American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global

ISBN-13: 9780691183107

Media Type: Paperback(Reprint)

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Publication Date: 11-13-2018

Pages: 328

Product Dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

John T. McGreevy is dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

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American Jesuits and the World

How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

NINETEENTH-CENTURY JESUITS AND THEIR CRITICS

I

Hostility toward the Jesuits first reached British North America in the seventeenth century as an extension of European political and religious conflicts. The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, taking into account the "the great warrs & combustions which are this day in Europe" and blaming this discord "on the secret practices of those of the Jesuiticall order," prohibited Jesuits from entering the colony in 1647, with town officials in Salem describing them as the "terror of the Protestant world." In Virginia, colonists worried about Jesuits fomenting rebellion among local Indians. In Massachusetts and New York, colonists banned the Jesuits, with New York authorities deeming them "disturber[s] of the public peace" meriting "perpetual imprisonment."

These fears were abstract. At the time of the suppression, thousands of Jesuits ran many of the most important educational institutions in Europe and Latin America. North America was different. Only twenty-five Jesuits lived in the British North American colonies in the 1760s, with perhaps an equal number in French Louisiana, on the Illinois prairie, and in Spanish California. Because of legal restrictions on their public activities, Jesuits in the British colonies kept a low profile, evading unwanted attention by wearing standard gentlemen's dress instead of clerical robes, addressing one another as "Mr." and not "Fr.," and building their churches on side streets. Philadelphia's most prominent resident, Benjamin Franklin, working in Paris, negotiated directly with anxious papal representatives to name the first American bishop, ex-Jesuit John Carroll. But even in Franklin's Philadelphia, Jesuits bemoaned the limited freedom "enjoyed by us."

In 1805, ex-Jesuits living in the United States quietly affiliated themselves with Jesuits living in Russia, where Catherine the Great was disinclined to obey papal edicts and permitted Jesuits to maintain their colleges and residences. In 1814, Bishop Carroll, who had personally witnessed the "catastrophe" of the Jesuit suppression in 1773 while training for the priesthood in Bruges, expressed "joy and thanksgiving" at the restoration of the Society by Pope Pius VII.

Still, Jesuit influence within the new United States remained modest. That changed when in one of the great migrations of modern history sixty million Europeans left the continent in the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries. The Catholic portion of the migration was immense — probably over half — and was led in sequence by immigrants from Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Poland.

The single-largest group of migrants made their way to the United States. Just 3 percent of the American population in 1830, Catholics numbered 18 percent of the population by 1900. This "continual inpouring of Catholic immigrants from almost all of the countries of Europe," in the words of one Jesuit observer, transformed the tiny Catholic Church in the United States into the nation's single-largest religious organization. By the 1840s, Father General Roothaan found himself continually appealing to European Catholic monarchs and missionary societies for funds to support Jesuits willing to work with Catholic immigrants in the United States.

Some Jesuits volunteered for missionary service. A larger number were pushed. The first wave of expulsions began in Russia and the Netherlands, and was followed by expulsions from Spain, Naples, France, and Portugal. These initial expulsions were the lingering aftershocks of the eighteenth-century controversies between Jesuits and their theological opponents that had resulted in the 1773 suppression. Often, the Jesuits became pawns in a contest between the papacy and Catholic monarchs. The expulsions were frequently brief, quickly followed by negotiations for the Jesuits' return.

Liberal nationalists sparked the second wave of Jesuit expulsions, beginning in the 1840s, with politicians, ministers, and popular novelists drawing on older anti-Jesuit tropes and texts, but now also portraying the Jesuits as conspirators against national unity and the ideal of progress that so captivated educated men and women. An initial trigger for this second wave of Jesuit expulsions was Eugène Sue's 1844 novel, Le Juif Errant, first serialized in leading French newspapers, and one of the century's best sellers not simply in France but also across the globe. Despite the title — "The Wandering Jew" — the plot revolved less around Jews than crafty Jesuits uniting from all corners of the globe to maneuver a vast fortune away from an honorable but needy French Protestant family. In Colombia, legislators referenced the novel in an ultimately successful campaign to expel the Jesuits. In Belgium, where leading newspapers also serialized Le Juif Errant, crowds inspired by the novel vandalized Jesuit residences and schools, and chanted anti-Jesuit slogans. In Santiago, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Vienna, the "avid" consumption of Le Juif Errant and other novels of a similar style astonished and worried prominent Jesuits. In Britain, the novel appeared in three English translations within a year of its publication.

Two leading French intellectuals, Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet, simultaneously offered a course on the Jesuits at the Collège de France, with their lectures immediately printed to great acclaim. Their conclusion that "Jesuitism" and "ultramontanism" (a term denoting Catholics sympathetic to the nineteenth-century revival and Roman authority) menaced new nation-states became a commonplace. That England, Prussia, and the United States were more prosperous than Ireland, Poland, and Spain only underlined the enervating "decadence" of a theological system incapable of cultivating either individual initiative or national loyalty. The choice was stark: either "Jesuitism must abolish the spirit of France," Quinet explained, "or France must abolish the spirit of Jesuitism." The Jesuit was a "machine" and a "Christian automaton." Julio Arboleda, a Colombian statesman, drew on Michelet and Quinet to express his fear that a Jesuit's "patria" would always be the Society of Jesus, not Colombia or any single nation-state.

