Books, Arts & Manners: Ideologues of Immanentism

The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, by Malachi Martin (Simon & Schuster, 525 pp., $19.95)

A whole generation of Catholics has now grown up amid the turmoil in the Church sparked by the Second Vatican Council. Feeding the turmoil have been many Jesuits who, in their own minds, have spiritually come of age as theological dissenters and political revolutionaries. Older Catholics are still shocked, and the Church’s enemies delighted, by a Jesuit whose self-proclaimed “ministry” is to defend sodomy (such as New York’s John McNeill, who has just been expelled from the Society of Jesus at Vatican insistence) or to serve as a cabinet minister in a Marxist-Leninist regime (such as Nicaragua’s Fernando Cardenal, who in late 1984 was expelled from the Society, at the Pope’s personal insistence, when he refused to resign his post). Sad to say, McNeill and Cardenal are only rather egregious agents of views that are all too prevalent in the Society and other religious orders. Jesuits have become the vanguard of clerical opposition to the teaching and authority of the papacy.

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Michael Liccione

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The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, by Malachi Martin (Simon & Schuster, 525 pp., $19.95)

A whole generation of Catholics has now grown up amid the turmoil in the Church sparked by the Second Vatican Council. Feeding the turmoil have been many Jesuits who, in their own minds, have spiritually come of age as theological dissenters and political revolutionaries. Older Catholics are still shocked, and the Church’s enemies delighted, by a Jesuit whose self-proclaimed “ministry” is to defend sodomy (such as New York’s John McNeill, who has just been expelled from the Society of Jesus at Vatican insistence) or to serve as a cabinet minister in a Marxist-Leninist regime (such as Nicaragua’s Fernando Cardenal, who in late 1984 was expelled from the Society, at the Pope’s personal insistence, when he refused to resign his post). Sad to say, McNeill and Cardenal are only rather egregious agents of views that are all too prevalent in the Society and other religious orders. Jesuits have become the vanguard of clerical opposition to the teaching and authority of the papacy.