibited even justified slavery.
The New Laws introduced other legislation that effectively reduced the power of the Spaniards over the conquered Indians.
The colonists in Chiapas squarely blamed their bishop, Las Casas, for the New Laws and staged a riot in 1545 that threatened to kill him.
Influential clerics, equally angry over their loss of encomiendas, denounced Las Casas to the Inquisition, but the case against him was dropped for lack of evidence, as well as a reluctance to go up against the bishop who was so much a favourite of the Spanish crown.
Bartolome de las Casas great test came when he was invited to express his ideas in a formal debate with the prominent scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a strong opponent of the bishop and a firm believer in conquest as the justified right of stronger nations to overcome weaker ones.
Another prominent scholar, the Humanist Francisco de Vitoria favoured Las Casas" arguments and used them in his lectures at the University of Salamanca dealing with the decline and corruption of Europe.
Vitoria condemned slavery outright, arguing that slaves have a code of civil rights and a "natural law" bound all nations together as equals and no one nation had the right to claim sovereignty over another.
Armed with Vitoria"s thesis Las Casas met Sepulveda in a special court-appointed hearing at Valladolid, Spain, over several weeks in 1550.
Las Casas" basic argument hinged on Spain"s unjustified conquest of the Indians, and it should return to the native peoples all lands it had taken by force.
Sepulveda was a firm believer in the Aristotlean view of a hierarchy of nations and cleverly used Biblical text in support of it, such as Luke 14:23: "Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in".
He argued that the Spanish Pope Alexander VI"s Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, in which the world was divided between Spain and Portugal, gave force to conversion by conquest.
For Sepulveda Spain was at the forefront of enlightened civilisation bringing the gifts of Christianity and European culture to the dark savages of the American continent by force if necessary.
That the Indians were clearly inferior to the Spaniards was seen by their practices of warfare, human sacrifice and cannibalism.
He ended by asking: "How can we doubt that these people -- so uncivilised, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties and obscenities -- have been justly conquered by such an excellent, pious and most just king?"
Las Casas pushed the Humanist line that Spanish behaviour in America was wholly contrary to the natural "Law of Nations" that views all people as equal and free to make their own decisions based on their own rationality.
He dismissed the argument that supported the crusades against infidels as appropriate in the conquest of America, because attacks against Moslems were justified in an effort to protect Christianity against the hordes of Islam, whereas the Indians knew nothing of Christianity before the Spaniards came to America and therefore posed no threat to it.
Christianity should be introduced to them through the kindness and patience of the padres, not through the brutal imposition of men lusting for gold, and the Indians should have a choice to accept or reject Christianity as their rationality saw fit.
As rational beings the Indians should be treated as equals and dealt with as independent sovereign nations as amongst Europeans; therefore Spain was duty bound to return America to its rightful native owners.
This last argument of Las Casas was unpalatable to King Charles, who had to concern himself with the ambitions of Portugal and other European nations that coveted Spains possessions, but he was compelled to act on the bishop"s powerful rational testament.
A compromise was sought in which the king forbade any further unbridled conquests.
Instead any war against the Indians had to be approved of by license issued by royal representatives in America to persons of "good conscience" and "lovers of peace".
Furthermore, he decreed in 1555 that the very word "conquista" would not appear on any official documents, to be replaced by such euphemisms as "pacification" and "settlement".
As for Las Casas, he resigned as bishop following the great debate and after a brief return to America spent his remaining years in Madrid where he continued writing his manifesto.
His two books on the history of the conquests were published across Europe and became central to the "Black Legend" of Spain used so enthusiastically by Spain"s enemies and continues in popular thought to this day.
Bartolome de Las Casas is a giant of Renaissance humanitarianism and remains history"s foremost champion of the Indian cause during a period of the worst excesses of European colonialism3.
The conquests of the populous Indian nations of Mexico, Peru and Yucatan brought other priests to the protection of Indian interests in the conquered territories.
Following Cortes conquest of the Aztecs, an enlightened Franciscan scholar and follower of Erasmusian Humanism, Bernardino de Sahagun, arrived in Mexico in 1524 and immediately began his missionary work among the defeated, dispirited native people, whose gods had deserted them in their hour of need.
He established his headquarters in Tlatelolco, immediately north of Mexico City, where he learned to speak Nahuatl fluently in order to understand his flock better.
