When Jesuits Were Giants: Louis-Marie Ruellan, S.J. (1846-1885) and Contemporaries by Cornelius Michael Buckley, S.J. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS665 When fesuits Were Giants: Louis-Marie Ruellan, SJ. (1846-1885) and Contemporaries . By Cornelius Michael Buckley, SJ. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 1999. Pp. 399. $21.95.) Cornelius Buckley has written here the biography of a fellow Jesuit, Louis Ruellan (1846-1885)—a biography of insight and understanding, appreciating the twists, turns, and "ironies of history." Within the very title of his book, "When Jesuits Were Giants," he presents this Jesuit missioner of but one short summer as a "Jesuit Giant" and asks the reader to judge for himself. Father Buckley 's book is not only a revealing biography of a fellowJesuit who might otherwise be forgotten, but also a reflective view of the author himself. The first two chapters relate the beginnings and roots of Louis Ruellan in Pordic, Brittany, France, "that craggy peninsula that turns its brooding face toward the Celtic Peninsula and islands to the north: Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland ." Ruellan was a Celt to the bone,with all the contradictory, conflicting traits of character of his Celtic heritage. Buckley's next four chapters show and reveal him to be a good teacher of history as he was for twenty-five years at San Francisco University; in relating the education and growth of Louis Ruellan as a Jesuit, priest, and a missioner, he uses the times and places in France and England to outline movements and controversies of the FrenchJesuits of the 1870's. Not until Part Two of his book does Father Buckley get to the heart of the biography. In the spring of 1884, Louis Ruellan arrived in Spokane Falls full of zeal to do missionary work among the Indians. He was met by his supervisor, Joseph Cataldo, SJ. (a Jesuit giant beyond challenge). Cataldo was in the midst of a building project for "Gonzaga College," a frame church and residence to take care of the needs of the whites in the wild gold-rush town of Spokane FaUs. Cataldo, with the decisiveness of a field commander, put Louis in charge of the entire mission: building project, church and all, for he had to leave to attend the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, and then head for Rome seeking new recruits for his Rocky Mountain Mission. So began the busy, short summer of 1884 for Louis Ruellan. The author presents seven letters that Louis wrote during that summer and adds enlightening commentaries to each. Here is the heart of Buckley's biography . The letters show Ruellan's response to the heroic challenge given him by Father Cataldo. These letters become a revealing autobiography of Ruellan himself . Louis, after the completion of the summer building project, was called on a mission to Colville, a hundred miles north of Spokane Falls, to settle some intercommunity differences between theJesuit fathers and the sisters at the mission 666BOOK REVIEWS school. There he took a sudden chill, had a fever, developed pneumonia, and died. So ended the life of Louis Ruellan, a true Jesuit giant of one summer. In an overview Buckley writes of the internal transformation of the Society ofJesus between 1965 and 1975: "changes greater than the Society had experienced in all its four hundred years." The reviewer was a pastor in the diocese of Spokane during those years of great change following Vatican Council II and can sympathize with a shared experience that involves Louis Ruellan himself . In that summer of 1884, Louis Ruellan viewed with cries of joy from the high plateau overlooking the Spokane valley, his mission and parish below. What a joy to stir the soul of this poetic Breton: On that same bluff was to rise up a magnificent brick and terra cotta building that was the Jesuit philosophate, the "jewel of the Northwest" from 1916 to 1970. On the brow of that plateau is also the Jesuit cemetery where Ruellan lies in peace with fellow Jesuits of his and Father Buckley's generations. Within the first few years of the 1970's, the beautiful Mt. St. Michael Philosophate became a huge hollow hermitage inhabited by a few ancient Jesuits. In 1978, the building and grounds were sold, to a schismatic group called the Fatima Crusades! At the cemetery where Louis Ruellan...