The Economy of Jesuit Missions

Robert Scribner once wrote that the sacred was “always experienced from within the profane.” The reverse is equally true, and the sacred and profane have been more mixed up than they are today. Only during the late eighteenth century was the economy perceived as a distinct entity, in many ways more fundamental than religion. In the early-modern world, economics and religion can never be entirely separated. Sometimes the relationship was direct, and the “Christian” rebellion of Japan (1637), for example, had immediate economic consequences. Often it is more unexpected, as when in the 1630s a proposed canal between the Manzanares and the Tagus rivers was submitted to a committee of theologians, who piously rejected it: “If God had intended the rivers to be connected, He would have made them so.” Acosta's economic analysis included a religious factor modern economists would reject, for he pointed out that the lands with the greatest mineral wealth were also the most Christian.

Despite common parlance, the Society of Jesus is, strictly speaking, a mendicant order. The Constitutions commend poverty to the point of denying the Society's missions the luxury of a stable financial foundation, and the Jesuits sometimes circumvented such restrictions by founding and funding a college to serve as a mission. This is not how scholars know the Jesuits, and this is not how most contemporaries knew them.