The Jesuits Arrive In Brazil

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 1549, King Joao the Third of Portugal sent the first Jesuit mission to Brazil, led by Father Manuel da Nobrega, who sailed to the new settlement of Salvador da Bahia alongside the colony's first governor-general, Tome de Sousa. Nobrega and his fellow Jesuits became the first in a long line of missionaries devoted to converting the Indigenous Tupi peoples, arriving as part of the same voyage that founded Portugal's colonial administration in Brazil.

That missionary work was bound up from the start with Portuguese colonisation, and, as elsewhere across the Americas, with the destruction of existing Indigenous religious life and increasingly with forced labor, first of Indigenous people and then of enslaved Africans; Nobrega himself resisted planters who sought to enslave Indigenous converts even as the wider colonial project he served made both forms of forced labor part of Brazil's founding economy.

What this changed for Christianity's spread was the planting of a Catholic mission at the very outset of Portuguese Brazil, arriving with the colony's first governor rather than following behind it. The Jesuits' arrival made the church an institution present from Brazil's founding moment onward, its later growth into the hemisphere's largest Catholic nation rooted in a mission that began on the same ships as colonial rule itself.