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Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, but it was his successors who cemented the order’s place in history.
In The Second Jesuits, Thomas Flowers, S.J., argues that the Society of Jesus’s survival and global identity depended on its second generation, a group of twenty men he labels the “Second Jesuits.” Following the death of Ignatius in 1556, the order entered a period of profound vulnerability because its constitutions had not yet been approved and formally promulgated. At this critical juncture, they faced immense pressure from Pope Paul IV and other ecclesial authorities to take on a traditional vision of religious life. Had they succumbed, the Jesuits would have lost the flexible, mobile character that defined their mission.
Flowers reveals how leaders like Peter Canisius, Jerónimo Doménech, and Jerónimo Nadal fiercely resisted ecclesiastical pressures to preserve the Society’s core principle of universal availability. With the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the Society, The Second Jesuits reimagines early Jesuit history not just as a transition of power, but as a story of how a “charismatic fellowship” was forged into a resilient, global institution. Flowers shows that the Jesuits survived not by following the rules of the past but by having the courage to remain distinct in order to serve a changing world.
“Thomas Flowers’s The Second Jesuits—arriving nearly three decades after John O’Malley’s pioneering The First Jesuits—advances its predecessor’s project of restoring historical contingency to the Society of Jesus’s origins and evolution. Deeply researched and elegantly written, this study will be required reading for anyone interested in the Society’s origins.” —Stephen Schloesser, S.J., author of Visions of Amen
Thomas Flowers, S.J., is a Jesuit priest and serves as assistant professor of Ignatian formation in the College of Philosophy and Letters at Saint Louis University and assistant rector at Bellarmine House of Studies, a formation community of the Society of Jesus. His most recent book is The Reform of Christian Doctrine in the Catechisms of Peter Canisius.
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction: First and Second Jesuits
Part 1. Our Way of Proceeding
1. Exercising Spiritual Freedom
2. Determining What’s Ours
3. The Recruitment Profiles
4. Second Vocations
5.The Trouble with Jesuits
Part 2. Instituting the Society
6. The Educational Platform
7. The Learned Spirit
8.The Travails of Governance
Part 3. The Existential Fight of the First General Congregation
9. The Congregation That Wasn’t
10. Congregated Jesuit Insistence
Conclusion: Misunderstanding the Way
Appendix A: The Second Jesuits
Appendix B: Fully Formed Jesuits at the Death of Ignatius of Loyola
Bibliography