The Jesuits: the Society of Jesus and the betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church 

by Malachi Martin (Simon & Schuster,525 pp., $19.95)

A WHOLE generation of Catholics hasnow grown up amid the turmoil in the Church sparked by the Second Vatican Council. Feeding the turmoil have been many Jesuits who, in their own minds, have spiritually come of age as theological dissenters and political revolutionaries. Older Catholics are still shocked, and the Church's enemies delighted, by a Jesuit whose self-proclaimed "ministry' is to defend sodomy (such as New York's John McNeill, who has just been expelled from the Society of Jesus at Vatican insistence) or to serve as a cabinet minister in a Marxist-Leninist regime (such as Nicaragua's Ferando Cardenal, who in late 1984 was expelled from the Society, at the Pope's personal insistence, when he refused to resign his post). Sad to say, McNeill and Cardenal are only rather egregious agents of views that are all too prevalent in the Society and other religious orders. Jesuits have become the vanguard of clerical opposition to the teaching and authority of the papacy.

If only for the tragic irony of it, thestory of what has happened to the Jesuits merits full telling to the wider world. In many ways, Malachi Martin is the right man for the job. He was a prominent Jesuit in Rome just when the ferment was bubbling up, and though he left the Society during the Council in cloudy circumstances, he has not forsworn the faith of Peter and his successors. Drawing both on standard sources and on his many private contacts, he has churned out a characteristic mixture of highbrow journalism and popular history to convince us that the Society has become the opposite of what Ignatius of Loyola founded it to be. And even though I've been convinced of that for years, I found the story as Martin tells it immensely gripping.

As the popes' loyal and orthodox"Rapid Deployment Force,' the Society was used with resounding and much-feared success in the past. Jesuits have reclaimed provinces from the Reformation, evangelized new ones all over the globe, educated the best and brightest of Christendom, advised and occasionally dominated rulers, and attained eminence in almost every field of intellectual endeavor. Martin evokes a sense of these accomplishments quite deftly; his treatment of Ignatius's life and spirituality, and of the true nature of Jesuitism, is moving, even lyrical in places. Here it matters not that he unearths nothing new. But the closer he gets to the present, the more evident, and deadly, do his sins against scholarship become.

His basic thesis is cogent, though henever acknowledges several other writers who have been saying much the same thing (e.g., James Hitchcock, in his devastatingly accurate The Pope and the Jesuits). Tracing the effects of theological Modernism on the Society, from George Tyrrell and his friends in the late nineteenth century through Teilhard de Chardin and his friends in the 1950s, Martin argues that a quiet surrender to secular, immanentist ideologies had been spreading through the ranks of the very company whose task had always been to beat the Church's cultured despisers at their own game. What looked in the Sixties like a sudden abandonment of the old certainties had really been under way for quite some time. So, by the time Pope Paul VI commissioned the Society at the Council's end to combat atheism-- in both its intellectually explicit and its culturally implicit forms--Jesuits had become much more interested in humanistic psychology and social activism. At their 32nd General Congregation in 1974-75, the leadership adopted as the new "mission' of the Society a social-justice agenda that paid lip service to papal exhortations but amounted to promoting and apologizing for almost anything that calls itself socialism. Indeed, liberation theology, which holds that democratic capitalism is antithetical to Christianity and that Marxist socialism can embody it, is the theory of which a good deal of the Society's recent work is the practice.

Things had got so bad by 1981 thatthe Pope took the unprecedented step of replacing the duly elected father general, Pedro Arrupe, with an appointee. The current father general, Pietr-Hans Kolvenbach, was elected at the General Congregation that the Pope, assured that things would improve, allowed in 1983. By and large, things have not improved. One example: When Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, warned against liberation theology in a 1984 "instruction' approved by the Pope, a leading Jesuit, Juan Luis Segundo, quickly published a book rejecting that document. Segundo argues that the essentials of liberation theology are authentic developments of the social teaching of the Vatican Council, and that to criticize liberation theology is therefore to undermine the Church's teaching authority. Partly in response to such spectacular cheek, the Pope convened the Extraordinary Synod of 1985 to "clarify' the teaching of Vatican II.

Papist Jesuits (there are still a fewleft) will confirm the substance of Martin's account. But he struts through his material in such high polemical dudgeon that his eye sometimes fails him. For example, he falsely identifies the founder of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutierrez, as a Jesuit; such a pertinent error can only cause disinterested readers to wonder how much evidence Martin is doctoring to make his case. Catholic cognoscenti may also note how Martin reconstructs a meeting the Pope once held with Curial redhats to discuss what to do about the Jesuits. The date is given as "the middle of spring 1981.' Their Eminences are all named by their (shortened) titles rather than their proper names; the one named "Dottrina' is clearly supposed to be Ratzinger; but if the meeting is dated correctly, Ratzinger could not have been there--or at least not as the holder of that office, which he did not assume until months later. Perhaps only the date is wrong. In either case, one isn't reassured about Martin's penchant for describing, almost as though transcribing, key conversations to which he could not have been privy.

Such errors are the obverse of Martin'sstrengths: What would be convenient for his thesis if true is presented in the same appealing way as the truth; the spotty documentation, which lets the story flow smoothly, also leaves puzzling lacunae; imaginative flair sometimes turns into shameless embroidery. But the worst thing about these defects is that they will probably let Martin's targets escape. Practiced in scholarly wriggling and dissembling, anti-papal Jesuits will gleefully point out that one too often can't tell just what in the book is factual and what is fanciful. And that will severely weaken its impact on the audience it is most important to convince: those infected by the Society's new outlook but not irrevocably committed to it. An important chance to control the damage the Society has wrought may thus be lost.