Introduction

This essay examines texts by Jesuit, religious (bishops, priests, nuns), and lay scholars in order to explore the historiography of the post-restoration Society of Jesus in Spanish America. The first part of the article covers texts that deal with the history of the Society of Jesus in Spain and Spanish America, as well as other historiographical essays. We also outline five ideas that are essential for the study of the Society’s history in the period since its papal restoration and reinstatement in the region.  These five ideas, some of which can be traced to Pope Pius VII’s (1742–1823) pontificate (r.1800–23) and the reign of King Ferdinand VII (1784–1833, r.1808 and 1813–33), are still objects of controversy and open to historiographical debate.

The second part of the article focuses on general histories of the Society related to Spanish America, taking into account their individual or collective authorship, language (Spanish and translated), general and specific objectives, and the subjects treated, including controversies, education, missions, conferences, and congresses on the history of the order and the authors of the papers presented at them.

The third part of the article consists of a systematic list of publications related to the Society’s post-restoration return to various regions of Spanish America, as well as the history of its colonization. It also provides a detailed account of the historiographical production related to how Jesuits were received, and the administrative divisions created on their return. In this regard, it is worth noting that the settlements took place in the provinces founded by the order during the colonial era, and that, as the provinces consolidated, the administrative divisions accommodated themselves to the newly independent countries.

The article concludes with some remarks on the Jesuit historiography of Spanish America following the Society’s restoration.

I. General Background

Jesuit history has always been a useful prism through which to view different perspectives of the interdisciplinary aspects of global modern historiography in its various manifestations.¹ The order’s historiography has thus become increasingly systematic, with scholars’ attention turned to integrating different lines of research that, when seen holistically, have made important contributions.

Before turning to the main subject of the article, it is important to consider the Jesuit expulsion from the Spanish kingdoms by Charles III (1716–88, r.1759–88) in 1767, which was followed by Pope Clement XIV’s (1705–74, r.1769–74) suppression of the order in 1773. Historiographical analysis of the Society of Jesus for the post-restoration period in Spanish America is determined by the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum that restored the order, which was issued by Pope Pius VII in August 1814. By that time, most of the Spanish empire had entered a period of political disintegration that hindered the Society’s return at a continental level.

The reinstatement process under new missions, either de facto or de jure, was consequently accompanied by new tensions and further expulsions―partial or general: Mexico in 1820, 1873, and 1914 (all partial); Argentina in 1843 (partial) and 1848 (general); Uruguay in 1859 (general); Paraguay in 1844 (general) and 1976 (partial); Colombia in 1850 and 1861 (both general); Guatemala in 1871 (general); Nicaragua in 1881 (general); Costa Rica in 1884 (general); El Salvador in 1872 (general); Ecuador 1852 (general) and 1896 (partial); Peru in 1879 (partial); Bolivia, several between 1970 and 1980 (all partial); and Cuba in 1959 (partial).²

Any study of the Society of Jesus in colonial Spanish America must begin by reviewing the work of Jesuit scholars Antonio Astrain (1857–1928), Lesmes Frías (1870–1939), and Manuel Revuelta González (1936–2019), all of whom contributed general histories of the Spanish assistancy of the Society from the time of Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) to 1912, though some of their works stretch beyond this date. Due to the significance of their works and the number of documents they include, the authors’ Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la asistencia de España, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en su asistencia moderna de España, and La Compañía de Jesús en la España contemporánea are the foundational sources of the historiography considered here.³

At a broader level, Jesuit Spanish American historiography is the result of several factors stretching into the colonial past. Two articles provide introductions to this topic: Patricia Manning’s on the historiography of the Society in Spain prior to its suppression, and Robert H. Jackson’s on the historiography of the Society in Spanish America in the same period.⁴ Oscar Ernesto Mari, Nicolás Hernán Perrone, José del Rey Fajardo, and María Clara Luchetti have also produced similar works.⁵ Regarding collective works, the chapters in the volume by Perla Chinchilla Pawling, Alfonso Mendiola, and Martín Morales, S.J.⁶ thoughtfully question the scientific validity of past historiographical publications of members of the Society. Chinchilla, in discussing the “scientific” character of this historiography, points out that a moralizing and rhetorical conception coexists within a scientific intentionality, but then the volume reverts to its apologetic goal.⁷ Nevertheless, the volume raises the question of whether a real contradiction exists between an apologetic that is scientific and one that is constrained by an apologetic intentionality.

Revuelta González’s article has proven crucial for the methodology used to reconstruct the Society’s history in the period and region of our study, even if it includes certain questionable points when projecting them onto Spanish America.⁸

Influenced by this broader context, we will set out five ideas that, in various degrees, appear in the treatment of the historiography of the Society in Spanish America. In doing so, we touch on aspects of that historiography that have the potential to broaden Revuelta González’s methodological proposal.

Continuity or Rupture in the Jesuit Order’s Identity?

The order’s restoration raises the question of whether its identity remained the same after 1814 or whether it experienced a rupture. This is a key question because the order’s identity essentially qualifies its spiritual objectives and ministry. Historically, the Spanish monarchy’s missionary goals during the colonial period intertwined with those of the Society of Jesus, producing tensions that led to the Society’s expulsion from the Spanish dominions at the end of the eighteenth century and that continued to linger in the postcolonial period. These tensions are detailed in Javier Burrieza’s study “La Compañía de Jesús y la defensa de la monarquía hispánica.”⁹

In the period following the Society’s gradual restoration in various Spanish American countries, there was no longer an intertwined pre-expulsion missionary identity linking the Iberian countries to the Society. However, the Hispanic world’s cultural roots proved stronger than the institutional breakdown, such that a common history prevailed between the Iberian countries and their former territories in Spanish America.¹⁰ Pertinent here is José del Rey Fajardo’s article “El alma de la identidad jesuítica como fuente histórica primaria,” which, like Burrieza’s study, analyzes the transcendence of the spiritual life that governs the Society and distinguishes its history.¹¹

Reasons for and Consequences of the Expulsions

When seeking to explain and account for the consequences of the Society’s expulsions from various Spanish American countries during the nineteenth century, historiographers tend to go back to the pre-suppression Society or focus on the consequences of the expulsion of 1767. Some historiographers even consider the Society’s reinstatement to the places from which it had been expelled as crucial when it comes to the configuration and importance of new national spaces. As Jesuit colonial writings were scrutinized, they contributed to the definition of national identities in the broader state-formation process.

Publications on the latter subject include Vitar Mukdsi’s volume on the impact of the order’s alienation in the border dynamics of Tucumán in Argentina; Villalba Pérez’s study on the Consecuencias educativas de la expulsión de los jesuitas de América for the entire continent; and, finally, Andrés Prieto’s article linking the tradition of a specific Spanish American Jesuit historiography to its origins in the seventeenth century, as it migrated to Europe with the expelled “creole Jesuits” of 1767 (e.g., Clavigero from Mexico; Velasco from Ecuador; Molina from Chile) and can be identified with a proto-nationalistic idea. To establish this link, Prieto argues that “language and rhetoric helped define the claims to the territories and spaces, both cultural and natural, as well as to the language used by nationalistic movements in the first half of the nineteenth century.”¹² A more global historiography is presented in Jeffrey Burson and Jonathan Wright’s collected volume, which concludes with Louis Caruana’s essay “What Was Lost? What Was Gained?” as a result of Pope Clement XIV’s brief, Dominus ac redemptor (July 21, 1773), which suppressed the Society of Jesus worldwide.¹³

The Repetition of Arguments in Relation to Expulsions and Reinstatements

The arguments used to explain the series of expulsions and reinstatements of the Jesuit order during the nineteenth century usually appeal to the reasons used to explain the first expulsion and suppression in the eighteenth century. Thus, the conflicting parties did not offer new arguments for these actions, regardless of the sociopolitical and structural changes that the West had experienced.

Alfonso Calderón Argelich’s article on the debate over the Jesuits’ expulsion by Charles III in Elizabethan Spain—a government that lasted from 1833 to 1868 and expelled the order in 1835 and 1868¹⁴—helps explain why the arguments for expelling, then reinstating, the Society of Jesus were repeated in both Spain and Spanish America during the same period. In Spanish America, Calderón’s study can be applied to the case of the Dictamen del fiscal Francisco Gutiérrez de la Huerta sobre el restablecimiento de los jesuitas, presentado y leído por el Consejo de Castilla of 1815 (The reinstatement of Jesuits, presented and read by the Council of Castile), published for the first time in Madrid in 1845.¹⁵ This dictamen had at least one edition in Chile (1849) and two in Mexico (1849, 1873).¹⁶ Its author was the only one of the three fiscales to elaborate his verdict and reinstate the order after re-examining the same documents that had led Charles III to expel the Jesuits. It would not be difficult to attribute to the Jesuits in these Spanish American countries the publications of the dictamen, especially if we look at Enrique Giménez López’s recent documentary analysis.¹⁷ However, it also seems astonishing that Colombia—having begun its independence process in 1810—invoked the validity of Charles III’s decision of 1767 to expel the Jesuits on May 18, 1850 under the power of President José Hilario López (1798–1869, in office 1849–53).¹⁸ Ferdinand VII reversed his grandfather’s decision in 1815. This example proves that arguments were undoubtedly lodged from both sides of the Atlantic, even when local realities had completely changed.

Guillermo Zermeño Padilla’s study of the Mexican case shows that political instability had a significant influence on the order’s reinstatement. From a legal standpoint, Zermeño’s research opens a new line of inquiry regarding the arguments for expelling or reinstating the order, adding “permanent temporariness” as another condition for the Jesuits’ return to that country during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, this fragility continued into the following century and was overcome only by the recent reformations led by Mexico, toward the end of the twentieth century, when legislatures officially recognized the Society of Jesus.¹⁹

Continuity or Rupture of the Order’s Historiography?

