Since the election of a member of the Society of Jesus, Jorge Maria Bergoglio, as Pope Francis in 2013, the world has seen what it is like to have a Jesuit as leader of the Roman Catholic Church. It is an appealing picture. Francis's decision to live in a modest guest house rather than the Vatican palace, his penchant for off-the-cuff remarks that send the theologians scrambling, his thoughts on such topics as climate change, his concern for the outcast and the poor—all seem to typify a distinctively Jesuit approach: open to the world and its troubles, experimental in how to address them, and eager to make the church not primarily an embodiment of doctrinal certainties, but rather (as he says) a “field hospital” for those in need. Just how different these attitudes are from those of earlier Jesuits, especially in the United States, is apparent from John McGreevy's analysis of the Catholic subculture Jesuits helped to build and then to remake. How we got from there to here is his story.

In a series of finely drawn case studies, McGreevy looks at the history of the religious order, founded in response to the Reformation and best known today for its work in education, in the years after its “restoration” in 1814. Always influential and active in politics, national as well as ecclesiastical, the Jesuits had been forcefully disbanded a generation before and, even after being reconstituted, they remained controversial, with a reputation for intrigue. Virtually every country in continental Europe expelled members of the order at one time or another, and many of those sent packing pitched up in America. For a while, the majority of Jesuits working in the United States had been born elsewhere, and their often-difficult experiences shaped their outlook. They turned a wary and combative eye toward the world, suspicious of modernity and committed to constructing a haven in which Catholics could shelter, confident that their own tradition, older than that of the nation, would flourish and eventually triumph. Enthusiastic backers of a resurgent, conservative papacy, they cheered when one pope condemned the notion that the Church had to adapt itself to “progress, liberalism, and recent civilization” (the Syllabus of Errors, 1864), and they earnestly worked for the dogmatic assertion of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council in 1870, a thumb in the eye to modern sensibilities. One of McGreevy's character studies, Father Burchard Villiger (expelled from Switzerland), established a college and built a massive church in Philadelphia, modeled on the one at the Jesuits’ international headquarters, thereby cultivating a global Catholicism whose emotional center was always Rome. At the same time, French Jesuit counterparts in Louisiana helped popularize a Catholic devotional imaginary that emphasized the miraculous as a counterweight to modern thought, often with a particular focus on the power of suffering.

By the time of World War I, things were changing. Native-born Jesuits were now a clear majority, and Catholic participation in the war effort initiated a rapprochement between the order and the American nation-state, breeding an “at-home-ness” (my term) with the wider world. The traditional, stoutly defended, classical curriculum in Jesuit colleges—twenty-five were founded in the United States by 1900—was quickly reshaped to fit the standards and expectations of the rest of American higher education. Even more important, their numbers had grown sufficiently large so that the United States could now become an exporter of them, not an importer. McGreevy's case here is of those who went to the Philippines, where they found at first a convenient “overlap between colonial and religious missions” (183) and later a deepening identification of American Jesuits with larger, universally applicable democratic principles. It is no coincidence that John Courtney Murray, the American most responsible for framing the worldwide church's changed position on religious freedom and the separation of church and state at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), had served in the Philippines as a young Jesuit. The “outward vision” (216) characteristic of the Council's documents had triumphed, and the Jesuits had helped make it so.

McGreevy pursues these themes through his selected examples rather than a comprehensive narrative, but the exhaustive research that lies at the heart of this effort supports an entirely convincing argument. There are passages in which virtually every sentence is footnoted. (How one does this while also serving as the dean at a major research university is a wonder.) The writing is characteristically smooth and suggestive, saying much in a few words and opening the way to future studies. He has unfortunately been ill served by his publisher: two maps that show the movement of Jesuits in and out of the United States, depicting the entire world, are only an inch and a half high, rendering them useless, and photos comparing the two Gesu churches (Rome and Philadelphia) are similarly indistinct. But the ideas here are the important thing, and they are clear. They help reframe the historical experience both of the Jesuits themselves and of the generations of Catholics who trusted them with their spiritual well-being and the education of their children.