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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 3.2 (2003) 275-277



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Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits. By Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. x + 380pp. (cloth) $29.95.

Peter McDonough's Men Astutely Trained (New York: Free Press, 1992), provided a sympathetic but critical social history of the Society of Jesus in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. He focused in particular on the Society's efforts to bring the social encyclicals to bear on the needs of the American church and society. One might summarize McDonough's overall judgment as "nice try fellas, but no cigar": in the end, differences between American society and the European context assumed by the encyclicals, lack of appropriate training, and other obstacles kept the Jesuits from realizing their social-justice goals. Picking up where the 1992 work left off, Passionate Uncertainty charts the difficulties the Society of Jesus has encountered since Vatican II. Because this book takes a sociological approach, the focus shifts from the historical concern of the earlier study to the complex interplay of cultural, institutional, and social-psychological dynamics of the post-Vatican II Society.

The authors' methodology has drawn some criticism from other reviewers. In developing their survey sample, McDonough and Bianchi not only included a good number of former Jesuits, they employed a nonrandom "snowball" technique that develops the sample from names supplied by an initial set of respondents. As a non-sociologist, I leave questions of statistical adequacy to the experts. However, as a Jesuit brother who entered the Society of Jesus in 1976, I can say at least this much in the authors' defense: the numerous quotations from Jesuit and ex-Jesuit respondents together provide a rather good representation of the different attitudes that Jesuits in my generation have encountered over the last quarter century. Even if the distribution of views is open to question, one gets a good feeling for the range of significant attitudes among those who have stayed in and those who have left the Society. For a sense of the various problems and tensions Jesuits have felt in the past decades, their various coping strategies, reasons for staying or leaving, their hopes and fears, Passionate Uncertainty is good place to start.

Moreover, the authors' main theses are sufficiently on target to merit serious consideration in any assessment of where the Society of Jesus has been since Vatican II. To begin with, the authors appreciate how deeply cultural surroundings affect religious life—including the perception of vocation. Not that they deny the importance of spiritual factors: as a number of the respondents emphasize, the sense of being called by God and staying in relationship with God are central to entering and remaining in religious life (32, 114-16, 137-47). But spiritual motives typically intertwine with more mundane attractions and repulsions. In a pre-Vatican II Church whose everyday substance existed largely in immigrant subcultures shaped by ethnically homogeneous mores, religious life and priesthood enjoyed a social status and legitimacy that made the sacrifices of celibacy easier to accept. As ethnic Catholic enclaves dissolved into the wider culture, the "rewards associated with that life have gone down, or their clarity has been occluded, while the costs have remained high" (47). Moreover, the stigma attached with departure has evaporated, lowering the costs of leaving. Thus the balance of motives works against perseverance: a number of factors must work together for a Jesuit to stay in religious life, whereas "only one thing needs to go seriously wrong to prompt him to leave" (23). [End Page 275]

Although not the only factor, the crisis in priestly identity plays a major role in the decline in numbers (chap. 8). As the possibilities for lay ministry expanded after Vatican II, the distinctive areas of ordained ministry contracted and Jesuits began asking themselves whether the sacrifice of "giving up sex and independence" was worthwhile (208; cf. 107). This identity crisis was accompanied by changes in community life and spirituality, namely a shift from the old-style...

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