The Success of the Guarani Missions Hastened the Abolition of the Jesuits

This historical saga of love, savage violence, and betrayal chronicles the Jesuit mission work among the Guarani people of South America.
Written for armchair historians it is the story of the Jesuit defense of the Guarani in the mission communities as the Portuguese and Spanish
slavers descended on Paraguay. The Jesuits resistance efforts to protect stone-age Indians in their missions 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.

320 pp. Softcover.