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Book Reviews
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Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova, eds.
The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges.
Washington, dc: Georgetown University Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 299. Pb, $32.95.
This volume of essays is the outcome of a three-year project hosted by the
Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University
which involved workshops held in Washington, Oxford, and Florence and culminated in a conference held in Rome (December 2014). The central question
addressed by the participants was whether or not the Jesuit “way of proceeding
[…] hold[s] lessons for an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world”
(vii). Although no fewer than seven out of the thirteen chapters were authored
by Jesuits, the presence amongst them of such distinguished scholars as John
O’Malley, M. Antoni Üçerler, Daniel Madigan, David Hollenbach, and Francis
Clooney as well as of significant historians of the Society such as Aliocha Maldavsky, John McGreevy, and Sabina Pavone together with that of the leading
sociologist of religion, José Casanova, ensure that the outcome is more than
the sum of its parts. Banchoff and Casanova make it clear at the outset: “We
aim not to offer a global history of the Jesuits or a linear narrative of globalization but instead to examine the Jesuits through the prism of globalization and
globalization through the prism of the Jesuits” (2). Accordingly, the volume
is divided into two, more or less equal sections: “Historical Perspectives” and
“Contemporary Challenges.”
In his sparklingly incisive account of the first Jesuit encounters with Japan
and China, M. Antoni Üçerler makes two crucial observations: first, that the Jesuits had no clear, agreed missionary strategy in place and second, that cultural
accommodation was somehow the exclusive “invention” of European missionaries is a myth (28–29). In both Japan and China, the initiative for accommodation came from members of the local cultural elites, “who helped the Jesuits
understand the cultural, social, political, linguistic and religious contexts in
which they were operating” (29). Üçerler explains how the Jesuits combined
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a Pauline theology (the “Jerusalem compromise” of Acts 15:20 whereby the
apostle refrained from asking Jewish converts to Christianity to give up their
“foreign” identity) with the “rhetoric of the Areopagus” approach (in which local rites and customs were to be permitted so long as they were not contrary
to the faith). In a complementary chapter, Francis Clooney considers the Jesuit critique of the belief in rebirth as framed by Jesuit missionaries in Japan,
China, and India, which he takes into the twentieth century. In his conclusion,
Clooney notes how “we see their [the missionaries’] great confidence in the
universality of reason and the power of philosophical argumentation” (63).
Daniel Madigan takes us into very different territory in his survey of Jesuit
attitudes to Muslims, in which he emphasizes that, although the picture is
not uniform, missionaries of the Society in both its pre- and post-suppression
eras “very often shared the negative view of Islam that they inherited from the
Church’s long history of polemics” (69). He studies a comparative sample of
the missionaries Jerónimo Xavier (1549–1617); Bento de Góis (1562–1607), and
Tirso González de Santalla (1624–1705), who were active, respectively, at the
Mughal Court, in Afghanistan, and in the Iberian peninsula, in order to make
the point that “the assumption that pluralism in religion logically follows from
a healthy process of globalization needs to be critically examined” (82) before
concluding that “the breadth of their experience, however, seems to have failed
to break them out of a centuries-old and already rather stale and unproductive
approach to Muslims and their faith […]. While Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Alessandro Valignano (1538–1606), and Roberto de’ Nobili (1577–1656) had a sense
of the newness and discovery in the religions and cultures of China, Japan, and
India, Xavier, Góis, and González seem to have found only the familiar enemy,
presumed to have been vanquished in argument long ago yet unaccountably
still resistant to the clear truth of the Gospel” (85).
In what is perhaps necessarily a somewhat schematic chapter, Maldavsky
provides a tour d’horizon of the Jesuits in Ibero-America that begins by re­
minding us of the degree to which the Jesuits were themselves “converted”
by their missionary experiences. The latter were of an extraordinary diverse
nature, including not only cities, but indigenous parishes, frontier and rural
­missions. One of the more controversial “accommodations” that the ­Society
made to colonial conditions was its involvement in slavery—not only in
­Brazil discussed by Maldavsky but also in North America (which has recently
involved the president of Georgetown University meeting some of the descendants of slaves in Maryland owned and sold by his institution to acknowledge
the wrongs committed). Maldavsky is particularly good on showing how the
­Jesuits “created” indigenous cultures by introducing artificial distinctions,
such as the case of the Tarahumara and Tepehuanes in Northern New Spain
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(to which she might have added the “Muisca” people of New Granada who
were endowed by the Jesuit missionaries with a quasi-Inca or Aztec coherence
as the research of Juan Cobo Betancourt has demonstrated). She concludes
with the significant observation that although “the achievement of the Jesuits
in early modern Ibero-America was in some ways lasting and durable, […] at
the same time, it was also, and always, unpredictably fragile” (106).
