In the past few months IgNation has presented three sets of Jesuit portraits. Jesuits were viewed through the lens of fiction, through the filter of biography, and through the written equivalent of “selfies” – short autobiographical reflections by contemporary Jesuits.

Today, in the first of three articles, IgNation contributor, Kevin Burns, looks through this collection of portraits to identify some of the recurring themes and images. This is what he learned about being a Jesuits from a somewhat random and eclectic set of novels. It all began at the Ottawa Public Library.

Earlier this spring when I was browsing under the keywords “Jesuit” and “Fiction” on the library computer terminal, I was reminded of another library search, back in the analogue 1980s in Toronto. I was at the Toronto Metro Reference Library looking for Canadian sources in preparation for a documentary celebrating the 400th anniversary of the birth of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It was an “old school” search without a keyboard, when you had to flip through ragged-eared, typed file cards.

I remember being intrigued by the recurring phrase “Controversial Subject” on so many of these cards. Most of these items were pamphlets from a volatile period in nineteenth-century Ontario when the “Orange and the Green” were caught up in often violent conflicts. Jesuits, these particular works insisted, were responsible for some of the most terrible crimes in Canada and the publications would reveal the sensational evidence.

No such warning labels this time round.

Earlier this year during my recent search in preparation for the “Keyword: Jesuit, Genre “Fiction” series, the tag “Controversial Subject” was nowhere in evidence. Even so, as I look through my notes on these fictional Jesuits in the eight novels I chose for this series, some long-held Jesuit stereotypes remain. Here are the top four:

1) The fictional Jesuit is the smartest person in the room – and often generates suspicion

 “… like many of your Jesuit brothers, [he is] considered intelligent beyond the ordinary.”  (The Rhetoric of Death)

“… there is many a robed devil walking the streets of Rome and the halls of the Vatican. Evil incarnate. Ambition beyond belief…” (Fabrizio’s Return)

2) The fictional Jesuit always leaves a record (a Relation of some order) for future generations to contemplate

 “I write for myself in the belief these words aren’t wasted. I write in the hope we’ve not been forgotten by our Church or by our nation. I write to please God, for I treat these relations as my prayers.” (The Orenda)

“…he made himself a quill from a chicken’s wing which had fallen in the courtyard, and began to write down all his reminiscences since coming to Japan. He did not know, of course, if what he wrote would ever reach Portugal.”  (Silence)

3) Where there is fictional Jesuit doubt there is also deep fictional Jesuit obedience

 “… the scruples to which he was prey caused Hopkins to consider the worldly pursuit of poetry writing in conflict with his vocation to the priesthood. Just before entering the Society of Jesus in 1868, Hopkins resolved to pen no more verse unless his religious superiors requested it.” (Exiles)

“What did God want? To test me again” choosing to enter the society at an earlier pivotal, uncertain stage of my youth had been a considerable test. Did I really have the calling to be a priest? Hadn’t I exceeded the limits of common sense with the ecological and radical libertarian impulses, with my obsession to save the world and love the dispossessed, to become a champion of social justice?” (The Book of God and Physics)

 “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?” (Black Robe)

4) The fictional Jesuit is (mostly) an exemplar of a mission-driven faith in action

“One must make sacrifices if one is to achieve anything in this world. I have no time for distractions. For my vocation, I have sacrificed love.” (Pasarolla Rising)

 “…suddenly there rose up within him a longing to talk to others, to be like other people, to hear the words of other men, to plunge into the daily life of men.” (Silence)

“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.” (Black Robe)

 “Saving souls is part of what God requires of us.” (Rhetoric of Death)

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igNation presented the eight novels in this order:

Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, published by Penguin, 2013.

Judith Rock’s The Rhetoric of Death, published by Berkley Trade, 2010.

Shusaku Endo’s Silence, published by Quartet Books, 1978.

Mark Frutkin’s Fabrizio’s Return, published by Knopf Canada 2006.

Azhar Abidi’s Pasarrola Rising, published by Viking Canada, 2006.

Ron Hansen’s Exiles, published by Picador, 2008

Enrique Joven’s The Book of God and Physics – A Novel of the Voynich Mystery was first published in Spain in 2007 and in English in 2009 by William Morrow/HarperCollins.

Brian Moore’s Black Robe was first published in 1985 by Penguin Books and released in its paperback edition in 1987 by Penguin Canada. 

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Next week, in his second piece in this 3-part series, Kevin Burns will look  at some of the recurring characteristics of Jesuit life as identified by biographers in the recent IgNation series, “Keyword Jesuit, Genre: Biography.”