The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540. Its members, the Jesuits, famous for their brilliance, courage, and missionary zeal, were also suspected across Europe, over the next 200 years, of Machiavellian politicking. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV abolished the order, but Pius VII restored it toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1814. In the 19th century, the Jesuits favored the vindication of miracles, hostility toward other branches of Christianity, and papal infallibility. Today, they are known for anti-imperialism, ecumenism, and integrating Roman Catholicism with indigenous cultures around the world. In American Jesuits and the World, John McGreevy explains the twists and turns of their history and dissolves the apparent paradoxes.
Jesuits feared the rising tide of liberalism in 19th-century Europe, which culminated in the revolutions of 1847-48. A new round of suppressions and expulsions led dozens of Jesuits to migrate to America from Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Italy. They had hardly settled in when boatloads of political refugees also arrived, fleeing the repression that had brought those revolutions to an end. As a result, conflicts that had begun in Europe resumed in Maine, Missouri, and Louisiana, with the old antagonists still confronting each other but now in a very different setting.
The United States of the 1840s and ’50s had a rapidly growing Catholic population, mostly immigrants from Germany and Ireland. Respectable Protestant leaders like Theodore Parker, Lyman Beecher, and his daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe feared (and wrote against) the rising Catholic tide. The country was also crisscrossed by traveling anti-Catholic agitators, such as Alessandro Gavazzi, an Italian ex-priest, and John Orr, who called himself the Angel Gabriel, wore a white robe, and blew fanfares on a silver trumpet before stirring up Protestant crowds into a frenzy. The “Know-Nothing” party was the political embodiment of this mood: It regarded Jesuits as the frontline agents of a foreign despotism (the papacy) that was plotting to destroy American freedom. A salacious literature—with titles like Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures (1836)—added that Jesuits used the confessional to seduce innocent young women, and that nuns in convents were the sexual playthings of lecherous priests.
One of the Jesuit exiles, John Bapst, from Fribourg in Switzerland, preached to the growing Irish immigrant population in Maine. Abrasive and outspoken, he objected to use of the King James translation of the Bible in local schools and tried to use public funds to hire a Catholic schoolteacher. Local Protestants reacted by blowing up his chapel with a primitive bomb; when he came back to town, they tarred and feathered him. Even when tempers had cooled, no remorse was expressed and a local jury declined to indict the ringleaders.
Meanwhile, in the South, the Jesuits were slow to condemn slavery. The Maryland Jesuits actually owned slaves until 1838. Their suspicion of individualism—which they saw as the outcome of the Reformation, made all the more toxic (in their view) by the ideology of the French Revolution—led them to look on abolitionists as worse than slave-owners. Ferdinand Helias, a Belgian Jesuit in Missouri during the 1850s and ’60s, described William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist speeches as the “mad ravings of Puritan fanaticism.” Born in 1796, Helias had witnessed the imprisonment of both his father and his twin brother for criticizing Napoleon’s attack on Catholicism in the early 1800s, and during the Civil War, both sides suspected him of disloyalty. Many of Helias’s German immigrant parishioners also disliked his provocative manner, denigration of the laity, and polarizing approach to all conflicts.
During and after the Civil War, American Jesuits joined in the effort to create a Catholic subculture among the immigrants, emphasizing baroque buildings copied from European originals, Catholic schools and colleges, and new teachings such as the Immaculate Conception of Mary (defined in 1854). Building projects, funded by poor working-class immigrants, could be astonishingly ambitious. One of the most stupendous was the construction of a full-size copy in Philadelphia of the Jesuits’ headquarters church in Rome, the Gesu. It was undertaken by the Swiss-born Jesuit exile Burchard Villiger in the 1870s and ’80s. Villiger also founded a college, St. Joseph’s, whose rigorous curriculum of Greek and Latin was based on the order’s ratio studiorum, laid down in 1599 and designed to cultivate Christian gentlemen.
Miracle cures also played a growing role in popular devotions. In 1866, Mary Wilson, a Roman Catholic convert and aspiring nun in Louisiana, suddenly recovered from a terminal illness when her Sacred Heart sisters prayed for the intercession of the Blessed John Berchmans, a 17th-century Jesuit. Other Jesuits publicized the miracle, adding it to their catalogue of Catholics who were sanctified through suffering. McGreevy vividly explains the centrality of the Sacred Heart to 19th-century Catholic spirituality:
The Jesuits, an international organization, were skeptical about romantic nationalism, but it was one of the most powerful phenomena of 19th-century politics. As the exile generation died out and a generation of American-born Jesuits matured, new attitudes developed, much less antagonistic to the idea of nationalism. When the United States went to war against Spain in 1898, won, and took over the Philippines, the father general of the Jesuits encouraged American volunteers to assist their Spanish brethren in the education of young Filipinos. From being itself a mission field, the United States now became the source of Jesuit missionaries.
The Americans who moved to Manila deplored the lax religious life they found there, and the hidebound, halfhearted methods of their Spanish predecessors. More to their taste was YMCA-style cultivation of manly sports such as boxing and basketball. They favored wearing suits in the streets rather than robes (less girlish, more manly), shifting the language of instruction from Spanish to English, and cooperating with the American governors. Theodore Roosevelt spoke well of the Jesuits as agents of civilization.
Trends evident during the Philippines occupation intensified during the First World War, an era when Catholics scrambled to demonstrate their one-hundred-percent Americanism. (Similarly, most German Jesuits were patriotic Germans and most French Jesuits were patriotic Frenchmen.) The power of nationalism had won out over the theoretical claims of Catholic universalism. Moreover, a movement on behalf of “Americanism,” pioneered by Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul, Minn., had reconciled much of the American Catholic population with public schools, freedom of religion, and wholehearted patriotism.
In a brilliant and concise conclusion, McGreevy surveys further changes in the landscape over the past century. The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) repudiated much that the 19th-century exile Jesuits had fought for. It depicted a Catholicism more hospitable to other Christians, less censorious, less hierarchical, and more attuned to democracy and to cultural variety. Some of this emphasis could be credited to John Courtney Murray, probably the most articulate and influential American Jesuit of the 20th century, who argued that the ideas embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights originated not with John Locke and other liberal theorists but in medieval Catholic teaching.
On the other hand, some parts of the old Jesuit program now seem acutely relevant to current realities. “That Manila now matters more to the future of Catholicism than Milan, and Kampala more than Cologne, is in part an achievement of 19th-century Jesuits and their missionary peers,” writes McGreevy. “[T]heir success as institution builders, along with their linguistic facility and a willingness to travel to all corners of the globe, seem oddly contemporary.” How fitting that the papal election of 2013 should bring forth, for the first time, a Jesuit pope, and that, giving an address in 2014 on the 200th anniversary of his order’s re-founding, Pope Francis should urge on them a renewed dedication to their “outbound” tradition.
Patrick Allitt teaches history at Emory and is the author, most recently, of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.
