ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CH3-012 PROFESSOR LAWRENCE REST PROFESSOR WILL SCHUMACHER Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***** >> PAUL: That was very interesting. It is certainly clear that the Catholics are very intent upon missions. How were early Roman Catholic missions organized? I've read books and viewed movies which depict the Jesuits' as ardent missionaries. Were Catholic missionaries organized around the monastic orders, or were other factors also important? >> DR. LAWRENCE REST: That's another great question, Paul. And of course the Jesuits' were important missionaries through much of the history of the mission of the church that we'll be studying. But before we come to the Jesuits, we can talk about a couple of other orders. We already mentioned Francis of Assisi. The order that he organized in 1209 named after him as the Franciscans, had as one of its purposes preaching and spreading the gospel. And of course we saw from his example that spreading the gospel could also means spreading the gospel to non-Christian People's, even to Muslim countries which were the foreign lands that he knew about. Shortly after the Franciscans were organized, the Dominicans were established in 1215. They were also a preaching order. Of course, preaching had two sides to it. Mostly, the focus of their work was preaching within Christendom, within Christian lands. But they also had as a goal to reach out beyond the Christian lands that already were under the influence of the church and to spread the gospel further. So both of these orders organized in the early 13th century already had in view the idea of mission, although they didn't have too many organized opportunities to spread the gospel outside of Europe. The first order that was established in what we would call the modern age of mission opportunity was the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, organized by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. They had essentially two purposes. One was Counter Reformation, that is countering the influence of the Reformation in Europe. But they also had as a goal the spreading of the Gospel into newly discovered lands. By 1540, European Christians, especially Roman Catholic Christians from Spain and Portugal, had made contacts and discoveries around the globe. And the world looked radically different and much of these newly discovered areas were outside the influence of Christianity. So Ignatius of Loyola and his companions formed an order specifically to address that missionary need to spread the gospel outside the church. Yes, the monastic orders were important. Missionary work was not their primary focus, in most cases. But orders such as the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and from the 1500's onward, the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits were very important in the spread of the gospel under the Roman Catholic Church. ***** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *****