A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

The Jesuits now returned to power, though not to their full power, at the court, and the remnant of the Jansenists was pitilessly persecuted. For nearly twenty years the opponents of the Jesuits attempted to evade the enforcement of the papal decisions, and it is said that more than a hundred priests were banished and a large number imprisoned. One of the bishops was deposed and degraded for resistance, and a fierce struggle shook the peaceful atmosphere of the innumerable monasteries. Fifty monks of one province of the Cistercian order were, in 1723, excommunicated and imprisoned by the authorities. The papal condemnation included propositions which were obviously sound and others which were no more than quotations of Scripture, so hastily had the vindictive sentence been promulgated. The Jesuits triumphed, however, and the reign of Louis XV. saw them fully reinstated at Versailles.

France was no longer the world-power she had been in the golden age of Louis XIV., and her selfish and dissipated monarch was blindly leading her toward revolution. The Jesuits, as before, clung to the prestige of the position of royal confessor, in spite of the flagrant immorality of the King, but the forces which would presently dislodge them were insensibly gathering power. The Puritans were silenced, rather than annihilated, and the Parlement, imputing to the Society much of the blame of its exile in 1753, revived its bitter hostility. The first stroke fell on them in that year. Father Pérusseau, the King's confessor, died, and a successful intrigue put in his place a priest who was not a Jesuit. Both Pérusseau and his successor refused absolution to a King whose libertinism was so cynically exhibited. In view of the persistent attack on their laxity during a hundred years, it would have been difficult for a Jesuit to do less. When, however, the Jesuits lost the principal position, there seemed for a moment some chance of their returning to favour in an indirect way. Mme de Pompadour also desired absolution, in order to find a convenient place in the Queen's suite; and, making a profession of penitence, she put herself under the spiritual guidance of the Jesuit Father Sacy. For a time he affected to believe in her sincerity; but the laughter of Paris disconcerted him, and the stern refusal of the Pope to interfere forced him to retire. From that time Mme de Pompadour and her courtiers were opposed to the Jesuits.

A few years later, in 1757, the attempt of Damiens to assassinate Louis led to another outcry against the Society. It is the general and probable verdict that the Jesuits had no share in the outrage, though the fact that Damiens had a Jesuit confessor, and had previously been in the service of the Jesuits, still seems to many writers to justify a grave suspicion. The evidence is inconclusive, but the outrage led to a fresh discussion of the regicidal doctrines of the Society, and the secrecy and sinuousness of its procedure. By that time, as we shall see, the Marquis de Pombal was meditating the destruction of the Jesuits in Portugal, and was in correspondence with their enemies in France. These enemies were now reinforced by the brilliant and powerful body of deistic and atheistic writers who were known as "the philosophers," and a formidable mine was being prepared under the feet of the arrogant and unsuspecting Jesuits.

The spark that fired this mine was a particularly disreputable action on the part of the Society. In 1753 the Superior-General of the Jesuits in the Antilles, Father Lavalette, was summoned to Paris to answer the charge of having engaged in commerce on a large scale. Lavalette was one of those men of commercial instinct whom the Society did not scruple to use in augmenting its wealth as long as they were successful. Although he had, in the name of the Society, vast estates in the West Indies and thousands of negro slaves (bought by himself, in disguise, in the public slave-market), and it was known that he had agents in Paris for the sale of his sugar and coffee, he came to Paris with a number of sworn testimonies from local French officers to the effect that the Jesuits had not engaged in "foreign commerce," and was acquitted. He returned to conduct his flourishing business on a larger scale than ever. He had spacious warehouses, and made a profit of about 280,000 francs a year; and he now—though acquitted on the understanding that he was not to engage in commerce—borrowed large sums of money, and increased the profit by a shrewd, and somewhat sharp, deal on the money-market. He overreached himself in these practices, and, as other disasters simultaneously overtook his business, some of his French creditors pressed for their money.

