God's Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue and Power: A History of the Jesuits.

God's Soldiers Adventure, Politics, Intrigue and Power: A History of the Jesuits

WRITTEN By Jonathan Wright PUBLISHED BY Doubleday, New York, 2004, ISBN: 0-385-50078-5, Hardcover, pp. 337, $39.95 CND 

This book is a history of the Jesuit community, not a study of individual Jesuits. Of course many individuals are mentioned but only in as much as they are involved in a movement.

On the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin on August 15, 1534, seven friends in Paris took solemn vows of poverty, and one of the group, the only one who was a priest, said Mass. In 1540 the group received approval from the Pope; St. Ignatius Loyola was chosen as its leader; and its members took an extra fourth vow to carry out whatever work the Pope asked them to do.

The best-known work in the early days was done by St. Francis Xavier, who spread the Faith in Goa (the Portugese colony in India) and in Japan, and died on the coast of China just before he was to begin missionary work there. But the Jesuits were also involved in every type of the Catholic apostolate, particularly in opposing the spread of Protestantism in Western Europe.

When St. Ignatius died in 1556 there were nearly a thousand members of the Community, and by 1626 membership had grown to 15,544. Inspired by the work of St. Francis Xavier, the Jesuits had missionaries all over the world, and in very large numbers in Central and South America. One problem which was always encountered was that the missionaries necessarily had to follow where the military had led, and thus had to vie with the civil authorities in matters dealing with the natives. Another problem, really insoluble, was caused by slavery: how could an enslaved people be won over to faith in Christ by the very group enforcing slavery? The missionaries might have wanted to abolish slavery, but the non-missionaries, who had the power, were to quite an extent in the New World for worldly profit, which involved the practice of slavery.

Under the heading "Sometimes sweetly, sometimes with the sword," the book deals extensively with the different techniques used by missionaries to win over non-Catholics to Christ. Some Jesuits, to a legitimate extent, used the beliefs and religious practices of the natives to make themselves friendly;, others did not.

Throughout the world the Jesuits were slandered, especially by Protestants. Dreadful lies about their life and their teaching abounded, especially about sexual matters. But unfortunately certain Catholics also opposed them. Jansenism, a movement in Western Europe claiming to be Catholic, was their enemy. Sometimes bishops resented not being able to control the Jesuits in their dioceses; and governments, even those conducted by Catholics, envied their wealth coming from missionary countries, a wealth which they greatly overestimated.

There arose what has been called the Jesuit Myth, a list of charges devoid of serious substance but effective nevertheless in defaming the Jesuits. Adherents of "the Enlightenment," a European eighteenth-century philosophy trying to replace divine revelation by human reasoning alone, considered the Jesuits to be their chief enemies. Many persons who held a grudge against the Pope or the Church fell into the habit of blaming the Jesuits for their problems.

The Myth became so strong that certain countries set about to have the Jesuits arrested or exiled. In Portugal under Pombral, the hostility was so strong that in 1762 he succeeded in passing a law putting 250 Jesuits in jail, and forcing the remaining 1100 Jesuits to leave the country. Spain and several other countries followed suit. By this time Jesuits were operating hundreds of colleges and seminaries throughout Europe. Finally in 1773, the Pope felt forced to dissolve the whole of the Jesuit Community throughout the world, with the exception of Russia--which did not recognize the authority of the Pope. The Jesuits had then to live a different kind of life. It is interesting to read how they solved this problem in a variety of ways.

Fortunately for the Catholic Church, in 1814 Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) restored the Jesuit Community throughout the world; it began again to take up the apostolates it had abandoned and to grow as great as it had been earlier. As of January, 2003, there were 20,408 members of the Society of Jesus. And the number of Jesuits martyrs was also large; there were 300 in the 1900s.