Following the Society’s restoration in Spanish America, historiographers began to discuss the continuity of its Jesuit identity. Some scholars promoted the notion that a new Society had emerged, which in turn required distancing the “old order” from the odious wars of independence, as the crown’s interests were still intertwined with those of the Jesuits despite the expulsion of 1767. However, this also required distancing the post-restoration Society from its accomplishments in the suppression period in terms of education, missions, and the intellectual formation of the Spanish American elites.

Zermeño’s work underscores the argument that historiography has overemphasized the continuity between the old and the new (restored) Jesuit order, regardless of the supposed “political and cultural rupture that arose from the events that occurred between 1808 and 1821.” This rupture is believed to have made the official recognition of the Society more difficult on its return to Mexico in 1816, forcing the Jesuits to “update their traditions and ideas” in response to situations not foreseen by its founders and followers that it had to accommodate in order to survive.²⁰

This “adaptability” that Zermeño refers to is entirely different from the question of whether Pope Pius VII’s bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum “restored” the order of 1540 or whether a new Society of Jesus was “re-founded,” as Thomas Worcester has suggested,²¹ a question Verdoy Herranz has tried to answer for the Hispanic world by examining the dichotomy between “involución” and “restauración.” After studying the Society’s suppression and restoration, Antonio Menacho similarly leaves us wondering whether the restored order is the same as that founded by Ignatius.²²

More recently, a new line of research has appeared focusing on the historiography of and after the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) and its relation to the Society of Jesus in Spanish America. This research considers works such as the biography of Gustave Weigel (1906–64), “gringo Weigel,” who lived in Chile between the mid-1930s and late 1940s. Weigel was close to Alberto Hurtado, S.J. (1901–52) and had a significant influence on the council as a peritus for the newly founded Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.²³ In a similar vein, the collection of interviews edited by Jorge Costadoat, S.J. provides insights into the council’s impact on Chilean Jesuits and the adjustments from the old to the new order regarding the question of rupture or continuity raised before and after the council.²⁴ Some of the interviewees emphasize the importance of the reforms inspired by Superior General Pedro Arrupe (1907–91, in office 1965–83) in relation to the renewal of the order’s religious life and mission, justified by the idea that the 1814 restoration does not seem to have been faithful to the original founders’ intentions.  Joseph Becker, S.J. (1908–2001) similarly discusses the problem of reformed Jesuits in the post-conciliar period but does so through the perspective of comparative history. He does not, however, study the particularities of the Spanish American case.²⁵  

The Society’s post-conciliar transformation had an impact, in turn, on the politics of the Spanish America countries. In the case of Chile, for example, the role of Roger Vekemans, S.J. (1921–2007) is particularly relevant. He arrived in the 1950s from Leuven and worked in academia, becoming the first director of the Sociology Department at the Universidad Católica in Santiago and the founder of its Centro Bellarmino. He became especially close to Eduardo Frei Montalva (1911–82) and played an influential role in his election as president (in office 1964–70). After Salvador Allende (1908–73) was elected as Frei Montalva’s successor in 1970, Vekemans went into exile in Bogotá before publishing his memoirs in Caracas in 1982. These memoirs exposed his relationship with Chilean politics and undermined the myth that had built around his name.²⁶ Vekemans had been accused of being one of the most influential people in Chilean politics and the church, an influence that also reached other parts of the continent through the Spanish American Episcopal Council (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano [CELAM]). He was even accused—incorrectly—of being a secret informant to the CIA at a critical moment of the Cold War.

Vekemans’s role in Chilean politics is discussed by the German scholar Antje Schnoor in her Santa desobediencia,²⁷ which highlights the order’s influence on Chilean politics between 1962 and 1983, a period encompassing the first decade of the military dictatorship. Schnoor argues that the Jesuits played a crucial role in the Chilean church’s opposition to the regime and its support of democracy and justice.

Although the abovementioned works exploring the Jesuit order’s transition from a pre- to a post-conciliar identity focus specifically on Chile, many of their insights could potentially be applied to the entire region. The study of the continuity or rupture of the order’s historiography has benefited from the Jesuit Urbano Valero Agúndez’s (1928–2019) important collections of documents. The first, titled Suppression and Restoration of the Society of Jesus, collects documents from the times of Spanish king Charles III to those of Superior General Adolfo Nicolás (1936–2020, in office 2008–16). The second, The Renovation Project of the Society of Jesus (1965–2007), gathers relevant documents on the circumstances of the Thirty-First General Congregation of 1965 as a starting point for the renovation of the Society’s spirit.²⁸ Both books take a global perspective.

Historiography and Restoration in Spanish America: Agreements and Disagreements

The issue raised by Revuelta González about the historiography of the Society of Jesus in Spain after its restoration refers to a crucial fact: the Society’s institutional establishment in Spanish America was a projection of its situation in the Iberian peninsula. According to Revuelta González, as a result of its three expulsions from Spain in 1820, 1835, and 1868, the Society suffered a period of “cultural underdevelopment” that has only been amended through scholarly historiography in the last quarter of the century.²⁹ Thus, Revuelta González assigns a highly important role to Superior General Luis Martin García (1846–1906, in office 1892–1906), who promoted the scholarly character of those studies in accordance with the instructions Leo XIII (1810–1903, r.1878–1903) gave in various apostolic letters and other documents. Leo sought to renew the study of history from a Catholic perspective, which, among other things, led to the creation of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1903.³⁰

Martín García’s initiative was a milestone in Jesuit historiography. Revuelta González divides Jesuit historiography that unfolded in three periods: (1) from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth; (2) a mature historiography from the 1940s to the 1980s; (3) and a more diverse and specialized historiography, marked by a greater participation of lay scholars not affiliated with the order, which began in the 1980s and continues to the present.

Although the Society in Spanish America came from nineteenth-century Spain, applying that context to the region presents three difficulties:

1

 The Spanish political reality generated a particular type of dynamic that was not always replicated in Spanish America during the nineteenth century. This leads us to question the role given to the most prominent historiography, which arose from the reinstatement of the order by Ferdinand VII in 1815 and runs to 1890, Revuelta González does not include. In fact, the existence in Spanish America of serious, documented works produced before Revuelta González’s first period means there is a need to modify the outline he devised when applying it to the region. This will become clear below when discussing the different countries that welcomed the Society.

2

It is necessary to distinguish two trends in the historiography of the post-restoration Society: first, the order’s official historiography following the creation of the Monumenta Historica on the basis of the plan laid out by Martín García; second, the earlier trend that arose from individual Jesuit enterprises during the nineteenth century that Revuelta González does not take into consideration.³¹ This distinction also throws Revuelta González’s periodization into question, given that its first stage begins as late as 1890, thereby excluding valuable studies produced before that date.

3

Revuelta González is correct to state that Jesuit historiography has become more diversified and specialized since the 1980s, and lay scholars have indeed been participating in research on Jesuit historiography in Spanish America in growing numbers; however, lay research on the region is almost as old as the order’s restoration. This has led to a recent study on the subject: La primera generación de historiadores laicos de la Compañía de Jesús en Iberoamérica, edited by Carlos A. Page and containing chapters by lay authors on contributors to Spanish American Jesuit historiography such as Magnus Mörner (1924–2012), Lucas Mayerhofer (1902–82), Branislava Suznik (1920–96), Maxime Haubert, Werner Hoffmann (1907–89), Hernán Busaniche (1914–57), Ernesto J. A. Maeder (1931–2015), Erich Luis W. E. Poenitz (1931–96), Francisco Javier Bravo (1825–1913), and Carlos L. Onetto (1909–2005).³²

In short, the periodization set out in Revuelta González’s important article needs to be revised in order to be applied to post-restoration Spanish American historiography.

II. Jesuit Historiography in Spanish America

General Jesuit Historiography and Spanish America

Since the mid-nineteenth century, histories of the Society of Jesus began to include background information on the order’s restoration in Spanish America. Lay scholar Jacques Cretineau-Joly (1803–75) played a leading role in this trend. His six-volume Histoire religieuse, politique et littéraire de la Compagnie de Jésus was published in Paris and Lyon from 1844 to 1846 and was a triumph from the moment it was released.³³ It saw various editions and was translated into at least nine European languages. Chapter 6 of volume 6 dedicates a special section to Spanish America, covering the arrival of the Jesuits in Mexico and their proscription by General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876, eleven-time president of Mexico). Cretineau-Joly also comments on Argentina’s request for Jesuits to establish schools and their later difficulties with Buenos Aires’ governor Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877), their partial expulsion from that province in 1843, and their consequent migration to Chile, Brazil, and New Granada.³⁴

Another lay scholar, J. M. S. Daurignac, published a two-volume study of the order from its foundation, which includes the main events of the Society’s reinstatement in the new republics of Spanish America during the generalship of Luigi Fortis (1748–1829, in office 1820–29). James Clements translated Daurignac’s work into English in 1865, with a second edition appearing in 1878. Both translations include an appendix that updates Daurignac’s history to the present.³⁵

Antonio Zarandona, S.J. (1804–82) wrote the first work in Spanish on the Society’s suppression and restoration in Spain and Spanish America; it was annotated and augmented by Ricardo Cappa, S.J. (1839–97). Its third volume refers to the order’s restoration in Cuba and Puerto Rico.³⁶

Thomas Campbell, S.J. (1848–1925) published a two-volume general history of the Society under the title The Jesuits: A History of the Society of Jesus from Its Foundation to the Present Time, the second volume of which covers the order’s restoration on Spanish American soil.³⁷

A study by Italian Enrico Rosa, S.J. (1870–1938) entitled I gesuiti dalle origini ai nostri giorni: Cenni storici was published in 1914 and was translated into Spanish by Jesús Juambelz, S.J. (1895–1959) ten years later. Its importance lies in its attempt to provide an organic view of the order’s history both at a global level and in Spanish America specifically.³⁸ The translation includes an appendix by the translator based on information from Acta Romana and Memorabilia, S.I. 1914–1924.³⁹

