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The Missionary Career of Philipp Anton Segesser
- University of New Mexico Press
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• xiii The Missionary Career of Philipp Anton Segesser in the very last year of the seventeenth century, a ten-year-old boy in the city of Lucerne, Switzerland, announced to his parents that he wanted to become a Jesuit missionary saving souls in faraway lands. Inspired by the successes of Saint Francis Xavier (1506–1552) in India during the sixteenth century, Philipp Segesser was steadfast in pursuing this career goal. In 1708, after completing studies in the Jesuit schools of Lucerne, he entered the Jesuit college at Landsberg, Bavaria, as a novice in the Society of Jesus. He attended the Jesuit university at Ingolstadt and was ordained a priest in 1721. After several years of on-the-job training in Altötting, Neuburg an der Donau, and Straubing, he was assigned as a people’s missionary at Ellwangen on the front lines of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in southern Germany. During all his years of training, Philipp Segesser campaigned vigorously for an overseas missionary assignment, petitioning Superior General Michelangelo Tamburini for one in January 1717 and March 1719 (Schmuck 2004: 88–89). In 1726 he was selected to go to the Jesuit missions in Paraguay (Hausberger 1995: 298; Schmuck 2004: 93; Letters 13, 34), but that was not to be, as he sadly reported to his father (Letter 14). Unbeknown to young Philipp, his fate was being decided by events unfolding on the remote northern frontier of New Spain in northwestern Mexico, where Benito Crespo y Monroy was appointed bishop of Durango in 1723. During a tour of inspection of the huge territory under his jurisdiction in 1726, Bishop Crespo discovered a severe shortage of missionaries in the Pimería Alta on the northern fringe of his diocese. He wrote to King Philip V of Spain on 22 August 1727 urging that three new missionaries be dispatched to northwestern New Spain. The king agreed and ordered Viceroy Juan de Acuña y Manrique to take appropriate action. On 27 April 1730 the viceroy instructed Bishop Crespo to establish three Jesuit missions in the Pimería Alta (Hammond 1929). As a result of this ponderous and long-distance The Missionary Career of Philipp Anton Segesser xiv bureaucratic activity, that ten-year-old boy, now Father Philipp Segesser, was one of the three new Jesuit missionaries Bishop Crespo welcomed to Durango on 19 July 1731. In May 1729 Father Segesser finally received word of his acceptance for overseas missionary service (Letter 20). He traveled through Munich to Genoa and on to Cádiz in Spain by ship along the Mediterranean coast, suffering terribly from seasickness all the way (Letters 21, 23). He spent more than a year in Spain, learning Spanish, waiting for a ship, and fulfilling the Spanish requirement that foreigners spend about a year being vetted in Spain before being allowed to travel to the New World (Treutlein 1937). He left Puerto de Santa María and the Bahía de Cádiz on 16 November 1730, passed by the Canary Islands, anchored briefly off Santo Domingo, spent three months in Havana, and finally arrived at Veracruz in New Spain on 19 April 1731. After the difficult trip over the mountains to Puebla de los Angeles and Mexico City, he traveled with Father Johann Baptist Gratzhofer and Father Ignaz Xaver Keller north from Tepotzotlán in central Mexico to Durango for the historic meeting with Bishop Crespo. Although Father Segesser was very busy in Durango collecting material to transport to his mission, he took time out on 1 August, less than two weeks after being welcomed by the bishop, to write to his younger brother Ulrich Franz Joseph, city councilman of Lucerne (Letter 46). He joyfully reported that he was finally realizing his boyhood dream, a dream he had kept alive because once, while he was serving Mass at Ingolstadt, the Virgin Mary nodded twice when he asked her if he would be sent to the Indies (Letter 20). After more than six years of petitions (Letter 11), disappointments (Letters 13, 14), delays (Letters 26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37), and difficult travels (Letters 21–23, 37, 42), the ten-year-old boy in him could not resist the desire to share with his family the excitement and promise of it all. Thus began his thirty-oneyear career as a Jesuit missionary in the Sonoran missions of San Xavier del Bac, San Ignacio de Cabórica, and los Santos Angeles de Guevavi in the Pimería Alta and, after...