The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay (1609-1768)

The Jesuit "Paraguay": A Territory, Not a Country

The word Paraguay, in the vocabulary of the Society of Jesus, does not refer to the modern state with its current borders, but to a vast religious province — the Provincia Paraquariae — which, in the 17th century, encompassed regions stretching across Paraguay, northeastern Argentina (Misiones, Corrientes), southern Brazil (Rio Grande do Sul), and the fringes of present-day Uruguay^[6]. The Jesuits distinguished four major Guaraní missionary fronts there: Guairá (to the northeast, toward the upper Paraná), Paraná, Uruguay, and Tape^[7]. Not to be confused with the “Thirty Peoples”: the some thirty Guaraní pueblos at their height (1732), which form only part of this vast jurisdiction—which also included colleges, the University of Córdoba, and non-Guaraní missions.

The main people targeted were the Guaraní, a group of Tupi-Guaraní-speaking populations practicing slash-and-burn agriculture (manioc, maize), semi-nomadic, organized in villages of long communal houses under the authority of chiefs (caciques) and shamans. This language, Guaraní, would be adopted by the Jesuits as the language of evangelization, and remains today an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish—a vitality to which the mission contributed, without alone explaining it.

The First Jesuits in Asunción (1588)

The Society of Jesus, approved by Paul III in 1540, defined itself from the outset by its universal missionary vocation. In the Río de la Plata, the first Jesuits arrived in Asunción in 1588: three religious, among them the Irishman Thomas Field (Tomás Fields) — one of the very first English-speaking priests in the New World — undertook apostolic journeys along the rivers^[8]. But evangelization was then hampered by a major obstacle: the encomienda system, which delivered the "entrusted" Indians to Spanish colonists as forced labor, emptying baptism of its liberating power.

The Creation of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay (1607)

The institutional turning point came from Rome. Under the generalate of Claudio Acquaviva, an autonomous Jesuit province of Paraguay, distinct from that of Peru, was erected in the mid-1600s—historians place the decision between 1604 and 1606, the Catholic Encyclopedia retaining 1606—and its first provincial, Father Diego de Torres Bollo (1551–1638), took office in 1607^[9]. A former missionary of the reductions of Juli in Peru, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, Torres Bollo brought a proven model: to gather the Indians into autonomous Christian villages, remove them from the encomienda, and instruct them in their own language.

Torres Bollo secured the decisive support of Governor Hernando Arias de Saavedra, known as Hernandarias, the first Creole governor of the Río de la Plata, who also advocated peaceful and free evangelization. The Spanish crown, eager both to fix the borders against Portuguese expansion and to moralize colonization, granted the reductions a unique status: converted Guaraní would depend directly on the Crown (pueblos de realengo), exempt from encomienda and taxes for ten years, under the sole spiritual and temporal administration of the Jesuits^[10].

"It is glorious for her to have been the first to show, in these lands, the idea of religion joined to that of humanity. In repairing the devastation wrought by the Spaniards, she began to heal one of the greatest wounds ever received by mankind." — Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book IV, ch. 6 ("Of some institutions of the Greeks"), 1748^[11]

The Word and the Reality

The term reduction (reducción) does not mean "diminution" but comes from the Latin reducere, "to bring back," "to gather": it refers to the act of gathering (reducir a poblado) scattered and semi-nomadic Indians into stable villages, organized around the church and Christian life^[12]. The reduction was thus at once a parish, a city, and an economic community: central square, baroque church, workshops, schools, hospital, communal granaries, collective fields (tupambaé, "the good of God") and family plots (abambaé, "the good of man").

San Ignacio Guazú, First Reduction (1609)

The first Guaraní reduction was founded on December 29, 1609: San Ignacio Guazú, by Fathers Marcial de Lorenzana and Francisco de San Martín, with Guaraní led by the cacique Arapizandú^[13]. The following year, 1610, Fathers José Cataldino and Simón Masseta founded in the Guairá the reduction of Nuestra Señora de Loreto, at the confluence of the Pirapó and Paranapanema, which would become the center of the Guairá mission. Within a generation, the network expanded; by around 1630, in Guairá and Paraná, there were already about a dozen foundations and more than ten thousand Christians^[14].

For a complete analysis of the internal organization of these cities — urban planning, economy, indigenous government, daily life, art, and architecture — see the article The Reductions of Paraguay. The present article follows the missionary thread: the method, the people, the martyrdom, the struggles, and the end.

What sets Jesuit Paraguay apart is not only the result, but the method. Whereas the Spanish conquest often evangelized through coercion and enslavement, the Jesuits built a pastoral approach founded on freedom, language, and beauty.

