JESUIT TREASURES - ARE THEY REAL?

Thank You deducer. It was your question of the Golden Age that sent me down that road.
 

Has there been mission creep, or do we surmise that they haven't changed goals and methods?

Here is what they are all about today.

I dug this out of the recycle bin for you all - notice it has never been out of the cellophane mailer.

sailaway said:
What is the Jesuit Creed?


this from the reformation secrets
Secret Instruction of the Jesuits -


The Engineer Corps of Hell
by Edwin A. Sherman
Secretary of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in California
published in 1882
rewritten from:
View attachment 1018605
Very Rev. Claudio Acquaviva, S.J.'s (the 5th Superior General of the Society of Jesus) manual for Jesuit spiritual directors appeared at the Giuntine press Florence, 1600. It contains his Jesuit dictum: Fortiter in re suaviter in modo
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Interesting post Sailaway, one of the most striking comments within the article jumped out at me:

This does not mean, I am sure, that we are entering a golden age when old legends and prejudices will once and for all be laid to rest, but there is no denying the new openness. I am speaking, of course, about serious history, not the sometimes vicious drivel about the Jesuits (some of it written by Jesuits themselves or former Jesuits) to be found in abundance on the Internet and in bookstores.
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<emphasis mine, not in the article>

The other eye opener, coming from a Jesuit author, was this:

I would go so far as to say that integrated into their pastoral, ecclesial and religious mission was a cultural and civic mission. That latter mission was never articulated in their normative documents, which is one reason why it has never been systematically addressed, but it is not for that reason less important. That mission, I propose, has implications for Jesuit spirituality and how we study it.
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and less of a surprise but still interesting,

But another self-definition was already in the making when the Jesuits began to operate schools, a decision that changed almost every aspect of their life and work, though they took little account of it explicitly. They acquired huge properties, for instance, and engaged in sometimes frantic fundraising to keep their academic institutions afloat.
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Part of the answer to the main question of this topic is rooted in the Mission system itself, and our modern revisionists seem to have ignored what the "mission" of the Mission reduccion system had as a main goal - that these "wild" and "heathen" Indians living on the frontiers of the colonized areas, were to be converted to Catholicism, at least in appearance, taught to speak Spanish, to help protect the inner colonial areas from the even wilder and more dangerous tribes living beyond the frontier Indians, and to become self supporting quasi-Spanish 'colonies' themselves! This goal of self support was highly important to the Spanish (and French, Portuguese etc) for the Crown did not intend to be paying financial support to the Mission Indians forever, it was expected that after ten years; a time span that seems to have rarely ever been "enough" time for the Missionaries did their best to keep extending that period of time of 'grace' from the Crown, so that "their" Indians did not have to pay taxes, the lands were not seized by the govt to be sold to Spanish colonists, their Indians not used for the Encomienda forced labor system and the properties of the Mission likewise not "secularized". Secularized meaning valuable properties seized by the govt and sold for cash to whomever had money.

All of the missions were expected to become self supporting. That is important, and the padres were thus expected to find and develop commercial enterprises that the wild/tame Indians would be thus able to support themselves and pay taxes. This meant in many cases livestock raising, farming, fishing (as for pearls and fish) even salt mining and very definitely mining of precious metals. Each mission had different assets or possibilities for that self-supporting goal, so that in French colonial America the for-profit enterprise was often furs. Hence we find Nentvig's description of Sonora, with the various Missions having various commercial enterprises, including mines, and quite logically listed separately from those owned by the Spanish.

The Spanish decided to try a different method after the Jesuit expulsion, sending father Garces to the Colorado river to found a mission there, but rather than having a span of time with no Spanish colonists and the usual exemptions from taxes etc, sent the colonists right along with them, and making a sort of 'hybrid' approach. The Indians responded violently to this approach rather quickly, leading to a massacre of the Spanish colonists and the priests at the new missions. As far as I know, this failure led the Spanish royal govt to return to the former Reduccion system, and the new Franciscan missions in California were established by the old methods complete with exemptions and no or very few Spanish colonists allowed to enter until after a span of time had passed.

