The Jesuit Factor

The Jesuit Factor: A Personal Investigation sends Peter Rawlinson in search of the truth about the Society of Jesus, an organisation which has spent more than four centuries being admired, mistrusted, expelled, restored, consulted by popes and blamed for almost everything except the weather. Founded by Ignatius of Loyola in the sixteenth century, the Jesuits became famous for education, scholarship, missionary work and a willingness to enter arguments that everybody else had wisely left unattended.

Rawlinson—a lawyer, former Attorney General and committed Roman Catholic—travels around the world examining what the Jesuits had become by the late twentieth century. His journey takes him from Warsaw to San Salvador and from Tokyo to Poona, visiting Jesuit communities and speaking to priests working amid poverty, political repression and social upheaval. It is part religious enquiry, part travelogue and part inspection conducted by a barrister who suspects that some of the witnesses may be withholding evidence.

At the centre of the book is the transformation of the order following the Second Vatican Council. Many Jesuits had moved beyond the traditional work of schools, universities and retreats to become directly involved in struggles for social justice. In Latin America especially, priests found themselves alongside the poor and oppressed, sometimes adopting the language and analysis of Marxism through liberation theology. To supporters, this was Christianity taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously; to critics, it was what happened when priests read Das Kapital without first seeking permission from the appropriate cardinal.

Rawlinson is fascinated but uneasy. He asks whether the Jesuits’ “preferential option for the poor” represents a courageous return to the Gospel or a political departure from their religious purpose. Have they become the conscience of the Church, or merely its most articulate internal opposition? Are they obeying the Pope, challenging him for his own good, or engaging in the ancient Jesuit art of explaining that obedience is a considerably more nuanced concept than non-Jesuits generally suppose?

The investigation inevitably leads into the strained relationship between the Society and Pope John Paul II, a pontiff who had experienced communism directly and was understandably unreceptive to clergy finding attractive features in Marxist analysis. Jesuit activism, the leadership of Pedro Arrupe and the order’s involvement in revolutionary societies all come under Rawlinson’s scrutiny. The result is not a detached encyclopaedic history but a distinctly personal argument by a Catholic establishment figure worried that one of the Church’s most powerful institutions may have exchanged spiritual authority for political fashion.

Along the way, however, Rawlinson encounters men whose lives cannot be reduced to Vatican disputes or ideological labels: teachers, missionaries and priests working in dangerous places where theology is less an academic pastime than a question of who gets fed, imprisoned or shot. The book captures both the international reach of the Jesuits and their peculiar ability to appear simultaneously at the centre of power and on the side of those with none.

Published in 1990, The Jesuit Factor offers a provocative snapshot of the Catholic Church at the end of the Cold War, when faith, revolution and geopolitics were sharing the same cramped confessional. It is an accessible mixture of reportage, religious debate and travel writing, written from a clearly sceptical perspective and best approached as Rawlinson’s case for the prosecution rather than the final judgement of an ecumenical court.

This Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition is in Very Good condition and has a plastic protective sleeve, preserving it from dust, handling and any sudden recurrence of the Suppression of the Jesuits. A rewarding book for readers interested in Catholic history, liberation theology, religious politics and an order whose members take vows of obedience yet have never shown much enthusiasm for being intellectually quiet.

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