Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe by Dale K. Van Kley (review)

In 1773 Pope Clement XIV (1705–1774) suppressed the Jesuit Order forcing that body to disband. Monarchs in France, Portugal, and Spain had previously expelled the Order from their territories—Portugal in 1759, France between 1761 and 1764, and Spain in 1767. The exodus left a vacuum at the highest levels of society since Jesuits had served monarchs as advisers, confessors and diplomats; in addition, they had operated schools for the nobility and they were forward-looking in their scientific pursuits. In Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe, Dale K. Van Kley attributes the actions of these two sources of authority to the spread then throughout Europe of a general anti-Jesuitism caused by French Gallicanism and Jansenism with their "reform Catholicism." He defines these acts as reforms, and includes among them the response to the demands by national Church and secular leaders for less Vatican interference in domestic politics, the release from Rome's monetary impositions, and the right to name the nation's bishops. The Order, which had been founded among other reasons to defend the Pope in the belief that the monarch was God's appointed ruler, thus came under secularist fire.

Van Kley introduces the term "reform Catholicism" to contrast with "the Catholic Enlightenment," currently in use among scholars, so as to emphasize its bearing on governance—reform which, he says, after the expulsion in France, translated into state autonomies, secularization of education, and sale of Jesuit properties with assets going to new commercial interests. Strengthening Europe's monarchies, however, had the unfortunate effect of contributing to France's bloody Revolution when that royal house was shown to be weak and incapable of addressing problems. A strongman, Napoleon, emerged who quickly saw the advantage of reengaging with the Pope. Both the suppression and the expulsion orders, according to Van Kley, contributed to the rise of the secular state. Yet after the devastation of the Revolution and Napoleon's wars, France happily restored the monarchy, and Catholicism returned.

Van Kley's historiographic aim is, as he says, to engage in comparative history. However, his claims that "reform" began in France at mid-century, that the anti-Jesuit impulse originated in France, that "the Enlightenment" was essentially a French product and its language a lingua franca for all of Europe, seem to deny the notion of "comparativeness." Although he covers events in France, Portugal and Spain, Naples and Parma, and Catholic Germany, the centrality and instrumentality of France are paramount. Thus those of us who deal with Spanish history question his claims for cause. Certainly "reform" in Spain goes back to the early sixteenth century with the founding by Cardinal Francisco Jiméne de Cisneros (1436–1517) of the University of Alcalá de Henares with his aims for clerical clean-up and the Biblical studies of his team of scholars. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) himself was a reformer. In the late seventeenth century, Spain's novatores and then later at the beginning of the eighteenth Gregorio Mayáns y Síscar (1699–1781) sought to rethink Church belief and its communicative modes, to demystify national histories based on pious legends, and to restructure Spain's educational system. It is too easy to say that Charles III hid behind the Esquilache riot of 1766 to disguise antagonism to the Order and decree its expulsion so as to initiate a policy of regalism. Jansenism traveled to Spain but the country's ecclesia's thinking was not limited to separating from the Vatican. Spain's "reform Catholicism" went to the bases for Catholic dogma and psycho-social attitudes to national identity.

Despite the confusion regarding his concept of "reform Catholicism," Van Kley digs into his coverage of French history so as to prove the country's preeminence. He goes back to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries to identify the emergence...