Jesuits in the New World: A Contrast in Conversion of North and South America (original) (raw)

The Jesuit Missionaries: Their Contribution to the Christian Conversion in Northern Mexico.

This research examines the rise of Christianity in the New World and the missionaries who served as messengers of Christianity to the Indians of Mexico. It will describe the efforts the missionaries made in Mexico in the 16th century. Although the mendicant orders believed in the same religion, they differed in the way theology was expressed, practiced, and implemented among the Indians. This research focuses on the Jesuit missionaries’ success in converting the native Indians of Northern Mexico to Christianity.I argue this success is mainly because the Jesuitextensively studied linguistic, cultural, and social norms of the natives through observation, participation, and social integration

The Jesuit-Guaraní Confraternity in the Spanish Missions of South America (1609–1767): A Global Religious Organization for the Colonial Integration of Amerindians

This article explores the vertical aspects of the Jesuit confraternity system in the thirty community towns under Span-ish rule (1609−1767) designated as " Missions " or " Reductions " in the Río de la Plata region of South America. The principal documents analyzed are the cartas anuas, the annual reports of the Jesuits. The chronological analysis is carried out with a view to tracing the process of integrating the Guaraní Indians into the Spanish colonial regime by means of the religious congregation founded in each Mission town. As a supplementary issue, we deal with the significance of the Spanish word policía (civility) used as a criterion to ascertain the level of culture attained by the Amer-indians. Normally the Jesuits considered members of indigenous confraternities to be endowed with policía, so they used confrater-nities to transplant Christian civility among the Guaraní Indians in the Spanish overseas colony.

The colonial discourse of domination: Notes on the Christian religious contact among the indigenous of Paraná, Brazil

This paper will focus on the relations established by the Kaingang with Christian missionaries from the time or their arrival in colonial frontier regions in the sixteenth century through the period of the Jesuit missions and later religious villages in the territory that came to be called the state of Paraná, Brazil. The primary objective of my paper is to explore and understand the relationship between indigenous peoples and Christianity in Spanish towns and missions in the Guairá region during the seventeenth century, as well as religious settlements in the nineteenth century primarily among the Ge-speaking Kaingang. In analyzing the entry of Christian religious knowledge in indigenous cultural practices, I also plan to discuss the indigenous processes of cultural reinterpretation and ethnogenesis. This work will contribute to an understanding of how the catechetical processes, translation, and ethnogenesis can explain why the Kaingang chose the figure of a monk named São João Maria (St. John Mary) to be the leader of a conflict in central Paraná, in April 1923. The work is linked to an ongoing research called "The Faith that Moves the Indians: The Monk São João Maria and his ‘Echoes’ in Kaingang Struggles for Land in the Interior of Paraná, in 1923," a PhD project in History from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro and Doctoral stage ‘sandwich’ fellowship from the Brazilian CAPES program at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA. BRASILIANA–Journal for Brazilian Studies. Vol. 5, n.1(Nov, 2016). ISSN 2245-4373.