Still enjoying St. Peter's (Harvard University Press, 2007) by Keith Miller, where I am unsurprised to find numerous references to the Jesuits and their church-building tendencies:
Luther's revolution cost the True Church dear in lost territories and broken alliances. But it is important to remember that things had not been particularly rosy before he arrived, nor would they be entirely bleak in the future. The temporal powers of the papacy had been under threat since the Middle Ages; Popes had been swept up in (or, in several cases, had actively instigated) the wars which raged through Italy from the late fifteenth century onwards. A bitter betrayal by the Habsburg Emperor Charles V would lead in 1527 to the disastrous Sack of Rome, and a humiliating redrawing of the balance of power between Caesar and God. But the Catholic Church landed, catlike, on its feet. As the preferred spiritual partner of the Spanish branch of the Habsburg Empire, the Church soon enjoyed unrivalled access to literally millions of fresh souls, whom a little education and the occasional crack of the whip might soon rid of their pagan beliefs. Organizations like Ignatius of Loyola's Society of Jesus took a newly pragmatic approach to doctrine and helped the Spanish and Portuguese build vast empires across the Atlantic and in the Indies. Slaves, spices, tobacco, mahogany, blue Brazilian marbles and tons of gold went a good way towards easing Roman pain at the loss of a few drizzly tracts of Northern Europe to the Protestant heresy.
When you enter the nave of St. Peter's today ... you feel as if you are in a standard-issue Baroque church of the sort built by the Jesuits all over the Catholic world from Antwerp to Ouro Preto to Goa ...
I quote these Keith Miller lines in particular because every morning on the way to my office at the library I pass behind just such a standard-issue Jesuit church. A few years ago the good Fathers spent quite a large sum to install exterior floodlights and now the church glows on its hill all night long, visible from most parts of San Francisco (though less so in the summer months when the fog obscures the spectacle).