Prr"ce I ADL 
-.sS~7 

bYDaniel A.Lord.S.J. 
mE QyEENS WORK 

3742 West Pine Boulevard 
ST. LOUIS, MO . 





What Is a Jesuit? 

by 

DANIEL A. LORD, S.J. 

THE QUEEN'S WORK 

3742 West Pine Boulevard 

ST. LOUIS, MO. 



Imprimi potest: 

Peter Brooks, S. J. 

Praep. Provo Missourianae 

Nihil obstat: 

Imprimatur: 

F . J. Holweck 

Censor Librorum 

>I< Joannes J. Glennon 

Archiepiscopus Sti. Ludovici 

Sti. Ludovici, die 9 Decembris 1940 

ANY FINANCIAL PROFIT made by 
the Central Office of the Sodality 
will be used for the advancement 
of the Sodalit), movement alld the 
cause of Catholic Action. 

Copyright, 1940 

THE QUEEN'S WORK, Inc. 

DeacIdified 



What Is a Jesuit? 
My Mother has just celebrated her four-

hundredth birthday. 

Amazing as the statement is meant to 
seem, this is not a jest but a happy truth. 
Of course by my Mother I mean my spiritual 
Mother, the Society of Jesus. For I am 
merely one of Ignatius's 26,309 sons, whom 
the world knows as Jesuits. 

Considering her four hundred years, I and 
the thousands of other Jesuit sons find our 
Mother vigorously young, intensely alive, 
graciously charming. 

Devoted sons always find it easy to 
launch into a eulogy of their mothers. If 
they hesitate, that is because they are re-
strained by the fear that their enthusiasm 
may make them seem boastful. They are a 
little shy about confessing before the world 
their love for their mothers; such confes-
sions may seem to lack reticence. 

Yet I have set myself the pleasant task 
of trying to explain to the reader what my 
Mother is and what are those distinctive 
marks that characterize her sons , the 
Jesuits. 

Ignatius Dreams 

In this brief and informal booklet I am 
trying to explain-quite objectively and with-
out too much reference to my own happy 

-3-



experiences as a Jesuit-what Ignatius of 
Loyola had in mind when he dreamed of the 
Society of Jesus. His vision of what the 
men attached to him would do was clear. 
He hoped to offer them with the aid of G<ld 
a spirit and an inner drive that would make 
them eager to do important and Christlike 
work. 

In his own lifetime Ignatius heard these 
associates of his called Jesuits and saw 
them actually at work in every country of 
Europe. He perhaps foresaw what they 
would do-penetrate the high walls of China 
and follow in the wake of the ships that 
pioneers were guiding into the harbors of a 
new world. He lived to see his handful of 
street preachers play an important part in 
the Council of Trent and the Counter Ref· 
ormation. He watched the rise, as he him· 
self had planned it, of the Jesuit universi-
ties and colleges that shortly were to ranl{ 
with the best in Europe. 

Too Much of Credit? 

The world soon came to know the Jesuits. 
(Historians give them, if anything, too much 
credit for their part in the affairs of the 
next three centuries.) But from the very 
start their enemies were numerous and 
powerful. Their name, as a name to love 
or fear, as a synonym for devotion to Jesus 
or for subtle, conscienceless political trick-
ery, was soon written into the English dic-
tionary. At the pressure of the Bourbon 
monarchs they were for a lifetime sup-
pressed by a Pope. They continued to exist 

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in un-Catholic Russia, and, restored by an-
other Pope to their full tradition, they have 
in about a century and a half again en-
circled the globe with their houses and their 
works. 

Who are these Jesuits? What are they 
like? What makes them what they are? 
Are they villains to be feared? Or are they 
sincere men trying to carryon what they 
believe to be Christ's kingdom and mission? 

The Real, Not Imagined, Thing 
Needless to say, I am not writing of 

Jesuits as they are imagined by people who 
probably never met one of them. I am 
describing the real Jesuit, as you will find 
him in the nearest Jesuit house_ And those 
Jesuit houses are easily accessible to any 
American. 

If you happen to know your Jesuits only 
through the pages of fiction and melodrama, 
you find them a pretty sly and rascally 
bunch of fellows. But luckily for us the 
Jesuits created by Eugene Sue or Thackeray 
are like no Jesuits we have ever known in 
our own community or in the records of our 
Society. Jesuits have traveled in disguise; 
but they have done and do this only in those 
rare lands where if they are known to be 
priests they are shot at sight, hung to the 
nearest lamppost, or tossed into the city 
jail. Russia is not hospitable to Jesuits, nor 
was Spain kindly in its brief Red days. 

But Jesuits in America or in any of the 
other lands that have a decent respect for 

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human rights and freedoms do not travel in 
disguise. In America you can find them in 
almost every major city. Here they are in 
charge of large parishes. They are con-
nected with institutions whose names ap-
pear frequently in the papers as the meet-
ing place, for example, of scientific con-
ventions; as part of the chain of laboratories 
in which earthquakes are predicted, re-
corded, and measured; or, if you are more 
familiar with the sports page, in the foot-
ball news. Fordham, Holy Cross, Boston 

. College, Georgetown, Gonzaga, Santa Clara 
·are a few Jesuit-conducted institutions in-
stantly familiar to any American reader. 

Jesuits are really very easy to meet, and 
they are more than willing to let the honest 
investigator have access to their libraries; 
to the famous Constitutions of the Society, 
which contain their rule of life; to their 
houses, in which they lead a very normal 
life. In fact what irritates a Jesuit most is 
t hat, entirely accessible as he is, he is 
presented and explained to the world by 
,people who simply won't call on him to talk 
his life over with him and who won't bother 
to read anything about him that wasn't writ-
ten by an avowed enemy. 

Part of a Logical Chain 

Before we come to Jesuits as such how-
ever, there is the larger question of the 
logic that makes men and women become 
what we Catholics know as religious. For 
Je'suits are of course religious, like the Bene-
dictines , Dominicans, Franciscans, and the 

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other men and women who take vows and 
live in community. 

A religious, when the word is used as a 
noun, is simply a man or a woman dedi-
cated by the three vows of poverty, chastity, 
and obed ience to the service of Jesus Christ 
in the Church He established. In order to 
follow the poor Christ, the religious gives up 
his right to own property. Through chastity 
he determines to follow the pure, unmarried 
Christ by giving up his right to marriage . 
Since Christ was obedient even unto death, 
he determines by obedience to follow the 
orders of his lawfully constituted superior 
officers. 

Careful Steps 
Back of these three vows lies a series of 

carefully thought-out steps. Here they are: 

1. God created the world for His honor 
and glory and the happiness of His human 
creatures- men and women. 

2. This world He turned over in impor-
tant part to men and women as His sons 
and daughters. God the Father asked these 
children to manage the earth devotedly, to 
handle the good things of earth unselfishly, 
and to make their brothers and sisters 
happy. 

3. Regretfully history here enters to point 
out that the majority of men and women 
have made an awful mess of their manage-
ment. Wars and oppressions , vices and 
crimes, greed and lust, selfishness and ex-
ploitation - these make up man's pitiful 

-7-



record, often outweighing the good he has 
done for God and his fellows. 

