The Anti-Jesuit

By Peter Swindal ( bio - articles ) | Jul 30, 2026

“Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16), Our Lord Jesus Christ commanded the Twelve Apostles.

Perhaps no saint in the history of Christianity has understood this command as deeply as St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast we celebrate today.

Recovering from a cannonball wound in a Basque castle, St. Ignatius decided to become a saint, radically devoting himself to Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church. Though his heart was immovably dedicated to God, St. Ignatius found that the devil could manipulate even his most pure intentions, subtly bringing him to sadness, anxiety, and despair. He found that being wise as a serpent as Christ commanded was a dire necessity to advance in the spiritual life, for only then could a soul understand and resist the temptations of the devil.

Thus, while living in a cave in Manresa in Spain, St. Ignatius wrote the Spiritual Exercises, the greatest guide to spiritual discernment in the history of the Catholic Church. Meant to be “given” over the course of a four-week-long silent retreat, the Exercises are a comprehensive course in determining which practices, thoughts, or beliefs are from God and which are from the devil. They also served as the cornerstone of St. Ignatius’ order, the Society of Jesus, which, by the time he died, was one of the most influential organizations both in the Church and the world.

To many orthodox and faithful Catholics, it is apparent that something has gone horribly wrong with the Society of Jesus in the present day. Perhaps we should look no further than their vocations. The number of men who make their first vows, taken at the conclusion of a two-year novitiate and which typically precede about a decade of further formation before priestly ordination, has plummeted to catastrophically low levels. The USA East province of the Jesuits, which contains eleven universities including powerhouses BC, Fordham, and Georgetown, saw only three men take their first vows last year (and one is already a priest).

The question of vocations is easy to quantify. Less simple to pin down is the sense that many faithful Catholics have that many modern-day Jesuits seem to undermine the teachings of the Church, yet in a way that evades an easy condemnation. For example, a Jesuit may seemingly encourage erroneous beliefs or sinful behavior, but fall back on a defensible justification when challenged. The power and popularity of the apparent offender Jesuits compound to lead many faithful people to either despair about the efficacy of the Church’s teaching or to succumb to the same subtle (or overt) lapses in orthodoxy.

Yet is this phenomenon real at all—namely, that many Jesuits, even with defensible justifications, are in fact seeking to undermine the Church’s teaching? St. Ignatius’ own principle is that “we ought to first put charitable interpretations on all men’s words” (1), so we ought not be quick to judge before a rigorous examination.

In the end, this rigorous examination will ultimately show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that indeed the tactics of at least one Jesuit have the aim of undermining the Church in mind. This Jesuit is Fr. James Martin.

Fr. Martin represents the epitome of the inversion of the modern Society of Jesus, which has used the tremendous power of spiritual discernment taught by the Exercises against the Church. As we will see, Fr. Martin comprehends the Exercises in everything but the ultimate aim of their creation by St. Ignatius, and that he rejects this aim will be manifestly clear once we first understand what the Exercises are.

The Exercises and “Jesuitical” Reasoning

The Spiritual Exercises feature a long list of ‘rules’ to guide spiritual discernment, detailing the workings of the devil and of God in the soul. The foundation of spiritual discernment, for St. Ignatius, is the teaching of the Church. This sounds obvious, but St. Ignatius’ easiest test of whether a thought, practice, or belief is good or bad is whether or not it leads one to agree with the teachings of the Church or to disagree with them.

Therefore, one rule is: “we ought to have our mind ready and prompt to obey, in all, the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, which is our holy Mother the Church Hierarchical.” St. Ignatius reiterates this in another rule: “to be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it” (2).

What makes the Exercises spiritual rather than merely intellectual is that they teach not merely to abide by the teachings of the Church, but also “praise” them, “keeping the mind prompt to find reasons in their defence and in no manner against them” (3). In other words, we ought not only agree with the Church’s teachings, but try as hard as we can to bring our intellect into accord with them and only ever speak positively about them.

At this point, any further look at the Exercises may seem unnecessary, for it seems that this bedrock is enough to demonstrate that men like Fr. Martin are not in accord with the good spirit which St. Ignatius aimed to bring to the world. However, in order to make Fr. Martin’s motives entirely manifest, we must continue by first touching upon a brief but important historical fact.

The Jesuits have almost always been known to use subtle and casuistic “Jesuitical” reasoning. Its apparent excesses were the basis of Pascal’s polemics against the order, but this same reasoning allowed them to be particularly effective missionaries and to gain extensive power in the Church and even in the secular world.

A highly illustrative example of this is the Jesuit Ven. Matteo Ricci’s mission in China in the late 16th century. Ricci took on the dress and customs of a traditional Confucian scholar and argued that there was no contradiction between certain Chinese rituals, which included ancestor veneration, and orthodox Catholic faith. This event, known as the Chinese Rites controversy, is a prime example of the controversies in which the Jesuits have always found themselves embroiled.

The question arises: if the Exercises are built upon consent to the Church’s teaching, where does Jesuitical reasoning come from, and why have the Jesuits always been embroiled in doctrinal controversy?

