"Promising Hope": Essays on the Suppression and Restoration of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Essays. .. in Honour of the 200th Anniversary (review)

The eleven essays in this collection have nearly all been printed before, but gathering them into one volume is very useful, not least because they are accompanied by a historical introduction, an afterword, five appendices, and nineteen well chosen illustrations. Eight of the essays are by Geoffrey Holt, S.J., the other authors being the late Hubert Chadwick, S.J., Thomas J. Morrissey, S.J., and Professor Maurice Whitehead. The English Jesuits numbered 268 at the time of their Suppression, forty of them being at Liège. Tracing the story of each one, including the novices, after 1773 is remarkable detective work. Survival at Liège (whither the English Jesuit College had transferred following its expulsion from St. Omers and, later, from Ghent) and, later still, at Stonyhurst, Lancashire, is described in great, but never boring detail, though some repetition is inevitable. The story includes curricular reform at Liège, inspired by Mother Mary Christina Dennett, a remarkable English nun, and the arrival of Niccolo Paccanari's followers in England, though nobody can explain the extraordinary effect which Paccanari himself had on his contemporaries. The two chapters on the correspondence of John Thorpe, S.J. (1726-1792), are justified by his 470 surviving letters and by his gifts as a correspondent. The story of the survival of a vestigial English Jesuit community includes the foundation of Georgetown College in the District of Columbia and the remarkable foresight of the tiny group of former Irish Jesuits who invested their money, hoping for the Society's restoration, despite a protracted campaign by Propaganda Fide, prompted by John Troy, O.P., Archbishop of Dublin, to appropriate the cash. When the Restoration of the Society began in a low key, Marmaduke Stone was made Provincial in 1803 and held the office until 1817. He may not have been the best choice, but needed all his reserves of patience, given that the vicars apostolic in England and Wales refused to recognize the restored Society until obliged to do so by Leo XII as late as 1829. He was not at his most adept in dealing with the former Irish Jesuits, but showed more sensitivity to their very different situation than did some of his brethren and ensured the restoration of the Society in Ireland. Two hundred of the former English Jesuits were dead by 1803, but thirty-six or thirty-seven rejoined the Society. Given the age of such men and the difficulties of recruitment, growth was slow: sixty-two Jesuits in 1810, ninety-two in 1820, and 110 in 1828, the year before Catholic Emancipation. The appendices include translations of Dominus ac Redemptor (the papal brief which suppressed the Society), Catholicae Fidei (which allowed its partial restoration in 1801), and Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum (the papal bull which restored the Society in 1814). The English Jesuit Catalogues (recording all of the Province) in 1773 and 1801 make an interesting contrast, but some of the other translated documents seem to be superfluous. This valuable collection of essays throws much light on an obscure and sometimes confusing period in Jesuit history.