Except for his year with the Christian Brothers in 1892, Joyce's entire formal education was under the Jesuits. As an adult, he often acknowledged the debt he owed to the Society's discipline, and continued to call his thought patterns “Jesuit,” claiming the Order taught him how to “arrange things in such a way that they become easy to survey and judge.” Oliver Gogarty characterized Joyce as an “inverted Jesuit” who failed to relinquish the Society's obsession with preciseness and pedantry. Joyce learned Catholic doctrine in its most detailed form from the Jesuits, and so found a sophisticated reinforcement there for “the Jew” as the betrayer of Jesus. But Joyce's education emphasized as well the virtue of Old Testament patriarchs as a crucial element of Bible typology. During his years at Belvedere, Joyce also read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, which provided him with a new, secular representation of “the Jew.” Undermining that image, however, were Jesuit arguments he encountered that connected the Church's long-running anti-Masonry campaign with a renewed animus against the Jews.

During the eighteenth century, the Society had lost its struggle for influence in Ireland with the suppression of the world-wide Order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. Yet throughout the next century it grew to become a formidable force of Irish Catholic education.