Jesuitize

English

Alternative forms

• jesuitize, Jesuitise, jesuitise

Etymology

Jesuit +‎ -ize

Verb

Jesuitize (third-person singular simple present Jesuitizes, present participle Jesuitizing, simple past and past participle Jesuitized)

1. (transitive) To convert to the form of catholicism practiced by the Jesuits; to make (more) Jesuit.
   • 1848, Jacopo Leone, Victor Prosper Considérant, The Jesuit conspiracy, page 182:

     It will be equally clear that it is their project to Jesuitize, besides all the other orders, the papacy itself; and, as the nec plus ultra of the metamorphoses they are effecting by their mysterious strategy, to Jesuitize the whole world.

   • 1874, Hiram K. Stimson, T. W. Greene, From the Stage Coach to the Pulpit, page 367:

     He belongs to the Jesuits. He has given names to streams and other natural objects in the region of the Mission, and has built some very substantial buildings for the uses of his church; but, although the Mission has been established forty-eight years, and every possible appliance has been used to civilize and educate and Jesuitize this tribe, yet, up to this time, not the first son or daughter of the Osages has been converted to Christianity, or even to Catholicism!

   • 2004, Scott R. Pilarz, Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature, 1561-1595:

     Opposition to this "shortness of scope" was especially common among older students training for the secular priesthood who resented what they perceived as efforts to "Jesuitize" them.

2. (transitive and intransitive) To argue like a Jesuit; to engage in sophistry (about).
   • 1861, William Howitt, Spiritualism versus pseudo-Swedenborgianism, page 4:

     It is a curious circumstance that the opponents of Spiritualism so continually fly across the Atlantic for their charges against it. Here Mr. Foster Jesuitizes again. They are American myths that these Jesuit fathers particularly deal in. , Spiritualism is widely spread in England; its results are well known; all its facts are most easy of ascertainment; why, then, do not these genglemen draw their statistics from home?

   • 1957, Biblical Criticism, page 31:

     First, it implicates Christ in moral evil; it makes him out-Jesuitize the Jesuits in the trade of questionable distinctions.

   • 1976, Niels C. Nielson, Solzhenitsyn's Religion, page 79:

     In philosophy, however, the liberal renegades decided to tell the whole truth, to reveal all their programme (war on materialism and the materialist interpretation of positivism, restoration of mysticism and the mystical world outlook), whereas on publicist subjects they prevaricate and hedge and Jesuitize.