The Jesuits’ mission in hospitaller Malta : confronting spiritual, financial and political challenges in the Mediterranean frontier (17th–18th century)

Abstract

Perched at the heart of the Mediterranean, Hospitaller Malta was both fortress and threshold: a bastion of Catholic Europe against the Ottoman world, yet also a crossroads of cultures where corsairs, merchants, enslaved Muslims, Jews, and Protestant sympathisers mingled in the bustling harbour towns. In this liminal space – what exasperated Jesuits, arguing for the financial subsistence, described as a «horrido scoglio» and a mission «in esiglio per amore del Signore»1 – the Catholic Church confronted challenges that went far beyond the island’s modest size. Clergy often lacked proper formation, the laity remained vulnerable to superstition, and competing jurisdictions between the bishop and the Grand Master frequently divided the Hospitaller state. It was into this contested frontier, poised between the pressures of reform and the threat of Islam, that the Society of Jesus entered in 1592. The foundation of the Collegium Melitense (Fig. 1) was not simply another act of institutional expansion by a particular religious congregation, but a decisive experiment in adapting Tridentine reform to one of the most exposed peripheries of Christendom.. [excerpt]