The Illinois, particularly the Kaskaskia, are well known to have converted in large numbers to Catholicism under the guidance of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, another lesser-known missionary society, the Missions Étrangères, also evangelized among the Illinois. The juxtaposition of these two French Catholic missionary societies working among the same Native nation provides an ideal case study to understand what aspects of Catholicism Native people appreciated and rejected. Converted Illinois people chose a specific practice of Catholicism that upheld fundamental values, enhanced gender roles and kinship connections in Illinois society, and strengthened their relationship to the secular aspects of the French empire.

This article offers an interpretation of the actions of the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque as bishop of the first Catholic diocese in Asia. The analysis considers the local impacts of the episcopal government and the connectivities of its action, particularly through comparison with similar processes adopted in Spanish America. Based on a wide range of historical sources and cross-referencing them, it investigates how Albuquerque governed in three stages: first, describing the enormous challenges he faced; second, outlining his profile; and third, proposing a reconstruction of his government and the implications it had on the dissemination of Catholicism. The hypothesis raised at the outset is that, in Asia, the Bishop of Goa built a structure that was inspired by the matrix and dynamics of the Portuguese dioceses, which were then adapted to the specificities of the local situation. Accordingly, it is necessary to review the thesis of Charles Boxer, for whom the dynamics of evangelization in the spaces overseen by the Iberian empires from the 16th century onwards were generated essentially by the missionaries from the regular clergy and by the monarchies. By shifting the focus to the actions of a single bishop, the article demonstrates that Albuquerque, the diocesan church he created from scratch, and the secular clergy should not be underestimated.