Religion: Reading this rather strange book as a Jesuit was a bit like travelling through a known but surreally distorted landscape.
The author, Jonathan Wright, writes revealingly in his introduction that "the myth and the counter-myth, the competing caricatures of Jesuits as priestly thugs and Jesuits as saintly heroes, the ways in which Jesuits have moved in and out of fashion, represent the marrow of the Society's story". The marrow of the story? Hardly. Although readable and well-written and including much interesting information about the Society of Jesus, such an odd perspective cannot possibly yield the coherent, properly researched, reasonably accurate history of the order which the book's title (whatever about the subtitle) appears to offer.
Things get off to a bad start when Wright chooses to begin his account with the bizarre story of a Portuguese noblewoman who was supposed to have bitten off one of the recently deceased Francis Xavier's toes in 1554 in what Wright calls "an act of profound, if somewhat gruesome, piety". Xavier was the Jesuits' "first great success story" and this was a symbolic moment in his "afterlife" and the history of his relics. Founded only in 1540, expanding rapidly but under fire already from critics resentful of their good fortune, the new order was supposedly bent on boastful self-promotion through the image of their most charismatic figure.
Soon enough, as the Jesuit missionary enterprise began to expand all over the known world, there are martyrs, whose heroic example is "constantly drummed into" young Jesuits in formation. The effect, as intended, is to make them dream, in their turn, of suffering "as excruciatingly as possible on distant shores". In due course they may hope to "achieve" beatification and canonisation. This was all part of "the Society's carefully constructed missionary narrative", leading to bliss for the individual Jesuit, glory and renown for the order.
"The Society's obsession with thrusting the edifying letters and reports of the heroes of New France on to the European public" was, we are told, part of this approach. Wright's extraordinarily simplistic concept of martyrdom, his tendentious language and the series of questionable presuppositions contained in the foregoing contribute, among other factors, to the distorting mirror in which he tries to catch his subject.
He is particularly familiar with the crude anti-Jesuit mythology of Elizabethan England, whence the negative definitions of the term "Jesuit" and "Jesuitical" to be found in English dictionaries, which seem to lurk in the background of his own book, not so much - be it said, in fairness - as prejudice on his part but at least as point de départ.
Later we also encounter the calumnies of the great Pascal, possibly the most influential of all critics of the Society of Jesus, and of those less worthy Enlightenment figures, whose campaigns eventually effected the order's temporary suppression in 1773.
Far from endorsing such attacks, Wright offers plenty of evidence in the Jesuits' defence. He knows they were not founded in response to the Reformation or as some kind of papal stormtroopers to defeat Protestantism. He knows too that the Jesuit superior is only adjectivally "general", in the sense of universal or overall, and not the GOC of a "military machine", the old misunderstanding, readily circulated by their enemies.
He writes with obvious appreciation of the Society's achievements as scientists, inventors and explorers. He also confronts past critics of the Jesuits within the Catholic Church, some of them uneasy at what he calls the order's "accommodationist" pastoral strategy in mission territories, others resentful of its supranational independence of local bishops or its expansion at the supposed expense of other religious orders. He shows genuine sympathy with the cultural difficulties intrinsic to the missionary enterprise of carrying a Gospel recorded at a particular place and time to the ends of the earth in every age.
Wright has a doctorate in history from Oxford but this is not it and it has to be said that the research base is, in the end, simply inadequate for the task he has undertaken. More seriously, he lacks a foundational understanding of what the Jesuits - or perhaps any religious order in the Catholic Church and even the Church itself - are about. To do justice to the topic, a much fuller sense is needed of how religious orders function, how they evolve, how revolutionary in its organisation the Society of Jesus was, and why, and what this has meant for its subsequent destiny.
His treatment of Ignatius's conversion in 1521, which was pivotal for all that happened afterwards, is hopelessly deficient. Nor does he show enough understanding of how important it was that, at a time when education, seminary education not least, was in a state of decline, the first "companions", as they knew themselves (hence the "Company" - which we poorly render as "Society" - "of Jesus"), were highly educated graduates of Paris, the leading university of the age. This has marked the order Ignatius founded and all its works ever since. Again - among many other points that might be made - he neglects the seminal insight of this group that they should place themselves at the disposal of the Pope, rather than of any more local ecclesiastical authority, because they wished to serve a universal mission and go wherever in the world they were most needed, "for the greater glory of God".
The book as a whole suffers from this lack of perspective. It needs to be said again that the intent is certainly not hostile. Wright has done his best to be objective. But he seems too far outside the soul of what he is describing to achieve any true objectivity - this is not the paradox it may seem - and he is often reduced to a kind of irresponsible agnosticism, which presents itself as judicious scholarly detachment. Again and again there are balancing phrases, designed to distance him from too much ardour in advocating one side or the other. If there had been "bilious criticism" of the Jesuits, it was "sometimes deserved, other times not". If their enemies snarled, sometimes it was with "every right". If Jesuit missionaries had many accomplishments and discoveries to their name, there were "no few transgressions" as well. "The worth and merit" of the famous Paraguayan "reductions" (the subject of the 1986 film The Mission) "remain a matter of controversy". And so on. In the end, whether he actually approves of the Jesuits or, on balance, disapproves remains perfectly opaque.
There are undoubted discontinuities in Jesuit history, most significantly owing to the hiatus caused by the 1773 suppression, which was not lifted worldwide until 1814. But to describe today's Society as only "a very distant cousin of its 19th-century self" seems too much. His coverage of the post-suppression period is sketchy and superficial and offers little sense of how the Society has come to where it is now. The sense of discontinuity is sharpened in his pages by his failure to identify the basic inspiration animating the order, through its founder, from the beginning. He does not at all understand the Spiritual Exercises, the "map" of Ignatius's intense conversion experience - at one stage they are ludicrously described as "a popular, if daunting recreation among Europe's laity" (and to this description the author adds, with characteristically distorted emphasis that they were "also an effective way of enticing recruits into a career as a Jesuit"). He understands the hardly referred to Constitutions, the order's "Rule" on which Ignatius laboured for much of the last 20 years of his life before his death in 1556, even less.
Wright mentions in an afterword that he "first thought of writing a book on the Jesuits during a year at the University of Pennsylvania". He has worked hard but I find myself wonderingwhy he did it. I wonder, too, if he has ever actually met a Jesuit.
• Father Bruce Bradley teaches in Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare