David Schultenover, S.J.’s monumental study of the Jesuit superior general Luis Martín (1846–1906) leaves all students of modern Jesuit, Catholic, and Spanish history in his debt. (For me this debt is personal. Some years ago, Schultenover generously provided me with a transcription of some of Martín’s memoirs for use in one of my own projects.) It is an unusual text derived from an unusual source. Schultenover combines a close reading and digest of the published version of Martín’s memoirs (two Spanish language volumes from 1988), with a comprehensive understanding of the unpublished portions of Martín’s archive. The original memoir, held in the Jesuit archives in Loyola, Spain, composed in French, English, Spanish, and Latin, runs to 5,424 manuscript pages.

Schultenover first encountered Martín’s memoir almost forty years ago. In the interval, he published several essays on Martín, along with a revealing book-length study on him and his opposition to the modernist theologians. All of this was as an offshoot of his work on the modernists themselves, and Schultenover had by then become a leading expert on modernist George Tyrrell, the feisty Anglo-Irish Jesuit.

Now Martín is center stage. Schultenover cautions his readers against beginning with his own sixty-six-page epilogue, itself a cogent summary of the 863-page main text. But I found myself unable to resist, since I could then tackle the text with greater confidence. Readers with command of Spanish might place the original memoir side-by-side with Schultenover’s English language assessment.

Martín’s childhood was not an easy one. He grew up in a farming village not far from Burgos in northern Spain. He had six siblings, all of whom died before adulthood, and this horror weighed heavily on the surviving son and the grieving parents, especially as they were separated for long periods of time (even years) during Martín’s seminary training. His academic career had a bumpy start at a local boarding school straight out of Dickens, complete with pedantic instructors and savage discipline.

He later entered a Jesuit novitiate and seems to have been more or less content during his long training, which included a lengthy sojourn in France after anticlerical political leaders in Spain exiled the Jesuits during the 1868 revolution. He became fully absorbed in the culture of the ultramontane Catholic revival of the nineteenth century: editing the widely read Spanish Jesuit version of the international devotional periodical, the Messenger of the Sacred Heart; cheering on Pius ix’s defiance of state officials after Italian unification in 1870, devotedly reading Civiltà cattolica and studying (and teaching) the standard neo-Thomist textbooks.

One persistent theme in the diary is Martín’s sexuality. At several moments, he recalls his intermittent, and to his mind utterly shameful, attraction to young men This candor was surely unusual when Martín composed his memoirs. Whether Martín was “gay” is hard to say and is perhaps an anachronistic question: he describes flirtations with young girls (also a source of shame and temptation) during his teen-age years, although the attraction to young men seems more enduring. As a teenager, he seems to have been sexually abused by an older family servant during his studies in Burgos, when he boarded with a local family. The trauma and shame of this episode, too, reverberated across the decades.

Another persistent theme is Spanish politics. Martín’s family was politically active and he kept one eye on the great debates within Spanish society and Spanish Catholicism. The ins and outs of Spanish politics in this era defy easy characterization but one important divide was between Carlists (focused on restoration of their preferred line of descent in the Spanish monarchy) and Integrists (focused on creating a Catholic state). Both groups located themselves on the Catholic right, but their mutual antagonism prevented a unified front, to the frustration of Leo xiii and many Spanish Catholic leaders. Even celebrating the centenary of the canonization of Teresa of Ávila—as a great writer embodying Spanish culture (Carlist) or as a holy woman devoted to her faith (Integrist)—led to polemics.

Spanish Jesuits, including Martín, struggled (with limited success) to keep the Society of Jesus from being embroiled in these disputes, which divided families, towns, and regions. Beyond these internal divisions, Martín and his Jesuit colleagues shared an opposition to a secular or anticlerical liberalism that seemed to them on the verge of annihilating Spanish Catholicism. These fears were frequently exaggerated. But they were not ridiculous. Repeated expulsions of Jesuits (from Spain, and later, France where Martín studied and taught) in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s demonstrate the ferocity of struggles between liberal nationalists and Catholics in Spain, certainly, but also across Europe, North America, and Latin America. In the Spanish instance, these divides endured and deepened through the 1930s, and were vividly displayed in the savagery (on all sides) of the civil war.

Martín’s “martyrdom” (as he termed it) occurred in 1898. By then superior general of the Jesuits, having returned to Rome in 1895 from exile in Fiesole, Martín suffered through Spain’s humiliation in the war with the United States. Losing colonies in the Philippines and Cuba to an arrogant, often anti-Catholic American empire was difficult. Watching bumptious American Catholics celebrate their victory with tired (and Protestant) tropes about Spanish decadence was excruciating. The episode led to more anticlerical violence in Spain, as some Spaniards, too, blamed their humiliating defeat on a corrupt government allied with the church.

Given the density and richness of this source, and given his unparalleled expertise, Schultenover might have given us more assessment of what the memoir means. It is fascinating, for example, to see him identify some of the crosscurrents of a global church with Spanish, American, Italian, and Filipino Catholics all staking out different positions on the 1898 war. (Spanish Jesuits eventually shuffled their men off to South America—and even India—after over three hundred years in southeast Asia, and American Jesuits journeyed across the Pacific Ocean to replace Spanish Jesuits in Manila.) How might we, then, place Spanish Catholics such as Martín in a European context or within the Spanish-speaking Catholic world? Alternatively, thanks to Schultenover’s hard work we now know more about the inner life of Martín than we do for the vast majority of figures in turn of the twentieth-century Catholicism. Fine studies by William Callahan, Mary Vincent, and Frances Lannon—as Schultenover knows well—sketch Spanish Catholic piety during this era (at least for Anglophone readers). What does Martín’s story add? The book’s title conveys Martín’s desire to “show up” for God’s call and for his daily work. But how he did understood “showing up”? Some evidence within the memoir suggests Martín’s complete absorption in a vocabulary of sin and suffering through which he refracted not only his daily struggles and temptations but also his geopolitical opinions. Were nineteenth-century Catholics in Spain—despite their adoption of telephones and telegraphs—less “modern” or “modern” in an entirely different way than we might have guessed?

These are speculations more than questions. That they can be posed, let alone answered, is one of the happiest outcomes of David Schultenover’s work over many decades. He provides us with a fully realized portrait of that most unlikely of literary figures, a Jesuit superior general. This archival and editorial triumph will inform the work of the next generation of historians of Spanish Catholicism, at a minimum, but should influence scholars of the modern Catholic world more generally.