8 - The first Jesuit confraternities and marginalized groups in sixteenth-century Rome

Summary

This article explores the ideological sources of Jesuit missionary activity by focusing on three of the first Jesuit confraternities founded in the 1540s in Rome. These confraternities administered houses for reformed prostitutes, daughters of prostitutes, and newly converted Jews and Muslims, and became the models for similar institutions throughout Italy. They illustrate a central feature of the Jesuit urban apostolate: to enlist elites in the reform of the most “public” sinners living on the margins of society. Focusing on these institutions also helps to recover women's roles in Catholic reform, to measure attitudes toward subcultures perceived as threatening, and to provide a clearer picture of the Jesuits and their relations with the laity generally.

Prostitutes, Jews, and Muslims stood out as symbols of the need for conversion because they were highly visible figures considered to be outside God's grace. By 1542, Ignatius Loyola established a new kind of institution, the Casa di Santa Marta, as a shelter where former prostitutes and battered women could stay before deciding whether to become a nun, to be reconciled with their husbands, or to get married; its administration was entrusted to a confraternity, the Compagnia della grazia. Almost simultaneously, a second confraternal shelter, the Conservatorio di Santa Caterina delle vergini miserabili, was established for the daughters of prostitutes and other young women who were thought to be in danger of turning to prostitution.