The Many Faces of Ignazio Maria Romeo SJ (1676–1724?), Petitioner for the Indies: A Jesuit Seen through his Litterae Indipetae and the Epistulae Generalium
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Year:
- 2016
- Journal Title:
- Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu
- Volume:
- 85
- Issue:
- 170
- Language:
- Abstract:
In this article, we will analyse the vocation to the Indies of a Sicilian Jesuit, Ignazio Maria Romeo SJ (Palermo 1676-1724?), through a number of sources preserved in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI). One of these sources deservedly is well known to scholars, the Litterae Indipetae, or petitions for the Indies sent from Jesuits all over Europe to the Superior General in search of a missionary appointment. These petitions will be considered alongside source material that is relatively unknown in this area of research, the Epistulae Generalium. These registers of correspondence sent from the office of the Superior General in Rome, and still preserved there, in fact include the General’s responses to numerous petitioners for the Indies, providing us with a valuable window onto the multiple perspectives and processes involved in the selection of candidates for the overseas Jesuit missions. In the case of Ignazio Maria Romeo, we discover a persistent petitioner for the Indies, whose responses from the Superior General, and even epistolary interventions from his family (remarkably still extant), spanned the first two decades of the eighteenth century. The documentary trail left behind in relation to this particular vocation story provides us with the opportunity to present the framework for understanding these sources in relation to each other; to explore the different viewpoints about the missionary appointment process afforded by these documents; to understand the potential impact on those concerned; and to apprehend the crisis of vocation that could take hold of petitioners when they failed in their objectives. More broadly, these documents allow us to investigate further many aspects of the missionary enterprise that usually remain obscure, despite the substantial interest in this subject in recent scholarship. despite the substantial interest in this subject in recent scholarship.In so doing, this essay seeks to shed new light on this important area of research in Jesuit history: the overseas missionary enterprise.
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- Page Range:
- 365-404
- ISSN:
- 0037-8887