Jesuit

6 Key excerpts on "Jesuit"

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  eBook - ePub

  English Jesuit Education

  Expulsion, Suppression, Survival and Restoration, 1762-1803

  • Maurice Whitehead(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1Jesuit Education: The Beginnings, 1540–1592

  The Jesuit Constitutions and the Early Development of Jesuit Education

  Pope Paul III formally approved the creation of the Society of Jesus as a new religious order within the Roman Catholic church on 27 September 1540. While his foundational bull, Regimini militantis ecclesiae , clearly expected that the members of the new Society would teach Christian doctrine, it was not envisaged that they would provide a wider education for lay students in a formal educational setting. Neither the pope nor the Society’s founder, Ignatius Loyola (c .1492–1556), anticipated that the new order would be anything other than a small missionary body, ready to move rapidly to wherever the pope might need it. Within the space of a few years, a prime aim of the Society of Jesus became helping to combat the growth of Protestantism. Initially, the Society was restricted to a maximum of 60 men, though this barrier to development was removed as early as 1544. Remarkably, by the time of Loyola’s death in 1556, the Society of Jesus had grown to about one thousand members.1

  The educational work of the new Society developed through Loyola’s realization of two key facts: first, that those seeking admission to the new order required the highest levels of learning; and, second, that there was real demand from parents across Catholic Europe for its members to teach their sons. Princes, bishops and civic leaders soon echoed the latter demand. Requests to the Jesuits, as members of the new body were soon called, to operate new schools for lay students was so intense that by 1556 numerous Jesuit educational institutions had been opened. Loyola’s Constitutions for the new Society of Jesus had envisaged two types of Jesuit domicile: the professed house , where fully formed Jesuits would exercise their priestly ministries, such as preaching and administering the sacraments; and the college , in which Jesuits in training would live and study until their education was complete, at which time they would transfer residence to a professed house. A professed house (and the fully formed Jesuits resident within it) had to subsist exclusively on alms, whereas colleges were allowed to have endowments and fixed revenues, though these were never to be used for the personal use of an individual Jesuit. Initially, Loyola anticipated that most of his Jesuit brethren would live in professed houses and that the colleges would be secondary residences – effectively seminaries to supply men for the professed houses.2

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  The Saint in the Banyan Tree

  Christianity and Caste Society in India

  • David Mosse(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  However, the Society of Jesus was really a victim of changes in Europe that (differently in France, Spain, and Portugal) set secular national governments against Rome as “a rival hub of power in their domains” (2004, 201; 2008). Jesuits were an obvious target for anti-Rome sentiment, stereotyped as “designing political agents,” disloyal, masters of disguise and intrigue (2004, 229). Wright concludes that Clement XIV had to destroy the Society of Jesus “because the secular powers of Catholic Europe left him with little choice” (2004, 204). But beyond dynastic politics were changes in the status of the Catholic Church itself within a new culture of secular modernity—one that Jesuits, in particular, had actually helped to create through their mission work, their enlightened account of other cultures, their observational empiricism, optimism about human nature, their emphasis on free will, the power of education, and, of course, the separation of human life into “social” and “religious” aspects (2004, 184). 46 Chapter 1 Disbanding the Society of Jesus meant that the “fragile system of author-ity which the Madurai Jesuits had only just installed was suddenly deprived of its focus” (S. B. Bayly 1989, 421). Unlike eighteenth-century Protestant missions, Jesuits had not developed an indigenous priesthood. All 122 Jesuits who worked in the Madurai mission between 1606 and 1759 were Europeans (Rajamanickam 1987; Manickam 2001, 261). The ex-Jesuit priests who continued to work in the area came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the See of Goa, and from the late 1770s until the return of the Jesuits in the 1830s it was the Padroado priests— apparently mostly Goans of Brahman origin (Hambye 1997, 168–69, 180–85)— who administered the churches of Ramnad. However, missionary resources were scarce (and made scarcer by the French Revolution), and pastoral care irregular in remote rural parishes (Strickland 1852).

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  Papacy, Religious Orders, and International Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  • Autori Vari, Massimo Carlo Giannini(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Viella Libreria Editrice

    (Publisher)

  Esther Jiménez Pablo The Evolution of the Society of Jesusduring the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:an Order that Favoured the Papacy or the Hispanic Monarchy?

  In the first decades of the sixteenth century the religious thought of Saint Ignatius of Loyola was forged, giving rise to the Society of Jesus. This period saw some of the richest and most complex moments in ideological tendencies in the Hispanic Kingdoms, particularly in the Kingdom of Castile.84 These were also the years in which the Hispanic monarchy was configured as a political organisation with spiritual power, and the socio-political elites that built it identified themselves with a specific ideological current and spiritual practice. This reality provides the context for the present study.

  At the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth, Castilian society experienced a radical movement of spiritual renewal, akin to that underway elsewhere in Europe and which led to the Protestant Reformation. In the Hispanic case the movement was complicated by its support by groups made up of Jews who after the 1391 pogroms converted to Christianity and were seeking a radical spirituality based on biblical texts (to match the profound mental transformation they had undergone). This paved the way for the illuminist heresy and, in other instances, intimistic or mystical movements.85 From the social and political point of view this group represented a sort of bourgeoisie dedicated to finance and administration that occupied governing positions in towns and the royal courts. Its members served the fifteenth-century monarchs and collaborated with them in setting up the political organisation of the new kingdoms.86

