For more than 400 years, Jesuits working in Canada have written about their daily life and mission. Originally, their letters were published as The Jesuit Relations (Relations des jésuites). This blog,  igNation, continues that tradition with a new series entitled: Getting to Know the Relations.

Using excerpts chosen from the first 200 hundred years of these documents, the series presents vignettes which speak to the timeless heart of Jesuit endeavour: the promotion of discernment in order to help people find God in all things.

These excerpts are found in The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents – Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in North America (1610 – 1791), selected and edited by Edna Kenton, and published in 1954 by the Vanguard Press. That edition uses the word “savages” throughout. In these excerpts that word has been replaced by “the people who were here before we arrived” or “the people here.”)        

Today:  A “Temporary Foreign Workers” Initiative – Jesuit Style

In 1635, Paul Le Jeune SJ explains to his superiors: “How it is a benefit to both Old and New France to Send Colonists Here”

Geographers, historians, and experience show us that every year a great many people leave France who go to enroll themselves elsewhere. For, although the Soil of our country is very fertile, the French women have this blessing, that they are still more so; and thence it happens that our ancient Gauls, in want of land, went to seek it in different parts of Europe. At present, our French people are no less numerous than our old Gauls; but they do not go forth in bands, but separately.

Would it not be better to empty Old France into New, by means of Colonies, than to people Foreign countries? Add to this, if you please, that there is a multitude of workmen in France, who, for lack of employment or of owning a little land, pass their lives in wretched want. Many of them beg their bread from door to door; some of them resort to stealing; others to larceny and secret frauds, each one trying to obtain for himself what many cannot possess.

Now; as New France is so immense, so many inhabitants can be sent here that those who remain in the Mother Country will have enough honest work left them to do, without launching into those vices which ruin Republics; this does not mean that ruined people, or those of evil lives, should be sent here, for that would be to build Babylons.

Now there is no doubt that there can be found here employment for all sorts of artisans. Why cannot the great forests of New France largely furnish the Ships for the Old? Who doubts that there are here mines of iron, copper, and other metals? Some have been already discovered, which will soon be worked; and hence all those who work in wood and iron will find employment here.

I do not pretend to recite all the advantages of the country; I will content myself by saying that it would be an honor and a great benefit to both old and new France to send over Emigrants and establish strong colonies in these lands, which have lain fallow since the birth of the world.

Your very humble and greatly obliged servant in our Lord,

Paul Le Jeune SJ