James Martin SJ inspires packed lecture halls, tears of healing and enraged online mobs
James Martin: In the Company of Jesus
JON M. SWEENEY
(Liturgical Press, 208 PP, £13.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.19 • Tel 020 7799 4064
It comes as a shock at first that the Jesuit writer Fr James Martin (full disclosure: a long-standing friend to The Tablet, and to this scribe in particular) should be included in the Liturgical Press “People of God” series, alongside Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero. But not long into Jon Sweeney’s highly readable homage, you get it. Jim, as Sweeney (and everyone else) calls him, may be down to earth, funny, vulnerable and accessible. He is also arguably the most successful Catholic writer of our time, “one of the foremost evangelisers – if not the foremost evangeliser – in the Church”, according to the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, Blase Cupich. Who in the Catholic world but Jim has 261,000 followers on Twitter, sells hundreds of thousands of copies of his dozen-odd books, pops up on Stephen Colbert’s show, gives retreats to Hollywood actors, and is received by the Pope in the apostolic palace?
With a fellow writer’s prurient interest in such matters, Sweeney estimates that over the past 20 years Jim’s spiritual best-sellers have earned more than $3 million (£2.3m) for his community, the Jesuit-owned America Media in New York. But it’s what Jim has done with that long reach that puts him in the pantheon. John Courtney Murray SJ used to say that the role of the Jesuits was to explain the Church to the world and the world to the Church. Nearing 60, Jim still does this better than almost anyone. His outstanding gift as a Catholic communicator is to think with the Church but without being a lackey for the institution; to do battle for the downtrodden, but with unfailing kindness, seeking reconciliation; and always in simple, honest, fast-moving prose.