A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

The elder prince, Theodose, had died prematurely, and Alphonso succeeded to the throne. Whether there was some incurably morbid strain in the youth, or whether the Jesuit tuition had made him incapable of serious political life, we cannot say; but, as he grew to manhood, Alphonso VI. entered upon ways of violence and licence which recall the youth of Nero. His court was filled with the wild companions of his orgies, and he paraded his vices on the streets and in the taverns of his capital. He exchanged his Jesuit confessor for a Benedictine monk, snatched the reins from the hands of his mother, and threatened to drag the country very speedily into the abyss which awaited it. Sober nobles and statesmen looked on with alarm, and it was inevitable that a conspiracy to dethrone him should shortly arise. But the details of the revolution, in which the Jesuits were very active, reflect little honour on its actors.

Alphonso had married Marie Isabelle de Savoie-Nemours, whose Jesuit confessor, Father de Ville, listened sympathetically to the story of the outrages she endured. Father de Ville and his colleagues were not less sympathetic when Marie Isabelle transferred her affection to the King's handsome young brother, Dom Pedro, and they entered into a plot to replace Alphonso by Pedro. The chief plotter seems to have been Father Vieira, whom the French historian regards as the glory of the Portuguese Province at that time. Vieira was not without ability, but he was a turbulent and meddlesome politician, and so eccentric in his religious ideas that he fell into the prison of the Inquisition. The Jesuits secretly engaged the nobles in a plan to dethrone and divorce Alphonso and replace him by his brother. Divorce is, of course, unknown to the Catholic Church, but it has never failed to discover a flaw in a marriage which it was expedient to undo, and, with something very like levity or cynicism, the Jesuits and the Queen determined to accuse the King of impotence and get the marriage annulled: a king who was notorious for his amours and had had a child by one of his mistresses. Pedro was then informed of the Queen's amiable disposition and the support of the nobles, and the conspiracy began.

The King was recalled from his licentious pleasures by an announcement that the Queen had retired to a convent and demanded the restitution of her dowry. He flew to the convent, but found his brother there with an armed force to protect the Queen, and, after a fruitless struggle, he was compelled to abdicate and to testify to the virginity of the Queen. We have the word of the English ambassador that Father de Ville and his colleagues were the chief authors of this audacious plot, or "comedy," as the Jesuit apologist calls it. The marriage was dissolved in March (1668), and it was arranged that a deputation of the Cortes should wait upon Marie Isabelle, and entreat her to marry Pedro, as Portugal was too poor to return her dowry. The marriage was celebrated a few weeks later, Alphonso was sent into a comfortable exile, and the Jesuits returned to power at the court. Sincerely as we may applaud the purification of the sordid palace and the relief of the young Queen, we must recognise that the procedure betrays a considerable lack of moral delicacy.

The gratitude of Pedro to his Jesuit confessor, Fernandez, and his colleagues could not be other than princely. He even made Fernandez a deputy of the Cortes (where he needed supporters), and we gather from the stern letter (given in Franco) in which General Oliva denounced this action to the authorities of the Portuguese Province that Fernandez was very reluctant to resign the honour. Under threat of punishment he yielded, but he maintained an absolute authority over King Pedro and placed his Society in a stronger position than ever. In the Jesuit documents of the time we find constant reference to "the Fathers of the Palace" and the immense benefits they procure for their colleagues. Through the King they secured a modification of the Spanish Inquisition—which had lately imprisoned one of their ablest men—and in many of the colonies they obtained a monopoly of the trade with the natives and acquired a wealth similar to that of the Spanish fathers in Paraguay. Pedro's second wife was no less generous to the Society than Luisa had been, and the ex-Queen of England, who returned to Portugal in 1693, joined in the enrichment of the Jesuits. When Pedro died in 1706, his son John V. continued to patronise the Society and enfeeble the kingdom. There were now more than a dozen Jesuits at the Portuguese court, and for many years it was hardly possible to approach the King without their permission.

During the long reign of the incompetent and superstitious John V. Portugal sank rapidly into the decline that awaited her. Not only did Jesuits undertake commerce in the colonies and absorb vast sums of money in donations and annuities, but the Church at large is calculated to have received about five hundred million francs, wrung mainly from the decaying colonies, from the priest-ridden monarch. The Jesuits are by no means wholly responsible for the scandalous expenditure and economic folly of John V., or for the revival of the burning of heretics and the erection of palatial monasteries. In his later years the King transferred his favour to Oratorian and Franciscan priests, and it seemed as if the long reign of the Jesuits was seriously threatened. But this appalling clerical parasitism and disregard of national economy, which were fast sapping the strength of Portugal, were only the culmination of the sentiments which the Jesuits had cultivated in the Portuguese court for a century.

