American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global

One of the best books that I have read on the Jesuits. Well paced and full of details. It was hard to put down this book. Even though it focused on the American Jesuits, you got a good feel for the non American Jesuits such as Father General Ledochowski. As a Camadolese Benedictine oblate based in Berkeley, we have close relationships with our Jesuit neighbors in Berkeley. I very highly recommend this book.Anthony Ordona ,Obl OSB Cam

McGreevy skillfully uses the Jesuit Order as a lens to examine an important question from his previous book,  Catholicism and American Freedom: A History , namely how the American Catholic Church was affected by and reacted against the prevailing ideology of liberalism during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although this book is not as wide-ranging in a temporal sense, it even more consciously places the American Catholic story into a global context using illustrative examples of how the Jesuits helped to create a separate Catholic subculture, a distinctly Catholic modernity during the 1800s and early 1900s. McGreevy's research in dozens of archives across the U.S. and Europe is extremely thorough and impressive. This is a very important book that should be read by anyone, especially historians and other scholars, with an interest in Catholic history or religion's impact on modern life.

Certainly a difficult subject to bring alive. But the challenges, some of their own making, they dealt with successfully in most cases is truly remarkable. The legacy of their efforts in education speak for themselves.

Good book. It seems to be an honest assessment of the Jesuits and their order. It is well annotated and I have begun to confirm the authors references.

