The Jesuits: A History by Markus Friedrich (review)

Reviewed by: The Jesuits: A History by Markus Friedrich Rev. Thomas Worcester SJ The Jesuits: A History. By Markus Friedrich. Translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xvi + 854. $39.95. In recent decades, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) has been a hot topic among historians—church historians, cultural historians, intellectual historians, art historians, and many others—exploring the complexities of a religious order founded in the mid-1600s, suppressed by an Enlightenment-era pope, but then restored in the early 1800s by a pope eager for help in rebuilding the church in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The election of the first Jesuit pope in 2013 has no doubt helped stimulate interest in the history of the Jesuits, but the order was already eliciting an astonishing number of new studies, dissertations, books, and articles, in many languages. The work by Markus Friedrich reviewed here, is in its lengthy text and its abundant bibliography of primary and secondary sources, a very readable and helpful summary of what is at issue in Jesuit studies. In a prologue and five chapters, F. examines who the Jesuits were, what they did and why they did it, where they went all over the world, how they were committed to leaving behind worldly ideals and to obeying the pope regarding the missions to which they were sent, and how they rubbed elbows with secular and clerical elites as well as with the poorest of the poor. F. does a good job of showing how the Jesuits had many disciples, friends, supporters, and admirers, as well as rivals, opponents, enemies, and relentless critics eager to destroy the Society forever. In the prologue and five chapters, F. manages to both follow the chronological development of the Jesuits and focus on many of the most important themes or foci of Jesuit activity from founding by Ignatius of Loyola and a small group of companions, to growth in Europe and expansion to lands previously little known by Europeans. We see in detail how Jesuits became both the schoolmasters of much of Catholic Europe and missionaries to far flung-places, places where they learned the local languages and worked to preach the gospel while respecting diverse cultures. Jesuits were prolific writers, and their letters and narratives sent back to Rome and other European centers were often the best or even the only sources on certain parts of the world. But some readers of such accounts were not pleased with what they learned and condemned the Jesuits as soft on paganism. F. takes his lengthy, well-crafted [End Page 295] narrative up to the 1773 suppression and 1814 restoration of what Ignatius had begun. It is in a final section of some fifty pages entitled Epilogue: The Modern Society, that F. treats over two hundred years of the Jesuits, 1814 to the present. Though judicious in the choices made on what to cover, the epilogue, in its very title and in its necessarily rapid treatment of many significant topics, seems to say that the "modern" Jesuits matter less, in history, perhaps quite a lot less, than those "early modern" pioneers of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Is this a fair judgment, or one based on too little attention to the abundant Jesuit sources for 1814 to the present? Is F. perhaps at times a bit too Eurocentric, and thus short-sighted on certain developments elsewhere? Much of the spectacular growth in the Society after the restoration occurred in the United States, Canada, Australia, India . . . a heavily Anglophone story, in fact. Though it is surely odd to suggest that a book well over 800 pages is too short (!), this one may need at least another 100 pages on post-1814. The book's many notes substantially enrich the volume's value, but they are placed at the end of the book instead of as bottom-of-page footnotes. A publisher's mistaken judgment, I would say. Some thirty-one illustrations considerably enhance the reader's access to the Jesuit past. But references to Jesuit "worship" of guardian angels (161) and "adoration" of the Virgin Mary (630) ring false as Jesuits...

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