Jesuit Heritage - Missions of a Lost Utopia

[Erasmus]

Larry Rohter, chief of The Time's bureau in Rio, narrates his trip to the Jesuitic Missions in South America:

In South America, Missions of a Lost Utopia


By LARRY ROHTER
Published: December 3, 2006
THE sun was already low in the sky when I arrived at the 17th-century Jesuit mission known as Trinidad, deep in the back country of southern Paraguay. It was late on a warm Saturday afternoon in October, and I was heading across a grass plaza to the main church, intent on examining a richly ornamented frieze depicting chubby angels playing musical instruments. Suddenly, a Baroque chamber concerto erupted from hidden loudspeakers.




As I paused to listen, the mission caretakers told me that the music was written not by a European composer but by the Guaraní Indians who lived for 150 years under Jesuit tutelage on missions spread over an area larger than California in what today is Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. And with that, a vanished world instantly came alive.
The Guaraní missions are all that remain of a 17th- and 18th-century utopian social experiment — call it theocratic communism for lack of a better term — that has fascinated thinkers for hundreds of years. Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu all wrote about the missions, praising the egalitarian impulse behind them.
From the time the Jesuits were expelled from them in the 1760s, the missions began to decline and even vanish. In our own time, right-wing military dictatorships ruled all three countries well into the 1980s, and viewed any radical social experiment, even one from the past based on Christianity, as something to be discouraged.
Thanks in part to Roland Joffe’s 1986 movie “The Mission,” there was a renewed surge of interest in the movement in the 1980s. Still, it was only in recent years that Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil began to restore and promote the missions — which, at their peak, had more than 100,000 residents and produced not just music and books, but also metal utensils and food for export — as tourist destinations.
Even now, the 30 existing missions are in widely varying states of repair, as I found during a weeklong journey through what was once known as the Jesuit Province of Paraquaria, and the infrastructure is hardly luxurious. I managed to visit more than half of the missions, also known in Spanish as “reducciones,” or “reductions,” on a roundabout tour that ended at Iguazú Falls, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet and the most dramatic scenes in “The Mission” were filmed.

QUITE quickly, I learned that all the missions — except the last to be built, in Santo Angelo in what is now Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state — were laid out in identical fashion. A large church, classrooms and workshops dominated the southern side of a square, where community life was centered. The other three sides were occupied by family dwellings and by the cabildo, where the Guaraní town council, led by the chiefs, had its offices.
The point in visiting as many of the missions as possible was not just to be able to see the differences in style of the various Jesuit architects — some Spanish, others Italian or German — and the Guaraní artists and craftsmen they trained. Sadly, no single mission survived intact after the expulsion of the Jesuits, meaning that to obtain a complete picture of what a mission looked like then, it is necessary to visit several of them.
For instance, the mission at Jesús de Tavarangue, a few miles from my starting point in Trinidad, is the only one at which a bell tower, some 160 feet high, still stands. On a quiet Sunday morning, I climbed to the top and immediately understood that the commanding view of the rolling countryside it offered had both military and religious functions: not only to summon the faithful to Mass as often as three times a day, but also to warn residents when the bandeirantes, the dreaded slave traders from Brazil who raided the missions, were approaching.
The mission that struck me as the most charming of the seven in Paraguay, though, was San Cosme y San Damián, in the far south of the country. A modern town of the same name, with 3,000 inhabitants, has grown up around the mission square. But in contrast to Encarnación, the largest town in the region, it has done so without destroying or even intruding on the church, which is still used for worship — aside from graffiti on a front wall that read “Irma, I love you, Tito.”
Inside the church, I was greeted by 21 statues of saints arrayed along the side walls, including the single most arresting and peculiar religious image I saw at any mission. St. Michael the Archangel slaying Satan is a common enough sight in Latin American churches, but this was the first time I had seen the Devil portrayed as a hermaphroditic being — clearly male from the waist down and female from the waist up.

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/12/0...html?th&emc=th

Read more:


http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/12/0...ed=2&th&emc=th
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/12/0...ed=3&th&emc=th
http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/12/0...ed=4&th&emc=th


São Miguel das Missões, Brazil.