American Indian Culture and Research Journal

At a time when Baja California was thought to be an island, a group of Jesuit priests launched a mission there to educate its Natives. Several sites were established, beginning in 1697, on what came to be recognized later as a peninsula. These missions were initiated thanks to private solicitations, rather than the royal patronage that had underwritten the missions in New Spain before. Perhaps for this reason the mission was subject to one of the characteristic institutions of the Catholic Church: the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de Propaganda Fidei). The Propaganda, for short, also held ecclesiastical jurisdiction over countries with non-Catholic governments, such as England, from 1622 to 1908. The Propaganda was not a sort of Vatican department of missions. It was, in fact, an effective response to conditions of doctrinal and moral confusion faced by counter-reformation Rome. The Propaganda evolved its own educational institution in Rome in 1627, known as the Collegium Urbanum, named after its founder Pope Urban VIII. Students were accepted from all lands under the Propaganda’s jurisdiction, which included the Native peoples of Baja California. The courses ranged from basic grammar to advanced studies in theology. One of the original reasons for the college’s establishment was the hope that students would share their differences throughout their lives. Whether from Scandinavia, the Balkans, the United States, Africa, or Asia, students related different cultures, languages, customs, and personal experiences to each other. While Pope Alexander VII required that students take vows to return to their homelands, where they would act as evangelists, he also insisted that they stay in lifelong correspondence with their alma mater. Throughout the last three quarters of the nineteenth century, the college maintained about 120 students at one time in various stages of preparation for missionary careers all over the world. Their native languages ranged from English to the aboriginal language of northern San Diego County, known in mid-nineteenth-century Rome as Californian.