Leaders of almost all the European revolutions of 1847–48 (and their Latin American admirers) expressed animosity toward the Jesuits. In Switzerland, attacks on the Jesuit role in the educational system spurred a civil war, and after the victory of the Protestant cantons over the Catholic cantons, the Jesuits were immediately expelled. Some of the leading figures in the Frankfurt Parliament, where reformers gathered in spring 1848 in an effort to unify Germany and create a democratic republic, published anti-Jesuit texts. In Prague, major Czech literary figures and nationalists did the same. Public demonstrations against the Jesuits stretched the length of the Italian peninsula, from Turin to Naples. These events culminated in the Roman revolution of 1848–49, when the revolutionary government forced the Jesuits to abandon the city a short time before the pope himself.

Most anti-Jesuit rhetoric came from Protestants, liberal Jews, and anticlericals, but some Catholics also criticized the Jesuits for thwarting the union of Catholicism and modern nationalism, and bolstering antimodern factions within the episcopacy and in Rome. A German Catholic priest, Johannes Ronge, appalled by the enthusiasm for miraculous cures among some Catholics, founded a breakaway church and also led attacks on the Jesuits. A handful of leading Catholics, not just Protestants, advocated banning the Jesuits from Prussia during the heady days of the 1848 revolution.One of the key figures of Italian nationalism, Vincenzo Gioberti, an Italian priest influenced by Michelet and Quinet, published an influential attack on the Jesuits titled Il Gesuito Moderno. He defined the Jesuits as the "enemies of nationalities" and "allies of despots." In Spanish translation, Gioberti's writings inspired anti-Jesuit oratory across Latin America. In Naples, crowds chanted "Long live Italy, long live Gioberti; death to the traditions, away with the Jesuits, death to the Jesuits."

II

Nineteenth-century Jesuits occasionally dismissed "ignominious stories" about the Society as a regrettable consequence of the "unbridled license of writing and reading in our times." They wryly contrasted mobs in Vienna and Rome chanting against the Jesuits in the name of "progress" with the "good manners and cordiality" of putatively uncivilized Blackfeet and Flathead Indians meeting Jesuits in the western United States. And they noted the incongruity of anti-Jesuit fervor given the small numbers of Jesuits — 1200 in France in 1848, 650 in Germany in 1872 — in any given country at any given time.

Still, all Jesuits recognized that they stood in an uneasy relationship with new understandings of individual freedom and national identity. The initial trauma was the suppression, beginning in Portugal in 1759 and culminating with a 1773 papal decree. The decree forced twenty-three thousand Jesuits to abandon the Society along with its hundreds of churches and schools. Major Jesuit communities in Italy, France, and Poland dissolved almost overnight, as did small Jesuit houses all over the world, from the Mariana Islands to French Guyana to New Orleans. Nineteenth century Jesuits came to blame the suppression on an alliance of corrupt monarchs and anti-Catholic Enlightenment intellectuals, who together forced the hand of a reluctant Pope Clement XIV.

The second trauma, shared by many Catholics, not just Jesuits or ex-Jesuits, was the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, with thousands of churches desecrated, priests and nuns persecuted, and libraries and schools destroyed. The formal restoration of the Jesuits in 1814 ameliorated some of the damage caused by the suppression, even if nineteenth-century Jesuits never shook a feeling of vulnerability to papal whim. But the French Revolution remained a backdrop for Catholic life well into the twentieth century. Tales of priests, nuns, and families fleeing Catholic Europe after the revolution, sustaining the faith despite persecution, became set pieces, reminders of modern Catholicism's founding drama. Even after the 1814 restoration, the training of young Jesuits often occurred in secret because of hostility from monarchs and politicians, and Jesuit leaders found themselves making (frequently unsuccessful) pleas for the repatriation of confiscated churches and facilities.

The surge of anti-Jesuit agitation in the 1840s, then, reactivated latent Jesuit anxieties about nationalism and democratic reforms associated with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. One Italian Jesuit writing to an American Jesuit in 1848 termed the explusions sweeping Europe a "great catastrophe" and "modern dispersion" more cruel than the 1773 suppression. When a few Italian Jesuits tentatively proposed joining forces with other Catholic nationalists in the 1840s, Father General Roothaan was dismissive. In Roothaan's view, contemporary nationalist leaders willing to expel Jesuits replicated the horrors of the "grand revolution in France."

The notion that the Jesuits stood athwart modernity, not in it, became for reformers conventional wisdom. François Guizot, professor of modern history at the Sorbonne, and later French prime minister, lamented persistent Jesuit opposition to "the development of modern civilization" and "freedom of the human mind." Or as Roothaan explained, "The Jesuits are [viewed] as an expression of Catholicism" and those who wish to "modernize" society must "destroy" them.

