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Jesuit Missions in Baja California*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
Whatever history may record about his personal life, there is no denying that Pope Alexander VI was among the most efficient and far-sighted of the Church’s long list of vicars. Perhaps nowhere is this fact more obvious than in the pontiff’s concern and zeal for the missions. In a decree addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, issued at Rome on May 4, 1493, the pope stated, in part:
We order you in virtue of holy obedience (for as you promise, so we do not doubt you will do, in your noble dedication and royal magnanimity) that you dispatch to the designated mainlands and islands virtuous and God-fearing men endowed with training, experience, and skill, to instruct the natives and inhabitants before mentioned and to imbue them with the same Christian faith and sound morals, using all speed in the premises.
With this and subsequent papal mandates, the Spanish monarchs inaugurated the Christianization and colonization of the New World.
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1967
Footnotes
The author gratefully acknowledges the critical observations of the distinguished Jesuit historian, Father Ernest J. Burrus, of Saint Louis University.
References
1 Alexander VI to Ferdinand and Isabella, Rome, May 4, 1493. Reproduced in Eugene Shiels, W. S. J., King and Church (Chicago, 1961), p. 81.Google Scholar
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26 V. g. “Alabado sea el Santísimo Sacramento del Altar! Bendita sea la Limpia y Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora María Santisima sin mancha de pecado original!“
27 Atole was a mush or gruel made from corn flour.
28 Pozole was corn cooked with bits of meat.
29 Father Jacob Baegert, S. J., as quoted in Ursula Schaefer, op. cit., p. 158.
30 The Our Father, for example, offered untold difficulties since the Baja California Indians lacked nine of the words needed to properly express that simple oration.
31 Bolton, “The Black Robes …,” p. 280.
32 Salvatierra had established a foundation at San Juan Londo in March of 1699 on the site of Atondo’s San Isidro but it remained chiefly a visita.
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