Jesuits

Jesuits, popular name for priests of the Society of Jesus, founded in 1534 by the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). Along with the usual vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, Jesuits took a special vow of obedience to the pope. Society priests were strictly selected and trained according to the programme Ignatius laid out in his Spiritual Exercises. The Jesuits played a large part in the 16th‐century reform movement of the Catholic church. Their speciality was education and their rigorous but flexible methods, systematized in the Ratio et institutio studiorum (1599), became models for Catholic education. Active as missionaries in India and Japan, they experimented with the inculturation of Catholicism in China. In Paraguay they set up closed missionary villages, the Reductions. Bowing to Bourbon and other pressures, Clement XIV reluctantly suppressed them in 1774, but they were re‐established by Pius VII in 1814 and have been to the fore of every major church initiative since. Active in Ireland from 1542, the first native Irish Jesuits were effective agents of the papacy and Tridentine reforms, identifying inadequate popular understanding of the faith and Protestantism as major threats. Predictably hounded by the government, small numbers remained active during the penal period. They founded Clongowes Wood College in 1812. Intellectually influential, especially through journals like Studies (1912), they took over University College, the successor to Newman's Catholic University, in 1883. A period of complacency in the wake of independence was followed by a renewal in the 1960s marked by involvement in domestic and international justice issues.

Thomas O'Connor