Waiting around in a doctor's office a couple of years ago, I began glancing through a copy of Newsweek prominent among the magazines on his display table. The first article to catch my eye and hold my interest dealt with the advanced age and declining health of Pope John Paul II and went on to speculate rather specifically about which of the current members of the College of Cardinals might be his successor. First among cardinals more eligible for that choice, Newsweek speculated, was the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini, an accomplished scholar, a brilliant diplomat, and the skilled pastor of the largest diocese in the Roman Catholic Church.

My thoughts strayed back some 30 years earlier, when Father Martini had been one of the very best among my several outstanding professors at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Our dean at the time, he also taught an introductory course on textual criticism, potentially the most arid subject in the entire curriculum, I suppose, but his remarkable pedagogical style fit that dry material into a lively historical narrative that gripped and maintained his students' attention through the whole semester. I can never forget the extraordinary Carlo Martini. Indeed, I type these lines while sitting under a framed copy of the degree awarded me by the Biblical Institute, and his own signature adorns that document.

But Martini the next pope? To me that would be a real first, inasmuch as I am unable to recall, try as I may, even a single one of my other teachers who was ever elected pope.

The prospect of his papal election seems massively improbable, however. In truth, it would probably be miraculous in the strict sense, something on the order of crossing the Red Sea dryshod or changing water into wine. Cardinal Martini, you see, is a Jesuit, and no Jesuit has ever been elected pope.

My suggesting the unlikelihood of a Jesuit's becoming pope may come as a surprise to some non-Roman Catholics. It is common knowledge, after all, that during the past nearly 500 years no other religious order has been so tightly tied to the Vatican as the Society of Jesus, the order popularly known as the Jesuits. This vigorous, highly disciplined organization, embodying the dynamics of the sixteenth-century Counter Reformation, became Rome's major force in the implementation of the Council of Trent, her most effective tool in the extension of Roman Catholicism beyond the boundaries of Europe, and her staunchest champion against the forces of Protestantism. To this day, the Society of Jesus is the only religious order of which most of the members, and all of the leaders, make a special vow of obedience to the pope personally. So what could be more natural than electing a pope from among the Jesuits?

To anyone needing background material on that question, I recommend Jesuits: A Multibiography, by Jean Lacouture. This French historian and critic tells the half-millennium history of the Society of Jesus through a chronological sequence of the lives of famous Jesuits. This is a fascinating book. Starting with the society's founder, Ignatius Loyola, and coming all the way to our own 1990s, Lacouture lays bare the chief qualities and characteristics of this remarkable organization as they were embodied in the histories of individual men: Francis Xavier and Matthew Ricci, missionaries to the Far East; the Jesuit founders of the Guaraní experiment in South America (remember the film The Mission?); Augustine Bea, the hero of Vatican II; Fessard, Chaillet, and Montcheuil, who resisted tyranny in Europe; and Ignacio Ellacuria, who died fighting it in El Salvador.

For all of the Jesuits' selfless devotion to the cause of the Roman See, however, Lacouture's narrative repeatedly makes it clear that their relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, and even to the Vatican itself, has not invariably been free of tensions and difficulties. His comparison of the society to a peninsula extending off of a mainland prompts me to reflect that the word peninsula etymologically means "almost an island," and there are times when the Jesuits seem to suffer considerable isolation from the rest of their church. So much is this the case that Father Richard John Neuhaus, writing in the October 1996 issue of First Things, joshingly (I think) called for "an expansion of the ecumenical agenda to include a Jesuit-Catholic dialogue"!

Some Sources of the Problem

Three features of Jesuit history strike me as particularly significant in this respect.

First, Jesuit elitism. For the past 500 years the Jesuits have been, without rival, the best educated body of men in the Roman Catholic ranks. Founded near the end of the Renaissance, the society implicitly adopted the ideal of "the Renaissance man," the scholar adept in both history and advanced mathematics, at home at once in the arts and all the sciences, thoroughly grounded in universal literature as well as theology and philosophy. The young college graduate joining a Jesuit novitiate faces at least 10 more years of training before ordination to the priesthood, and very often several years after that. A sub-standard Jesuit is one who reads only five languages; I am told that a few of them may exist, but I have never met one.

It is no wonder, then, that the Jesuits, heirs of both the medieval universities and the Renaissance academies, should have become the leading educators of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the chief task that history has loaded upon the society seems to be that of educating both the clerical and lay leadership of much of modern Western civilization. (One recalls, perhaps with a twinge of misgiving, that President Clinton holds his law degree from a Jesuit university.)

In assuming this educational role, the Jesuits have inevitably prevented others from doing so, and that fact itself would amply account for a great deal of the resistance that the society has faced over the centuries, not only from natural enemies like Voltaire, but also from devout Roman Catholics as far back as Melchior Cano.

Moreover, their superior education has tended to put individual Jesuits near the fonts of political power. Virtually from the day of their founding they have been the father confessors, confidants, and advisers of the kings and rulers of the earth. Indeed, as Lacouture convincingly demonstrates, they have actively pursued such positions of influence. In 1974, the Jesuits' thirty-second general convention admitted: "We have access to power that others do not share." This cultivated, strategic access to political influence is doubtless one of the chief reasons that many other Roman Catholics regard the Jesuits with caution and even suspicion.

Second, Jesuit separatism. Answering directly to the authorities at Rome, particularly their own superior general (popularly called "the Black Pope," the adjective referring to the color of his cassock), the Jesuits from the very beginning have operated largely in independence from the ordinary oversight ("episcopacy") of the bishops. In those many dioceses in which Jesuits conduct their own ministries, the local bishop often finds it impossible or extremely difficult to exercise his proper role of doctrinal and liturgical supervision. Nearly five centuries of jealousy, frustration, and animosity have accumulated on this point.