In 1938, Juan Isérn, S.J. (1878–1941) adapted Juambelz’s work for use with Jesuit novices, which omitted the translator’s appendix and incorporated a new section related to Superior General Włodzimierz Ledóchowski’s (1866–1942) administration (1915–42), covering the period up to 1937. Among other topics, Isérn discusses various Jesuit ministries with an emphasis on Jesuit schools, foreign publications, scholarly studies, and news about their social apostolate works.⁴⁰

In both the first edition of his Manual de historia de la Compañía Jesús, published in 1941, and a revised and augmented version in 1952, Ricardo García Villoslada, S.J. (1900–91) criticizes both Rosa and Isérn for attributing “little importance to the Spanish Society in Universal History, both in the Church and in culture.”⁴¹ Following an analysis of the Society’s expulsion, García Villoslada examines its restoration in the region and then the Society’s development into the contemporary era (1914–45).⁴²

In 1972, William V. Bangert, S.J. (1911–85) published a new history of the Society, also from an organic perspective, though he pays little attention to Spanish America.⁴³ Tomás Rodríguez Miranda, S.J. (1935–2017) translated Bangert’s volume into Spanish in 1981; a second English edition appeared in 1986.⁴⁴

Also of note is Frenchman Alain Woodrow’s Les jésuites: Histoire de pouvoirs, which seeks to explain, through a long historical account, how and why the Society produced the negative image that led it be expelled from many parts of the world. Translated into Spanish in 1985, the book includes a section entitled “Tercer mundo: Entre la reacción y la revolución” that deals specifically with Spanish America.⁴⁵

Finally, mention must also be made of two studies that focus on the common cultural roots of the Society in Spain and in Spanish America. The first, edited by Carmelite Teófanes Egido López, is a general history that examines both geographical areas. The second, by Revuelta González, depicts the different sides that affected the order’s journey over time. The volume bears the intriguing title Once calas en la historia de la Compañía de Jesús.⁴⁶

Spanish American authors also made significant contributions to the order’s universal historiography. In 1914, Sebastián Raggi, S.J. (1879–1967) published an interesting, well-documented work, La Compañía de Jesús y sus alumnos, al terminar el primer siglo de su restablecimiento that provides the contexts for the celebrations of the Society’s restoration mandated by Pope Pius VII. Twenty-eight years later, to celebrate the Society’s fourth centennial, Argentine Guillermo Fúrlong Cárdiff, S.J. (1889–1974) published Los jesuítas, su origen, su espíritu, su obra: La Compañía de Jesús a través de los cuatro siglos de su existencia 1540–1940.⁴⁷ Both works assume a global rather than regional perspective. These two studies, together with a third by former Jesuit Enrique Benítez de Aldama, are devoted to the general history and defense of the order in the face of the “Jesuit black legend.”⁴⁸

General Works on the Society of Jesus in Spanish America

Two recent scholarly works are worth noting because of their regional scope. The first, by lay author Francisco Javier Gómez Díez, is entitled Resistencia y misión: La Compañía de Jesús en la América del siglo XIX and explores how the Society faced hostility following its reinstatement on the continent, notably in the New Granada region.⁴⁹ The book documents how, in the process of restoring Jesuit influence, lost properties, and human resources, the order had to navigate the ideological obstacles imposed by the newly independent government, which sought to control ecclesiastical appointments through a system of patronage while also indoctrinating the people in what it meant to become a citizen of the new republic.

The second is Jesuit Jeffrey Klaiber’s (1943–2014) Los jesuitas en América Latina, 1549–2000: 450 años de inculturación, defensa de los derechos humanos y testimonio profético, which was published in Peru. In contrast to Gómez Díez, Klaiber writes from the perspective of the Society’s continental and institutional continuity before and after its first expulsion, the papal restoration, and its difficult return to the region.⁵⁰

Controversies

Some publications generated controversies that led authors to respond with their own publications; and certain apologetic texts sought to re-energize Jesuit action while others opposed it. This wrangling generated literature elsewhere that replicated the situation in Spanish America—for example, the “Jesuitism versus Anti-Jesuitism” conflict that arose in Buenos Aires following the 1858 republication of Joaquín María Nin’s volume Retrato al daguerreotipo de los jesuitas, sacado de sus escritos, máximas y doctrinas: Acompañado de los documentos en que se han fundado varios autores que han escrito acerca de la Compañía de Jesús led Rev. Melchor Bonfill to reply with his apologetic Verdadero retrato al daguerrotipo de la Compañía de Jesús.⁵¹ The original texts were published in Barcelona in 1852.⁵²

Spanish America also contributed publications generated from its own conflicts—for example, Peruvian Francisco de Paula González Vigil’s (1792–1875) four-volume Los jesuitas presentados en cuadros históricos, sobre las correspondientes pruebas, y con reflexiones al caso especialmente en sus cosas de America. Inspired by liberal, anti-ecclesiastical principles, this highly controversial anti-Jesuit polemic was dedicated to the memory of Clement XIV, who suppressed the Jesuits; it was rewarded with the author’s excommunication.⁵³

The conflicts originating from a series of writings on the European continent also provoked retorts from the New World. Jesuit Julián Pereda’s (1890–1982) volume on bullfighting, published in Bilbao, for example, was rebutted by lawyer Carlos Otero Valdés in Santiago de Chile in 1949.⁵⁴

Another example, also from Chile, is the dispute of 1968 between lawyer, politician, and historian Sergio Fernández Larraín (1909–83) and Julio Jiménez Berguesio, S.J. (1908–2003). The former published an academic work on the evolution of the order from the reign of Pope Paul III (1468–1549, r.1534–49) to that of Pope Paul VI (1897–1978, r.1963–78), speculating on how the political involvement of some Jesuits could have influenced Pope Clement XIV’s decision of 1773 to suppress the order. Jiménez responded in a rather less academic manner, arguing that the timing of the controversy should be considered, given that the church and the order were both going through their own political crises.⁵⁵

Jiménez’s argument can be explained by the discussion over continuity or rupture of the Jesuit order’s identity at the time, as well as the crisis of the church. Still, 1968 was marked by countless upheavals and unrests worldwide, at a critical moment of the Cold War. This manifested at a continental level with the CELAM meeting of 1968, and at a local level in Chile with the Marxist-influenced “La Iglesia joven” movement. The latter seized the capital’s cathedral in August of 1968. Among its members were laymen, nuns, and priests, with Nacho Gutiérrez, S.J. (1942–2007) being one of its supporters. Still of enormous value for the study of these critical years for the church and the Society is journalist and researcher Teresa Donoso Loero’s documented account Los cristianos por el socialismo en Chile.⁵⁶

Education

Along with the colossal, and by now classic, work on the Jesuits’ role in education in Spanish America by Miguel Bertrán Quera, S.J. (1924–85), celebrated by Revuelta González, we should also highlight the critical work (with documents) by Venezuelan José del Rey Fajardo, S.J., Fuentes documentales de la paideia jesuítica.⁵⁷ Colombian Carlos Vásquez Posada, S.J. has provided a more practical and updated view of education summarized in four “pillars.” Its originality rests on its educational foundation that proposes to integrate pedagogical moments of the Ignatian paradigm with the methodological instruments of “personalized learning,”⁵⁸ a systematic and epistemological process that involves sequential and interactive moments or developments in the educational process. Oriented and directed by the instructor, the student internalizes the values and principles that support different perspectives or ways of seeing life, people, events, and even the world and God. Its function in the classroom is to achieve the student’s integral formation, considering their mind, heart, and actions.

From the viewpoint of comparative history, the Jesuit João Batista Storck’s article “As humanidades em tempos de neoliberalismo: O modus operandi de duas universidades jesuitas na América Latina” presents an interesting case study of two Jesuit universities. Taking the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Colombia and the University of Rio dos Sinos Valley (Unisinos) as points of reference, Storck analyzes their statutes, institutional development plans, and educational projects.⁵⁹

The Missions

International conferences on Jesuit missions began in Argentina in 1982. The first was held in Resistencia, the capital of the province of Chaco; others followed in the cities of the former Guaraní region. Participants came from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and later from the eastern region of Bolivia where the Chiquitos missions were established. These meetings—which were launched with the aim of recovering the memory of the Jesuits’ missionary work among indigenous peoples while also studying the region’s cultural legacy—have increasingly acquired a continental character, encompassing topics derived from the work of the contemporary church and the Society of Jesus in Spanish America. Prominent among the topics is the need to preserve the Jesuit heritage. In the forty years since these meetings began, there has been an increasing emphasis on indigenous social and cultural issues, highlighting the fact that the destruction of the missions was “a catastrophe that thwarted a comprehensive development of [Latin] American peoples and impoverished Indian Christianity,” in the words of the organizers of the Jornadas held in Bolivia in 2012.

Conferences

Between 2000 and 2021, a series of thematic conferences were held in various places in Spanish America. In 1999, a conference celebrating the four-hundredth anniversary of the Jesuits’ arrival in the Argentinian province of Córdoba took place at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba that produced a four-volume work.⁶⁰

Two years later, the first meeting of Jesuit history archivists and researchers was held in Bogotá, Colombia.⁶¹ This was followed by the first international conference on Jesuit history, also in Bogotá. These conferences dealt with topics such as the reinstatement of the order not only in Spanish America but also in Switzerland.⁶² After this, Jesuit universities such as Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá and the Universidad Iberoamericana of Mexico played a leading role in publishing the documentary and collected works for the bicentennial of the Society’s restoration. Among other topics, the six volumes cover the following themes: De los colegios a las universidades,⁶³ Del ars historica a la Monumenta Historica,⁶⁴ Las misiones antes y después de la restauración,⁶⁵ La Compañía de Jesús en América Latina,⁶⁶ an anthology of documentary sources,⁶⁷ and last, Antijesuitismo y filojesuitismo.⁶⁸ The organizers of the conference solicited answers to the following questions:

How did restoration Jesuits face their own identity? Did they think there was an old Society and a new one, or merely the same one before and after the restoration, with no ruptures? Did their [original] missionary identity hold up in a nationalistic nineteenth-century West? Did [the Jesuits] use the same discursive strategies⁶⁹ or did they create new ones? Was the order’s identity affected by “anti-Jesuit” or “Jesuitphile” feelings after the restoration?

