(Death, Heaven, Purgatory, Hell)
Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults
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Jesuit Missions in Non-Christian Countries
The original intent of the Jesuits was to form a mission to the moslems of Jerusalem, and missionary work among non-Christians has always been a high priority of the order. In 1749 more than one seventh of all Jesuits were missionaries--more than one fifth of all Jesuit priests.
Within months after the order was founded, Ignatius sent his ablest associate, Francis Xavier, to preach in the Far East, and his work there bore considerable fruit. He and those who followed preached in Persia, Tibet, Ceylon, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, Indochina, and the East Indian Islands, but chiefly in India, China, and Japan.
The China Mission began in the 1580's, against obstacles in that the Chinese regarded theirs as the highest of all cultures and were convinced that outsiders had nothing to offer them in goods or ideas. Hence neither traders or teachers were welcome. The Jesuits sent some of their best scientists, astronomers like Matteo Ricci, to the Chinese court, where their skill at clock-building and their scientific and techinical knowledge won them respect and a hearing. In their missionary work, they took what has been called an "accommodationist" approach. They dressed like Chinese mandarins. They used Chinese rather than Latin in the liturgy. They retained Chinese terminology, using the Chinese word for "Heaven" to refer to God. They honored Confucius as a sage, a worthy teacher on ethical questions. Most controversial of all, they permitted converts, at least on a temporary basis, to continue ancient and beloved customs honoring their ancestors. But members of other religious orders, notably the Franciscans, moved either by inter-order rivalry or by honest concern, denounced these concessions as watering down the faith to the danger of the souls of the converts, and appealed to Rome, which in 1742 decided against the Jesuits.
In Japan, the Jesuit mission prospered at first, as the Jesuits took care to present their case diplomatically. (For,example they avoided the use of crucifixes, which the Japanese had a strong aversion to. This did not mean that they failed to preach about the death and resurrection of our Lord.) In came the Franciscans, brandishing their crucifixes and in other ways treading on local sensibilities, and in came some crude political interference by the Portuguese government, and in 1651 the whole mission effort collapsed in a welter of government persecution and suppression. Jesuit martyrs totalled 111. (In fairness to the Franciscans, they had their martyrs, too.) For the next two centuries Japan was closed to Christian missions, and Japanese Christians were secret and few.
The Jesuits were active in the missionizing of the Hispanic territories in the Americas, particularly in Brazil and in Paraguay. In the Jesuit province of Paraguay (which included what is now the country of Paraguay plus portions of the surrounding countries), they set up, with the approval of the government, what were called Reducciones ("reductions"), which were villages of Christian Indians, under the spiritual, social, economic, and political direction of the missioners. The intention was benevolent, and totally paternalistic. The Jesuits succeeded in protecting their charges from exploitation by the European settlers; they took no money or goods from them, saw to it that no one robbed them or enslaved them, and devoted themselves to the Indians' physical and spiritual welfare. However, they treated them like children, made all their significant decisions for them, and although they instructed them diligently in the Christian faith, they never considered encouraging or permitting them to seek the priesthood. As a result, when a change of government policy expelled the Jesuits from Paraguay, the local society simply collapsed. The missionaries were self-sacrificing parents who would do anything for their children except let them grow up.
The mission in non-Spanish America fared somewhat differently. The most famous work of the Jesuits there was a mission to the Huron Indians of eastern Canada and adjacent territories. The Hurons and the Iroquois were hereditary enemies, and several Jesuits, identified by the Iroquois as friends of the Hurons, were martyred.