This “history of the Jesuits in the American century” is worth spending time with and on. McDonough is cogent and interesting. Rewarding stuff.

For instance, the sociologist John L. Thomas SJ, on p. 439, according to McDonough:

The family [is] the crucial unit of social morality . . .  The church, then, [should] specialize in bolstering the ethical order.

This was Thomas’s view in the 50s and 60s.  His The American Catholic Family was published in 1956 by Prentice-Hall.

This view vied with the vision of socio-political change that eventually overtook and took over Jesuit thinking, with its concentration on “social problems” and emphasis on direct action, usually governmental, to solve them.

A big mistake in my view, having been there and done that as a fire-breathing young Jesuit in the 50s and 60s.  Problem is, this focus on the problems — poverty, racial discrimination, etc. — is essentially defeatist, encouraging as it does the short-term fix to the exclusion of later consequences.

For instance, how has society profited from massive welfare fixes that helped undermine black family structure — paying women to have babies in the absence of resident father, etc.?  Not very much, it seems.