New Challenges: Confronting Ethnic and Religious Diversity

What is it about?

This chapter of Celebrating Teresa of Avila. The Discalced Carmelites in Italy and Their Mission to Persia and the East Indies introduces Part 3, which analyzes and reconstructs the Order's conversionary aspirations and festivities in Asia from 160724. The best documented are the Discalced Carmelite missions in Hormuz and Goa, important centers in the Portuguese Estado da Índia and the focus here. Crucial to understanding the missionaries' manuals and defenses of proselytization is the context of ideas commonly expressed in Iberian secular discourse on lineage and religious diversity. The impact of these attitudes was profound. Conceptions of distinct lineages encouraged the missionaries to feel optimistic that Hindus residing in Hormuz and Goa would be easier to convert than Muslims in Safavid Persia where their mission had begun. At the same time, although the early Discalced Carmelites missionaries were open to admitting Asians into the Order, attitudes toward lineage, skin color, and behavior held by secular and ecclesiastical authorities curtailed their ability to do so. Building on this interpretative foundation, the two following chapters explore the imagery, messages, and perceived efficacy of festivities that the missionaries designed to strengthen the Catholic faith and effect conversions of heterogeneous audiences in Hormuz and Goa.

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Why is it important?

Whereas most research on Catholic missions of the seventeenth century, especially that conducted by art historians, has focused on the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), this study expands understanding of the era by offering a detailed analysis of the Discalced Carmelite religious culture. Part 3 of the book is devoted to the Order's conversionary strategies in its Mission to Persia and the East Indies. Multimedia ephemeral celebrations for the Order's founder, Teresa of Avila, are reconstructed and interpreted in their religious and geopolitical contexts as well as that of the discourse of ethnic and religious diversity.

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