Reducing to Liberate: Against the Encomienda

The first missionary act was, paradoxically, legal and social: to rescue the Guaraní from the slavery of the encomienda. By obtaining that the reductions be placed directly under the king and exempted from forced labor, the Jesuits made conversion a path of real liberation^[15]. This protection came at a cost: it set the Spanish colonists (encomenderos) of Asunción against the Society, as they saw their labor force slipping away—the first of many hostilities that, accumulating over time, would lead to the expulsion.

In his dedication to the king, Montoya assigns his book a purpose of pacification—to make peace between Spaniards and Indians—in the name of Christian charity and in the face of the neglect of the Indians; in chapter VIII, he describes the ravages of the mistreatment of the Indians, and denounces the manhunts of the paulistas of São Paulo "as if they were beasts"^[16].

The Guaraní Language as the Language of the Gospel

Rather than imposing Castilian, the Jesuits learned and codified Guaraní. Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya composed the first major linguistic tools for this language: the Tesoro de la lengua guaraní (1639) and the Arte y bocabulario de la lengua guaraní (1640), true monuments of Amerindian linguistics that codified grammar and vocabulary^[17]. Catechisms, prayers, hymns, sermons—everything was translated. The faith entered the people through their own language—a decisive choice that durably sustained the vitality of Guaraní, today an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish, like Quechua and Aymara, official in Peru and Bolivia.

Music, "the Doorway to the Guaraní Soul"

The most surprising apostolic tool was music. The Jesuits discovered in the Guaraní an extraordinary musical sense and made it the heart of life in the reductions: choirs, orchestras, instrument making (violins, harps, organs, oboes), music schools. The Tyrolean Anton Sepp (1655–1733), who arrived in 1691, organized musical instruction in the reductions^[18]. Most notably, the Italian Domenico Zipoli (1688–1726), a renowned organist from Rome who joined the Society to serve in the missions, composed liturgical works in Córdoba performed by the Guaraní: the remarkable case of a recognized Baroque composer placed at the service of evangelization at the ends of the earth^[19]. Masses, sacred operas, and cantatas were performed in the forest churches by indigenous musicians whose reputation reached Buenos Aires and Europe.

Printing at the Ends of the Earth

Even more astonishing: the reductions acquired printing presses, set up on site and operated by Guaraní craftsmen, in Loreto, Santa María la Mayor, San Javier, and elsewhere. It was there, around 1700, that the first printed books of the Río de la Plata appeared—devotional and doctrinal works, several in the Guaraní language^[20]. An indigenous Christianity that reads, sings, sculpts, and prints in its own language: this is the face of the golden age.

Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, the Apostle of Guairá

Born in Lima in 1585, Antonio Ruiz de Montoya is the emblematic figure of the first generation. Missionary in Guairá from 1612 to 1631, linguist, organizer, he founded and governed many reductions. His book, Conquista espiritual (Madrid, 1639), remains the great primary source for the mission: an account of evangelization, a description of the Guaraní spiritual world, and an indictment against the slave traders^[21]. The very title — spiritual conquest — sums up the program: to oppose military and commercial conquest with a conquest by the Cross and the word alone.

The Exodus from Guairá (1631)

The nascent golden age was nearly smothered at birth. Starting in 1628, the bandeirantes from São Paulo — Portuguese and mixed-race (mamelucos) slave hunters — swept down on the flourishing, defenseless reductions of Guairá, capturing tens of thousands of Christian Guaraní to sell them. Rather than abandon them, Montoya organized in 1631 one of the most extraordinary exoduses in missionary history: he evacuated the survivors of Loreto and San Ignacio — about twelve thousand Indians — and led them down the Paraná on hundreds of rafts and boats, through the falls, to resettle them further south, in safety^[22]. Thousands perished along the way; but the core of Guaraní Christianity was saved.

The First Saint of Paraguay

At the spiritual heart of the mission stands a martyrdom. Roque González de Santa Cruz, born in Asunción in 1576 to a Creole family, ordained priest and then entered the Society of Jesus, was one of the greatest founders of reductions on the Paraná and Uruguay. The first saint born on Paraguayan soil—Saint John Paul II hailed him as the "first saint of this beloved Paraguay"—he is the first Paraguayan raised to the altars^[23].

Caaró and the Pierced Heart

In November 1628, while establishing the reduction of Todos los Santos de Caaró (in present-day Rio Grande do Sul), Roque González encountered the hostility of a chief-shaman, Ñezú, who saw Christianity as the ruin of his authority. On 15 November 1628, while the Father was installing a bell, men sent by Ñezú struck him down with axes (itaîzá), along with his Spanish companion Alonso Rodríguez; their bodies were thrown into the burning church. Two days later, on 17 November, the third Jesuit, Juan del Castillo, who had remained at the Assumption reduction on the Ijuí, was beaten and then stoned to death there^[24]. Tradition holds that the heart of Roque González, recovered from the ashes, was preserved intact; it is venerated today as a relic^[25].

