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William H. McCabe, S.J. An Introduction to the Jesuit Theater. Edited by Louis J. Oldani, S.J. St Louis, Missouri : The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1983. XIV, 346 pp. ; $ 23 cloth, $ 19 paper.
This work earned Fr. McCabe his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1929. He continued revising it, but his appointment as President of Rockhurst College, and then of Marquette University, and finally illness, kept him from seeing it into publication. Fr. Louis Oldani has carefully tended this posthumous edition, and made his fellow Jesuit's work of a lifetime available to all.
To briefly summarize and show the magnitude of Fr. McCabe's field : Ignatius of Loyola had no plans for the Jesuits as a teaching order, but his first recruits for missionary work lacked the necessary education so that he and his companions were required to teach them. Soon they were being asked to educate young men who were not planning to enter religion but other professions. Within ten years of the Society's founding, by 1550, there were a score of Jesuit colleges on the Continent, by 1600 about 300, and by...