A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

They were ordained priests at Venice, and then they scattered over Northern Italy, to allow a year's grace to the Palestinian mission and let other cities see their ways. Bologna, Ferrara, Siena, and Padua—all university towns—now witnessed the strange labours of the nameless knights of Christ. The years were not far distant when men would start with suspicion at the coming of a "Jesuit" and wonder what dark intrigue brought him amongst them, but in those early days they seemed the plainest and most guileless of ministers. Two soberly dressed, barefooted youths, their pale faces warmed by the smile which the master bade them wear under the eyes of men, would enter the gate one evening, covered with the dust of long roads, and mount some stone in the busy street or square; and, when men and women gathered round to see the tricks of these foreign jugglers or tumblers, they would be startled to hear such fiery preaching as had not been heard in Italy since the fresh spring-time of the followers of Francis and Dominic. Then the preachers would beg a crust of bread and a cup of water, and ask for the hospital, where they might serve the sick. They had no name, the inquirer learned, and belonged to no monastic body; they were simple knights-errant in the cause of Christ and the poor. The one feature by which they might, to some close observer, have given an inkling of the future was that they hung about the universities and impressed youths with their learning; or that, while they served the poor, they were pleased to direct the consciences of noble and wealthy women. Yet who would suppose that within twenty years these men would be intriguing for the control of the universities and shaping the counsels of kings?

Ignatius, Favre, and Lainez went to Vicenza, and found a lodging in a ruined monastery near the town. From this they went out daily to beg, and tend the sick, and startle townsfolk and villagers with explosive exhortations, in broken Italian, to lay aside their sins. Again the Inquisition summoned them, and dismissed them. At last, when it was clear that the road to the East was indefinitely closed, Ignatius called his followers from their several towns, and a council was held in the old convent. The events of these early days are known to us only from Jesuit writers of the next generation, and, discarding only the miracles with which they unnecessarily adorn the ways of their founders, we may follow them with little reserve. These men were, beyond question, in deadly earnest, though we shall see that some of them sheltered little human frailties under their hair-shirts. But it is quite plain that, however high and pure their aim was, they formed and carried their plans with a diplomacy, almost an astuteness, of which you will not find a trace in the founding of any other monastic body. One monastic virtue is conspicuously absent from the aureole of St. Ignatius—holy simplicity.

It was decided that Ignatius, Favre, and Lainez should go to Rome, and the others should return to work in their university cities until they were called to Rome. Before they parted, however, they gave themselves a name, since people demanded one. We are, said Ignatius, the "Compañia de Jesu," the "Company of Jesus"; although the prose of a later generation has translated it the "Society of Jesus." Then Xavier and Bobadilla went to Bologna, Rodriguez and Le Jay to Ferrara, Salmeron and Brouet to Siena, Codure and Hozes to Padua, to tend the sick, and instruct the children, and angle for recruits; and Ignatius and his companions went on foot, in the depth of winter, to Rome.

Paul III. occupied the papal throne in the year 1537, and looked with troubled eyes to the lands beyond the Alps, where the Reformation was now in full blast. He was by temperament a Pope of the Renaissance, a man of genial culture and artistic feeling, a man who owed his elevation to his sister's intimacy with a predecessor, and who might, if the age had not turned so sour, have carried even into the papal apartments the graceful vices of his youth. But there was now no mistaking the roll of the distant thunder; Rome was sobered and disposed to put its house in order. Paul, knowing that the appalling corruption of the Vatican, the clergy, and the monks must cease, or else the Vatican and clergy and monks would cease, had appointed a commission of the sterner cardinals to examine Luther's indictment of his Church, and one of the clearest points of agreement was that the unquestioned degradation of the monks throughout Christendom must be severely punished. The general feeling was that most, if not all, of the monastic orders should be suppressed. It was therefore a peculiarly inopportune time to propose the establishment of a new order. Was Ignatius more holy than Benedict, or Bruno, or Francis, or Dominic? And had not every order that had yet been founded fallen into evil ways within fifty years?

Ignatius was not more holy than Dominic and Francis, but he was shrewder and more alert to the circumstances. He did not propose to rush into the presence of Paul III. He and his companions settled at the Spanish hospital, and began to tend the sick and instruct the children. They began also to have influential admirers. "Let us," Ignatius had said, as they entered Rome, "avoid all relations with women, except those of the highest rank." In later years he said of their early work at Rome: "We sought in this way to gain men of learning and of position to our side—or, to speak more correctly, to God's side." This identification of "our" side and God's is the clue to early Jesuitism. Men who were convinced of it might be intensely earnest and unworldly, yet act as if they were ambitious. In fact, they were ambitious to win the wealthy and powerful—Ignatius says it repeatedly—"for the greater glory of God." And the work went forward with great speed. They received a poor little house in a vineyard at the foot of the Pincian Hill, and went out daily to minister and to edify. One of their first friends was Codacio, a wealthy and important official of the papal court. The better disposition of Ortiz, the Spanish envoy, was also encouraged. Ignatius put him through the Exercises in the old Monte Cassino Abbey, and, when the strain nearly drove him mad, entertained him by performing some of the old Basque dances: a subject for a painter, if ever there was. After a time the Pope received Ignatius very affably, encouraged him to preach, and found academic chairs for Favre and Lainez. Within a month or two Ignatius had made so much progress that Roman gossip marked him as an intriguer for the red hat, which he was not wealthy enough to buy.

