The Jesuits & the Popes: A Historical Sketch of Their Relationship

The Jesuits & the Popes: A Historical Sketch of Their Relationship by O'Malley, John W.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780916101916.

The Jesuits are known for having an especially close relationship to the papacy. The Jesuits and the Popes traces that relationship from the earliest days of the Jesuit order until Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope. As such, it is the first book in any language to trace this full history and to analyze each phase of it as it unfolded. It covers, therefore, a history of some 450 years and does so in relatively few pages. This means that the book moves at a swift pace that pulls the reader along with it. While the book directly deals with the Jesuits and the popes, it at the same time leads readers into the larger issues of church history that determined how the Jesuits and the popes reacted to one another at any given moment.While for the most part the special relationship between the Jesuits and the popes was cordial or more than cordial, it had several tense moments, the most important of which was the church-wide suppression of the order in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV. The book does not hold back in describing those moments. The premier American Catholic and Jesuit church historian of our time, John O’Malley is known for his crisp style, easily accessible to the non-specialist. The style does not fail him in The Jesuits and the Popes.