Among the many books destined for children, the one preferred in America during the colonial period was the Fables attributed to the Phrygian slave, Aesop. Translated into Spanish, it was found in the hands of travelers and colonists throughout the Spanish empire. The simplicity of the tales and the morals which they point out made them the delight not only of children but also of adults, who explained the precepts with purposeful wit.

Aesop was one of the authors most read in the New World, according to what we can deduce by consulting the numerous lists of books which were sent to various parts of the American continent. His fables were also circulated in Latin and Greek, surely for pedagogical purposes. In Spain there was no lack of poets who devoted part of their work to fables, such as the Archpriest of Hita with his Enxiemplos, up to the culmination in the eighteenth century with Félix María Samaniego and Tomás de Iriarte, whose works it is logical to suppose were brought to the New World with many others of various kinds. By that time the shores of America were being swept by other ideas, distinct from those of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which brought unrest to the minds of the people, ideas foreign to the calm and well-being of the two previous centuries.

The leaders of the independence movements in the several Ibero-American areas frequently turned their attention to the problems of the aborigine. Usually the liberators’ concern was restricted to the pious hope that the Indian would be incorporated into creole society. Detailed programs to this end were not presented. The chief exception was José Bonifacio de Andrada e Silva’s Apontamentos para a civilização dos índios bravos do Império do Brasil. Mostly a drawing upon the experience of the past with a blending of the new ideas of the Enlightenment, the Apontamentos present little new. They are today important because, along with José Bonifácio’s more celebrated treatise on the Negro slave, they show an interest in social problems to which few of his contemporaries gave more than a passing glance. In the present century, they have become the guidepost for Brazil’s Indian program. As such they have frequently been hailed by Brazilians when the Indian problem is discussed.

Dr. Silvio Zavala is to be congratulated on his draft chapter dealing with the history and influence of religion in the New World. The topic covers the planting of Christianity on American soil and, under its influence, the birth of a new society that was to be Christian in its institutions, in its culture, and, for several centuries, in all outward manifestations of its thought. In summarizing so broad a subject in few pages, Dr. Zavala leads us to ponder many extremely important points. The pages that follow are the product of a good deal of thinking, with regard both to the provisional text and to the subject in general. What a pity that meditation does not always succeed in fully clarifying our ideas and in completely dispelling our doubts!

This is a very broad topic and its treatment is quite complex. The time necessary to complete a systematic search of the pertinent literature, which is very rich and very dispersed, was lacking to us. For these reasons, we do not hope to offer here more than some considerations based on certain cases which can be considered as symptomatic.

The area which we shall study extends in area from New Mexico to Chiapas and in time from the conquest of Tenochtitlan completed in 1521 to that of Tamaulipas, completed in 1755. Moreover, we shall make some reference in passing to the actual state of Christianity among certain groups of indigenes.

IBELIEVE that only because of this international aspect, which above all showed itself prominent in the activity of the Jesuits in America during the seventeenth century, can we be speaking in a special way of the Jesuits at this international meeting, which corresponds to the Pan American tone of the chapter written by Doctor Zavala.

This “internationality” of the Company of Jesus was not something exclusive to the Jesuits in America. It came from the very times of Saint Ignatius (1556), when not only in the European colleges but also in the missions of the Orient and of Brazil—the only ones founded before 1556—Jesuits of different nationalities were always living together.

An Order so essentially international of necessity had to have a greater unity of hierarchy and of thought to give it coherence and efficacy.

This paper is limited to the French-speaking Canadians; it does not include those who live in the United States, in the West Indies, in Latin America. In time it applies mainly to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The cultural foundation of the French Canadians is rooted in the sixteenth century. Most of the settlers who came from Old France to New France had been born in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, or were sons of these.

Their culture was made of a rich folklore still alive, of the laws then called the Coutume de Paris, which survive in the civil law still applied in the province of Quebec, of social attitudes which for a long time were characterized by the seignorial system, of ideas about education, of scientific curiosity then awakening in Europe, and of religious attitudes.

The author of these lines wishes, first of all, to ask your permission to study the theme presented in this program a trifle more extensively. That is to say, I will not limit myself in a spirit, perhaps, that is too narrow, to study only the evangelization of Brazil and Spanish America, but I will take a wider perspective of ecclesiastical or ecclesial matters, since the missions, as the great Belgian teacher Pierre Charles, S. J. taught me, do not represent anything more than the normal and natural growth of the Church. My comparison therefore will refer to the history of the Church in both dominions. However, I must amplify the theme in another way.