A Candid History of the Jesuits

by Joseph McCabe

It is absurd to regard this formidable indictment of a religious body as a mere list of charges into the justice of which the Pope will not inquire. It is a list of the charges proved to the satisfaction of his predecessors, and embodied in the decrees of the Popes whom he names; and the sternest critic of the Society could hardly frame a weightier indictment in a few lines. The Pope adds that the measures of his predecessors for the reform of the Society were fruitless, and under Clement XIII. "the storms became worse than ever." The Catholic monarchs, he says, have been compelled by "seditions" and "scandals" to expel the Jesuits from their dominions and demand the abolition of the Society. To this demand he has given conscientious attention, and, "recognising that the Society of Jesus can no longer produce the abundant fruits and the considerable advantages for which it was created," he "suppresses and abolishes the Society for ever." The brief closes with directions for the disposal of Jesuit property, and a singularly lengthy and subtle development of his sentence to prevent the casuistic genius of the Jesuits from evading it.

The brief is, therefore, much more than a declaration that the Jesuits must be sacrificed in the interest of peace, and the hatred with which they have pursued the memory of its author has solid ground. It is a plain and learned demonstration that the step taken by Clement XIV. is the just culmination of the history of the Society; it says nothing of leaving open the question of the truth of the charges against the Jesuits, and the deliberate addition of the solemn words "for ever" to the sentence of dissolution shows clearly that it contemplates no temporary situation. The only serious objection urged by the Jesuits and their friends is that they were not summoned to answer the charges against them. Clement might have replied that the charges had been examined, and their defence heard, a dozen times in the history of the papacy; but his chief reason for rejecting this futile idea of a trial was probably that he knew well how the Jesuits intrigued on such occasions. Like Sixtus V. he would certainly have passed away, leaving the Church in the throes of the struggle, before a verdict was given.

This brief was, as I said, concealed from all but the five cardinals who were to carry out the sentence until 17th August. On that day the Catholic Powers were officially informed of the signing of the brief. At nine o'clock that evening a band of officials and guards entered the metropolitan house attached to the Gesù, and ordered Ricci to summon all his subjects to the refectory. They knew—some of them had witnessed the same scene in Spain and Portugal—that their hour had come, but they must have been deeply pained at the wording of the brief, which was read to them. Their proud Society added to that list of degenerate congregations which the Vatican had been compelled to abolish! They were forbidden to leave the house until secular costumes were provided for them, and the notaries put the papal seal on their documents. The same evening, or on the next day, the brief was read in the other Italian houses, and, as the couriers sped to the north, the disastrous tidings slowly spread gloom and despair throughout the Jesuit world as far as Holland and Poland.

The grief of the Jesuits was not less intense than the rejoicing of their opponents. A laughing crowd stormed the chancellory for copies of the brief, but few copies had been printed, and its drastic clauses only gradually became known. Then came the long and stirring period when the news of the response of the Jesuits came in from every quarter. The Roman Jesuits quietly left their homes, day by day, as secular clothes were provided for them. The Pope provided, not only for them, but for the Portuguese ex-Jesuits, as Portugal refused to fulfil its promise, and had every effort made to find situations for them in the service of the Vatican, the secular clergy, or the educational world. Many merely changed their garments, and continued to be the confessors of noble ladies or the tutors of their sons. Large numbers of them lived in community, on their joint pensions, awaiting the death of Clement XIV. and the restoration of the Society. The chief trouble in Italy was that offensive anonymous pamphlets were printed in vast quantities and circulated, and were in some instances traced to the Jesuits; and that Ricci and his assistants, who remained in the central house, were detected in a treacherous correspondence with the insurgents in distant regions, and imprisoned in the fortress of S. Angelo, where the unhappy Ricci died two years afterwards. Rome was not indisposed to laugh at anti-Jesuits as well as Jesuits. No doubt the gossips of the city told each other the fables which Jesuits reproduced in later years, and their apologist gives as "history"—for instance, that the diamonds which had adorned the statue of the Madonna in the Gesù were publicly worn afterwards by the mistress of one of the prelates charged with the execution of the sentence—but the pro-Jesuit faction at Rome was completely silenced.

In the Italian provinces, where the Jesuits commanded the allegiance of peasants and nobles who were unacquainted with their history, the anonymous pamphlets circulated briskly, and some more overt attempts were made to weaken the condemnation. For some time before the suppression a holy nun of Viterbo had earned repute as an inspired oracle, and her fame was great among the followers of the Jesuits. After the suppression her inspiration became richer and more precise, and the Vatican presently learned that thousands were cherishing her predictions that the Pope was to die at once, the kings to perish miserably, Frederick the Great to be converted, and the Society of Jesus to be quickly restored. A second lady entered the field, with predictions of a like nature. The Pope ordered that both should be arrested and an inquiry held by the Bishop of Orvieto. In the rooms of the ex-Jesuits he found an enormous mass of literature relating to the prophetesses, and locks of their hair ("and other things which decency forbids me to mention," says Father Theiner) for sale or distribution as riches. A judicial inquiry was held, and two of the Jesuits were condemned to imprisonment in S. Angelo as the chief agents in the fraud.