The Clear Way 

4. So God, in order to show His sons and 
daughters how they ought to live and in 
what fashion manage the earth, sent his 
only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, perfectly to 
live, beautifully to do His "Father's busi-
ness," and heroically to die, that truth· might 
triumph and virtue prevail. 

5. Christ, the perfect Son; called upon 
men and women to follow Him in bringing 
happiness to earth and right order into the 
management of God's world. 

6. Though Christ meant this invitation for 
all mankind, He divided His followers into 
two main classes: 

a . All men and all women were invited 
a nd ordered to keep the commandments of 
Moses, Christ's own two great command-
ments of love, and the Beatitudes. When 
the rich young man first asked what he 
must do to win God's approval, Christ stated 
those essential things. 

b. There were however men and women 
who wanted to follow Christ far more per-
fectly. These He put into another class. 
Apparently the rich young man himself was 
considering this possibility of greater per-
fection. To these men and women, as to 
the rich young man, Christ said: "If thou 
wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and 
give to the poor .. . and come , follow me. " 

-8-



Professionals 

Here then in this second class were the 
professionals. They were men and women 
who, like the Apostles, devoted themselves 
exclusively to the following of the master. 
So that they might own nothing, they sold 
their possessions and gave away the pro· 
ceeds. They relinquished family ties, for 
they followed the virgin Christ. They ac· 
cepted His leadership and the leadership of 
the Church He had established, doing ex· 
actly what He ordered and what His Church 
commanded. 

These men and women, whatever the age 
in which they lived, were known as reli-
gious. Without personal property, without 
any work other than the work concerned 
with God and souls, cut free from family 
ties and responsibilities, they dedicated 
their whole lives to the work that brought 
the Son of God from heaven to earth. In 
this life 
abilities, 
kingdom 
mankind. 

they hoped, despite their limited 
to advance the glory of God, the 
of Christ, and the happiness of 

For themselves they aspired to 
attain some portion of the personal char-
acteristics of the Savior. 

Some Special Facets 

The ma~y founders of religious orders 
simply accepted the logic of these steps and 
invited men and women into organizations 
that would make relatively easy this ascent 
to perfection. They asked their followers 
to walk in the path of the Savior; they 
showed them how they could model their 

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lives on His. They carefully planned to 
continue the work that had engrossed His 
attentions and labors during His visible life. 
They saw in Christ their personal leader. 

To insure stability in this difficult life, 
the founders bound themselves and their 
associates by vow to be as like Christ as 
possible, to allow no other love to come 
between themselves and God, and to work, 
pray, and suffer for the advancement of 
man's ' happiness on earth and his final joy 
In eternity. 

Thus far all the founders and their as-
sociates agreed. These things made them re-
ligious, professional followers of the Savior. 

Yet each founder saw some special char-
acteristic of Christ that awakened his en· 
thusiasm. This he pointed out to his associ-
ates. The many-sided Christ made possible 
the widest variety of religious orders, each 
following the great ideals of the Savior yet 
each showing marked differences in the 
special characteristics of their lives .and the 
type of work they undertook. 

Many Founders Find Many Sides 

So Francis of Assisi, called the most 
Christlike man since Christ, loved the pov-
erty of the poor Christ and asked his 
Franciscans to be detached from wealth and 
to serve Christ's beloved poor. 

Dominic watched Christ standing with 
arms uplifted on the Mount of the 'Sermon 
or preaching from the bark of Peter; so he 
called his order the Order of Preachers. 

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Bernard of Clairvaux followed Christ into 
the mountaintops to pray and remembered 
the thirty years He spent in His significant 
hidden life; so Bernard built the monasteries 
where his Carthusians might lead the hid-
den life of meditation and solitude and pray 
for the sleeping, lazy, sinning world. 

John of the Cross held before his Pas-
sionists the sufferings and death of the 
Savior. Vincent of Paul remembered Christ 
preaching to the Samaritans and in -the lit-
tle villages; later he reminded his Daugh-
ters of Charity that the merciful Christ 
walked among the poor, the sick, the outcast. 

Out of the Needs of the Age 

In each case the wise saintly founder 
focused his attention on that particular 
aspect of Christ's multisided character that 
was most needed to solve the problems of 
his age. Dominic saw the need of preach-
ing to counteract the errors of the AI-
bigenses_ Francis chose Christ's poverty to 
overcome man's idolatry of wealth. As the 
Roman Empire fell before the warlike bar-
barous invaders, the Benedictines repeated 
Christ's charming admonition, "Peace!" and 
established havens of culture and gentleness 
on the relatively safe mountaintops. 

Now the Society of Jesus- or the Jesuits, 
as we usually hear them called- was born 
in exciting days. Those days could not fail 
to affect the character and the work of 
Ignatius's new company. The Renaissance, 
Catholic in origin, had grown chillily pagan; 

-11 -



its cynIcIsm had become a springboard for 
the Protestant revolution. Mohammedans 
were making their final bid for world dom-
ination, and they were doing it so success-
fully that Christendom feared they might 
succeed. 

Pagan Renaissance, Protestant Christian-
ity (hitherto unheard-of in world history), 
the threat of the great Red monster Moham-
medanism - these were the pressing, 
insistent facts that dominated the age of 
Ignatius. All civilization felt their effects_ 
For example : 

What Happened 

1. The scholars of the Renaissance in 
their enthusiasm for pagan literature, art, 
and philosophy were trying to swing the 
universities away from Christ and back to 
pre-Christian ways of thinking. 

2. The militant Protestant revolutionists 
disdained everything that was Catholic 
Christianity. They disliked Scholastic phil-
osophy because it inevitably lead to Catho-
lic conclusions. They turned Papal-founded 
universities from allegiance to the Pope. 
They substituted national religions for the 
world viewpoint of Christ's Church. They 
violently disagreed among themselves but 
were united in their vehement agreement 
that the Catholic Church and all things 
Catholic must be wiped from the earth. 

3. Much of the known world was being 
lost by the Church of Christ. Mohammed 
had long claimed Africa; now the flag of 

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the crescent floated in victory over the once-
great Greek empire. Protestantism was 
winning nations from their allegiance to the 
ancient center of Christendom, Rome. Ger-
many had swung toward Luther. England, 
Scotland, Wales, Switzerland, parts of 
France and the Low Countries set up re-
ligions that were as nationalistic as their 
climates and as individualistic as their 
favorite national food. Yet at this same 
time the discoverer and the explorer were 
opening another world, the Americas, to 
man's delighted attention. 

The Triple War 

4. What I must say of the Protestantism 
of Ignatius 's day, I say without the inten-
tion of offending modern Protestants. But 
one merely repeats history when he recalls 
that Protestantism then was a militant, 
vigorous, aggressive group of fierce preach-
ers like Calvin and Knox and soldiers ruth-
less as the princes of Germany and later 
the armies of Scandinavia and Puritan 
Cromwell. They were engaged in a cam-
paign of smashing Catholic teaching and 
Catholic tabernacles. They · had in many a 
land razed the altar and exiled the Eucharis-
tic Christ. The large body of revolutionists 
denied that Christ was present in the Host. 
They called the Mass idolatry and sacrilege. 
They outlawed priests and made the celebra-
tion of Mass a capital crime. 

