A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

It was not until 1756 that the resistance of the natives in the Jesuit reductions was finally overcome, and the proofs (which we will see later) of secret Jesuit provocation deeply impressed the King. There was at that time on the papal throne a Pope who had repeatedly condemned the Jesuits. We shall see later that their behaviour on the Chinese and Indian missions was, in a different way, as irregular as their behaviour in South America, and Benedict XIV. severely condemned them. His chief minister, Cardinal Passionei, was also opposed to the Jesuits. King Joseph now submitted to the Vatican an account of the conduct of the Jesuits in South America and asked that they should be reformed. Meantime, in the autumn of 1757, Pombal persuaded the King that the Jesuits were fomenting disorder in Portugal itself, and an order was signed for the expulsion of all Jesuit confessors from the court. In the night of 19th-20th September the servants and soldiers entered the palace, and Fathers Moreira, Costa, and Oliviera awoke to find themselves sentenced to removal from their comfortable offices. Pombal then ordered that no Jesuit should be allowed to approach the court, sent a very forcible justification of the King's conduct to the other European courts, and pressed the demand for reform at Rome.

On 1st April 1758 the Pope signed the decree for an inquiry into the behaviour of the Jesuits, and Cardinal Saldanha was sent to South America to conduct the inquiry. The proceedings at Rome had been kept secret from the Jesuits until the decree was signed, and Pombal's agents had secured the appointment of a cardinal who was no friend of the Society. But both the Pope and the General died in the spring of that year, and, when Cardinal Saldanha justly reported that the Jesuits of South America had been wrongly engaged in commerce, the new General, Ricci, appealed to the new Pope, Clement XIII., who was known to be favourable to the Society. Clement appointed a commission of inquiry which, being composed of friends of the Society and making no investigation on the spot, declared the Jesuits innocent.

The declaration was absurd and insincere, as we shall appreciate when we come to examine the conduct of the Jesuits on the missions, and Pombal saw that he must deal with the fathers in Portugal. In June (1758) the cardinal-patriarch had laid an interdict on all the Jesuits in the diocese of Lisbon, and public opinion seemed to be prepared for a drastic step. An event that occurred in the night of 3rd-4th September of that year gave Pombal his opportunity. As the King returned from the house of his mistress, the Marchioness Tavora, several shots were fired at him, and a large number of members of the Tavora family were arrested and put to the torture. One of the prisoners, the Duke d'Aveiro, said, under torture, that the Jesuits were privy to the conspiracy, and eight of the leading fathers were arrested and tortured. The duke afterwards retracted, and it must be said that, beyond this worthless declaration, there is no positive evidence to connect the Jesuits with the outrage, though they had been in close correspondence with the Tavoras. They were, however, not punished on that ground with the other prisoners. Only one of the Jesuits was executed, but for heresy, not treason; the others were kept in prison, while all the Tavoras were executed.

Instead of attempting to proceed against the Jesuits on such discreditable evidence Pombal took the more effective ground that their moral principles, especially in regard to assassination, were the ultimate source of such outrages, and a very fierce controversy ensued. It seemed to become gradually plain to all that the long conflict of the Jesuits and their opponents was about to enter on its last stage. There were bishops who supported Pombal, and bishops who appealed to the Pope to check his progress. What Pombal mostly feared was the stirring of the ignorant and superstitious masses, and he proceeded with great caution. Before his project was realised in Portugal, the Jesuits of the colonies were on their way, under guard, to the mother-country, and, when they arrived, the Jesuit houses were surrounded by soldiers, the more active fathers were transferred to prison, and the rest were prevented from communicating with the laity. By the month of April 1759 about 1500 Jesuits were in jail or under guard. The King then informed the Pope that he was about to expel the fathers from his dominions. When Clement protested, stronger evidence of their intrigues was produced, and it is the general feeling of impartial contemporaries (like the English historian Coxe) and later authorities that some of these documents were forged. Clement still refused to sanction the expulsion, and a ruthless and indefensible step was taken by Pombal. On the feast of St. Ignatius (31st July) six Jesuits were condemned to be broken on the wheel, as if some value were now attributed to the evidence of a tortured witness.

