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CHOICE Review

Martin's purpose in this polemic is to indict the contemporary Jesuits for allegedly departing from their role as elite shock troops of Roman Catholic orthodoxy and becoming instead conspirators against orthodoxy and papacy by supporting theological deviations and rapprochement with Marxism. A former Jesuit biblical scholar, Martin has set himself an ambitious task as evidenced by those he has chosen to attack as pernicious or deluded: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jacques Maritain, Karl Rahner, Pope John XXIII and all liberation theologians among them. Yet his program is entirely vitiated by his gross distortions of their views (e.g., in his assertion, p. 305, that Maritain had adopted a theology of history based on Marxist philosophy, with ``religious truth ... to be found exclusively in the masses of the people''). A brief note on sources and materials is too general to be helpful to nonspecialists, too elementary to be convincing to specialists. The notes are explanatory rather than bibliographical in nature, seldom identify primary sources, and ignore secondary scholarly resources almost entirely. The overheated style seems more calculated to rouse the general reader than to reassure the academic. Historically uninformed, logically imprecise, and rhetorically inflamed, this is a bad book.-J.M. McCarthy, Suffolk University