My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit polymath Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Over the years, I took five courses from him at Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, that was founded in 1818.Before Ong entered the Jesuit order in 1935, he had been educated by Jesuits in high school and college, and he studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University) in Kansas City, Missouri. As part of his Jesuit training, he did graduate studies in Thomistic philosophy and theology (in Latin) at SLU.The Jesuit religious order of men (known formally as the Society of Jesus) was founded in 1540 by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556). Within the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Julius III approved the new religious order in the papal bull Exposcit debitum in 1540 and subsequently confirmed it in the papal bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae in 1550.St. Ignatius Loyola is also famous for his compilation of guided meditations known as the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by the American Jesuit classicist George E. Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992) and for his Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, also translated by Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970).Certain early Jesuits became famous as missionaries to distant places including India and China, but other Jesuits stayed in Europe and established Jesuit colleges there. In a comparatively short time, the Jesuits had established so many colleges that they felt that they needed to coordinate their curricular efforts. As a result, they compiled the document in Latin known as the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, translated into English by the American Jesuit classicist Claude Pavur as The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005).Ong, himself a Renaissance specialist, connects Jesuit education with Renaissance humanism in his 1967 encyclopedia article on “Humanism,” which is reprinted in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999, pages 69-92).However, despite the ostensible successes of the Jesuits, Pope Clement XIV formally suppressed the Jesuit order in 1773. But later on, Pope Pius VII restored the order in 1814.In John T. McGreevy’s fast-paced and at times vividly written book American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton University Press, 2016), the author focuses on the restoration period from 1814 to 1914, but without totally neglecting the rest of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century.As McGreevy points out (pages 222-223), Pope Francis is the first Jesuit pope – and the first pope from South America (Argentina). The Jesuit missionaries in South America at an earlier time are the subject of the 1986 movie The Mission. In the pope’s recent eco-encyclical, in the process of alerting people of goodwill around the world today to the threat of climate change, he critiques our capitalist economic system and economic globalization.As McGreevy’s end-notes show (pages 225-295), he worked extensively in various Jesuit archives. McGreevy, who is in history at the University of Notre Dame, does not state whether he was educated by Jesuits.In Philip Gleason’s book Contending with Modernity: [American] Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1995), he aptly expresses the spirit of contending with modernity that dominated the core curriculum of philosophy courses in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy not only in Jesuit colleges and universities, but also in other Catholic colleges and universities in the twentieth century in the United States. Your guess is as good as mine as to how many American Catholic undergraduates actually understood the import of what they were taught in those various required philosophy courses in the core curriculum.In effect, McGreevy explains the understandable backstory of how that spirit of Catholic contending with modernity arose in Europe and then arrived in the Unites States, with Jesuits exiled from certain European countries bringing that spirit with them to American culture. He reports that roughly one thousand Jesuits “left Europe for the United States in the nineteenth century” (page 2). He also notes that “the United States was such an important site for Jesuit work, drawing more Jesuits from around the world than any other place in the nineteenth century” (page 4).McGreevy makes it clear that the anti-Catholic spirit in certain European countries had an American counterpart, most notably in the Know-Nothing movement.In Ong’s first book, Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (Macmillan, 1957), he also discusses “the post-Revolutionary period of nineteenth-century Catholicism in which most American Catholics came to America” as characterized by “the minority, defensive position, in which the Church found itself in a culture which really, although never quite officially, was anti-Catholic” (page 3). Out of this understandable reaction to a hostile environment, American Catholics, according to Ong, developed “a Catholic mentality which in many ways is the most conservative in the world set in the midst of the nation whose genius seems to be adaptability and change” (page 3).Basically, McGreevy adds substantially to Ong’s assessment of how deeply conservative American Catholics tended to be, but McGreevy credits the Jesuits with playing a significant role in shaping that conservative mentality.According to McGreevy, “This hostility prompted Jesuits and their allies to accelerate the building of a dense Catholic subculture of parishes, schools, associations, colleges, and magazines, all constructed in a reciprocal relationship with a particular devotional culture and communal sensibility” (page 3).The modernity that nineteenth-century Catholics were contending with included the American experiment in democratic government and the spirit of individualism. (A kindred but different inner-directed spirit of personal individuation is accentuated in Jesuits and other who undertake a thirty-day retreat in silence following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, as Ong has pointed out. But the spirit of individualism that Jesuits and others inveighed against came to be known later in the nineteenth century as social Darwinism.)But McGreevy carefully explains that “Jesuit opposition