The Catholic religious order founded in 1540 as a disciplined force for the Counter-Reformation, which became the Church's most influential educators, missionaries, and intellectuals — feared and admired across the world, suppressed by their own Pope in 1773, and restored in 1814.
They were the soldiers of the Counter-Reformation who conquered with schools. Founded by a wounded soldier turned mystic to defend a Church under attack, the Society of Jesus built the best classrooms in Europe and carried the Catholic faith to China, India, and the Americas. They grew so powerful, so clever, and so entangled in the politics of kings that the word 'Jesuitical' came to mean cunning and deceptive — and in 1773 the Pope himself dissolved the order entirely. Forty years later he brought it back. The Jesuits had been too useful, and too dangerous, to leave alone.