5. The religious revolutionaries of that 
day were persuaded, in what we Catholics 
feel was a strange obliquity, that the sure 

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way to please the Son of God was to attack 
Mary, His mother. As a consequence her 
statues lay smashed to rubble; her name 
was uttered in contempt or hatred; and the 
love of Mary was branded as idol-worship. 

Outlawed Church 

6. As for the Catholic Church, which his-
toric Christendom believed Christ Himself 
had established forever to continue His 
work, this the revolutionists attacked in 
Europe and the Mohammedans besieged on 
a dozen frontiers. The pagans of the 
Renaissance had wanted to wipe out any 
law that interfered with the cult of ancient 
Greek beauty. The Protestant revolutionists 
s plit from the Church and then marched 
off at the head of a dozen or more warring 
churches. Mohammedanism continued its 
war-helped now by the Protestant revolu-
tion, which has been called, only too cor-
rectly, "the camp mutiny in the heart of the 
Christian world"- in its determination to 
reduce Christianity to a memory and Chris-
tian men and women to the status of slaves. 

Ignatius Chooses Obedience 

Ignatius of Loyola was deep in the cur-
rents and the problems of his time. A 
soldier of then imperial Spain, he had seen 
the last of the bloody Mohamme(lans thrown 
out of the Spanish peninsula. He watched 
the universities in that swing from Christ 
back to Apollo, from Mary to Venus. And 
he heard the amazing doctrine that every 
man had-where religion was concerned- a 

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divine right to decide what Christ had 
taught and what He had meant by what He 
taught. He saw the countries of Europe 
hurrying on toward that terrible principle 
that a ruler might establish for his people 
the religion which he preferred and oblige 
them to bend knee and neck to that faith. 

The soldier in Ignatius resented this 
breakdown of authority. His training on the 
battlefield told him clearly that a church 
divided, like an army divided, was a church 
ready to be conquered and destroyed. He 
could not believe that Christ; who prayed 
for "one fold and one shepherd," was the 
founder of a hundred different churches, all 
disagreeing about the most fundamental ele-
ments of His teaching. 

The Gospels and the life of Christ t,hat 
fell into Ignatius's hands showed him on 'the 
other hand a magnificently obedient Christ. 
He watched Christ bow to the command of 
His heavenly Father. He followed the Boy 
Christ down to Nazareth, where He was 
subject to an earthly mother and foster 
father. He could not miss the perfect 
obedience of Christ to the state-even to 
pagan Rome; to the ecclesiastical authori-
ties of his time, however corrupt they per-
sonally might be; to the laws of census and 
taxation and unjust tribunals. 

So with the world throwing off obedience 
at the exhortations of Luther and Henry of 
England and Calvin and the rebellious 
princes of Germany, Ignatius determined to 
bind his followers with a very special obedi-

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ence to the desires and commands of Jesus 
Christ. 

He was a soldier, this Ignatius Loyola. As 
a soldier he knew the necessity of obedience. 
He loved the obedient Christ; and follow-
ing Christ, he felt he must give Him that 
same strict obedience which had marked 
the actions of Christ. 

He was a man of his times; and when he 
saw the international chaos brought about 
by the contempt for authority, he deter-
mined to make obedience the mark of his 
new Society. He would bind his associates 
to Jesus, giving them the Savior's name. 
He would use a military name, calling his 
organization a company. He would demand 
of the future Jesuits a military obedience 
as essential in the kingdom of Christ as in 
the nations of the earth. 

Soldierly Obedience 

So obedience became the heart of Ig-
natius's military rule. His society was called, 
not an order, but a company. He demanded 
of himself and of those who with him fought 
Christ's peaceful war implicit obedience to 
the commands of Christ and to those of 
Christ's commander in chief on earth, the 
Pope. If Christ declared to His Apostles 
and their successors, "He that heareth you, 
heareth me; and he that despiseth you, 
despiseth me," then Jesuits would hear and 
obey those commands as if they were spoken 
by the voice of the Savior Himself. 

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It has always struck me as strange that 
the very same people who vastly admire the 
obedience of a soldier find the obedience of 
a Jesuit ugly and unnatural. They write 
poems in praise of the Light Brigade dash-
ing to its doom because somebody ordered 
(he blundered as he ordered) , and then they 
write volumes denouncing the Jesuits be-
cause they give implicit obedience to Christ 
and to those whom the Jesuits regard as 
the officers in Christ's army_ 

Does it seem quite fair or reasonable? 

The Immediate Problems 

With a company held together in Christ-
modeled obedience, Ignatius turned to meet 
the problems of his day. 

If the Renaissance was turning the uni-
versities into schools of pagan living and 
unchristian thinking, he determined to estab-
lish new universities in which Christ and 
His truths would be taught to young men, 
especially to those who might reasonably 
be expected to be leaders in their generation . 

If the Protestant schools had cut them-
selves away from Scholastic philosophy and 
the teachings of the Fathers and the great 
Doctors, then the schools Ignatius estab-
lished must be aggressively Catholic, strong 
in loyalty to that truth which flowed from 
the Sermon on the Mount straight through 
the uninterrupted tradition of Christianity. 

If the religious revolutionists were using 
the printing press to spread their new teach-

-17-



ings and their swiftly changeable OpInIOnS, 
Ignatius determined that his Jesuits should 
write and publish, meet book with book, 
pamphlet with pamphlet. 

New Worlds and Old 

Under the blows of Mohammedanism and 
Protestantism the old world seemed to be 
cracking into frightening disunity. Ignatius 
and the general superiors who succeeded 
him turned their attention to the new 
worlds. Jesuits started for the Americas 
almost on the heels of the first explorers. 
Jesuit missionaries actually preceded trad-
ers into vast wildernesses of the new con-
tinents. I ' myself have seen in ancient 
Panama City the ruins of a Jesuit college 
that was flourishing hardly more than three 
quarters of a century after Luther had tried 
with his famous theses to cut the bloodline 
of Christian tradition. 

Those early Jesuits built a complete civil-
ization among the converted savages of 
Paraguay. They won to Christ the entire 
Huron nation in what was to be New York 
and Canada. 

Not content with working in the new 
worlds, they turned to the worlds that were 
older than Europe itself. They laid spiritual 
siege to Japan, China, and India; they won 
millions of these pagans to the faith of 
Christ. 

Systematic Replacement 

This was not a mere accidental burst of 
zeal on the part of new and enthusiastic 

-18-



recruits. It was a systematic effort at reo 
placement by men who, when they saw one 
battleground apparently lost, counterbal-
anced defeat in one field with a dozen 
victories in others. 

They built their schools and became 
world-striding missionaries because the faith 
was threatened and they felt impelled to 
leap into a battle that was not of their 
making or choosing but of Protestant and 
Mohammedan declaration. They taught on 
the street corners of Vienna and Antwerp , 
of Seville and Paris. They built new schools 
in every important center of Europe. They 
walked into the temples of India and Japan 
and spoke the name of Christ. They set up 
their altars and conducted their classes in 
the jungles of South America, the slum quar-
ters of Benares and Peiping, and the un-
mapped forests of North America. 

To the Defense of the Attacked 

Ignatius . could not have failed to be 
shocked at the treatment accorded the 
Eucharist by many who called themselves 
reformers. History records the smashed 
altars and broken tabernacles, the Eucharist 
trodden by mailed boots, the sacrilegious 
blasts against the Mass- written into the 
coronation oath of England and into the 
constitutions of German principalities gone 
Protestant. Men risked their lives if they 
assisted at Mass. Priests could be hung, 
drawn, and quartered for the crime of bring-
ing viaticum to the dying. 

