Pegleglooker wrote:
Wild idea... " IF " ( playing devils advocate here ) did mine all this treasure and they sealed up a ton... Why wouldn't they cut a deal toady and go get it Meaning cut a deal with the new government or local small town authority. Or... how do we know that thru the years they haven't already dug it up
A fair question, and one would think that a pragmatic General of the Order would not hesitate to make such arrangements whenever necessary. However it appears that they have never made any kind of deals like this. One of the reasons I have heard, is that they feel no reason to make a deal for a percentage of the treasures, when they own it 100%. Remember too that the official position is that they never did any mining and had no treasures, so if they ever agreed publicly to any kind of deal in which they would admit ownership of some treasure, it would prove they had been lying for centuries.
A thing to keep in mind is that the Society of Jesus does not "think" in the terms of a single lifetime - they are patient in the extreme and
can afford to wait for centuries if necessary to achieve their aims. So while it would make sense to you or I, if we had a great treasure and could not get it - to make a deal with a person or group that could rather than take the secret to the grave - but to the Society, there is no need to do this when all they have to do is wait until they have full access.
Where is mi amigo Lamar? He is fluent in the Jesuit history and positions on this subject, I am sure he would love to weigh in. Just an observation...
Gilbert, I am among those who are convinced that the Jesuits were in fact involved in mining in the Americas, and realize that much of the evidence is marginal at best - what the skeptics demand is some kind of absolute documentation from the Jesuits themselves, which is not going to materialize. We have good reason to suspect that at least some documents have been either hidden or deliberately destroyed. One example of a particular type of document that is strangely MISSING are WILLS and execution of estates; we know that the padres were involved in making many last wills and testaments, yet we have only a single example today, and that one is from a person despised by the Jesuits as an enemy. Cactusjumper and (I would guess) Lamar are quick to dismiss the evidence we find in such sources like the example you posted, perhaps un-fairly; how can we say, as Joe (Cactusjumper) does, that the statements in such a government-published source are just the result of "gossip"? There is a reason why we keep finding these traces, from what might be termed "secondary" sources, as the old saying goes - "where there is a lot of smoke...." I do not dismiss these evidences and would suggest that any treasure hunter serious about searching for lost mines do a bit of research into them before dismissing them as well.
Oroblanco
Meaning cut a deal with the new government or local small town authority. Or... how do we know that thru the years they haven't already dug it up 