Please do continue, hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend;
Oroblanco
 

Artistic Geography and the Northern Jesuit Missions of New Spain

Among the objects made in and regularly sent from Mexico City, there were many sculptures. Since these are often revered cult objects, a surprising number of seventeenth century images still exist. Although they are usually repainted, in combination with a reading of the inventories, they provide important evidence of the religious life of the missions, as can be traced in the case of Huejotitán. Some sculptures that are in the 1666 inventory still exist in the church there. A large figure of Christ was then in a Santo Entierro; that is, it was displayed as a dead Christ, wrapped in a sheet.
The Immaculate Conception was at the main altar, with the painting of St. Jerome and the landscapes just mentioned. The risen Christ had its own altar. This is a very frequent subject at the mission churches, which is a point to be further explored, since this is not the case in parishes. Iconography, too, has its geography, of course. St. Joseph with the Christ Child also had his own altar.
The missionary who made the 1666 inventory, declares that all the images, and everything in his list, which is considerable, was provided to the mission by the Society. The Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras only helped to pay for a lamp for the church. Obviously, the ones who were most interested in the decoration of the church were the Jesuits themselves.
Later, more sculptures arrived at Huejotitán. The archangel Michael must have come from Mexico City around 1690, since he resembles the work begun in 1684 by the sculptor Manuel de Velasco in the sacristy of Mexico City cathedral. Paintings from Mexico City were also numerous from the very beginning. They were easy to transport, relatively cheap, and there were painters in the capital who produced extensively for distribution throughout the viceroyalty. The Jesuits at the missions knew
about the painters in Mexico City, and often asked for the best. There was a painting by Villalpando, now lost, at Huejotitán. There are requests for paintings by Correa and Cabrera. At least one Cabrera is still today in the Sierra Madre. There are a number of paintings by Nicolás and Juan Rodríguez Juárez, and José de Páez. Other objects at the missions came from elsewhere in New Spain. The most frequently mentioned are: alabaster (tecali) and glass from Puebla, furniture, frames, lacquered gourds, and copper household and liturgical objects from Michoacán. Mexico City would have been the clearinghouse for some of these, especially the objects from Puebla, as well as for some silver liturgical objects.
However, the lists with requests sent to Mexico City do not account for all of the objects in the inventories. These were being acquired or accepted as donations in places closer to the missions. In the case of sculptures, we know that these were made much closer to the missions, in Durango or Parral. Although we have little information about this production, it certainly included the making of gilded altarpieces or retablos, at least from the middle of the 17th century. The missionary at San Miguel de Bocas, for example, asked for a “very beautiful, tender and compassionate” sculpture of the Virgin of Sorrows from Mexico City”, “by a good master”, but he adds that it should not come with a gilded base, because “those things are to be found here”. “Here” would likely have been in a nearby center of production, Parral probably. Also at Huejotitán the sculpture of St. Francis Xavier, less complex in its composition than the sculptures we saw before, may well have been made in Parral or Durango. The same would be true of many of the silver pieces, since there were silversmiths in various places in north central New Spain. Another category of objects produced not too far from the Tarahumara missions are painted hides and cloth from New Mexico.
The conclusion to be drawn is that these missions, very distant from Mexico City, were not so isolated if we look at the religious and liturgical objects they posessed. Indeed, we know that they were usually better decorated and provided for than most of the parish churches of Spanish towns throughout Nueva Vizcaya. This is easily proven by comparing the inventories of the missions with those of the parishes, and we have the explicit testimony of at least two of the bishops of Nueva Vizcaya on this point. (Tapiz and Tamarón). Although on the frontier, if we take the view from Mexico City or Europe, they can be thought of in the opposite way. They were, in many regards, actually at the center of a system that existed in large part to keep them functioning and provided for. The requests on the lists which have come down to us can be interpreted as indications of how a missionary might think of his mission as the center of the world, deserving of receiving objects from everywhere. To adopt and invert the vocabulary cited earlier, in this view the outermost circle for the missions was comprised of not only the European cities whence many of the missionaries came, but as far as art is concerned, by Rome, Antwerp, various cities in Spain, and also Asia. Closer than Europe, although on an outer circle with respect to the missions, was Mexico City. There followed the closer circle of Durango, New Mexico and other northern places.
