Jesuits

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JESUITS

JESUITS is the popular name for members of the Society of Jesus (S.J.), a religious order of clerics regular, founded by Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) and canonically established by Pope Paul III in 1540.

Purpose and Organization

The order's purpose is twofold: to promote the salvation and perfection both of individual Jesuits and of all humankind. Jesuit organization, manner of life, and apostolic ministries are all designed to further this very broad goal. For the same reason, all Jesuits are expected to be ready to go to any part of the world and to engage in any work assigned to them, laboring always for the greater glory of God—hence the order's motto, "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam" (A.M.D.G.). Much in the original structure was borrowed from existing orders, but several features were novel. These included the very extensive authority and lifelong tenure of the superior general; the lengthy training period and gradation of members; a distinct spirituality based on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola; and stress on the vow of religious obedience. Official directives can be found in a large body of writings, known collectively as the Institute, which includes pertinent papal documents; the Spiritual Exercises and the Jesuit Constitutions (also composed by Ignatius Loyola); decrees of the society's thirty-three general congregations; and instructions of superiors general.

Supreme authority, subject always to the pope, rests in an elective body, the general congregation, which selects the superior general (the sole elected superior) and which alone has full legislative power. Day-to-day government is highly centralized under the superior general, resident in Rome, who has complete authority over the entire order. In practice, however, much of this authority is delegated to superiors throughout the world and to others whom the superior general appoints. Members are priests, candidates for the priesthood (scholastics), or temporal coadjutors (brothers). After priestly ordination and a final period of spiritual training (tertianship), priests receive their final grade as spiritual coadjutors or they are professed of four solemn vows (poverty, chastity, obedience, and special obedience to the pope). No special privileges attach to this last group, although certain posts are open only to them.

Early History and Suppression

The combating of Protestantism was a major preoccupation of Jesuits up to the mid-seventeenth century, although the order was not founded with this goal in mind. Education, both of young laymen and clerics (whose seminary training was largely in Jesuit hands), was the principal area of activity in Europe and in mission lands. The society accomplished its most effective work in the Counter-Reformation by means of its schools, all of which were tuition-free and which concentrated on the humanities. Uniform pedagogical norms were supplied by the Ratio studiorum, first published in 1599. By 1749 the order, with 22,589 members, was operating 669 secondary schools (collegia ) and 176 seminaries; 24 universities were wholly or partly under its control. The academic renown of these institutions won Jesuits the reputation of being the "schoolmasters of Europe." Scholarship was also diligently pursued, especially in the ecclesiastical sciences. In theology those who gained lasting fame include Peter Canisius and Roberto Bellarmino (both doctors of the church), Francisco Suárez, Luis de Molina, Denis Petau (Petavius), Gregory of Valencia, Gabriel Vázquez, Leonard Lessius, and Juan de Ripal-da. The Bollandists, a group of Belgian Jesuits, are renowned for their contributions to Christian hagiography. Pastoral ministries were very diverse. The Jesuits placed special emphasis on preaching, popular missions, administration of the sacraments, retreat direction according to the method of the Spiritual Exercises, guidance of Marian Congregations (sodalities), and promotion of devotions, especially to the Sacred Heart. They had almost a monopoly on the post of royal confessor throughout Catholic Europe.

Next to education, missionary work was the chief preoccupation of the Jesuits. By the mid-eighteenth century the society was evangelizing more territory and sending out more missionaries than any other order. The overwhelming majority labored in the vast Spanish or Portuguese lands in the New World and Asia, with some also in Africa. Others toiled in the French possessions in North America. Jesuits first arrived in the present-day limits of the United States in 1566, along the southeastern coast. Up to the American Revolution almost all the Catholic clergy in the English colonies were Jesuits. In the Americas their missionary establishments, called Reductions, became famous. In Asia, however, the Jesuits' missiological method of accommodation to native cultures, beneficial as it proved in many ways, involved the order in long, bitter disputes over Chinese and Malabar rites of worship, the greatest of all mission controversies.

The Society of Jesus has never lacked opponents. During the third quarter of the eighteenth century disparate groups of enemies combined forces to engage the order in a losing battle for life. French Gallicans and supporters of monarchical absolutism resented Jesuit championship of the papacy. Jansenists were bent on the ruin of the group that had long supplied their chief theological critics. Most hostile of all were radical devotees of the rationalistic Enlightenment, whose ranks numbered highly placed government officials as well as such gifted authors as Voltaire. Between 1759 and 1768, governments expelled the society from Portugal and Spain and their overseas possessions, from the kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and from the Duchy of Parma. France outlawed the order. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV bowed to the demands and threats of the Bourbon courts, and by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, dissolved the entire order. Complete suppression never actually occurred, for Russia refused the necessary official publication of the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor. This permitted the society in Belorussia to continue its canonical existence. Pope Pius VII restored the order in the kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1804 and allowed Jesuits everywhere to affiliate with their brethren in Russia. In 1814, Pius VII revoked the brief of suppression and completely restored the Society of Jesus.

Activities since 1814

After its restoration, the Society of Jesus spread throughout the world and came to exceed by far the numbers it had counted before 1773. Its membership totaled 36,038 in 1965, with 8,393 members in the United States. Educational and missionary endeavors continued to be its main areas of ministry. Scholarly traditions were revived, with more attention devoted to the social and physical sciences. The turbulence that has characterized life in the Catholic Church since Vatican II has not escaped the order, as is evident by its decline in total membership (to 25,952 in 1983; and to 20,170 in 2004) and among young scholastics (from 9,865 in 1965 to 3,347 in 1983). Efforts to meet the challenges of the age were the major preoccupations of the thirty-first general congregation (1965–1966) and the thirty-second (1974–1975), which decreed changes in the order's government, in the training and life of members, and in the choice of ministries. These general congregations also called for more emphasis on the struggle against atheism, on ecumenism, on closer relations with the laity, on the social apostolate, on use of the mass media, on service of faith, and on promotion of justice.

Bibliography

The literature concerning the Jesuits is enormous and often controversial. For extensive bibliography, see Bibliography of the History of the Society of Jesus by László Polgár, S.J. (Saint Louis, Mo., 1967), with 963 entries, and the same author's Bibliographie sur l'histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus, 1901–1980, 3 of 7 projected vols. to date (Rome, 1981–). Complete and well-ordered annual bibliographies appear in Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu, published since 1932. Important secondary works include A History of the Society of Jesus by William V. Bangert, S.J. (Saint Louis, Mo., 1972); The Jesuits in History by Martin P. Harney, S.J. (New York, 1941; reprint, Chicago, 1962); Jesuiten-Lexikon: Die Gesellschaft Jesu einst und jetzt by Ludwig Koch, S.J. (Paderborn, 1934; reprint, with a few additions by M. Dykmans, S.J., Louvain, 1962); and The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice; A Historical Study by Joseph de Guibert, S.J. (Chicago, 1964), an authoritative study. The reader should also consult Ludwig von Pastor's The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, 40 vols. Volumes 12 through 39 devote in all several hundred pages to the Jesuits, giving a very detailed and lengthy treatment of the suppression.

New Sources

See also Documents of the Thirty-Fourth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, ed. John L. McCarthy, S.J. (St. Louis, 1995); The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, ed. John W. O'Malley, et al. (Toronto, 1999); Jesuits: Missions, Myths, and Histories, by Jonathan Wright (London, 2004).

John F. Broderick (1987)

Revised Bibliography

Encyclopedia of Religion