The Jesuits

Michael Walsh

Description

The Society of Jesus – the Jesuits – is the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church. Distinguished by their obedience and their loyalty to the Holy See, they have never, during nearly five hundred years’ history, produced a pope until now: Pope Francis is the first Jesuit Pope. Michael Walsh tells the story of the Society through the stories and exploits of its members over five hundred years, from Ignatius of Loyola to Pope Francis himself. He explores the Jesuits' commitment to humanist philosophy, which over the centuries has set it at odds with the Vatican, as well as the hostility towards the Jesuits both on the part of Protestants and also Roman Catholics - a hostility which led one pope to attempt to suppress the Society worldwide towards the end of the eighteenth century. Drawing on the author’s extensive inside knowledge, this narrative history traces the Society’s founding and growth, its impact on Catholic education, its missions especially in the Far East and Latin America, its progressive theology, its clashes with the Vatican, and the emergence of Jorge Bergoglio, the first Jesuit to become Pope. Finally, it reflects on the Society's present character and contemporary challenges.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian Church
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786222008
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

© Michael Walsh 2022
This book was originally published in English by Liturgical Press,
Saint John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321, USA, and is published
in this edition by license of Liturgical Press. All rights reserved.
This edition published in 2022 by Canterbury Press
Editorial office
3rd Floor, Invicta House,
108–114 Golden Lane,
London EC1Y 0TG, UK
www.canterburypress.co.uk
Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
(a registered charity)

Hymns Ancient & Modern® is a registered trademark
of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
13A Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich,
Norfolk NR6 5DR, UK
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher, Canterbury Press.
The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
978-1-78622-198-8
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd



Preface
1 From Inigo to Ignatius
2 Trent and Its Aftermath
3 Journey to the East
4 The New World
5 In Search of Prester John
6 Schoolmasters and Politicians
7 The Problem of France
8 The Path to Suppression
9 Restored or Renewed?
10 Thinking with the Church
Appendix The Black Legend of the Society of Jesus
Bibliography
Index

Contents

In memory of Kathleen Walsh, my wife of 46 years, who didn’t live quite long enough to see this book completed.

Preface
A very long time ago I found myself in conversation with a distinguished Jesuit historian. There were, I was well aware, many histories of the Society of Jesus available, most, like this one, in single volumes. My proposal, as a brash new graduate in history, was that what was needed was a Cambridge-style history, one in several volumes. For those not familiar with them, the Cambridge University Press histories are typically multiauthored volumes, with the essay titles in each volume carefully chosen to provide comprehensive coverage of the chosen topic.
My Jesuit historian interlocutor, and I honestly cannot remember who it was except that he was not British, demurred. The time was not yet ripe, he said; there was still so much to learn. He was, of course, right about there being so much more to learn. But then there always is. In preparation for this book I entered an alert for “Jesuit” in an academic search engine. Each day there arrives in my inbox a notice commonly listing forty or so, sometimes more, new articles added to the database, not all of them perhaps of great value, but some among them certainly reporting valuable new research.
Since that conversation, perhaps nearly half a century ago, many more volumes have appeared. There is still no Cambridge history, but there is a Cambridge Encyclopedia and a Cambridge Companion —though in my view the Oxford Handbook is far more satisfactory than either. But as my view is that a Cambridge-style history is still needed, why, then, have I produced yet another single-volume version of the 450-year story of the Catholic Church’s largest and most controversial religious order?
As I have indicated, many studies of the Society keep appearing. One reason for writing the book is to bring some of this new research to a wider audience. A second reason is that most, if not all, histories give prominence to what Jesuits did . That is important, of course, and indispensable in what claims to be a history, but in this new book I want to give rather more coverage of what Jesuits thought . Not, as will be seen, that they all thought the same, but there are some major controversies where Jesuit theologians were ranged against others in the Church, and I have tried to give a fair amount of space, at least for a general history, to these debates.
I have to confess, however, the main reason I wrote the book is that I was asked to do so. Half a dozen years ago I was approached by an evangelical publishing house to write a life of Luther. I said Martin Luther was not my kind of topic. The commissioning editor then kindly asked what I would like to write. In the mid-1980s I had been (very) marginally involved in the film The Mission , starring Jeremy Irons and Robert de Niro. One of the film’s producers, David, now Lord, Puttnam, asked me to write book about it: not about the film as such but about the historical context of the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay. In the end, the book never happened, but my interest in the project remained. I bought books and read articles, and so when asked by the obliging editor what I would like to write I suggested as a possible topic the Jesuit reductions. That was too narrow in scope for them, said the publisher. On the other hand, a general history of the Jesuits would suit very well.
With that encouragement, I began to write and research. Then the publisher became insolvent. Happily the idea of a history of the Society, especially in the light of the election of a Jesuit to be pope, eventually went on to find a home with Liturgical Press in the United States and Canterbury Press in the United Kingdom. For that, and to them, I am very grateful. I am also grateful to the editors for their patience. Because of problems arising from the pandemic, and hence the difficulty in accessing material, it has taken much longer to write than I, or they, anticipated.
But the Jesuit historian was in a sense quite right. There is never the right moment to write a history of the Society. Nor is there ever enough time or space to tell the complete story. There are always going to be things left out. I am conscious that in this text there are many matters I have not touched upon. I have, for example, said nothing about the Philippines, or about the Marianas Islands, or Cambodia, or Vietnam; there is precious little about Jesuits in Africa or in Eastern Europe. There is a little about science because of the Galileo affair but otherwise nothing about their important work as astronomers, still ongoing, not least in the Vatican Observatory, and nothing at all about art and architecture—though in my defense these have recently been excellently covered in two volumes edited by John W. O’Malley and others titled The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773.
This, then, is not a complete history of the Jesuits. It is about (some of) the Jesuits in history, hence the book’s title. It has been a great story, and it is most certainly not yet over.

