The American Jesuits: A History (review)

John O'Malley remarked famously in his history of the early Jesuits that, if we want to know who they were, we should look at what they did. Father Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., professor of humanities at St. Peter's College in Jersey City and the author of six books and 300 articles and reviews, follows the same approach in The American Jesuits: A History.By concentrating on the achievements of several dozen prominent American Jesuits he traces the contributions of the Society of Jesus to the American Catholic church over a period of 400 years in a fast-paced narrative that is characterized by candor and insights that could come only from a veteran member of the Society. Happily this is history with the history left in, not history swamped by esoteric analysis.

Schroth draws a long bow, beginning with the origins of the Society in Europe, and concludes with a survey of the state of the Jesuits in the United States today. He writes from the perspective of a warm admirer of Father Pedro Arrupe, superior general of the Society from 1965 to 1983. Although written for the general public without footnotes, the author's wide reading and helpful references to the sources for each chapter make this book a useful guide for those interested in furthering their knowledge of American Jesuit history and especially Jesuit higher education in the United States. The unifying theme is the remarkable diversity of the members of the Society and the variety of tasks at which they have excelled, whether it was the Native American missions, education, the retreat movement, labor schools, theological renewal, military chaplains, or the peace movement.

The English historian A. G. Dickens once attributed the effectiveness of the Jesuits to the sagacity of superiors in allowing their subjects to develop their natural talents. To put it mildly, that observation was not always borne out by their American experience. As Schroth demonstrates, individual Jesuits often paid a high price for opposing the policies of short-sighted superiors and only later were vindicated; they include Claude Heithaus and Louis Twomey, who promoted racial justice and desegregation in Jesuit institutions, and especially John Courtney Murray, who pioneered a new approach to church-state relations that was enshrined in Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom.

Schroth devotes the bulk of his book to the development of the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities in this country. Some faced almost insurmountable financial difficulties in their early years and barely survived. As if in confirmation of Dickens's thesis of the Jesuit gift for recognizing talent within their ranks (at least in emergencies), in several instances the appointment of one exceptionally capable president turned a faltering college into a thriving institution. The author also describes the difficulties of adapting the sixteenth-century Jesuit ratio studiorumto the demands of a twentieth-century research university and the contemporary challenge of maintaining a distinctive Jesuit ethos in institutions with a rapidly diminishing number of Jesuits.

Curiously, Schroth makes little mention of Jesuit high schools, except for the innovative Christo Rey schools, which provide a highly successful regimen of study and work for inner-city students. He gives even less attention to the work of Jesuits as hospital and prison chaplains. One can get a glimpse of the difficulties of this ministry from the fact that in the course of eight months as chaplain at the institutions on Blackwell's Island in New York City, the frail young Father John LaFarge anointed 3000 patients and came close to suffering a breakdown.

However, one can hardly complain of the lack of encyclopedic coverage of a topic as vast as that of the Society of Jesus in America in the space of 300 pages. Schroth has written an informative and perceptive survey in which he never allows his affection for the Society to mask his sometimes critical opinions about the course of its history in...