The King died in 1750, and the Jesuits returned to power under his son Joseph. Father Moreira was the King's confessor, and Father Oliveira the tutor of his children; Father Costa was the spiritual guide of his brother Pedro, Father Campo of his uncle Antonio, and Father Aranjues of his uncle Emmanuel. The junta was completely restored, and the government was again virtually in the hands of the Jesuits. There had, however, now come into the political life of Portugal a man who was destined to shake the European power of the Jesuits and, within the short space of ten years, to drive them from the Empire in poverty and disgrace.

Sebastian Joseph de Carvalho, Count of Oeyras and Marquis of Pombal, had been a member of one of the Jesuit Congregations for laymen and had obtained office, as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, with their cordial agreement. There is nothing either mysterious or discreditable in his hostility to the Jesuits. Even if it be true that he at times fought them with their own improper weapons, the ground of the conflict is plain. He perceived, as every non-Catholic historian perceives to-day, that their rule was as mischievous to the State as it was profitable to their own Society, and, as Foreign Minister and lay man of business, he recognised that their commercial activity in the colonies was injurious to the laity and inconsistent with their professions. To say that he was influenced by the works of the French philosophers is absurd—he had no sympathy with their ideas—nor is it less unjust to say that he wished to protestantise the Portuguese Church. It was precisely as a Catholic and a patriot that he set out to reform the swollen and degenerate Church and invigorate the national economy. We need not imagine vices in Pombal when the defects of the Jesuits are so flagrant.

The strong man was fortunate in having a weak, timid, and indolent monarch, and hardly less fortunate in the fact that the King had a stronger and more attractive brother on whose associates suspicion could easily be cast. It is difficult to-day to ascertain what truth there is in the charge that Dom Pedro aspired to the throne and had the secret support of the Jesuits. King Joseph was not indisposed to believe such a charge, and events soon occurred which gave it plausibility. In 1752 the Portuguese proposed to cede Sacramento to Spain in return for a part of Paraguay in which the Jesuits had seven of their profitable "reductions," and, when the troops went to enforce the change of frontiers, the pupils of the Jesuits made a sanguinary resistance. It is possible to quote letters in which the Jesuits advised submission, but a secret letter from one of the leading Spanish Jesuits to the American fathers was intercepted and was found to advise resistance. Further troops were sent, the Jesuits and their pupils were expelled, and Pombal drew up and circulated a memoir on the action of the Jesuits and the virtual slavery which they maintained in the reductions. Their monopoly of trade with the natives was abrogated, and Pombal was interested in a company which sought to secure the trade. The Jesuits fiercely attacked this change, and two members of the Society were exiled.

For a time the campaign of Pombal was then arrested by the appalling earthquake which devastated Lisbon in the year 1755. The timid and superstitious King was undecided as to the nature of the omen. At first, when it was found that Pombal's house had been spared while seven Jesuit houses had been wrecked, he was disposed to see in the catastrophe a punishment of the sins of the Jesuits; but those artful casuists easily persuaded the country that the only new event in the life of Portugal to account for this outpour of divine wrath was the persecution of the Society, and their zeal in succouring the homeless earned for them a great deal of sympathy. The exiled Jesuits were recalled, and they seemed to recover all the ground they had lost in the preceding ten years.

With a maladroitness which we recognise so often in the annals of the Society, the Jesuits then went on to attack Pombal, and their churches rang with denunciation of the great reformer. With all his faults Joseph I. had wisdom enough to choose between the Jesuits and his able minister. Pombal had effected more real reform in Portugal than Jesuit politicians had done in their two centuries of influence; he had abolished autos da fe, curbed the power of the Inquisition, clipped the parasitic growth of monks, set bounds to the pretensions of the nobles, and made great reforms in every branch of the administration. He was a hard and ruthless man, sharing, to some extent, the Jesuit feeling that the end justified the means, but he was a sincere and enlightened patriot. He retained his influence over the King and took the next step in his campaign against the Society.