Cities of Brotherly Love: Jesuits in South America

I went to a Jesuit school for a year. St. Joseph's Preparatory High School, in Philadelphia, otherwise known as St. Joe's Prep. The only school I've attended that had a separate post for Disciplinarian, second only to the Principal. He administered detention, which was called J.U.G., short for "justice under God". Typical tasks during detention involved impossibly long Long Division, reminiscent of the Chilean border control ledgers I'd seen on this trip. 


Or if you really crossed the line, you'd be sent to work evenings as janitor at the local inner city Philadelphia hospital. Keith, the senior who I'd car-pool with to school on frigid winter mornings, when it was too cold to wait for the public bus, was a careless pot-head. He spent a lot of time in the hospital. My friend Joe, a handsome and athletic fella, also spent time in the same hospital. But that's because some local kids broke his face with a plumbing pipe. They didn't like his school tie. It was a rough neighbourhood. 

The Jesuits had been offered more commodious sites in the suburbs, on more than one occasion. Our arch-rivals, the lightweights at La Salle - a countryclub masquerading as a prep school - occupied a grassy knoll in a leafy, wealthy Philly suburb. I think they were Dominicans. The Jesuits were having none of it. The inner city, not green pastures, was their pasture. If the students occasionally had trouble with the locals, that was firmly part of the curriculum. They're not called God's Marines for nothing. 


All that J.U.G. and urban crossfire may seem a bit extreme, but I always admired these priests, and especially appreciated the Latin (which wasn't available to study when I moved from Philly to Rome!), the rowing and the discipline. Perhaps there's more than a hint of the Prussian in me that values a hardline approach. 


The reason I mention this is that the Jesuits are everywhere in evidence in South America. We encounter traces of their work in every country we visit. OK, Franciscans and Dominicans ("domini canus", the dogs of God, I discover) and other orders have also made their mark, but the Marines made some serious inroads down here. 


Jesuits were to "strive especially for the propagation and defense of the faith and progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine." They also pledged a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, poverty and obedience. But they weren't merely into self-abnegation and religious domination. Jesuits have a claim to having founded Rio and Sao Paolo. In the depths of the jungle, their civilizing and prosthelytizing missions in South America were positively humanitarian by early modern standards, havens with no capital punishment or torture. We learned this from "Les Trains Pas Comme Les Autres", a great French documentary, dedicates an entire chapter to Jesuits in Paraguay, where they built utopian settlements in the jungle. These were veritable cities, entirely self-sufficient, with more than a hint of Marxist communal ownership. History is rarely if ever black and white, and the whole Christianizing project was anyway deeply suspect, but these ruins are quite a legacy. It seems that indigenous people were seduced by the promise of security in the Hobbesian wilderness, crawling with rival tribes and Slave hunters, but especially it seems by the songs introduced by these austere Europeans, which must have seemed ethereal in the jungle. 

I hadn't realized on seeing it on its release in 1986 that the plot of The Mission revolves around precisely this historical episode, with Jeremy Irons the Jesuit Missionary and Robert De Niro a repentant Portuguese slave hunter. Their good work is upended when the Church succumbs to realpoplitik and shuts down the Jesuit order. Having blazed a trail through the jungle and elsewhere, their idealist vision ran counter to the commercial interests of Portuguese and Spanish colonists and mercantilists. Scarface put it most succinctly: "you got the money, you got the power".   


Ennio Morricone goes a little overboard with the score (advancing age by this point?), but the cinematography, costumes and setting are terrific. De Niro and Irons make quite a duo on screen, entirely convincing in their predations and their piety, respectively. I download it for Flo, who has never seen it, but I'm glad to take it in again. It's rich viewing on this side of the Equator. 


And like the history of horseback, the Jesuits will command greater study in due course. They taught me many good things, but I still know relatively little about them.