Within four months, or at Easter 1538, Ignatius summoned the whole of his followers to Rome. The poor little house in a vineyard was now too small, and Codacio gave them a large house in the Piazza Margana. From this they went out daily to beg and teach and preach, and to visit "ladies of the highest rank." These eleven eloquent and learned preachers, these nobles who begged their bread and washed verminous invalids, soon divided the Roman world into ardent admirers and ardent critics. An Augustinian friar, in particular, opened fire on them from his pulpit. Ignatius was "a wolf in sheep's clothing," he insisted; let people inquire at Alcalà, and Salamanca, and Paris, and Venice, and see whether he was not wanted by the Inquisition here and there. Friends at the Vatican were reminded that this sort of thing interfered with their good work, and the Pope was induced to inquire into the charges; but even the Pope's acquittal of them did not silence their critics, and for a time they bore much poverty and anxiety. Half of Rome, if not half of Catholicism, hated the Jesuits from their first year; and it would be absurd to think that this was due to their fervour in denouncing sin. It was due in a very large measure to the diplomatic character of the work of Ignatius, which we perceive so clearly even in the discreet narratives of the early Jesuit historians.

The infant Society was delivered from its perils by returning from the cultivation of the rich and powerful to the service of the weak and powerless. We shall constantly find the fortunes of the early Jesuits vacillating according as they practise one or other of these incongruous activities, and we can quite understand that their critics came to see an element of calculation even in their philanthropy. By their brave ministration to the poor they win the favour of the rich: by the favour of the rich they rise to political and educational work, and the poor are almost forgotten until some epidemic of criticism threatens their very existence. It is quite useless to deny that there was calculation in their humbler ministration when we find Ignatius admitting it from the outset; yet it would be equally untrue to deny that they served the poor with a sincere and often heroic humanity, and that the favour and power they trusted to obtain by doing so were not sought for their personal profit, but for the better discharge of what they conceived to be a high mission.

So it was in the winter which closed the year 1538, in which their project ran some risk of being buried under the stones of their critics. The terrible cold of that winter led to a famine in Rome, and the followers of Ignatius spent day and night in relieving the sufferers and begging alms for them. Their house in the Piazza Margana was converted into a hospital, and no less than four hundred destitute men found a home in it. The sympathy of the pious slowly returned to them. "So happy a diversion had to be put to account," says Crétineau-Joly, and Ignatius began to draw up the rules of his Society for presentation to the Pope. Night by night the eleven priests sat in council to determine the broad features of their association: to say, especially, if they would add a vow of obedience to their vows of poverty and chastity and thus become a monastic body. In April they decided that they would have a Superior and vow obedience to him; in May they resolved to adopt that masterpiece of the "holy wiles" of Ignatius, the most distinctive and most serviceable feature of the Society—the vow to put themselves at the direct disposal of the Pope. Naturally there was, and is, no religious body in the Catholic Church whose members would not leap with alacrity to obey any order of the Pope, and think it an honour to be selected for such a distinction; indeed, we shall see that no other religious ever ventured to defy or evade the commands of Popes as Jesuits have done. But we must observe how happily this parade of obedience fitted the circumstances. The Pope had entered upon a war against half of Christendom. Heresy was, like an appalling tide, invading even his southern dominions, and it was inevitable that he should be attracted by the proposal to put at his service a body of men of high culture and heroic purpose, who would be ready, at a word, to fly to a threatened point, to penetrate in disguise into the lands of the heretics, to whisper in the ears and fathom the counsels of kings, or to bear the gospel to the new countries beyond the seas.

This was the beginning of the famous Jesuit Constitutions, which were not completed and printed until 1558. A short summary of their proposals was handed by Ignatius, in September, to Cardinal Contarini, who would present it to the Pope. It was read and approved by one of the Pope's monk-advisers, and Contarini then read it himself to Paul III. "The finger of God is here," the Pope is reported to have said, and he appointed three cardinals to examine the document with care. Unfortunately for Ignatius, one of the three, Cardinal Guiddiccioni, was so disgusted with the state of the monastic orders that he would not even read the document. It seemed to him preposterous to add to their number at a time when their corruption was ruining the Church. In that sense he and his colleagues reported to the Pope, and Ignatius betook himself, by prayer and good works, to a strenuous assault upon the heavens, that some miracle might open the eyes of the cardinal. And about a year later, the Jesuit historians say, the hostility of Guiddiccioni was miraculously removed. He read the document, and was enchanted with it; and on 27th September 1540 the bull "Regimini militantis Ecclesiae" placed the Society of Jesus at the service of the Counter-Reformation.

It need hardly be added that the "miracle" is susceptible of a natural explanation. There is a curt statement in Orlandini, one of the first historians of the Society, that during the year 1540 letters came to Rome from all the towns where the followers of Ignatius had already worked, telling the marvellous results of their preaching. Ignatius had done much more than pray. Many a time in the course of the next few chapters we shall find a shower of testimonial-letters falling upon a town where there is opposition to the admittance of the Jesuits, and they were not "unsolicited testimonials." Contarini, too, would not lightly resign himself to defeat by his brother-cardinal. Codacio, Ortiz, and many another, would help the work, under the discreet guidance of Ignatius. Long before the Society was authorised, the Pope was induced to employ the Jesuits for important missions. He had chosen Rodriguez and Xavier, at the pressing request of the King of Portugal, to carry the gospel to the Indies; he had sent Lainez and Favre, at the prayer of a distinguished cardinal, to fight the growth of Protestantism in Parma. Other members of the little group had gone to discharge special missions, and glowing reports of their success came to Rome. The Pope was won, and, when the Pope willed, it would hardly need a miracle to induce Cardinal Guiddiccioni to read a document which it was his office to read. Indeed, the statement that he refused for twelve months to read a paper which the Pope enjoined him to read is incredible; it was a good pretext for a change of mind, and for a miracle. The Society of Jesus was founded on diplomacy.