The studies arising from these questions were structured by considering “the Ignatian organization’s process of identity reconstruction in a long-term perspective, whose crux was the order’s legal restoration on August 7, 1814.”⁷⁰

III. Jesuit Historiography in Spanish America by Country

As demonstrated earlier, the expulsions, suppression, restoration, and returns of the Society of Jesus were always topical in the order’s history in Spanish America. During the French occupation of Spain, Spanish American representatives to the Cortes of Cádiz, the first national assembly to claim sovereignty in Spain (1810–14), petitioned for the Society to be restored in the New World. Though the motion was rejected, it became part of the political imagination of the time.

In what follows, we review the geographical regions where the Society settled and in which historical events consequential to the Society transpired. In each locale, the article considers the following topics: national histories, specific controversies, education, and biographies.

Mexico

The Mexican case is somewhat unique in that the independence movement was led by members of the clergy. Father José María Morelos (1765–1815) decreed the restoration of the Society of Jesus on November 6, 1813, even before it was decreed by Pope Pius VII in the following year.⁷¹ Only at the end of 1815 did Ferdinand VII decree the Society’s restoration in his territories; it became effective in Mexico at the beginning of 1816. That same year saw the publication of two works of interest to Jesuit historiography. The first recorded the handing over of the Royal College of Saint Ildefonso of Mexico City to the Society by its rector, Bishop Juan Francisco de Castaniza (1759–1825), author of the Relación.⁷² The second work emphasized the historical injustice perpetrated against the Society of Jesus, particularly in the territories of old California. It was edited by lawyer and writer Agustín Pomposo Fernández de San Salvador (1756–1842) and was partly based on Jesuit Francisco Xavier Clavigero’s (1731–87) studies of the region.⁷³

In 1820, the government of the Trienio Liberal (1820–23) passed a new decree expelling the Society from Spain, which in turn provoked the dispersion of Jesuits in Mexico, though not their expulsion. This situation prevailed even with the declaration of Mexico’s independence in the following year up until Santa Anna’s government partially reinstated the Jesuits in 1843 before fully reinstating them ten years later. During this period, a series of works were published that served as both apologies for and attacks against the order. The main one was the multivolume Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España…, the subtitle of which states the reason for its publication, namely to establish the benefit to Mexico of reinstating the Society of Jesus. Volume 1, authored by Jesuit Francisco Javier Alegre (1729–88) and edited and published by Mexican statesman Carlos M. Bustamante (1774–1848) in 1841, includes a reference to the petition presented that same year to Mexico’s Congress of the Union that the Society be reinstated.⁷⁴ The measure did not seek to restore the order’s possessions lost in earlier expulsions but rather criticized the arguments against its reinstatement and attested to the valuable role the Society had played in the country for more than two centuries. The appendix to volume 3 alludes to Santa Anna’s decree of June 21, 1843, reinstating the order and underscoring its exclusively mission-related ministries in the “less civilized” regions of Mexico.⁷⁵

In 1850, Los jesuitas en México was published. This anonymous work in defense of the order was similar in tone to Jesuit propagandist texts published during the “Jesuitism versus anti-Jesuitism” controversy that erupted with the Society’s restoration.⁷⁶ This apologetic work, as revealed in the subtitle, recounted Mexico’s history based on memoirs, testimonies, and writings of the time that supported the narrative of the “restablecimiento, destrucción y otros sucesos” (reinstatement, destruction, and other events) related to the Society of Jesus in the Mexican Republic from 1816.⁷⁷ In 1856, the fall of President Santa Anna led to another dispersion of the Jesuits, though they were allowed to remain in Mexico. Jesuits who were accused of meddling in internal political conflicts were expelled in 1876.

Complementing and completing Alegre’s Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Nueva España, Mexican Jesuit José Mariano Dávila y Arrillaga’s (1789–1870) Continuación de la historia de la Compañía de Jesús was published posthumously in 1888 and 1889. A brief biography of Dávila y Arrillaga introduces the first volume and highlights his remarkable work as a historian and physician.⁷⁸ Volume 2 includes a lengthy appendix of important documents.⁷⁹ His account stretches from the mid-eighteenth century up to the mid-1860s.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth were marked by the presidency of José del Cruz Porfirio Díaz (1830–1915, in office 1884–1911), the Mexican Revolution, and the later Cristero War in central-western Mexico that left the Society and much of the church fragile, as reflected in, for example, the events that backgrounded the martyrdom of Miguel Pro, S.J. (1891–1927), to whom we shall return below. French historian Jean Meyer’s three-volume La cristiada provides a detailed description of the church’s adversities, while Matthew Butler’s work on Michoacán is essential for appreciating regional nuances during this critical period.⁸⁰ In 2019, Rafael Ignacio Rodríguez Jiménez, S.J. completed his graduate studies with a dissertation entitled “Los jesuitas en la revolución mexicana (1910–1919): La confrontación por un proyecto social y político.”⁸¹

In 1914, among the more general works of the twentieth century, Gerardo Decorme, S.J. (1874–1965) published his two-volume Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la República Mexicana durante el siglo XIX: Restauración y vida de secularización 1848–1880. Forty-five years later, in 1959, a third volume appeared covering the 1880–1914 period.⁸² His work, like the other one mentioned above for Mexico’s nineteenth century, is examined in Zermeño Padilla’s article.⁸³ Decorme’s papers are held in the Archives and Special Collections section of Loyola University Chicago.⁸⁴

Also indispensable is lay librarian Juan Bautista Iguniz’s (1881–1972) bibliography of Mexican Jesuits from the Society’s restoration up to 1945.⁸⁵ Thirty years later, Jesuit Manuel Ignacio Pérez Alonso’s (1917–2007) La Compañía de Jesús en México: Cuatro siglos de labor cultural, 1572–1972 analyzed the history of the order before and after its restoration.⁸⁶ In 1972, José Gutiérrez Casillas, S.J. (1917–2015) published Jesuitas en México durante el siglo XIX; it was reprinted in 1990 with a sequel on Mexican Jesuits in the twentieth century appearing in 1981.⁸⁷ Finally, in 2001, Pablo López de Lara, S.J. published a history of the Mexican province over the four centuries since the Jesuits’ arrival in Mexico in the sixteenth century. It is now in its fifth edition, probably because it includes a civil history and highlights the province’s strong connections to the history of the church and the Society.⁸⁸

On the Society’s contributions to education in Mexico, the following studies are significant:

• Historia de la Universidad de Querétaro, two volumes from 1971, by Fernando Díaz Ramírez (1904–81). Volume 1 is dedicated to the Jesuit colleges of San Ignacio and San Francisco Javier, direct predecessors of the university.⁸⁹
• Esteban Palomera, S.J. (1914–97) surveys the contribution of the Society of Jesus to education in Guadalajara and Puebla from 1586 to 1986.⁹⁰
• In a similar vein, Perla Chinchilla Pawling and Jaime Borja edited Los jesuitas formadores de ciudadanos: La educación dentro y fuera de sus colegios, siglos XVI–XXI in 2010,⁹¹ and Padilla and Hidalgo published El Colegio de San Ildefonso de México: Documentos de fundación y reglamentos (1573–1867).⁹²
• Sergio Antonio Corona Páez researched the Jesuit ventures in the northern region of Mexico, now called Comarca Lagunera or the Laguna region. The Universidad Iberoamericana de Torreón published his study in 2012.⁹³
• Jorge René González Marmolejo’s tortuous history of the Colegio de San Francisco Javier de Tepotzotlán, written from a heritage perspective, appeared in 2014.⁹⁴
• Of considerable relevance is David Espinosa’s volume on the influence of Jesuit education in Mexico in the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the political, social, and economic spheres. The agenda of Jesuit-led student movements, youth organizations, and lay activists entered into the Mexican political imaginary and affected the histories of the Society, the Catholic Church, and the nation.⁹⁵
• José del Bosque provides notes on the pedagogical role of the Society through the lives of three Jesuit educators who left their imprint on Mexico’s twentieth century.⁹⁶
• Several renowned figures in Mexican Jesuit history inspired biographies and had their memoirs published. The most important biography was Vida íntima del padre Pro published in French 1929 by Antoine Dragón, S.J. (1892–1977) shortly after Miguel Pro’s martyrdom; it was first translated to Spanish in 1932, with numerous editions in the period that followed.⁹⁷ In 2016, Marisol López-Menéndez published her doctoral dissertation on Miguel Pro.⁹⁸
• Jaime Castillo, S.J. (1898–1937), a contemporary of Miguel Pro, is depicted in Javier Ortiz Monasterio’s biography as a charismatic man with a promising future and a “master and guide of university youth.”⁹⁹
• Also of note are biographies of other twentieth-century Jesuits¹⁰⁰ and an autobiography by Alberto Valenzuela Rodarte, S.J. (1904–99) titled Un mexicano cualquiera: 16 años en escuelas oficiales, 40 años jesuita.¹⁰¹

Recent historiographical works such as Dante Alcántara’s Historias en tiempos de desolación… open up new perspectives on the order’s contemporary history:¹⁰² Torales Pacheco and Casas García’s edited collection on the effects of the expulsion, suppression, and restoration of the Society of Jesus in Mexico, and Rodríguez Jiménez’s volume on its ephemeral reinstatement in Mexico during the nineteenth century.¹⁰³ In the twentieth century, two articles by Aspé Armella explore the Society of Jesus during the 1960s from a socio-religious perspective.¹⁰⁴

Argentina

After the Society’s expulsion from the Spanish realms in 1767, the Jesuits continued to play an influential role in Argentina through María Antonia de la Paz y Figueroa (1730–99). In fact, “Mama Antula,” as she was affectionately known, was deeply involved in the Jesuit spirituality. Barefoot, she walked the northern provinces promoting Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, finally ending up in Córdoba and Buenos Aires. This explains the title of Alicia Fraschina’s work La expulsión no fue ausencia: María Antonia de San José, beata de la Compañía de Jesús; Biografía y legado, published the year before her beatification by Pope Francis in 2016.¹⁰⁵

In 1954, Guillermo Fúrlong published an article summarizing the history of the Society in Argentina from 1556 to the 1970s. Antonio Larraouy, Raúl H. Castagnino, Rafael B. Esteban, and Roberto Di Stefano have all studied the Society’s arrival in Buenos Aires province at the invitation of Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877, in office 1829–32 and 1835–52).¹⁰⁶ Those who first arrived in 1836 established the mission of Buenos Aires and then founded residences in other provinces in the Argentinian Confederation. However, the Jesuits, having refused to support Rosas, found themselves expelled in 1843 and forced to disperse across the Southern Cone.

