History of the Jesuits

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The most famous work of the Jesuit missionaries in the New World, however, was the establishment in the order's South American provinces of reductions, or village communities of native peoples under the spiritual and temporal direction of the priests. The most successful were the reductions of Paraguay. In that country for almost 200 years the Jesuits governed a communal nation of Native Americans, founding 32 villages with a total population of about 160,000; they taught the Native Americans agriculture, mechanical arts, and commerce and trained a small army for defense of the settlements.© 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.