Instead he became fascinated by the Aztecs" ancient culture and became the New World"s first anthropologist, culminating in his encyclopaedic multi-volume Historia General de Nueva Espana, which includes Sahagun"s careful and objective observations of Aztec customs, society, religious beliefs and history.
Most of what we know about prehispanic Aztec culture came from the tireless pen of this curious Franciscan scholar.
In Peru a Jesuit scholar, Bernabe Cobo, who arrived in Lima in 1599, took on the task of recording the history of the Incas by referring to Indian men and women who had some recollection of their lives before the coming of the Spaniards.
He traveled the length and breadth of the Andean area tirelessly writing down everything told to him.
The result was a four volume work on Incan history and culture, the monumental Historia del Nuevo Mundo, which he wrote between 1612 and 1653, but which was published posthumously4.
The task of recording precolumbian Maya society fell to another Franciscan, Diego de Landa, who arrived in Yucatan in 1549.
Landa"s study of the Mayas was as ethnographic in its approach as Sahagun and he was particularly drawn to the Indians hieroglyphic writing, devoting most of the rest of his life to trying to master the secret of this ancient text.
His Relation de las cosas de Yucatan details his interest in the hieroglyphs as well as provides an outline of prehispanic Mayan society.
However, as fascinated as he was by ancient Mayan civilisation, Landa was much less objective than Sahagun for he was convinced that the Indians had fallen into the hands of Satan and their cultural achievements were more his invention than theirs.
With his appointment of Provincial of Yucatan in 1561 he took upon himself the duties of inquisitor general and was responsible for the mass destruction of thousands of examples of "the works of the Devil" in an auto de fe on the steps of his church in Mani, in which 500 sculptures, 200 ceramics and 27 ancient Mayan books went up in flames.
He also meted out stiff penalties to those who returned to idolatry, giving one high-born Indian of Xiu 200 lashes for praying to an image of his ancient god and exiling another from his town for drunkeness.
As many as 150 Indians were put to death, 4549 men and women were stretched on the rack or otherwise tortured, and 6330 given steep fines for minor infractions.
Bishop Toral of Yucatan brought Landa before him, severely reprimanding him and sending him back to Spain in disgrace.
Humanists in both Europe and America wanted him hanged and the Council of the Indies in Madrid wanted him disrobed.
Instead the Pope placed him on trial before a panel of seven Franciscans, who exonerated him.
Even more amazing he returned to Yucatan in 1571, this time as its third bishop.
But he was very much humbled by his experience and devoted the rest of his life to writing a scholary work on the Mayas as recompense for his earlier treatment of them.5
In early 16th century Spanish America a major intellectual thrust among some of the most prominent of the holy fathers was Erasmusian Humanism, which was critical of the established Church and European order in general.
Chief among these New World Humanists was the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga, a Franciscan friar who accepted his appointment in 1527 and immediately began bringing order and enlightenment to the chaos that came in the wake of the conquest.
He wrote a manual for the clergy in Mexico and a catechism for the Indians, and his works on Christian-Humanism were published and widely circulated in the New World.
At Tlatelolco, where Sahagun enthusiastically supported Zumarraga"s efforts, the bishop had the Colegio de Santa Cruz built, where young Indians were taught rhetoric, logic, music and philosophy and soon his native pupils were conversing in Latin.
Zumarraga encouraged the conversion of Biblical text into Nahuatl and spread the ideas of Erasmus among the college pupils.
In 1531 a Christian Indian named Juan Diego called upon the bishop"s office and excitedly told Zumarraga that a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared to him on a lava plain named Guadalupe by the Spaniards.
He described her dress exactly as he saw it in holy statues of the Virgin except this apparition had the face of an Indian and her skin was dark brown.
Skeptical though kindly and fatherly, the good bishop asked Juan to bring him proof next time the vision appeared to him.
A week later the Indian returned more excited than ever claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary in her Indian guise at Guadalupe once more, and as proof he had beneath his cloak a bunch of roses that she had picked from the solid lava surface.
Zumarraga asked to see the roses, but when Juan opened his cloak the flowers had disappeared and in their place was a picture of the Virgin imprinted on the inside of the garment exactly as he had described her.
Although Zumarraga remained skeptical, as soon as Indians across Mexico heard about the miracle of the Indian Virgin there was a mass demand for conversion.