But this setback was not a failure, as the dispersion led to the establishment of new Jesuit missions. In fact, the expelled Jesuits reestablished the Society in Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile. In the process, as we will see later, they assimilated the old Paraguayan mission and continued its work of educating and evangelizing the indigenous peoples throughout the region. Some Paraguayan foundations did not survive. Nevertheless, during the decade of 1860–70, what had come to be called the mission of Paraguay was assigned by the Society’s superior general Pieter Jan Beckx S.J. (1795–87, in office 1853–87) to the province of Aragon, putting the Jesuit houses in Brazil under the jurisdiction of the Roman province. In 1868, due to the proliferation of houses in Chile, the new foundations formed the Chilean–Paraguayan mission. In this context, in 1873 Paul-François Groussac (1848–1929), a French-born lay scholar who moved to Buenos Aires in 1866, published Los jesuitas en Tucumán, a slim volume loaded with anti-Jesuit bias aimed at preventing the Jesuits from taking up residence there. Tucumán’s town council and some of its businessmen also opposed the Jesuit presence. Lay attorney Ángel M. Godillo, private secretary to the bishop of Tucumán Buenaventura Rizo Patrón (1861–84), and later president of the local Supreme Court for fourteen years, refuted the anti-Jesuit arguments in a series of well-documented articles defending the Society’s reinstatement in Tucumán. Godillo’s articles were published by La razón in 1873.¹⁰⁷

In 1901, the Guatemalan Rafael Pérez, S.J. (1842–1901), adhering to a wider movement from the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth—a new writing of the history of the missions¹⁰⁸—published La Compañía de Jesús restaurada en la República Argentina y Chile, el Uruguay y Brasil.¹⁰⁹ A detailed account of the activities of the Society in Paraguay was provided by Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), whom the Argentine government entrusted with recording the ventures of the Society in Paraguay. The study, entitled El imperio jesuítico, evolved into a more expansive historical essay than originally conceived, as it incorporated the geographical and archeological features of the Jesuit estate.¹¹⁰

Revuelta González also mentions Pablo José Hernández (1852–1921) as another Jesuit who collaborated with Antonio Astrain after accompanying him on his trip to Spanish America to study archival documents in Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. The fruit of this research was Reseña histórica de la misión Chile–Paraguay, which not only corroborated Pérez’s work on Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil but also extended its scope from 1879 to 1914.¹¹¹ In 1918, four years after Hernández’s volume appeared, the Argentine–Chilean province, including Uruguay, was formed.

Around 1940, according to Revuelta González, a new stage began in the maturation of Jesuit historiography. This phase involves the concern for such issues as the formation of Argentina’s clergy and secular education in the region, since the Jesuits supervised it. This line of study deals with aspects such as the history of schools, houses of formation, and seminaries, among other educational establishments. The most outstanding historiographical publications on these enterprises are those by Isérn―and later continued by Ibáñez Padilla, S.J. (1927–2015)―Sebastián Raggi, S.J., Joaquín Gracia, S.J. (1869–1944), and Guillermo Fúrlong, S.J.¹¹² Fúrlong’s Los jesuitas y la cultura rioplatense attempts to systematize the Society’s cultural contribution by cataloging clergymen who played important roles in the development of evangelization in the Río de la Plata region: explorers, colonizers, protectors of indigenous peoples, cartographers, builders, printers, botanists, philosophers, theologians, teachers and masters, saints and martyrs.¹¹³ Fúrlong’s prolific historiographical work requires particular notice, covering, as it does, the pre- and post-restoration period and various themes arising from this, in particular the Jesuits’ contribution to education,¹¹⁴ which finally led to the opening of the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires in 1956.

From the 1960s, there was a revision of historical, historiographical, and heritage studies of the Society. Among others, the most important contributions here are those by Fúrlong, María Elena Imolesi, and the vast oeuvre of Pedro Grenón, S.J. (1845–1912) in Córdoba.¹¹⁵ More recently, a conference was held in Mendoza to celebrate the bicentennial of the Society’s restoration and presence in Argentina. The proceedings were published as Incarnatio novitas: 200 años de la restauración de la Compañía de Jesús.¹¹⁶

Among the many biographies published, the most noteworthy are those by the first director of the San José de Córdoba School, Cayetano Carlucci, S.J. (1834–1900); Camilo María Jordán, S.J. (1839–1911); the “apostle of immigrants,” Juan José Auweiler, S.J. (1832–1911); Hilario Fernández, S.J. (1845–1912, Operarius and “apostle to labor”); Grenón (operarius, “apostle of the poor and those suffering from leprosy,” as well as being a prolific historian); and the controversial Leonardo Luis Castellani (1899–1981).¹¹⁷

Uruguay

As indicated earlier, the Jesuits’ return to Uruguay was a consequence of their expulsion from Argentina in 1843, which was in turn provoked by their disagreements with the administration of Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of Buenos Aires province, who had previously welcomed them. In 1857, a Jesuit sermon on the difference between charity and philanthropy angered Gabriel Antonio Pereira (1794–1861), president of Uruguay between 1856 and 1860, who, influenced by Freemasonry, expelled the order in 1859. In 1860, in response to the sermon, Clemente Marica (a pseudonym) published “an explanatory letter” attacking the Society and its sympathizers and defending the Freemasons and their philanthropy.¹¹⁸

For the remainder of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, the history of the Society in Uruguay is best understood through the publications of the Jesuits Rafael Pérez, Pablo Hernández, and Guillermo Fúrlong. Also worthy of note is Los jesuitas en Uruguay: Tercera época (1872–1940) by Uruguayan historian Juan Faustino Sallaberry, S.J. (1871–1945), which was published in 1935 and inspired by the fervor induced by the Eucharistic Congress of the previous year. This slim volume describes the background to the Jesuits’ return to Uruguay, their missions, and the founding of their seminary, as well as their contributions to the local church. A corrected and substantially expanded second edition appeared in 1940.¹¹⁹

New contributions to Jesuit historiography appeared in the 1970s with the work of Darío Liserio, S.D.B.—an article followed by a collection of chapters entitled Iglesia y estado del Uruguay en el lustro definitorio (1859–1863) based on a broad range of historic sources.¹²⁰

In 1996, Cotelo Fariña compiled a bibliography on the Jesuits in Uruguay that facilitated a renewal of Jesuit historical studies in the country. Under this impulse, the Jesuit Julio Fernández Techera’s two-volume Jesuitas, masones y universidad en el Uruguay appeared in 2007 and 2010. This is a key reference work not only for research on Uruguay but also on Argentina and Chile, as it showcases an extensive documentary apparatus that confirms the Jesuit contribution to the development of education in that region.¹²¹ In this context of renewal, we also find significant the works of Susana Monreal on the history of the Society on Uruguay from its reinstatement to the early twentieth century.¹²²

Other important works fill out the history of the order’s apostolate in Uruguay. They relate to specific apostolic ventures such as the Apostolic Center San Francisco Javier founded in 1896 by a group of Catholic women, with the members of the center receiving spiritual direction from the priests of the Society. Francisco Costa, S.J. (1855–1923) recorded its evolution in 1914. Also noteworthy is the Jesuit Juan José Villegas’s (1931–2007) work on Jesuit education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹²³

Paraguay

The study of the Guaraní missions in Paraguay of the pre-suppression era has dominated the local Jesuit historiography of the post-restoration period. Many reasons can be given for this, as the enormous success of that apostolate in colonial times was widely recognized. However, the reinstatement of the Society was a harsh process in the new republic. From 1814, the dictator José Gaspar de Francia (1766–1840, in office 1814–40) expelled all religious orders and closed the existing seminaries. His successors did not facilitate the reinstatement either, and after a brief stay in the mid-1840s, and due to a problem involving the local bishop of Asunción, Basilio López (1781–1859), once again the few Jesuits present were forced to leave the country.

