Recollects
It was observed by communities of friars in France in Tulle in 1585, at Nevers in 1592, at Limoges in 1596 and in Paris at Couvent des Récollets in 1603.
The distinctive character of Recollection houses was that they were friaries to which brothers desirous of devoting themselves to prayer and penance could withdraw to consecrate their lives to spiritual reflection.
[7] Furthermore, the Jesuit Acadian mission had failed in 1613 following a British raid led by Captain Samuel Argall against Port Royal in present-day Nova Scotia.
Jean Dolbeau was assigned the northern shore of the Saint Lawrence Valley, the territory of the Montagnais (Innu), as well as the post of Tadoussac.
[15] Frustrated with the French bureaucracy, the Recollects petitioned the papacy in Rome to return to New France, and succeeded in gaining permission to undertake their endeavour in 1637.
The Recollects would not re-enter New France until 1670, nearly forty years since their expulsion[17] After returning, they reestablished missions at Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal.
On 22 March 1682 a Recollect chaplain who accompanied LaSalle, Father Zenobius, preached to the Tensas tribe on the lower Mississippi River using his knowledge of the Illinois language.
Within the Recollect theory of conversion, the French settlers in New France played a primordial role in the Christianization of indigenous peoples.
French settlers were seen by the Recollects as the key to creating their ideal society; they wished to promote French-Native intermarriage, in the hopes of eventually building a larger Christian settlement.
This led the missionaries to instead travel alongside indigenous communities in the hopes of teaching them about the Catholic faith, much like their Jesuit counterparts.
To solve this problem, the Recollects recruited truchements (helpers), who were young and resourceful men from humble backgrounds, to interpret indigenous linguistic patterns and respond with gestures and miming.
For example, Nicolas Marsolet [fr] was granted a seigneury, while Pierre Boucher became governor of Trois-Rivières, later founding the town of Boucherville.
[22] Their return to New France in 1670 was led by Father Germain Allart, accompanied by Gabriel de la Ribourde, Simple Landon, Hilarion Guenin, Anselme Bardoun, and Brother Luc.
[23] At this point, the conversion of Amerindians to Christianity was no longer the main priority of the Recollects, as they were more concerned with rebuilding infrastructure that had been left behind following their expulsion by the British in 1629.
In fact, when they first arrived in New France, they openly welcomed "unruly" native children within their walls in order to teach them the way of God.
As the Recollect Gabriel Sagard shows in his writings, their convent was very close to a few indigenous settlements, and he himself was very good friend with some Hurons.
Texts written by Recollect missionaries combined aspects of natural history and ethnography, as they generally paid very close attention to the environments these men lived in.
Their works often spoke of the difficulties encountered by missionaries when converting natives, which led to these texts being dismissed by readers as pessimistic.
This explains, in part with the burning of the Recollects convent in 1796, the small quantity of texts related to the missions which have survived to this day.
His fluency in their dialect allowed him to compose a dictionary of the Mi’kmaq language, meant to serve as an aid for future missionaries who would live among these First Nations people.
To this day Leclercq's Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie and Sagard's Le grand voyage du Pays des Hurons is considered an important piece belonging to the large corpus of texts published on eastern Canada during its French regime.
Martin de Valence with nine priests and two fathers in the West Indies, and there, they converted in a very short time more than one thousand and two hundred Indians.
In the late 17th century, the order had these provinces outside of Europe: four in New Spain, four in Peru, and two elsewhere in Latin America and two in Southeast Asia.
It was destroyed by the Santa Marta earthquakes of 1773 and is preserved today as a national monument, La Recolección Architectural Complex.
