The Jesuits (12 page)

The leadership of the Catholic Church, and especially papal leadership, soon came down unequivocally on the side of the
ancien régime,
which meant opposition to virtually everything that now began to proclaim itself modern. Liberty, equality, and fraternity became anathema to devout Catholics, who saw in the slogan nothing but a recipe for chaos and carnage. More moderate voices tried to make themselves heard, but generally to little avail.

This was the context in which the restoration of the Society of Jesus occurred. The young men who now entered it were perforce creatures of that context. Although there were exceptions, the Jesuits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were inimical to the values of “the modern world” or at least highly skeptical of them.

The Jesuits' main efforts, however, were directed to putting their own house in order and especially to once again taking up their ministries. They did their best, often under the most adverse
circumstances, to reconstruct the traditions operative before the suppressions severed them many decades earlier. To guide them, however, they had available only a small number of texts, virtually all of them normative: the
Spiritual Exercises,
the
Constitutions,
the
Ratio Studiorum,
and a selection of the letters of Saint Ignatius. They also had specific ordinances of more recent fathers general and detailed rules regulating daily life, and such documents as these loomed large in how Jesuits began to think of their vocation. “Observing the rules” sometimes seemed to be the essence of the Jesuit vocation.

The vast correspondence of the early Jesuits had either been looted and scattered at the time of the suppressions or, at best, lay unexamined in the archives the Society in some places now had restored to it. Missing in the Society's attempt to re-create itself were the traditions as they were actually lived. The result was an often wooden, moralistic, and legalistic interpretation of the normative texts. But the discrepancy between such interpretations and the way life had to be lived made itself felt ever more keenly.

In 1814 there were about six hundred Jesuits, virtually all of them in Europe. Not until six years later was the Twentieth General Congregation able to meet to elect a new superior general. After a contentious beginning, the delegates chose the seventy-two-year-old Italian Luigi Fortis. By then the number of Jesuits had already doubled, but it was still a pitifully small number compared with the 22,500 in the middle of the previous century. For nine years Fortis worked quietly but effectively at putting in place the necessary institutions within the Society for it to be able to function.

By the time Fortis died, the number of Jesuits had again doubled. By midcentury it reached five thousand and by 1900 about
fifteen thousand. In 1900 the Dominicans had been reduced to just over four thousand, and the combined branches of the Franciscans to only a few thousand more than the Jesuits. The Carmelites and Augustinians were operating at less than 20 percent of their numbers before the Revolution. In this scenario, therefore, the Jesuits were doing very well.

They were fortunate in that Fortis's two successors had long tenures, which provided stability to an organization still finding its way. Jan Roothan, general from 1829 to 1853, exercised an especially important influence during his tenure of twenty-four years because he called Jesuits' attention to the centrality of the
Spiritual Exercises
in their spirituality and in an important letter in 1833 impressed upon them the need to revive the Society's missionary tradition. He brought to completion, as well, a revision and updating of the
Ratio Studiorum,
but, as time would tell, even the revision did not meet the new and rapidly evolving needs and expectations of prospective students. The Jesuits attempted, as was typical of them, to meet those needs and expectations and bit by bit put a distance between practice and norm.

They set about their ministries with energy and enthusiasm. In the Papal States and in a few other places, they received back some of their original real estate and buildings, but for the most part they had to begin from scratch. In no area of endeavor was this more difficult than the schools because of the investment of men, money, and ongoing commitment they required. Nonetheless, the Jesuits succeeded remarkably well, especially in times and places where they enjoyed the favor of the government. Their schools once again began to enjoy prestige, especially among the upper classes for whom the limitations of the
Ratio,
rather than
being a problem, symbolized the restoration of the standards of an earlier and happier time.

The schools, as well as the other ministries, of course suffered severely from the political upheavals in Catholic countries that marked the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Jesuits, now identified by friend and foe as among the strongest supporters of the older order, that is, of monarchy or its equivalent, were expelled from country after country only to return with a change of regime. France, for instance, banished them three times—in 1828, 1880, and 1901. At the time of the banishment in 1901, the Jesuits had to leave behind twenty-four colleges as well as churches and other institutions. As before, they had to seek refuge abroad.

France was hardly unique. Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1835 and 1868, and Germany in 1872. Besides other European countries, Colombia banished them in 1850, Guatemala in 1871, Nicaragua in 1881, and Brazil in 1889. Between 1821 and 1914, the Jesuits had to leave Mexico five times. In 1873 after the seizure of Rome by the forces of the new Kingdom of Italy, Pieter Jan Beckx, Roothan's successor as general, took refuge in Fiesole outside Florence. Not until twenty-two years later, 1895, when Luis Martín was general, would the Jesuit curia be able to return to Rome. In Italy and elsewhere, anti-Jesuit vitriol flourished. It was for the most part an update of the themes of the
Monita Secreta.

As a certainly unintended consequence, the expulsions helped supply manpower for the Society's missions. Banished from their homelands, the exiled Jesuits had a new freedom to heed the call of the superiors general to venture into new lands. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw waves of missionaries setting out from Europe for Asia, Africa, and America, some because they needed to seek a new home but others simply inspired by the
example of earlier Jesuit missionaries, especially Francisco Xavier. Not only among Jesuits but among Catholics at large, Xavier became one of the era's most popular saints, much better known and revered than Saint Ignatius. The Jesuits were again giving substance to their claim that “the world is our house.”

The Society returned to China in 1842 when two French Jesuits landed in Shanghai. As their numbers increased, the old problem of Chinese Rites returned because a ceremony honoring Confucius was required of everybody entering government service. After the revolution of 1911–1912, the new government declared the act was of purely civil significance. Twenty-five years later, the Holy See abrogated the old prohibition. By 1945 more than nine hundred Jesuits were in China, of whom 250 were Chinese. But Chinese suspicion and resentment of foreigners exploded time and again, culminating with the expulsion of all Christian missionaries by the Communist government in 1949.