The numbers that turned up at the bishop"s church wanting baptism was so staggering that for once Zumarraga waived his prohibition of a mass baptisimal and gave orders to his priests to spray holy water over the mob and declare them all Christians.6
Another episode in Zumarraga"s 20 year tenure as bishop of Mexico took place in Michoacan, a province to the north of Mexico City that had been the homeland of the civilised Tarascan Indians for three centuries but whose ruler surrendered peacefully to Cortes after the fall of their enemies, the Aztecs.
In 1530 there came to Michoacan one of the most brutal conquistadors ever to plague the Americas.
Nuno Beltran de Guzman had been appointed president of the audiencia in Mexico City two years earlier, but Zumarraga had him sacked when he learned of Guzman"s atrocities against Huastec Indians as governor of Panuco in 1527.
Guzman organised an illegal slave raiding party and marched into Michoacan where he put 7000 Indians to the sword and tortured the Tarascan king to death trying to get him to reveal where his treasure was hidden.
Then he marched on into Sonora to cause more damage, but he left a desperate and dispirited people behind.
When Zumarraga learned of the fate of the Tarascans he sent his friend and fellow Franciscan, Vasco de Quiroga, who was also a dedicated Humanist, to Michoacan to try and repair the destruction wrought by Guzman"s butchers.
He had read Thomas More"s Utopia, describing an imaginary heaven on earth along the lines of Desiderius Erasmus" ideals, and attempted to put it into reality in this war-ravaged land.
Within two years of his arrival in Michoacan in 1536 Quiroga managed to raise the spirits of the Tarascans enough to have created a perfect model of Utopia by reconstructing an entirely new society without its prehispanic tiered hierarchy, in which property was owned and worked communally.
Furthermore, the Indians were so encouraged by this experiment that they re-discovered their ancient crafts, which Quiroga put to good use making violins and lutes for the European market.
Many a court and church orchestra in Europe played on the sweet-toned instruments crafted by Indian woodworkers in distant Mexico.
Quiroga continued to live in the Tarascan community, becoming the first bishop of Michoacan in 1538, an office he held until his death 17 years later7.
Regulars vs Seculars
The fall from grace of Erasmusism in Europe eventually led to disfavour in America.
By 1570 the Humanist friars in the New World, like Las Casas, Sahagun, Zumarraga and Quiroga, had either passed on, returned to Spain or lived in America in seclusion, whilst the established Church, which was especially hostile to the Erasmus tradition, strengthened its grip in the Spanish colonies.
The missionary orders, known as regulars because they followed a regula or set of rules, moved away from the colonial centres and founded their ministries on the frontier or even beyond the borders of Spanish America.
The mendicants could not abide by the seculars, or parish priests, who lived in the secula or ordinary world, because they were part of a church hierarchy that was tainted by greed and corruption.
But, while the seculars were essential for maintaining Spanish society intact in the centres, the regulars were equally essential to the crown and papacy for spreading Christianity, and ultimately Spanish civilisation, to the heathen nations on the borderlands.
Fortunately for the maintenance of Catholic solidarity and Church unity the internal division between regulars and seculars was never allowed to fester beyond a distant dislike for one another.
It helped pave the way for the most remarkable of all the Catholic orders to establish itself in the New World and create the greatest missionary movement in the history of the Church.8
The Jesuit order, or Society of Jesus, was founded by a Spanish Basque ex-soldier, Ignatius Loyola (who was canonized in 1622), in 1534 and the order granted official papal approval in 1540.
Their regula was among the strictest and most regimented of all mendicant orders, and each newcomer entering the order takes a vow of chastity, poverty and obedience, together with a commitment to undertake a mission of converting the heathen when and wherever their general orders them "to the greater glory of God".
Not only were the Jesuits too late to participate in the initial conquests of nuclear America -- the Indies, Mexico, Peru, Central America -- but they had to await papal approval and the dissolution of earlier missions before taking their place in the New World.
The frontiers became then the opportunity the order sought to make its mark in America.
The first Jesuits to Spanish America did not begin arriving in Mexico and Peru until Francis Borgia"s generalship (1565-72) as second successor to Ignatius (who died in 1556).
In 1566 the first frontier Jesuit apostalate was established in Florida but the mission leader, Father Peter Martinez, was martyred immediately on landing.
