`Give us," went the apocryphal boast of the Society of Jesus, "the first seven years of a man's life, and we will guarantee the rest." Be that as it may, the Jesuits also channelled their remarkable energies in more mundane directions. In many parts of the world, they were closely associated with the development of modern meteorology.
Education, to a large extent, was the Jesuits' raison d'etre and mathematics, astronomy and the natural sciences were important elements of their curriculums. Consequently, during the 19th century, geophysical or astronomical observatories were established at many of their colleges and universities, and at most of these meteorological observations were also undertaken.
The Jesuits' mission, however, took them to many of the more remote and less developed countries of the world, and to regions where natural phenomena rarely observed in Europe regularly occurred. By 1930, the Order had more than 30 major meteorological establishments in operation, including observatories in Havana in Cuba, Calcutta, La Paz in Bolivia, Ksara in Lebanon, San Miguel in Argentina, and many others.
The absence of other scientific institutions in many of these countries made the pioneering work of the Jesuits invaluable, and in many cases they laid the foundations for the future development of national meteorological services.
Manila Observatory, for example, was founded by the Jesuits in 1865, and in 1884 was designated by the Spanish government as the headquarters of the Meteorological Service of the Philippines; its mandate was renewed in 1901 by the Americans as the cornerstone of the Philippines Weather Bureau, by which time it was the hub of a regional network of 72 weather stations. As another example, the Jesuit Observatory at Ksara was selected as the headquarters of the Syrian Meteorological Service in 1920.
Many individual Jesuits, too, became well known and loved in their local communities for their meteorological eccentricities. At Santa Clara University in California, Father Ricard studied the rainfall of the region during the 1920s, and became known as the "Padre of the Rains"; Father Benito Vines, director of Havana Observatory, who carried out seminal work on tropical revolving storms, was known affectionately as "the Hurricane Priest".
From about 1950 onwards, the Jesuits, by and large, took their leave of these meteorological activities in far-flung places. In some cases it was because the rise of national institutions had made their work no longer necessary; in others, like Havana and Shanghai in China, the coming to power of communist regimes made their tenure less amenable. And in any event, there was by then an emerging view that the proper Jesuit vocation lay, not in the weather, but in elements more spiritual still.