At the end of the 1850s, French Jean Antoine Víctor Martín de Moussy (1810–69) published Memoria histórica sobre la decadencia y ruina de las misiones jesuíticas en el seno del Plata: Su estado en 1856 in the city of Paraná (Argentina). Half a century later came the aforementioned Imperio jesuítico by Leopoldo Lugones, which was later complemented by another work by Pablo Hernández, the two-volume Misiones del Paraguay: Organización social de las doctrinas guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús, published in Barcelona in 1913. In the appendix to chapter 9 of this work, Hernández devotes a section to the old town of the missions and its ruins.¹²⁴ Pérez’s and Hernández’s aforementioned works of 1901 and 1914 are still valuable for their general views on the country.¹²⁵

Despite several attempts, the official return of the Society to Paraguay was only achieved in the second half of the 1920s. In a mimeographed edition and over half a century later, Luis Parola, S.J. (1885–1978) wrote a history of the 1927–69 period. New historical research appeared in Asunción in 1978 and 1988, the latter written by the Jesuits Clement J. McNaspy (1915–95) and Fernando María Moreno.¹²⁶ Ernesto Maeder’s study on the Society’s missions in Paraguay from 1768 to 1850 was published for the fifth centennial of the discovery of America in 1992.¹²⁷ Maeder also collaborated with Ramón Gutiérrez on an important study of the Guaraní mission from an urban perspective, considering its demographic, social, and economic characteristics as well as its daily life, the effects of the wars for independence, and the consequences of the division of the mission between Argentina and Paraguay.¹²⁸

In 2014, two important documents on the Jesuits’ first attempt to return to Paraguay were published by Ignacio Telesca and Nicolás Perrone. The following year, Telesca delivered his research “The First Return of the Jesuits to Paraguay” outlining his earlier works. His book of 2009 is part of the current historiographical renewal that emphasizes the regional Spanish American character of nineteenth-century Jesuit history, supported by new archival research, and complemented by a strong demographical, territorial, and economic focus.¹²⁹

Chile

Jesuits were only able to settle in Chile at the end of the 1840s. However, both before and after, several re-published foreign works and original ones on the Jesuitism versus anti-Jesuitism controversy appeared. Among others, it is worth mentioning the panegyric of Saint Ignatius of Loyola that was published in 1843 as well as Catholic lawyer Salvador Valdés Morandé’s (1898–1975) La Compañía de Jesús, ¡ay Jesús qué compañía! ¹³⁰

The author of the abovementioned panegyric, Argentinian priest Vitaliano Molina, who died in 1859, migrated with his uncle Father Castro Barros (1777–1849) to Chile in 1841 as religious missionaries. In the first part of the book, Molina reproduces his preaching on July 31, 1843, at the monastery of Santa Rosa de Lima in the nation’s capital―with footnotes by his uncle that were aimed at enhancing the saint’s legacy. The second part of the volume includes an Apologetic Memory of the Society of Jesus written by Castro Barros and based almost exclusively on non-Catholic authors such as Bacon, Grotius, Leibnitz, von Haller, Robertson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire.

Castro Barros, a prominent member of the Argentinian congress of Tucumán of 1816 that declared Argentina’s independence, was known for his promotion of the Society’s “repatriation” to Spanish America. In 1844, at his “request and expense,” as stated on the cover page, he reissued in Chile a work on the restoration of the Society in New Granada. The volume, which reproduced a series of documents on this subject, was extensively annotated by Barros with the same apologetic tenor as the aforementioned work, Apologetic Memory, though its contents were completely different.¹³¹

Almost a decade later, in the 1860s, two events of some consequence affected the order’s history. The first was the burning of the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús in Santiago on the feast of the immaculate conception in 1863. In recent years, Sol Serrano has examined the importance this tragedy acquired within Chile’s secularization process and the conflict by which the order was afflicted.¹³² The second was the beginning of negotiations by the Chilean state for the purchase of the archive of the “Junta de Temporalidades de la Compañía en América.” The archive, property of the Spanish government, had been transferred to Madrid and put on sale as wrapping paper in 1868.¹³³ The Chilean government was successful in the negotiations,¹³⁴ and today the description of more than 633 volumes and their respective documents can be accessed online for free through the catalog of the National Library. The collection includes papers from 1561 to 1800, mainly from Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Venezuela.¹³⁵

Regarding the general history of the order in Chile, in 1891, Francisco Enrich (1817–83), one of the first Jesuits to arrive during the post-restoration era, published two volumes in Barcelona on the colonial period. His research examines the “old order,” as he calls it, from 1593 up to the death of the last surviving expelled member from 1767, a Chilean Jesuit brother who died at the age of ninety-six in 1839 in Imola, Italy. Enrich also wrote a third volume that took the Society’s history in Chile up to his death in 1883. This work, however, was left unpublished, probably because of the author’s judgmental stance toward some of his colleagues, according to Rodrigo Moreno and Alfredo Palacios Roa, who recently edited the manuscript. Pérez and Hernández, as mentioned above, completed the history of the entire region in 1901 and 1914, thereby relegating Enrich’s third volume to a historical curiosity, albeit one that still contains very valuable information.¹³⁶

The Jesuit Walter Hanish’s (1916–2001) Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Chile (1593–1955) is an indispensable reference work on the history of the Society in Chile as contextualized within a wider bibliography about the history of the church and the Society. Also noteworthy are the regional studies on the Society’s venture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in places as distant as the northern border and Arauco in the south of the country. Blanco and Pereira, on the other hand, reassess the contribution of Jesuit education in Chile. Fernanda Beigel’s volume on the Jesuit academic world and the beginning of international Catholic cooperation in the mission of Santiago, between 1957 and 1973.¹³⁷

The twentieth century saw the first biographies and autobiographies of Chilean Jesuits. Fernando Vives, S.J. (1871–1935) published in Spain a biography of his colleague and friend Luis Goycolea Walton, S.J. (1871–1905). Rafael Sagredo published a compilation of the writings of Vives, one of the most paradigmatic figures of the Society in Chile. As spiritual father of an important generation of Catholics in the middle of the twentieth century from a broad political spectrum that helped transform Chilean society, Vives’s story ironically sparked curiosity due to the lack of information given about his life. Marked by the “exiles” he suffered in Argentina and Spain by order of his superiors, for unclear reasons his papers were burned at the time of his death.¹³⁸

Vives’s main disciple was Alberto Hurtado, S.J. (1901–52, canonized 2005), whose first biography was published by Alejandro Magnet in 1954.¹³⁹ A new biography was recently published that focuses on his formation in the order, a sloppy topic in general from a historiographical standpoint. It covers the interwar period in Leuven, where he was a student of Jean-Baptiste Janssens, S.J. (1889–1964).¹⁴⁰ Thus started a long personal and intellectual understanding, a friendship reaffirmed with Hurtado’s trip to Rome in 1947 to meet Pope Pius XII to present him with a report describing the religious and social situation of his country. However, Hurtado did so only after he discussed his draft with Janssens, then superior general of the Society (in office 1946–64). As those meetings developed, Janssens asked Hurtado to help him with some ideas in a letter that he wanted to address to the order on the same subject, later titled “Instructio de apostolatu sociali” and dated October 10, 1949. Janssens’s letter set the basis for the future “renovation project” of the Society of Jesus—as Valero Agúndez calls it in his 2011 work—that began years later.¹⁴¹

Other relevant biographical works are Eduardo Tampe’s 1995 article devoted to Jesuit chaplains in the War of the Pacific (1879–84), Juan Isérn’s biography of social worker Antonio Falgueras, S.J. (1864–1924), and lawyer Manuel Ugarte Godoy’s (1953–2017) biography of Hurtado’s disciple Mauricio Riesco, S.J. (1908–91). Valuable information is also available in the autobiographies of the Jesuits Álvaro Lavín Echegoyen (1902–90), Mario Vergara Vicuña, and José Aldunate Lyon (1917–2019), which were published during this period.¹⁴² The book on the Hungarian Jesuit Feren Deák (d.2019), Misión en Chile: En tiempos de cambio y crisis (1956–1975), based on interviews by Gábor Molnár, tells of Deák’s twenty-five-year sojourn in Chile. ¹⁴³ Also worthy of note is Eduardo Tampe’s important two-volume biographical work En la huella de San Ignacio: Semblanzas de jesuitas en Chile, the second volume of which covers the history of the Jesuits in Chile from 1823 to 1985.¹⁴⁴

Colombia

Any history of the Society of Jesus in Colombia in the twentieth century must recall the negotiations in 1820 between the archbishop of Bogotá, Nicolás Cuervo y Rojas (1751–1832), and the Colombian minister in London concerning the order’s return to Colombia. However, it was only in 1842 that Mariano Ospina Rodríguez (1805–85), minister of the interior, presented a bill before congress for the reinstatement of one or two mission schools that the Jesuits had founded prior to their expulsion of 1767. Several works record their reinstatement. The first, by Manuel J. Mosquera (1800–53), bishop of Popayán, was published in the same year as the aforementioned bill in 1842.¹⁴⁵ Under the liberal rule of José Hilario López, the Society was again expelled in 1850. It was reinstated in 1858 during President Ospina’s administration (in office 1857–61), which generated a new surge of publications on the subject. Among them are those by José Joaquín Borda (1835–78), a talented individual who had a strong influence on the intellectual and political life of his country. Dissatisfied with the works by José Cassani, S.J. (1673–1750), Borda published the two-volume work Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la Nueva Granada, covering the period from Christopher Columbus’s (1451–1506) discovery of Cabo Gracias a Dios in 1502 up to the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁴⁶

As a continuation of Borda’s work, Rafael Pérez’s three-volume La Compañía de Jesús en Colombia y Centro-América después de su restauración (1896 and 1898), covered the first period but then extended the history from 1842 to 1871.¹⁴⁷ In the twentieth century, a greater number of general studies of the Society’s history in Colombia appeared. Of note are the contributions in 1920 of the Jesuits Luis Muñoz and Félix Restrepo (1887–1965).¹⁴⁸ Several works were published in response to Superior General Ledóchowski’s call to celebrate the fourth centennial of the foundation of the Society in 1540. Worthy of note are works by the historian Daniel Restrepo, S.J. (1871–1962); an anonymous work on the Colombian Jesuits during the Society’s first four hundred years, published in 1940; and a volume by brothers Jesús (1910–2008) and Gerardo Sanín (1926–2006), both Jesuits, which were published in 1956.¹⁴⁹ Other works appeared between 2003 and 2012 celebrating the fourth centennial, this time of the arrival of the Jesuits to the city of Cartagena de Indias in 1604, the most comprehensive of which is by Fortunato Herrera Molina.¹⁵⁰

In 2014, Jorge Salcedo Martínez, S.J. published Las vicisitudes de los jesuitas en Colombia durante el siglo XIX. This work, the fruit of Salcedo’s doctoral studies, served to commemorate the bicentennial of the Society’s universal restoration by Pope Pius VII in 1814.¹⁵¹