A painting that in 1666 was at San Ignacio, a subsidiary Huejotitán, is eloquent on the issue of the centrality of the missions for the Jesuits. In a recently built adobe church, the painting, over a meter high, was described as “by an able hand, of our Apostle of the Indies, St. Francis Xavier, dressed in the habit of the Society and on his knees, in the middle (of the composition), receiving from Our Lord Christ some crowns and passing them to angels who, in turn, give them to our martyrs in Japan and to St. Philip of Jesus”. This extraordinary composition, of which I do not know any surviving version anywhere, testifies to the centrality of the missions and of missionary heroism for the Jesuits, and to their own importance and preeminence for New Spain and as universal missionaries. St. Philip of Jesus was a Franciscan from Mexico City, martyred in Japan, and he had been beatified and declared patron of New Spain in 1629. In the painting the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier is the conduit for Philip’s glorification as well as that of his fellow Jesuits, also killed in Japan. It is a universalist Jesuit message for a New Spanish audience, an audience that included the Jesuits themselves. What the Tarahumaras might have thought is difficult to know, yet the very existence of this high quality and iconographically original painting at San Ignacio is yet one more proof that the missions were provided with the best and were not isolated from the rest of New Spanish society.
This examination of importations to the missions has brought us closer and closer to the actual mission buildings and to the decoration directly applied to them. The buildings, their carved stone portals, the painted ceilings and walls, most of the woodwork in the churches and sacristies, all had to have been produced at the missions themselves. The evidence of local artistic production is irrefutable. We are no longer dealing with importations from far and near through a complex support system, nor directly with wealthy patrons. However, the precise character of this local production, when considered in terms of artistic geography is problematic, and it further questions the frontier mission thesis, because it points to the need for a different definition and description of the Tarahumara mission endeavor itself.
The reason the local mission production of art and architecture is a problem is that, when we look at what was done, and as art historians ask who did it and how, some of the answers result in a picture of these missions as much more complicated entities than that imagined by the notion of a frontier institution. There had to have been more agents at the missions, beyond a Jesuit or two and their Tarahumara or Tepehuan neophytes plus a few other natives and some nearby soldiers.
Craft and artistic activity is confirmed by the quantities and varieties of tools in mission inventories: carpentry, stone and iron working are amply represented, everywhere with a similar range of tools. These are widespread and recurrent, since the missionaries must have needed certain basic tools for many tasks. When the tools exceed the norm, however, it is probably because there was a certain kind of production at the mission. It is with respect to architecture that we see major implications for the Jesuit missions and their place in the society of Nueva Vizcaya. In many of the missions there were compasses and plumb lines, and we know that some missionaries engaged in simple building activity, but we have no documentation about Tarahumara mission Jesuits with specialized architectural knowledge. Stone and vault construction was out of reach in Nueva Vizcaya, except for the cathedral of Durango, when a cleric-architect, Pedro Gutiérrez Patarren, arrived there in 1640. He did not stay long, and there is no evidence that he had anything to do with any mission buildings.
By around 1680, however, the Jesuits obviously wanted to construct more durable and impressive structures. This marks an important step, because on the whole, it seems that missionaries saw a significant difference between erecting imposing buildings and decorating the interior of a church. The latter was deemed proper, while the former was thought superfluous or at least problematic. Bernando Rolandegui, Italian missionary at Carichi, later to become Provincial, in a 1682 report, asked that Simón de Castro be sent north. Simón de Castro, actually Simón Boruhradsk_, was a czech Jesuit lay brother, “carpenter, craftsman, musician, painter and knowledgeable in mechanics...and medicine”, who, among other things, would propose a plan to reconstruct the Viceregal Palace in Mexico City after its partial destruction in the 1692 riots. Although Castro was not sent, the Sicilian Jesuit Francisco María Piccolo, who was the missionary at Carichi a few years later, took advantage of the presence in Parral of another architect, Simón de los Santos, and got him to go to the mission. De los Santos, who was a mulatto probably of Portuguese origin, had arrived in Parral between1672 and 1678 from Mexico City at the request of a group of miners and merchants to build them a new parish church, which is the oldest surviving vaulted structure in all of Nueva Vizcaya. The Parral parish was finished in 1686, and Simón de los Santos spent much of the 1690’s at Carichi, until he was called to Durango in 1698 to replace the master architect of the cathedral who had had to return to Guadalajara whence he had come.
By Clara Bargellini
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
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Lost City in the Catalinas
Hidden deep within the majestic Santa Catalina mountains, north of Tucson, Arizona are ancient ruins that may be linked to the legends of the mine with the iron door and the lost city. The site is near the Cañada del Oro in an extremely remote area of the Catalinas. The remains of nearly a half dozen stone constructed buildings are scattered in an area that is suspected to be connected with the famous legend of the Iron Door Mine. Nearby, extensive mining activities have been conducted for hundreds of years. Evidence of mining shafts, tunnels and early human activity have been founded and documented. The U.S. Forest Service retains these items.

