Free The Jesuits by S. W. J. O'Malley

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits in the northern region of Spanish America—Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba—were stationed in 40 colleges and residences and in 114 missions. Staffing these establishments were about 680 Jesuits.
    Ongoing financing of the schools was a problem here as elsewhere. The rents and products from the Jesuits’ holdings in the countryside were enlisted and organized to offset school costs. The Jesuits operated ranches, plantations, and fulling mills in which agricultural activity and the raising of livestock were often combined with an industry, such as sugar production and cloth making. For such institutions to function, waterworks were required to provide for drinking, washing, and manufacturing as well as for the movement of goods, which meant the construction of canals, dikes, dams, and mills. Some missions operated by the Jesuits contained potteries and silversmitheries, and others produced high-quality religious images and musical instruments, including organs.
    The reductions, self-sufficient and self-governing communities of Amerindians, are of course the best known of the Jesuit enterprises in Latin America. Although the two or three Jesuits residing in them had the final word, the immediate authority for governance belonged to a council of the natives that possessed legislative, executive, and judicial power over perhaps as many as ten thousand inhabitants of a given reduction. These were not small settlements!
    Each reduction contained flour mills, bakeries, slaughterhouses, and similar institutions, with an ample water supply and a sophisticated sewer system. The church, the most impressive building in a reduction, was the site of elaborate liturgies. At their peak, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, the urban development of the reductions equaled or surpassed that of neighboring cities, with the exception of Buenos Aires and Córdoba. The heaviest penalty for anyone convicted of criminal activity was ten years’ imprisonment. The death penalty did not exist, which was unique for the era.
    In China the Jesuits attained the height of their success during the reign of Emperor Kangxi (reign 1661–1722), the longest rule in Chinese history. Highly intelligent and inquisitive, Kangxi was attracted to his Jesuit courtiers for their knowledge and personal gifts. In his youth the Jesuits acted as his tutors and later served him in several important instances, which included helping him quell a major rebellion and facilitating for him his relationship with western powers. In gratitude for these and other services, Kangxi issued in 1692 an edict of toleration of Christians, which inaugurated the most promising dozen or so years in the entire history of the mission. The edict and the excellent relations between the emperor and the Jesuits led Louis Le Comte (1655–1728), aFrench Jesuit returned to France from China, to publish a eulogistic biography of Kangxi as an extraordinarily wise and prudent ruler, a philosopher-king.
    The French Jesuit missionaries convinced the emperor of the usefulness of a full-scale map of his domains. Kangxi undertook the project and, with the Jesuit cartographers and a large entourage, traveled to different parts of his empire to oversee it. The project turned out to be the largest cartographic endeavor based on exact measurements ever undertaken anywhere in the world. Similar projects in France and Russia, for instance, were not completed until decades later. In the project’s final stages, the French Jesuit Pierre Jartoux (1669–1720) led efforts to combine regional maps to produce a large overview that enabled the emperor to take in his vast empire in a single glance.
    In Europe the Jesuits continued to draw large congregations to their churches, continued in many places to send their teams of missionaries to villages in the hinterlands, and continued as chaplains in prisons and hospitals. Their Marian