The mission was shifted north to Virginia in 1570 but in the next year all eight priests were slain and joined the ranks of the first martyrs in the New World.
This brought an end to the Spanish Jesuit enterprise in North America.
At the other end of the Spanish Empire Jesuits entered the frontier community of Chile with Martin Garcia de Loyola, a great nephew of Ignatius and husband of an Incan princess, in 1592 when he took up the position of governor in that southern colony.
Unfortunately for Governor Loyola he did not live to see the fruits of his labours on behalf of his great uncle because he and his entire squadron of 35 cavaliers died in an ambush whilst pursuing a war-party of Mapuche Indians.9
One of the greatest of the Spanish Jesuits in America is undoubtedly Luis Valdivia, who came to Chile with Governor Loyola.
He was another of those courageous friars who took up the cause of Indian rights at the risk of his own life by threatening to excommunicate any colonist who persisted in illegal slave raiding in Chile.
When the ban on the enslavement of rebellious Indians was lifted in 1608 Valdivia approached Governor Garcia Ramon, who had replaced the slain Loyola, with a proposal to draw up a boundary between Indian and colonist.
The governor approved of the plan and on 18th February 1610 an official boundary line at the Rio Bio Bio was established by decree making it unlawful for colonists to cross.
Valdivia was appointed a government official in charge of Indian affairs and he and his Jesuit brothers became the only white-men living south of the Bio Bio line.
In 1612 a patrol of 20 soldiers was wiped out by Mapuches when they crossed the line and Valdivia intervened to prevent full-scale war from breaking out.
The next year a soldier ran off with a chieftain"s daughter and the Indians retaliated by killing three Jesuits.
A military force crossed the Bio Bio and destroyed a Mapuche village and once more Valdivia avoided an escalation of further hostilities.
For six more years he played the peace-maker everywhere healing wounds, pacifying angry chiefs and colonists, bringing leaders on both sides to a peace conference and generally preventing the outbreak of war.
His tireless efforts probably saved many thousands of lives, but his good work came to an abrupt end when he was recalled to Spain in 1619 and never again returned to Chile.
A century later another outstanding Jesuit emerged on the Spanish American frontier.
His name was Eusebio Francisco Kino, who was born an Italian in 1645 and probably became the greatest of all missionaries.
His ministry began among the Pimas in Sonora in 1687 and continued until his death in a Pima hut in 1711.
The Jesuits came to Mexico in 1572 and gradually made their way northward to the Chichimeca borderlands, establishing themselves in Guanajuato by 1582 and in the San Luis Potosi area in 1592.
Throughout the 17th century they made remarkable headway among the tribes of Gran Chichimeca -- the Tepehuans in Durango, the Tarahumaras in Chihuahua, the Yaquis, Mayos and Seris in Sonora, and the Pimas in Sonora and Arizona -- all generally hostile to the Spanish but strangely receptive to the "black robes" who came amongst them.
Kino worked outward from his central mission at Dolores and in quarter of a century covered 80,000 square kilometres of territory, founding 14 missions among the Pima and selected another 13 sites for future missions.
His entire travels back and forth across the Pimeria desert took place on foot or on the back of a mule with nothing but a Bible in one hand and a cross in the other and with only one Indian as companion.
Like Sahagun before him he learned to speak fluent Pima and scrawled down everything he could about the tribe"s customs and social life.
In 1695 the Pimas took up arms against Spanish invaders and slew all the missionaries on their lands, except Kino.
This wonderful man who had won the hearts of the Pimas with patient dedication turned the whole tribe into devoted Catholics without the need of military intervention or miraculous holy images.
The first Jesuit missionaries to Brazil were led by Father Manoel da Nobrega who arrived at Bahia in 1549, nearly 20 years before the order came to Spanish America.
They were appalled by conditions in Brazil, which was in a state of constant warfare between the Portuguese colonists and the coastal Tupinamba tribes.
Slavery was openly practiced and Indian women unfortunate enough to be captured for the slave market were treated as concubines by the colonists.
In 1556 the first bishop of Brazil, Pero Sardinha, was captured by Caete Indians and eaten, which rocked the colony of Pernambuco and only inflamed the wars of attrition that had been going on since the Portuguese arrived in 1530.
Nobrega was a man of unbounded energy in the Las Casas mould and fought tirelessly but unsuccessfully to eradicate slavery in Brazil up until his death in Bahia in 1570.