For starters, the Exercises are not simply a dogmatic manual, but, as stated earlier, a guide for spiritual discernment. For St. Ignatius, the most key aspect for spiritual discernment is understanding the shape of the soul. This is because the good spirit and bad spirit act in different ways depending on the soul to be acted upon.

St. Ignatius writes: “in the persons who go from mortal sin to mortal sin, the enemy is commonly used to propose to them apparent pleasures,” while “in the persons who are going on intensely cleansing their sins… it is the way of the evil spirit to bite, sadden and put obstacles.” Moreover, to understand our own soul is direly necessary to understand the devil’s attacks, for the devil “behaves… as a chief of the army… looking at the forces or defences of a stronghold, attacks it on the weakest side, in like manner the enemy of human nature… where he finds us weakest… there he attacks us.”

The Exercises, given as a retreat, are meant to be a profound experience in understanding the structure of the soul through the Gospel. Retreatants are commanded to undergo rigorously structured prayer around scenes from the life of Christ and, by means of how they observe their own reactions to these scenes, understand how Christ is at work in their life.

This self-understanding is then scaled to the understanding of other souls and how God is at work in their lives, leading to a greater knowledge of how to ultimately spread the Gospel to them and further the cause of the Catholic Church.

For example, a key instruction St. Ignatius gives to retreat directors giving the Exercises is that the good spirit must never be forced or asserted, but rather the soul must be led to freely choose it. As such, the soul to be formed is only to be given what it can “bear.” This has its direct roots in Christ’s command not to throw your pearls before swine.

Therefore, the entire tradition of Jesuit casuistry comes from the order’s charism of spiritual discernment. To be casuistic merely means to reason from broader principles to an individual case, and the Jesuits, who are formed better than anyone to know the individual soul and the shape of the soul, reason with a particular soul in mind.

This is why Ven. Ricci argued that adopting Chinese rituals was not only not idolatrous, but actually necessary for evangelization, as it awarded respect among the etiquette-minded Chinese elite. Otherwise, Fr. Ricci argued, the sensibilities of the Chinese may have been offended, making evangelization impossible.

One crucial point on Ven. Ricci is that, while he himself did not have idolatrous intentions with his Confucianism, others around him might have. This is the meaning of the “mental reservation,” in which an ambiguous statement or action is permitted insofar as it has a valid sense which the speaker hiddenly intends.

Therefore, we can see that even in one of the order’s historical controversies, the aim in its “Jesuitical” reasoning was to interpret ambiguous behavior as being in accordance with the Church’s teaching, rather than trying to change the Church’s teaching itself. Moreover, the aim of this reasoning was to change souls towards the Church according to their discerned needs and sensitivities, rather than to change the Church in response to the discerned needs of souls.

These are the crucial points on which the ministry of Fr. James Martin represents a rupture with both the Church and the tradition of the Society of Jesus. We are now prepared to interpret this ministry as what it is: the working of an anti-Jesuit.

Ambiguity and the Good Spirit

There is only one question that we need to answer to understand Fr. Martin and his ministry: what does the word “gay” mean?

There is an extremely simple but extremely important argument that must first be established. First, as Christians, we can always avoid sin with God’s grace (5). Second, all expression of same-sex sexual desire is sinful, even at the level of consenting to a thought or desire. It therefore follows that, as Christians, we should not identify with our same-sex attractions, for to do so would be to say that we cannot resist them. This denies the first premise, which is the precise definition of despair.

This argument is the basis of the term “same-sex attraction” (SSA), which is meant to frame such attractions as something that people have, never something that they are.

Nevertheless, is it always a sin to use the term “gay” to describe someone? No, for in the present day the colloquial use of the term “gay” implies only the attraction and not necessarily the acts. To say “he is gay” and “he has SSA” do not necessarily contradict each other.

In fact, usage of such terminology could even be necessary for evangelization, as we have seen. Fr. Martin, the expert Jesuit, explains: “if one persists in using a term that a group finds outdated or offensive it is going to be hard to dialogue at all.” This is the same argument that both Ven. Ricci made in China, as we saw, and thus a classic example of the casuistic reasoning derived from the Exercises.

However, we must ask: who is evangelized by Fr. Martin’s use of the term “gay”? Is the term “gay” employed to change souls to the Church, or the Church toward souls?

We may test this by the following: were Fr. Martin to use the term “gay” in order to evangelize, he would need to believe that the term describes something that both can and must be ultimately overcome by the power of God’s grace. (Remember the argument beginning this section). This would qualify as a mental reservation, in which the usage of the term would only be valid if Fr. Martin held the preceding as a belief.

He does not. In Fr. Martin’s recent essay regarding whether priests with SSA ought to be admitted to the priesthood, he writes:

It is one thing to overcome temptation or lust; it is another to overcome one’s overall sexuality. My sense is that the authors are speaking about what my health-class teacher in junior high school called a “phase.” But this could easily be misinterpreted as overcoming one’s sexuality overall, a dangerous proposal.

