JESUITS

JESUITS. The history of the Jesuits in America can be divided into three periods. The first, a period of Jesuit missionary enterprise, begins in 1566 with Pedro Martínez landing in Florida, and ends in 1773, when Pope Clement XIV suppresses the order. The second period stretches from the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814 to the early 1960s, and traces the broad shift toward educational and academic ministries and parish work. The third period begins in 1962 with the Second Vatican Council.

Pedro Martínez died in a clash with the indigenous people of Florida. Neither he nor any of the other Spanish Jesuits established enduring Catholic settlements in the region north of modern-day Mexico. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jesuits had more success, especially in southern Arizona, where Eusebio Kino worked among the people of Pimería Alta, and in Maryland, where a handful of British Jesuits settled in the one colony enthusiastic about Catholic immigrants. By the late eighteenth century, 144 Jesuits had served in missions in British territories in Noh America. French Jesuits moved south from Canada into the colonies of New York and modern-day Maine; they also inhabited the southern portion of the Great Lakes region. Jesuit willingness to blend Christian and Native traditions facilitated conversions. Eventually the Jesuits established cadres of Catholic Indians throughout the region.

The primary difficulty faced by Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was anti-Catholicism and anti-Jesuitism brought to the New World by British colonists weaned on the fundamental texts of the Reformation. In 1620, William Brewster brought on board the Mayflower a just-published translation of the Venetian historian Paulo Sarpi's attack on the Council of Trent and the papacy. Fears of popery and Jesuits shaped the rhetoric of settlers in colonial New England just as in Britain. New England Protestant missionaries asked Abenaki Indians in 1699 to abandon "those foolish superstitions and plain idolatries with which the Roman Catholics and especially the Jesuits and missionaries have corrupted [religion]." In 1724, Sébastian Råle, a French Jesuit working among Maine Indians, was murdered and his scalp carried back to Boston.

The papal suppression of the Jesuits occurred in 1773, and though the new nation was growing rapidly, Catholic priests were few. Still, in 1789 John Carroll (1735–1815) became the first American bishop. In the same year Carroll founded the first Jesuit college, Georgetown College (now Georgetown University) in Washington, D.C. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Pope Pius VI allowed ex-Jesuits to begin to affiliate with each other.

The restoration of the Jesuits by Pope Pius VII in 1814 allowed the order to begin again. The initial efforts in the United States were halting, as only a small number of Jesuits spread throughout the East, Midwest, and Louisiana. Their focus was often on setting up missions for Native Americans. Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–1873) became the most famous Jesuit missionary; he traveled back and forth across the continent and consulted with Indian chiefs and governmental officials. During the nineteenth century, the primary task of the Jesuits switched from missionary work to education. Their students were the Catholic immigrants pouring into the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century; the first were immigrants from Ireland and Germany, with slowly increasing numbers from Italy and Poland. Here the distinctive mentality of the nineteenth-century Jesuits—suspicion of modern philosophical trends, wariness toward any deviation from Roman orthodoxy—helped create a Catholic educational system that saw itself as countercultural, protecting the faith in a hostile environment. By 1916, the Jesuits, then numbering 2,626, had founded twenty-four Catholic colleges and a larger number of Catholic high schools. Virtually all of the students in these institutions were male, and the Jesuits understood themselves to be training a lay Catholic elite of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen to defend the church in the world.

Since they were busy establishing schools, few American Jesuits became intellectual leaders until the middle of the twentieth century. Pushed by coeducation and even more by the effect of the G.I. bill after World War II, Jesuits found themselves struggling to keep pace with the 130,000 students enrolled in their colleges by 1963. Still, from the middle of the nineteenth century forward, Jesuits provided much of the energy behind Catholic publishing, founding such magazines as America in 1909. By the 1930s, there were roughly twenty Jesuit labor schools, attesting to the growing interest in social reform and mobilization of the Catholic working classes.

Not until the 1940s did individual Jesuits begin to exert intellectual leadership. They primarily used a natural law template to argue that moral values were universal and that reason could lead to faith. The most important figure was John Courtney Murray (1904–1967). A brilliant stylist and deeply learned, Murray became a leading figure in the church-state debates of the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that America's founders did not intend as rigid a separation of church and state as contemporary American liberals assumed. Within the church, he became the foremost spokesman for the position that Catholics should embrace religious freedom along the American model, not grudgingly accept it while formally proclaiming "error has no rights." These heterodox views led Roman authorities to suppress Murray's writings on the topic during the latter 1950s. Yet, Murray's views triumphed at the Second Vatican Council, with the adoption by the assembled bishops in 1965 of a document he helped draft, Dignitatis Humanae, also called the "Declaration on Religious Freedom."

At the time of the Council almost one quarter of the 36,038 Jesuits in the world were American. Within thirty years, the number of American Jesuits had fallen almost by half, even as the worldwide Jesuit population fell by one-third. The dwindling order focused more on interior spiritual development than on fighting secularists. Yet, the primary Jesuit ministry remained education. Many Jesuits pushed their colleges and high schools toward what one worldwide gathering of the Jesuits called the "struggle for justice," meaning greater engagement with social evils such as poverty and the suppression of human rights. At the same time, fears that the declining number of Jesuits signaled an evisceration of Catholic institutional identity were widespread. Jesuit high schools (now primarily coeducational) seemed more stable in this regard than universities, which were overwhelmingly staffed by laypeople, many, if not most, of whom were non-Catholic.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jesuits remain as leaders in every aspect—editorial, liturgical, pastoral, and intellectual—of Catholic life. In addition a small number of Jesuits have achieved prominence in the wider world of the American academy. One American Jesuit theologian, Avery Dulles (b. 1918), noted for his defense of the theological views of Pope John Paul II, was even named a cardinal in 2001, the first American theologian so honored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Garraghan, Gilbert J., S.J. The Jesuits of the Middle United States. 3 vols. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1983. The original edition was published in 1938.

McDonough, Peter. Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1992.

O'Malley, John. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

John T.McGreevy

See alsoAnti-Catholicism ; Education, Higher: Denominational Colleges ; Explorations and Expeditions: French ; Indian Missions .