BECKX, PIERRE-JEAN. – 22nd Superior General of the Society of Jesus, born 18 February 1795 at Sichem near Diest (Belgium), died in Rome on 4 March 1887. At the age of twenty he entered the seminary of Malines but, eight months after his priestly ordination, was received into the novitiate of the Society at Hildesheim (29 October 1819). Professor of canon law in the episcopal seminary of that same city (1823), he was appointed, in March 1826, chaplain to Duke Ferdinand of Anhalt-Koethen, who had just converted to Catholicism; at the same time he had charge of the Catholics of the region. When the duke died (1830), he followed the duchess Julia to Vienna, where he remained her confessor until her death (1848). During these years, in addition to carrying out various missions of confidence entrusted to him by Fr Gio. Fil. Roothaan, the superior general, in Austria, Bavaria, and Belgium, he devoted himself extensively to preaching and published several ascetical pamphlets, among them a Monat Mariâ (Vienna 1837, a reworking of the Mese di maggio by Fr Lalomia), which went through many editions and translations.
B.’s career then rapidly took another direction. Returning to Belgium, in 1849 he became secretary to the provincial and the following year rector of the scholasticate at Louvain. On 8 September 1852 he assumed the office of provincial of Austria; in this capacity, he obtained from Emperor Franz Joseph the revocation of the ban imposed on the Jesuits during the revolutionary disturbances of ’48 and, through new foundations, secured a better organization for the province. On 2 July 1853 he was elected in Rome superior general of the Society.
His long government marked for the order a period of expansion, with the establishment of new provinces and missions and an influx of vocations that doubled its membership (from 5,209 religious in 1853 to 12,070 in 1887). The superior general worked especially to improve the studies of young religious, to organize the missions more effectively, and to extend to the various provinces the apostolate of the periodical press, already inaugurated in Italy (with La Civ. Catt., first Saturday of April 1850) and in Belgium. But he also saw persecution directed against the Society in several countries: in Spain (1854 and 1868), in Germany with the Kulturkampf (1873), in France, and in the various regions of Italy. In Rome itself, the principal houses were confiscated after the occupation of Rome, and Fr B., expelled from the Gesù, transferred the seat of the government of the Society to Fiesole in October 1873. Weighed down by age, in 1883 he obtained from the 23rd General Congregation a vicar general with the right of succession, in the person of Fr A. M. Anderledy, and shortly thereafter withdrew to the novitiate of S. Andrea in Rome; when this was expropriated in 1886, he spent his final months at the German College.