If they had been extraordinary persons of their own class, their canonisation took place almost immediately on their decease, as was the case with St Francis, the founder of the ragged and beggarly order of monks which bears his name, and St Antony, the great miracle worker,[246] both of whom were ranked among the saints only a year after their death. The trade of saint-making proving very lucrative, from the many offerings presented at their shrines, the priests encouraged the multitude, always ready to believe in the marvellous, to credit extraordinary legends and to find saints everywhere. Above all, as we have said elsewhere, after the Reformation, the priests were creating saints in such alarming numbers, that Urban VIII. fearing, it would seem, that heaven would not be large enough to admit the whole of them, by two bulls, of 1625 and 1634, put a check upon the mania of saint-making, and swept away from churches, convents, and public places, the images of those poor blessed ones who had been patiently waiting in their niches for the supreme oracle of the Vatican to send them up to heaven; and who, doubtless, were now much annoyed at being removed from their places of adoration and worship. The bull ordained that no offering, no burning lamp, nor any sort of worship whatever, should be rendered to any one, no matter how great might have been the fame of his saintship, if he had not been recognised as a saint, either from immemorial time, immemorabilem temporis cursum, or by the unanimous consent of the Church, per communem Ecclesiæ consensum, or by a sort of tolerance of the apostolic see, tolerantiâ sedis apostolicæ. By immemorial time, the Pope says in his bull of 1634 that he means more than a hundred years. In consequence, all those persons who had been called saints, and worshipped as such for only ninety-nine years and some months, were to be discarded, and their images or statues removed from the place of worship;[247] unless, indeed, some money were spent, and a privilege or dispensation obtained from the all-powerful Pope. Alas! how many sinners, who had perhaps chosen those very saints as mediators between them and an offended God, must have been driven to despair by the unmerciful bull!
However, a regular canonisation may be obtained from Rome, and in two different ways. The first is the more simple:—Whosoever is interested in obtaining a canonisation must prove before the Congregation of the Rites,[248] that, for more than a hundred years, the man who is proposed as a candidate for saintship had been worshipped either by a burning lamp before his image or his sepulchre, or by a person praying before it, &c.; and that these signs of veneration had been repeated before they had been prohibited at no greater distance of time than ten years. If the congregation deliver their opinion in a dubious form, that the immemorial worship seems to them to be proved, videtur constare de cultu immemorabili; and, if the omniscient and infallible Pope affirm, constare, “it has been proved,” then the man becomes a beatifice, and mass, prayers, and offerings may be addressed to him with a perfectly safe conscience. This was the mode of canonisation resorted to after the famous bull of 1634.
More difficult is the other way, now generally followed, to obtain a canonisation. The man must pass through many stages—as it were, serve an apprenticeship before he become a saint; first, the name of Servus Dei, servant of God, must be obtained for the candidate; and that is neither difficult nor expensive. Then, if the Congregation of Rites find, on examining his printed life, that his virtues seem to be proved, videtur constare de virtutibus, and the Pope says, constare, the Servus Dei is to be called venerabilis Servus Dei, venerable servant of God. Again, if the authenticity of the life, and of the virtues and miracles, is proved in another congregation, in the same way, then the venerabilis servus Dei assumes the title of blessed, beatus; a feast, mass, prayers, &c., are voted to him, and the Pope goes to St Peter’s Church, to be the first of all to worship that same man who, had he pronounced only those two words, non constare, would have been a Pagan, or little better. That the blessed (beato) should become a saint, nothing more is necessary than that he should have worked three first-class miracles[249] (such as those performed by St Anthony, I suppose), and that there should be paid (not by the blessed—beato—for the offerings are only shewn to him, but by whosoever would make a saint of him) twenty thousand pounds sterling for the diploma. As may be perceived, the degree is somewhat dearer than in any other university; but only consider the difference betwixt a doctor and a saint![250] However, as the expenses are too great, families or religious communities who wish for a saint, now unite together, each proposing a candidate for saintship, and a single proceeding serves to decide the fate of five or six saints, and the expenses are paid in common. Under the last Pope, Rome witnessed two or three of those wholesale canonisations.
