Beschreibung:
Using a broad definition of globalization, one could claim that the Jesuits were the first organized group in history to think and act globally. From a historical point of view, three interrelated developments shaped the opportunity structures that made this possible: a) the Iberian colonial expansion into the newly discovered «Indies», b) the early modern Catholic revival, and c) Renaissance Christian Humanism. The Jesuit «catholic» missionary impulse naturally had the hegemonic purpose of universal conversion to the true Catholic faith. But what makes Jesuit global missionary practices particularly relevant is the fact that - under certain «circumstances» - their controversial method of «accommodation» took a form which today we would call «nativist inculturation». The uncontested suppression of the Jesuits in the second half of the eighteenth-century would seem to indicate that their global practices were in fundamental tension with all the ascending global forces: a) with the triumphant structural forces of capitalist and Westphalian globalization; b) with the alternative secular cosmopolitan project of the Enlightenment; and c) even with the two other Catholic models competing over the direction of global Catholicism, namely plural national Catholic churches under royal patronage versus a uniform transnational Catholic regime under centralized Roman control.