To anyone who does not regard the Eu-

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charist as the body and blood of Christ, all 
this might seem unimportant. But we can-
not expect Ignatius so to regard it. To him 
the Eucharist was Christ dwelling with men, 
and he sprang to the defense of his at-
tacked, insulted God. 

Thus it was that into the very core of 
his company Ignatius wrote a loyalty to the 
Eucharistic Christ. Later this loyalty was 
to show itself in the Jesuits' famous devo-
tion to the Sacred Heart. It was to express 
itself in the Jesuits' struggle for frequent 
communion, a struggle against the teach-
ings of those Catholic puritans who are 
known to history as Jansenists. Loving 
Christ Himself, shuddering at the attacks 
upon Christ in the Eucharist, Ignatius 
swiftly de dicated his company to the service 
of the Eucharistic king. 

In the same way he rushed his new 
soldiers to · the defense of the attacked 
Queen of Heaven. The Protestantism of 
those days was bent on snatching from the 
head of Mary her star-circled crown. It 
begged m a nkind to give up its beloved 
mother. Hence Ignatius demanded of his 
followers a love for Mary that would be like 
the spiritualized service of a knight for his 
lady. He pledged his company to serve 
Mary as soldiers of pen and pulpit and 
prayer. They were to love her, these Jesuits, 
as grateful sons. 

The Beleaguered Church 

Because the J esuits sprang into action at 
the very time w hen Protestantism seemed 

- 20 -



most likely to succeed, and because from 
the moment of the Jesuits' arrival the 
Protestant revolutionists never won another 
country, history has been accustomed to pay 
almost too exaggerated a compliment to the 
Jesuits for their loyalty to the Church. 
Jesuits are often regarded by non-Catholics 
as kind of super-Catholics. In the words of 
the little boy, "Oh that priest is worse than 
a Catholic; he's a Jesuit." 

Even loyalty can be exaggerated by rumor 
and report. But this much is true: Ignatius 
did his very best to bind his men to a 
strong and constant defense of the Church. 
He dreaded the prospect of a disunited 
Christendom, a Christendom weak before 
the attack of Christ's enemies. He was 
sure that Christ wanted His followers to be 
united as He and His Father were united, 
not split up into a hundred national and a 
thousand sectional churches. He believed 
that Peter was the rock and that to Peter 
and to his successors had been entrusted the 
keys of the kingdom of heaven. 

The non-Catholic reader may emphatically 
disagree with Ignatius's convictions. But at 
least those convictions explain what Ignatius 
tried to do and why he tried to do it. 

A Strong Defense 

From the beginning the Society of Jesus 
has been battling in defense of the Church. 
To the regular three vows of all men and 
women religious Ignatius added a fourth for 
his company, a vow of special obedience to 
the Pope as Christ's Vicar on earth. 

-21-



Friends Admire 

. Jesuit schools made Catholic teaching the 
basis of their curriculum. In the famous 
Council of Trent, when Protestantism de-
manded that the Church withdraw from its 
divine and historic position and admit a 
purely human character and consequent 
fallibility, Jesuit theologians reasserted in 
strongest terms that Peter was the rock on 
which Christ established His Church for-
ever, that the Church has Christ's own power 
to loose and bind, and that though human 
abuses may arise and the weaknesses of 
men for a time obscure the divine character 
of the Church still Christ will never for-
sake that Church. He had given it a blanket 
promise that He would be with it all days, 
even to the end of the world. If He failed 
to keep that promise to His Church, He 
failed His plighted word. 

Their schools, their missionary zeal, their 
love of the Eucharistic Christ and of Mary 
Mother of God, their intense loyalty to the 
Church - these are precisely the things 
which have endeared the SOciety of Jesus 
to its many friends. 

Universities 

On the other hand these qualities would 
quite naturally excite in enemies of the 
Church a frank hatred and resentment of 
Jesuits. 

There is first of all the matter of Jesuit 
schools. Looking for just a second merely at 
our United States, we find that Jesuits today 

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are still distinguished schoolmen. Of the 
27 Catholic universities in the country, 14 
- more than half - are operated, guided, 
and largely staffed by Jesuits. 

The names of these universities are na-
tionally known. Their Jesuit connection is 
often forgotten: 

The Creighton U niversity in Omaha, U ni-
versity of Detroit in Detroit, Fordham U ni-
versity in New York, Georgetown University 
in Washington, Gonzaga University in Spo-
kane, John Carroll University in Cleveland, 
Loyola University in Chicago, Loyola U ni-
versity in Los Angeles, Loyola University 
in New Orleans, Marquette University in 
Milwaukee, St. Louis University in St. Louis , 
University of San Francisco in San Fran-
cisco, Santa Clara University in Santa Clara 
(CaL), and Xavier University in Cincinnati. 

Colleges 

Jesuit colleges are numerous and often 
quite famous: Boston in Boston, Canisius in 
Buffalo, Holy Cross in Worcester (Ma:;s .), 
Loyola in Baltimore, Regis in Denver, Rock-
hurst in Kansas City (Mo.), Seattle in 
Seattle, Spring Hill in Spring Hill (Ala.), 
St. Joseph's in Philadelphia, St. Peter's in 
Jersey City. 

Statistics 

In addition the Jesuits operate 38 prepara· 
tory and high schools across the country. 

Statistically this record would read thus: 
Jesuit universities ........ ........ .. ........... _ 14 

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Faculty (Jesuit and non-
Jesuit) ................................ 3,146 

University students ........................ 34,661 
Jesuit colleges............. 10 

Vaculty (Jesuit and non-
Jesuit) ....................................... 750 

College students ............................. 10,360 
Jesuit high schools.................. 38 

Faculty (Jesuit and non-
Jesuit) .............. _._..... ......................... 838 

High-school students ..................... 15,555 

Across the Pagan World 

Well as the historian knows the Jesuit 
schools, he is perhaps even more likely to 
know Jesuit missionary labors. At the pres-
ent time, 1941, of the 26,309 Jesuits in the 
world, 3,785 are working on the missions . 
This means that approximately one out of 
every seven Jesuits is directly concerned 
with the conversion of the pagans to Christ. 
And as over one third of the more than 
twenty-six thousand Jesuits are still in their 
long course of training and study, almost 
two out of every seven actively engaged 
Jesuits are missionaries. 

Forgetting for a moment the wider world 
in favor of our own country, Americans may 
be interested to know that from the United 
States, Jesuit priests and brothers go out to 
teach the Christian religion and civilization 
in the following far-tlung places and in the 
following numbers: 

Indian Reservations of the United 
States ............................................................. 90 

British Honduras......................................... 32 

-24-



Patna, India .................................................................. ... 90 
The Philippines .............................. : ................ _ ........... 256 
Jamaica ................ _ ............................................................. 42 
Alaska __ ............................................................................... 33 
Iraq (Bagdad) ................................. .... _ ....................... 17 
China ............................................................... ..................... 25 

The Great Loyalties Continue 

Any Catholic who knows Jesuits at all is 
likely to have visited one of their 96 parishes 
in the U nited States. In these the Jesuits 
continue to stre ss devotion to the Blessed 
Sacrament and to Mary Mother of God. 
Some Jesuit churches have the privilege of 
perpetual adoration of the Eucharistic 
Chri st. All of them continue the pra ctice. 
sta rte d in protest against Jansenism's aloof-
ness from Christ, of the first-Friday de-
votions . 

