Since they emphasize both teaching and missionary work, they do a lot of arguing and have a reputation for using casuistry and lies of omission in their arguments.
A joke I heard:
A Jesuit is a man who, upon being accused of murdering his neighbor and killing a lamb, would promptly and proudly produce the lamb.
The Jesuits were also extremely influential in the East Indies, making them obvious targets for the English, Dutch, and other Protestant traders and merchants who wanted access to Eastern markets but were kept out by the Jesuits.
Much of the plot of James Clavell’s Shogun is about that. Also there’s a lot of intra-Catholic rivalry, sometimes bitter, between Spanish Dominicans and Portuguese Jesuits in the East Indies and Japan – is that historically correct?
Not really an answer to the OP, but an intriguing anecdote indicates that stereotypes about Jesuits and Catholic sensitivity to the subject remain alive and well; James Michener, writing about his experiences as a textbook editor at the large Macmillan publishing company had this to say:
Not only Catholics…the writer also told of a threatened boycott and lawsuit by the Mormon church against his company for the unforgivable sin of including an account of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in their American History Text.
It seems that when organized religion collides with freedom of speech, its reactions can be almost…jesuitical.
SS
I’m not sure i’d consider that first example of yours to be Catholic sensitivity. “Typical jesuitical cunning” seems pretty unpleasant wording to me as a non-Catholic, and I don’t believe i’d personally be pretty happy to boycott a company which decided using “jesuitical” as a pejorative was acceptable. Would “typical jewish meanness with money” or somesuch other pandering to stereotype be acceptable phrasing?
Free speech doesn’t mean you get away with no consequences for the content of your speech. Censorship would be one thing; simply electing not to purchase the products of speech you find unpleasant doesn’t abridge that right. The lawsuit in the second case would be a different matter, of course.
The rivalry in Shogun is between Jesuits and Franciscans, but there is a famous Dominican-Jesuit rivalry. that started with a debate over free will and grace that lasted for about 25 years, which led the pope at the time to call a conference between the Jesuits and Dominicans to settle it. The conference lasted 9 years and didn’t come to any conclusions, so the Pope just gave up, told them to try to be tolerant of each other or at least stop insulting each other, so they went home and still disagree.
Jesuits and Franciscans also have issues with each other.
You’re right, Franciscans. When Blackthorne meets a Spanish Franciscan priest in jail, the first thing the old priest wants him to swear is that he did not come to Japan on a Portuguese ship! (The possibility Blackthorne is from a Protestant country never occurs to him, he chalks up the blond hair to “Spanish Flanders” and Blackthorne is careful not to correct him; if he did not come on a Portuguese ship it must have been Spanish – again, it never occurs to the priest another European nation might be sailing these waters for the first time.) It all seems to be a complicated nationalistic rivalry (the King of Spain is also King of Portugal at the moment, but it’s only a personal union and the Portuguese are still touchy about it, etc.), combined with a conflict in the two orders’ priorities (the Franciscans want to convert the masses, the Jesuits want to cozy up to the princes and rajahs and mandarins and daimyo). Non-converted Japanese prefer the Jesuits at least for appearance and smell; they call the Franciscans the “Barefoot Hairies.”
Again, not sure how historical any of that is, though I know Blackthorne at least was based on a real person, William Adams.
That’s all basically true. The Jesuits, sponsored by the Portuguese, had the sole right to evangelize in Japan, and focused mainly on the samurai, but Franciscans, usually Spanish, would come in and preach in secret to the peasants, which would usually end with them getting martyred.
Most of the characters in Shogun are based on real people, and the events depicted are loosely true. I wouldn’t take any of the characterizations as gospel, though, and the less politically important the character, the less seriously I’d take it, because there are fewer actual historical records. That book is what got me started reading about European trade in the Indies.
