BECKX, PIERRE-JEAN. - 22nd general of the Society of Jesus, b. 18 Feb. 1795 at Sichem near Diest (Belgium), d. in Rome on 4 March 1887. He entered the seminary of Malines at the age of twenty, but eight months after his priestly ordination he was received into the novitiate of the Society at Hildesheim (29 Oct. 1819). A 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 then been converted to Catholicism; at the same time he had charge of the Catholics of the region. After the duke's death (1830), he followed the duchess Julia to Vienna, remaining her confessor until her death (1848). During these years, besides carrying out various confidential missions entrusted to him by the father general John Philip Roothaan in Austria, Bavaria and Belgium, he devoted himself greatly to preaching and printed several ascetical pamphlets, among them a Monat Mariä (Vienna 1837, a reworking of the Mese di maggio of Father Lalomia), which went through many editions and translations.
B.'s career then quickly took a different direction. Having returned to Belgium, he became in 1849 secretary of the provincial and the following year rector of the scholasticate of Louvain. On 8 Sept. 1852 he assumed the office of provincial of Austria; in that capacity he obtained from Emperor Francis Joseph the revocation of the ban imposed on the Jesuits during the revolutionary disturbances of '48, and by new foundations he secured for the province a better organization. On 2 July 1853 he was elected general of the Society in Rome.
His long government marks for the order a period of expansion, with the erection of new provinces and missions, with an influx of vocations that doubled its numbers (from 5,209 religious in 1853 to 12,070 in 1887). The general laboured especially to improve the studies of the young religious, to organize the missions better, and to extend to the various provinces the apostolate of the periodical press, already inaugurated in Italy (with La Civ. Catt., 1st Saturday of Apr. 1850) and in Belgium. But he also saw persecution hurled 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 Father B., expelled from the Gesù, transferred the seat of the Society's government to Fiesole in Oct. 1873. Burdened by age, he obtained in 1883 from the 23rd General Congregation a vicar general with the right of succession in the person of Father A. M. Anderledy, and withdrew shortly afterwards to the novitiate of St. Andrew in Rome; when this was expropriated in 1886, he spent his last months in the German College.
Bibliography6 works
Edmond Lamalle