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CHAPTER 4
FAITH IN NUMBERS
In order to make sense of the “mixed messages” generated by information gaps
and our own historical distance, I return to the Jesuit Relations. The collections of
Christian-themed artifacts prompt several questions: How were the Jesuits
communicating Catholicism? What approaches did priests take to undermine
indigenous beliefs and gain converts? How many “believers” lived in a given village
and who were they? Lacking a written first-person indigenous perspective, we have
only the limited and biased accounts written by various Jesuit priests, who surely had
their own concerns in the wake of warfare and as “strangers in a strange land.”
Nonetheless, the Jesuits were some of seventeenth-century Europe’s most educated
and articulate men; if their writings are read mindfully and scholarly research is
undertaken with as much respect possible to cultural sensitivity, there is no reason no
undermine the Jesuit Relations here as a source.
In order to try and unpack these questions of religiosity, I have compiled data
on the recorded baptisms mentioned in the Seneca volumes, and gathered some
examples of the “spiritual pedagogy” employed by the missionaries. The situational
patterns evident in the accounts of Seneca conversion are examined last in hopes that
the previous sections will have provided a broad enough context to understand the
limitations of Jesuit influence, as well as how and why certain individuals came to be
counted among “the faithful.”
For the research purposes, it is perhaps best if one considers the accounts of
adult catechumens in Seneca territory separately from the number of recorded
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