Jesuits themselves disparaged the modern world with enough frequency to confirm Guizot's stereotype. Still, distance from old arguments permits a more measured assessment. Jesuit opposition to modernity was selective, not wholesale. It included hostility to new notions of nonsectarian education, religious freedom, and the idea that science and the miraculous were incompatible. It valued the community over the individual. It drove the construction of a dense network of Catholic institutions to shelter the faithful from potentially hostile influences. But the very construction and maintenance of those institutions required engagement with host societies. Over time, Jesuits and other Catholics crafted a distinctive version of modernity, askew to dominant currents but immersed in the same river carrying their opponents.

This Jesuit path toward a Catholic modernity began with an act of historical retrieval, an effort to skip the bewildering history of the eighteenth century and the suppression, and reestablish the Society on foundations laid by Ignatius of Loyola. This process started with a reassessment of Jesuit spiritual life. Roothaan insisted on an almost-literal reading of Saint Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises, the key document for spiritual formation within the order, and personally translated a new edition from the original text.

Exactly how nineteenth-century Jesuits understood the Exercises — in daily meditations, annual retreats of eight days, and a thirty-day retreat at some point during their training — is difficult to recapture. But the focus was clearly on the Lord's passion and suffering, notably the regret of one Jesuit that Jesus desired to "suffer more, while I am occupied only in trying to suffer less." The stress was on humility, "mortification and abnegation." The "terrible enemy" of authentic Jesuit work, explained one pastor in New York, was "selfishness." Its remedy: "obedience."

That a leading Jesuit taking the thirty-day retreat in 1853 identified "inordinate self-love" as his "principal fault" only confirmed the sense among anticlericals that Jesuit spirituality was "an assault on individuality and selfhood." That Roothaan's notes on the Spiritual Exercises stress "the obedience of the Child Jesus" as a spiritual model highlighted the vast gulf between Jesuit piety and the simultaneous effort by Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to promote self-reliance.

In an era marked by fierce competition between Protestants and Catholics, and Catholics and anticlericals, Jesuit spirituality took on martial overtones. Many aspiring Jesuits wavered between careers as a soldier or priest, and they habitually used military metaphors to describe evangelization efforts. In Maryland, Jesuit instructors pledged to train "young warriors with fresh courage and with weapons of proof, who will fear no danger and dread no defeat."

Alongside a set of reenergized spiritual practices came a revitalized missionary ethos. Roothaan viewed evangelization as the Society's highest priority and worked carefully with like-minded bishops to send Jesuits to the far-flung corners of the world. Roothaan specifically noted in an 1833 plea that the "burden of every letter" from Jesuits already in the United States was a request for more missionaries to combat "ministers of error" (i.e., Protestant clergy) also "sent from Europe." He worried that European Catholic immigrants, moving to "faraway countries, their numbers rising," might "go into Protestant churches to hear the word of God, and to even celebrate Easter." Or as one Belgian Jesuit later wrote to European colleagues, invoking the great sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to India and Japan, "Where are the [Saint Francis] Xaviers ... of the nineteenth century?"

The appropriation of the sixteenth century shaped Jesuit educational practice as well. Roothaan made a detailed study of the original 1599 Ratio Studiorum, or plan of studies, for Jesuit schools and required in the early 1830s that it again become operative as the restored Society took over new educational establishments. A group of Jesuits working in the United States who authored a report on the Ratio Studiorum in 1889 triumphantly concluded that "the Method of the old [1599] and the new Ratio [1832] is the same."

This effort to recast Jesuit intellectual life extended beyond the classroom. Eighteenth-century Catholic reformers often disparaged the Jesuits as leaders of a backward, reactionary Catholicism. These intra-Catholic disputes help explain the willingness of some European Catholic monarchs and bishops to support the Jesuit suppression.

Still, even the most determined opponents of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century recognized the centrality of the Society to the era's scientific investigations, theatrical productions, and publishing ventures. What historians term the "Republic of Letters" rested in its Catholic variant on the learned labors of Jesuits scattered from Vienna to Macao.

Nineteenth-century Jesuits sustained some strands of eighteenth-century Jesuit intellectual life, notably a passion for astronomy. But the dominant impulse was to again return to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when a philosophical tradition, Scholasticism, derived from Saint Thomas Aquinas, dominated the intellectual life of the Society. One Irish Jesuit serving in the United States scanned the room at a gathering of the world's Jesuits in 1829 and admitted that "the Society can no longer boast of so many brilliant men as she had in the age when Scholasticism flourished." He nonetheless insisted that Scholasticism "has always been the Theology of the Society and the weapon with which our forefathers conquered the enemies of the Catholic Truth."At the same meeting, the assembled Jesuits cautioned each other "against the dangers of novelty, especially in any matters that in some way touch on religion."

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction 1

1 Nineteenth-Century Jesuits and Their Critics 8

2 Ellsworth, Maine: Education and Religious Liberty 26

3 Westphalia, Missouri: Nation 63

4 Grand Couteau, Louisiana: Miracle 104

5 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Americans 142

6 Manila, Philippines: Empire 179

Conclusion 210

Abbreviations Used in the Notes 225

Notes 229

Acknowledgments 297

Index 301