To Japan the Jesuits returned late, only when asked by Pope Pius X to found a university there. In 1914 they opened Sophia University in Tokyo, which especially after World War II achieved a distinguished reputation. In India the Jesuits arrived in considerable numbers and on an international basis. The Belgians went to Bengal and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the French to Malabar and Madurai, the Germans to Bombay (Mumbai), the Italians to Mangalore. The Americans and Canadians arrived much later in Darjeeling, Jamshedpur, and Patna. As before, the Jesuits established schools, seminaries, printing presses, and churches wherever they went. These institutions soon flourished and continue to do so today in a country that now boasts eighteen Jesuit provinces, the largest number in a single country in the whole history of the Society.

In the United States the Society experienced extraordinary success, even though it was a nation with a strong anti-Catholic prejudice. Immigrants from Catholic countries of Europe began arriving in great numbers, and with them came priests, including a significant number of Jesuits. By the middle of the century, Jesuits from Flemish Belgium had settled in the midwestern part of the country, from France in Louisiana and other parts of the south, from Italy in the west. Later in the century came more Italians for the southwest, Germans for the area of the Great Lakes, and Irish for the northeast. They established schools in virtually every major city where they were present and used them to help integrate into American society the sons of immigrants. By century's end, the Society in the United States numbered close to two thousand members.

European Jesuits also arrived in significant numbers in the various countries of Latin America, where they found a situation that resembled what they had left behind—the Catholic heritage now radically challenged by an anticlerical Liberalism, the generic name for republican and secular ideologies. The political situation tended, therefore, to be as unstable as in parts of Europe and often rabidly unfavorable to the Jesuits. Nonetheless, by 1900 there were about 1,500 Jesuits working there, many of them Europeans.

The Jesuits had been in Africa since the beginning, but for a variety of reasons their missions there never really stabilized. That was now no longer true. French Jesuits arrived in Madagascar in 1844, for instance, and the Belgians in the Congo (Zaire or Congo Kinshasa) in 1893. In that same year the British province took over the mission to present-day Zimbabwe from Jesuits from various provinces who had arrived there a few years earlier. As was true of other missionaries of the era, the Jesuits traveled under the flags of
their respective nations and tended to see themselves as promoting the culture and values of the home country in what was both a religious and a “civilizing” mission. This aspect of their labors changed radically after World War II.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, therefore, the Jesuits once again seemed to be everywhere, even in what might seem like highly unlikely places. In 1914, for instance, there were 217 in Armenia and Syria, 22 in Egypt, 78 in Indonesia, 102 in Australia, and 42 in Albania. In these places and wherever they were, they tried to learn the languages and, in accordance with their tradition, to accommodate as best they could to local situations.

The Jesuits of this era did something that, except for the
Journal de Trévoux,
their predecessors never did. In most countries where they established themselves, they began publishing journals and periodicals aimed at both professional and general readerships. Some in the latter category were devotional. Others were important commentaries on contemporary politics, religion, and culture, such as
La Civiltà Cattolica,
1850, in Italy;
Études,
1856, in France; and
Stimmen aus Maria Laach,
1871 (since 1914,
Stimmen der Zeit
), in Germany—all of which are still publishing today. From 1865 until 2001, the English Jesuits published
The Month,
a journal whose pages contained contributions from such distinguished authors as John Henry Newman, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Edith Sitwell, and Muriel Spark.

The Jesuits continued to cultivate the sciences. Some schools around the world again began to operate astronomical observatories, as had their predecessors, and they provided a welcome service to the discipline until the cost of keeping up with technological advances became prohibitive. Even today the Society still
trains a few members to staff the Vatican's Observatory, where the equipment is up to present-day standards. The best-known Jesuit scientist in the modern era is of course Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), the French paleontologist.

The introduction of historical methods into the study of virtually all disciplines is one of the most striking features of the intellectual culture of the nineteenth century. Jesuits at first resisted the application of these methods to sacred subjects. In the early twentieth century the general, Luis Martín, enthusiastically supported Pope Pius X's campaign against Modernism, a movement among Catholic intellectuals in which such an application was a pervasive characteristic.

But by the 1930s and 1940s, some Jesuits had become leaders in the enterprise. For a revival of the theology of the patristic era, for instance, the Belgian Jesuit Émile Mersch (1890–1940) and the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) played important roles and challenged the theological paradigm in vogue that was based on medieval Scholasticism. In 1932 the Austrian Jesuit Josef Andreas Jungmann (1889–1975) published a book showing that the Catholic discipline of requiring private confession to a priest for the forgiveness of sins was unknown until the Middle Ages. Then in 1948 he published his groundbreaking and extremely influential
Missarum Solemnia,
a study of the history of the mass of the Roman rite showing the changes that had occurred over the centuries. For the Catholic Church and therefore for the Society
of Jesus, studies like these had an incalculably great impact and required a reexamination of established traditions.

As Jesuits applied the new methods to the history of the Society itself, the methods had a transforming impact on the development of Jesuit self-understanding. They made the tradition available in an incomparably broader base of documents, which led to a broader understanding of it. A group of Spanish Jesuits under the leadership of José María Vélaz (1843–1902) set about publishing a critical edition of the full correspondence of Saint Ignatius and other documents coming from his hand, such as the
Exercises
and the
Constitutions.
The first of the twelve volumes of Ignatius's correspondence rolled off the presses in 1894. The correspondence revealed Ignatius as a farsighted leader, a man altogether different from the prevailing stereotype of him as a martinet enforcer of military discipline in the army of Jesuit crusaders.