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

by G. B. Nicolini

In Austria, although the reaction had long begun, coercive measures against the Protestants were not resorted to till somewhat later. As we have already said, Ferdinand invited the Jesuits to Vienna, and delivered up to them the university as early as the year 1551. Soon after, he established another Jesuit college at Prague, to which he sent his own pages, and to which resorted all the nobility belonging to the Roman communion. Colleges, and schools of less consequence, were established throughout all the Austrian dominions, and great efforts were made to win back the Protestants to the Romish faith. Yet, under the prudent and conciliating Ferdinand I., and during the reign of the wise Maximilian, the Jesuits could not obtain any severe persecuting measure against the followers of the Reformed religion, but were more successful with Rodolph II. Father Maggio, the Provincial of the Jesuits, was held by the emperor in great estimation, and consulted in every matter of importance. He was continually pressing the monarch to come to the resolution of completely extirpating heresy from his dominions. The Pope’s legate and the Spanish ambassador backed him in his intolerant demand. This bigoted prince at last, under the pretence of a popular tumult, which took place on the occasion of the procession of the Corpus Domini in 1578, banished from his estates Opitz, a Protestant preacher, and all his assistants; and this measure was the signal for a general persecution of the Lutherans. The greatest atrocity and the utmost rigour were displayed in destroying every trace of Protestantism.

In the first place, it was determined to extirpate Protestantism from the imperial cities. The towns east of the Ens, which had separated from the estates of the knights and nobles twenty years before, could offer no resistance; the Reformed clergy were removed, and their places filled by Catholic priests; private persons were subjected to a close examination. A formula, according to which the suspected were interrogated, has come into our possession. ‘Dost thou believe,’ inquires one of its articles, ‘that everything is true which the Church of Rome has laid down as the rule of life and doctrine?’ ‘Dost thou believe,’ adds another, ‘that the Pope is the head of the one Apostolic Church?’ No doubt was to be endured. The Protestants were to be expelled from all offices of state; none were admitted to the class of burghers who did not declare themselves Catholics. In the universities, that of Vienna not excepted, all who applied for a doctor’s degree were first required to subscribe the Professio Fidei. A new regulation for schools was promulgated, which prescribed Catholic formularies, fasts, worship, according to the Catholic ritual, and the exclusive use of the Catechism of Canisius. In Vienna, all Protestant books were taken away from the booksellers’ shops, and were carried in heaps to the Episcopal court. Search was made at the customhouses along the river; all packages were examined, and books or pictures not considered purely Catholic were confiscated.[196]

All throughout Germany the same proceedings were resorted to, and everywhere we find the Jesuits foremost in the reaction. There was no bishop, no prince, who went to visit a province upon religious concerns, who did not bring with him a troop of Jesuits, who, on his departure, were often left there with almost unlimited powers.

POLAND.

If from Germany we pass to Poland, there also we meet the ominous influence of the disciples of Loyola. “The Protestant cause,” says Count Krasinski, in the fourth of his admirable Lectures on Slavonia, “was endangered by the lamentable partiality which Stephen Batory had shewn to the Jesuits; and the Romanist reaction, beginning under his reign, had been chiefly promoted by the schools, which that order was everywhere establishing.” Stephen, however, either too prudent to attack openly the religion then professed, in Lithuania at least, by a great majority of his subjects, or anxious to maintain, to a certain extent, religious liberty, had recourse to no extraordinary measures for the furtherance of this reaction, and contented himself with ordering that in future none but strict Roman Catholics should be appointed to bishoprics. But under the bigoted Sigismond—under that king, who, as the same learned Count says, “gloried in the appellation of the king of the Jesuits, which was given him by their antagonists, and who indeed became a mere tool in the hands of the disciples of Loyola”—the reaction made fearful and continued progress. Although Sigismond could attempt nothing by main force against the liberties of his Protestant subjects, he had it in his power to give, and he at last effectually gave, a mortal blow to the Reformed religion. The chief prerogative of the Polish kings—we should perhaps say, the only real power possessed by these nominal sovereigns—was the right of conferring all dignities and official appointments. Twenty thousand offices were at their disposal; and Sigismond declared that none but strict Roman Catholics should be named to them. The favour of the Jesuits was an essential condition of obtaining a situation under the Government; and “the Starost Ludwig von Montager became Waivode of Pomerellia, because he presented his house in Thorn to the Society of Jesus.”[197] Many of the nobles who had professed the doctrines of the Reformation, were induced to recant, depending exclusively as they did on the king’s favour for the maintenance of their rank, and having no hope for preferment while out of the pale of the Romish Church. The influence of these examples, seconded by the rigorous measures subsequently taken against the Lutherans, and, above all, by the diabolical cunning and artifice of the Jesuits, in a short time brought back the great majority of the Polish nation under the yoke of the Church of Rome.

