The Jesuits Read Free Page B

regard are among the principal factors in accounting for the Society’s rapid growth and the high quality of the young men who entered it.
    What moved Ignatius to this momentous decision? Many factors, surely. He came more and more to recognize the long-rangeadvantages of ministry with a fixed base. He and his colleagues were, as university graduates, almost by definition committed to the “war against ignorance and superstition” that in the sixteenth century engaged both Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, he recognized that at Paris the first Jesuits had learned certain pedagogical techniques that made them particularly effective teachers.
    The list of reasons could go on, but surely determinative for Ignatius was the philosophy of education that underlay the humanistic schools of the era. That philosophy, derived from classical antiquity but now revived and given a Christian cast by Renaissance theorists such as Erasmus, was radically student-centered. It promised to produce men of integrity, dedicated to the common good of church and society, and skilled in persuading others to similar dedication. That scope, Ignatius saw, coincided with the scope of the Society, and the schools provided a fine matrix for integrating the two.
    Ignatius’s decision inaugurated a new era in Roman Catholicism for formal education. If the Jesuits were the first religious order to undertake as a primary and self-standing ministry the operation of full-fledged schools for any students, lay or clerical, who chose to come to them, they were in time followed by many other orders, both male and female. Such schools became a hallmark of modern Catholicism in every part of the world. Their religious and cultural influence is beyond calculation.
    Ignatius’s decision had a transforming impact on the Society itself. Even in the early years the schools were comparatively large and complex institutions that required the best talent for their staffing, which meant that talent was not available for other ministries. The schools led the Jesuits into becoming major propertyowners. With their classrooms, theaters, courtyards, and astronomical observatories, they were often huge establishments, to which were attached a church and a Jesuit residence. In some places they became one of the most impressive monuments in the city. Then as now schools ate up money with seemingly insatiable appetites, which meant they were perpetually in debt and drove the Jesuits into undertaking a most mundane occupation, money raising. They thus in some quarters gained a reputation for being avid for gold.
    Money raising was imperative because, as Ignatius told the Jesuits at Perugia in 1552, the schools were for “everybody, poor and rich.” 1 They therefore charged no tuition. Since there was no income from the students, Jesuits had to look for funds elsewhere. As a result of sad experience, Ignatius began to insist that no school be opened unless its funding had been secured beforehand by endowment or some other means. Even when endowed, schools continued to need funds for operating expenses.
    Although the program offered by the Jesuit schools held little appeal for many students from the lower social classes, the free tuition meant that in fact the schools attracted students from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. In the Jesuit school in Munich between 1601 and 1776, for instance, about 5 percent of the students came from noble families, about another 12 percent from families of civic office holders. Some 83 percent, therefore, came from the rest of society. Of the 1,500 students in the school at Billom in France, 7 percent were of the nobility, 9 percent from the bourgeoisie, 24 percent of minor officials’ class, and the rest from lower classes. These figures are typical, except of course for the relatively few “Colleges of Nobles” that the Jesuits ran in some places.
    From the beginning most of the Jesuit schools were