[Marxism] Re: Ratzinger elected pop.

["Carlos Eduardo Rebello" <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> Message: > Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 15:54:39 EDT
> From: Rickypagered@xxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] Re: Ratzinger elected pop
> To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Message-ID: <90.5c32f62c.2f980d7f@xxxxxxx>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
>
The Mission was based on a historical moment of Brazilian history when in
> support of the native population the Jesuits proclaimed an independent
kingdom
> in the Amazon basin.
>                                    Rick Page

It was not on the Amazon - it was on the Plate River basin (namely Uruguay
River), it was not an independent kingdom (the missions were conceived as
settlements where the indians worked as serfs to the Jesuits, who traded
their agricultural produce with the outside world) and the missions were
not, technically, Brazilian (i.e. part of Portuguese South America). The
episode was that the Spanish Bourbon crown swapped the land on the Left Bank
of the Uruguay where the missions were for a Portuguese settlement in what
today is Uruguay, therefore allowing both parts to round their colonial
borders in South America. By the same token, the Portuguese had the task of
suppressing the Jesuitic missions (the Order of St. Ignatius being then in
the process of being briefly suppressed) in order to open the region to
cattle ranching and slave labour. It was an episode of the general process
of "Enlightened despotism" by which the Church was ceasing to be a corporate
agency of the feudal-Absolutist state, as capitalist forms of ownership
developed and the priviliged status of religious orders came to be
challenged even prior to the French Revolution (The contemporary religious
reforms of  the Austrian Emperor Joseph II were much in the same vein)

CR


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