The devotion of the Jesuits to the Blessed 
Sacrament took the form of the interna-
tional League of the Sacred Heart, which 
has for its objective world-wide love of 
Christ and personal closene ss to the Savior 
in Holy Communion. In the United States 
alone the League of the Sacred Heart has 
14,000 centers and over 6,000,000 members. 

Mary 

May and October are a lways beautiful 
months in Jesuit parishes and schools . Then 
Our Lady is especially loved and honored. 
The Jesuit novice shortly after he enters 
the Society gives as his first public sermon 
a talk on Our Lady. University students 
assemble around the statue of their mother 

- 25-



on the university campus. There are May 
altars in every Jesuit church and chapel. 
Young men and women walk in procession 
to honor heaven's queen. You will find the 
Jesuit school papers filled with young men's 
prose and poetry in her honor. 

Significantly the first church entrusted to 
the Society after its foundation was that of 
Our Lady of the Wayside. Today that title 
has been conferred on one of the latest 
Jesuit chapels, the chapel at Loyola Uni-
versity in Chicago. 

Again the Jesuits' devotion to Mary be-
came concrete in an organization, this time 
the world-wide Sodality of Our Lady. The 
Sodality exists in every civilized country 
and most of the missionary countries on the 
globe. In the United States alone it has 
11,974 units with an estimated membership 
of more than 2,000,000 men and women, boys 
and girls. 

For the Leaders 

Ignatius was especially interested in the 
men and women who would be, not ordinary, 
routine-ridd en Catholics, but leaders in the 
kingdom of Christ. Hence from the start of 
the Society, Jesuits have stressed the special 
training school known as the retreat. For 
this school Ignatius himself wrote the text-
book. Because of this pioneering, the Holy 
Father proclaimed Ignatius the heavenly 
patron of retreats throughout the world. 

The retreat is pleasantly familiar to most 
Catholics. They know it as a time of silence 

-26-



and prayer, a time when a man looks deep 
into his own soul, upward and downward 
at the possible goals that lie ahead, care-
fully at the person of the Savior, and far 
into the center of fundamental truths. For 
three days or longer the man or woman 
measures his own strength and his obvious 
weaknesses, the successes of the past and 
the reasons for recurring failures; and then 
in the light of Christ's teaching and life he 
faces a future patterned after the divine 
modeL 

Centers of Prayers 

Returning from this time of prayer and 
serious thinking, the retreatant tries to 
make concrete in his own life the lessons 
Christ through His life taught him in theory 
and in practice. 

During the course of a single year Jesuits 
give about 3,000 of these retreats. In 
specially built citadels of prayer and medi-
tation they invite men to do something 
that was old in the Society long before 
Gandhi made it headline news: meditate on 
the great truths and measure their lives by 
these standards. 

They give retreats to priests and seminar-
ians, to men and women religious, to 
parishes and schools, to university students, 
to professional men and women, to mothers, 
to workingmen. 

In the United States there are 10 Jes uit 
houses in which retreats are given all 
through the year. Another 15 are opened 
for retreats during the summer. 

-27-



Publications 

The Society of Jesus was born s hortly 
after the invention of the printing press . 
This greatest of all inventions, which a great 
Catholic printer got from the Chinese, be-
came extraordinarily effective in the hands 
of the Protestant revolutionists. Hence from 
the very start of the Society, Jesuits have 
taken a strong interest in publishing. Many 
a Jesuit is a trained publicist. Jesuit 
journals appear in every country of the 
world. 

In America, Jesuits publish the following 
major publications: 

America, A Oathol'ic Review of the Week, 
with a weekly circulation of 30,000. 

rhe Messenger of the Sacred Head, pub-
lished in the interests of the League of the 
Sacred Heart, with a monthly circulation in 
advance of 300,000. 

THE QUEEN'S W ' OllK, the official journal of 
the Sodality of Our Lady, with a monthly 
circulation of 95,000. 

Jesuit Missions , a magazine devoted to the 
work of Jesuits among pagan peoples, with 
a monthly circulation of 30,189. 

Jesuit learned publications start with 
Tho ught and include Jesuit-university jour-
nals in the fields of history, philosophy, 
literature, and theology. 

Presses 

Jesuits own and operate several important 
publishing houses , among them being 

-28-



America Press, THE QUEEN'S WORK Press, 
the Messenger Press, Fordham University 
Press, Loyola University Press. 

Under the editorship of Father Joseph 
Husslein, S.J., Bruce Publishing Company of 
Milwaukee brought out a University in Print 
called "The Science and Culture Series." 
Father John J. Wynne, S.J., conceived the 
idea of "The Catholic Encyclopedia" and 
with an eminent board of editors brought it 
to scholarly completion. 

Jesuit textbooks are widely used in sem-
inaries, universities, high schools. Jesuit 
writers are well known in poetry, fiction, 
history, biography, literary criticism, the· 
ology, and learned and popularized phil-
osophy. 

Not So Popular 

Inevitably those very things , which have 
endeared Jesuits to staunch Catholics have 
won for them sincere distrust or frank 
hatred from those who do not like the 
Church of Christ or Christ Himself or Mary. 
Jesuits would themselves be shocked and 
surprised if tomorrow they awoke to find 
themselves universal favorites. 

Take for example the reaction aroused by 
the Jesuit schools. Whenever a persecution 
of the Church breaks out in any land, the 
Jesuits are inevitably the first to be at-
tacked, suppressed, and driven from the 
country. The prime reason for this is of 
course their schools. Any man determined 
to root out the Church would of necessity 

-29-



have to make war on those Catholic leaders 
in whose schools young people are frankly 
taught to know, love, and give their loyalty 
to the Church. An)'" man who dislikes the 
Church is bound to hate the Jesuits for their 
schools, which have for their objective first 
of all the education of loyal, intelligent, and 
convinced Catholics. 

The Protestant revolutionists hated the 
Jesuits with special enthusiasm. They knew 
that the Jesuit schools were a hurdle high 
and difficult to clear. 

Absolutism or totalitarianism is certain to 
dislike Jesuits . When a tyrant or a despotic 
ruler means to fasten his rule or whim on a 
nation, he must of necessity get rid of the 
Church. More important still, he must close 
the Church's schools. For no matter what 
faith or lack of faith the despot professes, 
he cannot be supreme while the Church is 
teaching young minds that over every ruler 
there is the supreme ruler and that Christ 
gave to all men a dignity that cannot be 
suppressed by tyrant or code or despotism. 

On the other hand the despot is sure that 
once Catholic education is denied to chil-
dren he can easily win them to him and 
away from the Church. So throughout his-
tory we see him invariably hitting at the 
Jesuit schools. The Jesuits are driven out 
of their colleges; their schools are con-
fiscated by the state; the educational grip 
of the Church upon the young mind and 
heart is notably weakened. 

