Jesuit Sanctity: Hypothesizing the Continuity of a Hagiographic Narrative of the Modern Age

The introduction to this special issue provides some considerations on early modern sanctity as a historical object. It firstly presents the major shifts in the developing idea of sanctity between the late medieval period and the nineteenth century, passing through the early modern construction of sanctity and its cultural, social, and political implications. Secondly, it provides an overview of the main sources that allow historians to retrace early modern sanctity, especially canonization records and hagiographies. Thirdly, it offers an overview of the ingenious role of the Society of Jesus in the construction of early modern sanctity, by highlighting its ability to employ, create, and play with hagiographical models. The main Jesuit models of sanctity are then presented (i.e., the theologian, the missionary, the martyr, the living saint), and an important reflection is reserved for the specific martyrial character of Jesuit sanctity. The introduction assesses the continuity of the Jesuit hagiographical discourse throughout the long history of the order, from the origins to the suppression and restoration.

Patronage, Politics, and Devotion: The Habsburgs of Central Europe and Jesuit Saints

The main components of the Habsburgs’ dynastical piety—worship of the Crucified, of the Eucharist, of the Blessed Mary and her spouse St. Joseph—are already well-known. They were common to both branches of the House of Austria, the Spanish as well as the Austrian one. However, they are far from exhausting the variety of manifestations with which they fostered the cult of the saints. More than other sovereigns, Austrian Habsburgs intervened on behalf of patron saints with the popes and the Roman Congregation of Sacred Rites. During the seventeenth century and still in the eighteenth century, they promulgated public feasts in the Austrian hereditary lands as well as in the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia. This paper focuses mainly on the veneration they addressed to the Jesuit saints: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Luigi Gonzaga, Stanisław Kostka, and Peter Canisius using archive and printed materials from Rome, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.

Martyrs and Missionaries: Strategies of Jesuit Sainthood between the Suppression and the Restoration

This article explores the promotion of “Jesuit sanctity,” in the delicate passage between the suppression and the restoration of the Society of Jesus, as a reflection of the process of revival of the order. The strategies of sainthood that were fostered by the ex-Jesuits during the suppression and by the restored Society reveal fundamental information about the self-image that the order wanted to show to the world. These strategies emerge clearly from the activity of the General Postulation for the Causes of Saints of the new Society of Jesus, which in the nineteenth century focused in particular on two models of sanctity: martyrs and missionaries (and often martyred missionaries). Presenting important case studies of Francesco De Geronimo and Andrzej Bobola, this article investigates the reasons why the Society of Jesus promoted these typologies of sanctity in lieu of the trauma of the suppression, which emerges as “martyrdom” in Jesuit sources, and in the process of re-establishment of the order. It eventually explores how this “policy” of sainthood fits more broadly in the history of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.