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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 45 Article 15April 2014Portrayals of Jesuits in Popular CultureEditorial BoardFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationEditorial Board (2014) "Portrayals of Jesuits in Popular Culture," Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education: Vol. 45, Article 15.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol45/iss1/15Conversations 35Afascination with theideals and history ofthe Jesuit order hasseeped into popularculture though all types ofmedia, but particularly film.Type the word Jesuit into thesearch window of the InternetMovie Database and this com-ing attraction pops up: TheJesuit (2014) “A man nick-named ‘the Jesuit’ is impris-oned for a crime he didn’tcommit. When his wife ismurdered and his son kid-napped to Mexico, he devisesan elaborate and dangerousplan to rescue his son andavenge the murder.” This kindof vigilante story is ubiquitousin the crime/thriller category,but one has to wonder at thisattempt to goose audienceinterest. Why create a char-acter with that name or try tomarket a picture with thattitle? There is some kind ofpop culture shorthand atwork that connects the con-cept of Jesuit to the willing-ness to go to an extreme inthe cause of correcting aserious injustice. Whateverthe genre, this is not the onlyincident of this type of char-acterization. Movies, for bet-ter or worse, are primarytexts in American culture andhave tremendous influencein establishing definitions,prejudices, and personal val-ues. For those unfamiliarS tories elsewhere in this issue of Conversations detail the political and cultural forces that led to the suppression of theSociety of Jesus in the mid 1700s. These years generated a lotof stories that fed the popular imagination. In South America, thegovernment agents who confiscated Jesuit property hoped to gettheir hands on the legendary hoards of Jesuit gold locked in thevaults of their houses. The fact that they found none simply con-firmed how sneaky those Jesuits were, hiding their treasures beyondfinding. Treasure maps came to be printed for the gullible: Buy thismap and you will get rich. Then there was rumor of a Jesuit letterthat disputed King Charles III’s legitimacy, which infuriated the kingand fueled his purpose against the Society. No such letter has everbeen found. Stories led to literature like Voltaire’s Candide, which takesplace partly in the Jesuit reductions of South America; Candide’sbeloved Cunegonde has an unnamed brother who was a leadingJesuit there. In Eugène Sue’s notorious The Wandering Jew from1844, the Jesuits d’Aigrigny and Rodin scheme to take possessionof a family’s fortune while Gabriel, a family member who was aJesuit for a while, shows “the fatal stamp of that enervating subjec-tion, that moral emasculation with which the victims of theCompany of Jesus are always branded, when they are not fortunate-ly delivered in time from their homicidal influence.” Two centurieslater, Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov presents its ownunflattering Jesuit characters. Jesuit characters still appear in print and film. A southern pub-lisher still puts out anti-Jesuit works in books and comics. Morepositively, last summer Judith Rock’s fourth novel appeared featur-ing Charles du Luc, a Jesuit scholastic solving crimes in Paris in thelate 1600s. And the trend is far from over: coming soon to a theaternear you, Laurie Ann Brit-Smith notes in the next article, are twonew films with Jesuit characters, The Jesuit and Silence. And in thesubsequent article, Ernest Fontana studies a prominent Jesuit character in Italian literature (The Leopard). Jesuits in FilmPioneers,Musketeers,ExorcistsBy Laurie Ann Britt-SmithPortrayals of Jesuits in Popular Culture00621_conversations #26   12/13/13  5:38 PM  Page 351: Portrayals of Jesuits in Popular CulturePublished by e-Publications@Marquette, 2014

Portrayals of Jesuits in Popular Culture

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Portrayals of Jesuits in Popular Culture

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