to modernity was selective, not wholesale. It included hostility to new notions of nonsectarian education, religious freedom, and the idea that science and the miraculous were incompatible. It valued the community over the individual. It drove the construction of a dense network of Catholic institutions to shelter the faithful from potentially hostile influences. But the very construction and maintenance of those institutions required engagement with host societies" (page 13).Later on, McGreevy says, “By the late 1940s, the vast majority of Jesuits in the North Atlantic had also come to terms with nonsectarian public education (as long as Catholic schools were permitted), religious liberty (in practice), and modern science (while sustaining a belief in the miraculous)” (page 212).In Frontiers in American Catholicism, Ong says, “Collectively, American Catholics seem quite unaware that their achievement in setting up their present school system represents not only a remarkable achievement in the face of a neutral state which gives no financial assistance whatsoever to any but state schools, but also a tremendous development in the interior economy of Catholic life itself” (pages 7-8; also see page 107).In Frontiers in American Catholicism, Ong commends the Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore (pages 15, 21, 23, and 125), Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul (pages 15, 21, 23, and 125), and the Protestant convert to Catholicism Orestes Brownson (pages 22 and 125).McGreevy also discusses Cardinal Gibbons (pages 160 and 164), Archbishop Ireland (pages 159-166, 179-180, and 190), and Orestes Brownson (pages 86, 92-93, and 111).As McGreevy notes, “In 1914, the Jesuits inaugurated a centenary celebration [of the restoration of the Society of Jesus by Pope Pius VII in 1814]. The Society now numbered over sixteen thousand – a remarkable increase from the several hundred survivors of the suppression who celebrated the restoration in 1814. Beginning with a handful of beleaguered institutions, Jesuits now ran 234 colleges in forty-three countries, sponsored dozens of scholarly, devotional, and missionary journals, ran multiple scientific observatories, served as advisers to the pope and in various high ecclesiastical positions, and as a collective constituted the most significant Catholic intellectual resource” (page 173).However, McGreevy adds, “The celebration was ill timed, since it coincided exactly with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo (with an Austrian Jesuit delivering last rites) and the beginning of World War I” (page 173).McGreevy also notes that the American Catholic subculture that emerged in the nineteenth century “endured and even strengthened, into the 1960s” (page 168).Of course in the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church significantly changed certain church teachings regarding religious freedom, as McGreevy points out (page 216). American Catholics to this day rightly celebrate the influence of the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray on Vatican II’s decree regarding religious freedom. But apart from this rightly celebrated decree, most of the theologians who influenced other aspects of Vatican II were Europeans, not Americans. For example, McGreevy mentions the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (pages 214 and 221), the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (pages 214 and 216), and the German Jesuit theologian Augustin Bea (page 214). (McGreevy discusses Murray on pages 210-211, 213-214, and 215-216.)In McGreevy’s tactfully worded concluding assessment of nineteenth-century Jesuits, he says, “Their hesitations about democracy and religious liberty did not equip them for the challenges of the twentieth century” (page 217).McGreevy quotes Rahner as saying that in the nineteenth century the Roman Catholic Church “‘exported a European religion as a commodity it did not really want to change . . . together with the rest of the culture and civilization it considered superior. . . . [But] the victory of the vernacular in the church liturgy [as decreed by Vatican II] signals unmistakably the coming-to-be of a world Church whose individual churches exist with a certain independence in their respective cultural spheres, inculturated, and no longer a European export’” (quoted on page 221; I’ve added the material in square brackets here).McGreevy says, “A Belgian Jesuit coined a verb – ‘inculturate’ – that became talismanic for missionaries, signaling a turn away from soul-by-soul conversion to ‘inculturating’ Catholicism into local societies” (page 219).In effect, Ong was urging his fellow American Catholics to undertake the spirit of inculturation in his 1957 book Frontiers in American Catholicism, a theme he also advances in his 1959 book American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-Secular Encounters in the Modern World (Macmillan).No doubt many Jesuit missionaries in the past manifested the attitude that Rahner characterizes as “export[ing] a European religion as a commodity [that the church] did not want to change.” Evidently, that attitude characterized the French Jesuit missionaries to North America in the seventeenth century, some of whom were martyred along with some of their converts. They are known collectively as the North American martyrs. The Jesuits maintain shrines to their memory. One is in Auriesville, New York; the other, in Midland, Ontario.When Pope John-Paul II visited Canada in 1984, he celebrated a Mass outdoors in the large field adjacent to the shrine in Midland, as Emma Anderson in religious studies at the University of Ottawa recounts in her book The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard University Press, 2013, page 271). She says that in the Vatican II era a “new notion [emerged] that native peoples who has not yet heard the Gospel were nevertheless imbued with the spirit of Christ” (page 272). She says, “No longer were missionaries seen as bequeathing to native peoples new and saving truths but rather as recognizing those that native culture had independently evolved and from which the missionaries could learn. This new theology was perhaps most memorably captured in Pope John-Paul II’s much quoted but little understood catchphrase uttered during his 1984 visit to the Midland shrine: ‘Christ, in the members of his Body, is himself Indian’” (page 272).However, despite Pope John-Paul II’s much quoted