Jesuits and Race: A Global History of Continuity and Change ed. by Charles H. Parker and Nathaniel Millett (review)

Jesuits and Race is an important and timely book. Catholic thinking about race has become a central concern of historians of the early modern and modern church in recent years. As leaders of the global missionary enterprise, members of the Society of Jesus developed close ties to racial and religious minorities in Europe, the Americas, and Asia from the time of the founding of the order in 1540. In the process, they produced a distinguished body of work on race and the global church.

Six of the book’s nine chapters focus on the early modern Society. These include strong contributions by Liam Matthew Brockey, Emanuele Colombo, Susan Deeds, J. Michelle Molina, Andrew Redden, and Erin Kathleen Rowe. A common theme is the rejection, by some important Jesuit writers and missionaries, of the racism and anti-Semitism that pervaded the early modern Church and that caused deep and lasting divisions within the Society.

Emanuele Colombo’s essay about Antonio Possevino (1533–1610) provides a perceptive analysis of these divisions, especially those surrounding the decision by the Fifth General Congregation in 1593 to prohibit the admission to the Society of men of Jewish or Muslim descent. In practice, this decision affected mainly New Christians, as men of Jewish descent were known (few men of Muslim descent sought admission to the Society). Many of the most distinguished Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—including Pedro de Ribadeneira, Juan de Polanco, José de Acosta, and Francisco Suárez—were New Christians. The campaign to exclude New Christians nearly provoked a schism in the Society. The prohibition was not rescinded until 1946, in the wake of the Holocaust.

Discrimination against Jews and New Christians was inextricably linked to discrimination against Africans and people of African descent. Erin Rowe cites the seventeenth-century historian and bishop Prudencio de Sandoval, who asked, “Who can deny that the descendants of Jews . . . persist in the evil tendencies stemming from their ancient ingratitude and poor understanding, just as Black people are inseparable from the accident of their blackness?” Rowe analyzes a widely-circulated treatise by the Jesuit historian Martín de Roa, who rejected his contemporaries’ denigration of blackness and affirmed, in what Rowe notes is an “extraordinary passage,” that “Black Christians were as endowed with heavenly light as white ones.”

Liam Brockey writes that although Jesuits throughout the Portuguese empire benefitted from unfree labor, they rarely referred to this labor in their writings, an absence that he suggests is likely due to the pervasiveness of slavery in colonial societies, and to “the unquestioned assumption that owning slaves or indentured servants was permissible, even for members of religious communities.” Like the New Christian question, the question of unfree labor divided Jesuits in Asia. Alessandro Valignano, the Visitor who played a decisive role in shaping the Asia missions, tried to steer a middle course, insisting on the need for unfree labor but cautioning the Jesuits against the excessive use of such labor: “moderation was essential if the Jesuits were to avoid the appearance of pomp while still projecting autoridad y reputación.”

Sean Dempsey, Nathaniel Millett, and James M. O’Toole contribute chapters on the restored Society. In “A Challenge to Our Sincerity: American Jesuits Discover ‘The Negro,’” O’Toole takes as his point of departure a circular letter that the Jesuit General Pedro Arrupe sent in 1967 to all American Jesuits. Arrupe acknowledged the Jesuits’ ownership of slaves before the Civil War, which is the subject of Millett’s chapter, “The Memory of Slavery at St. Louis University.” Arrupe then “laid out the political and religious case against any form of racism” and called on the Jesuits to expand their ministries to include not only the white Catholics whom they had traditionally served but also African Americans. Arrupe’s letter produced far-reaching changes. O’Toole...