Fr. Martin here denies God’s healing grace because of the invalid distinction made between “temptation” and “sexuality.” As we have established, same-sex attractions are necessarily and universally temptations in the Christian worldview. Therefore, if a sexuality is to be understood as a pattern of sexual attractions, all Christians are called to overcome their same-sex sexuality.

We must interpret this paragraph carefully, for it seems that Fr. Martin is referring to forms of therapy which would seek to prevent same-sex attraction from arising. These therapies have contested track records in practice. However, purely theoretically, is it permissible to focus on not only resisting tempting desires when they do arise, but preventing them from arising at all?

It is not only permissible but actually obligatory to focus on both aspects—otherwise, we would not pray “lead us not into temptation,” as Christ commands. Grace does not only act on the will at the moment of consent; it heals the appetite from which the disordered motion arises. To deny this is to fall into the Jansenist error which says healing grace (gratia sanans) does not act upon nature. (7)

Therefore, by suggesting that we ought not work to overcome objectively sinful inclinations, and by calling such efforts “dangerous,” Fr. Martin reveals that his anthropology is opposed to the Christian understanding of man and grace. To be clear, in the context of the Church, doubt is never neutral; to publicly call an affirmed teaching of the Church into question is to do the same as the snake in the garden: “Did God really say?” (Gen 3:1).

A Jesuitical Inversion

These facts in conjunction do not constitute a mere “gotcha” but are evidence for a much more disturbing pattern with reference to the Spiritual Exercises. They establish three things:

First, that the aim of Fr. Martin’s evangelical strategy in matters of sexuality is not to advance orthodox teaching, but heterodox teaching. Among other things, his use of the word “gay” is not intended to spread a Christian anthropology of grace, but a despairing one in which disordered appetites cannot be healed by God.

Second, if Fr. Martin is using such an evangelical strategy within the Church, his aim is not to adapt the Church’s pastoral prudence to be more merciful towards people with same-sex attraction, but to change its anthropology to affirm condemned beliefs about the nature of human beings and their desires.

Third, Fr. Martin is using St. Ignatius’s understanding of the soul, but for aims contrary to those of St. Ignatius. We will look at two possible such instances.

As we established, in the Exercises, a soul is to be given only what it can bear for the purposes of making a free election towards the service of Christ and the Catholic Church. Let us assume that Fr. Martin aims rather to give a soul what it can bear to accept a heterodox anthropology.

This means that orthodox people might be given statements that are seemingly orthodox, when in fact, Fr. Martin would mentally reserve a heterodox interpretation of the same statement. He may state that “the Church’s stance on [SSA] is clear.” while at the same time interpreting this statement with a Modernist hermeneutic in which the Church’s teachings are subject to change or we are not bound to assent to them. This is why Fr. Martin is always careful to state that the Church’s teaching is “clear,” but not that he assents to it.

This is not a wild accusation, but logically follows from both St. Ignatius’s methods and our establishment that Fr. Martin does in fact hold heterodox views.

Other things become more easily understood after we realize that Fr. Martin is heterodox and uses St. Ignatius’s methods against orthodoxy.

Remember that the spirits act in different ways on different souls. Perhaps the “Outreach Guide to the Bible and Homosexuality” would not serve as merely a means for “dialogue” between scholars but a resource for heterodox people who have SSA to justify their sin. Of course, many of the articles in this guide outright deny any Biblical justification for the Church’s teaching.

Fr. Martin, of course, maintains plausible deniability that he agrees with these articles, since he did not write them. Therefore, aside from being a venue by which Fr. Martin himself promotes heterodoxy, this Outreach Guide could be presented to orthodox souls to inure them at least to the toleration of heterodoxy.

We can see how all-encompassing—and extremely dangerous—heterodoxy is if promoted using the Church’s own strategies of evangelization. In other words, if a Jesuit, formed by perhaps the most powerful manual for evangelization the world has ever seen, decides to use its method against the Church, he could be profoundly effective: if not in changing the Church’s teaching, then in moving many souls to be lukewarm or outright hostile toward it.

For St. Ignatius, if a spirit is not aimed towards following the teachings of the Church, it is the bad spirit. The bad spirits, of course, are either the devil himself or the fallen angels who serve him. We are meant to recognize the devil’s attacks on our souls in order to become as wise as serpents while remaining as innocent as doves, like the Holy Spirit which animates the Church.

It seems as though Fr. Martin is as wise as a serpent—but also as guilty as one.

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(1) St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Presupposition.

(2) Ibid, Rules for Judging with the Church, Rule 13.

(3) Ibid, ibid, Rule Nine.

(4) Ibid, Rules for the First Week, Rules One and Two.

(5) Ibid, ibid, Rule Fourteen.

(6) Council of Trent, Session VI, Canon XVIII: “If any one saith, that the commandments of God are, even for one that is justified and constituted in grace, impossible to keep; let him be anathema.”

(7) Council of Trent, Session VII, Canon XI: “If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favour of God; let him be anathema.”