From 1980 on, important regional histories contributed to the historiography of the Society’s ministries in Colombia, including books by the Jesuits Manuel Briceño Jauregui (1917–92) on the mission of Magdalena, Jaime Álvarez (1917–2001) on the Society in Pasto, and three woks by Tulio Aristizábal Giraldo (1921–2019) on Cartagena de Indias. To these must be added two articles, one on the order’s arrival in the city of Antioquia and the other on the press coverage of the Jesuit debates in Santiago de Cali.¹⁵²

Daniel Restrepo’s aforementioned work includes a “gallery of illustrious men,” the first biographies of Jesuit priests who worked in Colombia. Another highly valuable work, fruit of the enormous labor by Alberto Moreno Arango, S.J. (1899–1984), is Necrologio de la Compañía de Jesús en Colombia, which was published between 1957 and 2013 with the collaboration of other Jesuits.¹⁵³ Finally, two monographs were also published about individual Jesuits who stood out for their social and intellectual work: José María Campoamor Álvarez (1872–1946), founder of the Workers’ Circle, and historian Juan Manuel Pacheco (1914–86), whose three-volume study mainly covers the colonial period.¹⁵⁴

The Jesuit historiography of Colombia includes works in the field of education: one on the order’s formational centers and schools and a series on the Universidad Javeriana. Histories of smaller Jesuit schools—San Ignacio in Medellin, San Bartolomé in Bogotá, and San José in Barranquilla—are also of interest, while an article by the Jesuits Augusto Gutiérrez and Carlos Espinal records the trajectory of all the Jesuit establishments in the country.¹⁵⁵

Regarding studies devoted to the Universidad Javeriana from the 1930s onward, some articles consider the religious question in the context of the debates on education and the Jesuits’ contribution to Colombia’s national culture. In more recent times, however, Thomas J. Williford has re-examined this period, taking into consideration that the reopening of the university coincided with the political changes the country was experiencing and the prominent political role of the Concejo of Bogotá.¹⁵⁶ Other articles reflect on the university’s re-founding after 163 years of suppression, the Society’s contribution to the sciences, the debate over the relationship between the university and the Society, as well as the university’s inauguration as “Catholic” and “pontifical.” Of considerable interest is a series of articles on the history of the Universidad Javeriana emphasizing its bond with the old academy founded by the Jesuits in 1623.¹⁵⁷ A more recent study describes the university’s historical contribution to the sciences in Colombia from its foundation, while another considers the campus of the university as a “historical memory.”¹⁵⁸

Central America

The history of the order in Central America presents challenges from early on, stemming from strong Freemason and anticlerical influences in the region that led to the expulsions of the Society of Jesus from these territories. During the nineteenth century, the Jesuit province of Central America, formed by the republics of Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and, later, Panama, experienced various expulsions and reinstatements, which generated instability throughout the province. The republics themselves were unstable, with social problems and concomitant violence compounding the province’s difficulties. During the early twentieth century, the Society negotiated with each of the republics with the aim of forming a consistent, collective relationship but without success.

After thirty years of expulsions, in 1936, Superior General Ledóchowski designated the Central American province a vice-province dependent on the province of Castile. This administrative division presented new opportunities for the order from both pastoral and historiographical perspectives. As to the latter, the fractious character common to Central American countries facilitated the production of interconnected articles on the different historical aspects of the order in the region.

In the category of general history, it is important to consult the Jesuit Rafael Pérez’s work on the Society in Colombia and Central America, which was complemented years later by articles by other authors.¹⁵⁹ For Guatemala, the works of Orlando Falla, Hubert J. Miller, Francisco Javier Gómez Diez, and the Jesuits Ricardo Bendaña Perdomo and Jesús M. Sariego are the most relevant.¹⁶⁰ On Nicaragua, the works by Franco Cerutti are especially important, but also noteworthy are those by Julián N. Guerrero C. with Lola Soriano de Guerrero and Enrique Alvarado Martínez.¹⁶¹ Foremost for Costa Rica is Roberto Marín Guzmán’s study on the controversy between Guatemalan politician Lorenzo Montúfar (1823–98) and León Tornero, S.J. (1818–77).¹⁶² The historiography of the Society’s ministries in El Salvador is particularly vast. Of particular note are works by the Jesuits Santiago Malaina (1884–1962), Sebastián Mantilla, and Charles J. Beirne, the latter covering the tragic killing of Jesuit priests during the military dictatorship.¹⁶³ The Jesuit Fernando Cardenal Martínez’s (1934–2016) work on El Salvador is particularly controversial given his involvement in the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and his papal suspension a divinis in 1984, which Cardenal recalls in his two-volume memoirs Sacerdote en la revolución.¹⁶⁴ Articles by historians Ernesto Castillero R. (1889–1981) and Juan Antonio Susto Lara (1896–1985), as well as lay writer Manuel Cambra’s En todo amar y servir, explore the historiography of the Jesuits and their ministries in Panama.¹⁶⁵ Indispensable for Honduras are the autobiographical memoirs of James Guadalupe Carney, S.J. (1924−83) and the Jesuit Ricardo Falla’s history of the Society in Honduras from 1946 to 1996.¹⁶⁶

Ecuador

As mentioned earlier, the Court of Cadiz rejected the petition of the Spanish American deputies to restore the Society of Jesus in the region, though it was never a unanimous petition—the Quito representative dissented. Nevertheless, Ecuador, as a member of Gran Colombia, made various attempts to reinstate the order in its own territory. Twenty years after Gran Colombia was dissolved (1831), Ecuador became an independent republic, and Diego Noboa (1789–1870), president between 1850 and 1851, facilitated the Jesuits’ reinstatement. But this did not last long, as studied by Eduardo Restrepo Sáenz.¹⁶⁷

The liberal government of José María Urbina (1808–91, in office 1852–56) expelled the Jesuits, who took refuge in Guatemala. In 1860, Gabriel García Moreno (1821–75) became interim president, then president (in office 1869–75), with a policy of infrastructure development. He saw the Society of Jesus as especially capable of expediting the educational transformations he planned. Hence, as Francisco Miranda Ribadeneira, S.J. reports, the Society was readmitted and entrusted with the Colegio Nacional de Quito and the Colegio de Guayaquil, among other institutions.¹⁶⁸ In 1863, the Jesuit province of Spain was divided, and Ecuador became part of the new province of Castile. As Jorge Villalba, S.J. (1915–2011) recounts, Federico González Suárez (1844–1917), who entered the Jesuit order but left before ordination in 1872 went on to play a key role in Ecuador’s ecclesiastical life as future archbishop of Quito.¹⁶⁹

In 1912, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Jesuits’ arrival in Ecuador, José Ricardo Vázquez, S.J. (1867–1953) published the first general history of the Society’s work in this region. French Jesuit José (Jean) Jouanen (1860–1952), who lived in the country for fifty-eight years, produced the most complete history of the Society in Ecuador from 1850 to 1900. However, this work remained unpublished until 2003, when Jorge Villalba, S.J. published it along with his own extension of the history to the mid-twentieth century.¹⁷⁰

In 1894, Lorenzo López Sanvicente, S.J. (1841–1917) published La misión del Napo, Ecuador’s first regional history. Jaime Moreno Tejada recently took up the topic again in his article on the socioeconomic interrelationship toward the turn of the twentieth century among religious men, indigenous peoples, merchants, and civil authorities in the east Amazonian region of Alto Napo.¹⁷¹ Finally, among other notable works is Jouanen’s Los jesuitas y el Oriente ecuatoriano, 1868–1898 on the missions in today’s Manabí and Esmeraldas provinces. It remained unpublished until 1977, and the work has since been updated by David Chamorro Espinosa for the 1918–62 period.¹⁷²

Peru

Peru was still a viceroyalty in 1815 when King Ferdinand decreed the Jesuits’ readmission to Spain’s dominions. When Peru gained its independence from Spain in 1821, however, liberal and anticlerical influences in the Peruvian government delayed the Society’s reinstatement until the 1870s, when the new republic became part of the Ecuadorian mission. During the War of the Pacific that pitted a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance against Chile, Jesuits commendably filled pastoral needs on the battlefield. However, Spanish Jesuit Ricardo Cappa’s 1886 compendium of the history of Peru, in which he referred to the Inca Empire as barbaric, praised Spain’s colonization, and condemned the heroes of Peru’s war of independence, provoked a congressional resolution to expel the order. Not until the twentieth century did publications treat the history of this period: for example, Freemason Christian Dam’s (c.1853–1920) rabidly anticlerical Breve reseña sobre la historia de los jesuitas desde su fundación hasta el año de 1907; an article by Francisco Mateos, S.J. (1896–1975) on Spanish Jesuits in nineteenth-century Peru; José Carlos Martín's pamphlet on the order’s apostolic role in the armed conflict with Chile (1879–84); and the Jesuit Armando Nieto Vélez’s (1931–2017) article on the Society’s activities in Peru during the same period.¹⁷³

Other works of note are Jesuit Rubén Vargas Ugarte’s (1886–1975) essay on the Society’s legal situation in the country, complemented by other articles by Francisco Mateos and one by Nieto Vélez, both on twentieth-century Spanish Jesuits in contemporary Peru.¹⁷⁴ Lastly, José Antonio Benito Rodríguez recently contributed an article on Nieto Vélez’s historiography.¹⁷⁵ Also worth noting is historian and politician Luis Antonio Eguiguren’s (1887–1967) substantial Las huellas de la Compañía de Jesús en el Perú, which contains valuable documentation such as inventories of Jesuit libraries made at the time of the Society’s expulsion in 1767.¹⁷⁶

