Palafox was Bishop of Angelopolis, and in that capacity he attempted to make the Jesuits pay his see the just tithes on the property they inherited. They replied with abuse, and he then inquired by what authority they preached and heard confessions in his diocese. They arrogantly boasted of their special privileges, and refused to show the documents, as they had a further privilege excusing them from doing so; a claim which the Pope afterwards declared to be false. Palafox informed the faithful that they had no powers for the ministry. At this the Jesuits produced another of their remarkable privileges—the power to appoint judges of the difference—and paid 4000 crowns each to two Dominican monks of Mexico city to come and arbitrate. The viceroy also was bribed, and the two monks were led into Angelopolis with a great parade of trumpeters and guards. A notice was soon posted at the street corners to the effect that the Bishop of Angelopolis was deposed and excommunicated for his improper conduct, and, in June 1647, Palafox fled to the hills from the growing violence. On 31st July, the feast of St. Ignatius, a carnival-procession, starting from the Jesuit house, bore round the town the most ribald, and even obscene, caricatures of the bishop's office. Numbers of his supporters were banished, and bands of soldiers and Jesuit spies wandered about the hills in search of the wretched hut where Palafox was hidden.
All these details are submitted to the Pope in the bishop's letters, and, in order to make them intelligible, a remarkable account is given of the worldly prosperity of the fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth of Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, [31] besides cattle and other property. They own six large sugar-refineries, worth from half a million to a million crowns each, and making an annual profit of 100,000 crowns each, while all the other monks and clergy of Mexico together own only three small refineries. They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue for legacies—a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns—and they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit congregations at Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to indulge in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely maintain that the Society never engaged in commerce. It should also be added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidised by the King of Spain, that there were (the bishop says) only five or six Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they conducted only ten colleges.
From his refuge Palafox had sent messengers both to Rome and Madrid, and replies severely condemning the Jesuits were at once sent both by the Pope and the King. Pope Innocent appointed a commission of cardinals and bishops to examine the appeal of Palafox and counter-appeal of the Roman Jesuits. They declared in favour of the bishop on almost every point, and the Pope issued his first brief in that sense (14th May 1648). On 25th June the King severely condemned them for appointing a judge and defying the bishop. The Jesuits affected to regard the papal brief as not binding because it had not been endorsed by the Royal Council; a strange departure from ultramontane principles. In a word, the King had to repeat his warning, and the Pope had twice to repeat his orders, before they abandoned their intrigues in Mexico, Madrid, and Rome. Palafox was, however, invited to Spain—the King's letters treat him always with the greatest respect—and it was concluded that, in the interest of peace, he should remain in the motherland. Even in the grave the Jesuits persecuted the saintly bishop, bitterly opposing his canonisation, but his letters remain a terrible indictment of their behaviour on the missions.
There were other Jesuit estates and villages in California (or the eastern part of North America), from which a profitable trade was conducted with Manila by means of a fine frigate belonging to the Society. In the Antilles they boasted an official monopoly of the "spiritual administration" of the French islands. It is true that this gave them a new opportunity for commerce, and that they did much political service for the French government in return for the privilege; but it is proper to add that many of the fathers distinguished themselves by self-sacrificing labour among the negro slaves. Their mission in Maryland was destroyed by the growth of Protestantism, and it remains only to say a word about their fortunes in Canada.
The nomadic habits of the Indians and the ever-recurring warfare prevented them from achieving a great success in Canada. In the softer districts by the St. Lawrence and the lakes they succeeded in establishing a few of their agricultural colonies, but their work was arduous, dangerous, and not generally profitable, and even the prestige of the French government, for which they acted as political agents, did not enable them to convert a very large proportion of the Indians. Moreover, much as we may admire the devotion and endurance many of them displayed in seeking to win the fierce and roving tribes, commercial eagerness taints their work indelibly. When they first received permission to enter Canada from Henry IV., they were long detained in France because they refused to come to an agreement about trade with the lay colonists, and their first missionaries were captured by the English in an endeavour to cross the seas without this understanding. Eighty years later, when peace was made with the formidable Iroquois, who had so often blighted their work, the Indian spokesman insisted that they would not admit the Jesuits, as the fathers sought only their beavers and their women. On the other hand, no one questions the great political service they rendered to their government in disposing the Indians to receive French authority and embittering them against the English. Their story, until England took Canada in 1759, and France itself disowned them a few years later, was one of individual devotion overshadowed by a corporate occupation with commerce and politics.
We have now surveyed the vast field of Jesuit missionary activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and can appreciate the effect when, in a few years time, the voice of the Pope will summon them to lay aside for ever their black robes and their proud name. It would be hypocritical to say that we cannot sum up in few words the impressions gathered from this survey. Let us recognise in the first place that thousands of the fathers displayed heroic zeal in discharging the work which the Society laid on them. Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians, often of noble birth and brilliant parts, faced the perils of a mediæval voyage, wandered afoot over leagues of desolate mountain or deadly forest, and laid down their lives courageously under the plague or the sword. Yet there is another aspect which we perceive just as clearly: another quality which we find in the silken courts of China or Siam or Persia, the blaze of Indian or Brazilian villages, on the plains of Paraguay or Mexico, and amid the snows of Canada. It is everywhere, it is identical, and it is palpable. These men have fallen from their ideals. In virtue of a vast and hypocritical system of commerce they amass wealth and power, defend it with mean intrigue and violent assault, blunt their moral sense in pursuit of more, relax into sensuality and are lifted to arrogance. It is time that they have a severe lesson.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [29] This taly is described by the other missionaries as a gross image representing a Hindu divinity equivalent to the Latin Priapus. It was certainly mythological, and was suspended on a cord of very clear mythological import. The Jesuits first declared that it was a "civil custom," and then said that a "direction of intention" on the part of the convert made it harmless. When Rome brought pressure to bear on them, they invented a taly with the cross on one side and the emblem of Pillear on the other.
[ [30] It is difficult to estimate the value of the Paraguay reductions. Robertson, in his Letters on Paraguay, calculates that the average Indian earned at least a hundred dollars yearly, and that his food, hut, and clothing did not cost fifty. He estimates the total value of a hundred thousand such workers and the property as about £5,641,200.
[ [31] In the English translation of Hoensbroech's Fourteen Years a Jesuit the figure is wrongly given as 30,000.