In the 16th century Montaigne voiced the fear that missionary endeavour — the white man’s ‘contagion’ — would hasten the ruin of the New World. Though Jesuits played their part in the spoliation of the Americas, only the most romantic could claim that Indian tribes there lived in a state of prelapsarian grace, so artless, happy and free. Brian Moore, in his marvellous novel Black Robe, portrayed 1640s Canada as a Huron backwater, where French Jesuits were in danger of being scalped and fur-trappers disembowelled.
As Jonathan Wright makes clear in this informative history of the Society of Jesus, the earliest Jesuits were regarded as not quite regular clergy. Refusing to be cloistered in a monastery, they took the Gospel message out to all corners of the world, creating an itinerant ministry which engaged vigorously in the apostolic life.
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