Black Robes in Paraguay: The Success of the Guaraní Missions Hastened the Abolition of the Jesuits (review)

For quite some time the Paraguay Jesuit missions have captivated the imagination of scholars and, especially after the movie The Mission (1987), the general public. But the Paraguay mission experiment is still relatively little known in the English-speaking world. William Jaenike’s Black Robes in Paraguay bridges the gap between scholarly works written for the academic world and popularized versions geared for the general reading public. The author relies heavily on older classical authors such as Robert Southey and R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1901), as well as on more modern historians such as Philip Caraman to re-create the story of the missions. Although his major thesis—that the Paraguay missions hastened the expulsion and suppression of the Jesuits—is open to debate, there is no question that the missions played a role in the downfall of the Jesuits.

Jaenike provides an overview of the origins of the Jesuits and the Guaraní missions, their economic success, and their defense against the Portuguese slave raiders. He fills in the international background with specific reference to tensions between Spain and Portugal and the treaty of Madrid, which was the first step toward the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish America. The author also places this story in the larger context of the Enlightenment and anti-Jesuit sentiment in the Bourbon courts in Europe. His chapter on the Jesuits who lived in Prussia under Frederick the Great and in Russia under Catherine the Great is most interesting and well developed.

Although the author is not a professional historian nor a specialist, he successfully weaves together a complex story that involves Jesuits, overbearing bishops, slave raiders, court conspirators, French deists, and enlightened despots. But he would have done well to consult standard Latin American histories to avoid a few glaring errors. He has Antonio de Montesinos delivering his famous sermon in Puerto Rico (it was Santo Domingo), and he refers to the eighteenth-century commoners’ rebellions as “communist.” These small details aside, Jaenike has produced a very enjoyable and easily readable account of the early Jesuits, the rise and fall of the Paraguay missions, as well as the aftermath and consequences.