Black Robes in Paraguay: The Success of the Guarani Missions Hastened the Abolition of the Jesuits

by William F. Jaenike

This historical saga of love, savage violence, and betrayal reads like fiction. While it is a Roman Catholic story, it is written for armchair historians of all beliefs including Catholics, Protestants, Jews, agnostics and secular humanists. In colonial South America the Jesuits established missions among the Guarani. As the Portuguese and Spanish slavers descended on Paraguay, the Jesuits sought to protect stone-age Indians in their missions. Their resistance efforts added to political problems of the church with Catholic monarchs back in Europe. Under pressure from the monarchs a frightened Pope abolished the Jesuit order. In the long, tortured history of European colonization of the Americas, these Jesuit Black Robes in Paraguay stood out as a breed apart, even from their fellow Jesuits elsewhere. Leaders of the anti-Catholic, anti-Jesuit Enlightenment such as Voltaire and Raynal rallied to the side of these extraordinary Paraguay missionaries. Raynal wrote that never has so much good been done for mankind with so little evil. Ironically, the heretic monarchs of Russia and Prussia invited hundreds of the former Jesuits to run their colleges. In doing so, they inadvertently saved these outcasts to become the nucleus around which a reinvigorated papacy would re-establish the Jesuit order forty years after its abolition.

356 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2008

Reviews

[C.M. Mayo]

This magnificent, deeply and scrupulously researched book will always have a place of honor in my library. It should interest anyone who enjoys Latin American history -- and that includes the history of Mexico's Baja California, because of the parallel stories of their Jesuit missions.

[Ann]

Fact-laden and fast-paced.