We Italians call the proceeding, fare una infornata di Santi, making an ovenful of saints. But under the reign of Leo XII., in 1826, a much more scandalous profanation took place. Saints being wanted by some town or other (almost every Italian borough has got one), and the Congregation of Relics, who dispense those Beati, having none at hand, one of the counsellors, we suppose, thought of a very expeditious way of making saints, and supply what was wanted. A sort of catacomb having been discovered at the church S. Lorenzo fuor delle mura, in which some skulls were found, five of them were extracted, and declared to be the skulls of martyrs. The Pope, with the advice of the Congregation of Rites, by his apostolic authority and certain knowledge, Apostolicâ auctoritate ac certâ scientiâ, declared that they were martyrs; and, two or three months after, they were exposed to the public worship in the Apollinare, the ancient Collegio Germanico, which had belonged to the Jesuits, and where now met the Congregation of the Relics. I have myself seen them thus exposed. Those having been disposed of, other skulls were dug up, and other martyrs made; till, at last, a learned antiquarian (I do not remember whether French or German) proved almost to a certainty that the place where these skulls were found had been a Pagan burial-place. The noise was great, and so great the scandal, that the Pope ordered the catacomb to be shut, and no more martyrs to be made. One may still see the excavation, and some bones may be seen through an iron grating, but they are called martyrs no more. If these were not facts which happened in our own days, and of which all Rome is witness, I would hardly have dared to mention them, so incredible do they appear.
We hope we shall be excused for this digression. The canonisation of Loyola and Xavier took place in 1623. We shall spare the recital of all the feasts, all the gorgeous ceremonies, all the pagan pageantry exhibited on the occasion. At Douay, above all, the whole of this theatrical representation was on a great and magnificent scale. Two galleries, supported by a hundred columns adorned with tapestry, and with no less than four hundred and forty-five paintings, were erected in the two streets leading to their college. The panegyrics in honour of the saints were not only ridiculous, but impious in the highest degree. In one of them it was said that “Ignatius,” by his name written upon paper, “performed more miracles than Moses, and as many as the apostles!” And again, “The life of Ignatius was so holy and exalted, even in the opinion of heaven, that only Popes like St Peter, empresses like the Mother of God, some other sovereign monarchs, as God the Father and his holy Son, enjoyed the bliss of seeing him.” We do not comment on these words; even the Sorbonne, now in league with the Jesuits, condemned them.
Some years after, another extraordinary and fantastic solemnity came to rejoice the Jesuitic world. From the year 1636, Vitelleschi had ordered that preparations should be made to solemnise, in 1640, the secular year of the establishment of the Society. We shall not give any description of it, but must mention a strange publication, which has given to this feast an historical celebrity; we mean the Imago Primi Sæculi Societatis Jesu. It is a huge folio of 952 pages, richly and superbly printed, embellished by hundreds of fantastic and extravagant emblems, and filled with absurd and ridiculous praises of the Society. Many were the contributors to this work, which was printed at Antwerp. “Many young Jesuits,” says Crétineau,[251] “found in the aspirations of their hearts poetical inspiration, accents of love, and words of enthusiasm!” The book is modestly dedicated to—God the Father; and among the poetical inspirations, we read as follows:—“The Society of Jesus is not of man’s invention, but it proceeded from Him whose name it bears, for Jesus himself described that rule of life which the Society follows, first by his example, and afterwards by his Word.”[252] And further on,—“The Company is Israel’s chariot of fire, whose loss Elisha mourned, and which now, by a special grace of God, both worlds rejoice to see brought back from heaven to earth, in the desperate condition of the Church. In this chariot, if you seek the armies and soldiers by which she daily multiplies her triumphs with new victories, you will find—(and I hope you will take it in good part)—you will find a chosen troop of angels who exhibit under the form of animals all that the Supreme Ruler desires in this chivalry.”[253]
“As the angels, enlightened by the splendours of God, purge our minds of ignorance, suffuse them with light, and give them perfection,—thus the companions of Jesus, copying the purity of angels, and all attached to their origin which is God, from whom they derive those fiery and flaming movements of virtue, with rays the most refulgent, putting off the impurities of lust in that furnace of supreme and chastest love in which they are cooked (excoquuntur), until being illuminated and made perfect, they can impart to others their light mingled with ardour—being not less illustrious for the splendour of their virtue than the fervour of charity with which they are divinely inflamed.