Bolivia

In many ways, Bolivia’s historiography is similar to Paraguay’s in that both focus on the colonial mission period and leave aside the events of their independence and post-restoration periods. On the other hand, while Francisco Mateos investigated the contribution of Spanish Jesuits in Bolivia, María del Carmen Salcedo Vereda examined the particular local contribution of the Catalonian members. In 1981, commemorating the centennial of the Jesuits’ arrival in Bolivia, Antonio Menacho, S.J. published a brief history of the order for private circulation covering the period from the colonial and republican eras into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2007, Menacho also studied the relationship between the Society of Jesus and its apostolate of education in the country. In 2016, Enrique Jordá’s article commemorated the centennial of the Jesuits’ arrival in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.¹⁷⁷

Though the historiography of Bolivia has, until now, overlooked the Jesuit missions in that territory, worth noting are the works by Pedro Querejazu on the Chiquitos mission, David Block on the Moxos mission, and Fernández Zambón and Aldo Guzmán Ramos’s account of the development of the reductions in the Chiquitania region from 1691 to 2011.¹⁷⁸

Venezuela

Venezuela was the last of the Spanish-speaking territories on the continent to welcome Jesuits. After the tension between church and state in this country during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, negotiations between the Venezuelan secular authorities and the Holy See’s apostolic delegate, Archbishop Carlo Pietropaoli (1857–1922), determined that the order would take charge of the diocesan seminary in Caracas. This occurred in 1916. Since then, education has been the Society’s primary ministry in Venezuela. The previously mentioned works by Miguel Bertrán Quera and José del Rey Fajardo are still among the most important studies about Jesuit education at the universal level. Locally, also of note is lay historian Aureo Yépes Castillo’s (d.1998) comprehensive study La Universidad Católica Andrés Bello: En el marco histórico-educativo de los jesuitas en Venezuela (1994).¹⁷⁹

As to general works, noteworthy are those of Mons. Nicolás Navarro (1867–1960) and Manuel Aguirre Elorriaga, S.J. (1904–69) at the beginning of the 1940s.¹⁸⁰ José del Rey Fajardo’s impressive intellectual production on the history of the order in Venezuela marks a substantial advance in these studies for both the colonial and post-restoration periods.¹⁸¹ More recently, Joseba Lazcano, S.J. published Sembrando esperanza: 100 años de los jesuitas en Venezuela (2016) on the centennial of the order’s arrival in the country.¹⁸²

Spanish Antilles

By 1826, the territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only surviving remnants of a once-continental Spanish Empire. Thus, in contrast to other parts of Spanish America, the restoration of the Society of Jesus in both archipelagos was subject to Spain’s initiative, as were, of course, the expulsions decreed in the peninsula.

The return of Jesuit missions to both countries in the second half of the nineteenth century focused on secondary education. Colegio de Belén in Havana and Colegio de San Juan were outstanding. The Spanish–American War in 1898 culminated in the political independence of these territories and changed the situation not only of the these nations but also of the Jesuit institutions they contained, as they were no longer under Spanish dominion. The Society’s scant historiographical development here was probably due to the protracted turmoil on both islands.

For Cuba, in the first three decades of the 1900s, all works published were of an institutional character, celebrating jubilees of the foundation of their main schools or that of the order. The two main pieces of research on the history of the Society in the country were published in 2005 and 2016. The first, by scholars Eduardo Torres Cuevas and Edelberto Leiva Lajara, reviews the order’s history from the Jesuits’ arrival in 1566 to the beginnings of the 1900s. The second, by José Luis Sáez, S.J., also begins in the mid-1500s before eventually reaching the first years of Fidel Castro’s (1926–2016, in office 1965–2011) revolution in the 1960s.¹⁸³

For Puerto Rico, historical studies on the Society of Jesus appeared by the mid-twentieth century. The history of the Jesuit contribution to general education from 1858 to 1886, by Antonio López de Santa Anna, S.J. (1881–1964), coincided with the local centennial of the order. Four years later, Sister M. Teresa Gertrude Webster, O.P. published her article on the history of the seminary in Puerto Rico, which was in Jesuit hands between 1858 and 1878. Francisco Javier Gómez Díez has published two articles on Jesuit education in the country. The first is dedicated to its history between 1858 and 1886 and the tensions that arose with the secular authorities. The second, following the same trail, explores the marginalization of Puerto Rico in the Spanish educational system of the nineteenth century.¹⁸⁴

Though the Dominican Republic was part of the Spanish Antilles, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) profoundly marked its social and political evolution. For the Dominicans, the nineteenth century started with the invasion of the Haitian revolutionary army, followed soon after by French troops, who imposed their own government. With the help of the British, the invaders were expelled, and in 1821 the country declared its independence. However, a new offensive from Haiti merged the two states, and only after several decades were the Dominicans able to regain their freedom and plead with the Spanish to be reincorporated to the empire. Their return to the Spanish crown did not last long, and once again independence was declared, not before a brief attempt to reinstate the Society of Jesus was explored at the end of 1861 and the beginning of 1862. A second attempt failed at the turn of the century.

A third attempt at the beginning of the 1930s set the basis for the order’s definitive return in the second half of the decade. The first objective of the members of the order that were to settle there was the mission near the Haitian border. In 1958, López de Santa Anna, S.J. wrote its history after twenty-one years of apostolic work. The importance of the “Misión Fronteriza,” however, is that it became the center for all other Jesuit foundations in the country, such as the Fundación del Seminario Menor (1939–41), El Colegio Agricola San Ignacio de Loyola (1945), Radio Santa María (1956), Centro de Formación Social y Agraria (CEFASA), and Colegio de Dajabon (1968), among others. A detailed historical account, containing information on further initiatives such as the parishes under their care, was published by José Luis Sáez Ramo, S.J. in two voluminous books of more than nine hundred pages between 1990 and 1995. In 1995, secular priest Rafael Bello Peguero’s documented work on the Society of Jesus and its relationship with the pontifical seminary in the country was published, too.¹⁸⁵

Conclusion

After this journey across Spanish American Jesuit historiography, we are able to draw some relevant conclusions. First, we take responsibility for what we have argued in relation to Revuelta González’s article,¹⁸⁶ specifically on the period from the restoration to the 1890s. Through studies published by Jesuit and lay scholars, we have established the need to reevaluate the historiographical importance of this preliminary stage. Jesuit history in Spanish America began for a second time from the moment Ferdinand VII reinstated the order in the Spanish Empire in 1815. In this way, the phase between 1815 and the 1890s―despite all the problems faced by Jesuits, or possibly because of those same struggles―must be included in Revuelta González’s opening period if we are to follow his schema. From the 1930s onward, a subsequent phase runs to the 1980s, when a new period, with diverse and specialized characteristics, renovates the Jesuits’ studies. That historiographical renewal in this part of the world, however, relates to the efforts of the church and the order to thoroughly assimilate the Second Vatican Council, as well as those of the of Thirty-First General Congregation of 1965. Moreover, Revuelta González asserts that a new period begins in the 1980s, characterized by a wider scope of research topics and a stronger tendency for female participation in the Society’s historiography. In the case of Spanish America, the traits of maturity in Jesuit historical production emphasize the links between the order and the social and political areas in terms of the order’s identity, as introduced in the first part of this work.

Second, we have raised a question concerning Revuelta González’s assertion about the projection of the Society’s Iberian situation onto Spanish America. As we have indicated, the Society’s conflicts in each region had distinct characteristics arising from their own sociopolitical processes, all of which were different from those of Spain. To make any generalizations, we would first have to carefully analyze each particular case. This would require that we recognize that the Jesuit historiography of Spanish America is a complex issue, not least because European parameters do not easily translate and replicate themselves on this continent.

Third, among the lines of research that are more developed, we can highlight the Society’s general histories, written primarily to discern continuity between the old and the restored order in various countries. The Jesuit provinces that stand out for quantity and quality of publications on Jesuit historiography are those from Mexico, Argentina, and today’s Colombia, while the least prolific ones, despite the importance of their contributions, are those from Paraguay, Peru, and Bolivia, where historiography is still focused mainly on the colonial period to the neglect of the post-restoration era.

Judging from the number of historiographical publications on education, this topic sparked considerable interest—particularly in the development of Jesuit schools and their curricula, as well as Jesuit contributions to pedagogy and the Ratio studiorum as a special teaching methodology. Parallel with this interest, we find studies on the order’s contribution to culture as well as its influence regionally, socially, and politically.

Another noteworthy aspect of Jesuit historiography is the order’s relevance as a subject of study within ecclesiastical history. Our research confirms the interest of historians in multiple aspects of Jesuit ministries in the church of Spanish America that remain to this day.

However, that the topics identified above have proven of interest to historians raises the question of which issues have sparked less interest and why. There is a scarcity of works on the Jesuit mission’s greatest influences on society, namely publications related to spiritual guidance and the transmission of the order’s spiritual characteristics to Spanish American populations. In this respect, we should also note the limited attention given to the intellectual history in which Jesuits participate. With exceptions like Fernanda Beigel’s work, a systematic study of the intellectual networks of the order is also urgently required.

Finally, the issue of the missions in the Society’s post-restoration period has scarcely been discussed, especially in the nineteenth century; the same also applies to its evolution toward the end of that century. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century was much attention paid to the transformation that Jesuit works experienced in terms of geographic space from rural to urban, and in terms of action from evangelizing missions to an apostolic mission in the social sphere. These are closely connected to issues raised by industrialization. We believe this phenomenon was crucial for twentieth-century historiography and the analysis of continuity or rupture within the Society between the old and restored order.

To close, we would like to recall Róisín Healy’s words. In her review of Klaus Schatz’s five-volume Geschichte der deutschen Jesuiten (1814–1983), Healy asserts that, the “post-restoration era has long been neglected in Jesuit historiography.”¹⁸⁷ As announced in the introduction, we have tried to explore the core historic works of the order at a continental level. Our view will hopefully contribute to new and renovated studies on the history of the Jesuit order in the region, especially considering the fact the current pope is not only a Jesuit but also from Spanish America.