The Footprints of the Jesuits

A fierce 19th-century polemic examining the political ambitions of the Jesuits and their perceived threat to American civic life. Richard W. Thompson writes as both historian and warning voice, tracing the Society of Jesus from its founding through its clashes with Protestant powers and into his present day. His central argument: that the Jesuits' dual loyalty to Rome and to their own organizational advancement makes them incompatible with democratic self-governance. Thompson dedicates substantial attention to the question of temporal power, whether the Pope should hold secular authority, and argues that any attempt to restore papal political dominion represents an existential danger to free nations. The book stands as a primary document of its era's religious anxieties, capturing the deep Protestant fear of Catholic encroachment that shaped American political culture from the colonial period through the 1890s. For readers interested in the intellectual history of American secularism or the long tradition of anti-Catholic sentiment in the United States, this text offers an unvarnished look at how one influential writer understood the relationship between faith and the state.