n.

1. Roman Catholic Church. A member of the Society of Jesus.
2. often jesuit One given to subtle casuistry.

[French Jésuite, from Jésus, Jesus, from Late Latin Iēsus. See Jesus¹.]

Jesuitical Jes'u·it'i·cal adj.
Jesuitically Jes'u·it'i·cal·ly adv.

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The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola and approved by Pope Paul III in 1540. It offered total obedience to the papacy and was prominent in the effort to recover ground lost to the church by the Reformation. Mary Tudor, though a devoted catholic, mistrusted the order and did not invite it to England. But the deterioration of relations between Elizabeth and the papacy, culminating in the bull of excommunication of 1570, changed the situation. William Allen had already founded a seminary at Douai and about 100 catholic priests had made their way back to England by 1580, living an undercover existence, hiding in priest holes, and protected by the old catholic gentry. In that year, two Jesuit priests landed— Campion and Parsons. Their mission lasted only a few months but gave an important boost to the morale of English catholics. Campion was soon apprehended and executed in December 1581: Parsons left for the continent and never returned. The events of the rest of the decade—powerful French and catholic influence in Scotland, plots against the queen's life, the threat of the Armada—combined to strengthen anti-catholic feeling in England. But the culminating disaster for English catholics was the Gunpowder plot of 1605, which resulted in the capture of Henry Garnett, Jesuit superior in England for nearly 20 years. Though he claimed that he knew of the plot only through the confessional, he was executed as a traitor. For decades, ‘Jesuitical’ became a term of abuse, signifying mental reservation, prevarication, and casuistry. But, in the long run, the Enlightenment proved more damaging to the order than downright persecution. The Jesuits were accused of undue pliability in their zeal to proselytize and the order was wound up by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 after France, Spain, and Portugal had all moved against it. Though reconstituted in 1814 by Pope Pius VII, the circumstances which had made Jesuits so hated were no longer in existence. The English province of the order was re-established in 1829. Although fierce bursts of anti-catholic feeling were still possible, particularly at the time of ‘papal aggression’ in 1850, the role of the Society of Jesus was no longer a national bugbear.

The Society of Jesus, founded by the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola in 1534, soon established itself in France, and played a vital role in French history over the following centuries. While acquiring considerable influence at times, the Society encountered great hostility; it has often been presented caricaturally as the bête noire of French anticlericalism. ‘Mangeons du Jésuite’ is the cry of the ‘Oreillons’ in Voltaire's Candide.

The Society is a religious order whose purpose is to combat for the Catholic faith in the world (as opposed to the convent). Its role was for a long time a militant one, seeking converts, winning the ear of the powerful, and educating the young. The Jesuits' Ultramontane loyalty to Rome was often seen as being in conflict with France's national interest. Their sympathies with the Ligue caused them to be popularly associated with the assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV, and they were expelled from the country for a brief period beginning in 1594.

In the 17th c. the Jesuits established themselves increasingly firmly in France, allying themselves closely with the monarchy of Louis XIV, two of whose influential confessors, the pères la Chaise and le Tellier, belonged to the order. They conducted a running feud with the Jansenists, whose theology had been condemned by the Pope. Port-Royal responded with Pascal's Provinciales, which fixed the image of the Jesuit as worldly casuist in the French imagination. In the 18th c. they found themselves equally opposed to the new philosophy, and attacked the Encyclopédie in their periodical Mémoires de Trévoux. In 1762, however, disaster struck: following their expulsion from Portugal and a financial scandal in Martinique, their schools were closed by the Parlement de Paris, and two years later they were expelled from France; this time they were not allowed back until 1814. Thereafter, they regained power and influence, and were involved in politics on the side of the clerical ultra-royalists. They were again expelled in 1880 and in 1901, and their subsequent influence on French society appears to be much diminished.

The Jesuits were very active as a missionary order outside Europe, notably in India, Japan, and China, in North America, and in Brazil and Paraguay. In the last of these they set up a remarkable colony which drew the fire of Voltaire (in Candide) and Diderot (in the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville). As missionaries, they produced numerous reports (relations) on the countries they lived in, including a series on Canada published in Paris between 1632 and 1671; the perspicacity of these texts make them important forerunners of ethnography.

