I have had brief brushings with a 484-year-old club called the Society of Jesus. My first university job at age 51 was at Loyola in New Orleans, which was run by this club of Catholic priests called “Jesuits.” Ignatius de Loyola was the founder of their society in 1541. At Loyola U. on the streetcar line of St. Charles, I learned a little bit about the Jesuits, those black-clad bachelors with “S.J.” after their names. I spent half a day in one of their “Spiritual Exercises,” and learned about how they instructed the conversion of Walker Percy there at Loyola U.

Years later, in 2018, I took my magazine class to the New York offices of “America,” the Jesuit periodical. I asked an editor about another Catholic tradition, the Benedictine practice of withdrawing in community from secular/consumerist culture. Fr. Sam Sawyer said the Jesuits were the opposite. They have always gone out into the world to see how it is, with a well-trained and highly educated confidence that Jesus Christ and His (Roman) Church have a truth to tell at the highest level of relevance and intelligence. Pope Francis is the first Jesuit pope. Today, you can listen to a cool podcast of young lay America magazine staffers, “Jesuitical.”

It’s interesting how relevant the Jesuits can seem today, as the world faces a new form of an older battle between liberal democracy and illiberal authoritarianism. The Jesuits seem to be firmly on the side of liberal democracy, for all their loyalty to the illiberal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The Jesuits, as much as our own Jeffersonians and Progressive lefties, can claim heroes of the 17^th and 18^th century European Enlightenment. I have recently run across two examples.

Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), a mathematician and musicologist known as the “father of acoustics,” was a French Jesuit educated at the Sorbonne in the Franciscan Marims order. He brought the New Science of the times, as it was called, to his monastery outside Paris, and his circle became a salon of intellectual ferment, frequented by Blaise Pascal and both Descartes, father and son.

Ippolito Desideri (1684-1733) was an Italian Jesuit missionary who spent some 12 years in India and Tibet. He was the first Westerner to study Buddhism in depth, a project he took on to better evangelize for Christianity. The book he wrote on Buddhism was remarkably objective, so lacking in a Christian “slant” that the Catholic Church prevented its publication. He also lost his plea with the Pope for the Jesuits to retain control of the Tibet mission, which yielded to the Capuchin order instead.

Desideri’s works on Buddhism and Christianity is described this way in a footnoted passage in Wikipedia:

“Between 1718 and 1721 he composed five works in the Classical Tibetan literary language, in which he sought to refute the philosophical concepts of rebirth (which he referred to as “metempsychosis“) and Nihilism or ‘Emptiness’ (Wylie: stong pa nyid; Sanskrit: Śūnyatā), which he felt most prevented conversions from Tibetan Buddhism to the Catholic Church in Tibet. In his books Fr. Desideri also adopted and utilized multiple philosophical techniques from Tibetan literature for scholastic argumentation. Fr. Desideri also used multiple quotations from the dharma and vinaya, and even brought the Scholasticism of St. Thomas Aquinas into a debate with the nihilistic Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna to argue his case for “the superiority of Christian theology.”^[4]”

Imagine, if you can, the followers of Christ, today, spending 12 years seeking to understand, respectfully, the beliefs or non-beliefs of other people before trying to convince them of the better truth of Jesus. What the world needs now, beside “love, sweet love,” is the intellectual energy of the best of the Jesuits.