catchphrase uttered at the Midland shrine in 1984, we should not forget that he cracked down hard on the Jesuits in the 1980s and on liberation theology in South America, as Matthew Fox reminds us in his book The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved (Sterling Ethos, 2011). But liberation theology may be rehabilitated a wee bit under Pope Francis.Now, even though McGreevy does not happen to mention it, Vatican II also enjoined all religious orders to re-examine the orders original charism. For the Jesuits, this re-examination included studying more carefully how St. Ignatius Loyola himself had directed individual persons making retreats following the Spiritual Exercises.After Vatican II, American Catholics turned their attention toward cultivating spirituality and spiritual practices, including Ignatian spirituality. See, for example, The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, edited by Michael Downey (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier Book/ Liturgical Press, 1993). For an accessible presentation of Ignatian spirituality, see the American Jesuit spirituality writer James Martin’s book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (HarperOne, 2010).Even though McGreevy also does not mention it, Vatican II effectively down-sized the ascendancy of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology that the church had promoted as a result of Pope Leo XII’s 1879 encyclical that inspired the subsequent Thomistic Revival, which McGreevy does mention (page 16). He also notes that Pope Leo XIII was educated by Jesuits and had a Jesuit brother (page 141).The Jesuits at SLU and their lay collaborators contributed significantly to the Thomistic Revival in the United States. Certain SLU Jesuits and certain laymen in philosophy at SLU authored influential textbooks in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy that were widely used in American Catholic colleges and universities in the required core courses in philosophy. But Jesuits and laymen in philosophy at SLU also published their fair share of scholarly books in philosophy.As part of the Thomistic Revival, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) undertook two book-length studies of certain aspects of St. Thomas Aquinas’ thought. Then Lonergan published his philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957; 5th ed., University of Toronto Press, 1992, as volume three of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan).The Canadian Jesuit theologian and Lonergan scholar Frederick E. Crowe published his important article “Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All” in Philippine Studies, volume 13 (1965): pages 546-571. Crowe’s essay is reprinted, slightly revised, in the anthology Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1993, pages 89-1107; now distributed by Rowman & Littlefield).As part of the post-Vatican II interest in spirituality, the American spirituality writer Matthew Fox creatively constructed conversations with St. Thomas Aquinas about creation spirituality in his 550-page book Sheer Joy (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).Other creative post-Vatican II studies of St. Thomas Aquinas regarding spirituality include A. N. Williams’ book Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (Oxford University Press, 1999), Bernard Blankenhorn’s book The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2015), and Daria Spezzano’s book The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas (Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2015; distributed by Catholic University of America Press).Now, McGreevy claims, in passing, that the German Jesuit Thomist Joseph Kleutgen was “the most influential Jesuit philosopher [and theologian] of the nineteenth century” (page 125).In Ong’s book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press, 1986), the published version of Ong’s 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, he carefully critiques Kleutgen (pages 94-97, 124, and 131-132). Nevertheless, Kleutgen undoubtedly influenced Pope Leo XIII’s thinking about St. Thomas Aquinas that inspired the Thomistic Revival.In Ong’s 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Ong writes a kind of apologia for the agonistic (contesting) spirit of contending. No doubt he was speaking from his own personal experience as part of his own formal education in the Jesuits.In his 1981 book, Ong says, “once in a while a theological student of outstanding competence would perform the ‘grand act,’ the greatest performance of all, as did Father Joachim Villoslada, S.J., on April 29, 1903, when in impeccable logical form and equally impeccable Latin, he defended orally in open forum against all comers his 212 theses from theology and philosophy before an audience that included President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was visiting Saint Louis to inspect the site of the coming World’s Fair” (pages 137-139).McGreevy also reports President Roosevelt’s visit to Saint Louis and his attendance at the Spanish Jesuit’s performance of the grand act, which he says was the third held in the United States (pages 193-194). McGreevy also correctly notes that the Spanish Jesuit’s name was Joaquin Vilallonga. According to McGreevy, Fr. Vilallonga later became the Jesuit superior of the Spanish mission in the Philippines (page 207). Later on, American Jesuits took over the Jesuit mission in the Philippines.McGreevy says, “In the middle of the twentieth century, the single-largest group of Jesuits came from the United States. Since the 1980s, the single-largest group has come from South Asia” (page 221).In conclusion, because global history is now fashionable, McGreevy’s new book about the Jesuits fits nicely within this new trend in historical studies. Because Jesuit missionaries both before the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 and after its restoration in 1814 were globetrotters, I suspect that his fast-moving study will be supplemented by further studies of the Jesuits in the near future.

Well written. Easy to read. Well documented. Interesting format where each chapter focuses on one Jesuit or institution and uses this individual experience as an example and starting off point to explain the wider influence and way of proceeding of the Jesuits both in the United States and throughout the world.

I have not completed the reading but I like it so far