The table below summarizes the three protomartyrs of the Río de la Plata, commemorated together on 17 November in the region's national calendars (a solemnity in Paraguay)^[26].

Beatification and Canonization

The process for their martyrdom, opened as early as 1628 with depositions collected on site, led to their beatification by Pius XI on 28 January 1934, and then to their canonization by Saint John Paul II on 16 May 1988 at Asunción (Paraguay), at Campo Ñu Guazú^[27]. John Paul II hailed them as the protomartyrs of the Río de la Plata and held up their love for the Guaraní as an example. Their blood seals the truth of the mission: the reduction is not a disguised colonial enterprise, but a work for which men accepted to die in the service of the Indians.

The Paulista Slave Trade

The most persistent danger did not come from the Guaraní, but from their Christian neighbors. From São Paulo, expeditions of bandeirantes—the bandeiras—would descend to raid the reductions and supply the Brazilian slave market. The raids, particularly violent in the 1630s, captured tens of thousands of Guaraní from the missions—about 60,000 neophytes according to the assessment established by Newson following Furlong^[28]. The reductions of Guairá and Tape were largely destroyed.

Mbororé (1641): When the Guaraní Took Up Arms

Faced with this disaster, the Jesuits obtained an exceptional authorization from the King of Spain: to arm the Guaraní with arquebuses and organize trained militias. The decisive confrontation took place on March 11, 1641 at the Battle of Mbororé, on the Uruguay River, after several days of operations: a flotilla of Guaraní canoes, supported by infantry, defeated a major Paulista bandeira—a decisive river engagement^[29]. The victory changed everything: it secured the safety of the Paraná and Uruguay reductions for a century, and transformed the Christian Guaraní into a military force at the service of the Crown, which would call upon them on many occasions to defend the Spanish frontiers, notably against the Portuguese of Colônia do Sacramento^[30].

According to Charlevoix’s account, the Guaraní militias fought with the piety and discipline of true Christian soldiers, the rosary as present as the arquebus—not to conquer, but to defend their families and their faith^[31].

A Century of Flourishing

From the mid-17th to the mid-18th century, the Thirty Peoples experienced a century of peace and prosperity remarkable in colonial America. The demographic curve of the Guaraní reductions, despite epidemics, attests to their vitality.

Data based on royal censuses and the synthesis by Magnus Mörner^[32]. The total number of Guaraní baptisms over the entire period (1610–1768) is estimated at over 700,000^[33].

Utopia or Theocracy? The European Debate

The experience fascinated Enlightenment Europe. For some, it was a realized utopia, a happy Christianity; for others, an infantilizing theocracy. The Italian historian Ludovico Antonio Muratori published in 1743 Il cristianesimo felice nelle missioni de' padri della Compagnia di Gesù nel Paraguai—“the happy Christianity”—which spread an idealized image of the reductions throughout Europe^[34]. Montesquieu saw in them the honor of humanity (see above). Even Voltaire, though hostile to the Jesuits, conceded in his Essay on the Manners:

"The establishment in Paraguai by the Spanish Jesuits alone appears in some respects the triumph of humanity; it seems to atone for the cruelties of the first conquerors." — Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations, ch. 154, 1756^[35]

The experience also divides historians: some see in it a close tutelage of the Fathers over the Guaraní, isolated from the colonial world, others a "state within the state" removed from the Crown's authority—readings to be examined on the basis of the evidence rather than conceded or rejected wholesale. As for the black legend of a "Jesuit empire" amassing hidden treasures, the inventories drawn up by the royal commission at the time of the expulsion revealed nothing of the kind—a finding noted even by the Protestant historian Robert Southey^[36].

The Treaty of Madrid (1750) and the Guaraní War

The end came from the policies of the European courts. The Treaty of Madrid, signed on January 13, 1750 between Spain and Portugal, redrew the South American border: Spain received the colony of Sacramento and ceded to Portugal the territories east of the Uruguay River, where the seven reductions (los Siete Pueblos) stood, inhabited by about thirty thousand Guaraní^[37]. Article XVI of the treaty thus ordered thirty thousand Christians to abandon their cities, churches, and lands to withdraw, with their missionaries, to lands that remained Spanish—it was the evacuated territories that became Portuguese, along with the very occupier that, through the bandeirantes, had raided them for a century.

The Guaraní refused. This led to the Guaraní War (guerra guaranítica, 1754-1756), in which the Indian militias of the seven communities, sometimes against the wishes of the Jesuits—torn between obedience to the king and loyalty to their flock—resisted the combined armies of Spain and Portugal.

