1651 –
EUROPE
• Spiritual Exercises printed in Spanish
• June – Piccolomini dies after only about one year as General.
• Nicholas Caussin (French SJ advisor to King Louis XIII) dies.
He was appointed by Cardinal Richelieu.
• Charles II succeeds Charles I.
• Peter Wright (English martyr) is killed. Beatified in 1929.
AMERICAS
• By 1651 22 reducciones functioning under Antonio Ruiz de Montoya with the Guarani Indians. Earlier 38 reducciones were destroyed and several thousand Indians sold as slaves by Spaniards and Portuguese.
• Santiago reducciones in Paraguay is founded.
1652 –
EUROPE
• Jan – GC X – elects Luigi Gottifredi as 9th General
• March – Fr. Gottifredi dies. GC X was still in session when Fr. Gottifredi died.
• March – GC X – elects Goswin Nickel from Germany as 10th General
During his term the struggle with Jansenism and also question on Chinese Rites intensified.
• Birth of Paul Hoste mathematician and expert on construction of ships and history of naval warfare.
AMERICAS
• Antonio Ruiz de Montoya Spanish Jesuit working in Paraguay dies.
As requested by him, he is buried with the Guarani Indians whom he served.
• San Cosme y Damian reducciones (also an astronomic observatory) in Paraguay is founded.
• Antonio Vieira returns to Brazil, from Portugal, as director of missions in Maranhao.
1653 –
EUROPE
• Portuguese Province divided into two “to avoid bickering among the Jesuits from different areas of the country”.
• Publication of Innocent X’s bull declaring the Five Heretical Propositions were really contained in Jansenius’ Augustinus. The Jansenists retailiate by violent calumnies against the Society.
AMERICAS
• Antonio Vieira defends the Indians in Brazil.
1654 –
EUROPE
• Two features of Jesuit apostolate were provoking open hostility at this time –
a) mission in China;
b) their principles in moral Theology
• Jacques Marquette enters the Society.
• A new boarding school (Vienna) is erected with St. Barbara Church adjacent, in the Inner City just a block or so northeast of the Jesuitenkirke and the old university founded in 1560.
AMERICAS
• Peter Claver dies in Cartagena, Colombia after having worked there for 40+ years.
Church of Peter Claver (Cartagena) is founded.
• Simon LeMoyne is sent by French governor as ambassador of peace to the Iroquois and Onondaga.
1655 –
EUROPE
• Innocent X dies. Alexander VII becomes pope.
• William Ireland (martyr of England of the infamous Titus Oates plot) at age 19 enters the novitiate in Flanders.
ASIA
• Jesuits led by Fr. Tomaso Valguarnera, a Sicilian, arrive in Ayutthaya (capital of Siamese Kingdom/Thailand) and start a school for the Portuguese community there.
The first Jesuits came in Siam in 1607; and 1624-25.
• Two Jesuits, Alejandro Lopez and Juan Montiel killed by Muslims – the first missionary martyrs in Mindanao.
1656 –
EUROPE
• Blaise Paschal publishes his first Provincial Letter against the Jesuits.
Here he denounces the Jesuits as the chief cause of the laxity in the current teaching on
moral questions. Other letters followed at intervals. Though condemned in Rome and
publicly burned by the King’s orders (France) they were influential in portraying Jesuits in
a very negative way.
• Andrew White, founder of the Jesuit Mission in Maryland dies. He was called “Apostle of
Maryland”. He worked with Native Americans, composing a dictionary grammar and
catechism in their language. Before his death he was taken to England and cast into Newgate prison.
• Alexander VII pleads with the government of Venice for the restoration of the Society in that Republic.
• Aloysius La Nuza (Venerable), dies.
• Jesuits are allowed to return to Republic of Venice after being exiled in 1607.
ASIA
• 108 Jesuits in the Philippines – 74 priests, 11 scholastics, 23 brothers; working in 83 towns; number of Christians about 52, 225.
• Roberto de Nobili (missionary to India) dies at Meliapore. He was nephew of Cardinal Bellarmine. Sent to the Madura mission, he learned to speak three languages and for 45 years labored among the high caste Brahmins.
• Philip Couplet (Belgian) and Ferdinand Verbiest (Flemish) sail to China.
• Rome (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) lifts the ban against Chinese Rites
(condemned earlier in 1645).
1657 –
EUROPE
• Andrew Bobola (Polish SJ) is martyred.
ASIA
• By this time there were already about 150,000 Christians in China
• Fr. Stephen Le Fevre, first French Jesuit assigned to the Chinese mission, dies.
1658 –
EUROPE
• Claude La Colombiere enters the novitiate.
• The Jesuit high school (Gymnasium) is founded in Ellwangen (Germany).
ASIA
• Paris Foreign Missions Society is established by Jesuit Alexander de Rhodes.
By this time Tonkin/Vietnam had about 300,000 Catholics. Rhodes arrived in Tonkin (Vietnam) in 1625.
1659 –
ASIA
• Ferdinand Verbiest arrives in China.
