Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Shea

Calling the Jesuits a religious organization "modeled along military lines" is less a history lesson than a pressure point: it forces the reader to admit how easily spiritual authority borrows the machinery of command. Robert Shea chooses his adjectives like a prosecutor. "Successful and influential" sounds like a corporate annual report, not the language of saints. That businesslike praise primes the twist: the engine of that success is discipline, hierarchy, obedience - the stuff of armies - openly "consciously" embraced rather than accidentally drifted into.

The subtext isn’t that religion is secretly violent; it’s that institutions win by organizing desire. A military model isn’t only about war. It’s about training, messaging discipline, clarity of mission, and a chain of accountability. In that frame, Loyola becomes less the mystic founder than the systems designer: a man who understood that charisma fades but structure replicates.

Context matters because Shea is writing in a 20th-century atmosphere suspicious of centralized power, especially power that claims moral purity. The Jesuits have long been mythologized as intellectual shock troops of the Counter-Reformation - educators, confessors to kings, agents of Rome. Shea leans into that cultural image to suggest a broader pattern: when an organization aims to change the world, it tends to adopt the tactics of world-changing machines.

What makes the line work is its calmness. No outrage, no sermon, just a neat linkage between sanctity and strategy that leaves the reader slightly unsettled - and therefore thinking.