A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

When the President of the Parlement found these weighty and irregular documents thrown into the scale, he temporised. The suit was suspended; the Jesuits were provisionally allowed to teach. In the following year, however, the University appealed to the Constable of France, complaining that the professors were unable to keep discipline, as a pupil went to the Jesuits the moment he was reprimanded. Then two singular discoveries were made by the Jesuits, and they had the effect of disarming many of their patriotic opponents. In 1567, Father Oliver Manares, the Provincial, informed the court and the civic authorities of Paris that the Huguenots had concerted a plot to sack and burn the city; he had learned it from a Polish noble, who was visiting Paris and had been warned to leave in time. [5] Paris flew to arms and scared the supposed plotters; it was also grateful to Father Manares, and incensed against the Huguenots. In the same year, Father Auger was fortunate enough to discover a similar plot at Lyons. There is evidence of a conspiracy at Lyons, but the historian must regard the "discovery" of Manares with grave suspicion. The effect of the discoveries was that the grateful King at once ordered that all opposition to the Jesuits must cease, and all legacies to the Society must be valid in law; and that the Catholics were soon ranged against the Huguenots in open field. The ablest of the Jesuits, Auger and Possevin, ardently stimulated the Catholics, accompanied the troops, and were even seen in the thick of the battles.

A peace was arranged in 1570, to the disappointment of the Jesuits; and the country still enjoyed this precarious peace when Alessandrini and Borgia reached the court, at Blois, in the first month of 1572. In regard to the discussions which took place we know only that France declared itself unable to join in the crusade against the Turk, and Charles's sister, Mary of Valois, was promised to Henri de Béarn instead of to Sebastian of Spain, as the Pope wished. Alessandrini and Borgia went back to Rome, to announce their failure to the dying Pope. And on 24th August of that year took place the horrible massacre which lays an eternal stain on the memory of Catherine de Medici. We have, fortunately, neither to linger over the revolting details of that outrage, nor to enter the larger controversy as to the responsibility for it. [6] The general feeling of historians is that the massacre was deliberately planned by Catherine; and, since the Jesuits had influence with Catherine, we have to consider whether they may have been implicated in the barbaric slaughter.

Since General Borgia conferred with her at Blois some months before the massacre, it has been thought by many that he was initiated. A careful consideration of the character of Borgia disposes one to acquit him confidently of this suspicion; it seems incredible that he should approve, or that Catherine should expect him to approve, so inhuman a measure. It is a common mistake to suppose that there was a fixed type of Jesuit, and that almost any member of the Society may be regarded as a man who would sanction criminal means for the attainment of a good end. Our narrative has already shown us that Jesuits differed considerably in character, and that individual features were not, as is sometimes thought, obliterated by the impression of a corporate stamp. Borgia was cruel only to himself, and he does not seem to have been much of a casuist.

The real question is how far such men as Auger, Possevin, and Manares were responsible for that general mood and temper of Catherine which culminated in the Bartholomew massacre. It does not seem probable that any of them were actually initiated to the plot. They were not the keepers of the royal conscience in France at that time, and were not at all constantly consulted by Catherine. But since the days when, at and after the colloquy at Poissy, Lainez had sternly forbidden her to grant an elementary freedom of worship to the Huguenots, they had impelled her toward that harsh and intolerant policy which at length took this criminal form in her diseased mind. Their intellectual campaign against the Huguenots was a failure. They made few converts from it, and they urged coercion to prevent it from spreading. Then, when the Huguenots stirred under this unjust treatment, they were very zealous in warning the court of "plots." It seems to me a grave circumstance that in 1567, Father Manares "discovered" on the part of the Huguenots of Paris a design not unlike that which the Catholics afterwards perpetrated against them; it is probable that this was the germ of Catherine's bloody enterprise. Whether she ever discussed her plan with any of the leading Jesuits we have no evidence whatever to determine. At a later date, when their house is raided and their preachers are bolder, we shall find the Jesuits of Paris expressly advocating crime in the interest of religion. At this stage we can only say that they pressed a policy of violence and injustice, and Catherine's crime, in which they acquiesced, was an extreme deduction from it.

Simultaneously with the trouble in France, Alva was engaged in "pacifying" the Netherlands. Here the Jesuits had miscalculated the strength of the Catholics, and, in encouraging the policy of violent repression, led to their own undoing. Only the favour of princes had secured some shelter for them in Belgium, and their houses now disappeared in the flames of the civil war. Their college at Douai had been interdicted by the university authorities in 1567, but relieved by papal authority. As the Spaniards proceeded, however, in the drastic and bloody policy which the Jesuits were known to favour, the crowds stormed their residences, and by 1570 they were almost driven from the country. They returned in the wake of Alva, but there was bitter hostility to them, and they were generally accused of rebuilding their house at Antwerp out of the loot of Flemish towns. Father Sacchini is moved to lament the perversity of men who could entertain such a suspicion, though, as their sardonic critic Steinmetz observes, "it would have been better to supply the place of this moral maxim by stating whence the funds were obtained for building or beautifying the house at Antwerp."

