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A French Jesuit Parish, Without the Jesuits: Grand Bay’S Catholic Community and Institutional Durability in British Dominica

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A French Jesuit Parish, Without the Jesuits: Grand Bay’S Catholic Community and Institutional Durability in British Dominica Chapter 12 A French Jesuit Parish, without the Jesuits: Grand Bay’s Catholic Community and Institutional Durability in British Dominica Steve Lenik In eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies and frontiers, the primary means by which French Jesuit missionaries contributed to building communities of free and enslaved African populations was the parish as a unit of ecclesiasti- cal administration. The Catholic communities in these parishes remained after the Society of Jesus was dissolved in the 1760s, even as access to priests was intermittent and church buildings deteriorated. The parish examined in this chapter, at Grand Bay in the Neutral Island of Dominica, was established in 1747 by the Jesuit Antoine de La Valette (1708–67), and the parish continued to exist after the island became a formal British colony in 1763 under the pur- view of the Anglican Church. This chapter traces the durability of the parish at Grand Bay as an institution in colonial and independent Dominica after the removal of the Jesuits, as it formed lasting social linkages against anti-Catholic political sentiments and maintained a material presence via churches, a cross, and cemeteries. Thinking about Catholic–Protestant interactions at the scale of institutions like the parish reveals the resiliency of Jesuit missions in places that were subject to competing colonial programs, as French Catholics and Africans in Dominica have continued to maintain strong attachments to their faith up to the present day. The Society of Jesus was suppressed by order of Pope Clement xiv (r.1769–74) in 1773 after a sustained period of attacks against the Jesuits beginning in the 1750s. This painful period saw the destruction of the order in Europe and abroad as its properties were confiscated or destroyed, and its membership was persecuted and forced to disband. Yet this did not eliminate the parish communities, indigenous populations, or enslaved and free Africans in the Americas who chose to remain Catholic. Nor did it erase the Jesuits’ material presence in the churches, schools, plantations, and other properties that had new owners. Scholarship examining this period of Jesuit history often seeks to explain the many reasons for the suppression.1 Other works mine the records 1 Jeffrey D. Burson and Jonathan Wright, eds., The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context: Causes, Events, and Consequences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Robert E. Scully, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi �0.��63/97890043738��_0�4 <UN> 254 Lenik that were produced as properties were seized and sold to assess the state and condition of Jesuit properties, or to examine the populations on missions or plantations.2 Some parishes in the Americas that the Society had previously administered shifted to secular priests or other Catholic missionaries to fill the vacuum, whereas other parishes came into close contact with Protestants as Britain and France resolved territorial disputes at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) in 1763.3 The end of the war coincided with the dissolution of the Jesuit order in French Catholic domains, and some of these, like the east- ern Caribbean island of Dominica, abruptly entered a Protestant British Em- pire that had to engage with Catholic populations and former Jesuit properties. In French Caribbean colonies before the suppression, including St. Domingue, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana, as well as in Louisiana, Jesuits concentrated their mission work on the enslaved Africans who made up most of the colonial population. This included several planta- tions that the Society owned and operated.4 Among the lands changing hands with the 1763 Treaty of Paris was Dominica, nominally a neutral territory be- fore the war that was left for the indigenous Carib, or Kalinago, but in practice a French-dominated island surrounded by the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, and Martinique. The parish community and the Catholic Church property at Grand Bay, where the Jesuits had founded a parish in 1747, became part of Protestant Britain’s empire as a formal colony. Accompanying this shift in political power were Anglicans, Methodists, and other Protestants who brought in their own religious programs alongside Britain’s political and economic dominance. These Protestants became entangled with an existing majority Catholic population composed of descendants of French settlers who had come before 1763, and the African population, most of whom were enslaved as laborers, who were also Catholic because of this French influence. “The Suppression of the Society of Jesus: A Perfect Storm in the Age of the ‘Enlightenment,’” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 45, no. 2 (2013): 1–42; Sydney F. Smith, S.J., The Suppression of the Society of Jesus (Leominster: Gracewing, 2004). 2 For example: Eduardo Cavieres F., “Los jesuitas expulsos: La comunidad y los individuos; La provincia de Chile,” Cuadernos de historia 38 (2013): 7–38; Jean-Pierre Tardieu, “Los esclavos de los jesuitas del Perú en la época de la expulsión (1767),” Caravelle 81 (2003): 61–109; D. Gil- lian Thompson, “French Jesuit Wealth on the Eve of the Eighteenth-Century Suppression,” in The Church and Wealth, ed. W. [William] J. Sheils and Diana Wood (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 307–19. 3 Edward F. Beckett, S.J. “Listening to Our History: Inculturation and Jesuit Slaveholding,” Stud- ies in Spirituality of Jesuits 28 (1996): 1–48; Richard Pares, War and Trade in the West Indies 1739–1763 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 179–85. 4 Stephan Lenik, “Mission Plantations, Space, and Social Control: Jesuits as Planters in French Caribbean Colonies and Frontiers,” Journal of Social Archaeology 12, no. 1 (2012): 41–61. <UN>.
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