Hola amigos,
I guess no one is willing to try to reconcile the situation in Pimeria Alta as found by father Garces, with the mission Indians apparently totally un-educated in Christian doctrine even after eighty years of Jesuit proselytizing? In other words, silence means assent, that our skeptics find this situation completely to be expected, since the Jesuits spent eighty years trying to catechize and Christianize the Indians, left, and after eleven months time, these Indians had simply and
completely forgotten everything?
To our skeptics - do you acknowledge that the Jesuits had mines in Mexico?
We have gone over the evidence, there is considerably more but I am sure it would be as quickly dismissed as the rest, so let us point up that issue - the Jesuits had mines! Were they allowed to have mines? No! This was posted long ago here:
Previously, it has been stated that the Jesuit Precept against mining or having any knowledge (direct or indirect) was first put to paper in 1747, but I have found that to be inaccurate. Found in a random mission was a Precept from Father Provincial Francisco de Arteaga (1699-1702). This would fall right in line with the Jesuit Agreement with King Charles III to have free reign over Northern New Spain with a restriction against Mining. It reads:
No one will possess knowledge about mining either directly or indirectly; even if his intention is to have a general knowledge about everything, such knowledge would fall under this precept.
This precept was again restated in the precepts of Father Provincial Andres Javier Garcia (25 June 1747). It reads:
No one will work mines. This includes the prohibition that no one will have any knowledge about the matter of mining either directly or indirectly. The intention of the precept is to include all forms of knowledge or interpretations that could even fall within the same precept.
So, our FIRST official NO MINING Regulation was in 1699. Since this WAS an Ecclesiastical Precept, for a Jesuit Priest to mine OR HAVE ANY KNOWLEDGE OF MINING (at least, I believe, displaying any knowledge of mining) would have been a sin! It would have meant breaking his vow of OBEDIENCE. Above all the vows a Jesuit is required to take, the Vow of Obedience is the most important.
http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/t...jesuit-treasures-they-real-3.html#post1642769
We now know that even the temporal records of the Jesuit mines,
would not be listed in the official reports made to the Spanish government, for the items to be reported were prescribed, and
covered only agricultural products, as well as the number of people. It was against the law for ANY priests or nuns to be mining, and this law was repeated which can only mean that the law was not being obeyed, and we know for a fact that it was not, as the study proved the Jesuits owned and operated mines, including as a part of the California Fund to help support the Jesuit missions there. So it was against the Jesuit Precepts, against the direct orders of the General of the Order in repeated letters and this covered ALL forms of commerce, against the laws of Spain, and yet we know they had mines!
How does this square with that vow of obedience? <
Not to mention the vow of perpetual poverty?>
We also know that the letters of the Jesuits can not be expected to contain any "convicting" statements, for
ALL of their mail was opened and read by the Spanish officials, both coming and going; this helps explain why the strange and otherwise puzzling orders for Jesuits NOT to put things into writing, or to write in Latin, which most people cannot read. Yet even so, we have that statement from father Segesser, about working the mines in the "silver mountains", which must have slipped through, and yes
Segesser worked a sizable part of his career in Arizona.
How could the Jesuits have had "illicit" mines, right under the noses of Spanish soldiers, we have pondered, the answer is that the laws and rules were simply
NOT ENFORCED; the
mines were considered the property of the Indians and the Missions, and the Colleges, so were a 'dodge' about the laws and rules against priests having mines, we know that the Indians could not own property and the padres were their legal 'guardians' hence
this amounted to a major loophole for the padres to have mines. As was posted earlier, the priest could literally stand in a silver mine, holding a bar of silver just smelted from the ore, and state with a clear conscience that he has no silver mine! Technically the mines belonged to the Missions and Colleges, exploiting a loophole that excluded all religious clergy from having mines.
We have posted repeated references from the early American prospectors who rediscovered old Jesuit mines, including statements that they found the mines by the aid of Jesuit records found in the missions, records which naturally are not among the holdings of the Park Service today; and this is rejected wholesale. I must wonder why then, these early prospectors would have
made up such stories? What did they gain by making up a story that they had found mines by use of Jesuit records found in the old missions? I say that these statements are certainly NOT DISPROVEN, and ought not be rejected out of hand. Neither is this the product of fevered treasure writers imaginations.
Another issue raised by the skeptics, especially concerned Tumacacori, but would likewise apply to Arivaca and Sonoita; that there was no Jesuit priest assigned to them as a resident priest, and by extension, there could not have been any kind of mining going on since there was no resident priest. This reasoning is flawed, for the priests of the 'main' missions certainly did visit each of the visita churches that were allocated to each main mission, sometimes irregularly, but in the priests absence, trusted local Indians known as Temastianes, would lead the Indians in prayers, and all of the missions had overseers and foremen to keep the Indians hard at work. In fact one of the main complaints by most of the tribes in the various revolts against the missions and Spaniards, included that they were being overworked by the padres. So even at a remote visita like Arivaca, which might only be visited by the priests from Guevavi a few times a year, the life and enterprises of the mission pressed forward year round. In fact, one of the silver mines associated with the Arivaca visita later proved to have ore that ran over 900 ounces of silver per ton, for thousands of tons of ore mined by the Americans whom rediscovered it, and this would hardly be considered "okay grade" ore. This was not even the richest ore found at this mine, some was truly 'bonanza' grade. We might also note that the mines of Arivaca were noted to have been shut down in 1767 (source captain Anza) the very year the Jesuits left, and not re-opened for some time later. If those mines around Arivaca really belonged to Spaniards, why on Earth would they suddenly shut down, the instant that the Jesuits departed?
If we try to assign those early Jesuit mines to some unknown, mystery Spaniards, then who or whom were they? There are pretty good records of the Spanish miners for most of Mexico, yet there is very little relating to what occurred in Arizona; the only considerable mining by Spaniards being at the Planchas de Plata, which ticked off some Jesuit padres whom felt this should have belonged to them; there was some minor copper smelting at Tubac too, which may date to after the Jesuits (no way to know for certain) so just who was mining Salero, the Alta, etc? Why would not a Spaniard, file a claim on (denounce) a mine he discovered?
In my view, we have a clear chain here - the numerous sources that attribute the earliest mining to the Jesuits, the statements by the first American prospectors that they located former Jesuit mines, the tremendous wealth of the Jesuits in Mexico and around the world, even statements from the Jesuits themselves like Nentvig and Segesser clearly showing that mines were very much a part of their missions system, where such mines could be found of course; the mission systems were expected to become fully self-sustaining and this meant that the missionaries should have been looking for ways and means for these wild Indians to become civilized and productive members of the Spanish colonial world. The fact that the Franciscans found the former Jesuit mission Indians to have virtually no knowledge of Catholicism helps support the case that the Jesuit padres were far too busy with all of their commercial enterprises, which included mining, ranching and farming. The alternate scenario, with the Jesuits as mainly focused on saving souls, simply will not fit the evidence.
I realize this is so much more wasted virtual ink (and time) as applied to our skeptics, but for our readers, hopefully it should help in making
your own conclusions about the questions posed for this thread; Jesuit Treasures, Are They Real?
Springfield wrote
We can believe the magazine stories, if we want to, putting gullibility issues aside. Humans are quite willing to die defending their beliefs, but unfortunately, that doesn't make those beliefs true.
How many treasure magazines do you own Springfield?
Oroblanco
The modern historians almost never mention those mines owned openly by the Jesuits or if mentioned at all, it is a passing notice. Not to mention the rich ornaments recorded BY Jesuits as being in ALL of their missions, including the remote and small ones, which were not to be seen when the Franciscans took over - what happened to that stuff?
NO 
