A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

The Assistants or Councillors of the General now asserted their power. They threatened their General that, if he did not withdraw the work, they would warn the heads of all the Provinces of the Society of the danger he would bring on them. Father Gonzalez offered to omit his name from the title-page and cut out a particularly obnoxious section of the work, but they sternly refused the compromise. He published, and they denounced their General to the Pope for issuing a theological work without papal authorisation. There was now so fierce a controversy in the Society that the Pope suspended the sale of the book, and remitted the affair to the triennial Congregation of Jesuit Procurators in 1693. A feverish intrigue and a number of heated pamphlets from experienced Jesuit pens prepared the way for the Congregation, and, when it assembled, it voted for the calling of an extraordinary General Congregation. Numbers of them were threatening to have Gonzalez deposed. The Pope, however, declared their vote invalid, and the book was published; but his "subjects"—whom so many regard as corpses in the hands of a despotic General—persecuted and assailed Gonzalez until his death. [38]

The interest of the Italian Jesuits is almost confined to Rome during this period. They were now so wealthy and powerful throughout Italy that they held in check the opposing elements, and we find few of those interesting episodes which saved their earlier career from monotony. In 1656 they secured permission to return to Venice, the last stronghold of their enemies. The dwindling commerce of Venice was now gravely menaced by the Turks, and the Jesuits did not scruple to fan the zeal of the Turks. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Venice was hard pressed, and compelled to look for assistance. It is said that the Jesuits paid a handsome sum to the impoverished Republic; it is at least true, and is the same thing in principle, that the Pope promised assistance on condition that the doors were opened to the Jesuits. The dire oaths never to readmit them were reluctantly erased, and the fathers soon restored their old prosperity. Although wholesome jets of criticism were constantly directed against them, especially at Rome, they flourished throughout Italy much as they did in Spain and Portugal. Hardly a year elapsed without some dying noble bequeathing them a palace or a country house, or some small town being induced to invite them to found a college; and when plague or earthquake or famine desolated the land, and they recovered their heroic mood, a shower of blessings and benefactions fell upon them.

Only one serious calamity overtook them during the period we are surveying. Toward the close of the seventeenth century there was a violent quarrel between the King of the Two Sicilies and the Pope; always one of the most painful dilemmas for the Society. The King claimed a high spiritual authority, and the bishops, supported by the Papacy, placed an interdict on large areas of Sicily. The civil power retorted with a decree of banishment against the clergy who obeyed the Pope, and part of the Jesuits incurred the sentence. Later, when Victor Amadeo received the island and promised conciliatory conduct, the Jesuits reopened their churches; but they were directed from Rome to close them, and were again exiled. Spain then resumed control of Sicily, and reinstated them.

In the year 1705, Gonzalez died, and the learned Tamburini succeeded him. At that time the scandal of the Jesuit concessions in India and China was added, in the literature of their opponents, to the scandals of the American missions, and the Papacy was being forced to act. In 1710 and 1715, Clement XI. sternly condemned their practices, and the Roman Jesuits could do no more than represent, inaccurately, that their missionaries had submitted. The next Pope, Innocent XIII., found that this was untrue, and again severely condemned them; but he was followed by several complaisant Pontiffs, and the Society continued its irregular ways in all parts of the globe. Edifying utterances on the part of the Roman authorities were not wanting. Tamburini died in 1730, and at the Congregation which followed one of the decrees severely enacted that the fathers of the Society must, in every part of the world, avoid "even the appearance of commerce," and refrain from violence in attacking their opponents. No one knew better than these rulers of the Society the industrial and commercial system which was then followed everywhere by the fathers, and the devices by which they silenced their critics; yet no effort whatever was made to enforce the decree.