Third, Jesuit ambiguity. Because of their extensive training in epistemology and logic, Jesuits themselves tend to reason with great clarity. It has not always been so easy, however, to think clearly about them. Just what are they, after all? Their deliberate dispensing with corporate prayer, for example, clearly sets them apart from the traditional monastic and mendicant orders, while their vows distinguish them from laymen, and their governmental arrangement puts them outside of traditional ecclesiastical structure. Neither monks, nor diocesan clergy, nor laymen, Jesuit priests are unique, and, because unique, somewhat threatening, at least in popular imagination. Étienne Pasquier doubtless spoke for many Roman Catholics when he referred to the society as "this Monster which, being neither Secular nor Regular, was both things together, thereby introducing into our Church a Hermaphrodite Order."

France

The English edition of Lacouture's engaging work is considerably abbreviated from the two-volume French original published in 1991. Most to be lamented among the parts left out, in my opinion, is the section on the French Jesuit missionaries to Canada, several of whom are commemorated at the altar as martyrs for the Christian faith. (Their history is evoked in Black Robe, a novel by the lapsed Catholic writer Brian Moore, and in the film based on Moore's book.) An admirer of Jean de Brebeuf and Isaac Jogues from my youth, I believe that the omission of their story from this volume diminishes the accent on Jesuit holiness that I know, from personal experience, to be very real.

Those responsible for the present version of this work evidently felt that the accent of the original edition was a bit too French for English readers, and they abbreviated it accordingly. Even shortened, however, the book has much to say of the French experience of the Jesuits. Ever since Ignatius Loyola and some of his first followers studied in Paris before the Society's founding, there have been strong bonds between France and the Jesuits. Some of the most famous names in Jesuit history are French: Clorivière, de Smet, Fontoynont, de la Chaize, de Lubac, Daniélou, Teilhard de Chardin, and so forth.

At the same time, the relations between the Jesuits and France have not been unfailingly cordial, as witnessed by the fact that not one of the society's 29 superior generals has been a Frenchman. On the contrary, France has provided the Jesuits with their most severe, effective, and even eloquent critics; in addition to Voltaire, there was Pascal, Hugo, Choiseul, Balzac, Michelet, d'Alembert, Stendhal, Renan, Zola, and King Charles X. It was France that led Spain, Portugal, and the Republic of Venice in pressuring Pope Clement XIV to abolish the Society of Jesus in 1773. It was not restored until 1814.

America

One supposes it inevitable that the democratic and sometimes rebellious spirit of our own country may sometimes run counter to the disciplined obedience and respect for authority that have traditionally characterized the Jesuits. One recalls, for example, the political activism of Fr. Daniel Berrigan.

Berrigan, on the other hand, has never been rebellious against ecclesiastical authority, as far as we know; indeed, the very contrary appears to be true. The real example of American Jesuit rebellion against the authority of Rome is provided by the very interesting case of Fr. Robert Drinan.

Lacouture devotes a couple of pages to narrating how Drinan, after serving five terms in the United States Congress, where he was chiefly distinguished by voting invariably against every piece of pro-life legislation ever brought to the floor of the House, finally yielded to Pope John Paul's explicit prohibition against clergymen holding secular elected office. At the time, many voices praised his proper Jesuit obedience to ecclesiastical authority.

Drinan then accepted the job of director of the American Civil Liberties Union, a move to a position of powerful political influence that the present reviewer has always believed was an act of defiance, if not of the letter, at least of the spirit of the pope's prohibition. Since the appearance of Lacouture's book, more information has come to light that occasions further doubt about Drinan's proper Jesuit obedience.

Two published articles in particular served to draw new attention to Drinan in 1996. One was his own piece in the op-ed section of the New York Times in support of President Clinton's veto of the congressional bill banning partial-birth abortions. Well, nothing new there; it was the same old Drinan we all knew and some of us wept over.

The other article, however, was truly shocking. Drawing on materials from the archives of the Jesuits' New England Province, Saint Louis University historian James Hitchcock re-investigated Drinan's political career in the July 1996 issue of Catholic World Report. He shows how both Drinan and his American Jesuit superiors did everything possible to ignore, delay, and even defy Rome's instruction that Drinan remove himself from Congress. That was, to say the least, surprising behavior on the part of men bound, not only by the normal obligation of obedience to their order, but also by a special vow of obedience to the pope personally.

Hitchcock's revelations would have been sufficiently devastating, but there is more. During the summer of 1996 the provincial head of the Jesuits' New England Province circulated a letter in which, not once challenging the accuracy of the Hitchcock's allegations, he names and then brutally criticizes the Jesuit who leaked the archival material to Hitchcock in the first place, expressing his outrage "that such documents should become public." Needless to say, this letter in turn has been leaked to the rest of us, strengthening the position of those many Roman Catholics and others who have long considered the Society of Jesus a bastion of conniving, intrigue, duplicity, and secret subversion.

The present reviewer is not among the latter, nor does he share the opinion of those who believe that the Jesuits are on their last legs. Merely the likes of Fr. Joseph Fessio and the marvels he has wrought for the Roman Catholic Church through the work of Ignatius Press are adequate refutation of that latter opinion. Meanwhile, the long Jesuit drama goes on. The Society of Jesus may never produce a pope, but it continues to add unexpected contours to the crafting of both church and world history.

Patrick Henry Reardon is a parish priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church, an associate editor of Touchstone, and an instructor in philosophy at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh.

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.

July/August, Vol. 3, No. 4, Page 14

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