When we pass to Germany we naturally find that the Jesuits are apostles of toleration, charity, and calm intellectual discussion of differences of creed in the north, fanatical intolerantists in the south, and advocates of every conceivable compromise between the two extremes in the intervening or mixed States. Canisius still maintained his great work and his austere standard. Appointed Legate of the Pope in 1565 he traversed the whole of Germany on foot, and strengthened the loyalty of the Catholic rulers to the Council of Trent. In the following year we find him, at the Diet of Augsburg, helping to unite Protestants and Catholics against the Turk. Many new colleges were founded by him, including three in Poland, before the death of Borgia. On the other hand, grave reports had to be sent to Rome from the more Catholic and prosperous centres. The University of Dillingen, which the Jesuits controlled, was found in 1567 to be permeated with heresy, and a rigorous scrutiny ended in some of the Jesuits (including an English refugee, Edward Thorn) going over to the Protestants. In 1570 the Jesuit rector of Prague College became a Protestant and married. In Bavaria the cry was raised that they mutilated boys in their colleges. A most extraordinary trial resulted in their acquittal, but there was a deep and widespread prejudice against them. In the same year, 1565, they were fiercely assailed in Austria. Their college at Vienna was raided by an angry mob; and the nobles, who had been convoked by Maximilian, refused to give their aid in the campaign against the Turk unless the Emperor expelled the Jesuits.

In Italy the chronicles of the Society tell of slow advance chequered by fits of hostility. By the year 1567 the Roman college had more than a thousand pupils, but the provinces were beginning to murmur at the burden of supporting this establishment, and the next congregation would restrict its growth. In Genoa, Siena, and other cities, the fathers struggled with poverty; in one place a college had to abandon the struggle and die. In most parts, however, the Society flourished and adapted its work to the circumstances. At Palermo we hear, in 1567, of a weird pageant, known as "The Triumph of Death," arranged by the Jesuits. Sack-clothed men bearing candles, a huge figure of Christ in a coffin, and two hundred flagellants, stimulated to their ghastly exercise by a troop of choristers dressed as hermits, went before a car containing a monstrous skeleton, higher than the roofs of the houses, with a mighty scythe in its hand. In the north the appeal was to princes. Borromeo still favoured the Society at Milan, while at Ferrara and Florence the Jesuits directed the consciences of princesses. The daughters of the Emperor who had married the Duke of Ferrara and Francis de Medici insisted on retaining their Jesuit confessors; and, when Borgia would refuse permission, the confessors themselves pleaded that the fair ladies could not possibly be abandoned to strange influences. Borgia reluctantly consented. He saw, and regretted, that one of the sternest rules of the Society was being sacrificed to expediency, but his counsellors seemed to have overruled him. Ignatius had sanctioned the first royal confessor: now there were four.

From his survey of the provinces, in which he saw much to distress his austere feelings, Borgia returned, exhausted, to Rome. He died a few weeks afterwards (1st October 1572), and Polanco, one of the ablest administrators at the Roman centre, was appointed Vicar-General. He fixed the election for April, and in the early spring the most famous officers of the army began to come in from their remote battlefields. Auger was occupied in so congenial a task in France that he would not come to Rome; he was with the Catholic troops besieging the Huguenots in La Rochelle. But there was an impressive gathering of the veterans of the Society. Salmeron and Bobadilla were still there to tell the story of their humble beginning on the flanks of Montmartre thirty years before; Ribadeneira, Miguel de Torres, Canisius, Possevin, Manares, Leo Henriquez, Miron, Polanco, and other fathers, before whom kings would bow, came in from the frontiers to the eternal city, as the commanders of legions had done before them. And of this brilliant group one of the lowest in ability and distinction, Father Everard Mercurian, was chosen to be General.

The new Pope, Gregory XIII., had intervened. "How many Spanish Generals have you had?" he asked, when the older Jesuits came to greet him. All three had been Spaniards. "How many votes have the Spaniards amongst you?" he then asked. Quite enough to elect a Spaniard once more, as they were bent on doing; and the man on whom they had fixed their thoughts was the gifted and energetic Polanco. But Polanco was descended from converted Jews, a class disliked by high-born Spaniards, and Kings Philip and Sebastian had written to ask the Pope to prevent him from being elected. The fathers respectfully protested that the Pope, who was Protector of their Society, ought not to coerce their decisions. "Are there no able men amongst you except Spaniards?" he went on; and he suggested Everard Mercurian. Gregory knew that the blind obedience of the Jesuits to the Pope was not of the kind which hastens to carry out the slightest wish of the ruler, and on the morning of the election he sent a cardinal to tell them that they must not elect a Spaniard. They still expostulated; but Gregory insisted, and Mercurian, a mild and mediocre old man, was made General. Being a Belgian, he was at least a subject of Spain; and he was sixty-eight years old.

Then the conscript fathers assembled, day after day, to discuss the mass of secret reports from every centre, and pass those instructive decrees—forty-eight were issued on this occasion—which tell us so plainly the decay of the original spirit. Ignatius had taught them to seek power and wealth for God: it had proved a dangerous lesson. The Congregation dispersed in June, and Mercurian entered upon his seven years' generalship. The real control was openly entrusted to Father Palmio, the Italian assistant, until Father Manares ousted him, and secured the chief place and the hope of succession. There was, at this, some unedifying language; we shall see presently that Manares, at least, undoubtedly sought the generalship. But the various provinces were now under the command of such able men that the progress of the Society was not retarded. Let us glance at the more significant happenings in the provinces, and then sum up the work of the Society in its first four decades.