This unjust sentence was not carried out, probably from a fear that the Pope would seriously question the jurisdiction of the civic authorities, but the plight of the Jesuits was lamentable. It was in Portugal that they had first attained power and wealth, and they had enjoyed an almost uninterrupted dominion for two centuries; now they lay on straw in the common jails, or tremblingly discussed the dark future in their overcrowded residences. On the first day of September the sentence of expulsion was enforced. The younger Jesuits were offered a dispensation from their vows by Cardinal Saldanha, but few accepted it, and the majority of them were put on ship and conveyed to the Pope's dominions. Pombal was cruel and unjust to the end in the realisation of his design; it is possible that he feared their later activity on foreign soil. There may be some exaggeration in the stories of their hardships, and indeed such a sentence could not be carried out without hardship, but one cannot defend his action in keeping 221 of the Jesuits in the jails of Portugal. One of them, Father Malagrida, an old man of seventy-two, seems to have been a little deranged by his imprisonment, and certain works which he wrote in prison were submitted to the Inquisition. He was condemned to be burned alive by the very tribunal which the Jesuits had been instrumental in establishing in Portugal. Of the 200 Jesuits, 88 died in jail, and the rest lingered in their humiliating captivity until the death of Joseph I. and dismissal of Pombal in 1777. By that time their Society had ceased to exist.

Such was the tragic issue of Jesuit history in the land which they had been accustomed to regard as the safest and most generous country in which they had taken root. However severely we may censure the detailed procedure of the Marquis de Pombal, his action was in substance just and patriotic. Portugal, which, in the sixteenth century, had promised to become one of the greatest powers in the world, had sunk to a humiliating depth, and its decay had proceeded apace with the power of political Jesuits. They were incapable of a patriotic conception of the task of governing, and they took advantage of and encouraged the economic folly of living on overburdened colonies. If they were unwilling to discharge the proper duties of priests and refrain from intrigue for political power, they must depart.

We have already seen how this bold stroke echoed in France and encouraged the enemies of the Society. We must now turn to Spain and see how "the most Catholic majesties" of that country came to follow the terrible example of Pombal. The general outline of the story is somewhat similar to that of the story of Portugal. A series of weak and incompetent rulers occupy the throne; they are dominated (generally) by a group of court-Jesuits, who teach them that the main duty of a king is to be chaste, zealous for the faith, and generous to the Church; the broad empire of Spain is repeatedly shorn, as its increasing weakness is exposed; and at length a strong man realises the evil of Jesuit domination and induces the King to send the fathers back to the Pope's dominions from which they came. In one respect the story is even more unpleasant than that which we have just concluded. Chaste as the Spanish monarchs generally are in this period, they are so weak and purblind that the court is filled with the most sordid intrigues for power, and the Jesuits are deeply involved in these intrigues.

We left the Society in Spain enjoying a splendid prosperity in the early years of the reign of Philip IV. Readers of Major Hume's brilliant Court of Philip IV. (1907) will not need to be reminded that this was "the gayest and wickedest court since the days of Heliogabalus," and that Madrid was in a repellent condition of vice and decadence. The King's confessor was not a Jesuit, but a worthless Dominican, and there were spirited struggles between the rival orders. However, the Jesuits still guided the consciences of most of the nobles and wealthy people, and were generously patronised by the King. They prospered richly in the decaying kingdom, were indifferent to the periodical national disasters, and claim only that they produced such brilliant casuists as Escobar. At the end of this long and dreary reign the chronicle of the Society becomes more interesting.

An infant of four years, Charles II., inherited the throne, and this gave the Jesuits an opportunity under the Regency of Maria Anna, daughter of Ferdinand III. Queen Anna had brought with her from her German home a very learned Jesuit, Father Nidhard, who was her confessor. It was quite natural that this father should attain predominant power at the death of the King, and we may regard it as a piece of particularly frivolous Castilian gossip that the sixty-year-old priest had a more tender relation to the Queen than that of political adviser. We may further grant that Nidhard's power was used unselfishly, and he was true to the ascetic ideal of his Society. But he was flagrantly false to other and more important rules of the Society in occupying the position he did, and he added a heavy contribution to the accumulating hatred of the Society. He was not only royal confessor, but a Councillor of State—in fact, the first minister—and Grand Inquisitor. He had pleaded his rule when the Queen pressed these dignities on him. She obtained a "dispensation" from the Pope, and Nidhard then posed as a Jesuit Ximenes and ruled Spain. The papal document gives him no moral justification. Had he and his superiors willed, he could at once have been transferred to Germany. They acquiesced in his political position on account of the power it gave them.

The Spanish nobles chafed under the rule of a priest and a woman and were irritated to see the decay of the nation continue. In 1668 they lost much of the Low Countries in the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, and the independence of Portugal was recognised. Don Juan, a natural son of the late King, seized the opportunity and attacked the Jesuits. They appointed the prince governor of the Low Countries, and he refused to go. They forbade him to approach the capital, and he boldly advanced to Madrid and demanded the dismissal of Nidhard. The troops and people supported him, and, shedding bitter tears, the Queen was obliged to "permit Nidhard to retire from office." The crowd threatened to end his career at once, but he escaped to Rome, where he became Spanish ambassador, and afterwards Cardinal and Archbishop of Edessa. He had greatly strengthened the hostility to the Jesuits in Spain.