Book Reviews ∵

journal of jesuit studies 4 (2017) 99-183 brill.com/jjs Book Reviews ∵ Thomas Banchoff and José Casanova, eds. The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges. Washington, dc: Georgetown University Press, 2016. Pp. viii + 299. Pb, $32.95. This volume of essays is the outcome of a three-year project hosted by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University which involved workshops held in Washington, Oxford, and Florence and cul- minated in a conference held in Rome (December 2014). The central question addressed by the participants was whether or not the Jesuit “way of proceeding […] hold[s] lessons for an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world” (vii). Although no fewer than seven out of the thirteen chapters were authored by Jesuits, the presence amongst them of such distinguished scholars as John O’Malley, M. Antoni Üçerler, Daniel Madigan, David Hollenbach, and Francis Clooney as well as of significant historians of the Society such as Aliocha Mal- davsky, John McGreevy, and Sabina Pavone together with that of the leading sociologist of religion, José Casanova, ensure that the outcome is more than the sum of its parts. Banchoff and Casanova make it clear at the outset: “We aim not to offer a global history of the Jesuits or a linear narrative of globalization but instead to examine the Jesuits through the prism of globalization and globalization through the prism of the Jesuits” (2). Accordingly, the volume is divided into two, more or less equal sections: “Historical Perspectives” and “Contemporary Challenges.” In his sparklingly incisive account of the first Jesuit encounters with Japan and China, M. Antoni Üçerler makes two crucial observations: first, that the Je- suits had no clear, agreed missionary strategy in place and second, that cultural accommodation was somehow the exclusive “invention” of European missionaries is a myth (28–29). In both Japan and China, the initiative for accommodation came from members of the local cultural elites, “who helped the Jesuits understand the cultural, social, political, linguistic and religious contexts in which they were operating” (29). Üçerler explains how the Jesuits combined © the author(s), 2017 | doi 10.1163/22141332-00401005 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 4.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:07:38AM via free access <UN> 100 book reviews a Pauline theology (the “Jerusalem compromise” of Acts 15:20 whereby the apostle refrained from asking Jewish converts to Christianity to give up their “foreign” identity) with the “rhetoric of the Areopagus” approach (in which local rites and customs were to be permitted so long as they were not contrary to the faith). In a complementary chapter, Francis Clooney considers the Je- suit critique of the belief in rebirth as framed by Jesuit missionaries in Japan, China, and India, which he takes into the twentieth century. In his conclusion, Clooney notes how “we see their [the missionaries’] great confidence in the universality of reason and the power of philosophical argumentation” (63). Daniel Madigan takes us into very different territory in his survey of Jesuit attitudes to Muslims, in which he emphasizes that, although the picture is not uniform, missionaries of the Society in both its pre- and post-suppression eras “very often shared the negative view of Islam that they inherited from the Church’s long history of polemics” (69). He studies a comparative sample of the missionaries Jerónimo Xavier (1549–1617); Bento de Góis (1562–1607), and Tirso González de Santalla (1624–1705), who were active, respectively, at the Mughal Court, in Afghanistan, and in the Iberian peninsula, in order to make the point that “the assumption that pluralism in religion logically follows from a healthy process of globalization needs to be critically examined” (82) before concluding that “the breadth of their experience, however, seems to have failed to break them out of a centuries-old and already rather stale and unproductive approach to Muslims and their faith […]. While Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Ales- sandro Valignano (1538–1606), and Roberto de’ Nobili (1577–1656) had a sense of the newness and discovery in the religions and cultures of China, Japan, and India, Xavier, Góis, and González seem to have found only the familiar enemy, presumed to have been vanquished in argument long ago yet unaccountably still resistant to the clear truth of the Gospel” (85). In what is perhaps necessarily a somewhat schematic chapter, Maldavsky provides a tour d’horizon of the Jesuits in Ibero-America that begins by re- minding us of the degree to which the Jesuits were themselves “converted” by their missionary experiences. The latter were of an extraordinary diverse nature, including not only cities, but indigenous parishes, frontier and rural missions. One of the more controversial “accommodations” that the Society made to colonial conditions was its involvement in slavery—not only in Brazil discussed by Maldavsky but also in North America (which has recently involved the president of Georgetown University meeting some of the descen- dants of slaves in Maryland owned and sold by his institution to acknowledge the wrongs committed). Maldavsky is particularly good on showing how the Jesuits “created” indigenous cultures by introducing artificial distinctions, such as the case of the Tarahumara and Tepehuanes in Northern New Spain journal of jesuitDownloaded studies from Brill.com09/25/20214 (2017) 99-183 08:07:38AM via free access <UN> book reviews 101 (to which she might have added the “Muisca” people of New Granada who were endowed by the Jesuit missionaries with a quasi-Inca or Aztec coherence as the research of Juan Cobo Betancourt has demonstrated). She concludes with the significant observation that although “the achievement of the Jesuits in early modern Ibero-America was in some ways lasting and durable, […] at the same time, it was also, and always, unpredictably fragile” (106). Sabina Pavone, in a particularly well-translated chapter, offers a summary of her fine study on anti-Jesuitism (The Wily Jesuits and the Monita secreta: The Forged Secret Instructions of the Jesuits [St. Louis, mo: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005]), in which she draws attention to the two complementary accusations levelled at the Society: their perceived drive for a universal empire, on the one hand; their wish for a “state within a state,” on the other. Pavone then goes on to identify four currents of anti-Jesuitism: religious-political; ecclesiastical; Je- suit and Enlightenment. Ironically, it was the third type which was, in several respects, the most damaging, for it included not only the Monita secreta itself, authored by the disgruntled former Jesuit, Hieronim Zahorowski (1582–1634) in 1614, but also the Monarchia solipsorum, which was a particularly vitupera- tive attack, authored by the former Jesuit Giulio Clemente Scotti (1602–69) with materials supplied by Melchior Inchofer (c.1585–1648), a Hungarian Jesuit who never left the Society and who is perhaps best known for his role in the trial of Galileo. John McGreevy follows with a fine chapter on the Society after its restora- tion in 1814, which covers similar ground to his recent, important study: Ameri- can Jesuits and the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). As Mc- Greevy puts it succinctly, “The history of the Jesuits does not substitute for a history of the nineteenth-century Catholic whole. But it comes close” (132). Moreover, it is simplistic to identify the Jesuits with the strand of conservative Catholicism symbolized by the figure of Pius ix (r.1846–78). McGreevy points out how the Society was arguably much more influential under his successor Leo xiii (r.1878–1903), whose encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) famously repre- sented a watershed in the engagement of the papacy with the condition of the working masses. Leo’s closest advisors included several Jesuits, among whom was one of his own brothers. The revival of the refounded Society was indeed remarkable: the six hundred aged members of 1814 grew into almost 17,000 members on the eve of the First World War. On one level, this expansion could be seen as but a reflection of “one of the great migrations of modern history” (133) in which some sixty million Europeans decided to emigrate to the usa, more than fifty percent of whom were Catholic. However, it was not simply a case of the Society riding the Catholic tide of history for in the same century the Jesuits were expelled from more than two dozen E uropean and Latin Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 08:07:38AM via free access 102 book reviews American countries. A key figure of the Society in the nineteenth century, whom McGreevy rescues from the kneejerk condescension of liberal posterity, was Jan Roothaan (in office, 1829–53), whose overriding priority was the need to rebuild the Society’s spiritual and institutional dna. This Roothaan achieved by reissuing such key documents as the Spiritual Exercises (with his commen- tary that insisted on their literal reading); the Ratio studiorum, as well as re- introducing such practices as the writing of annual letters to Rome, insisting on the use of Latin as the Society’s lingua franca and restarting the Bollandist collection of saints’ lives. Roothaan was also responsible for the foundation, at papal behest, of the journal Civiltà cattolica (1850), which soon became the most influential Catholic publication in the world, a position it has more or less maintained ever since. Just as Roothaan, for McGreevy, embodied the pri- orities of the Society in the nineteenth century, Karl Rahner (1904–84) did the same for the second half of the twentieth.

Load more