Sunday Word: Jesuitical
Jesuitical, jesuitical [jezh-oo-it-i-kuh l; jez-oo-, jez-yoo-]
adjective:
1 of or concerning the Jesuits; a member of the Society of Jesus.
2 practicing casuistry or equivocation; using subtle or oversubtle reasoning; crafty; sly; intriguing.
Examples:
It may be too clever by half, but what sense is there in criticizing a Jesuit for being jesuitical? (Kevin D Williamson, The Bishop and the ExecutionerNational Review 2018, 2020)
Trotsky, who sided with Martov, compared Lenin to the Jesuitical Catholic Abbe Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes - suspicious toward other people, fanatically attached to the idea, inclined to be dictator while claiming to put down supposedly ubiquitous sedition. (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928)
They are Jesuitical. They even see their way to doing wrong that right may come of it. (Jack London, The Iron Heel)
It was a jesuitical, cold, unfeeling, and selfish manner, that seemed to say, “I have kept within the law,” to the man he had so cruelly injured. (James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers)
She practices her unholy inquisitorial and Jesuitical doctrines in this country, as far as she can and dare act them out. (William Gannaway Brownlow, Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture1856)
Origin:
1540s, from Modern Latin Jesuita, member of the Societas Jesu ('Society of Jesus'), founded 1533 by Ignatius Loyola to combat Protestantism. Their enemies (in both Catholic and Protestant lands) accused them of belief that ends justify means, hence the sense 'a crafty or dissembling person' (1630s), and jesuitical 'deceitful, designing, insinuating' (1610s). Online Etymological Dictionary)