If the only Jesuit you ever met was a character in a work of fiction in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library when he entered the search term "Jesuit" and filtered it through the genre of "Fiction". The novels that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar Jesuits.
This week: the martyrdom-risking missionary, Paul Laforgue SJ.
Like Joseph Boyden’s 2013 novel, The Orenda, Brian Moore’s 1985 novel, Black Robe, is set in the Canada of the early seventeenth century. Both novels echo the lives of some those very real missionaries we now call the Jesuit Martyrs. In his 1985 New York Times review of Black Robe, James Carroll (himself an acclaimed novelist and commentator of Catholic culture) described Brian Moore’s work as:
Part adventure story, part the life of a saint, part parable, it is an exemplary act of imagination in which Brian Moore has brought vividly to life a radically different world and populated it with men and women wholly unlike us. His novel’s achievement, however, is that, through the course of its shocking narrative, these strangers become first figures of great sympathy and finally images of our own humanity. By the end of Black Robe, we recognize its fierce, awful world as the one we live in. … We can read Black Robe and see our own times in it. We can read it and remember that human beings can reach across vast divides to find one another. We can read it and understand that history, the endless story of colliding cultures, is tragic for everyone.
This series is not about literary criticism, though, it is about the Jesuits you meet in fiction.
The character of Paul Laforgue SJ was born in Rouen, the city where Jeanne d’Arc was burnt at the stake. “[It] was true that ever since the Order had granted his petition to be sent to New France he had dreamed of the glory of martyrdom in that faraway land.” (p. 33) He was ordained in the church of St. Ouen during a “solemn High Mass, the unseen choir singing the Kyrie high in the vaulted roof, his parents kneeling on prie-dieux just in front of the communion rail, their faces a mirror of their joy.” (p. 152)
Laforgue is pale, bearded, and when we first encounter him he has an infection in his left ear that sometimes makes hearing difficult. His superiors are confident that he is ready for the challenges ahead. “In my opinion…he is adequate to the task. He is an ordained member of the Society of Jesus and, as such, his capabilities have been carefully assessed by the Order.” (p. 6)
Once in New France he must adapt quickly. Rather than reading “silent and absorbed in the cloister … from now on he would read his office in some clearing in a strange forest, or behind the wooden palisades of a distant mission house.” (p. 36) Every night, no matter the circumstances, he tries, “as was his nightly custom, to direct his last waking thoughts to the crucifixion of Jesus.” (p. 39)
This fictional Jesuit is open to what that the actual Jesuit and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, would call God’s grandeur. Laforgue is alone, lost in prayer, beginning to doubt God’s presence, when an eagle soars above him. “And as Laforgue knelt there, his struggles, his deafness, the dangers of this journey were transformed miraculously inot a great adventure, a chance to advance God’s glory here in a distant land. God was not hidden; He had shown Himself in the eagle’s flight… In the beauty of this wold place, his heart sang a Te Deum of happiness.” (p. 44)
He is a Jesuit of the strict observance, especially when he feels sinful. “Methodically, as though he used a flail of wheat, he scourged his back, lash after lash, as blood spilt into the folds of his lowered robe, until his flayed back was purpled as the sky above.” (p.56)
When his fever breaks and his hearing is restored, this is another sign. “Everything that he did, everything that he suffered, he did and suffered as a Jesuit, for the greater glory of God. God had tested him and would test him further. God had restored his hearing to remind him he was not alone.” (p.121)
He is troubled by the idea that he cannot convert the warring people he has come to serve. “Laforgue looked at the girl… her eyes closed, her face shut as though she were a mystic deep in prayer. Yet she knew nothing of prayer; she, like her father, was far from the sight of God, knowing nothing of God’s mercy.” (p. 180)
After witnessing the calculated brutality of these warring nations, he is frightened and alone in the makeshift chapel, “in this land of darkness, as distant as the pomp and magnificence of the Church in Rome. Here in this humble foolish chapel, rude as a child’s drawing, a wooden box and a painted statuette could not restore his faith. Yet somehow he must try. …He looked at the tabernacle. He felt the silence. Do you love us?” (p. 242/245)
His question is answered by the final page of this novel.
In 1991, Brian Moore adapted his novel into a screenplay for the Australian film director Bruce Beresford who cast Jesus of Montreal star Lothaire Bluteau as Laforgue. In his review, the insightful film critic, Roger Ebert, said:
Of all the Christian missionaries, the Jesuits were the most far-ranging and adventuresome. And they were everywhere, not only in Quebec, but in South America (see The Mission) and Japan (see Shogun). Movies about their exploits tend to romanticize them, however, and to fit their actions into the outlines of conventional movie plots. The reality was no doubt more like Black Robe, in which lonely men put their lives on the line in a test of faith, under conditions of appalling suffering and hardship.
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Black Robe was first published in 1985 by Penguin Books. The edition cited here is the 1987 Penguin Canada paperback version.
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This is the last item in this series of Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Fiction.
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Coming soon is Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Biography, a series exploring the lives of some decidedly non-fictional Jesuits. The first in this new series will be Matteo Ricci SJ, as presented by Jonathan D. Spence in his 1984 biography: The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.
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