Sabina Pavone, in a particularly well-translated chapter, offers a summary
of her fine study on anti-Jesuitism (The Wily Jesuits and the Monita secreta: The
Forged Secret Instructions of the Jesuits [St. Louis, mo: Institute of Jesuit Sources,
2005]), in which she draws attention to the two complementary accusations
­levelled at the Society: their perceived drive for a universal empire, on the one
hand; their wish for a “state within a state,” on the other. Pavone then goes on
to identify four currents of anti-Jesuitism: religious-political; ecclesiastical; Jesuit and Enlightenment. Ironically, it was the third type which was, in several
respects, the most damaging, for it included not only the Monita secreta itself,
authored by the disgruntled former Jesuit, Hieronim Zahorowski (1582–1634)
in 1614, but also the Monarchia solipsorum, which was a particularly vituperative attack, authored by the former Jesuit Giulio Clemente Scotti (1602–69) with
materials supplied by Melchior Inchofer (c.1585–1648), a Hungarian Jesuit who
never left the Society and who is perhaps best known for his role in the trial of
Galileo.
John McGreevy follows with a fine chapter on the Society after its restoration in 1814, which covers similar ground to his recent, important study: American Jesuits and the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). As McGreevy puts it succinctly, “The history of the Jesuits does not substitute for a
history of the nineteenth-century Catholic whole. But it comes close” (132).
Moreover, it is simplistic to identify the Jesuits with the strand of conservative
Catholicism symbolized by the figure of Pius ix (r.1846–78). McGreevy points
out how the Society was arguably much more influential under his successor
Leo xiii (r.1878–1903), whose encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) famously represented a watershed in the engagement of the papacy with the condition of the
working masses. Leo’s closest advisors included several Jesuits, among whom
was one of his own brothers. The revival of the refounded Society was indeed
remarkable: the six hundred aged members of 1814 grew into almost 17,000
members on the eve of the First World War. On one level, this expansion could
be seen as but a reflection of “one of the great migrations of modern history”
(133) in which some sixty million Europeans decided to emigrate to the usa,
more than fifty percent of whom were Catholic. However, it was not simply
a case of the Society riding the Catholic tide of history for in the same century the Jesuits were expelled from more than two dozen E
­ uropean and Latin
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­ merican countries. A key figure of the Society in the nineteenth century,
A
whom McGreevy rescues from the kneejerk condescension of liberal posterity,
was Jan Roothaan (in office, 1829–53), whose overriding ­priority was the need
to rebuild the Society’s spiritual and institutional dna. This R
­ oothaan achieved
by reissuing such key documents as the Spiritual Exercises (with his commentary that insisted on their literal reading); the Ratio studiorum, as well as reintroducing such practices as the writing of annual letters to Rome, insisting
on the use of Latin as the Society’s lingua franca and restarting the ­Bollandist
collection of saints’ lives. Roothaan was also responsible for the foundation,
at papal behest, of the journal Civiltà cattolica (1850), which soon became the
most influential Catholic publication in the world, a position it has more or
less maintained ever since. Just as Roothaan, for McGreevy, embodied the priorities of the Society in the nineteenth century, Karl Rahner (1904–84) did the
same for the second half of the twentieth. A key protagonist of the ­Second
Vatican Council (1962–65), for Rahner, Catholicism could no longer be understood simply as “a European export” (141). With the e­ lection of the first Jesuit
pope, Jorge Bergoglio, in 2013, this complex intellectual and ­spiritual legacy is
now at work at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church.
The historical perspectives section of the book ends with a characteristically lucid and authoritative chapter by John O’Malley on Jesuit education and
globalization. More specifically, O’Malley addresses the relevance of the Jesuit
tradition of education in today’s globalized world. Given the former’s origins
from “a melding of three […] traditions developed in the Mediterranean Basin more than two millennia ago” (147)—namely, the Greek philosophical-­
scientific tradition based principally on Aristotle; the literary one based upon
the prose and poetry of Greece and Rome (later reborn at the initiative of humanists); and finally Christianity itself, one might have thought that the answer will be an unequivocally negative one. However, O’Malley shows us it was
otherwise: beginning with the Jesuit-run colleges for students of high school
age, starting with that set up in Messina (1548), just eight years after the Society
was itself founded. A century later, the Jesuits operated forty schools alone in
the area now comprising present-day Belgium (compared to ninety in the Italian peninsula‚ excluding twenty-two on the island of Sicily). In all of them, the
curriculum was based on the teaching of “humane letters” (the studia humanitatis) whose intended purpose was, as with the Spiritual Exercises, to produce
a certain kind of person; one who, to quote from a favorite text studied in the
schools, Cicero’s De officiis, “are not born for ourselves alone […] [but] for the
sake of other human beings, that we might be able to help one another” (153).