Chapter 1
From Inigo to Ignatius
“It is generally agreed among his foes no less than among his friends that Ignatius Loyola was a maker of history.” These are the opening words of the saint’s biography by the Irish—though a member of the English (now British) province—Jesuit historian James Brodrick, and he adds, “ A hundred books can be cited in proof of this statement.” 1 Ignatius’s life story is fairly well known, not least because he left an account of some of it in his Reminiscences , a short biography that he dictated to his secretary, Luis Gonçalves da Cámara, urged on by the man whom Ignatius eventually appointed as vicar general of the Society, Jerónimo Nadal. It begins, however, only with his involvement in, and wounding at, the siege of Pamplona in May 1521: “Until the age of twenty-six he was a man given up to the vanities of this world, and his chief delight used to be in the exercise of arms, with a great and vain desire to gain honour.” 2
That might suggest a birth date of 1495, but from other sources it would seem he was born in 1491 when “Erasmus was twenty-five, Machiavelli twenty-two, Copernicus eighteen, Michelangelo sixteen, Thomas More eleven, and Luther had just turned seven.” 3 He was born, in other words, in a year that hovers between the medieval and the Renaissance.
He might indeed have won fame as a soldier as he hoped. Born in the castle of Loyola, built by his grandfather some thirty years earlier, Inigo López (as Ignatius was baptised) belonged to one of the most important families in Guipúzcoa. It seems his father, Beltrán Yáñez, may have been away from the castle at the time of his birth, fighting with the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella in the siege of Granada, the capture of which finally united the whole of what is now Spain under Christian rule. Inigo’s mother, Marina Sánchez de Licone, was of noble birth, related to the counts of Oñate and to the dukes of Nájara. All but one of Inigo’s brothers became soldiers, two of them dying in battles in Europe, one in the New World. Inigo, the youngest son, might have been destined for the priesthood rather than the army had not the parish in the family’s gift, that of Azpeitia, a village a mile or so north of the castle, been bestowed on the next youngest, Pero López. It is likely that Inigo had also entered the clerical state, though his behavior, or so witnesses thought when a case was brought against Inigo and Pero in 1515, was more that of a young gallant than of a priest: there is even a possibility that he may have fathered a daughter, though the evidence is slight. 4 He escaped the charges against him only through the intervention of Juan Velázquez de Cuellar, a close friend of Inigo’s father to whose household in Arévalo he was consigned sometime before his father’s death in 1507; his mother had died soon after he was born, and he had spent his first years in the care of the wife of the local blacksmith.
Juan Velázquez was the majordomo of Queen Isabella and treasurer of Ca