Sepé Tiaraju and Caiboaté (1756)

The resistance had its hero: Sepé Tiaraju, corregidor (Indian magistrate) of the São Miguel reduction, to whom tradition attributes the cry, “This land has a master” (esta terra tem dono). He was killed in a skirmish on February 7, 1756. Three days later, on February 10, 1756, at the Battle of Caiboaté, a combined Spanish-Portuguese force of three thousand soldiers crushed the Guaraní: about 1,500 Indians fell, compared to four European deaths—a massacre rather than a battle^[38]. The flower of the Seven Communities was cut down; Guaraní Christendom would not recover.

The Expulsion (1767-1768)

The final blow was political. Throughout Enlightenment Catholic Europe—Portugal (1759), France (1764)—the Jesuits were expelled. By the royal decree of February 27, 1767, Charles III of Spain ordered the expulsion of the Society from all his realms, given force of law by the Pragmatic Sanction of April 2, 1767. In Paraguay, the order was carried out in 1767-1768 by Governor Francisco de Paula Bucareli^[39]. At that date, the Jesuit province of Paraguay counted twelve colleges and the University of Córdoba, and the Guaraní reductions—some thirty pueblos at their 1732 height—still gathered tens of thousands of Christian Indians. The Fathers left in silence, under escort; six years later, in 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the entire Society by the brief Dominus ac Redemptor.

After the Jesuits: Ruin

Entrusted to secular administrators and other orders, the reductions collapsed within a generation. Deprived of their protectors, once again subjected to forced labor and the corruption of officials, the Guaraní fled or died. The livestock disappeared, the fields returned to wilderness, the baroque churches crumbled. The 1801 census counted only 45,000 Indians in the former reductions, compared to 141,000 seventy years earlier^[40]. One of the most remarkable experiments in modern evangelization faded into abandonment.

An Authentic Christendom, Not a Colonial Facade

The blood of the martyrs and the fidelity of the Guaraní during the Guaraní War forbid reducing the missions to a mere colonial operation. What was at stake in Paraguay was the birth of a genuine indigenous Christendom: a people who received baptism, the Mass, the sacraments, and the saints—sealed by the martyrdom, recognized by the Church, of the three Jesuits of 1628. The resistance of the Guaraní during the Guaraní War, in which attachment to their churches and pueblos mingled with the defense of their lands, extends this witness without being identical to it. The reduction was, according to the Jesuit historian C. J. McNaspy, an attempt to build a Christian city in the forest^[41]—imperfect, but animated by real charity.

Inculturation Before Its Time

By its method—Guaraní language, music, art, Indian autonomy, defense against slavery—the mission in Paraguay anticipated by three centuries what the Council of Vatican II and the popes would call inculturation of the faith: proclaiming Christ to a culture without crushing it, allowing the "seeds of the Word" to grow from within—those truths and values already present in Guaraní culture, in the expression of Saint Justin taken up by the Council (Ad Gentes, 11). Like the Jesuits in Japan and China, the Fathers of Paraguay wagered that grace could espouse a people rather than destroy it. The table below situates Paraguay among the great Jesuit missions of the modern era^[42].

The Ruins, World Heritage Sites

What remains of the Thirty Peoples—church facades, cloisters, stone and wooden statues now claimed by the forest—are today part of the UNESCO World Heritage: the ruins of La Santísima Trinidad de Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue in Paraguay (listed in 1993), San Ignacio Miní and others in Argentina (1984), and São Miguel das Missões in Brazil (1983)^[43]. These stones bear witness to a mestizo Baroque—the "Guaraní Baroque"—where European art was reshaped by indigenous hands.

"The Mission," Cinema, and Memory

In 1986, the film The Mission by Roland Joffé, with music by Ennio Morricone, brought the story of the Guaraní War and the tragedy of the reductions handed over to Portugal to a wide audience. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes, it fixed in the contemporary imagination the image of the Jesuit as defender of the Indians—at the cost of historical simplifications, but with genuine spiritual power.

A Jesuit Pope from the Río de la Plata

Finally, the memory of the reductions lives on in the Church today in an unexpected way: the first Jesuit pope and first Latin American pope, Francis, was born in Buenos Aires, at the heart of the former province of Paraguay^[44].

From Saint Roque González to the ruins of Trinidad, from the Guaraní choirs of Zipoli to Joffé's film, the "happy land" of the Jesuits of Paraguay continues to challenge us: is it possible to proclaim the Gospel while truly loving a people, even to the point of dying for them?

• The Reductions of Paraguay — the social, economic, and political institution of the Guaraní pueblos.
• The Foundation of the Society of Jesus (1521–1556) — the missionary order at the origin of the adventure.
• The Catholic Counter-Reformation (1517–1648) — the great apostolic movement of which the missions were the spearhead.
• The Jesuit Missions in Japan (1549–1644) — the other great apostolic field of the Society.
• The Jesuit Missions in China (1582–1773) and The Chinese Rites Controversy — the question of cultural accommodation.