The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (review)

There was a specter haunting Germany—not of communism but of Jesuitism. This at least is what bourgeois Protestant opponents of the Society of Jesus believed, according to Róisín Healy's The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany. The title echoes that of Friedrich Heyer's article "Das Jesuitengespenst der deutschen Protestanten" of 1977, but the fascinating topic of anti-Jesuit fanaticism has waited for a sustained and serious study. This book is both an examination of the Jesuit Feindbild (enemy image) and the legislative history of the Jesuit Law of 1872, which banned the order from the new German empire.

The hysteria directed against the Society of Jesus extended well beyond opposition to the activities of the 634 Jesuits living in the German empire in 1871. It included hostility toward what liberal Protestants called "Jesuitism": the fantastic conspiracy to subjugate the world to the rule of the Pope and to convert Protestants back to Catholicism. In the introduction, Healy argues that anti-Jesuits exhibited the characteristics of the "paranoid style," a mode of political behavior coined by the American historian Richard Hofstadter in a seminal article published in 1964. Accordingly, anti-Jesuits imagined themselves persecuted by subhuman Jesuits with superhuman powers. Unable to recognize the advantages they had as the religious majority, anti-Jesuits were hardly the victims they made themselves out to be.

The opening chapter demonstrates that the anti-Jesuits of imperial Germany inherited the traditions of the Jesuit Feindbild that dated back to the foundations of the order in 1540. Anti-Jesuit rhetoric across Europe slandered Jesuits as megalomaniacs, traitors, snakes and lizards, robots and sorcerers, and sexual deviants. Anti-Jesuits of the imperial period then adapted these tropes to their own particular circumstances including the proclamation of papal infallibility, unification, and the Kulturkampf, the campaign to break the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. They achieved a major victory with the Jesuit Law of 1872, which closed the Society of Jesus in the empire and restricted the activities of individual Jesuits. The Catholic Center Party repeatedly assembled majorities in the imperial parliament in favor of repeal. Full repeal, however, was not achieved until 1917, when the Prussian state recognized the need to boost Catholic morale for the sake of the war. Healy describes in careful and unprecedented detail the origins of the law, the role of pressure groups, the passage of the legislation, and the campaigns for and against its repeal.

In three chapters, Healy argues that anti-Jesuits developed historical, moral, and intellectual critiques of the order that provided the on-going support for the Jesuit law. Based on a historical narrative of the order's loyalty to the pope, anti-Jesuits claimed that Jesuits would never support the new empire. Leading liberal and Protestant historians catalogued the nefarious intrigues of the Jesuits as a warning. According to the moral critique, Jesuits violated the border between the public and private spheres that anti-Jesuits believed was central, Healy argues, to the proper balance of personal autonomy and discipline. According to anti-Jesuits, the Jesuits concentrated their attack on sites at the borders: the school which they infected with perverted pedagogy and the confessional which they used to establish intimacies with women. By dictating to the family on moral matters, Jesuits infiltrated the home and substituted their own authority for that of the husband. In the intellectual critique, Jesuits represented the worst case of Catholics who polluted the public with dogma. Anti-Jesuits believed that the Jesuits, with their rejection of scholarly objectivity and their reputation for duping the masses, were hostile to Bildung, the cultivation of the autonomous self both for its own sake and for the sake of participation in public life. These critiques allowed anti-Jesuits to claim their right to social and religious leadership and applaud their own contributions to the nation.

Although Healy follows the "paranoid style" of the anti-Jesuits throughout the Wilhelmine period, she...