After his death the spirit of enthusiasm that began the Jesuit missions in Brazil flagged and the number of missionaries failed to rise significantly.
Disillusioned by colonial attitudes, the rapid decline in the Indian population and the Indians determined resistance against conversion, there were only 128 Jesuits in Brazil by 1600.
Their initial mission of Sao Vicente had been abandoned and they were driven from Sao Paulo, where they had a mission among the Tamoio tribe, by slave raiders who established their headquarters in the town to make inroads into the vast interior.
Forced southward by ever increasing raids by these Paulistas, the Jesuits established their first missions, Loreto and San Ignacio, among the Guarani tribes in 1610.
By 1629 eleven more missions were founded in southern Brazil, but because of the congregacion system of gathering native villagers into large mission communities these proved to be prime targets by organised armies of slave-hunters known as bandeirantes.
After years of attacks on the Guarani missions, the Portuguese Jesuits appealed to their Spanish brethren in Paraguay to provide them with arms with which to retaliate.
The Spanish Jesuits joined them with guns and permission to found missions east of Rio Uruguay and then met an army of bandeirantes head-on on the Rio Mborere in 1641 inflicting heavy losses.
It was sufficient to dissuade any more slave attacks on the missions.11
While the Jesuits were battling the bandeirantes in southern Brazil, another of those extraordinary priests who placed life and limb on the line in a fight for justice for the Indians came to prominence in the Brazilian colony to the north.
His name was Antonio Vieira (1608-97), who came to Brazil as a child, entered the Jesuit College in Bahia at 17 years of age, and was ordained ten years later.
He immediately set to work defending the Indians with a series of sermons in Lisbon during the 1640s and in 1653 returned to Brazil to begin missionary work in the frontier province of Maranhao where a lively slave market existed in the port town of Para for slaves brought down the Amazon.
Faced with assassination daily by angry settlers who were making fortunes from the slave trade, he thundered out sermons that threatened excommunication to any who persisted in making money from the misery of others.
Throughout his ministry in Maranhao he founded 54 missions that gave sanctuary to 200,000 Indians, both pagan and Christian.
Finally the settlers managed to concoct an arrest and cast him aboard a ship bound for Portugal in 1661.
In Lisbon he delivered his now famous "Sermon of Amazonia" before the Queen of Portugal, prompting her to declare herself "Protector of the Amazon Indians".
In 1680 Vieira managed to persuade King Joao IV to issue a decree declaring all Indians free from enslavement and encourage the importation of Africans for the Brazilian slave markets.
The next year Vieira returned to Brazil where he took up residence at the Jesuit College in Bahia until his death there at nearly 90 years of age.
After Vieira"s death the plight of the Indians in Brazil gradually improved, culminating in the Law of Liberty of 1755 that finally ended their enslavement.
Meanwhile, the Jesuit missions in southern Brazil and Paraguay continued to grow under the congregacion system.
By the Treaty of Madrid between Spain and Portugal in 1750, however, Brazil"s international border was agreed upon, which meant the largest missions east of the Rio Uruguay, in Portuguese territory, which were run by Spanish Jesuits had to close down and relocate to Paraguay.
The Guaranis refused to leave their missions, which had been their homes for more than a century, and a Portuguese army was sent in to force the closures.
A savage war resulted that lasted for two years (1754-56) as battle raged from mission to mission.
In one battle 1400 Indians perished, while the largest mission, San Miguel, was burnt down by the Indians themselves rather than let it fall into the hands of the Portuguese.
Some of the Jesuit fathers took up arms and fought alongside their congregation and this was enough for the Portuguese authorities in Brazil to accuse the order of sedition.
In 1759 the Portuguese crown banned the Jesuits from all its possessions in Brazil, Asia and Europe.12
Jesuits in New France
Far to the north another Catholic colony proved to be the setting for what may well be the Jesuits" finest hour.
The first Jesuits arrived in the colony of New France, or what was already being known unofficially by the Iroquoian term for the Great Lakes, Ca-Na-Da, in 1611, but they had to share their missionary work with the Recollet and Capuchin fathers.
By mid-century, however, these latter two orders pulled out of New France, leaving the Jesuits with a monopoly on souls.
Throughout the 1630s the French Jesuits established more than a dozen missions among the Huron Indian villages around Georgian Bay, as many among the Montagnais, Cree and Abenaki tribes, and one in a Mohawk village.