The French Jesuits were divided in opinion on the issue. The shrewder fathers at Marseilles were disposed to borrow money and meet the obligations, but the Parisian authorities believed that they were still strong enough to win a conflict, and they insisted that Lavalette must plead bankruptcy. It was the last and most fatal of the long series of blunders they had perpetrated; to say nothing of the moral aspect of their procedure. The law was set in motion; in March 1761 the lawyers of the Paris Parlement were set the task of judging their traditional enemy, and the long trial, amidst intense excitement, ended in the Jesuits, as a collective body, being condemned to pay the whole of Lavalette's debts—about five million francs. In order to determine the responsibility, the lawyers had compelled the Jesuits to produce their Constitutions and other documents which they were eager to keep from the laity, and this exposure led to a broader and more determined attack on the Society. Their action in refusing to meet the obligations of the West Indian business, by which they had profited so much, was, and always will be, regarded as morally dishonourable. It is pleaded on their behalf that the Jesuits are a "simple-minded" and spiritual body of men, with no inclination or aptitude for commerce, and that Lavalette had concealed his operations—as they compelled him to state—from his superiors. Such statements merely increase the cynicism of their procedure. We have found them repeatedly engaging in commerce, and we know that the Jesuit system made it absolutely impossible for an inferior, even if he wished to do so, to conceal large commercial operations from his superiors. The Jesuit documents made this plain to the whole of Paris, and their adversaries advanced to the last attack.

The Parlement declared that the Jesuit Constitutions were unfit for a body of French priests, and demanded that they should be altered; it forbade the Society to form congregations among the laity, to teach the young, or to receive novices. The Jesuits at court induced the King to summon a meeting of the higher clergy and elicit a counter-declaration in favour of the Society; but a fearful storm was now raging in their ears. In their extreme apprehension they disavowed the most characteristic Jesuit principles. They proclaimed that they accepted the four articles of the Gallican Declaration of 1682, and that they would be loyal to the Gallican Church even if their General commanded them to do something contrary to its principles. They were fighting for life; but men in France knew from their previous history in the country that such declarations as this were merely diplomatic, and were set aside the moment they returned to power.

The struggle continued through the winter, and in the spring (1762) the King annulled the measures taken against them, but bade them modify their Constitutions. They were in future to have a Vicar-General in France, independent of the Roman General, and to be subject to the bishops. Louis had secretly consulted the Roman authorities, and urged them that this compromise was absolutely necessary to save the French Province; and, although General Ricci bitterly replied: "Sint ut sunt, aut non sint" ("Let them be as they are, or not be at all"), the proposal was openly made in France. But Parlement refused to register the King's decree, and went on to close eighty-four Jesuit colleges. All through the spring and summer the fusillade of pamphlets and the fiery debates of Parlements were sustained, the Jesuits straining every resource to avert the blow, and on 6th August 1762 the Paris Parlement decreed that the Society must cease to exist in France. The Jesuits were expelled from their residences, and a small pension was allotted them out of the confiscated property. Their entire property in France was valued at nearly 60,000,000 francs, and they had, as it proved, forfeited this rather than pay the just debts of Lavalette. At the same time the Paris Parlement condemned one hundred and sixty-four works written by Jesuits between 1600 and 1762.

Louis XV. signed the decree of suppression in December 1764, and from school and palace, from humble residences among the poor and the mansions of princes, the Jesuits sadly made their way toward the frontiers of the land in which they had so long enjoyed and abused a remarkable power. In vain was the Pope induced to protest against the action of Louis XV. Some of the chief provincial Parlements condemned the Pope's bull to be burned in the public square, and the Parlement of Paris disdainfully rejected it. The vast majority of the nation applauded the suppression; and, once their power was gone, the Jesuits were overwhelmed by the flood of hatred that now rose freely against them. It was useless to plead that a few sceptical lawyers or statesmen had wrought their ruin. In a few localities they were still protected by the Provincial authorities; but the country at large, by the mouths of its officials and the great body of its clergy, rejoiced in their fall. They sought at first to parry the blow with customary manœuvres. Large numbers of them laid aside their dress and name, and remained to intrigue against their opponents; and in 1767 the Paris Parlement decreed that they must all leave the country. Except for a few who still remained as private teachers of the young, having ostensibly quitted the Society, and a few who were sheltered in ultramontane localities, the Jesuits were now ignominiously expelled from the land of St. Louis. And few will read the long story of their work in France and not acknowledge that it was a just conclusion of their intrigues, shiftiness, selfishness, thirst for power, unscrupulous persecution of rivals or opponents, and condescension to vice and crime.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] I have consulted Molinier's admirable edition of the Letters (1891). The editor gives the original Latin passages from the Jesuit theologians, and it is after comparison of these with Pascal's quotations or paraphrases that I reach the conclusion given in the text. It is necessary to add that some of these doctrines were not confined to the Jesuits. The point is that the Jesuits, as a body, were characteristically lax. Probabilism, for instance (the pernicious doctrine that a man may commit an action which is probably lawful, though more probably sinful) was not invented by the Jesuits, but they made it a basic element of their casuistry. They taught that a man was free to follow one single lax theologian, if he were a "grave authority," against the adverse opinion of all the others.