  In addition to these religious tendencies there were other currents that sought reform, but based on ascetic principles of a spirituality centred on self-betterment, compliance with norms, and reason. These corresponded to the social sectors that for many generations had been exercising among the infidels a process termed “Re-conquest.” Their values, ideology, and way of life were completely different from the social groups mentioned earlier. And at the end of fifteenth century the Re-conquest completed, these groups were displaced from their position of power by elites of converted Jews. They were the ones who demanded the establishment of the Inquisition (based on the accusation that converted Jews had not sincerely embraced Christianity) and that set up external standards like the limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood) to prove authenticity in Christian practices and sincerity in conversion.87 During the reign of Charles V (1517-1555) this Castilian social elite gradually took control of the main government and imperial posts, and its members carried out the configuration of the Hispanic monarchy of Philip II (1555-1598).88

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  The Jesuit Suppression in Global Context

  Causes, Events, and Consequences

  • Jeffrey D. Burson, Jonathan Wright(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Nothing can be taken for granted and, as Thomas Worcester’s chapter reminds us, even those who sought to protect the Society of Jesus, even those who have most often been assumed by scholars to have been the most stalwart allies of the Society, like the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, could in fact be liabilities. Why did it all happen? How does it matter to subse- quent history? It should come as no surprise that the Jesuit Suppression is an event woven from a tapestry comprising the métissage of personal and institutional rivalries; the cultural politics of the eighteenth-century, deep-seated theological tensions latent within the post-Tridentine order of the Catholic church; conflicting strains of Enlightenment Catholicism; and the construction of absolutist states faced with crises of empire after the 1750s. This volume does not provide definitive answers, but its chap- ters should encourage us to keep asking important questions about one of the most fascinating series of events in eighteenth-century history. 2003); B. Barthet, Science, histoire et thematiques esoteriques chez les Jesuites en France (1680–1764) (Bordeaux: Press Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2012); I. Rowland, The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); C. Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangzi Reign (1662–1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For the intersection of Spanish American mis- sions and Jesuit science, see A. I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America 1570–1810 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011); also L. Millones Figueroa and D. Ledesma (eds.), El Saber de los Jesuitas, Historias Naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Frankfurt, Mad rid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2005). A satisfying overview of recent work on Jesuit science is S.

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  The Jesuit Mission to New France : A New Interpretation in the Light of the Earlier Jesuit Experience in Japan

  • Takao Abé(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Brill

    (Publisher)

  2 E.g . Tomas J. Campbell, SJ, Te Jesuits, 1534–1921: A History of the Society of Jesus from Its Foundation to the Present Time (New York: Te Encyclopedia Press, 1921). 3 Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, SJ, Histoire de l’établissement, des progrès et de la décadence du christianisme dans l’empire du Japon, où l’on voit les diferentes révolutions qui ont agité cette Monarchie pendant plus d’un siècle (2 tomes, Rouen: Guillaume Behourt; Jacques Joseph le Boullenger; Pierre le Boucher, 1715.); and Charlevoix, Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France, avec le journal his-torique d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale (3 vols., Paris: Didot, 1744). 4 Joseph-François Laftau, SJ, Moeurs des savauge amériquains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps (2 tomes, Paris: Suagrain l’aîné & Charles-Estienne Hocherau, iberian and french Jesuits 3 Te Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century New France were familiar with the mission to Japan because of the Society’s tradition of global correspondence. Te superiors of the respective missionary provinces, which by 1615 counted thirty-two all over the world, provided annual reports of their provinces. Such reports provided fellow Jesuits with an international exchange of information and advice. Te successive superi-ors of the colonial French mission were included in this network. 5 Some familiarity with Japan, associated with this global information exchange, can be detected even in the French reports on North America that referred to the Iberian mission in Japan. From time to time the Jesuits in New France visited their local superior in Quebec or Montreal, depending on where the colonial missionary station was, and they sent him annual journals. Te Jesuit superior in New France included these reports in his own Relations , and transmitted them to the French Jesuit provincial at Paris, who supervised the colonial missions.

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  The Hermeneutics of Jesuit Leadership in Higher Education

  The Meaning and Culture of Catholic-Jesuit Presidents

  • Maduabuchi Muoneme, S.J.(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  cura personalis , and interdisciplinary activity. We should teach human rights, sustainable development, justice, solidarity. We need better to relate theoretical knowledge to social responsibility, developing our capacity for sociocultural analysis and assessing the social relevance of our research choices.

  (p. 320)

  General Congregation 34 (1995) exhorted Jesuit institutions to establish climates of solidarity and justice and exhorted all Jesuits to collaborate with their lay colleagues in promoting justice in one or more of the following levels: (1) practicing direct service and accompaniment of the poor, (2) developing awareness of the demands of justice joined to the social responsibility to achieve it, or (3) participating in social mobilizations for the creation of a more just social order (Decree 3, no. 9). Daoust (2001) focused on the second level by arguing that the first level (direct service, e.g., soup kitchens) and the third level (advocacy, e.g., political mobilization) are not at the core of Jesuit education. Even though Jesuit universities have a role at the direct service and advocacy levels, the essence of Jesuit education is at the second level of developing awareness, educating for social consciousness and conscience, or conscientization (p. 18).

  The Catholic Landscape of Jesuit Education

  The Catholic university owes its origin to the faith tradition of the Catholic Church (Feldner & D’Urso, 2009, p. 148). The Church, attempting to measure up to the needs of the Catholic laity, embarked on the mission of education and established universities in Europe and throughout the United States (Feldner & D’Urso, 2009, p. 148). John Paul II (1990) declared that the Catholic university “has always been recognized as an incomparable center of creativity and dissemination of knowledge for the good of humanity” (no. 1). The vocation of the Catholic university is dedicated to research, pedagogy, and education of students—pursuing love of knowledge with their professors (John Paul II, 1990).

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