The Society produced untold quantities of literary texts, both published and unpublished. It numbered among its French members theologians such as Petau, preachers such as Coton, literary critics such as Bouhours and Rapin. The Jesuits' contribution to French literature resides less in their own writings, however, than in their role as teachers. Until 1762 they were the dominant teaching order of the ancien régime [see Education]. Their network of secondary schools (collèges) covered France, the most important being the Collège de Clermont (subsequently Collège Louis-le-Grand) in Paris. Many of France's leading men (for these were all-male colleges) were taught by them, including numerous writers, from Corneille to Diderot. Their education was Latin-centred, giving a central place to rhetoric as a practical, performing skill, extending to the composition and acting of innumerable Latin plays—a genre whose cultural importance has been insufficiently recognized. There were innovators and brilliant teachers among the Jesuits, but their teaching, regulated by the Ratio studiorum first laid down in 1599, remained essentially traditional. Their philosophy and science lagged many years behind new developments, to which they were often bitterly opposed. Nevertheless, they remained a dominant educational power in France after the Restoration and under the Second Empire.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• F. de Dainville, L'Education des Jésuites (1978)
• M. Fumaroli, L'Âge de l'éloquence (1980)
• J. Lacouture, Les Jésuites (1990- )

The history of the Jesuits in America can be divided into three periods. The first, a period of Jesuit missionary enterprise, begins in 1566 with Pedro Martínez landing in Florida, and ends in 1773, when Pope Clement XIV suppresses the order. The second period stretches from the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814 to the early 1960s, and traces the broad shift toward educational and academic ministries and parish work. The third period begins in 1962 with the Second Vatican Council.

Pedro Martínez died in a clash with the indigenous people of Florida. Neither he nor any of the other Spanish Jesuits established enduring Catholic settlements in the region north of modern-day Mexico. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jesuits had more success, especially in southern Arizona, where Eusebio Kino worked among the people of Pimería Alta, and in Maryland, where a handful of British Jesuits settled in the one colony enthusiastic about Catholic immigrants. By the late eighteenth century, 144 Jesuits had served in missions in British territories in Noh America. French Jesuits moved south from Canada into the colonies of New York and modern-day Maine; they also inhabited the southern portion of the Great Lakes region. Jesuit willingness to blend Christian and Native traditions facilitated conversions. Eventually the Jesuits established cadres of Catholic Indians throughout the region.

The primary difficulty faced by Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was anti-Catholicism and anti-Jesuitism brought to the New World by British colonists weaned on the fundamental texts of the Reformation. In 1620, William Brewster brought on board the Mayflower a just-published translation of the Venetian historian Paulo Sarpi's attack on the Council of Trent and the papacy. Fears of popery and Jesuits shaped the rhetoric of settlers in colonial New England just as in Britain. New England Protestant missionaries asked Abenaki Indians in 1699 to abandon "those foolish superstitions and plain idolatries with which the Roman Catholics and especially the Jesuits and missionaries have corrupted [religion]." In 1724, Sébastian Råle, a French Jesuit working among Maine Indians, was murdered and his scalp carried back to Boston.

The papal suppression of the Jesuits occurred in 1773, and though the new nation was growing rapidly, Catholic priests were few. Still, in 1789 John Carroll (1735–1815) became the first American bishop. In the same year Carroll founded the first Jesuit college, Georgetown College (now Georgetown University) in Washington, D.C. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, Pope Pius VI allowed ex-Jesuits to begin to affiliate with each other.

The restoration of the Jesuits by Pope Pius VII in 1814 allowed the order to begin again. The initial efforts in the United States were halting, as only a small number of Jesuits spread throughout the East, Midwest, and Louisiana. Their focus was often on setting up missions for Native Americans. Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–1873) became the most famous Jesuit missionary; he traveled back and forth across the continent and consulted with Indian chiefs and governmental officials. During the nineteenth century, the primary task of the Jesuits switched from missionary work to education. Their students were the Catholic immigrants pouring into the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century; the first were immigrants from Ireland and Germany, with slowly increasing numbers from Italy and Poland. Here the distinctive mentality of the nineteenth-century Jesuits—suspicion of modern philosophical trends, wariness toward any deviation from Roman orthodoxy—helped create a Catholic educational system that saw itself as countercultural, protecting the faith in a hostile environment. By 1916, the Jesuits, then numbering 2,626, had founded twenty-four Catholic colleges and a larger number of Catholic high schools. Virtually all of the students in these institutions were male, and the Jesuits understood themselves to be training a lay Catholic elite of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen to defend the church in the world.

