The Society of Jesus, the largest Roman Catholic religious order, whose members are called Jesuits, was founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola. Noted for its discipline, based on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, and for its lengthy training period of as much as 15 years, the society is governed by a general who lives in Rome. Jesuits do not wear a special habit and are not subject to local ecclesiastical authority. Professed members are bound by a vow of obedience to the pope.
The Jesuits began as a group of seven men who as students in Paris took (1534) vows of poverty and chastity. Ordained as priests, they placed themselves at the disposal of the pope, Paul III, who gave formal approval to the society in 1540. Ignatius became (1541) its first general. The order grew so rapidly that at Ignatius's death (1556) the little band had expanded to nearly a thousand persons.
From the first, the Jesuits concentrated on foreign missions, education, and scholarship. Saint Francis Xavier, one of the original seven, was the first Jesuit to open the East to missionaries; Matteo Ricci and others followed at the court of China. Jesuits established missions throughout Latin America and founded a model commune for Paraguayan Indians. A remarkable account of the Jesuit mission to North America can be found in the Jesuit Relations (1632 - 73).
When the Counter Reformation was launched, the Jesuit order was its driving force. During the Council of Trent, several Jesuits, notably Diego Lainez, served as theologians. The English mission, a bold attempt to reclaim England for Catholicism during the reign (1558 - 1603) of Elizabeth I, was led by Edmund Campion and included the poet Robert Southwell. Jesuits established schools in almost every important European city and were leaders in education until the 18th century. Members of the society taught the sons of leading families and served as spiritual advisors to kings.
Because of the extent of the Jesuits' influence, powerful forces opposed them - forces composed of such unlikely allies as Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists, Voltaire, the Bourbon monarchs of France and Spain, and certain cardinals at the Vatican. These forces were instrumental in bringing about the suppression of the society (1773) by Pope Clement XIV. Among the members of the order at that time was John Carroll, who later became the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States.
. The Jesuit order was reestablished (1814) by Pope Pius VII and resumed its work. Jesuit schools and universities, such as Georgetown, Fordham, and Saint Louis in the United States, were opened. In Europe, Jesuit traditions of learning were continued by the Bollandists, who were charged with compiling the lives of the saints; the Jesuits also published several periodicals and journals. Members of the order were in the forefront of many social and theological movements; several others undertook scientific pursuits, such as the study of earthquakes. Among noted modern Jesuits are the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John LaFarge (1880 - 1963), who worked for interracial justice, and the theologian John Courtney Murray.
Cyprian Davis
Bibliography
W Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus (1986);
M Barthel, The Jesuits (1984); C Hollis, The Jesuits (1968).
The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) are a monastic order founded by Ignatius of Loyola and approved as a Roman Catholic religious order in 1540. The Jesuits are classified as mendicant clerks regular. Unlike most earlier orders there is no parallel branch for women.
In 1534 Loyola and six companions, all students of theology at the University of Paris, took vows of poverty and chastity and promised to devote their lives to missionary work in Palestine if that were possible. Since war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire kept them from Palestine, they began preaching, teaching catechism, and doing various charitable works in the cities of northern Italy. Gradually they gathered new recruits, and since they wished to give permanent structure to their way of life, they sought approval from Pope Paul III as a religious order. Initially membership was restricted to sixty professed priests, but this was soon lifted, and the popes conferred many privileges on the new order and relied on it for many special tasks, including diplomatic missions to Ireland, Sweden, and Russia. Jesuit - professed fathers take a special vow of obedience to the pope.
Loyola was elected the first superior general in 1540 and spent his remaining years directing the new order and writing its Constitutions. The new order had several distinctive features. The superior general is elected for life and appoints all subordinate superiors, hence the Jesuits are highly centralized. Obedience is especially stressed. There is no distinctive religious habit or uniform, such as earlier orders had, no special fasts or bodily austerities, no common singing of the divine office. Loyola demanded that recruits be carefully selected and trained and that those who did not measure up be dismissed. Later the training normally lasted fifteen years. Two years at the beginning (novitiate) and a year at the end of the training (tertianship) were devoted to the spiritual development of the members in contrast to a one year novitiate in the old orders.
Since the Jesuits were to be active in working with outsiders, monastic discipline had to be interiorized by vigorous training. Loyola's Spiritual Exercises shaped the Jesuits' interior life, and one hour's private meditation daily has been mandatory for most of the order's history. The Jesuits were in the forefront in spreading systematic meditation, a characteristic of Counter Reformation piety. For the Jesuit, prayer and activity were to be mutually reinforcing. Popularization of the Spiritual Exercises in the retreat movement has been a major contemporary Jesuit apostolate; as many as five million Catholics annually make retreats.