In Naples, Spain, and Portugal the news was received with great rejoicing. In France, according to Crétineau-Joly, it was received with indignation, and the Archbishop of Paris, speaking in the name of "the Gallican Church," boldly rejected the Pope's brief, and addressed a very remarkable letter to His Holiness. There were still bishops in the French Church who owed their sees to the Jesuits, and Archbishop de Beaumont had earned their gratitude by defending their casuists. But M. Crétineau-Joly is here guilty of one of the gravest of the many grave ruses in this part of his work. The supposed letter, in connection with which he does not give a word of warning, is a flagrant Jesuit forgery. It is dated 24th April 1774, yet it is well known that a few weeks before that date the archbishop had suspended an ex-Jesuit preacher, M. de la Vrillière, for presuming on his noble connections and fashionable repute to make a few remarks, in a sermon, on the Pope's action. The fact is that this forged letter, and one forged in the name of the Archbishop of Arles, first saw the light in a Jesuit pamphlet eighteen years afterwards. The French received the news with indifference or joy.

Austria also at once secularised its Jesuits. In spite of earlier assurances the Pope had some misgiving about the attitude of Maria Theresa, and with a copy of the brief he sent her a letter from his own hand. She replied, as she had said for four years, that what the Pope thought it proper to do was agreeable to her. Apart from Prussia and Russia, which we will consider in the next chapter, it was chiefly in small countries like the Swiss cantons, or on the foreign missions, that the Jesuits tried to resist. At Lucerne the Jesuits induced the senate to take the bold step of suspending the execution of the brief and writing to the Vatican for explanations. They were disdainfully ignored until they decided to carry out the sentence against the Society. At Freiburg—this is told as a touching and creditable incident by the Jesuits themselves—the superior gathered a vast congregation in their chapel ("to say farewell"), made a most eloquent discourse on the virtues and services of the Society, and implored their followers to respect the Pope's orders. Naturally, the effect was the reverse of pacifying the people, and it took some time to get rid of the Jesuits in Freiburg. At Soleure and other towns there was similar trouble. At Cologne the ex-Jesuit Fuller edited the Gazette, and its columns erupted fiery attacks on the Pope, and reproduced all the unfavourable gossip of Rome about him and his commissioners. They were to appeal to a General Council against this infamous pontiff. It was only in June of the following year, after the Nuncio had threatened to lay an interdict on the town and the authority of the emperor was invoked, that the Jesuits and their friends were silenced; and then they merely changed their coats and continued, in their various positions, to await better days. In Poland the bishops at once began to execute the brief, but the Jesuits inspired the idea that it was invalid on a technical ground, and the senate talked of sending an ambassador to Rome. The struggle ended in the Polish Jesuits taking shelter, as we shall see, under the authority of Catherine.

We do not, in a word, find that admirable and meek submission which is claimed by pro-Jesuit writers, who seem to think that the cases of vituperative pamphlets which were smuggled from country to country, and the bold stand made by local authorities here and there, were quite painful to the condemned fathers. We find, on the contrary, that from General Ricci downward the Jesuits intrigue or rebel wherever they have large local support and are not subject to a powerful Catholic monarch. On the distant missions the sequel was worse than in Europe. The removal of the Spanish and Portuguese fathers had demolished most of the missionary provinces, and the condemnation of their rites had greatly reduced the missions of the French and German Jesuits. But a few of them still lingered at the court of the Chinese Emperor or worked secretly in the provinces, and there were more in Tong-King and India. They resisted the papal brief for three years, at least in China. From every mission they held they were reported to the propaganda for insurrection, and the letters which are sometimes quoted to show how meekly they accepted the sentence were written by exceptional individuals. A small minority of them were for submission. Most of them made a hypocritical plea that the emperor (who no longer recognised their existence as priests, it will be remembered) would not suffer them to obey.

When, in 1776, they were forced to yield, they fell into three parties and entered upon a long and scandalous quarrel about the division of their property. As late as 1785 one of the ex-Jesuits dragged the former superior of the Peking mission into the Chinese civil court and exposed the quarrel. Bourgeois had the disposal of their property, goods, shops, etc., which were valued at half a million francs, and he rewarded the members of his own party with a thousand taels each, and left his opponents in great privation. In 1786 the propaganda forced them to hand over their missions, which they still controlled, in secular dress, to others, but they continued for several years to quarrel with each other and with the other missionaries. The last chapter of their Asiatic missions is little less than sordid, and it is sheer deceit to conceal these facts and offer us only one or two edifying letters written by the better fathers.

At the time of its abolition the Society numbered 22,589 members (of whom 11,293 were priests), and owned 669 colleges and 869 other residences (of which only 24 were "houses of the professed"). It is needless to add any reflections on the suppression. The papal brief is the supreme judgment on the Jesuits in the first phase of their existence. However many devoted and austere members there were among the twenty thousand, the Society was incurably corrupt. There was no serious ground to think, after earlier experience, that reform would succeed; they would not reform themselves—the decrees of their Congregations were waste paper—and they resisted every papal effort to reform them. The Society, as a body, was committed to the pursuit of wealth and power, and in this pursuit it acted invariably as if the end justified the means. The germs planted in it by Ignatius had ripened. His followers had sought the wealthy and the powerful, had veiled their actions in secrecy, and had trampled on their own rules and the rules of the Church when the end required it.