It’s Still a Fight

31 July 2026  Jeremiah 26:1-9

Memorial of St. Ignatius Loyola, Priest

“…then the priests, the prophets, and all the people laid hold of him, crying, ‘You must die!’” (Jeremiah 26:8)

In the 1530s the Protestant Reformation was entering its second generation. John Calvin was converted to Protestantism in 1533, and in 1536 began his reforming work in Geneva. Large swaths of northern and central Germany (Saxony and Hesse) had gone over to Lutheranism, and others were moving in that direction.

St. Ignatius Loyola recognized at the start of the modern era that emerging secularism would mean a fight, and well-trained fighters would be essential. Not much has changed since then, although many parishes seem not to be aware that a fight is going on.

In response, seven Spaniards living in poverty in Paris in 1534, resolved to become the Society of Jesus, and do four things:

1.    Resist the spread of Protestantism by…

2.   Missionary work all over the world, in which they would…

3.   Build schools to train youth and clergy in the Catholic faith and theology, and do it all…

4.   In absolute obedience to the Pope

In all of this they were fantastically successful, with fruitful missions to India (1542), Japan (1549), China (1583), long before any successful Protestant missions got out of Europe (Protestant missions would not hit their stride until the 18th and 19th centuries).

During the Enlightenment of the 18th century, the Jesuits became very unpopular with secular philosophers who envisioned a world without religion, and secular monarchs who wanted state control of religion. The Jesuits became even more unpopular because they successfully out-argued the philosophers and their kings, who then leaned on the Pope to suppress the Jesuits, and Pope Clement XIV dissolved the order in 1773 – they were restored by Pope Pius VII in 1814, and picked up pretty much where they left off.

Today, the most successful and influential Catholic apologists are not Jesuit priests, but laymen like Jimmy Akin, Scott Hahn, Trent Horn and Brant Pitre. The Jesuits weren’t kidding, however, when it comes to their commitment to education. Jesuit scholars have been deeply involved in the hard sciences for over a century. In 1927 Fr. Georges Lemaitre, using Einstein’s general relativity equations, proposed that the universe is expanding. In 1931 he expanded on this math to propose what has become the most widely accepted theory of cosmology, commonly called the Big Bang. Big Bang cosmology, in turn, has led to modern theories of information which have called Neo-Darwinism into question. High-level conferences, like the 2016 Royal Society conference New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives, have proposed that Neo-Darwinian mathematics doesn’t work, and doesn’t explain enough, and suggested that a new theory is necessary. Philosophers of science like Jesuits Fr. Robert Spitzer, Fr. Marc Leclerc, and Fr. Louis Caruana, are very visible and energetic participants in this conversation. They are still resisting the assumptions of secularism, and still drawing fire on account of it – and they are still hard to argue with because their scholarship is so good.

St. Ignatius Loyola recognized at the start of the modern era that emerging secularism would mean a fight, and well-trained fighters would be essential. Not much has changed since then, although many parishes seem not to be aware that a fight is going on. Stanley Hauerwas has observed,

God has entrusted us, His Church, with the best story in the world. With great ingenuity we have managed, with the aid of much theory, to make that story boring as hell. Theories about meaning are what you get when you forget that the Church and Christians are embattled by subtle enemies who win easily by denying that any war exists. God knows what He is doing in this strange time between “worlds,” but hopefully He is inviting us again to engage the enemy through the godly weapons of preaching and sacrament. (First Things, 1 May 1995)

Thankfully, we still have exemplars like the Jesuits. St. Ignatius Loyola, pray for us.