-30-



It is the Jesuit as a schoolman that the 
despot always hates. Whether in Russia or 
modern Germany, in the Bourbon Portugal 
of the late eighteenth century or in scarlet 
Mexico the despot suppresses the Jesuits 
because that is a quick way of putting their 
schools out of business. Often the despot 
will let the Church seem free to minister to 
souls-provided its schools are closed and 
its teachers silenced. But the despot knows 
he cannot make absolute his tyranny while 
the Jesuits and Catholic teachers like them 
are training men and women to recognize 
the essential dignity of the human soul and 
the inalienable rights of human beings. 

Abolish the Schools 

So the impartial historian comes to realize 
that Jesuits are hated and struck down, not 
because they are priests or religious or 
traitors or internationalists, but because 
they are Catholic schoolmen who teach in 
their schools loyalty to Christ, His Vicar 
the Pope, and the infallible Church. They 
are expelled and their schools are confis-
cated because they insist on the principles 
of Bellarmine and Suarez, great Jesuit 
theologians and lawyers, who flouted the 
divine right of kings and taught the funda-
mentals of human right, liberty, dignity, 
and equality under God, fundamentals from 
which was born all modern democracy. 

Repeated Confiscation 
In Mexico the Jesuit schools have been 

confiscated time and again by a succession 
of tyrants differing in party and shade but 

-31-



identical in their determination that there 
should be no power above them, no free· 
dom under them. When in France the 
Grand Orient of freethinkers and atheists 
determined to rid the country of God, it 
immediately suppressed the Jesuits and con· 
fiscated their schools. The Bourbons had 
done the same thing a full century before 
when an arbitrary ruler wanted complete 
power over his people. In the case of the 
Grand Orient there was a determination that 
God should be exiled from France and Christ 
denied a place in national life. So out must 
go the Jesuit professor, and barred forever 
must be his schooL 

The Jesuits are so accustomed to this that 
the news of a fresh suppression in some 
country neither surprises nor vastly alarms 
them. Suppression and confiscation have 
been the commonplace routine of their 
history. 

England in the days of the Tudors and 
Stuarts racked and hanged the Jesuits be· 
cause, with all Englishmen in Oxford and 
Cambridge and the public schools being 
trained to hate the Church and deny the 
Eucharist, the Jesuits had the effrontery to 
establish schools right across the Channel, 
there to welcome and train young Catholic 
Englishmen in their faith. 

You can hardly be surprised that Protes· 
tant and pagan historians who have been 
frank in their dislike of the Church and 
Scholastic philosophy have detested the 
Society of Jesus. They are naturally bit· 

-32-



ter at the thought that these Jesuits build 
schools to "pervert young minds." We 
think this "perversion" really a splendid 
thing, the training of youth to love Christ, 
accept the Church's ancient truths, sit at 
the feet of Aristotle and Aquinas, find the 
Savior in the Eucharist, and serve their fel-
low men with Christlike devotedness. But 
if you don't believe in Christ or if you dis-
like the Church, you can hardly be expected 
to cheer the Jesuits at work in their schools. 

Stop the Army's Advance! 

'l'hose who regard the Church as evil 
naturally regard as a misguided enemy any-
one who extends the Church's influence. 
Tho se who think the kingdom of Christ a 
purely mythical realm that rates no place "in 
the council of the nations aren't going to 
be enthusiastic about a body of men vowed 
to win new lands for that kingdom . 

Hence-and once more naturally enough 
- the missionary activities of the Jesuits 
have met with a lot of unfavorable com-
ment and systematic opposition from men 
not precisely enamored of the Church itself. 

Early American colonists bent on destroy-
ing the Indian tribes cordially disliked the • 
Jesuits, who were trying to civilize the 
savages. It was trying news to the staunch 
old Puritans when word came that the 
Jesuits were actually making Catholics out 
of the Hurons and the Iroquois. 

One Calvinist pirate in a burst of religious 
zeal threw Into the sea forty Je suit mis-

-33-



sionaries bound for South America. No 
doubt he complimented himself on having 
done a praiseworthy deed. Hadn't he stop· 
ped a parcel of mischief-makers from turning 
savages into sons and daughters of the 
villainous Church of Rome? 

As soon as the Indian rajahs learned that 
the Jesuits were teaching pariahs the essen· 
tial dignity of all human beings, they 
swiftly had the priests banished from India. 
The slave traders grew furious and then 
effectively obstructive when Jesuits under-
took to work among the Negroes brought 
from Africa to the slave port of Cartagena 
in Central Africa. 

Bourbons Smell Money 

As for the Bourbons-when they heard 
that the Jesuits had built up a flourishing 
mission in Paraguay and were teaching the 
Indians to live in peace and to construct a 
Christian culture and a prosperous civiliza· 
tion- they decided that the influence of 
these priests must come to a quick halt. 
If there were riches in the new w orld, 
those riches belonged, not to the natives, 
but to the European exploiters. What right 
had these J esuits to establish a culture in 
w hich Paraguay Indians thought first of the 
kingdom of God and only second of the 
empire of Portugal and Spain? Indians were 
meant to be slaves, not saints. 

So the Bourbons clapped the J esuits into 
prison ships and hustled them back to 
Europe; then they raked up every penny 

- 34-



they could find-little enough, heaven and 
history know-from the defenseless Indians. 
And then they lost all interest in the new 
lands, and tile Indians were permitted the 
privilege of plunging back into slavery and 
savagery. 

Naturally Unkind 

Protestant historians have not been kind 
to Jesuits. Jesuits would not expect them 
to be. They could hardly be enthusiastic 
about a Campion or a Persons, who, with a 
hundred like them, tried to keep the old 
faith alive in Tudor totalitarian England. 
They could scarcely be fond of the Jesuits, 
who themselves denied and trained "sem-
inary priests" to deny that James I or any 
other monarch was king by reason of divine 
right. 

German Protestants could scarcely ap-
plaud Canisius for turning back the Reforma-
tion in Austria, Holland, and Belgium. 
French Protestants were not likely to be 
warm in praise of the Jesuits, who kept 
insisting that the Huguenot fifth columnists 
were splitting France wide open and build-
ing up in the vulnerable center of France 
a separate and treacherous nation. 

Hating the Catholic Church or at least 
distrUsting it, Protestant historians could 
not be asked to pin medals on the men who 
lived their lives and often shed their blood 
in defense of that Church. Standing on the 
side lines of history, they could hardly cheer 
Jesuit effort, which was advancing the 
Catholic cause. 

-35-



In all this I am not discussing the right-
ness or wrongness of the Catholic cause; I 
am merely trying to point out why the 
Jesuits' intimate connection with that cause 
has led to so much unpleasant interpreta-
tion of their spirit and their deeds. 

As for the Eucharist ... 

But we must remember something e lse : 
Protestantism in those early days was not 
the gentle, almost kindly thing it now is. In 
a hot and glowing fire it was melting down 
intellectual convictions of long centuries 
past and fusing for centuries to come all 
kinds of emotional prejudices. Protestantism 
-and we have only to turn to Protestant 
history to see this- was as violent as the 
tongue of John Knox, as fierce as the doc-
trines of Calvin, as warlike as the sword s 
of the German princes, as relentless as the 
rack of Elizabeth and the torture chambers 
of Topcliffe and the pursuivants of England 
and the Huguenots of France. 

High on the list of most of those early 
Protestant hatreds was the Catholic Mass 
and the Catholic Eucharist. Near that ran 
the hatred for Mary Mother of God. Protes-
tants of England smashed the altars in their 
cathedrals, banished the tabernacle, made it 
treason to say Mass on English soil, and 
required the king before he mounted the 
throne to swear that he rel1"arded the Mass 
as idolatry and the Catholic Eucharist as a 
blasphemy. 

Calvin and Knox rent their garments at 

-36-



the thought that Mass was said in the 
French palace and in the castle of Mary of 
Scotland. In Ireland death was decreed for 
the man who knelt at Mass behind a shelter-
ing hedge. It was high treason in Scotland 
to shelter overnight a "Massing priest." Prot-
estant Germans and Scandinavians were 
often scarcely less violent in their hatred 
of the Catholic Mass and the Eucharist. 

Or Mary 

Sometimes even today we find the ancient 
Protestant dislike of or actual acute hatred 
for the Mother of God still continuing. 
Naturally few modern Protestants smash a 
mallet into the face of Our Lady's statue. 
Yet they still accuse the Catholic of idolatry 
because he honors the woman God chose 
for His mother and because they regard as 
worthy of praise and poetry tl~e Lady whom 
a messenger of God hailed with the words 
"full of grace." 

Let us in all fairness remember that the 
men who for three centuries ana more wrote 
the histories read in English-speaking coun-
tries had little if any belief in the Eucharist, 
often regarded it as the most frightful 
superstition, and spoke of the veneration of 
Mary as idolatry. Could they be expected 
to like the Jesuits, who fought so sturdily 
for the Mass, the Eucharist, and Mary? 

The historian who disliked the Mass or 
thought it ridiculous saw the -Jesuits persist 
in saying Mass, however vigorous the laws 
to the contrary. The German Protestant 

-37-



historian saw the Jesuits in the famous 
German College in Rome training young 
Germans to come back into Germany and 
say that Catholic Mass in the shadow of 
Lutheran churches and honor Mary, toward 
whom the revolutionists had felt hatred and 
contempt. 

At the present time the Jesuits are train-
ing young men to go back into Russia, 
there as priests to say Mass, preach loyalty 
to the Catholic Church, and praise the purity 
of Mary's virginity. No one could expect a 
communist writer to lavish much love on 
them; no one could expect the Pmvda to 
print editorials praising their ideals and the 
high purposes of their seminaries. 

Enemies of the Church 

Perhaps it may sound strange to a casual 
reader, but Jesuits have often felt flattered 
that certain men have hated them and made 
war on them. More than likely those men 
were precisely the writers, historians, states-
men, and politicians who made war on the 
Church, hated or despised the Eucharist, 
and slurred the Mother of God. There has 
scarcely ever been an enemy of the Church 
w ho hasn't paid the Jesuits the compliment 
"f his cordial dislike. "Judge" Rutherford , 
savage old anti-Catholic, constantly calls 
the Jesuits vicious names. In that he 
merely takes over the heritage of the 
"Menace," the KKK, the AP A's, who con-
sistently bracketed in the roster of hatred 
the Catholic Church itself and the Jesuits, 

-38-



who take a special vow to defend that 
Church. 

As long as England maintained its penal 
laws against the Church, Jesuits by name 
ranked high on the list of the proscribed . 
Calles of Mexico threw the Jesuits out in 
the first gesture he made against all the 
liberties of the Church. Once-and re-
cently- by remarkable chance the Jesuits 
missed a bit of this hatred ; for before 
priests and nuns began to fall before the 
rifles and machine guns of Spanish anarch-
ists and communists, the Jesuits had already 
been banished from Spain and their beauti-
ful colleges confiscated. Hence they could 
not be shot in really satisfactory numbers 
by the Christ-haters; they had been sent 
away before the bloody persecution of the 
Red s really got under way. 

Training for the Task 

The training of a Jesuit for his work is 
long and careful. Ignatius meant his sons 
to be carefully prepared for their life's task. 
They were to be trustworthy to the extent 
of going "to any part of the world an.d liv-
ing in whatever manner .they could, so long 
as there was hope of God's glory and the 
salvation of SOUls." Modified by such 
changes as the development . of science and 
general knowledge has made n ecessary, the 
Jesuit's training remains una ltered since 
Ignatius mapped it out. 

Future Jesuits must, before entering the 
Society, have finished their full high-school 

-39-



course, with four years of Latin. Most of 
them enter with college training; many of 
them enter with degrees. On his entrance 
into the Society, the young novice is plunged 
into his first long retreat. For a full month, 
in unbroken silence, prayer, and meditation, 
under the skillful guidance of an experi-
enced Jesuit, he looks at Christ, studies 
Christ's teachings in so far as they affect 
his own life, watches Christ at work, comes 
into personal association with the Savior, 
and is presented with the one leader about 
whom his whole life is henceforth to swing. 

Preparation 
This long retreat melts into the two 

years of his novitiate, the West Point of his 
militant career. During these two years he 
continues the training that consists in the 
close following of Christ's ideals, ideas, 
principles, and practices. He meditates on 
Christ for almost two hours each day. He 
does the humble work that characterized 
the hidden life of the Savior. He trains his 
will to do hard and self-sacrificing things. 
He is tempered to a burning enthusiasm for 
the cause of Christ as the only cause worthy 
of his lifelong loyalty. 

Following this come the two years of his 
classical studies, when he reads the best 
Latin, Greek, and English literature. By 
mastering the style of the great writers, it 
is hoped, he will be able to use technical 
literary perfection in presenting the mes-
sage of Christ to the listening and reading 
world. 

-40-



Next come three intensive years of phil-
osophy and science. The science is as 
modern as a university course can make it. 
The philosophy is the great philosophy of 
Aristotle and of Aquinas, the rock-firm rea-
soning and common sense that establish the 
fact _ of the existence of God and the im-
mortality of the soul and face the great 
questions that can be solved by the light 
of reason. 

The Course Continues 

Usually after this he is sent for three 
years to experience personally the active life 
of the Society. He may follow the teaching 
Christ into the classroom, where he teaches 
the classics or sciences. But he may be sent 
to the missions to work for the conversion 
of the pagan. 

When this period of three years is ended, 
he returns to his studies, for four years of 
theology. Theology, be it noted, is, contrary 
to popular misconception, really the sum 
total of the doctrines and principles of 
Christ presented, analyzed, studied in the 
light of science, history, man's wide experi-
ence, traced through the historical adapta-
tions, and followed to the logical conclusions 
and applications to modern life. The young 
Jesuit is supposed to know Christ' s truths in 
expert fashion. He is a lawyer where 
Christ's law is concerned. He should know 
how to deal with sick, sinful souls in the 
spirit of the divine physician. As a future 
young officer in Christ's regiment he learns 
the strategy of the battles of peace and the 
conquests for the kingdom of God. 

-41-



During the period of his theology the 
Jesuit attains the priesthood. Then when 
his theology course has been completed, he 
retires once more to the hidden life, again 
makes the long retreat-another full month 
with Christ in silence and prayer - once 
more takes inventory of his virtues . and 
weaknesses, faces the work ahead, rekindles 
his enthusiasm for the cause of Christ, and 
accepts the high responsibility that will be 
his for the advancement of Christ's inter-
ests and the happiness of mankind. 

