The American Jesuits A History by Raymond Schroth
NYU, 368 pp., $29.95
Jean Bethke Elshtain, the respected professor of religious history, once remarked at a lecture at the University of Chicago that Roman Catholicism may very well have had a greater influence on the religious life of Americans than has Protestantism.
This was, of course, an offhand remark, but it has some support: Catholics are the largest single denomination in the United States, and they have tended to dominate in urban areas and in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, regions which flatter themselves that they drive the cultural motor of America. Certainly the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor attracted a surprising amount of attention in the American media, considering these events were only the replacement of a foreign government's head of state.
If there is any truth to Elshtain's remark, the Society of Jesus--the -Jesuits--must count among the primary factors in the rise of Catholic influence in America. And yet Americans seem to know little about Jesuits beyond the performance of Boston College's football team or the famous fictionalized account of an exorcism at Georgetown.
Enter Fr. Raymond Schroth, S.J., who attempts to fill the gap with his history of the American Jesuits. This book consists largely of grouped character sketches of important Jesuits and vignettes of the society's contributions to American life from the first Spanish and French explorer-missionaries to modern activists and academics. Many of these vignettes and sketches are quite compelling, even gripping.
For example, Father Schroth adds a poignant detail to our iconic image of the Battle of Iwo Jima. Fr. Charles F. Suver traveled with the troops to Iwo Jima from the Mariana Islands, a 600-mile journey that induced such acute anxiety that two Marines flung themselves into the ocean rather than meet certain death on the beach. The night before the landing, the Marines bantered with each other about whether one of them could hoist a flag on top of Mount Suribachi.
One of them said to the other, "Okay, you get [the flag] and I'll get it up there!"
To which Father Suver responded, "You get it up there and I'll say Mass under it."
On the fifth day of the bloody attack, Suver saw four men clambering up the mountainside and scrambled after them with his assistant. Schroth records the scene:
With the permission of the commanding officer, he spread a board across two gas drums for an altar, had two marines hold up a poncho to protect the altar from the wind, placed men with their rifles to hold off any Japanese still lingering in the caves a few yards away, and began, "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti."
A powerful image: The Jesuit military chaplain saying Mass beneath one of the most famous American flags in history.
Gripping though this story is, and charming though many others are, vivid stories and well-wrought characters are not enough to make a history out of a bedside yarn. Sometimes it seems that Schroth simply compiles stories and figures without drawing much thematic connection between them, resulting in a kind of haphazard catalogue or a willy-nilly litany of his favorite Jesuits.
For instance, he follows the slightly quixotic tale of Pierre-Jean De Smet, a charismatic missionary of the Northwest who helped broker peace between Sitting Bull and the U.S. Army with the disgraceful affair of Georgetown University being forced to sell its slaves--breaking up some families--when its finances collapsed in the 1830s. If there is reason to place these two vignettes one after the other, Schroth does not provide it, and the reader can only guess at the connection.
The problem with the rambling-catalogue approach runs deeper, however. The stories Schroth tells present fascinating and important issues, but he merely recognizes them without ever exploring them. A frustrating example is the controversy over Harvard's elective system in the 1890s. Charles W. Eliot, the famous Harvard president at the time, was the leader of a pedagogical reform movement that advocated increasing the selection of courses available to students and letting them decide which of these "electives" they wanted to take. The idea was to let the student shape his own education as an individual, thus becoming a free and mature man rather than an indoctrinated child.
In 1893, Eliot decided that Harvard Law School would admit no students from Catholic, let alone Jesuit, colleges. Eliot explained this by claiming that the typical Catholic course of studies left Catholic students unprepared for law school. This was primarily a judgment about Jesuit education, since then, as now, the Jesuits dominated Catholic higher education. Eliot considered the Ratio Studiorum--the basic Jesuit program of education, inherited from the 16th century and modified somewhat over time--to be a backward relic and a system that "cultivates nothing more than memory."
A noted Jesuit professor responded to Eliot's pedagogical attack. Schroth summarizes his response, a detailed refutation of Eliot's typically 19th-century fetishization of free individuals, containing the Burkean retort that the Jesuits in fact "respect the individual too much 'to make the plastic souls and hearts and minds of those entrusted to their care the subjects of untried, revolutionary and wholesale experiment.'"
This debate clearly poses enduring questions about the path American education has taken away from a coherent body of study toward a smorgasbord for the student-as-consumer (to put it ideologically). But Schroth never really explores them; he recites the arguments without discussing their validity. This is not because of a scrupulous academic distance; Schroth apparently believes that the Jesuits did need to progress with the times. One detects this assumption in the way he tells the story: Those advocating for the reform are portrayed as voices crying in the desert against stubborn and narrow-minded Jesuit functionaries.
Since Schroth insists on advocating for his opinion on the various controversies he recounts, he might do it openly by providing context for the debate and discussing the arguments made on their own terms. Too often his summaries of the arguments feel distinctly like those of a liberal Jesuit of our own day instead of those of a historian of the period in question.
Nevertheless, Schroth has done a service by shedding light on the often-ignored role of the Jesuits in American history. Their contributions, most of all in missionary work and in education, are crucial aspects of the formation of America and of Americans. The importance of Schroth's subject makes all the more frustrating its haphazard presentation. Most people cannot tell a story without injecting their own perspective; Schroth might have mitigated this inevitability by consciously drawing together the themes of the stories he tells into a coherent account in concepts as well as facts.
That would, at least, have forced him to justify the spirit-of-Vatican-II perspective he otherwise tacitly assumes. Without this last step, American Jesuits provides a diverting read, but seems all the same a lost opportunity.
Daniel Sullivan is a writer in Chicago.