Humble Women, Powerful Nuns: A Female Struggle for Autonomy in a Men’s Church, by Kristien Suenens

Abstract

century: a life of endless chaos, multiple exiles, and relocations. Given present-day scholarship of the psychology of migrants in general and, more particularly, of refugees and exiles, Martín’s accounts invite further study. Other topics include the peculiarly Spanish context requiring Martín’s astute navigation between loyalist Carlists, extreme integralists, and liberal nationalists (383). Martín’s visceral, bitter reaction to the end of Spain’s empire following the Spanish-American War might usefully be read alongside John McGreevy’s final chapter (“Manila, Philippines: Empire”) in American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Beyond Spain, at exactly the same moment (1899–1901), Martín had to address France’s political earthquake following the Dreyfus Affair. Judging that Jesuits’ “efforts to protest our innocence” against “the cruelest and vilest libels” had failed (723), Martín needed to guide French Jesuits through their exile abroad (once again) and the confiscation of their properties (once again). Finally, Martín spent the last weeks of his life navigating Pope Pius X and the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis. One of his final acts was the expulsion of George Tyrrell from the Jesuit order. It is understandable that, although Martín seems to have wanted his “showing up” eventually to be published, in the near term he entrusted its safety not to the official archives in Rome (as would be expected for a superior general’s writings), but to archives in his home province. Its survival of censorship and civil war is remarkable, and Schultenover’s modified format in English translation significantly expands its accessibility for scholars across the globe. It is an invaluable resource for historians of nineteenth-century Spain, modernization and laicism, church-state conflict, religion and religious life, mentalities and emotions.