Gathering Souls: Jesuit Missions and Missionaries in Oceania (1668–1945)

Brill's Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies

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This essay deals with the missionary work of the Society of Jesus in today’s Micronesia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Although the Jesuit missionaries wanted to reach Japan and other Pacific islands, such as the Palau and Caroline archipelagos, the crown encouraged them to stay in the Marianas until 1769 (when the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Philippines) to evangelize the native Chamorros as well as to reinforce the Spanish presence on the fringes of the Pacific empire. In 1859, a group of Jesuit missionaries returned to the Philippines, but they never officially set foot on the Marianas during the nineteenth century. It was not until the twentieth century that they went back to Micronesia, taking charge of the mission on the Northern Marianas along with the Caroline and Marshall Islands, thus returning to one of the cradles of Jesuit martyrdom in Oceania.
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Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, PhD (2001), SUNY at Stony Brook, is professor of Asian and Latin American Studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). He has published a great deal of monographs, articles, and edited books on ecclesiastical history of the Marianas and the Philippines, including (with David Atienza) Scars of Faith: Letters and Documents of the Mariana Islands’ Jesuit Missionaries and Martyrs (Chestnut Hill, MA: Institute of Jesuit Sources, forthcoming, 2019).
“This impressively erudite essay provides a condensed but informative history of Jesuit missionary engagement in Micronesia.”
John Barker, University of British Columbia. In: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 72, No. 1 (2021), pp. 200–201.

“Alexandre Coello de la Rosa offers a brief history of the Jesuit missions in Micronesia from arrival in the Marianas Islands in 1668 to the conclusion of World War II in 1945. The fifteen high-quality images, sixteen sections, over four hundred footnotes, and a bibliography of fourteen pages made for an instructive narrative. I recommend this book as an overview of the Jesuits in Micronesia. In addition, Coello’s wide use of scholars of Pacific Islands studies has much to teach a worldwide audience. The author introduces the global mission of the Society of Jesus and “global modernity in the Iberian colonial empires,” connecting histories of the Jesuits from the Pacific Ocean to Atlantic histories, the Spanish monarchy, and world history, all in a worthy endeavor.”
James B. Tueller, Brigham Young University, Hawaii. In: Journal of Jesuit Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2020), pp. 673–675.

Introduction
The Arrival of the Jesuits in the Philippines
The Marianas as Part of the Universal Christian Project
Gathering Souls at the Margins of the Spanish Empire
To Retain or Abandon the Marianas?
Corruption, Greed, and Misgovernment
New Spiritual and Geopolitical Configurations
The Baroque Theater of Power
Lights and Shadows: The Virgin of Our Lady of Light
A New Foothold in the Nineteenth-Century Carolines
Twentieth-Century Jesuits at the Crossroads of the New Pacific World Empires
Chuuk
Yap
Palau and Pohnpei
The Marshall Islands
Conclusion
All interested in the Jesuit evangelization of the Oceanic islands, and particularly in the history of the Mariana Islands and the Carolines from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
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