Review: "American Jesuits and the World" Part 2

Yesterday, I began my review of John McGreevy'south American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Club Fabricated Modern Catholicism Global. I looked at the showtime two historical accounts with which McGreevy sketches his narrative, noting how these touched on issues of nationalism and Nativism, patriotism and education, religious liberty and religious submission, issues that are still with us and always will be. Today, I should like to briefly mention the remaining vignettes and and then ask if McGreevy'south effort achieves what it promises.

The story surrounding the miracle cure of Mary Wilson in Chiliad Couteau, Louisiana, after the Sacred Centre nuns began a novena for the intercession of Blessed John Berchmans in December 1866, is one of the more fascinating in the book. McGreevy shows how the Jesuit network was quite successful at getting its own would-be saints through the canonization process, right downwards to the prayer spoken at Wilson's sickbed, a prayer manifestly meant to convince Roman officials of the putative saint's intervention:

Oh God! Glorify They Servant John Berchmans by relieving our Sister, and if it
Be to the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that she recover, permit it be through
The intercession of Blessed John Berchmans, that hereby his canonization may exist forwarded.

McGreevy notes, "Berchmans happened to exist the Jesuit saint of the moment, merely the communal Catholic response to Wilson's illness, the sense that an entire religious community must rally effectually an ill member, was unexceptional."He mentions other times that religious men and women were at the forefront of fights against epidemics and affliction.

Still, McGreevy, following previous Catholic historians, overstates the caste to which nineteenth-century spirituality represented a suspension from that of the eighteenth. He argues that nineteenth century spirituality was at once more populist and more sectarian:

The focus on Mary was especially divisive. Zippo more alarmed American Protestants than what they saw as idolatrous worship of Christ's mother, and nothing so marked nineteenth-century Catholicism. Involvement in the rosary, the dedication of the month of May to Mary, and the countless stream of devotions, paintings and churches named in Mary's award made her presence inescapable in ways that would have surprised many eighteenth-century Catholics.

I submit that this is not truthful. The late historian Fr. Charles O'Neill, S.J., who interestingly was born in the same Grand Couteau where Wilson's miracle occurred, led a graduate seminar at Catholic Academy that examined this very issue and which resulted in a useful book Preaching and Piety in the Time of John Carroll, edited past Rev. Msgr. Raymond Kupke. I attended that seminar and contributed a affiliate to the book. There were plenty of devotions to the Blessed Female parent in the eighteenth century, Corpus Christi devotions too. The myth of an "aware" eighteenth century gear up between a Puritanical seventeenth and a devotional nineteenth never added up, and this specific Catholic angle is just another part of that myth. It is truthful some of the founders were Deists, and that the language of the Deists transcended sectarian differences and immune then, and still allows, the founding to be understood as a religious event. But the myth of an enlightened Catholic Church building in the eighteenth century obscures, but does non destroy, McGreevy'south disquisitional thesis, that spirituality is "a subject area usually treated in isolation from debates over community formation and national identity, just [is] in fact complementary to both."

The account of Jesuit Fr. Burchard Villiger, a Swiss born Jesuit, and the construction of the Gesu church building in Philadelphia and concurrent founding of St. Joseph's Higher illustrates the degree to which compages and relics and the Jesuit style of education were all trans-national. The objections to "commercial courses"by advocates of the Ratio Studiorum mirror debates on college campuses today: Why do we have required philosophy or theology courses? Answer: So people can exist truly educated. The Jesuits' fight with Archbishop John Republic of ireland, the "consecrated blizzard of the Northwest,"never gets old and seems perennial.

The concluding story, about the role of the Society in the Catholic Church of the Philippines when that nation switched from the Spanish crown to a U.S. colony, is the most fascinating in the unabridged book. There the American crawling to acquire an empire forced the Society to re-examine its opposition to nationalism if information technology wanted to stay friendly with the new regime, and the age onetime indictment confronting the Society, that some of its members put admission to ability before piety, appears as well. If you wish to know more than, purchase the book, something I strongly recommend.

Every bit should be obvious, I recollect this is a wonderful book. Yet, the volume does not deliver on the hope in its subtitle. It is not clear that the Jesuits, uniquely, "fabricated"modernistic Catholicism global. How did the Franciscans and the Dominicans modify with the development of the telegraph and the steam engine. ii powerful rungs in the globalization ladder? The "conclusions"in the final chapter may be accurate, but they are not causally related to all that preceded. Instead of adopting a more liberal outlook and embracing ideas thought horrific only a couple of generations prior, the twentieth-century Jesuits could have launched a new fundamentalism and, indeed, Jesuits can be found not only among those who led the charge for modernization but among those who resisted. John Courtney Murray was a Jesuit; and then, was Leonard Feeney.

This book put me in mind of the bully John Boswell'south last book, The Union of Likeness: Same-Sexual practice Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, which similarly delivered a fascinating historical sketch of an area too petty studied, merely information technology did non add upward to an argument that anything like gay marriage existed in medieval Europe. Boswell did not have what he claimed to have. In McGreevy's case, the earth-shaking "how"is not met and the "made"is not proven. In both cases, the shame is that the authors made such grand claims in their subtitles because the books are immensely worthwhile per se and the history surveyed does non need to add up to a tight conclusion or proof. The lesson I drew from McGreevy's accounts of the nineteenth century Jesuits is that life does not always add upwardly into a tidy whole, that there are conflicting pressures and multiple loyalties, sound arguments on both sides of a dispute, and we poor humans, even those who have been ontologically changed and schooled in the ways of Loyola, all of u.s., as Paul said, see through a drinking glass, darkly. Conclusions may or may not exist available, merely if history helps us to come across how others grappled with the problems of their day, problems that nourish Catholicism in every historic period in one style or some other, it has done its chore. McGreevy's volume is a splendidly informative text, even if it does not yield all that it promises.

[Michael Sean Winters is NCR Washington columnist and a visiting fellow at Cosmic University'due south Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies.]

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