Edited by two history professors at St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution founded in the early nineteenth century, this volume contains an introduction, nine essays, and an epilogue. It offers a variety of studies on how Jesuits in various times and places have acted regarding racial differences, or what Ulrike Strasser in a blurb on the back cover calls “the long history of Jesuit entanglements in racialized views and practices.” The introduction begins with the 1838 infamous sale of slaves by Georgetown University, the oldest of the Jesuit universities in the USA. Six of the volume's essays deal with the period up to 1773, that is, prior to the Suppression of the Society of Jesus. Two of these examine European contexts, especially Italy and Spain; one considers East Asia, and three concern Mexico or Chile; the three essays on the post-1814 restored Jesuits all deal with the United States. John McGreevy's epilogue offers a very helpful summary of this collection of essays.
In addition to McGreevy's work, at least two essays stand out. Emanuele Colombo's essay on Italian Jesuit Antonio Possevino (1533–1611) offers an excellent summary of the efforts of one Jesuit to defend admissibility to the Society of Jesus of moriscos and conversos (and the descendants of these converts to Christianity from Islam or Judaism). Though Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) saw no obstacle to such admissions, by the end of the sixteenth century the Jesuit Order had banned those lacking what was considered purity of blood, that is, “blood” free of any Muslim or Jewish ancestry. Colombo shows this ban came to be used to also justify other exclusions, such as “native” peoples on various continents where Jesuit missionaries endeavored to preach the gospel. Nathaniel Millett's essay on the memory of slavery, or lack of such a memory, at St. Louis University, shows how a Jesuit university that had slaves from 1823 to 1865, has again and again conveniently left this out of its historical narrative, referring at times to those enslaved at the university as servants. John McGreevy not only succinctly summarizes various shameful episodes of Jesuit involvement in slavery, but also points to some signs of hope, especially since Vatican II. At the council, German Jesuit Augustin Bea led the way to a dramatic change in the church's attitude toward Jews.
Jesuits have been a global religious order since their first decades in the sixteenth century; if this volume of essays is “global” in some degree, as the subtitle states, it is in a sporadic and scattered way, and not at all for the more recent centuries. Why focus only on the USA for the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries? This seems odd indeed. What about Jesuits in many parts of Africa, or in India, a country where today there are ca. 4,000 Jesuits, far more than anywhere else? Apart from consideration of what were the racial attitudes and racialized policies of generations of European and North American Jesuit missionaries in India, it would be helpful to know what “race” means today among Indian Jesuits, on a subcontinent with a hierarchy ranging from Brahmins to so-called untouchables. What about the history of Jesuits in other Asian countries such as China, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, or Vietnam? Latin America and the Caribbean are home to an exceptionally rich array and mixing of peoples; what have Jesuit attitudes and practices regarding “race” been in these contexts in the last two centuries?
The three essays on the United States might have made some room for neighboring Canada. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French Jesuits struggled to learn various indigenous languages in New France, as they sought converts among peoples often dying from the contagious diseases the Europeans has brought. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were Jesuits that no longer emphasized learning “native” languages, but instead worked closely with the Canadian government, and along with many other Catholic religious orders, in taking indigenous children away from their parents and forcing them to abandon their own language and culture in favor of a white culture. In 2022, Pope Francis traveled to Canada to apologize for what many call cultural genocide.
Editors Nathaniel Millett and Charles Parker, in their introductory essay, suggest that among Jesuits over their five hundred years of existence there has been a broad range of attitudes and actions, from trafficking in slaves to advocating for equal social justice for all races. Despite its limitations, this volume offers some valuable case studies, and it could well be a book that inspires and elicits more studies of this important topic.
I think it significant to note that there are some recent developments regarding Georgetown University. Instead of forgetting the horrific event of enslaved persons sold to benefit the university's finances, Jesuits, together with the Descendants Association of these slaves, have recently formed a Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, to work on healing the long-lasting wounds of that unimaginable violation of human dignity, and other violations like it. Time will tell how successful or unsuccessful this promising and overdue project is.
