The «interior missions» in the country of Buenos Aires between two centuries: from Borbones to Rosas

Abstract

The «misiones interiores» were promoted by the political authorities, required by bishops and parsons and carried out by Jesuits, Mercedarios and Franciscans. Both in Europe and America, during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were conceived as missionary strategies to spread the teachings and the sacraments to areas of weak ecclesiastical presence, and they often sought to pacify the most distant and conflictive communities. The missions were an extraordinary moment of contact with religion, and were planned with a strong pedagogical character, so that the duties of the missionaries meant an important help to the parsons. The «misiones interiores» involved a wide range of actors: parishioners and churchmen, political and religious authorities, regular and secular clergy. This article offers a comparison between the missions developed in the countryside of Buenos Aires in two moments of change in the relationships between regular and secular clergy on one hand, and between the Church and the civil authorities on the other, during the colonial period and Juan Manuel de Rosas’ second period of government. We want to highlight the way in which the civil powers resorted to these missions, and their characteristics in those two different historical contexts, in which the role of the ecclesiastical institutions in the social order and their ties with the civil powers were subject to modifications.