The Mission Monologues

Eighteenth-century Spanish Jesuits try to protect a remote South American tribe in danger of falling under the rule of pro-slavery Portugal.

So, your Holiness, now your priests are dead, and I am left alive. But in truth it is I who am dead, and they who live. For as always, your Holiness, the spirit of the dead will survive in the memory of the living.

With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the entire continent.

Your Holiness, the little matter that brought me here to the furthest edge of your light on Earth is now settled. The Indians are once more free to be enslaved by the Spanish and Portuguese settlers. I don't think that's hitting the right note. Begin again... Your Holiness, I write to you in this year of Our Lord 1758 from the southern continent of the Americas, from the town of Asunción, in the Province of La Plata, two weeks march from the great mission of San Miguel. These missions have provided a refuge for the Indians against the worst depredations of the settlers and have earned much resentment because of it. The noble souls of these indians incline towards music. Indeed, many a violin played in the academies of Rome itself has been made by their nimble and gifted hands. It was from these mission the Jesuit fathers carried the word of God to the high and undiscovered plateau to those Indians still existing in their natural state and received in return, martyrdom.

Your Holiness, a surgeon to save the body must often hack off a limb. But in truth nothing could prepare me for the beauty and the power of the limb that I had come here to sever.

I assure you, Father Gabriel, that the courts of Europe are a jungle in comparison with which your jungle here is a well-kept garden.

And you have the effrontery to tell me that this slaughter was necessary?

With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the whole continent. So it was that the Indians of the Guarani were brought finally to account to the everlasting mercy of God, and to the short-lived mercy of man.

So I had arrived in South America, my head replete with the matters of Europe. But I soon began to understand, for the first time, what a strange world I had been sent to judge.

This seeking to create a paradise on earth... how easily it offends. Your Holiness is offended. Because it may distract from that paradise which comes hereafter. The Spanish and Portuguese kings are offended... because a paradise of the poor is seldom pleasing to those who rule. And the Settlers here are offended for the same reason. So it was this burden I Carried to South America: To satisfy the Portuguese wish to enlarge their empire. To satisfy the Spanish desire that this would do them no harm... to satisfy Your Holiness... that these monarchs would threaten no more the power of the Church... and to ensure for you all... that the Jesuits here could no longer deny you these satisfactions.

Though I knew that everywhere in Europe the states were tearing at the authority of the Church, and though I knew well that to preserve itself there the Church must show its authority over the Jesuits here, I still couldn't help wondering whether these Indians would not have preferred that the sea and wind had not brought any of us to them.