SWEDEN.

In Sweden, the efforts of the Jesuits against Protestantism, although no less active and vigorous, were less successful. John III., son of the heroic Gustavus Vasa, on ascending the throne, published a ritual, in which, to the great amazement and dismay of the Protestants, were to be found not only ceremonies, but even doctrines of the Church of Rome.[198] The Pope, apprised of this prince’s good disposition towards his Church, despatched to Stockholm in all haste and secrecy, as his legate, the famous Possevin, one of the cleverest and least scrupulous among the Jesuits. To obviate the difficulty of obtaining admission into the country and court of Sweden as Pope’s legate, Possevin, in passing through Prague, induced the widow of the emperor Maximilian to send him to Stockholm as her extraordinary ambassador. He assumed, in consequence, another name, a splendid costume, and girded himself with a sword, but, “to do penance in advance for these transient honours, he went the greatest part of the way on foot.”[199] Acting publicly as the envoy of the empress, he found means secretly to inform the king of his real name and mission, and had several conferences with him. The result was, that John was persuaded to make the Professio Fidei, according to the formula of the Council of Trent, promising at the same time to take measures, and to use all his endeavours, to induce the nation to follow in the same path, provided the Pope would second him by making certain concessions, the most essential of which were, that the sacramental cup should be administered to the laity, and mass performed in the language of the country. Possevin said that the Pope should be apprised of his majesty’s will, and asked him whether he would submit to his decision in this matter. John having answered in the affirmative, was absolved of his sins, and received the sacrament according to the Roman Catholic ritual.[200]

The Jesuit departed in high glee at his success, far surpassing his most sanguine hopes. He hastened to Rome, and assuming a privilege in use among ambassadors, he boasted of having achieved more than he had really done, assuring Gregory XIII. that Sweden and its king were at his Holiness’s mercy. He then laid before the Pope the conditions on which John had insisted, but Gregory, either too intolerant to make any concession, or considering it unnecessary to grant honourable terms to an enemy who threw himself at his feet, refused to listen to such proposals, and sent back the Jesuit to Stockholm, with letters to the king, in which he required the monarch to declare himself a Catholic without restriction.

This imperious conduct saved Sweden from falling back under the Popish rule. John, indignant at being held in so light account—indignant at the assurance of Possevin, who unceremoniously entered Stockholm and the court in the garb of his order as the Pope’s legate, and accompanied by other Jesuits, as if Sweden had already become a Roman Catholic country—moved by the remonstrances of the Protestant princes and divines, who, in the interval of Possevin’s departure and return, had entreated him to remain in their communion—dismissed the Pope’s ambassador, and returned to the Reformed worship.

The attempts of the Jesuits to convert Sweden to the Roman faith were revived with new vigour under John’s successor, Sigismond, the Polish king. Fortunately, Charles of Sandermania, the king’s uncle, headed the nation in its resistance to Sigismond’s Popish propensities; and although the Jesuits had the sad glory of plunging Poland and Sweden into a bloody war, the last-mentioned country remained Protestant.