FOREIGN MISSIONS 295
The Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (1622) looked upon the whole earth as its territory. The hierarchically destitute regions of England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Northern Germany, Scandinavia, and above all the countries o the New World and of Eastern Asia were entrusted to it. The authority of the Papacy had been so great even under the Borgias that Spain and Portugal had invited Alexan- der VI to arbitrate in 1493 their quarrel over the disposition of lands discovered by Columbus. The Pope drew a boundary line from pole to pole, one hundred ten miles west of the Azores. Both countries received from Rome the right to be the patrons of all missionary foundations within their colonies. Everyone knows the sad part played by the Christian conquistadores, and also by many monks who figure in the history of this missionizing work. Pope Paul III had to summon to mind the human rights of the Indians; and during the sixteenth century Las Casas, the fiery Dominican, had to make seven trips to Spain in order to defend the Christianity of the Cross against the Christianity of the Catholic Crown. Jesuit missionary activity in the New World (in Paraguay, where Christian communism throve according to the Utopian plans of St. Thomas More and Campanella) , in Indo-China and in Japan (where the adjustment of the new to the old seemed for a time to involve the merging of religions) re- mained on the whole a torso despite all the heroism, and all the daring and cunning, of the methods used in colonization and civilization. If nothing else had been accomplished but the signal service rendered by the Propaganda to the study of peoples and languages, the incal- culable expenditure of energy would not have been wasted. The Papacy always realized that every missionary activity, whether domes- tic or foreign, cannot prosper without the personal heroism of the few. It canonized or beatified the most successful of these heroes of the Counter-reformation: Ignatius Loyola; his magnificent fellow-Jesuit, Francis Xavier; Teresa of Avila, who both as a mystic and a re- formatrice was a woman of genius; her fellow religious, John of the Cross, who is the classic expounder of Spanish mysticism; and Philip Neri, to whom Goethe paid his glowing tribute.
The wishes and demands of France and its Church exacted more and more attention from the Vatican Chancellery. Richelieu, ten
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