Loyola stressed quality rather than quantity, but the Society of Jesus grew rapidly. There were about a thousand Jesuits by the founder's death in 1556, mainly in Spain, Italy, and Portugal, but also in France, Germany, and Belgium, as well as missionaries in India, Africa, and Latin America. By 1626 there were 15,544 Jesuits. Growth was steady but somewhat slower until 1773 when Clement XIV, under pressure from the Bourbon monarchs of France, Spain, and Naples, suppressed the society. A few Jesuit houses survived in Prussia and Russia where the monarchs refused to promulgate the suppression. In 1814 Pius VII restored the Jesuits worldwide. Despite being exiled from most European Catholic countries at one time or another, the Jesuits grew steadily in numbers during the next hundred years and peaked at 36,038 in 1964. Membership declined after the Second Vatican Council, reaching 27,027 in 1981 with roughly one third in Europe, one third in the United States and Canada, and one third in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Education quickly became the largest single Jesuit apostolate. Loyola supervised the founding of a dozen colleges in the order's first decade. By 1626 the Jesuits directed five hundred colleges or seminaries, a number which nearly doubled by the mideighteenth century. Most of the Jesuit colleges approximated modern prep schools, but some were full fledged universities. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a high percentage of educated Catholic males, particularly the nobility, were graduates of these schools. The basic charter of these schools was the Ratio Studiorum (the Plan of Studies) of 1599, which tried to purify and simplify Renaissance humanism. Classical languages and literatures and religion provided the core curriculum with Aristotelian philosophy for advanced students. Attendance was compulsory and a planned curriculum carried students forward step by step in rod was largely replaced by friendly rivalry as a stimulus to study.
The Jesuit schools used drama, often with lush pageantry, to inculcate moral and religious values. Education remains a major Jesuit apostolate today; the Jesuits run some four thousand schools worldwide, mainly in mission countries, as well as eighteen American universities. The Jesuits adopted Thomas Aquinas as their official theologian but freely modified his system, as in the theology of Francisco Suarez (1548 - 1617). Generally they stressed human action in the process of salvation in contrast to the Dominicans, who put more emphasis on the primacy of grace. Blaise Pascal attacked their casuistry as laxist. The Jesuits overwhelmingly rejected the principle that the end justifies the means, which was often attributed to them. Prominent among recent Jesuit theologians are Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan. The Jesuits presently edit some one thousand periodicals, including NT Abstracts, Theology Digest, and Theological Studies.
Traditionally the Jesuits have reserved their highest regard for missionary work. Francis Xavier (1506 - 52), the first and greatest Jesuit missionary, laid the basis for Jesuit activity in India, Indonesia, and Japan. The Japanese mission particularly flourished until it was wiped out by savage persecution in the early seventeenth century. In China Matteo Ricci (1552 - 1610) founded the Jesuit mission where he and his successors won the protection of the Ming emperors by introducing Western scientific and technical knowledge to court circles at Peking. They pioneered the adaptation of the gospel to Chinese traditions and thought forms, although in this many Catholic critics felt that they had gone too far. Their writings introduced China to the West.
The goal of the Peking mission was the conversion of the emperor, but the Jesuits never found their Chinese Constantine. Ricci's idea of adapting Christianity to local culture was applied to India by Robert De Nobili (1577 - 1658). Jesuits such as Jacques Marquette and Issac Jogues worked among the Indians of North America. Eusebio Kino (1644 - 1711) established a string of mission stations which introduced the Indians of northern Mexico and the present southwestern United States to advanced agriculture. The Jesuits Christianized and civilized the Indians of Paraguay and Brazil in organized towns (reductions), which flourished for more than a century until the Jesuits were suppressed.
Although the Jesuits were not founded to combat Protestantism, they were quickly drawn into the struggle. Many Jesuits published controversial works, for instance, Peter Canisius and Robert Bellarmine, both of whom also wrote catechisms that enjoyed wide use for three centuries. Other Jesuits influenced policy as court preachers or as confessors to the emperor; the kings of France, Spain, and Poland; and the dukes of Bavaria. Well over a thousand Jesuits died as martyrs both in Europe and in the missions. The Roman Catholic Church has canonized thirty eight Jesuits, including twenty two martyrs.
J P Donnelly
(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)
Bibliography
J Brodrick, The Origins of the Jesuits; W Bangert, A
History of the Society of Jesus; D Mitchell, The Jesuits; J de
Guibert, The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice.
General Information
The Bollandists are a group of Belgian Jesuits who publish the Acta Sanctorum, a critical edition of the lives of the saints. Named after their first editor, Jean Bolland (1596-1665), they also publish a quarterly review, the Analecta Bollandiana.
Currently, there are around 16,500 Jesuit Priests worldwide, and about 3,000 in the United States. This is around half of their numbers in the 1960s.
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