ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) – Pope Francis is balancing out his apology for the crimes the Catholic Church committed against indigenous during the colonial-era conquest of the Americas with high praise for the Jesuit missions in Paraguay that brought Christianity and European-style education and economic organization to the natives.
The Argentine Jesuit praised the Jesuit “reductions,” as the missions were known in Paraguay, as an almost utopian social and economic experiment – one that was immortalized in the 1986 film “The Mission.” He said Saturday they were “one of the most important experiences of evangelization and social organization in history.”
“There the Gospel was the soul and the life of communities which did not know hunger, unemployment, illiteracy or oppression,” he said. “This historical experience shows us that, today too, a more humane society is possible.”
The Jesuits founded the Paraguay missions in the 17th and 18th century as an alternative to the colonial encomienda system, in which Spain’s king granted land in conquered territories to those who settled there, who then had indigenous peoples live there and work the land. The missions were relatively autonomous from Spanish rulers – intentionally so to protect the Guarani from the abuses of the encomienda leaders who wanted them as a source of labor.
The missions were well defended – the Jesuits created a Guarani militia – and were economically successful, with the Jesuits teaching the Guarani to have both individual and communal property to provide for families who couldn’t provide for themselves, according to “The Jesuits in Latin America: 1549-2000,” a history of the order on the continent written by the Jesuit historian, the Rev. Jeffrey Klaiber. Unlike missions elsewhere in the Americas, where indigenous rebellions against the missionaries were rife, there were no such rebellions by the Guarani in Paraguay, Klaiber wrote.