Benedict XIV. came to the papal throne in 1740, and put an end to the intrigues of the Society in the Roman courts for a time. His bulls of 1742 and 1744, sternly condemning their contumacious conduct in India and China, struck a heavy blow at two of their most profitable missions; but their American missions were veiled by the optimist assurances of France, Spain, and Portugal; and, when Lawrence Ricci became General of the Society in 1758, there was little ground for serious anxiety. Indeed, Benedict XIV. died in that year, and a friendly Pope, Clement XIII., an Italian noble of conciliatory temper, received the tiara. By that time (according to a list published in 1750) the Society had 22,589 members, of whom 11,293 were priests. These were distributed in 669 colleges and 945 residences of less importance; it is singular, and characteristic of the Society, that there were only 24 "houses of the professed" to 22,000 members, and that one half these members were not priests.

One cloud rested on the horizon when Lawrence Ricci became General; but even the most timid and despondent observer could not have ventured to suggest that he was destined to be the last successor of Ignatius. It had been proved to the satisfaction of the Spanish and Portuguese courts that the Jesuits had inspired the revolt in Paraguay, and Pombal had begun his campaign against the Society. The accession of Clement XIII. in July reassured the Jesuits, but in September of that year the news came of the attempt to assassinate the King of Portugal, and a few months later a number of the leading Portuguese Jesuits were in jail. From that moment the doom of the fathers was sealed in Portugal, and their efforts were chiefly directed to restricting the contagious area. Clement was encouraged to resist the Portuguese, and the Spanish court was induced to regard Pombal as a slanderer. In France, however, the famous Lavalette case had recently occurred, and a very ominous wave of indignation against the Jesuits was rising. Choiseul was now known to be leagued with Pombal in hostility to the Society.

Ricci, a Florentine noble by birth, a man of quiet and cultivated taste, was not an ideal ruler for such a period, but as the clouds gathered thicker he threw all his energy into the combat. Before the end of the year 1759 he had to make provision for the thousands of Portuguese Jesuits whom Pombal cynically flung upon the shores of Italy. In the following year the French courts began to condemn the Society to pay the debts of Lavalette, and in 1761 the Parlement of Paris condemned the Society and began the work of repression. In the fiery controversy which now filled all the Catholic countries of Europe every questionable episode in the history of the Society, and probably much that had been added to the historical facts, was discussed and advertised. Myriads of pamphlets fed the sensations of the people, and for the first time since the early years of Ignatius the Jesuits cowered before the storm of obloquy. In 1764, Louis XV. signed the decree for the abolition of the Society in France, and by 1767 the Italian provinces were once more swamped with crowds of fugitives.

Charles III. of Spain had so far firmly resisted the arguments of Pombal, but in the spring of 1766 the Jesuits of Madrid had drawn on themselves the suspicion of having inspired a revolt against the royal authority, and it would be reported to Ricci that the monarch was sombre and inaccessible. As the year proceeded (and, as we now know, Aranda completed his case against the order), increasingly gloomy messages would come from the Spanish court, and in the early days of April 1767 the news came from the coast that 6000 Spanish Jesuits were tossing homeless on the waters. Taking the colonies into account, the Society had now been destroyed in by far the greater part of the Christian world, and a stupendous amount of its property had been confiscated. Moreover, it was now known that the French, Spanish, and Portuguese were pressing the Pope to abolish the Society; and, at least from the middle of 1767, the prospect of that terrible contingency was discussed throughout the clerical world at Rome.

Before the end of 1767 the work began on Italian soil. Charles III. had passed from Naples to the throne of Spain, and he had left that kingdom in the charge of a liberal minister, Tanucci, under the rule of his son Ferdinand IV. Little pressure was needed by the Neapolitans. On the 3rd of November 1767 the Jesuit houses were surrounded, the papers seized, and the fathers banished from Southern Italy. A few months later it was the turn of Parma, and in April the fathers were driven from Malta, as the Grand Master was a feudatory of the King of Naples. Whether the idea came from the Jesuits or no we cannot say, but the Pope concluded that, in the case of Parma, he might retaliate. He revived an old pontifical claim to the duchy, annulled the sentence against the Jesuits, and excommunicated those who had banished them. The allies promptly replied; France seized Avignon, and Naples occupied Benevento and Ponte Corvo, of the Papal States.