“They are angels like Michael in their most eloquent battles with heretics—like Gabriel in the conversion of the infidels in India, Ethiopia, Japan, and the Chinese hedged in by terrible ramparts,—they are like Raphael in the consolation of souls, and the conversion of sinners by sermons and the confessional. All rush with promptitude and ardour to hear confessions, to catechise the poor and children, as well as to govern the consciences of the great and princes; all are not less illustrious for their doctrine and wisdom: so that we may say of the Company what Seneca observes in his 33d epistle, namely, that there is an inequality in which eminent things become remarkable, but that we do not admire a tree when all the others of the same forest are equally high. Truly, in whatever direction you cast your eyes, you will discover some object that would be supereminent if the same were not surrounded by equals in eminence.”[254]
These quotations may suffice to give the reader an idea of the book. It will, however, be instructive to give the opinion of Crétineau upon it. He calls the work, indeed, a dithyrambic, and admits that there are some exaggerations in those academical exercises (he might as well have said that even the Court of Rome condemned the book); “but,” adds he, “the critics would not recollect the extravagances, the impieties even, of the book entitled Conformity of the Life of St Francis with that of Christ, by brother Bartholomew of Pisa, nor the Origo Seraficæ Familiæ Franciscanæ by the Capuchin Gonzalez;” and so on. Indeed we know that other monks are as boastful, as impudent, as impious as the Jesuits; yet it seems a very poor apology to exculpate one’s own faults by proving that our neighbour has committed similar ones. But so it is, we repeat it again, the Jesuits would inculpate God himself to justify their order. All we can say of the book is, that it is a most ingenuous and sincere exposition of the feelings of the Jesuits at such epochs, and of the opinion they had of themselves. They were at the height of their prosperity. The difficulties they had encountered—the battles they had fought—the victories they had obtained—the consciousness of their own strength and power, all combined to make them believe that their ambition had to recognise no limits short of the absolute dominion of the world. This idea is clearly expressed in every page of the Imago; and they struggled hard to realise it. Had the Jesuits united to this consciousness, and to the superlative force of will and perseverance which is characteristic of their order, the conception of some great and magnanimous object, which drew upon itself the interest and admiration of the multitude; and had they by bold and unequivocal conduct contrived to carry into execution the lofty design,—who knows what might have not been accomplished by a society so strongly and so admirably constituted? Such as they were, however, their influence became greater and greater every day. As when of two royal pretenders to a noble kingdom, the conqueror sees the crowd of his courtiers increased, not only by all those prudent persons who had waited for the result of the contest, but by a part of his former adversaries, now the most submissive and humble of all his flatterers; so the Jesuits, after they had mastered all opposition, and were in possession of power, saw themselves surrounded by a multitude of adherents and courtiers, eager to obtain their all-powerful influence. When to be a Jesuit became an honour, and the shortest way to ecclesiastical and secular dignities, persons of every sort, and especially such as were ambitious, resorted to the Society, to find the means of satisfying their several aspirations. Before Vitelleschi, the nobility had protected the Jesuits, but few of them had embraced the institute; but afterwards, the highest families in Europe, princely houses not excepted, had a representative in the Company, who gave to the order a new prestige, and imparted to it the love and veneration with which his name was regarded by the people. The houses of Lorraine, Montmorency, those of Gonzaga and Orsini, Medina-Sidonia and Abouquerque, Limberg, and Cassimir of Poland, and a thousand other great and illustrious families, respectively contributed members to the order of the Jesuits.
Our space will not allow us to enter into details, and to follow the Jesuits step by step in their prosperous course. Let it suffice that we have shewn how the Society developed itself by degrees, and by what means it arrived at the pinnacle of power and greatness. We shall now proceed to shew, in its principal facts, what use the Jesuits made of their ill-gotten influence.