American Jesuits and the World
How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
How American Jesuits helped forge modern Catholicism around the world
At the start of the nineteenth century, the Jesuits seemed fated for oblivion. Dissolved as a religious order in 1773 by one pope, they were restored in 1814 by another, but with only six hundred aged members. Yet a century later, the Jesuits numbered seventeen thousand men and were at the vanguard of the Catholic Church's expansion around the world. In the United States especially, foreign-born Jesuits built universities and schools, aided Catholic immigrants, and served as missionaries. This book traces this nineteenth-century resurgence, showing how Jesuits nurtured a Catholic modernity through a disciplined counterculture of parishes, schools, and associations.
Drawing on archival materials from three continents, American Jesuits and the World tracks Jesuits who left Europe for America and Jesuits who left the United States for missionary ventures across the Pacific. Each chapter tells the story of a revealing or controversial event, including the tarring and feathering of an exiled Swiss Jesuit in Maine, the efforts of French Jesuits in Louisiana to obtain Vatican approval of a miraculous healing, and the educational efforts of American Jesuits in Manila. These stories place the Jesuits at the center of the worldwide clash between Catholics and liberal nationalists, and reveal how the Jesuits not only revived their own order but made modern Catholicism more global.
The result is a major contribution to modern global history and an invaluable examination of the meaning of religious liberty in a pluralistic age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McGreevy (Catholicism and American Freedom), historian of American political and religious history at the University of Notre Dame, seeks to place 19th-century American Jesuits in a global context. Beginning with Pope Pius VII's 1814 restoration of the Jesuit order, ending 41 years of exile from the faith, McGreevy marches forward into the early 20th century through a series of thematic case studies laid out in roughly chronological chapters. Each case study is well sourced in the historical record, using moments of theological and political tension to illustrate change over time. Readers are introduced to violent clashes over education and religious liberty (Ellsworth, Maine), debates about nationalism and war (Westphalia, Mo.), the place of miracles in the Catholic faith (Grand Couteau, La.), Americanization of immigrants and the nature of higher education (Philadelphia, Pa.), and U.S. imperialism (Manila, Philippines). At times, the book's intense focus on intra-Catholic and Catholic-Protestant tensions in the context of nation-building leave key aspects of American nationalism underexplored. The Jesuits stance on slavery and abolition, for example, is framed in terms of fear about white radicals rather than appreciation for black humanity. Not until the chapter on empire does the author begin to articulate the multiracial and truly global nature of the Jesuit order. Despite this, McGreevy's deeply researched work sheds significant light on the European Jesuits' role in shaping modern America.
