The Jesuits

Praise for
The Jesuits

“Only John W. O'Malley is today in a position to offer a sweeping scholarly yet accessible overview of the extraordinarily rich and complex history of the Society of Jesus—from Ignatius of Loyola to Pope Francis.”

—Robert A. Maryks, Boston College, editor in chief of the
Journal of Jesuits Studies

“John O'Malley's brief history of the Jesuits is both readable and accurate. From the order's official foundation by the Basque nobleman Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 to the recent election of a Jesuit pope, the story of the Jesuit order as told here is one of extraordinary consistency, flexibility, and persistence. O'Malley provides a dispassionate account of the role of Jesuit education throughout the world, and of the often violent political reactions to the order's perceived power. Readers will be inspired to follow up on the more detailed sources listed here, but John O'Malley's text stands alone as an authoritative and illuminating guide.”

—Elizabeth Cropper, dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art

A History from Ignatius to the Present

JOHN W. O'MALLEY, SJ

A Sheed & Ward Book

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Copyright © 2014 by Editions Lessius, Brussels. All rights reserved. First published as
Histoire des jésuites d'Ignace de Loyola à nos jours

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O'Malley, John W.

The Jesuits : a history from Ignatius to the present / John W. O'Malley, SJ.

pages cm

“A Sheed & Ward Book.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-3475-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4422-3476-5 (electronic) 1. Jesuits—History. I. Title.

BX3706.3.O425 2014

271'.53—dc23

2014007970

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

Important Dates in the History of the Society of Jesus

Preface

1
Foundations

2
The First Hundred Years

3
Consolidation, Controversy, Calamity

4
The Modern and Postmodern Era

Epilogue: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Further Reading

Notes

About the Author

1491 Birth of Ignatius of Loyola

1521 Battle of Pamplona, where Ignatius was wounded and his conversion begun

1534 Ignatius and six fellow students at the University of Paris pronounce a vow to go to Jerusalem

1540 Official approval of the Society of Jesus by Pope Paul III

1542 Francis Xavier arrives in India

1547 Portuguese Jesuits arrive in Brazil

1548 Jesuits open their school in Messina, Italy

1556 Ignatius dies in Rome

1558 The First General Congregation approves the
Constitutions
and elects Diego Laínez to succeed Ignatius

1583 Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri enter China

1614 Jesuits and other missionaries expelled from Japan Publication of the
Monita Secreta

1622 Canonization of Ignatius and Xavier

1656 Pascal publishes the first of his
Provincial Letters

1704 Condemnation of “Chinese Rites” by Pope Clement XI

1754 Outbreak of the “War of the Seven Reductions”

1759 Expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal and Portuguese dominions

1764 King Louis XV issues the royal decree suppressing the Jesuits in France

1767 Jesuits suppressed in Spain and Spanish dominions and their properties seized

1773 Worldwide suppression by Pope Clement XIV,
Dominus ac Redemptor

1801 Pope Pius VII validates the existence of the Society in Russia,
Catholicae fidei

1814 Worldwide restoration of the Society by Pius VII,
Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum

1965 Election of Pedro Arrupe as superior general, Thirty-First General Congregation

2013 Election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope

W
ithin a few decades the Society of Jesus will observe the five hundredth anniversary of its founding in 1540. During the course of almost five centuries, it has had a rich, complex, and often tumultuous history. Much admired and much reviled, it has from the beginning eluded facile categorization. On the most basic level, the Society is simply a Roman Catholic religious order, whose members pronounce the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Like the members of other orders, the Jesuits engage in the traditional ministries of preaching and administering the sacraments. Like the members of many orders, Jesuits travel as missionaries to distant lands and peoples. “The world is our house,” as Jerónimo Nadal, an early and extremely influential Jesuit, put it.
¹

About a decade after their founding, however, the Jesuits began to operate schools for lay students, something no religious order had ever done before in a systemic way. At that point they began to assume a profile that was altogether distinctive. Through the schools they were drawn into aspects of secular culture in ways
and to a degree unprecedented for a religious order. Jesuits became poets, astronomers, architects, anthropologists, theatrical entrepreneurs, and much more.

They were much appreciated. They were also feared and hated, even by many Catholics. Histories written about them have for centuries reflected this bifurcation: the Jesuits were saints; the Jesuits were devils. Of course, there were always more judicious appraisals, but only about twenty years ago did an almost seismic shift occur as historians began approaching the Jesuits in a more even-handed way, asking the simple and neutral question, “What were they like?”

This approach has been extremely fruitful and has generated an unprecedented outpouring of studies on every aspect of the Jesuit enterprise. The quality of this new research is consistently high. We now know more about the Jesuits than ever before, and we see them in new and helpful perspectives.

The pages that follow are informed by that scholarship. In them I limit myself to two objectives: (1) to provide in almost skeletal form the basic narrative of the origin, development, triumphs, and tribulations of the Society of Jesus up to the present; (2) to provide through almost arbitrary choice descriptions in detail of a few undertakings—lest the narrative soar too high and lose touch with the concrete reality that is history. This small book will have been a success if it whets readers' appetites to read further into the fascinating history of the Jesuits.

O
n February 2, 1528, a devout Basque nobleman, Iñigo de Loyola, arrived in Paris. At the advanced age of thirty-seven, he intended to pursue a degree at the university. Iñigo enrolled in the Collège de Montaigu, where he remained for a year before transferring to the Collège Sainte-Barbe. At Sainte-Barbe he shared lodgings with two much younger students, Pierre Favre and Francisco Xavier. Friendships formed among them and then expanded to include four more students—Diego Laínez, Alfonso Salmerón, Nicolás Bobadilla, and Simão Rodrigues. At this time Iñigo began to refer to himself as Ignacio or Ignatius, the name by which he has been known ever since.

Inspired by Ignatius, these “friends in the Lord,” as they described themselves, vowed in the summer of 1534 to travel together to the Holy Land to live at least for a while where Jesus lived and to work for “the good of souls.” However, if because of the disturbed political situation in the Mediterranean they could
not get passage, they would offer themselves to the pope for whatever ministries he thought best. On August 15 during a mass celebrated by Favre, the only priest among them at the time, they bound themselves to this course of action as well as to a life of poverty. Since they all in fact intended to be ordained, they were already committed to a life of celibate chastity. They did not realize at the time that on that fateful August 15, 1534, they took the first step that led six years later to the founding of the Society of Jesus.

Before these seven left Paris to begin their journey, they were joined by three more students—Claude Jay, Paschase Broёt, and Jean Codure. By 1537 the ten, now holding their prestigious Master of Arts degrees from the University of Paris, had arrived in Venice. There they were ordained and awaited passage eastward. As they waited they engaged in preaching and other ministries in northern and central Italy. When asked who they were, they now responded that they were members of “a brotherhood of Jesus,” in Italian
una compagnia di Gesù
(in Latin,
Societas Iesu
). As the months passed and turned into years, they realized that political tensions made the trip to the Holy Land impossible. What were they to do? Should they stay together, and even take more members into their
compagnia
? If so, should they go so far as to try to found a new religious order?