Alonso Messia Bedoya

Alonso Messia Bedoya, also spelled Alonso Mesía Bedoya or Alonso Messía Bedoya, was a Jesuit priest, preacher, and spiritual writer of colonial Peru. He was born in Lima, capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, in 1655, a criollo of the Spanish colonial society of the city. He entered the Society of Jesus and received his formation in the Jesuit colleges of the Peruvian province. He became a prominent urban preacher and theologian in Lima rather than a missionary on the Amazonian or Andean frontiers, working in the milieu of the Colegio Máximo de San Pablo and the Jesuit church of San Pedro, which served as centers of baroque Catholic culture in the viceroyalty.

His principal contribution to Catholic devotion was the institution of the Three Hours of the Agony of Christ (Devoción de las Tres Horas de la Agonía de Cristo Nuestro Redentor). In the later seventeenth century, commonly placed in the 1680s, he organized at the Jesuit church in Lima a continuous Good Friday service from noon until three o'clock, the hours during which the Gospels describe Jesus as hanging on the Cross. The rite joined successive sermons or meditations, frequently arranged around the Seven Last Words, with prayers and hymns. Messia Bedoya composed a handbook that guided preachers and congregations; the text circulated in manuscript and in print in Lima and was later republished in Spain, from which the custom spread across the Hispanic world and, in later centuries, into other Catholic countries. The Three Hours became a characteristic public observance of Holy Week in Latin America and Spain.

Messia Bedoya's oratory belonged to the high baroque style of the Spanish American seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: elaborate in rhetoric, affective in tone, and intended to move a socially mixed urban audience of Spaniards, creoles, indigenous people, Africans, and people of mixed ancestry. He is credited with other works of Jesuit spirituality and sacred eloquence besides the Three Hours manual. Within the Society he exercised teaching and administrative functions in Lima, taking part in the intellectual and pastoral life of a province that still combined great colleges in the capital with the famous reductions of Paraguay and the missions of the interior.

He died in Lima in 1732. No successful cause of beatification or canonization was completed for him, and he is not numbered among the saints or blesseds. He is remembered chiefly as the originator of a popular Good Friday devotion that remained in use into the twentieth century and as an example of criollo Jesuit pastoral initiative in the late colonial Andes. Precise information about his family, the exact date of his Jesuit vocation, and his place of burial is not firmly established in the standard historical literature.