Czech Jesuits, travelers and explorers : Exhibition on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of Jesuits arrival to Prague
Abstract
The exhibition contained a list of the Czech missions and missionaries. The missions in China, Japan, the Pacific region, Mexico, reductions and their statistics in South America.
Excerpts from the letters of Czech missionaries in the translation of Kalista (The Sign of the Cross). Documents on missions and missionaries and original photographs of father Fochler were added.
Special attention was paid to S.Fritz who mapped the flow of Amazon River. It was only after the Thirty Year´s War when the first Jesuits could leave Bohemia for missions, first to China and then to Brazil and to other South American and later also Asian countries.
Czech Jesuit province sent during one century about 160 missionaries. However, more and more members of the order asked the Superior General to be sent to missions.
Only the best ones were satisfied because the candidates were selected carefully and pragmatically and it had been clear in advance that they must be a benefit for the mission. Therefore it was possible to meet in the 18th century missionaries from Bohemia not only in South America but also in India, Cochinchina (Vietnam), in China, but also in the Philippines and the Marian Islands.
Others then served in Northern Europe and Russia. The most Jesuit missionaries from Bohemia were in Mexico (30), in the Philippines (20), in Paraguay (30), in Quito (15) and in Peru and Chile (12), less in India and China (9).
The exhibition presented not only the overview of our missionaries but it also focused on some notable personalities. Czech missionaries excelled as tough and hardy travelers, explorers and cartographers.
They were interested in history, art and also dialect of the tribes among whom they worked. Jesuit formation always included two-year novitiate, four-year study of philosophy and theology studies of the same length.
Many Jesuits were also excellent philologists, architects, musicians, botanists or pharmacists.