Jesuit Paraguayan Reducciones

The New York Times isn't always purveying evil through its journalistic endeavors, as this piece on the social experiment called the reductions in English in what is now Paraguay.

The destruction of the Jesuit Order in the 1760s sealed the fate of the Catholic Church as a victim of Enlightenment excesses that led to the French Revolution, atheism as a philosophy and a whole host of evils. The miraculous revival of the Jesuits thanks to Catherine the Great is a miracle of God's providence.

The Jesuits were simply too smart and too skilled for a bunch of benighted Italian prelates who dominated the Papacy, and when Matteo Ricci, SJ, convinced the Chinese Emperor to convert to Catholicism, the Pope vetoed the one proviso the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom had stipulated, the use of the Chinese language in the Roman liturgy.

The Jesuit Relations covered the entire known world in the 17th and early 18th centuries, including the discovery of ginseng growing wild in the American Middle West which the Jesuits speculated could be marketed in their Chinese missions, where a shortage of ginseng was driving up prices. Their worldwide intelligence network was one of the reasons for their downfall.

The Italian popes venality and parochial POV doomed the Church to its present marginal position in world affairs, although two non-Italian popes in succession indicate the dead hand of the Curia has not yet squelched Catholic thought and philosophy.

Right now, I'm trying to get my daughter into Boston College or Georgetown, and the Jesuits' monumental acheivements persist today in their outstanding educational efforts.

Ask Jesuit grad Charles de Gaulle, now deceased, or the very alive Bill Clinton, a perfect example of Jesuitical thinking!