"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.
There was no one, however, to covet the place of Peter Claver, who was devoting himself to the care of the filthy, diseased, and brutalized negroes who were being literally dumped by tens of thousands in Cartagena, to be sold into slavery to the colonists. He had come out from Spain in 1610, after the old lay-brother, Alfonso Rodriguez, had led him to the heights of sanctity and determined his vocation in the New World. His work was revolting, but Claver loved it, and as soon as a vessel arrived he was on hand with his interpreters. They hurried down into the fetid holds with food, clothing and cordials, which had been begged from the people in the town. It did not worry Claver that the poor wretches were sick with small pox or malignant fevers; he would carry them out on his back, nurse them into health, and even bury them with his own hands when they died. The unfortunate blacks had never seen anything like that before, and they eagerly listened to all he had to say about God, and made no difficulty about being baptized, striving as well as they could to shape their lives along the lines of conduct he traced out for them.
He was on his feet night and day, going from bed to bed in the rude hospitals, with supplies of fruit and wine for the sick. He even brought bands of music to play for them, and showed them pictures of holy scenes in the life of Christ to help their dull intellects to grasp the meaning of his words. No wonder that often when he was among the lepers, who were his especial pets, people saw a bright light shine round him. His biographers tell us that he did not find these ordinary sufferings enough for him, and though he wore a hair-shirt and an iron cross with sharp points all day long, he was scourging himself to blood at night and praying for hours for his negroes. He died on September 8, 1654, and is now ranked among the saints, like his old master, Brother Alfonso.
To the long line of islands, alternately French and English, which form, as it were, the eastern wall of the Caribbean Sea, and are known as the Lesser Antilles, the French Jesuits were sent in 1638. They are respectively Trinidad, Grenada, Saint-Vincent, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and near the northern extremity of the line, one that is of peculiarly pathetic interest, Saint Christopher, or, as it is sometimes popularly called, Saint Kitts. When the French expedition under d'Esnambuc landed at Saint Kitts in 1625, they found the English already in possession, but like sensible men, instead of cutting each other's throats, the two nationalities divided the island between them and settled down quietly, each one attending to its own affairs. In 1635 the French annexed Guadeloupe and Martinique, and, later still, Saint-Croix, Saint-Martin and a few others.
The population of these islands consisted of white settlers and their negro and Indian slaves. They were cared for spiritually by two Dominicans, one of whom, Tertre, has written a history of the islands. But these priests had no intercourse with the savages, whose languages they did not understand, and hence to fill the gap, three Jesuits, one of them a lay-brother, were sent to Martinique, arriving there on Good Friday, 1638. They began in the usual way, namely by martyrdom. Two of them were promptly killed by the savages. Others hurried to carry on their work but many succumbed to the climate, and others to the hardships inseparable from that kind of apostolate. An interesting arrival, though as late as 1674, was that of Father Joseph-Antoine Poncet, one of the apostles of Canada, who is remembered for having brought the great Ursuline, Marie de l'Incarnation, to Quebec, and also for having been tortured by New York Mohawks at the very place where Isaac Jogues had suffered martyrdom a few years before. Poncet was old when he went to Martinique and he died there the following year. The names of de la Barre, Martinière, de Tracy and Iberville, all of them familiar to students of Canadian history, occur in the chronicles of the Antilles.
For people of Irish blood these islands, especially Saint Kitts and Montserrat, are of a thrilling interest. On both of them were found numbers of exiled Irish Catholics held as slaves. As early as 1632 Father White on his way to Maryland saw them at Saint Kitts. He tells us in his "Narrative" that he "stopped there ten days, being invited to do so in a friendly way by the English Governor and two Catholic captains. The Governor of the French colony on the same island treated me with the most marked kindness." He does not inform us whether or not he did any ministerial work with them but in all likelihood he did. He is equally reticent about Montserrat, and contents himself with saying that "it is inhabited by Irishmen who were expelled from Virginia, on account of their Catholic Faith." He remained at Saint Kitts only a day, and on this point his "Relation" is very disappointing. In 1638 the Bishop of Tuam sent out a priest to the island, but he died soon after. He was probably a secular priest, for in the following year the bishop was authorized by Propaganda to send out some religious. But there is no information available about what was done until 1652, when an Irish Jesuit was secured for them. In the "Documents inédits" of Carayon he is called Destriches, which may have been Stritch, but there is no mention of either name in any of the menologies; Hughes, in his "History of the Society of Jesus in North America" (I, 470), calls him Christopher Bathe. He was not, however, the first choice. A Father Henry Malajon had been proposed, but the General did not allow him to go. A Welshman named Buckley was then suggested, but though his application was ratified he never left Europe. Next a Father Maloney offered himself, but was kept in Belgium; finally, however, Father Christopher Bathe or Stritch arrived.
