Within a generation of its founding, the Society of Jesus had missionaries in Goa, Japan, Beijing and the Amazon — and was already building the largest private education network on Earth.
One of Loyola's original companions, Francis Xavier, sailed for Portuguese Goa in 1541 and spent the rest of his life evangelising across India, the Malay Archipelago, and Japan, dying in 1552 while attempting to reach mainland China. He is traditionally credited with converting more people to Christianity than any missionary since the apostles, and his approach — learning local languages and adapting preaching to local custom rather than imposing European forms wholesale — became a defining Jesuit hallmark carried forward by every mission that followed him.
The most sophisticated expression of that adaptive approach was Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China in 1583 and spent nearly three decades mastering classical Chinese, dressing as a Confucian scholar, and presenting Christianity as compatible with Confucian ethics rather than as a foreign replacement for it — an approach that became known as the Chinese Rites controversy once it drew criticism from rival Catholic orders and, eventually, from Rome itself, which grew uneasy about how far the accommodation had gone.
Ricci also introduced European cartography, mechanical clocks, and mathematics to the Ming imperial court, becoming one of the first Westerners to be genuinely embedded in Chinese intellectual life rather than simply observing it from outside — a model of scholarly missionary work that had no real precedent in the history of Christian evangelism up to that point.
In South America, Jesuits organised indigenous Guaraní communities into self-governing mission towns called reductions, which combined Christian instruction with protection from Portuguese and Spanish slave raiders. The reductions ran their own workshops, farms, and militias and are remembered, not uncritically, as one of the more humane colonial-era experiments in the Americas — and were the subject of the 1986 film The Mission, which dramatised their eventual destruction after the Jesuits' 1767 expulsion from Spanish territories.
In 1599 the Society codified its teaching methods into the Ratio Studiorum ('Plan of Studies'), a standardised curriculum used across every Jesuit school worldwide — combining classical humanities, rhetoric, logic, and philosophy with structured progression and regular assessment, decades before such systems became common in secular education. The pedagogical concept of cura personalis ('care for the whole person') — attending to a student's intellectual, spiritual, and personal development together — remains the guiding philosophy of Jesuit education today.
By the time of the order's suppression in 1773 the Jesuits ran several hundred colleges across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The network survived and expanded after the 1814 restoration, and today includes prominent universities such as Georgetown (Washington D.C.), Fordham (New York), Boston College, and the Gregorian University in Rome, alongside hundreds of secondary schools worldwide.