Father Isaac Joques became the first Canadian martyr when he was killed by Mohawks in 1646.
But the escalating Beaver Wars between the Hurons and their enemies, the Iroquois tribes, including the Mohawks, over control of the French fur trade reached its devastating climax in 1648 and 1649 when Iroquois hordes fell upon the Huron towns, killing their inhabitants and putting each to the torch.
Father Antoine Daniel was captured by an Iroquois war-party and tortured to death on 4th July 1648, and his martyrdom was followed by Fathers Jean de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant and five of their companions caught in the Huron towns at the time of the attacks.
The two superiors, Brebeuf and Lalemant, suffered hideous deaths by slow burning at the hands of the victorious Iroquois at St Ignace on 16th and 17th March 1649 (all eight Jesuits were canonized in 1930).
The last and largest of the Huron missions, Sainte-Marie, was burned to the ground on 15th May 1649 while its superior, Father Paul Ragueneau, managed to escape the fate of his fellow Jesuits, and led surviving Hurons to safety at Fort Quebec.
It was a devastating end to the thriving Jesuit missions of Upper Canada, but one that is remembered in the Jesuit Relations as an episode of supreme heroism.
The fall of the Huron missions did not bring the Jesuit experience in New France to finality.
On the contrary, it encouraged a fervour of missionary activity in more distant parts of far Canada.
Missions were established among the Ottawas and Ojibwas at the northern and western ends of the Great Lakes, and beyond them among the Illinois, Winnebagos and Sioux.
Fresh missions were built for the refugee Hurons at Sillery and Lorette near Quebec, and others were even founded amongst the Iroquois tribes, who maintained a hostile attitude towards the French.
One group of Christian Mohawks followed Father Jacques de Lamberville to a new mission at Caughnawaga near Montreal.
There the pious Indian girl, Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-80), was killed for her faith by her heathen tribesmen and has been immortalised as the first Indian heading for sainthood (she was beatified in 1980).
Other Jesuits traveled far and wide with the French traders, or the coureurs des bois (runners of the woods), in search of souls to save and potential mission sites, such as Father Jacques Marquette, who sailed down the Mississippi with Louis Jolliet, and Father Claude Allouez, who visited the distant Sioux of Minnesota west of the lakes.
During the French-and-Indian War against England (1754-63) France"s Indian allies used the Abenaki mission of St Francis from which to launch destructive raids upon New England towns, prompting English rangers under Major Robert Rogers to attack the place in 1759, kill hundreds of defending Indians and their priests, and put the mission to the torch.
The loyalty of the Jesuits during the war did not save their order, for the French crown followed the Portuguese example and banned it in 1764.
The Spanish crown did the same three years later, and finally the Pope decreed an end to the order altogether in 1773.13
Roberta Perkins
REFERENCES:
1 Bartolome de las Casas: History of the Indies (translated by Andree M Collard) Harper & Row, New York, 1971
2 Bartolome de las Casas: The Tears of the Indians (translated by John Phillips) Oriole Chapbooks, New York, 1972.
3 Manuel Gimenez Fernandez: Bartolome de las Casas 1474-1566, 2 vols, Seville, 1953-60.
4 see John Lloyd Mecham: Church and State in Latin America, Chapel Hill NC, 1934; William E Shiels: King and Church -- The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real, Chicago, 1961; Charles Gibson: Spain in America, Harper & Row, New York, 1966, esp pp 68-89 and 137.
5 Inga Clendinnen: Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan 1517-1570, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1987. pp 57-92 and 112-126.
6 Richard E Greenleaf: Zumarraga and the Mexican Inquisition 1536-1543, Washington, 1961.
7 Fintan B Warren: Vasco de Quiroga and His Pueblo-Hospitals of Santa Fe, Washington 1963; Silvio Zavala: Ideario de Vasco de Quiroga, Mexico City 1941.
8 Gibson, op cit, pp 75-80.
9 T J Campbell: The Jesuits 1534-1921, NY 1921; M P Harney: The Jesuits in History, NY 1941.
10 Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Padre on Horseback, Loyola University Press, Chicago, 1986.
11 John Hemming: Red Gold Macmillan, London 1978. pp 97-118.
12 Hemming, op cit, pp 312-344 and 462-486.
13 W J Eccles: France in America Harper & Row, New York, 1972.