How The Jesuits Survived Their Suppression

The forty-one years between the Society of Jesus’s papal suppression in 1773 and its eventual restoration in 1814 remain controversial, with new research and interpretations continually appearing. Shore’s narrative approaches these years, and the period preceding the suppression, from a new perspective that covers individuals not usually discussed in works dealing with this topic. As well as examining the contributions of former Jesuits to fields as diverse as ethnology—a term and concept pioneered by an ex-Jesuit—and library science, where Jesuits and ex-Jesuits laid the groundwork for the great advances of the nineteenth century, the essay also explores the period the exiled Society spent in the Russian Empire. It concludes with a discussion of the Society’s restoration in the broader context of world history.

Analysing a period of 'hidden history', this book tracks the fate of the English Jesuits and their educational work through three major international crises of the eighteenth century: · the Lavalette affair, a major financial scandal, not of their making, which annihilated the Society of Jesus in France and led to the forced flight of exiled English Jesuits and their students from France to the Austrian Netherlands in 1762; · the universal suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 and the English Jesuits' remarkable survival of that event, following a second forced flight to the safety of the Principality of Liège; · the French Revolution and their narrow escape from annihilation in Liège in 1794, resulting in a third forced flight with their students, this time to England. Despite repeated crises, huge adversity and multiple losses of personnel, property and educational goods, including significant libraries, the suppressed English Jesuits reconfigured themselves. Modernising their curriculum, they influenced the development of Jesuit education not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the nascent United States of America: in 1789, their influence contributed to the founding of Georgetown Academy, which later developed into the present-day Georgetown University in Washington, DC. English Jesuit Education is a unique story of educational survival and development against seemingly impossible odds, drawing on hitherto largely unexplored material in a wide range of archives.

An investigation into the role of Reform Catholicism in the international suppression of the Jesuits in 1773†‹ The Jesuits devoted themselves to preaching the word of God, administering the sacraments, and spreading the faith by missions in both Europe and newly discovered lands abroad. But, in 1773, under intense pressure from the monarchs of Europe, the papacy suppressed the Society of Jesus, an act that reverberated from Europe to the Americas and Southeast Asia. In this scholarly history, Dale Van Kley argues that Reform Catholicism, not a secular Enlightenment, provided the justification for Catholic kings to suppress a society instituted by the papacy. Spanning the years from the mid†‘sixteenth century to the onset of the French Revolution, and the Jesuit presence from China to Brazil, this is the only single volume in English to make coherent sense of the series of expulsions that add up to what was arguably the most important religious event in Europe of the time, resulting in the secularization of tens of thousands of Jesuits.

This volume analyses the causes and consequences of the Jesuit Suppression, one of the most dramatic events in eighteenth-century history.