A Breviary? A Contemplative Devotion? A Horror Story?

This book spurs confessions:  If I have any faith left at all, it is still steeped in pre-Vatican II incense.  I met my first Jesuit teaching comparative religion in a Sacred Heart college.  An authority, like all Jebbies, in pre-revolutionary New England based protestant religions, I enrolled in the course probably more to have a male lecturing before the mob of girls than the typical nun.  He certainly did provoke respect for his erudition and as a byproduct, awe of the Order.

Now decades later, Jebbies have re-entered my daily life:  my older son teaches at a fabulous preparatory high school where he teaches Latin and Greek, and hopefully makes male teenagers a tad more cultured.  My step-son teaches accounting at a Jesuit university.  Ah, there's the late 20th century tension investigated in this book:  the Jesuits:  The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church by Malachi Martin (himself an eminent theologian and ex-Jesuit).

My daughter-in-law loves to read the lives of the saints, and this book taught me all about Ignatius Loyola, his piety, his understanding of his own motives and the needs of the Church during the dawn of the Renaissance.  His approach to a changing world was to personalize the need for a group of pious, intelligent and some-what militant men to battle in the eternal wars between the force of good, God as embodied in Christ, and Evil, the fallen archangel Lucifer, in order to help mankind enter the Kingdom.

After such lofty inspirations, Malachi tracks the erosion of this purpose, whereby Jesuits became social workers to the people of the church, in fact chose to become socialists whose main purpose was to battle capitalism as the main oppressor of the masses.  Jesuit theologians rather than fighting the changes brought on by humanism and the theory that heaven on earth was meeting the material needs of the poor rather than providing spiritual elucidation.  He arrays several events as contributing to this corruption of Ignatius' organization:  Vatican 2, several Jesuit convocations, the personalities and weaknesses of Popes and heads of the Society

All is lost:  vocations and actual numbers of Jesuit priests have plummeted, papal disobedience is taken for granted, the voices and opinions of everyone is of equal validity.

I wish this book made me more hopeful and more religious; instead it made my chronically nostalgic.
I talk often to friends about the wholesale abolition of the good old days:  Latin masses (when asked for one for my mother's funeral mass, one of my priest classmates from high school said his bishop would not permit it) to be defiant, my son did the readings in not only Latin but Greek and we did get old Latin hymns worked in.  the diminution of the ceremony to folk song jamborees, the absurdity of the congregation shaking hands to extend peace to a pew-mate.

I should have stopped reading after the sections on Ignatius.  Maybe I found find more consolation in reading the lives of the saints.  By not holding up ideals of behavior and faith, the flood of current political and psychological theories prevail to the ultimate loss of souls, respect, and tradition.