This is a history book that reads like a novel, one of the best books I've read this year. It's the story of the English Catholic priests who tried to keep the faith alive in Elizabethan England, climaxing with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Beginning in the 1560's, English priests trained at seminaries on the continent (they couldn't well study at home) to convert England back to Roman Catholicism. They were known as "seminary priests." By 1580, they were getting help from the Jesuits, the dynamic new religious order known as the Pope's shock troops. These two groups hads to sneak their way back into England, travel incognito, and minister to England's Catholics in secret. They were pursued by Queen Elizabeth's elaborate spy network, and they had some pretty formidable people on their trail, including Richard Topcliffe, the "priest-hunter" extraordinaire. These priests were a pretty impressive group. The Jesuit Edmund Campion, known as the "light of Oxford," one of the most brilliant men of his time. He could have had any position he wanted under Elizabeth, but, like Thomas More, he gave it all up rather than go against his conscience. Just before he was executed in 1581, his statement of intent, known as "Campion's Brag," was circulated throughout England: ""And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league-all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England-cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored." The Jesuits who came after Campion were pretty impressive too. John Gerard traveled throughout England in a series of elaborate disguises, got arrested, and escaped fom prison. His book "Autobiography of a Hunted Priest" is a great book in its own right, and I hope it gets reprinted soon. Alice Hogge does a great job of recreating Elizabethan England, with all its intrigues, heroism, villainy and wit. For a first time author, this is an impressive piece of work. However, as a Church History professor who's written a biography of one Jesuit, I felt she was a little weak in her understanding of how the Jesuits operate. For example, she tends to rely heavily on the image of Jesuits as spymasters extraordinaire, and she relies on heavily military imagery to describe the order. At times, she makes mistakes in her use of terms. For example, she refers to the heads of the Jesuits as "General" rather than "Father General." She also refers to the seminary priests as "seminarians," which is incorrect, because a seminarian is someone studying to become a priest. Still, if that's the worse you can say about this book, it's not bad, and it doesn't keep me from recommending this book as easily the best I've read this year!
It seems that, for a lot of its history, the Society of Jesus was used as a convenient whipping boy by governments. The Jesuits were accused of many awful things, probably the most serious being complicity in the Gunpowder Plot in 1606 England. This extremely well-written book gives the history of the Jesuit mission in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and shows that these brave men were merely trying to keep the flickering flame of Catholicism alive in Anglican England. For this they were branded traitors, hunted down like dogs, and murdered in the most horrible manner possible. The Gunpowder Plot may have been known to some of them, but they took no part in it, and rightfully realized that it would only harden government action against them. This is a book well worth reading to see how far we have come (or have we?), in disagreements about religious doctrine.
