A Catholic Moment

...Gripping though this story is, and charming though many others are, vivid stories and well-wrought characters are not enough to make a history out of a bedside yarn...

...Eliot considered the Ratio Studiorum—the basic Jesuit program of education, inherited from the 16th century and modifi ed somewhat over time—to be a backward relic and a system that “cultivates nothing more than memory...

...The importance of Schroth’s subject makes all the more frustrating its haphazard presentation...

...Raymond Schroth, S.J., who attempts to fi ll the gap with his history of the American Jesuits...

...On the fi fth day of the bloody attack, Suver saw four men clambering up the mountainside and scrambled after them with his assistant...

...Certainly the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of his successor attracted a surprising amount of attention in the American media, considering these events were only the replacement of a foreign government’s head of state...

...Most people cannot tell a story without injecting their own perspective...

...Army with the disgraceful affair of Georgetown University being forced to sell its slaves— breaking up some families—when its fi nances collapsed in the 1830s...

...For instance, he follows the slightly quixotic tale of Pierre-Jean De Smet, a charismatic missionary of the Northwest who helped broker peace between Sitting Bull and the U.S...

...Too often his summaries of the arguments feel distinctly like those of a liberal Jesuit of our own day instead of those of a historian of the period in question...

...The idea was to let the student shape his own education as an individual, thus becoming a free and mature man rather than an indoctrinated child...

...And yet Americans seem to know little about Jesuits beyond the performance of Boston College’s football team or the famous fi ctionalized account of an exorcism at Georgetown...

...This was primarily a judgment about Jesuit education, since then, as now, the Jesuits dominated Catholic higher education...

...But Schroth never really explores them...

...Schroth summarizes his response, a detailed refutation of Eliot’s typically 19th-century fetishization of free individuals, containing the Burkean retort that the Jesuits in fact “respect the individual too much ‘to make the plastic souls and hearts and minds of those entrusted to their care the subjects of untried, revolutionary and wholesale experiment.’” This debate clearly poses enduring questions about the path American education has taken away from a coherent body of study toward a smorgasbord for the student-as-consumer (to put it ideologically...

...Schroth apparently believes that the Jesuits did need to progress with the times...

...The stories Schroth tells present fascinating and important issues, but he merely recognizes them without ever exploring them...

...Schroth might have mitigated this inevitability by consciously drawing together the themes of the stories he tells into a coherent account in concepts as well as facts...

...That would, at least, have forced him to justify the spirit-of-Vatican-II perspective he otherwise tacitly assumes...

...To which Father Suver responded, “You get it up there and I’ll say Mass under it...

...he recites the arguments without discussing their validity...

...The night before the landing, the Marines bantered with each other about whether one of them could hoist a fl ag on top of Mount Suribachi...

...A powerful image: The Jesuit military chaplain saying Mass beneath one of the most famous American fl ags in history...

...Their contributions, most of all in missionary work and in education, are crucial aspects of the formation of America and of Americans...

...Sometimes it seems that Schroth simply compiles stories and fi gures without drawing much thematic connection between them, resulting in a kind of haphazard catalogue or a willy-nilly litany of his favorite Jesuits...

...If there is any truth to Elshtain’s remark, the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—must count among the primary factors in the rise of Catholic infl uence in America...

...Schroth records the scene: With the permission of the commanding offi cer, he spread a board across two gas drums for an altar, had two marines hold up a poncho to protect the altar from the wind, placed men with their rifl es to hold off any Japanese still lingering in the caves a few yards away, and began, “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti...

...For example, Father Schroth adds a poignant detail to our iconic image of the Battle of Iwo Jima...

...Many of these vignettes and sketches are quite compelling, even gripping...

...This book consists largely of grouped character sketches of important Jesuits and vignettes of the society’s contributions to American life from the fi rst Spanish and French explorer-missionaries to modern activists and academics...

...Without this last step, American Jesuits provides a diverting read, but seems all the same a lost opportunity...

...If there is reason to place these two vignettes one after the other, Schroth does not provide it, and the reader can only guess at the connection...

...Charles F. Suver traveled with the troops to Iwo Jima from the Mariana Islands, a 600-mile journey that induced such acute anxiety that two Marines fl ung themselves into the ocean rather than meet certain death on the beach...

...Nevertheless, Schroth has done a service by shedding light on the oftenignored role of the Jesuits in American history...

...One of them said to the other, “Okay, you get [the fl ag] and I’ll get it up there...

...Enter Fr...

...Charles W. Eliot, the famous Harvard president at the time, was the leader of a pedagogical reform movement that advocated increasing the selection of courses available to students and letting them decide which of these “electives” they wanted to take...

...BY DANIEL SULLIVAN Jean Bethke Elshtain, the respected professor of religious history, once remarked at a lecture at the University of Chicago that Roman Catholicism may very well have had a greater infl uence on the religious life of Americans than has Protestantism...

...The problem with the rambling-catalogue approach runs deeper, however...

...In 1893, Eliot decided that Harvard Law School would admit no students from Catholic, let alone Jesuit, colleges...

...A noted Jesuit professor responded to Eliot’s pedagogical attack...

...This is not because of a scrupulous academic distance...

...A frustrating example is the controversy over Harvard’s elective system in the 1890s...

...This was, of course, an offhand remark, but it has some support: Catholics are the largest single denomination in the United States, and they have tended to dominate in urban areas and in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast, regions which fl atter themselves that they drive the cultural motor of America...

...Since Schroth insists on advocating for his opinion on the various controversies he recounts, he might do it openly by providing context for the debate and discussing the arguments made on their own terms...

...Eliot explained this by claiming that the typical Catholic course of studies left Catholic students unprepared for law school...

...One detects this assumption in the way he tells the story: Those advocating for the reform are portrayed as voices crying in the desert against stubborn and narrowminded Jesuit functionaries...