Such training in virtuous conduct—education as character-building if you
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like—was so attractive to Europe’s elite that in the German-speaking lands,
there were Protestant as well as Catholic students. In addition, certain colleges
were at the cutting edge of teaching and learning, such as the College of Nobles
in Milan, where the Jesuit Newton, Roger Boscovich (1711–87), who was the
first (and last) Jesuit to be elected to the Royal Society, taught science, and
the Collėge Louis-le-Grand, whose pupils included Voltaire. Jesuit universities
were of course less numerous, but in time, particularly after the restoration of
the Society in 1814, they became increasingly important. So that O’Malley can
remark, “Today by far the largest percentage of Jesuits is still engaged in education. In 2013, there were 189 universities or other postsecondary institutions
around the world” (162).
The second section of the book, “Contemporary challenges” opens with a
chapter by David Hollenbach, who is the Pedro Arrupe Distinguished Research
Professor in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, on the Jesuits at Vatican
ii. We have already had occasion to discuss Karl Rahner’s contribution, understanding of which Hollenbach deepens by his discussion of how the German
theologian envisaged Catholicism coming to grips with (and learning from)
the beliefs of other faiths such as the transmigration of souls and of the need to
approach Muslims theologically and not just politically. The other key Jesuit at
Vatican ii whom Hollenbach identifies is the American John Courtney Murray
(1904–67), who did much to shape the council’s declaration on religious freedom (Dignitatis humanae), which contains the following clarion call: “The usages of society are to be the usages of freedom in their full range. These require
that the freedom of the human person be respected as far as possible, and curtailed only when and insofar as necessary” (173). The full impact of Vatican ii
on the Jesuits had to await the thirty-second general congregation convened
in 1974–75 which defined the corporate mission of the Society as follows: “The
mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement” (176). However, this has not been
carried out without a considerable cost. Since 1975, more than fifty Jesuits have
died violently because of their work on behalf of the poor and marginalized.
Another initiative of this post-conciliar times has been the Jesuit Refugee
Service (jrs), set up in response to the predicament of the Vietnamese boat
people in 1979–80 (and discussed in a separate, compelling chapter by its former director, Peter Balleis), which sees its mission under three aspects: service,
advocacy, and accompaniment. This last dimension is of particular importance
to Pope Francis for whom, as he puts it in his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium, the art of accompaniment “teaches us to remove our ­sandals
before the sacred ground of the other” (181). In a chapter devoted to the Jesuits and
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social justice in Latin America, Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer, professor of
theology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, devotes attention not only to Superior General Pedro Arrupe (in office, 1965–83), during whose time of leadership the thirty-second general congregation was
convened, but also to such champions of the “‘crucified people’ who have to
be brought down from the Cross, even though the act of doing so—of living
lives of compassionate service to the poor—might lead to oneself ending up
on the cross” (199) as Ignacio Ellacuría (1930–89), rector of the Jesuit University
of Central America in San Salvador, who was martyred by the Salvadoran army
in 1989.
A chapter by John Joseph Puthenkalam and Drew Rau, focuses a critical lens
on the Jesuits and human development in Asia. A particularly important role
here has been played by the umbrella organization, Jesuits in Social Action
(jesa), which also supports the South Asian People’s Initiative (sapi), a coalition of faith-based and secular organizations in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.
For the Jesuits involved in these initiatives, the central challenge has been to
overcome what Pope Francis describes as “the globalization of indifference.”
Thomas Banchoff picks up the theme of Jesuit higher education and makes
the important point that the “combination of global reach and sensitivity to local circumstances in the Jesuit educational enterprise should not be confused
with liberal cosmopolitanism” (242). As late as 1957, the thirty-first general congregation of the Society referred to “missions to the infidels” (250). It was left
until the 1970s for Pedro Arrupe to articulate “Jesuit Internationalism” and in
1982 for Ignacio Ellacuría to insist that “a Christian university must take into
account the gospel preference for the poor” (252). In Mexico City, the former
superior general Adolfo Nicolás, addressed in 2000 Jesuit university presidents
from around the world by indicting the “globalization of superficiality” and
insisting that a Jesuit education “integrates intellectual rigour with reflection
on the experience of reality together with the creative imagination to work
towards a more humane, just, sustainable and faith-filled world” (253).
In his vigorously argued conclusion to this rich and wide-ranging collection of essays, José Casanova returns to the ostinato theme of the volume as a
whole: how examination of globalization through a Jesuit prism fosters a revisionist perspective. Amongst the “lessons” he identifies is the fact that study of
the Jesuit contribution to globalization before the triumph of the West (over
the Rest) teaches us that “globalization did not need to happen through imposition of Western modernization”—“globalization is neither Western ‘modernity on a global scale’ nor necessarily Westernization” (278). Moreover, “the
Jesuits’ global story of dialogical inculturation and of deep intercivilizational
encounters still contains valuable lessons for us. Most of the issues they grappled with and their attempts to find viable resolutions to the tensions between
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universality and particularity, and between the global and the local, are still
with us” (281).
Simon Ditchfield
University of York
[email protected]
doi 10.1163/22141332-00401005-01
journal of jesuit studies 4 (2017) 99-183