Missionaries, scientists, and a philosopher-priest censured in his own lifetime — and, since 2013, a pope: an order whose relationship with Rome has never been simple.
Francis Xavier (1506–1552) — co-founder of the order and its most celebrated missionary, evangelising across Portuguese Asia. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) — pioneer of the Jesuit mission to Ming China, who mastered classical Chinese scholarship and introduced European science to the imperial court. Peter Canisius (1521–1597) — the leading Jesuit figure of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Germany, whose catechism shaped Catholic religious education for centuries after his death.
The Jesuits maintained an unusually strong scientific tradition, staffing observatories and producing significant work in astronomy, mathematics, and seismology — the Vatican Observatory is still run by Jesuit astronomers today, a direct continuation of a scholarly tradition stretching back centuries.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a Jesuit palaeontologist involved in the discovery of Peking Man, attempted a controversial synthesis of Catholic theology with evolutionary biology that was censured by the Church during his lifetime — his major theological works were only published posthumously — but went on to influence later Catholic thought on science and faith considerably more than the Vatican of his era anticipated.
In the 1960s and 70s, many Latin American Jesuits — working amid widespread poverty and political repression — embraced liberation theology, a movement interpreting Christian faith through the lens of social and economic justice for the poor, sometimes drawing on Marxist social analysis. The movement produced both celebrated pastoral work and serious tension with a more doctrinally cautious Vatican under Pope John Paul II, who was wary of its political dimensions.
Relations between the Society and Rome grew strained enough in the early 1980s that John Paul II took the unusual step of directly intervening in Jesuit governance in 1981, appointing his own delegate to oversee the order rather than allowing its normal internal succession process after Superior General Pedro Arrupe suffered a stroke — a moment widely read as a sign of Vatican distrust of the order's leftward drift during that period.
In March 2013, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina — a Jesuit priest and former provincial superior in his home country — was elected Pope and took the name Francis, becoming the first Jesuit pope in the order's nearly 500-year history and the first pope from the Americas. His notably pastoral, socially engaged style is widely traced by observers directly back to his Jesuit formation, closing a historical loop between an order once viewed with Vatican suspicion and the very top of the Church it serves.