Jesuítas no estado do Maranhão e Grão-Pará: convergências e divergências entre Antônio Vieira e João Filipe Bettendorff na aplicação da liberdade dos índios

Abstract

The present work reorganizes the Jesuit missionary project for Portuguese Mara- nhão in the second half of the seventeenth century. The course taken in its own dynamic, that is, in the tension between the ongoing continuity and the irruptions of its being process. In another manner, the Jesuit presence, considered after careful thought, and justified in the transit between its determinants: the experience of missionarity and the category of thought, through which it took shape. Drawing out this study, it offers a worrisome feeling that deals with the circumstances of Jesuit activities in the sixteenth century in Amazonia in which the colonial reality that has been tested according to the Iberian scholastic system of thought for which Jesuit were the leading point. That dealing shows in an analysis of two distinct and complementary moments of the Jesuit mission's History in the north of Portuguese American: in the transition between the foundation phase and the phase called enlargement period in which there was on outreaching and conflicting intervention of Father Antonio Vieira in the continuous support of the Indian' freedom, and later on, in the analysis in the "vieirian" period to the consolidation phase, gained by the setting up a new structure of the mission and, as well as the adoption of a friendly position obtained by Father João Filipe Bettendorff towards Portuguese colonial settlements.