The missionary found there a very great multitude of enslaved Irish exiles, for on April 1, 1653, the London Council gave "license to Sir John Clotworthie to transport to America 500 natural Irishmen." On September 6, 1653, he asked leave to transport 400 Irish children. Ten days later liberty was granted to Richard Netherway of Bristol to transport from Ireland one hundred Irish tories. When Jamaica was captured by the English in 1655, one thousand Irish girls and a like number of Irish boys were sent there. The earlier throngs had been sent first to Virginia, but had been driven over to the islands, as we learn from White's "Narrative." The English authorities in Ireland wrote to Lord Thurlow: "Although we must use force in taking them up, yet it being so much for their own good and likely to be of great advantage to the public, it is not the least doubted but that you may have as many as you wish." He offers to send 1500 or 2000 boys. "They will thus," he said, "be made good Christians." The first of these "good Christians" were found by Father Bathe when he arrived in Saint Kitts in 1652 and they eagerly came to the little chapel which he built on the dividing line between the English and French settlements. For three months he was busy from dawn till nightfall saying Mass, hearing confessions, baptizing babies and preaching. After that he started for Montserrat which was entirely under English control and hence he was compelled to go there disguised as a lumber merchant who was looking for timber. As soon as he landed he passed the word to the first Irishman he met and the news spread like wildfire. A place of meeting was chosen in the woods where every day Mass was said and the people went to confession and communion. That took up the whole morning, and in the afternoon they began chopping down the trees so as to carry out the deception. Unfortunately, the Caribs found them one day, and killed some of them, but we have no more details of the extent of the disaster.
By the time Father Bathe got back to Saint Kitts, the English had taken alarm and had forbidden their Irish slaves ever to set foot on the French territory. But there must have been disobedience to the order, for one night, after they had returned home, a descent was made upon their houses, and one hundred and twenty-five of the most notable among them were flung into a ship and cast on Crab Island, two hundred leagues away, where they were left to starve, while those who remained behind at Saint Kitts were treated with the most frightful inhumanity. One instance is cited of a young girl who, for having refused to go to the Protestant church, was dragged by the hair of her head along the road, and treated with such brutality that some of the more timid of the victims were terrified and obeyed the order about keeping away from the chapel. The greater number, however, came to Mass secretly, walking all night through dense forests and at the edge of precipices, so as to escape the sentries posted along the ordinary road. Two very old men were conspicuous in this display of faith.
The castaways on Crab Island kept life in their bodies for a few days by eating what grass or roots they could find or by gathering the shell-fish on the beach. At last to their great delight a ship was sighted in the distance and when they hailed it, came to take them off. Unfortunately, however, it was too small for such a crowd, and only as many as it was safe to receive were allowed on board. The rest had to be abandoned to their fate. What became of them nobody ever knew. It is supposed that they made a raft and were lost somewhere out on the ocean. Even those who sailed away came to grief. When they reached Santo Domingo, they were not permitted to land, because they came from Saint Christopher, which made the Spaniards in the fort suspect a trick. Then they were caught by a tornado and carried four hundred leagues away. At one time hunger had brought them so low that they were on the point of casting lots to see who should be killed and eaten, but fortunately they caught some fish and that sustained them till they reached the land. What land it was we do not know.
A characteristic example of Irish feminine virtue is recorded in this very interesting account, which is worth repeating here. A young girl, for her better protection, had been disguised as a boy by her father when both were exiled. After he died, she obtained work in the household of a respectable family where her efficiency so charmed the mistress of the household that the husband grew jealous of the friendship of his wife for this estimable man-servant. To avert a domestic disaster, the good girl had to make known her identity and she was then more esteemed than ever. What became of her ultimately is not recorded. Meantime, Father Bathe had gathered what was left of his poor people and carried them off to Guadeloupe, where there were no English. God spared him for five years more, and he went from island to island under all sorts of disguises, if there was danger of meeting the English. He even succeeded in converting not a few of the persecutors.
Hughes informs us further that in 1667 an Irish priest named John Grace returned to Europe from the islands, and reported on the deplorable condition of his compatriots in the Caribbean. Passing through Martinique, Guadeloupe and Antigua he heard the confessions of more than three hundred of them. He related, also, that fifty of the three hundred had died while he was there. In Barbadoes there were many thousands who had no priests and were conforming to Protestantism. In St. Bartholomew, there were four hundred Irish Catholics who had never seen a priest. At Montserrat, however, Governor Stapleton was an Irishman and a Catholic, and consequently there was no difficulty in having a priest go there. There were as many as four hundred Catholics at that place and they formed six to one of the population. These islands of the Caribbean were the favorite hiding places of the "filibusteros," a set of abandoned men of various nationalities, French, Dutch and English, who were lying in wait for the rich galleons of Spain, on their way from the silver mines of Peru to the palaces of Madrid. Their life was a continued series of daring adventures, robberies, massacres and wild debauchery. They were ready for any expedition and against any foe. With them nothing could be done, but with the great numbers of negro slaves who were sold at Martinique and elsewhere there was ample opportunity for apostolic work. It was a most revolting task; the whites, regarded them as devils, but the Fathers took care of them and sent many of them to heaven.