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Gathering souls. Jesuit missions and missionaries in Oceania (1668–1945). By Alexandre Coello de la Rosa. (Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies.) Pp. vi + 115 incl. 15 colour and black-and-white figs. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019. €70 (paper). 978 90 04 39485 8

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Gathering souls. Jesuit missions and missionaries in Oceania (1668–1945). By Alexandre Coello de la Rosa. (Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies.) Pp. vi + 115 incl. 15 colour and black-and-white figs. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019. €70 (paper). 978 90 04 39485 8

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2020

John Barker*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

This impressively erudite essay provides a condensed but informative history of Jesuit missionary engagement in Micronesia. The bulk of the text focuses on Jesuit activities in Guam and the Marianas from their initial efforts to convert the Chamorros in 1668 to their expulsion from the islands in 1769 as the Society came under attack and eventual suspension in the wider Roman Catholic Church. Coello de la Rosa situates the Jesuit mission to the Chamorros ‘within the context of early Iberian expansion’ (p. 1), giving attention to the intersections between secular and religious agents in the expansion of the Spanish empire in the Americas and Oceania. Specifically, the Jesuits sought to impose the aldeamento system in Guam, ‘the practice of setting Christianizing indigenous people of diverse origins in supervised villages’ (p. 10). This served the purposes of administrators appointed from Manila, far more interested in profiting from exploiting local labour than in saving souls. ‘Spanish colonization, of which Christianity was a fundamental aspect, was experienced by the native Chamorros as an exercise in exploitation, forcefulness, and humiliation’ that served to undermine Jesuit teachings of God as a ‘loving being’ (p. 24). Coello de la Rosa acknowledges Chamorros agency as well as tensions between the Jesuit missionaries and the mostly corrupt administrators; but his account deals primarily with the severe violence of the Spanish occupation which, along with imported diseases, reduced the population to a fragment of its former size. The briefer, final chapters of the book present a survey of Jesuit activities across Micronesia from the restoration of the Society in the mid-nineteenth century to 1945, a period when colonial control passed from the Spanish to the Germans and then to the Japanese.