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36 chapter 2 Confessing the Power to Heal o n April 11, 1593, the city of Santiago was preparing to celebrate the imminent arrival of the first Jesuits in Chile. The occasion was a joyous one. The settlers, impoverished after decades of warfare against the Mapuche people, and separated from the cultural and administrative centers in Peru by the inhospitable Atacama Desert, were eager to welcome the Jesuits. After several unsuccessful attempts, the Chilean authorities had finally convinced both the Society’s superiors and the Spanish king to send a small group of priests to their southernmost frontier of the empire to take care of the education of the conquistadors’ offspring. This fact was somewhat vaguely acknowledged by the Peruvian provincial, Juan Sebastián, who sent seven priests to Chile“to help their neighbors by means of the ministries regularly used by the Society of Jesus.”1 Given the fact that elsewhere in South America the Jesuits had usually founded a college or a residence as their base of operations, the citizens of Santiago could reasonably expect them to do the same in their city, thus giving their sons the education they sorely needed. Having been warned of the festivities being prepared in their honor, the leader of the Jesuit expedition, Baltasar Piñas, decided to make a show of Jesuit modesty and shunned the homage. The group therefore entered Santiago at dawn on the next day and went directly to the Dominican convent, where they had been offered lodging until they could find a place to reside. When later that day they received the official visit of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of the city, the Jesuits refused to reveal their plans until they could speak to all the citizens . That occasion arose a week later. On Easter Sunday, Piñas delivered a sermon to the Spanish population of Santiago in which he presented himself and his six companions. Invoking the order’s legislation and its founder’s wishes, he stated that unlike other religious orders, the Jesuit way of proceeding involved traveling to all corners of the world to work for the salvation of souls. He added that they were also aware of the poverty of Chile and of the city of Santiago in particular—a product, he acknowledged, of the “long and stubborn war that it Confessing the Power to Heal 37 had endured for over forty years” against the Mapuche people. Therefore, they had decided not to establish themselves in Santiago nor in any other city for that matter, to avoid imposing the burden of their presence on the neighbors. Instead, they would travel around the country, tending to the spiritual needs of the Spaniards , but also keeping their freedom to travel into Mapuche-controlled territory to evangelize the natives.2 Clearly, the newly arrived priests were choosing missionary over pedagogical ministries. Piñas’s sermon shows how profoundly the experience gained by the order during their first decades in Peru had altered the way in which the Jesuits conceived of their mission. As we saw in the previous chapter, the instructions issued by Borgia to the Jesuits sent to Peru in 1567 had made clear that pedagogy and preaching to the Spanish living in the cities should be the main tasks taken up by the Society in South America. However, both the clash with Viceroy Toledo over the doctrinas and the missionary program pushed by Acosta during his tenure as Peruvian superior put the evangelization of native communities at the forefront of the Jesuit agenda. Understandably, Piñas’s declaration of intentions caused a considerable stir among the santiaguinos, who had expected the Jesuits to reside in the city and open a college for their sons. The citizens rallied together and successfully lobbied for a Jesuit residence and college in Santiago, gathering enough money to buy two houses and to endow the nascent college with the resources needed to ensure its viability.3 Despite the opening of the College of San Miguel, the Jesuits pushed forward their missionary plans. The Jesuit Luis de Valdivia, who would later have a leading role in defining the colonial strategy toward the Mapuche in the early seventeenth century, set out immediately to work with the natives who lived in the city as servants of the Spaniards. Applying the lessons learned by the Society in Juli,Valdivia became both teacher and student of the Indians, instructing them in Catholic dogma while at the same time learning their language from them...

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