JESUIT CHILD

by Hastings Macdonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 1972

Now a ""lapsed Roman Catholic,"" Hastings, a novelist and free-lance writer, retraces his steps in fact and memory to boyhood days at Stonyhurst, the venerable Jesuit boarding school where, like his father and grandfather before him, he was educated. Spartan, comfortless, and surfeited with spirituality though their regimen was, it inspired affection and loyalty undiminished by the passage of time. Hastings evokes it in a gentle and pleasing manner from the eccentricities of the black-robed fathers (one, dubbed ""Bouncy,"" taught Greek declensions to the steps of the tango) to the dreaded ferula, a leather strap used to discipline the unruly. Less persuasive is the second part of this quasi-autobiographical tract which sketches the history of the Order from the self-flagellations of Loyola to the troubled present. Sentimentalized and overinflated with martyrs, the story of Jesuit peregrinations from 16th century China to the American wilderness is marred by crude ethnocentric stereotypes (e.g., American Indians are dismissed as ""sadistic, dirty, treacherous, idle, cannibalistic"" savages -- and most uncharitably -- ""I myself believe they weren't worth the saving""). Ditto the heathen Chinese who expelled the Jesuit missionaries despite their gifts of western clocks and calendars. ""Better-educated, better-disciplined, better-led"" than any soldiers of Christ before or since, everywhere they went they were persecuted, tortured, killed -- and always unjustly according to Hastings whose admiration for their tenacity leads him into some terrible historical gaffes: ""In the seventeenth century, in Paraguay, they founded the first ideal communist society, rather more successfully than Marx and Lenin."" Slight and wistful rather than heroic, this may interest other Jesuit children who have strayed but not too far.

Pub Date: March 16, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION