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  • Avventure dell’obbedienza nella Compagnia di Gesù. Teorie e prassi fra XVI e XIX secolo ed. by Fernanda Alfieri and Claudio Ferlan
  • Thomas M. McCoog S.J.
Avventure dell’obbedienza nella Compagnia di Gesù. Teorie e prassi fra XVI e XIX secolo. Edited by Fernanda Alfieri and Claudio Ferlan. (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino. 2012. Pp. 267. €22,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-15-23789-7.)

Jesuit apologists and anti-Jesuit polemicists concur that obedience is the trademark of the Society of Jesus. Each cites St. Ignatius of Loyola’s exhortation that Jesuits ought to allow themselves “to be carried and directed by Divine Providence through the agency of the superior as if he were a lifeless body . . . or as it were an old man’s staff....”1 Recently historians such as Michela Catto in La Compagnia divisa: Il dissenso nell’ordine gesuitico tra ‘500 e ‘600 (Brescia,2009) have been peeking behind the rhetoric of spiritual treatises and congregational decrees to ascertain “blind obedience” as practiced.

Each article in this collection offers a new, fascinating perspective on a subject that merits more investigation and discussion. The Society of Jesus rests on twin pillars: the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions. A sensitivity [End Page 356] to and a discernment of spiritual movements is the goal of the former; the latter invites Jesuits to a blind obedience to the will of the superior. The authors investigate conflicts between a subject and his superior. In an article not in this collection but cited by Sabina Pavone, Antonella Romano suggests that dissidenza (dissidence, dissent) is inappropriate, because it connotes explicitly organized opposition to a central power. Instead, she recommends obbedienza negoziata (negotiated obedience). Besides prescriptions to blind obedience, the constitutional decree

is not only highly but supremely important for the superior to have complete knowledge of the inclinations and motions of those who are in his charge . . . [and] thus he may direct them better without placing them beyond the measure of their capacity in dangers or labors greater than they could in our Lord endure with a “spirit of love”. ...

(p. 104, no. 92)

This should be neither forgotten nor underestimated. Each Jesuit has the right to represent to his superior his hopes and aspirations, fears and anxieties, but the final judgment is the superior’s (p. 117, no. 131). Despite such representation, tension may remain, as individual Jesuits opt for obedience to a power higher than their superior. In the late-seventeenth century, for example, French Jesuit provincials claimed obedience to King Louis XIV took precedence over that to the general. The contributors examine various modalities (variegate modalità) of Jesuit obedience: among others, Tirso González’s desire to go to the Indies2; Brother Juan de Casasola’s refusal to relinquish a reliquary of the True Cross; Paolo Segneri’s advocation of probabilism despite González’s crusade against it; the survival of Jesuits in Russia after Pope Clement XIV’s Dominus ac Redemptor; Anthony Kohlmann, better known in American Catholic history for the legal recognition of the seal of confession, and exorcism.

For some unexplained reason, interest in the theory and practice of Jesuit obedience remains a quasi-Italian preserve. Perhaps the English translation of articles on the same theme by Silvia Mostaccio, scheduled to appear in 2014, will encourage Anglophone historians of the Society of Jesus to venture into this field. Meanwhile, the contributions here provide a fascinating introduction. [End Page 357]

Thomas M. McCoog S.J.
Fordham University

Footnotes

1. Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. and ed. George E. Ganss, S.J. (St. Louis, 1970), pp. 248–49, no. 547.

2. For Tirso’s subsequent problematic career see Jean-Pascal Gay’s Jesuit Civil Wars: Theology, Politics and Government under Tirso González (1687–1705) (Burlington, VT, 2012).

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