Them and Ours

I think it was the British historian MacAuley (a later link here, with correct spelling) who noted the Roman Church's solution for keeping schism and heresy to a mimimum. Since it is usually the super-religious rather than the impious who split the Church, Rome has developed Religious Orders for dangerously charismatic individuals and their followers to indulge their special passions and unique enthusiasms while not only remaining within the Fold, but serving it.

Religious Orders therefore have judgments and assessments about other religious orders. From the memoirs of a former Jesuit, who belonged to that Society --one whose charms have always completely eluded me---in the halcyon days before the Vatican Council, this frank appraisal.

Their rules refer to the Jesuits as "this least Society," an expression almost paralyzed with irony. If there is a "least Society" in the bosom of Mother Church, it was assuredly not, on the Jesuits own reckoning, the Society of Jesus. It must be some other confraternity pursuing its own imperfect vision of the religious life. Some were fitfully admired by Ours* in the manner of a connoisseur smiling upon a picturesque ruin, once glorious things like the Benedictines or Dominicans that had fallen into decay. The more remote the ruin, the greater the pretended respect: Carthusians, whom no one had ever seen, were thought to be obscurely worthwhile, but the Franciscans, whatever their imagined service to the Church in the past, were by now unspeakable. Others were mere cartoons: the dimly single-minded like the Passionists; shamelessly self-promoting entrepreneurs like the Maryknollers; the unnumbered hordes of helot brutes posing as Brothers, Christian, Irish Christian, Marist, or whatever; and your parish priest who at least owned up to his inferior status and so won from Ours the same grudging respect that the physician grants to the dentist but withholds from the insolent chiropractor.

*Jesuit jargon for "Jesuits".