A NYTimes Travel piece on the Jesuit missons in Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina:
Even now, the 30 existing missions are in widely varying states of repair, as I found during a weeklong journey through what was once known as the Jesuit Province of Paraquaria, and the infrastructure is hardly luxurious. I managed to visit more than half of the missions, also known in Spanish as “reducciones,” or “reductions,” on a roundabout tour that ended at Iguazú Falls, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet and the most dramatic scenes in “The Mission” were filmed.
QUITE quickly, I learned that all the missions — except the last to be built, in Santo Angelo in what is now Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state — were laid out in identical fashion. A large church, classrooms and workshops dominated the southern side of a square, where community life was centered. The other three sides were occupied by family dwellings and by the cabildo, where the Guaraní town council, led by the chiefs, had its offices.
The point in visiting as many of the missions as possible was not just to be able to see the differences in style of the various Jesuit architects — some Spanish, others Italian or German — and the Guaraní artists and craftsmen they trained. Sadly, no single mission survived intact after the expulsion of the Jesuits, meaning that to obtain a complete picture of what a mission looked like then, it is necessary to visit several of them.
For instance, the mission at Jesús de Tavarangue, a few miles from my starting point in Trinidad, is the only one at which a bell tower, some 160 feet high, still stands. On a quiet Sunday morning, I climbed to the top and immediately understood that the commanding view of the rolling countryside it offered had both military and religious functions: not only to summon the faithful to Mass as often as three times a day, but also to warn residents when the bandeirantes, the dreaded slave traders from Brazil who raided the missions, were approaching.
The mission that struck me as the most charming of the seven in Paraguay, though, was San Cosme y San Damián, in the far south of the country. A modern town of the same name, with 3,000 inhabitants, has grown up around the mission square. But in contrast to Encarnación, the largest town in the region, it has done so without destroying or even intruding on the church, which is still used for worship — aside from graffiti on a front wall that read “Irma, I love you, Tito.”
Inside the church, I was greeted by 21 statues of saints arrayed along the side walls, including the single most arresting and peculiar religious image I saw at any mission. St. Michael the Archangel slaying Satan is a common enough sight in Latin American churches, but this was the first time I had seen the Devil portrayed as a hermaphroditic being — clearly male from the waist down and female from the waist up.
Unfortunately, two other images, of St. Barbara and St. Joseph, were stolen a few years ago and never recovered. Some of the original statues are still taken out for Holy Week processsions and on the feast day of the town’s patron saints in September.
“We live daily with the past here, many times without even thinking about it,” Rolando Barboza Aguilera, the site’s caretaker, told me. “There are a lot of mysteries here, a lot of questions we still can’t answer.”
The church was also notable for a 17th-century chair painted with passion flowers, which is not only used by the parish priests but which Pope John Paul II sat in when he visited Paraguay in 1988. Out in the courtyard, I came across a sundial that still worked just fine, the only remnant of what once had been an astronomical observatory.
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