American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global by John T. McGreevy (review)

In this intelligent and engaging new book, John T. McGreevy, the dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, traces the history of the Jesuits during their nineteenth century resurgence and places them at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s global expansion during that era. Focusing his attention on Jesuit activity in the United States, one of their primary arenas of missionary energy, McGreevy shows how the Jesuits helped foster the development of the institutional networks, devotional culture, and collective ethos that served as the hallmarks of the nineteenth-century “Catholic revival.”

The book unfolds in six chapters, the first of which briefly recounts the criticism lobbied against the Jesuits by nineteenth-century nationalists and others who saw the Jesuits loyalty to the papacy as a threat to the emergent nation-state. Faced with persecution and expulsion in Europe, large numbers of Jesuits joined a growing migration to fields afar, including hundreds to the United States. Subsequent chapters each explore a facet of American Jesuits’ religious involvement as told from a particular geographic vantage point, moving from Maine and Missouri to Louisiana and Philadelphia before leaping to Manila to show how the style of Catholicism the Jesuits nurtured in the United States was itself later exported abroad. Particular attention is given to the Jesuits’ educational ministry and their efforts not only to cultivate greater devotionalism and a more rigorous piety among the laity, but to instill in them a stronger loyalty to Rome and deeper sense of belonging to a universal church that crossed and transcended national boundaries.

Among its broader accomplishments, McGreevy’s book sheds light on “how Catholic globalization worked.” The Jesuits were just one part of a vast movement of priests, nuns, and other religious who cultivated and sustained the global, nineteenth-century Catholic order. His work helps us understand how the Catholic Church extended its reach and influence in an era increasingly shaped by the currents of secularism and modernity. This review symposium acknowledges the scholarly significance of McGreevy’s book and is offered here to promote further conversation about Catholicism in both its American and global manifestations.

The Editors, American Catholic Studies

I

In 2040, the Society of Jesus will celebrate its 500th anniversary. In his new book, John McGreevy covers about 200 years of this journey, from the Society’s return after more than 40 years of suppression through the present, spotlighting American Jesuits during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The grand themes at the center of his study are globalization and institution-building. Until a few years after the Civil War most Jesuits were refugees from Europe. Their arrival coincided with a surge in Catholic migration. The doughty Jesuits evangelized the flock and built schools. They also bore scars from European anticlericalism that the anti-popery of America’s republican culture rubbed raw. It was not until World War I, by the time most American Jesuits were native-born, that glimmers of an entente with the Protestant ethos emerged.

McGreevy transforms his chronicle into a page-turner, in three ways.

The first is narrative virtuosity wedded to scholarship. He draws on archives in several languages, he gives the secondary literature its due, and he recreates a gritty subculture. The bombast and violence had consequences beyond verbal and physical sparring – perhaps most notably, the forging of a separate school system.

Second, McGreevy retrieves old quarrels from oblivion by situating them with reference to present-day religious attenuation. The attempt to “sustain religious faith in a diasporic community,” he observes, was an issue for Catholics then as much as is today “for Muslims and other members of global religions.” Collective amnesia regarding religion affects us today.

Before getting to McGreevy’s third contribution, a technical detour is in order. The...