From Ignatius to Francis: The Jesuits in History by Michael Walsh (review)
2023; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 109; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cat.2023.a914169
ISSN1534-0708
Tópico(s)Early Modern Women Writers
ResumoReviewed by: From Ignatius to Francis: The Jesuits in History by Michael Walsh Thomas Worcester S.J. From Ignatius to Francis: The Jesuits in History. By Michael Walsh. (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2022. $29.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-8146-8491-7.) With a preface, ten chapters, and an index, this work, by Michael Walsh, a former Jesuit and a resident of the United Kingdom, offers an overview of Jesuit history, from the era of the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits, to that of Francis, the Jesuit pope. Seeking to distinguish this attempt at a history of the Society [End Page 771] of Jesus from many other such efforts, the author states that he will focus less on what Jesuits did than on what they thought. What Walsh really means by "thought" is not altogether clear, though one might expect a good deal of focus on what Jesuits published over the centuries. There is some of this here, but there are also gaps, as in a substantial chapter on France where a very prolific author such as Jesuit Etienne Binet (1569–1639), the author of some fifty books, is passed over in silence. Factual errors are not as rare as one would like. The author speaks of King Louis XV as active in the 1660s (125), but that would have to be Louis XIV. For what is surely Urban VIII (103), Walsh has Urban VII. Walsh states that the "pinnacle of Jesuit achievement in Japan" (78) was in the early sixteenth century, but that would in fact be the early seventeenth century. More than once (139, 145), Walsh attributes an entry in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits to the Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits; on p. 102, note 11, Walsh gives 2008 for the publication date of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits; it is 2017. He has Fr. Pedro Arrupe resigning as Superior General (286) at Jesuit General Congregation 34 (but this took place in 1995, after Arrupe's death), whereas General Congregation 33 would be correct for Arrupe's resignation (1983). The most egregious error is on p. 274, note 41, where Walsh claims that no Jesuits were killed in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, several were; see the entry "Sitjar, Tomas, SJ, Bl. (1866–1936) and His Companions," by Inmaculada Fernández Arrillaga, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Jesuits, 740–41. To be sure, Walsh may at times be more journalist than scholarly historian. He offers a concise, easily accessible book, and one of modest size compared to the lengthier histories often produced by academics. The secondary sources Walsh uses are often rather dated; the author in some cases appears unaware of the abundance of studies, in many languages, published in recent years. Though his chronology goes up to the present, he gives much more attention to the Society of Jesus in its early centuries than after the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814. Since the 2014 bicentennial of that event, scholarship on Jesuit topics has increasingly turned to the last two centuries, for which an exceptional range of sources is beginning to get serious attention. I happily share the author's deep appreciation for cultural historian Peter Burke, with whom I was delighted and privileged to do a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University. Walsh rightly gives Burke the last word in this book: the Cambridge Professor of Cultural History Emeritus suggests that while the deeply hostile, negative stereotypes of the Jesuits that once were widespread have diminished in recent times, they can yet re-emerge (294–95). Indeed, has not such hostility re-appeared in the past decade, in some of the reactions to Pope Francis, the anomaly that is a Jesuit pope? [End Page 772] Thomas Worcester S.J. Fordham University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press
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