In the mid-nineteenth century, when European Catholic clergy sought refuge in the United States in large numbers, no more frightful bogeyman seemed to threaten Protestant America than the Jesuit. “Jesuits and Sisters of Charity are landed in hardly less than ship-loads of our shores,” the Reverend Nathan S. S. Beman, a prominent Presbyterian pastor, warned a Massachusetts audience in 1847. “The Jesuits, of all the men in our world, are the most to be dreaded,” and they are “establishing their institutions of learning all over the West” (Beman, Collegiate and Theological Education in the West [New York: 1847]). Despite nativist opposition, the Society of Jesus, as the Jesuit order is formally known, thrived in the United States, erecting colleges and churches across a growing nation. Although their numbers shrank in the wake of upheavals in American civil and religious society in the 1960s, the Jesuits in the United States today number over 3,000 members who are engaged in a variety of ministries—from running large urban parishes to education on the high school and collegiate levels to working with the poor.

Raymond Schroth, a journalist and professor of humanities at St. Peter's College in New Jersey, surveys the Society's evolution in America, from the arrival of the first missionaries in Florida in 1556 to the present day. Drawing largely on secondary sources, he constructs his overview around several central themes: the formative imprint of the order's spirituality on all Jesuit undertakings; the role of foreign missionaries in advancing the order's nineteenth-century expansion from East to West; and the educational reforms of the twentieth century that forced the Jesuits to confront shortcomings in their educational program and to propel their high schools, colleges, and universities into the American mainstream. Recognizing that his readership will not be limited to clerics, the author explains the Jesuit system of government cogently and succinctly.

Schroth is a gifted storyteller. Evidencing the journalist's eye for engaging detail, he recounts the instruction of French missionary Jean de Brébeuf to fellow missionaries on proper etiquette when traveling with Huron Indians: “Don't keep them waiting when embarking in the canoes,” and “don't ask a lot of questions” (31). The author enlivens his narrative by highlighting the careers of dozens of colorful individuals. One reads, for example, of the Dutch Jesuit Arnold Damen, a legendary nineteenth-century preacher, who, during one of his pastoral tours of the Midwest, heard 9,000 confessions in Chicago and another 4,000 in Dubuque (98). Some Jesuits were showmen and promoters, including the Belgian Indian missionary, Pierre-Jean De Smet. “Addicted to travel,” this peripatetic priest made himself well-known throughout Europe and America by means of myriad publications and public lectures on behalf of the Society's missionary work in the Pacific Northwest (65). The twentieth century produced Edmund A. Walsh, America's “most famous Jesuit.” A man whose “obsessions may have exceeded his wisdom,” this founder of Georgetown's school of Foreign Service toured the world lecturing against Soviet communism during the Cold War, advocating that America had the right of nuclear “first strike” against the Soviet Union (160–165).

Although Schroth underscores “the heroism” of the Society's missionary pioneers, he does not ignore the order's failures and shortcomings. The Jesuit body, he writes, is comprised of men “who live not in a heavenly banquet hall but in the Bronx or in Kansas City or Worcester with sinners like ourselves” (xii). For example, as a group, the Jesuits were not leaders in racial integration; nor were they ahead of the American public in advancing equality. In 1850, they admitted to their ranks an African American, Patrick Healy, the son of a Southern white planter and his slave common-law wife. Although legally a slave himself at the time of his admission, Healy later became president of Georgetown University. Sixty years later, when a Jesuit president of Fordham University rejected a black student applicant, another member of the order, Father John La Farge, a promoter of interracial justice, charged his confrere with “mortal sin” and threatened to “denounce Fordham in public.” As late as 1947, only 456 of the 105,288 students enrolled in American Jesuit high schools and colleges were black (121–122).

Some readers might quibble with the publisher's decision to omit footnotes and to instead bundle references together at the end of each chapter. While understandable in a study intended for a general audience, it sometimes prevents the reader from tracing citations to their original sources. The book would have benefited from having a more thorough index. There are significant topics explored in the text—the Jesuit relationship with the laity, to cite only one example—that are not signaled in the index. However, these lapses are more than compensated for by the book's strengths. Eminently readable, it integrates a mass of literature on a subject that is complex and covers four and a half centuries. There has long been a need for a popular survey of American Jesuit history, a need that New York University Press and Raymond A. Schroth have satisfied, to their credit.