[ [7] See a selection in the Annales de la Société des soi-disans Jésuites (1764), vol. i. pp. 132-159.
[ [8] It did not become a dogma of the Church until 1854.
PROGRESS AND DECAY UNDER ACQUAVIVA
The older of the fathers who obeyed the summons to a new election, and converged upon the Eternal City, must have wondered whether it would pass without a fresh exhibition of the very human passions which the occasion so frequently revealed amongst them. Father Oliver Manares had been appointed Vicar-General, and had announced the election for the spring of 1581. We remember Manares as the fortunate discoverer of Huguenot plots at Paris, and then as successfully ousting Father Palmio from the position of chief assistant to Mercurian. He had made his way to the steps of the throne, and the more religious brethren were now startled to find him shamelessly canvassing for votes, in spite of the stern prohibition in their Constitutions. Four of the older fathers were at once appointed to investigate the charge against him. Bobadilla, impetuous and masterful still in his old age, was one of the four, but he expressed his resentment of the charge against his friend so strongly before the inquiry opened that they had, with great difficulty, to remove him from the commission; and, when the commissioners found Manares guilty, he made very sore trouble in the house. In the end Manares was persuaded to forego his right of nomination, and Father Acquaviva was elected.
Claude Acquaviva was one of the youngest of the electors. Though strenuous work had already begun to whiten his dark southern hair, he was only thirty-seven years old; but he was distinguished for his high birth, his great ability, his integrity, and a happy combination of resolution and cold equanimity that recalled Lainez. He was a son of the Neapolitan Duke of Atri, and was destined to rule the Society during thirty-four years of that dangerous period when its desire for wealth and power, in the service of God, led it into the dark ways of political intrigue and the accumulation of earthly treasure. We shall now find the seeds of decay spreading over larger areas and germinating rapidly. We shall witness a singular eruption of the worldly spirit in the Spanish peninsula, and the development of the political Jesuit as he is known in the history of England, which I reserve for a special chapter, and of France.
The first few years of the generalship of Acquaviva were peaceful. A friendly Pope, Gregory XIII., occupied the Roman see, and the Society increased in numbers and prestige. The Gesù, the famous metropolitan church of the Jesuits, was opened by the Pope in 1583; the Gregorian calendar was very largely framed by one of their members, the learned Clavius of Bavaria. But Gregory died in 1585, and Acquaviva prepared for a struggle with the papacy. The stern, despotic Sixtus V. had now received the tiara, and all Rome expected him to clip the wings of the soaring Society. Acquaviva thought it would be prudent to disarm the Pope and disavow the thirst for power. He offered to resign control of the Roman seminary. Sixtus refused the offer, and awaited his opportunity; and in the following year, 1586, the flash and roar of the gathering clouds in Spain led him to intervene.
The Spanish fathers had, as I said, looked upon the generalship almost as an hereditary right, and had resented the election of Mercurian and Acquaviva. But this feeling is so wholly opposed to the religious ideal of the Society that we at once suspect a serious decay of the character of the Spanish Jesuits, and we find some remarkable evidence of it. The official history of the Society in Spain does not attempt to conceal that under Borgia and Mercurian there had been widespread decadence, [9] and I have shown how this was due to material prosperity and the lack of serious work and heretical neighbours. We have, however, a more singular and ample account of this decadence. One of the most brilliant of the Spanish Jesuits, Mariana, the famous advocate of regicide, was moved to discredit the Roman authorities by showing the corruption into which they had allowed his own province to fall, and his Tratado del Govierno de la Compañia de Jesus gives us a very candid picture of the Spanish houses. The work was, naturally, not published by Mariana. Like so many documents in the Society, it was intended for private circulation in manuscript, but it was found amongst his papers by a bishop whom the king appointed to examine them, and the only ground for the claim of certain Jesuits that it is partly spurious is that they dislike its revelations. The decrees of the Society itself confirm the substance of its charges, and the temper and spirit of the book are quite in keeping with its Jesuit authorship.