Devotion to Our Lady of Loreto in the first Annual Letters of the Province of Paraguay: experience persuasion and elaboration

Abstract

 This article deals with the Annual Letters written by the Superiors of the Jesuit missions of the Province of Paraguay, or Reductions, in the first decades of the 17^th century. In these documents, the records of the effects of the devotion to Our Lady of Loreto, introduced by the missionaries, on the imagination of the Jesuits and the Guarani indigenous populations who occupied those territories are evidenced. The aim is to highlight the persuasive function attributed to the image from the perspective of the narrative of the missives and the relationship between devotion to Our Lady of Loreto and the elaboration of personal experience in missionaries and natives, from the perspective of the authors of the letters. The work method of will start from the selection of excerpts referring to these themes to, then, make a critical analysis that will be carried out based on the conceptions of image and its persuasive function, typical of the theology of the time, and the conception of people and their psychological and spiritual dynamism, typical of the phenomenological psychology.