A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

The storm passed without very serious consequences, but it was not long before the conduct of the Jesuits again endangered their mission. We have already seen that from the time when the Vatican appointed a bishop to control the missionary priests in Holland the Jesuits conducted an extremely selfish crusade against him. They maintained this opposition throughout the period with which we are dealing. Neercassel, the Archbishop of Utrecht and Vicar Apostolic, complained to Rome of their behaviour in 1669, and they retorted with the familiar charge of Jansenism. Neercassel was summoned to Rome, but Innocent XI. was on the papal throne and the Jesuits lost. They did not relax their opposition, and when Peter Codde succeeded Neercassel in 1686 (the Jesuits having failed, after strenuous efforts, to get a friend of the Society appointed), the feud became more and more unedifying. In 1702 they induced the Vatican to depose him and substitute a more congenial prelate named Cock. Codde had been friendly with Arnauld, who had taken refuge in the Netherlands, and an unscrupulous use of their influence at Rome under Clement XI. secured his deposition. They could not, however, induce the papal authorities to detain Codde, who belonged to a good Dutch family, in the prisons of the Inquisition, and, when he returned to his country, the Government took up his case against the Jesuits.

The situation they had brought about in the Church in Holland was deplorable. The chapters of Utrecht and Haarlem refused to recognise Cock as archbishop, and the faithful were in a state of confusion. For years the Jesuits had jeered at the divisions amongst the Protestants. These divisions were at least based on considerations of belief, and the Protestants could heavily retort that their clergy, of any one denomination, had never been rent into bitterly hostile factions on a mere question of corporate interest. Codde resumed his ministry, and the Jesuits, aided by the friendly Nuncio at Brussels, supported Cock against him. In similar circumstances Queen Elizabeth had assisted the English secular clergy against the Jesuits, and the Dutch Government decided to do the same. Cock was expelled, and four of the leading Jesuits were summoned before the States-General (1705) and ordered to use their influence at Rome for the rehabitation of Codde or else leave the country. The Dutch smiled when the Jesuits protested that their slender influence would not sway the Vatican, and, when a negative answer came from Rome, they were proscribed. They evaded the sentence, but in 1708 they were expelled from the whole of Holland except the privileged Province of Utrecht. When the resentment of the Dutch cooled, however, they crept back into the country and ministered stealthily to their followers. Even after so drastic an experience they continued to lessen the merit of their strenuous and dangerous labours by persistent hostility to, and abuse of, the rival clergy.

In Belgium, which was now predominantly Catholic and had only passed from the control of Catholic Spain to that of Catholic Austria, the Jesuits prospered down to the time of the suppression of the Society. The last remnants of Protestantism had been crushed under the heel of the Spanish soldiers or driven to Holland, and the province was an excellent field for tranquil work. The only notable episode is that, in their eagerness to rise above the other clergy, the Jesuits pressed Rome to apply to Belgium the famous test of belief which had been devised for the "Jansenists" of France. Arnauld had many admirers in Belgium, and the University of Louvain, especially, strongly resented the prospect of being forced to say that there were in the obscure work of Bishop Jansen five propositions which were not there. The Archbishop of Malines and the Nuncio were won by the Jesuits, but Innocent XII. hesitated to extend that miserable struggle to the peaceful Belgian Church. The Nuncio deliberately withheld the Pope's brief until the Jesuits made another attempt to win their demand, but in 1694 the Pope insisted that only priests who were found to hold the five propositions in question should be molested. As usual, the Jesuits failed to find any one who held the famous propositions and the matter was abandoned.

The story of the Jesuits in the States which now form the German Empire and in Austria has not yet been systematically written, and the material is a large and undigested mass of laudatory episodes and drastic charges. [33] In Austria, or the Holy Roman Empire, as it was then called, we might follow the fortunes of the Society with some continuity, but it would add little, in regard to Jesuit character, to what we have gathered from the records of France, Spain, and Portugal. The central and most important fact is the continued influence of the Jesuit confessors at the court. Amongst the interesting manuscripts which were seized at the time of the suppression of the Society was a document, dating from the time of General Acquaviva, giving royal confessors secret instructions as to their duty; [ [34] openly, of course, the Jesuit rule was to refuse such offices as far as possible, and to confine themselves to purely spiritual matters if the office was accepted. These instructions make the confessor a spy not only on the monarch, but upon his ministers and civic officials, and direct that he shall obtain information even about the private lives of his principal subjects. We know from other confiscated manuscripts which have been published (especially by Döllinger and Reusch) that this information was regularly sent to Rome, and that at every important juncture the confessor, who used to ask the monarch for time to consult God and his conscience, sent a secret messenger to Rome (or consulted other Jesuits) and acted on the policy of the Society.

In this sense the Jesuits controlled the policy of Austria to a great extent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Father Lamormaini, confessor to Ferdinand II., inspired the decree for the restoration of church-property in 1629, as we saw, and afterwards secured the best portion of it for the Jesuits; to whom nothing could be "restored," as they had not owned any of the property. In the following year Lamormaini practically decided the dismissal of Wallenstein. There was no question of importance on which the Emperor did not consult him, and the published documents show that there were times when the Jesuit, acting on instructions from Rome, advised a policy which would profit France rather than Austria; in 1635, for instance, he endeavoured (in vain) to induce the Emperor to cede Alsace to France. We have a large number of the Emperor's letters to Lamormaini, and they show that the Jesuit was practically first minister, in secular as well as spiritual matters. Other Jesuits were attached to the princes and nobles, and the natural result was a great increase of the power and wealth of the Society. Once more the suppression of the order and confiscation of its documents have provided a confirmation of the suspicions of historians. J. Friedrich (Beiträge) has published some of the confiscated documents, including a statement drawn up in 1729 by the Procurator of the Province of Upper Germany, Father Bissel. From this it appears that the German Province of the Society advanced (at a high rate of interest) 262,208 guldens to the Catholic Power for the purposes of the Thirty Years' War, and the Jesuit college at Liège 200,000 guldens. The Jesuit treasurer appends the remark that these loans must be kept strictly secret, as a disclosure "might bring ruin on our establishments."

