Jesuits' uniqueness

Suddenly it’s Jesuit season. A surprise for most of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and a puzzle for non-Catholics. The reason for the surprise within the Church is the fact, the media says, that in the Church’s 2,000-year history, no Jesuit has ever even been truly considered a candidate to take St. Peter’s throne. Actually, the Jesuits didn’t exist until 1534, and didn’t receive papal approval until 1540 (Pope Paul III – 1418-1549). Which means none were ever chosen in the 473 years of the order’s existence. That’s due in great part because Jesuits have actively shunned ambitions, or lobbying for such higher positions as bishops, etc.

Now Pope Frank, as someone, presumably a non-Catholic, called Catholicism’s new leader, has placed the world’s largest male religious order in print and electronic headlines. The father of what’s long been known as “Soldiers of Christ” and “God’s Foot Soldiers” would be puzzled, amused, possibly aghast. That man, a Basque, was born “before October 23, 1491 ... it is deducted,” says a much quoted historian. He was named Iñigo Loioakoa (Basque), and is known today as Ignacio de Loyola (Spanish).

As a young knight, Loyola was attracted to all things military, and, beginning as a swaggering young man of 17, seems to have had a steely inclination for sword play. Dueling was something he engaged in until the events of 1521. He was seriously wounded – a leg shattered by a cannon ball – in the Battle of Pamplona during the the Italian-Spanish War of 1521-1526. His long recovery, due to several operations endured without anesthetics, prompted him to assess his much-changed future. He switched from reading about El Cid and the knights of Camelot, to more contemplative fare. The men he now found interesting were bold religious figures: Jesus, Ludolph of Saxony’s Vita Christi, which he said changed his life, and texts on the lives of the saints. He especially admired the quiet bravery of St. Francis of Assisi. This resulted in a spiritual, and practical, conversion from a life of a soldier to one of devotion, which, in turn, lead Loyola to embrace the vocation of a priest. He joined the Franciscan Order and was soon studying at the University of Paris. There he joined six other students, meeting in the crypt of St. Denis, August 24, 1534, to form a group committed to hospital and missionary work wherever the Pope might direct. They called themselves “the Company of Jesus.” The word company, used in the military sense, implying an infantry unit as well as stern discipline.

The Soldiers of Christ hammered on about strict chastity, obedience and poverty – something the Church preached yet was not widely known to practice (but something Pope Francis has already dramatically demonstrated during his short time in office). And as the Company’s reputation for discipline and obedience to the Pope grew, Loyola drove his “spartan corps” into classical study and theology. This rigor – to be a good Soldier of Christ meant to be a smart one, if at all possible — in turn attracted more adherents. Such an able corps made both the Spanish Church and the Spanish court restless. They preferred foot soldiers to be obedient, courageous, and mostly silent, not too smart. For their leaders, in both the military and in charge of the Church’s campaign to spread Christianity, often could be dim.

Jesuits got to Nueva España late (1572), appearing after widely-known orders were well established in the New World. Christ’s foot soldiers simply and quickly cut an ambitious and cannily independent swath while seeming to act with full obedience to the Viceroy of New Spain. Theirs was a “frontier ministry,” taking on the challenge of bringing new, efficient, educational, farming and ranching techniques and, of course, the Church’s teaching to areas where neither the Vice Regal troops nor its missionaries had explored with such eagerness, energy and efficiency. Jesuits explored, recorded and mapped the territory beyond what older maps called tierra incognita, carefully charting, taking detailed inventories of areas that other Spaniards had glimpsed without making useful contact with locals, or even clearly registering where they, themselves, were. Jesuits created missions and schools in territory claimed by the Spanish Empire, but beyond anything either Madrid or Mexico City could imagine or locate.

Those two entities – Viceregal authority and its missionaries – thus continued to believe in a raft of childish, capricious and paranoid things about great, bountiful swaths of the world they hubristically claimed but couldn’t imagine. Spanish authorities, and all their experienced explorers, still insisted in 1698 that Baja California was an island. But a now-famous Jesuit, Eusebio Francisco Kino, astronomer, mathematician, cartographer, horseman and about-to-become cattle baron, sensed it was not. In 1699, he climbed Santa Clara volcano and saw at “the head of the Sea of Cortes,” the “junction of these lands of New Spain and those of California.” His critics far away refused to believe him. Of course, his precisely detailed maps deep-sixed their old myths, stunning desk-bound experts in Madrid and Mexico City. Even some fellow Jesuits said Kino saw the prospect of green pastures where there was nothing but sand storms, cacti, the scum of alkali water. Those who accused Kino of abusing Indians in the region he called “Primeras Alta” simultaneously claimed he was becoming a heretic because he was too familiar with indigenous religions, culture and languages (foreshadowing later, and true, allegations that Jesuits were Mexicanizing Spanish Catholicism). Kino was said to be living in mortal sin by neglecting his parish duties to explore distant lands that became the Mexican states of Sinaloa, Sonora and Alta California, and the American state of Arizona (which claims him as a founder). And he did all this, he noted, while never missing a single day of saying Mass.

This is the first of a two-part series.