Test of flexibility: new role for the Jesuits?

by Rev. BROCARD SE WELL, 0.Carm. A History of the Jesuits by Christopher Hollis (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 50s.) FATHER BRODICK'S Origin of the Jesuits and Progress of the Jesuits were published 20 years ago; Rene Fiillop-Miller's The Power and Secret of the Jesuits dates back to 1930. Apart from these, I cannot recall any other worthwhile general surveys of Jesuit history that have been. published in this country over the last fifty years. So with his new book Mr. Christopher Hollis has supplied a real want.
Numerous studies of particular aspects of Jesuit history have appeared during the present century,from Cunningham Grahame's A Vanished Arcadia—wrongly cited as by 'Cunningham' in Mr. Hollis's bibliography, though correctly cited in the text—to Fr. Taunton's 'controversial' History of the Jesuits in England and Fr. Caraman's valuable biographies. To collate and condense all this diverse information into a single well-proportioned volume must have been a most difficult task, and Mr. Hollis has accomplished it most expertly.
Much of it, inevitably, is an oft-told tale, yet there is a sustained freshness in Mr. Hollis's writing. He is particularly suc,
cessful when he comes to relate the sad and complex story of the Society's suppression by Pope Clement XIII, much of which will be new to the general reader.
There is an excellent chapter on "The Jesuits and the aggiornamento." Two pages are devoted to Teilhard de Chardin, of whose treatment Mr. Hollis justly observes that "the question was not so much whether the ecclesiastical authorities were right in what they were defending as whether by their methods of defence they were not doing incomparably more harm than any that they could possibly be preventing."
It is good to see in the same chapter an appreciative reference to Archbishop Roberts— which might usefully have been extended. History seems likely to give to Archbishop Roberts a prominent place as one of the most enlightened and courageous church reformers of the present dark days.
The concluding chapter of this book, "The Future," is necessarily tentative. One woo' ders, for instance, what will result from the Pope's recent reminder to the Jesuits—in a letter to their Minister-General —of their fourth vow, of personal obedience to the Roman Pontiff; and also from the General's instruction to his subjects that they must look for arguments to support rather than to criticise the encyclical "Humanae vitae."
Mr. Hollis is not very enlightening on the Society's future role in the Church; but he can hardly be blamed for this in view of the fact that all religious 'orders seem now to be in a state of uncertainty and hesitation over their funcUlan in the modern era. With the Society of Jesus this may well take many different, and perhaps as yet unsuspected forms; for Mr. Hollis is quite right in emphasising that the Society is far from being the monolithic structure that it is often taken for. The inspiration of St. Ignatius of Loyola and his companions is still powerful; so that, in Mr. Hollis's own words, "There is every probability that the Society will with its accustomed flexibility adjust itself to the new world and play in it a part as large as that which it played in the old."