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Friday, August 27, 2010

Ten Things You Didn’t Know (About the Jesuits)



  1. They invented the trap door. Without the Jesuits, the Wicked Witch
    of the West wouldn’t have been able to disappear so suddenly
    in The Wizard of Oz. With a history in theater and the arts, Jesuits
    also perfected the “scrim,” the sheer curtain still used in theaters
    today.

  2. They discovered quinine (called “Jesuit bark” in the 16th century)
    that is used today for anti-malarial drugs and also in tonic water.
    Without the Jesuits, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy your gin and
    tonic. *

  3. Their founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the Spanish-soldier-
    turned-mystic may be the only saint with a notarized police
    record: for nighttime brawling with intent to cause bodily harm
    (needless to say, this came before his conversion).

  4. Their dictionaries and lexicons of the native languages in North
    America in the 17th century were the first resources Europeans
    used to understand these ancient tongues, and they still
    provide modern scholars with the earliest transcriptions of the
    languages.

  5. They located the source of the Blue Nile and charted large
    stretches of the Amazon and Mississippi Rivers.

  6. They educated Descartes, Voltaire, Moliere, James Joyce, Peter Paul
    Rubens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fidel Castro, Alfred Hitchcock, and
    Bill Clinton
    —not to mention Bing Crosby, Vince Lombardi, Robert
    Altman, Chris Farley, Salma Hayek, and Denzel Washington.

  7. They founded the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

  8. There are 35 craters on the moon named for Jesuit scientists. And
    Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scientist, called “master
    of a hundred arts” and “the last man to know everything”, was
    a geologist, biologist, linguist, decipherer of hieroglyphics, and
    inventor of the megaphone.

  9. They inspired the film On the Waterfront, based on the groundbreaking
    labor-relations work of Jesuit John Corridan, who worked in
    New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. His part was played by
    Karl Malden, who, last year, died 50 years to the day after Fr.
    Corridan.

  10. They count 40 saints and dozens of blessed among their members,
    including the globe-trotting missionary St. Francis Xavier. Their
    famous “former” members include Garry Wills, John McLaughlin,
    and Jerry Brown.


Source: http://www.companymagazine.org/v274/jesuit-guide.pdf

P.S. *Quinine is also used to dilute Heroin.

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