Landmarking: City, Church & Jesuit Urban Strategy by Thomas M. Lucas, S.J.

Abstract

Landmarking: City, Church J indeed that flexibility was perennially a much-criticized aspect of the Jesuit approach to moral and theological issues. But in this post-Colonial era, accommodation is one of the most recuperative ideas in Jesuit studies, one which recasts the Jesuits as much more sympathetic agents at the very forefront of complex encounters with alterity. Before arriving at the central core of Lucas's original research on the subject, a rereading of the entire corpus of Ignatius's formidable correspondencemore than 9,000 letters-in light of urban stratagem with extensive statistical analysis of the subject in appendices, Lucas sets a couple of stages. He casts the modernity of Ignatius's methods against his feudal upbringing, showing how cosmopolitan he must have become by the time he gave up the pilgrim's cape and settled in Rome in 1537. Lucas dwells on the tension in the earliest years of the association between the unrootedness of pilgrimage (which Ignatius and the early companions yearned for intensely) and the decision ultimately taken to institutionalize the group and thereby establish fixed residences, while the special fourth vow of obedience to the pope to undertake missionary work opened up the possibility for any Jesuit to be rooted elsewhere. To set these crucial decisions in context Lucas undertakes (Chaps. III-V) a very broad survey of the history and vicissitudes of the Christian pull to and away from the city, from Christ's own apostolate in Galilee, Paul's traversing of the Mediterranean world, to Constantine's political and urban strategies for locating the Church in Rome, caput mundi. With the pessimistic turn inward in Augustine's Civitas Dei, the city of man became an unsatisfactory way-station, almost desacralized. The rise of monasticism as a retreat from the city of man, a walled utopian alternative, preceded the renewal of urban life in the communal period, coinciding with the rise of the mendicant orders, the competitive Franciscans and Dominicans who really set the stage for the Jesuits. Lucas highlights that these orders, in jockeying for position in dense urban fabrics, compelled legislation mandating fixed distances between religious houses, making it more difficult for the orders of the future to find footholds in cities already crowded with large religious complexes. …