An emailer defends the Jesuits:
“As I recollect (from reading John O’Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits, a book well worth reading), the Jesuit ban on Jews was because to begin with, unlike other religious orders (and, indeed, all Christian society) they did not ban conversos, and therefore included a rather high percentage of them in the first generation or two of the Jesuits’ existence. (Note, for example, St. Teresa of Avila, in the loosely-Jesuit-affiliated Carmelite order, herself of converso descent.) The ban was in some ways forced on them: their rival orders (Dominicans, etc.) were making hay about “the Jesuits are all a bunch of Jews,” so the Jesuits conformed with the rest of Christian society. It’s also specifically in line with the Spanish limpieza de sangre laws, barring conversos from a variety of occupations–with which the Church in general at first fought and then generally compromised. Of course, by the time the compromises were done, and the Jesuits had forbidden conversos from the order, a rather large number of conversos and part-conversos in the middle and upper classes had forged sufficient genealogies to get into any order they wanted. The limpieza de sangre laws were in some ways more a tool in intra-Castilian factional fights–your great-grandmother was a Jew, so you can’t get this lucrative job, Don Miguel–than an expression of simple bigotry. But the point being that to identify the Jesuits as particularly guilty of anti-Semitism avant la lettre is 1) counterfactual; and 2) buying into the old tropes of anti-Catholicism, where it’s always the Jesuits, the Jesuits, the Jesuits who are evil, evil, evil. At the time they’re disliked from being too philosemitic; now they’re accused of the reverse.”
I don’t think any reader of this blog would remember me having anything but respect for the Jesuits. In this country, they are becoming the underground resistance that will keep the decent church alive while Benedict spreads his brittle reactionaryism. My point is simply that the Church hierarchy has acquiesced in and found theological justifications for the stigmatization of minorities in the past – and their chief objects of loathing were Jews. Like gays, Jews’ very existence seemed to violate the abstract notions of natural law that the Church had constructed to qualify the message of universal love in the Gospels. The Church hierarchy is human. It has perpetrated bigotry against the marginalized in the past. It is doing so again today. Merely the objects of dehumanization have changed. And one day, it will be as ashamed of its treatment of gays as it now officially is of its persecution of the Jewish people. It just may take a couple of millennia for the point to be conceded.
The Dish 