Since they were busy establishing schools, few American Jesuits became intellectual leaders until the middle of the twentieth century. Pushed by coeducation and even more by the effect of the G.I. bill after World War II, Jesuits found themselves struggling to keep pace with the 130,000 students enrolled in their colleges by 1963. Still, from the middle of the nineteenth century forward, Jesuits provided much of the energy behind Catholic publishing, founding such magazines as America in 1909. By the 1930s, there were roughly twenty Jesuit labor schools, attesting to the growing interest in social reform and mobilization of the Catholic working classes.

Not until the 1940s did individual Jesuits begin to exert intellectual leadership. They primarily used a natural law template to argue that moral values were universal and that reason could lead to faith. The most important figure was John Courtney Murray (1904–1967). A brilliant stylist and deeply learned, Murray became a leading figure in the church-state debates of the 1940s and 1950s, arguing that America's founders did not intend as rigid a separation of church and state as contemporary American liberals assumed. Within the church, he became the foremost spokesman for the position that Catholics should embrace religious freedom along the American model, not grudgingly accept it while formally proclaiming "error has no rights." These heterodox views led Roman authorities to suppress Murray's writings on the topic during the latter 1950s. Yet, Murray's views triumphed at the Second Vatican Council, with the adoption by the assembled bishops in 1965 of a document he helped draft, Dignitatis Humanae, also called the "Declaration on Religious Freedom."

At the time of the Council almost one quarter of the 36,038 Jesuits in the world were American. Within thirty years, the number of American Jesuits had fallen almost by half, even as the worldwide Jesuit population fell by one-third. The dwindling order focused more on interior spiritual development than on fighting secularists. Yet, the primary Jesuit ministry remained education. Many Jesuits pushed their colleges and high schools toward what one worldwide gathering of the Jesuits called the "struggle for justice," meaning greater engagement with social evils such as poverty and the suppression of human rights. At the same time, fears that the declining number of Jesuits signaled an evisceration of Catholic institutional identity were widespread. Jesuit high schools (now primarily coeducational) seemed more stable in this regard than universities, which were overwhelmingly staffed by laypeople, many, if not most, of whom were non-Catholic.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jesuits remain as leaders in every aspect—editorial, liturgical, pastoral, and intellectual—of Catholic life. In addition a small number of Jesuits have achieved prominence in the wider world of the American academy. One American Jesuit theologian, Avery Dulles (b. 1918), noted for his defense of the theological views of Pope John Paul II, was even named a cardinal in 2001, the first American theologian so honored.

Bibliography

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Garraghan, Gilbert J., S.J. The Jesuits of the Middle United States. 3 vols. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1983. The original edition was published in 1938.

McDonough, Peter. Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1992.

O'Malley, John. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - jesuit

Nederlands (Dutch)
jezuïet

Français (French)
n. - (Relig, fig) jésuite
adj. - (Relig, fig) jésuitique

Deutsch (German)
n. - Jesuit
adj. - jesuitisch

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (θρησκ.) ιησουίτης
adj. - (θρησκ.) ιησουίτης, (μτφ.) (υβρ.) υποκριτής

Italiano (Italian)
gesuita

Português (Portuguese)
n. - jesuíta (m)
adj. - jesuíta

Русский (Russian)
иезуит, лицемер, иезуитский, лицемерный

Español (Spanish)
n. - jesuita
adj. - jesuita, de la Compañía de los Jesuitas

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - jesuit
adj. - jesuitisk

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
耶稣会信徒, 阴险的人, 阴谋家

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 耶穌會信徒, 陰險的人, 陰謀家

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 예수회의 수사, 궤변가, 음흉한 사람

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - イエズス会士, 策謀家

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) يشوعي (صفه) يشوعي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮ישועי, צבוע‬

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