History of the Jesuits: Their origin, progress, doctrines, and designs

by G. B. Nicolini

Lainez left Trent for Rome, and his whole journey through Italy was one continued triumph. But, alas! poor Lainez had not long to taste the sweetness of adulation. His health, which had always been delicate, became worse and worse. He fell seriously ill, lingered in his bed for two or three months, and breathed his last on the 19th of January 1565, at the age of 53.

Lainez was under the middle size, had a fair complexion and cheerful countenance, with large bright eyes, but his appearance was very unprepossessing. He was gifted with a great facility of elocution, and a prodigious memory. He left many manuscripts behind him; some were unfinished, and almost all are unintelligible, as his handwriting was execrable.

Francois de Borgia.

Hinchliff.

The day after Lainez expired, the Jesuits in Rome named Francis Borgia Vicar-General, until a new election should take place. Borgia is one of the saints and glories of the order, and his history is really a most extraordinary one. He was descended from that Alexander VI. who united in his person all the crimes of past and future Popes, and was a stain to humanity itself. Our Borgia was, however, a man of the strictest honesty, and of unblemished honour. He was handsome, brave, the companion in arms and friend of Charles V., was Duke of Candia and Vice-king of Barcelona. In 1546, when he was only 36 years of age, his duchess died. The sight of her beautiful face, altered and disfigured by death, made such a powerful impression upon his mind, that he from that moment resolved to give up all worldly thoughts, and consecrate himself (as the phrase goes) to God. He chose the Society of the Jesuits as the safest retreat, and wrote to Loyola for the purpose. Ignatius’ answer begins thus:—“The resolution you have taken, most illustrious lord, gives me much joy. Let the angels and saints in heaven give thanks to God, for we on this earth cannot be sufficiently grateful to God for the great honour He bestows upon His little Society in calling you to join it.”[125]

This man had nine children, some in infancy, and all under age, whom he left in the wide world unprotected, to enter the Society. And the angels and saints ought to praise God for this! Alas for the moral blindness of perverted human nature! Loyola again wrote to him, saying that he accepted him as his brother, but that, before he could be admitted into the noviciate, he must settle all his temporal affairs, and have nothing more to do with the world; meanwhile, until he was ready to enter the Society, to keep his intention a secret. Borgia was admitted into the house of probation in 1548, and from that moment he became a bigoted fanatic, whose greatest happiness consisted in lacerating his body. Macaulay says, in an article in the Edinburgh Review, “that it is making penitence with him to listen to the recital of his flagellations and his self-inflicted punishments of all kinds.” He had so destroyed his constitution by this absurd way of trying to please God, that he never had a single day of good health, and was even once threatened with a gangrene over his whole body. Such was the man appointed Vicar-General, and afterwards chief of the order. He had no wish for the honour, considered the office a burden, and we believe he was sincere in his humility. The first battle he had to fight was against the Holy See itself. Almost contemporaneously with his nomination, a Dominican friar ascended the Papal throne, under the name of Pius V. A more bigoted, fanatical, cruel, and sanguinary man never existed. Brought up under the wing of the Inquisition, he contracted a sort of blind passion for that bloody tribunal, and never felt so happy as when he heard of some barbarous cruelties inflicted upon the heretics, or when some hecatombs of these accursed enemies of Popery were sacrificed at the altar of his revenge, or when some new instrument of torture was invented against them. Suffice it to say, that when he sent his general, Santafiore, to fight against the French Protestants, he commanded him in the most peremptory manner to take no Huguenot prisoner, but to put them one and all to the sword; and because Santafiore had not rigorously executed his commands, he reproached him in the most bitter manner. And when that monster of cruelty, the Duke of Alva, had spread death and desolation over the entire of the Netherlands, 18,000 of the inhabitants of which he boasted of having delivered up into the hands of the executioners, so pleased was Pius with his deeds, that he sent him the consecrated hat and sword, as marks of his approval.[126] Can this, then, be the religion of Christ? Is it for a moment possible that this should be the true religion, this which erects upon its altars the statues of such monsters of iniquity, and impiously calls them saints, to be worshipped in place of God the Lord? And among the greatest of these modern saintships stands forth the name of Pius V.! This Pope, a most rigorous observer of all the monastic and superstitious ceremonies, gave the Jesuits to understand that they should undertake the choral hours as prescribed by Pius IV., and that no Jesuit should be ordained a priest before he had pronounced the four vows. We shall not repeat the conversation which took place between the Holy Father and the saint Borgia, as given by Sacchini and other historians; we shall only give some extracts of the bold and eloquent memorials which the Jesuits presented to the Pope on this occasion.

After reminding his holiness, in a gentle yet admonitory manner, that their Constitutions had been approved of by three popes, and that they could not be altered without good reasons for so doing, they proceed to state, “that their Society had been established to repel the impious efforts of the heretics, to oppose the infernal tricks which had been had recourse to to extinguish the light of the Catholic truth, and to resist the barbarous enemies of Christ, who were besieging the holy edifice of the Church, undermining it insensibly; that, in order that they might be able to resist this invasion effectually, their holy father Ignatius thought that it would be better for them to leave singing to others.... And did not the same causes still exist, they inquired, for the exercise of their activity, as the signs of the times unmistakably demonstrated? They submitted that a vast conflagration was devouring France; that Germany was in a great measure consumed; that England was one heap of ashes; that Belgium was falling into ruins; that Poland smoked in every quarter; that the flames were already blazing around the confines of Italy.... And they should lose their time in undertaking the choral hours.”[127] On this point the Pope yielded; but, on the other, he was inflexible, saying, that it was requisite that at least as much learning and virtue should be in a priest as in a Jesuit, even of the class of the Professed. This Sacchini denies, affirming that it is more difficult to make one good Jesuit than a thousand priests. The Jesuits, who stood in need of priests, but would not enlarge the aristocratic class of the Professed members, who alone take the four vows, obtained as usual their end by exercising a little cunning. They presented themselves for ordination, not as Jesuits, but as secular ecclesiastics.

We pass over a number of interesting incidents which happened under the generalship of Borgia down to the year 1571, when we find the General, though in very ill health, leaving Rome for Spain and France, for the purpose of soliciting assistance from the respective monarchs of these countries to aid the Venetians in a war against the Turks, who were then threatening to pour their savage hordes over Europe. Philip II. joined the league, and his vessels gained some of the laurels which were won at that ever memorable battle fought at Lepanto on the 7th October 1571, when the descendants of the Prophet suffered a defeat from which they have never recovered. Before Borgia entered Spain, the Inquisition, aware that Philip was on the best terms both with him and the Pope, published, with the highest eulogium, those same works which she had proscribed nine years before when the king frowned upon Father Borgia—a most striking example of the servility of the Spanish Inquisition to the crown. From Spain, Borgia proceeded to Portugal, thence to France, at the very time when Catherine and Charles were plunged in continual feasts and pleasures, the forerunner of what they expected to enjoy on Saint Bartholomew’s eve. But we have no reason to believe that he was at all privy to the plot. It is not at all likely that the cunning and circumspect Catherine of Medicis would be so foolish as to confide so important a secret to such a weak-brained man. Borgia witnessed the massacre in the southern provinces of France, when on his return to Rome, where he arrived on the 28th of September 1572, and where he expired three days after. So ended this extraordinary man, whom the Church of Rome has enrolled among the saints. Would to God that none of them were worse than he!