The Jesuits, Pro and Con

The first Jesuit martyr in North America, from Effigies, 1608

One of the recent success stories in the rare book market is the surge in the value of books relating to the Society of Jesus. When John Mellin was working in London around 1960, the same books that command impressive prices today were available for little indeed, perfect matches for a Jesuit-educated but not overly wealthy new collector. This July Mr. Mellin, at the urging of his son Dan (C'74), generously presented the library with more than 60 volumes, including some very rare titles, in honor of Father Walter J. Burghardt, S. J.

One the rarest is the anonymous Effigies et nomina quorundam e societate Iesu qui pro fide vel pietate sun iter facti ab anno 1549 ad annum 1607 (Rome, 1608), a very early if not the first Jesuit martyrology. A poignant reminder of the Spanish settlement of Florida in the 16th century is the large number of Jesuits who died for the faith there, the first being Pedro Martinez, S.J., killed and "thrown into the sea" on September 24, 1566. But Mr. Mellin also collected items which portrayed the Jesuits in a less flattering light, and one of these, the Arcana societatis Iesu publico bono vulgata cum appendicibus utilissimis (No place, 1635), ranks among the black tulips of anti-Jesuit literature.

Closer to home, the collection includes a far from pretty, but complete and usable, copy of one of the rarities of 18th century Catholic Americana, Patrick Smyth's The Present State of the Catholic Mission, Conducted by the Ex-Jesuits in North-America (Dublin, 1788), a scathing attack on the Jesuit reliance on farms for their support and on their principal spokesman, John Carroll, in particular. In passing, Smyth (an Irish priest) provides a great deal of information about the Catholic settlers around Frederick, Maryland, in the course of a long interview with their priest, the German ex-Jesuit James Frambach.