By JUDE DOUGHERTY
McGreevy, John T. American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. vii + 315 pp.
Dissolved as a religious order by Pope Clement in 1773, the Society of Jesus was restored 41 years later by Pius VII. At the time of the restoration the order had only 600 aged members, yet a century later, the Jesuits numbered 17,000 men who were at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s expansion around the world.
The story is admirably told by John T. McGreevy, dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.
In telling the story of how they were first viewed in North America, McGreevy has brought to light some interesting correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Adams wrote, “If any Congregation of Men could merit eternal Perdition on Earth or in Hell, it is the Company of Loyola.” Jefferson replied, “I dislike, with you, the restoration because it marks a retrograde step from light to darkness.” Adams wrote later, “The Society has been a greater Calamity to Mankind than the French Revolution or Napoleon’s Despotism or Ideology.” The year was 1816.
Politicians and intellectuals around the world worried that the Jesuits would detain the enlightened progress of the century. They were expelled from many countries in Europe and in Latin America. That hostility prompted Jesuits, their episcopal friends, and other allies to accelerate the building of what became a dense subculture of parishes, schools, associations, colleges, and journals, all constructed in a reciprocal relationship that existed until 1960, and the emergence of a more global Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.
Soon after the restoration, the civic leaders of Fribourg, Switzerland, arranged for the return of the Jesuits to one of their oldest colleges that they had been forced by the suppression to abandon. It was in Fribourg that an early skirmish in the battle for the soul of Europe took place.
There was no doubt that modern philosophy and the French Revolution had placed Catholics and modern liberals on an unbridgeable chasm. French students studying at Fribourg would later become among the leading opponents of the secular republic. One Jesuit professor aptly contrasted the horrors of the modern world he envisaged to come with that of previous centuries of faith. The fact that the student body and faculty at Fribourg came from a dozen countries irritated Swiss nationalists, who were held responsible for a series of attacks on the Jesuits in the 1830s and 1840s.
Even a leading French Catholic intellectual, Charles Montalembert, while defending the right of Jesuits to have their schools, regarded their view of the modern world as “false, narrow, and unfortunate.” That, of course, was to change dramatically.
McGreevy uses a chapter to describe the Jesuit promotion of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and other examples of Catholic piety in the 19th century. He illustrates that promotion with the story of Mary Wilson who entered the convent of the Society of the Sacred Heart at St. Louis in 1866. Already unwell when she joined the order, she fell desperately ill after beginning her training at Sacred Heart Convent north of New Orleans. Her superior then moved her to another convent 145 miles away at Grand Coteau.
As her illness advanced, Wilson took little food and water and could only swallow the Communion host with agonizing difficulty. After extended treatment, her doctor gave up hope that she would survive. A doctor today after examining the report of her symptom might diagnose her as suffering from tuberculosis.
On December 5, 1866, the Society of the Sacred Heart began a novena, invoking the intercession of John Berchmans, a 17th-century Jesuit who was beatified by Pius IX only the year before. Even as she orchestrated the novena, the mother superior asked the convent handyman to begin carving a coffin. On December 14, Berchmans appeared to Wilson, standing next to her bed after she placed a picture of Berchmans on her lips. He whispered, “Open your mouth,” and then touched her tongue. “I come by order of God, he said, your suffering will come to an end.”
Although some in the convent were skeptical, news of the miracle reached the archbishop of New Orleans, who began an investigation, asking those close to the event to write an account of what they had seen. Wilson’s 42-page handwritten account and other accounts have survived.
Still speaking of Catholic piety in the 19th century, McGreevy reports that in the aftermath of the French Revolution — an episode that was responsible for the deaths of an untold number of priests and nuns — between 1800 and 1860, nuns and a few priests and bishops founded 400 new women’s religious orders in France alone, with over 200,000 women entering religious life. The Society of the Sacred Heart itself numbered 3,000 women by 1865.
Catholics opposed the devotion and called it “fantastic, “reeking of baroque excess,” and “an offense to all learned theologians.” In its defense, Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore equated enemies of the Jesuits with enemies of the Sacred Heart.
Eventually news of the Louisiana miracle reached Rome and a formal enquiry was instituted by Leo XIII. For evidence of sainthood a miracle attributable to Blessed John Berchmans was required, and Wilson’s recovery seemingly provided that. A fact omitted in a report to Rome is that Marie Wilson died eight months later. Miracle or not, John Berchmans was a holy man. After some hesitation Pope Leo canonized Berchmans on December 15, 1888.
Doubters still persisted, pointing out that Leo himself was educated by Jesuits and may have been unduly influenced by his brother, a Jesuit. Privately, Leo more or less acknowledged that he proceeded with the canonization out of respect for the Jesuit order.
Returning now to the principal narrative of the book, the advancement of a more global Church after the Second Vatican Council was supported by Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Jesuit Father General Adolfo Nicolas.
But a global ethos on the part of the Jesuits may have been in place long before. An early example is found in the career of a Jesuit who was expelled from Sicily in 1848, who moved to Ireland, then to Spain, then to the Philippines where the Jesuits had an important, and one may add, lasting presence, and then to France, before ending his career in New Mexico.
In McGreevy’s judgment, one of the most important Catholic intellectuals of the 20th century was John Courtney Murray, SJ, who urged interreligious cooperation, grappled with the notion of “civic faith” advanced by John Dewey, and who in defense of religious freedom took as a model the church/state relationship that prevailed in the United States at the time.
In addition to his professional work as a theologian, Murray lectured widely and published extensively on church/state issues and religious freedom with a lay audience in mind. His 1960 volume, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, pulled together much of his political thought and was widely reviewed in both Catholic and major secular media. Time magazine placed him on the cover of its December 12, 1960 issue and called attention to his impact on Vatican II. Murray’s The Problem of God, published in paperback in 1965, was known by Catholic students nationwide.
While McGreevy cannot be faulted for his exclusive focus on the Jesuits, it would be interesting to know how Jesuit missionary and educational activity dovetailed with that of the Franciscans and Dominicans who were similarly far flung in their missionary work.
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