What happened to the Jesuits first began in the mid-nineteenth century with a bundle of heresies spawned in the Enlightenment era and earlier. By 1907, these had attracted enough followers to alarm Church hierarchy, and Pope St. Pius X condemned them all collectively as “modernism, synthesis of all heresies” in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis.

Despite papal interventions in the next few decades, modernism survived underground, joining with nouvelle theologie (new theology) in the nineteen-forties and fifties with its agenda of mitigating the influence of many centuries of the Church’s favored scholastic theology from St. Thomas Aquinas. Proponents of the combined modernism-new theology included theologians from the Jesuits and other religious orders, many of whom participated in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) as theological advisors to the world’s 2,500 assembled bishops.

After the Council, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, the newly-elected Jesuit Superior General, allowed theologian Karl Rahner to introduce the new modernism—updated with his own theories—into the vast Jesuit apostolate of higher education, and thence to the world. His writings were enthusiastically studied by large numbers of diocesan priests and bishops for several decades after the Council. Eventually, following Jesuit leadership, other religious institutes imbibed the new modernism, itching to reform “medieval” Church doctrines. The Society of Jesus became modernism’s primary promoter. For most ordinary Catholics, the modernism was simply “liberal” Catholicism.

Fr. Arrupe also formally changed the Society’s mission to promoting a religionless form of social and economic justice for the world’s suffering people and supporting liberation war efforts in Latin America. It is not unreasonable to think that, under Jesuit lead, the modernism-social justice partnership seeped out from the many Jesuit colleges to other Catholic colleges, seminaries, and clergy, and possibly spreading to secular colleges also. It may also have prepared the ground for other a-religious social and humanitarian movements like critical theory, wokism, and today’s diversity-equity-inclusion (“DEI”) obsession.

The many Jesuit secondary schools did not escape the effects of modernism either, offering still today “immersion” in religionless social justice and non-Catholic moral teaching. Further crippling the Society of Jesus, Arrupe instituted new formation practices for aspiring Jesuits to turn them into New Jesuits for the new mission and a “new era.” He also swung the legendary Jesuit foreign missions apostolate away from evangelization to what is essentially a godless humanitarian program for the poor.

These critical changes were made in spite of the fact that the Church has always known, and her Catholic Social Teaching always so stated, that while social justice is a Christian imperative, evangelization is the Church’s primary mission—a mission established by none other than Jesus in his last words on earth, the Great Commission: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…” (Matt. 28:19).

The chapters of this book explore all of these reasons for Jesuit decline, culminating in the papacy of Pope Francis. He is the pure distillate of lifelong Jesuit formation and of all Jesuit departures from the principles of Catholic orthodoxy and evangelization to which founder St. Ignatius of Loyola had committed the Society five hundred years ago.