‘The head is very large; the forehead is flat, and a foot and a half bet- ween the horns,” wrote the priest. Fr Jacques Marquette, a French Jesuit, joined the explorer Louis Jolliet on a canoe journey along the Mississippi River in 1673. Marquette’s prose could be mistaken for an adventure tale: the bison they spotted “are very fierce”; “when attacked, they catch a man on their horns if they can, toss him in the air, and then throw him on the ground, trample him under foot, and kill him”.
Marquette’s dramatic story is a minor excerpt from the voluminous Jesuit Relations, letters submitted by Jesuits in the American colonies to their French superiors. The reports were minutely detailed and deeply thorough, and the French Jesuits cur- ated the collections, using them as both a recruitment text and a public relations tool. The serialised Relations even inspired some to make the trek themselves to the colonies, despite the dangers.
The Jesuits in the United States: A Concise History traces the exploits and travails of these Jesuits and others, as they ministered and worked among Native Americans and European immigrants. The preface notes: “It is a book for people who have heard something about Jesuits – good, bad, or neutral – but are not sure exactly what a Jesuit is.” The author, David J Collins, was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1998. A historian who has written widely on saints and Renaissance humanism, he has taught at Georgetown University in his native Washington DC for nearly 20 years.
Collins writes for a general aud-ience probably leaning to Catholic; his prose lilts like a teacher offering explanations and clarifications amidst the narrative. Although a Jesuit who works for one of the premier American Jesuit institutions, he is honest about the Society’s struggles, and its historical sins.
Early in the book he succinctly sum- marises the Jesuit vision: they “have been committed to the ideal that Cath- olics could make a home in, be integ-rated in, thrive in and productively shape mainstream American society”. America’s first bishop, John Carroll, was a former Jesuit. (Although Pope Clement XIV’s 1773 Dominus ac Redemptor formally suppressed the Jesuits, they had been restricted and expelled from various countries for over 20 years prior.) Carroll retained the Jesuit sensibility: he “established parishes, founded a seminary” and “laid the groundwork for the founding of the first Catholic girls’ school”.
Collins notes that unlike their Prot-estant missionary counterparts, who had the “immediately pressing goal” of baptisms, the Jesuits “were prepared to wait years, even decades, for formal conversion; and in the meantime they built infrastructure into their missions – schools, churches and other civic buildings – and encouraged cultivation of the land”. Although the Society’s Ratio Studiorum was a “time-tested educational model”, the American needs differed. In fact, Collins cap- tures a paradox in his book: although Jesuits were known for their robust educational institutions, the perception was complicated. An 1898 survey “re-vealed that the majority of Catholics attending college were enrolled in non-Catholic institutions”. In 1964, the Jesuit Education Association examin- ed how well Jesuit high schools fared “in the Christian formation of their student bodies”. The results were dis- appointing. Jesuit secondary education “might be highly regarded for enhanc-ing students’ social status but could not be credited with fostering their long-term religious commitment”. Yet Collins also demonstrates Jesuit scholars thrived inside and outside Catholic institutions. The US jurist Clarence Thomas, the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court, was Jesuit-educated at the Coll-ege of the Holy Cross. Three Americ- an Jesuits “make their apostolic home at the Vatican Observatory, and their work has been essential to a sustained and mutually enriching dialogue between science and religion”.
Taken together, do these observat-ions demonstrate that the Jesuits long to be cosmopolitan and elite, and look down upon the local, often tedious work of faith formation? Not quite. Collins argues that although valid in certain circumstances – the Society’s participation in (and profit from) slave- holding, and how Jesuit leadership “was no more transparent, conscient-ious, or insightful in handling the [clergy sexual abuse] problem as it was happening than officials of other orders and dioceses” – the tenor and style of Jesuit criticism often sounds like anti-papist legends of yore.
Perhaps the greatest accomplish-ment of Collins’s concise history is how it feels like a literary example of the Examen, the daily Ignatian prayer that includes gratitude, a request that God enlighten us, an examination of the day, a request for forgiveness and a resolve to change. Late in the book, he writes that Jesuits have “showed themselves no more perspicacious than anyone in anticipating or responding to the late 20th-century crisis in religious practice.” Certainly any “human community and institution” will have faults; ultimately, “the question is how the Jesuits’ track record of recoup and recalibration will shape their mission now in the 21st century.” In my own family, past and present, I have seen first-hand the rigour and faithfulness of Jesuit education at its best – and the American Church, ultimately, will benefit from a strong Society.
The Jesuits in the United States: A Concise History by David J Collins, SJ (Georgetown University Press)
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