<P> Among the Jesuit victims of the Nazis, Germany's Rupert Mayer has been beatified . Mayer was a Bavarian Jesuit who clashed with the Nazis as early as 1923 . Continuing his critique following Hitler's rise to power, Mayer was imprisoned in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp . As his health declined, the Nazis feared the creation of a martyr and sent him to the Abbey of Ettal in 1940 . There he continued to give sermons and lectures against the evils of the Nazi régime, until his death in 1945 . </P> <P> In his history of the heroes of the Holocaust, the Jewish historian Martin Gilbert notes that in every country under German occupation, priests played a major part in rescuing Jews, and that the Jesuits were one of the Catholic Orders that hid Jewish children in monasteries and schools to protect them from the Nazis . Fourteen Jesuit priests have been formally recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust of World War II: Roger Braun (1910--1981) of France; Pierre Chaillet (1900--1972) of France; Jean - Baptist De Coster (1896--1968) of Belgium; Jean Fleury (1905--1982) of France; Emile Gessler (1891--1958) of Belgium; Jean - Baptiste Janssens (1889--1964) of Belgium; Alphonse Lambrette (1884--1970) of Belgium; Emile Planckaert (1906--2006) of France; Jacob Raile (1894--1949) of Hungary; Henri Revol (1904--1992) of France; Adam Sztark (1907--1942) of Poland; Henri Van Oostayen (1906--1945) of Belgium; Ioannes Marangas (1901--1989) of Greece; and Raffaele de Chantuz Cubbe (1904--1983) of Italy . For more information on them see 100 Heroic Jesuits of the Second World War (2015) by Vincent A. Lapomarda . </P> <P> Several other Jesuits are known to have rescued or given refuge to Jews during that period . A plaque commemorating the 152 Jesuit priests who gave of their lives during the Holocaust was installed in April 2007 at the Jesuits' Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, United States . </P> <P> The Jesuits have made numerous significant contributions to the development of science . For example, the Jesuits have dedicated significant study to earthquakes, and seismology has been described as "the Jesuit science". The Jesuits have been described as "the single most important contributor to experimental physics in the seventeenth century ." According to Jonathan Wright in his book God's Soldiers, by the eighteenth century the Jesuits had "contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes--to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity . They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings . They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave - like nature of light ." </P>

The jesuit religious order was particularly influential in