Jesuit Superior General Luis Martín Garcia and his Memorias: 'Showing Up' by David G. Schultenover SJ

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jesuit Superior General Luis Martín Garcia and his Memorias: 'Showing Up' by David G. Schultenover SJ Oliver Rafferty SJ David G. Schultenover SJ, Jesuit Superior General Luis Martín Garcia and his Memorias: 'Showing Up' ( Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2021), 960 pages. Fr Schultenover's book is the crowning achievement of decades of research and writing on and around the topic of Luis Martín (1846–1906), the 24th Superior General of the Society of Jesus. It builds on Schultenover's masterly biography of George Tyrrell, George Tyrrell: In Search of Catholicism, and his 1992 work, A View from Rome: On the Eve of the Modernist Crisis. His aim here is to reduce the more than 5000 pages of Martín's Memorias to a manageable digest in English of that remarkable work, which has been published in Spanish in two volumes. For the most part the author allows Martín to speak for himself, but there is a considerable scholarly apparatus and some eighty pages of commentary on the Memorias placed at the end of the work. Although the original is mostly in Spanish, Martín employed some six languages in his memoirs. It constitutes the first attempt by a general of the Jesuit order since Ignatius Loyola to record the significant aspects of his life. What are we to make of it? How does one encapsulate the enigma of Luis Martín, a man deeply given to the things of God, and yet in a way very deeply flawed – marked perhaps more profoundly by the scars of his culture, his upbringing and the historical context in which he lived than most other important church figures in the last 200 years? Social background There are perhaps three or four revealing aspects of his life and personality that help us understand not only who Martín was but how he conducted affairs in the various offices he held in the Jesuit order. Firstly, there is his social background. Given that he was born into relative poverty he was initially at a serious social disadvantage when he joined the Jesuits. Many of their best recruits were themselves products of Jesuit schools and tended to come from the upper echelons of Spanish society. Martín, however, so aligned himself with the social position of the Jesuits in Spain that he became quite adept at dealing with the aristocracy, even with Carlos VII, the pretender to the Spanish throne, and his mother Maria Beatriz. He also had contact with [End Page 74] the Queen Regent, Maria Cristina, and most extraordinarily of all with the Marquis of Comillas. It was in his skillful dealing with that individual that he managed to establish one of the most enduring institutions the Society has produced in Spain in modern history, the Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid. Martín was mindful as both provincial and general to be on good terms with those in Spain by whose patronage the Society of Jesus was enabled to carry on its work. By contrast he became increasingly distant from his own family. To some extent it became a source of embarrassment for him, at least as a young priest, even to the extent that he did not ask permission to go to see his dying mother even though she pleaded with him to visit her. Was his vocation to the Jesuits then in some measure a product of social ambition? He had after all initially intended to be a diocesan priest. Although as a very young student he had a certain distrust of the Jesuits based on stories he had heard about them, he ended up joining a group whose position in Spanish cultural life allowed them to deal on equal terms with the leading lights of Spanish society. Personality and mindset There can be little doubt about Martín's intellectual, cultural and organisational abilities. One of the factors in his choosing to join the Jesuits was the effect on him of reading the Spanish translation of Jacques Joly's six-volume history of the order. In itself, this was a remarkable achievement for a young teenager, but it was fully in keeping with his intense lifelong...