Jesuits and ex-Jesuits on the North Atlantic Frontier, 1762-1814

The Society of Jesus was suppressed by papal brief in 1773 and only restored in 1814. At the time of the Suppression, there were Jesuit missionaries in the province of Québec, Lower and Upper Louisiana, and the continental British colonies. De facto, Jesuits were offered the following choices: become secular priests (under their bishop's jurisdiction), join the Russian province (where the Society had not been suppressed), or adhere to new societies that revived the Society under a different name (such as the Paccanarists). Whereas in Lower Canada the order simply died off, in the United States the rivalry between those who favoured the strengthening of the church at large (under Bishop Carroll, yet a former Jesuit) and those who strictly supported the former Society's ways and means, was further complicated by the issue of slave labour as it was practiced in the Jesuit southern plantations.

Luca Codignola, FRSC, is Senior Fellow at the University of Notre Dame and Adjunct Professor at Saint Mary's University (Halifax). He is best known for his work on the Roman Catholic church in the North Atlantic area in the early modern era and has also written on early European expansion. Among his latest works are the book Blurred Nationalities Across the North Atlantic: Traders, Priests, and Their Kin Travelling Between North America and the Italian Peninsula, 1763-1846 (2019), and the historiographical essay "The Historiography on the Jesuits of New France," in Robert A. Maryks, ed., Jesuit Historiography Online, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020.

→ Register