Obituary NoticeRobert L. Bireley, S.J. (1933–2018)

Reverend Robert L. Bireley, S.J., of the Jesuits’ U.S. Midwest Province and teacher of history for over forty years at Loyola University Chicago, died at his province’s healthcare center, St. Camillus, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, on March 14, 2018. He was born in Evanston, Illinois, July 26, 1933, had been a Jesuit since 1951, and a priest since 1964.¹ He made his theological studies for ordination along with his German confreres at the school of Sankt Georgen, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, which prepared him with the language and with several personal contacts to become a well-published scholar on relations of religion and politics on the Catholic side in Bavaria, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War.

Doctoral studies at Harvard (1965–1972) led Bireley to dissertation research in Munich and Rome on the role of Adam Contzen, S.J., who had published in 1620 an 800-page treatise, Libri decem de politicis, on government and Christian political action, and who served from 1624 to 1635 as confessor to the Bavarian Archduke and Elector, Maximillian. Bireley thus entered a little studied area of Jesuit history, that of Counterreformation militancy in the central years of the Thirty Years War. A stroke of archival luck came when he found in the Roman Jesuit archives copies of 109 letters of the order’s Superior General, Muzio Vitelleschi, to Contzen, with political content, during the latter’s service to Maximillian. His dissertation identified Contzen’s promotion of the fateful 1629 Edict of Restitution, issued by Emperor Ferdinand II demanding the return of formerly Catholic lands and institutions taken over by Protestants since 1555—a striking case of ideas moving persons to historic action. But this act was an “overreach,” leading to Catholic defeats when the Protestant Swedes under King Gustavus Adophus entered the war and the France of Cardinal Richelieu attacked to counter any Hapsburg increase in power. His dissertation, translated into German, was published under the auspices of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.²

From this beginning Bireley published three other monographs on the religious and political motivations advanced during the Thirty Years War by the Jesuit court confessors in Munich, Vienna, Paris, and Madrid, as the Superior General and through him Pope Urban VIII sought to guide them. But serious difficulties resulted for the Empire from the “holy war” ideal of Contzen and William Lamormaini, S.J., the Emperor’s confessor, before Catholic moderates won out over their militant approach in 1635.³

Beginning from Contzen’s opus magnum, Bireley identified five other Catholic writers on morality, politics, and statecraft who between 1589 and 1640 entered the lists against Machiavelli’s positing of immoral action as essential to building and maintaining a strong state. These “antimachiavellians” rehearsed the philosophical and theological objections to Machiavelli, but went on to advance other, practical arguments, as they sketched successes due to moral politics and the deleterious effects of immoral governance in states and peoples. This strain of Christian thought agreed with the Renaissance and with Ignatian spirituality on the nobility of active and moral service in public affairs.⁴ In a recent contribution, Bireley made Giovanni Botero’s text of this tradition available in translation with an introduction.⁵

In the 1990s Bireley drew upon his own teaching, and on a surge of recent research and reinterpretation, to portray the Catholic Church in the early modern “refashioning” of itself from 1450 to 1700, as it adapted to the broad social, spiritual, political, and even geographical developments of early modernity.⁶ Although historians apply “counterreformation” accurately to policies of Catholics during the Thirty Years War, neither it nor “Catholic reform” explain the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century flood tide of missionary outreach into the Americas, South Asia, and the Far East from the Iberian peninsula and France. “Tridentine Catholicism” is only partially serviceable, because the influential new agents of Christian formation, the Capuchins, Jesuits, and Ursulines, were founded before Trent began in 1545. For Bireley a better understanding comes from attending to developments...