"About one hundred years ago the Jesuits held full sway over the population of this territory, and at that time they had large fields under cultivation and many men employed delving in the earth after the precious metals and turquoise stones. At that time the principle gold mines were situated in these mountains and there was a place called Nueva Mia Ciudad, having a minster church with a number of golden bells that were used to summon the laborers from the fields and mines, and a short distance from the city which was situated on a plateau, was a mountain that had a mine of such fabulous riches that the miners used to cut the gold out with a 'hacheta.' At the time of the Franciscans acquiring supremacy the Jesuits fled, leaving the city destitute of population; before their flight they placed an iron door on the mine and secured it in such a manner that it would require a considerable time to unfasten it. There were only two entrances to the city and they also were closed and all traces obliterated." Arizona Weekly Star, January 10, 1880

"Early in the present decade a prominent journalist of this city discovered in a "rugged and precipitous defile" of the Santa Catalinas the ruins of a long lost pueblo, adjacent to which were numerous shafts that had been sunk in ages past, for in one of them was a giant sahuara fully 70 feet high, only a small portion of which appeared above the surface."
The Tombstone Prospector, February 17, 1891
Flint Carter's next expedition to the Lost City and Iron Door Mine is planned for October 2011.
The Lost City in the Santa Catalinas
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Does anyone know the outcome from the research?
 

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sailaway said:
Does anyone know the outcome from the research?
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Follow the links in your article, you can just buy it
IRON DOOR MINE FOR SALE

FOR SALE: Silver and gold mine located in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, AZ.

Jewelry grade gold, silver and silica ore in place, carat weight returns. This historic property is a Federal lease - mineral rights only for sale. A 'Proven' past producing mine.

Last shipment 1959, 36% tungsten, bond in place, operations plan applied for 20 acres (87,1200 square ft.) Unsubdivided Pima County, AZ. Asking price is $120,000,000.

Product placement in 8 museums worldwide and the Mining Hall of Fame. Terms negotiable and reasonable.

Call Flint Carter at 520-289-4566 for more information. emol.org/irondoor/codystone.html.
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Ed T said:
120,000,000 for that...I wonder how much Tayopa or even El Naranjal might be worth or even the Juana de Arco ???LOL

Ed T :)
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BILLIONS amigo, you could even say TRILLIONS, however that is ASKING price not SELLING. Funny how that works, one can ask any price you wish, but a buyer will only pay what they will pay.:dontknow:
 

No one commented on this part of that description of this "Iron Door" mine? ???

Last shipment 1959, 36% tungsten,<snip>
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Funny but I don't recall ever seeing tungsten mentioned in relation to the lost Iron Door mine? ??? :icon_scratch: :dontknow:

I have serious doubts that this is "the" lost Iron Door mine for some reason. :tongue3:
 

ey ED, lets go to the vatican and ask for a deal, since they lost it origiionally. I'm not greedy, how about you ?

Oops I forgot that they publicly have stated "we never owned any mines or did any mining"..

Don Jose de La Mancha
 

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