Special Training 

This year finishes his formal training. A 
great many Jesuits however are given in 
addition special courses in various fields of 
learning. They may go to Rome or Louvain 
or elsewhere for advanced philosophy ur 
theology. They may reenter one of the uni-
versities or enter a famous secular school 
for some specialized study. They may be 
given an added course in preaching or 
public speaking. Sometimes they take de-
grees in law, medicine, fine arts. 

With all this behind him the Jesuit ac-
cepts the orders of his superior who assigns 
him to his work i,n the Society. He may be 
a parish priest; he may be an instructor in 
a college or a teacher in a high school; 
special training or aptitude may fit him for 
a post in a university; he may be assigned 
to retreat work, to an editorial post on a 
publication or in a publishing house, to 
special work as a preacher or in one of the 

-42-



Jesuit radio stations. Or he may be sent 
to one of the near or far missions. 

Give Common Denominator 
Into whatever office he moves however, 

one sole ideal is supposed to be his: "I must 
be a follower of Christ; I must as far as 
possible duplicate the virtues of Christ in my 
own life ; I must bring Christ to those who 
shall be influenced by my work." 

That is the spirit that a Jesuit is trained 
to have and supposed to have. Despite all 
the weird, fictionized, and fantastic things 
written about him, he can rightly have no 
other spirit. If he fails, as often he must, 
it is not because the standard set before 
him is a low, shifty, mean, ignoble one but 
because the ideal is too high for mere un-
aided human strength. He has set for his 
goal the Christlike life. No one has ever 
suggested or claimed that that goal is easy 
to attain. 

So in success and failure the Jesuit is 
expected by his founder, Ignatius, and by 
the rule that that genius left behind him to 
keep his eyes fixed on Christ. His friends 
love him because they know that that is his 
ideal. His foes hate him because they hate 
that ideal, or because they know of indi-
vidual J esuits who have missed that ideal, 
or because they have been given an alto-
gether false picture of what a Jesuit should 
be and is. 

Anyplace 
As a Jesuit he may move into the learned 

societies or into a slum parish ; whatever 

-43-



his destination, there he hopes to carry 
Christ. His assigned task may be to teach 
first-year-high boys the paradigms of Latin, 
or he may be the president of a great uni-
versity, or the dean of an important Jesuit 
medical school. Wherever he goes, he goes 
as a representative of Christ the teacher. 

Perhaps he is told to write, ordered to 
preach, assigned to the work of giving re-
treats. In each assignment he knows the 
higher assignment common to all-to pre-
sent Christ to a waiting world. He may be 
placed in charge of some activity of the 
Sodality of Our Lady or of the League of 
the Sacred Heart. He thus becomes a 
publicist of Christ and Mary. He may sail 
to Rome and in the Jesuit-staffed Gregorian 
University teach each year two thousand 
future priests who come to the center of 
Christendom for philosophy, theology, Scrip-
ture, sacred eloquence. He may be assigned 
to the Biblical Institute, also staffed by 
J esuits, to work on Scriptural research or 
on the guidance of graduate Scripture stu-
dents. He may take his place in the Jesuit 
Oriental Institute to pursue oriental sciences 
and languages. 

The recent assignment entrusted to the 
Jesuits by the Pope may bring him as a 
volunteer to leave the Latin rite to follow 
the Greek rite of the Church; and trained as 
a Russian priest, he may prepare himself to 
enter the Union of ::Socialist Soviet Repub-
lics or to care for Greek Catholics in the 
various cities to which they have fled from 

-44-



Red wrath. Or he may go to the college 
operated by the Jesuits in Iraq. 

Missionary assignments may take him 
among the Sioux of Wyoming or the Eski-
mos of northern Alaska. He may travel the 
rivers of British Honduras, working among 
the "bush" Caribs, or he may find himself 
in the crowded cities of Patna, teaching 
Hindus the faith. His ticket may carry 
him to the great Jesuit university in Manila; 
if he goes to the Philippines, he may live 
among the lepers of Mindanao. He may 
conduct one of the many parishes in Ja-
maica's cities or back in the Jamaican hills, 
where can still be heard the drums that 
once beat out voodoo rhythms. He may go 
to the new Jesuit university in China. 

The Important Thing 

The matter of the particular place where 
the Jesuit goes he never regards as impor-
tant. Whatever he does or wherever he is, 
his real assignment is to follow Christ, 
serve the Church of Christ, labor for the 
souls for whom Christ died, spread the truth 
of Christ, bring the Eucharistic Christ down 
into the midst of men, honor the mother of 
Christ, and protect by every honest means 
the interests of Christ. 

In this tremendous assignment he will 
often fail. He cannot hope for popularity 
among people with whom even Christ is 
unpopular. Many Protestants will, thanks 
to the distortion of the Jesuit figure in the 
warped glass held up by historians, often 

-45-



distrust the Jesuits. Their purposes and 
actions will be strangely twisted from the 
true meaning. Sincere men hearing the 
charges against them and then meeting the 
singularly inoffensive Jesuits who really 
work throughout the world will be puzzled. 
The Jesuit will sometimes be praised beyond 
his deserts and blamed beyond his faults. 

But as a Jesuit he must continue his 
work. He keeps up the brave hope that his 
life will not be without some service of hi s 
fellows, some advancement of truth, some 
forward movement of the kingdom of Christ. 

The Insult of a Name 

The name Jesuit, it is interesting to re-
member, is not of Jesuit invention. Like the 
name Christian, it was first used as an 
Insult. "Let us," said some forgotten enemy 
of the then new Society of Jesus, "find a 
new name for these intruders, a name that 
will hiss and sting, that will sound like a 
slap in the face, that will be ridiculou s, dis· 
dainful. ... I have it! Let's call them 
Jesuits." 

So Jesuits they became, and by the choice 
of their enemies. Soon the word took on 
that ugly, sl':condary meaning that recurs 
so often in English literature. Jesuit came 
to mean a sly trickster, a villain lurking 
in dark corners, an underhand rogue given 
to equivocations and political conspiracies. 
Jesuit suggested a man with oil on his 
hands, poison on his tongue, and in his 

-46-



dark, crafty soul malice and a hatred of 
his fellow men. 

But as the early Christians hearing their 
name as a cynical insult quickly made it 
their own, so the Jesuits accepted their 
nickname quite gladly. They were Latinists, 
these early Jesuits, and the Latin form of 
the new n ame was Jesuita. And J esuita was 
a thoroughly delightful word. 

For it was a combination of the Latin 
words J esu and ita, which in conjunction 
means simply like to Jesus. Their enemies 
had never meant a compliment like that. 
The Jesuits would not have dared suggest 
the name. But since malice and contempt 
had given them the title, they accepted it 
gratefully, each determining that, to the 
best of his powers, in life and doctrine, 
loyalty and love, service of the Church of 
Christ, devotion to Christ in the Eucharist 
and love of Christ's Mother, in his choice 
of important things, and in the works he 
understood, he would indeed strive to be a 
J esuita, a person like to Jesus. 

Today, on the four-hundredth birthday of 
their Mother - the Society of Jesus - the 
Jesuits have no higher ambition and no 
other aim than to be a little like the king 
and leader who is always Chr~st. 

- 47-



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