The death of Ferdinand II. in 1637 made no difference in the position of the Jesuits. Ferdinand III. had been carefully trained by them, and he was ever ready to endanger the welfare of his Empire and disturb the peace of his subjects by furthering the designs of the Jesuits in the Protestant Provinces, as we shall see presently. Leopold I., who succeeded in 1657, was an even more fervent pupil of the Jesuits, and had been destined for the priesthood. We may say, in a word, that the Jesuits retained their wealth and power until, to their great anger and disappointment, the Emperor Joseph II. light-heartedly joined the other Catholic monarchs in the campaign for the suppression of the Society, and even Maria Theresa refused to plead for them with the Papacy. At that time their property alone was worth more than £2,000,000, but the Government discovered that they had anticipated the dissolution by investing large sums abroad. It is therefore impossible to estimate their real wealth, but when we add to the income from their vast estates the salaries of royal and noble confessors, the fees of masses and spiritual exercises, the emoluments of university and other teachers, and the very generous and constant inflow of gifts and legacies, we realise that the Austrian Jesuits cannot have been much less wealthy than those of France and Spain.

It may be suggested that we should regard this wealth with indulgence, in spite of the Jesuit vow of poverty, because of the immense educational services which the Society rendered to the Empire. Their school-system has, however, been heavily criticised by Austrian writers, and even in the height of their power it was boldly and successfully assailed by Austrian statesmen. A memorial addressed to the Empress Maria Theresa in 1757 insisted that all the universities had deteriorated since they had been captured by the Jesuits. Two years later (September 1759) the Empress compelled them to surrender to other teachers the chairs of logic, ethics, metaphysics, and history, and several chairs of theology, which they held at the Vienna University. The historian of the university, Kink, fully confirms this statement that it deteriorated under the control of the Jesuits. Indeed, the learned Oratorian priest Father Theiner, the Prefect of the Vatican Archives, shows in his Histoire du Pontificat de Clément XIV. that in other ways the Jesuits had done grave harm to culture in Catholic Germany. Their selfish determination to monopolise teaching and letters had destroyed the intellectual life of the non-Jesuit clergy, and there were few to succeed them when the Society was abolished. We shall see later that when Frederick the Great annexed Silesia, where the German Jesuits controlled education, he disdainfully advised them to send to France for some abler teachers.

It is also necessary to observe that a large number of scandals occurred among the Austrian and German Jesuits, especially the teachers. The subject is unpleasant, but pro-Jesuit writers are so insistent on the cleanness of their record that it cannot be entirely overlooked. A former director of the Bavarian State Archives, Dr. Karl Heinrich von Lang, examined the Jesuit documents under his care at Munich, and found, in the letters of the Provincial of the Upper German Province to the General, an alarming number of charges of unnatural or other vice. There was clearly an extraordinary amount of sexual corruption in the province in the period he reviews (1650-1723), and, if we find this to be the case where it happens that the secret documents of the Society have come into our hands, we must regard with grave suspicion the claims of Jesuit writers in regard to provinces of which we have not similar information. [ [35]

Dr. von Lang has also written a sketch of the history of the Jesuits in Bavaria (Geschichte der Jesuiten in Baiern, 1819), and we have a picture of degeneration and prosperity as in so many other countries. We saw, in an early chapter, the unattractive story of their settlement in Bavaria and coercion of the Protestants. Before and during the Thirty Years' War they were the most ardent instigators of Maximilian, and, when the terror of the Swedes had passed away, they entered upon a period of great prosperity in the impoverished country. When Maximilian died, however, in 1651, some attempt was made to check their progress by the statesmen who knew how deeply they were responsible for the desolation of Bavaria. Members of a rival religious order, the Theatines, were patronised by the Duchess Maria, and the Jesuits conducted an unedifying campaign against the Theatines, who made a spirited resistance. Each body accused the other of forging miracles in honour of its saints. Von Lang estimates that a little after the middle of the seventeenth century the 585 members of the Bavarian branch of the Society enjoyed a permanent income of 185,950 florins. To this, however, we must add fees, salaries, gifts, and legacies. Dr. von Lang shows that between 1620 and 1700 large donations amounting to 800,000 florins were made to the Society, often at the suggestion of its members.

The later wealth of the Jesuits in Bavaria cannot be estimated as the larger contributions to their funds were only stated in strictly secret documents which have never seen the light. We know that the Society prospered more than ever in the eighteenth century. In 1727 there were 875 Jesuits in Bavaria and the Tyrol, and the papers confiscated at the suppression proved that their wealth was enormous. Their college at Ingolstadt alone owned hundreds of farms, or a series of estates worth about 3,000,000 florins. A dozen other colleges were also richly endowed with landed property. As the eighteenth century wore on, however, the hostility to the Jesuits increased. Protestants were never without some serious ground for complaint of Jesuit controversy, and in Bavaria we find them accusing the Jesuits (quite justly) of recommending the sons of Protestant parents to steal the "bad books" of their fathers and bring them to the college. Catholics, on the other hand, complained that the Jesuits rendered no material service in proportion to their great wealth, and, as the successive messages of suppression came from Portugal, France, and Spain, their opponents became bolder. The Jesuits so little expected to be disturbed that in 1770 they created a separate Bavarian province, with more than 500 members. Three years later they were secularised and dispersed on account of the suppression of the Society.