THE NEW JESUITS
For a few years after the restoration the Italian Jesuits were fully occupied with the reorganisation of their body, the recovery of their property, and the absorption of the lingering Paccanarists and survivors of the older Society. It is clear that, had it not been for the partial restoration in Parma and Naples, the Society would long have remained feeble. How many still lived of the 22,589 followers of Ignatius who had been expelled from their homes forty years before we do not know, but there was by no means a rush to the colours when the regiment was reformed. It was difficult also to recover their property. In spite of the generosity of the rulers of Piedmont, Naples, and the Papal States the work proceeded slowly. It is in the year 1820 that we catch a first interesting glimpse of the reconstituted body.
At the beginning of that year General Bzrozowski died at Polotzk, a few months before the Jesuits were expelled from Russia, and the Italians hastened to hold an election. Before he died the General had appointed Father Petrucci Vicar-General, and this official came to Rome and, in conjunction with his fellow-Italians, fixed the election for 4th September. We are not, of course, permitted to know the whole truth in regard to this election, but such facts as we know clearly show that the Italians were determined to regain control of the Society. There seems, however, to have been a deeper quarrel. Some of the younger men and the ex-Paccanarists wished to reform the constitutions, and they had the support of Cardinal della Ganga, the Pope's Vicar (and later Leo XII.); the older men opposed reform. But what the precise position of Petrucci was it is impossible to decide. Crétineau-Joly, who alone has had access to the archives and has used his privilege in such a way as to make the quarrel unintelligible, offers the ridiculous suggestion that Petrucci and the cardinal wished to destroy the Society.
However that may be, Petrucci tried to have the election held before the Poles arrived, but there was a spirited Breton member of the Russian Province, Father Rozaven, in Rome at the time, and he appealed to the cardinal. Petrucci then wrote to the Poles to say that they must postpone their voyage to Rome, but Rozaven exposed the trick to them and they reached Rome early in September. There must have been a most unedifying turmoil in the Jesuit house, as, instead of an election on 4th September, we find Cardinal della Ganga intervening on the 6th to say that a commission, with him and Cardinal Galeffi at its head, had been appointed by the Pope to adjudicate on their quarrels. A week later the commission found that Petrucci was to have the powers of a general, but the two cardinals were to preside at the election. The account given us by the French historian is bewildering in its confusion, and is evidently intended to screen an angry conflict of personal and national ambitions and of reformers and anti-reformers.
The party opposed to Petrucci (and, presumably, to reform) now appealed to Cardinal Consalvi and denounced their Vicar-General. Consalvi had little interest in the Jesuits, but, as they knew, he was not disinclined to thwart della Ganga. He secured the calling of the Congregation in October. It seems to have been the most lively and impassioned election that the old house had ever witnessed. Petrucci ruled that the voters from England and France and part of Italy had no canonical right to vote; the Congregation overruled him, and, when he protested, deposed him and excluded him and his chief supporter, Pietroboni, from the Congregation. Della Ganga appealed to the Pope, Consalvi defeated his appeal, and on 18th October Father Fortis was elected. The triumphant section then held a trial of the conduct of the minority. Petrucci and Pietroboni were pardoned on account of their age, but a number of younger men were expelled from the Society.
It must be admitted that this Congregation shows a decided continuity of the irregular features of the Society. Fortis, Rozaven, Petrucci, and the leaders of the conflicting parties were old members; Fortis, at least, an elderly Italian in his eighth decade of life, had belonged to the suppressed Society, and the conduct of him and his followers suggests that forty years of life without the restraint of discipline had not tended to improve their character. In the pacified Europe of 1820 they saw an easy field for the triumph of their order, and the Italians were ambitious to control it. The struggle against the proposal to reform the Society is equally unattractive; and the facility with which both parties appealed to rival cardinals, when the Jesuit tradition was fiercely to resent any outside interference with their Congregations, completes an unpleasant picture. The anti-reformers won, and the voters scattered to their respective provinces and missions.
Three years later Pius VII. died, and the triumphant clique at the Gesù had a momentary anxiety when Cardinal della Ganga mounted the papal throne under the name of Leo XII. Rozaven expresses their concern in a letter to a colleague, and predicts that he at least will be compelled to leave Rome. But Leo XII. was convinced that the Society had become one of the most useful auxiliaries of the Papacy, and he hastened to assure them that their intrigue against his authority was forgotten. He had, in fact, hardly been a year at the Vatican when he gratified them by restoring the Roman College to their charge, and they gathered their best teachers from all parts of the world to win back its earlier prestige. Other of their old colleges in the Papal States were secured for them by Leo XII. and the Italian Provinces quickly recovered their power.
It was known to all that the liberal feeling engendered by the revolutionary movement was still intensely alive. The secret Society of the Carbonari spread its net over Italy, and the cultivated middle class was very largely liberal and anti-clerical. At Naples, in 1820, the Carbonari had seemed for a moment about to triumph; but the rebellion was defeated, and the Jesuits returned to the task of educating the middle class in pro-papal sentiments. They had a college for the sons of nobles at Naples, and four other colleges in the Neapolitan district; while they had no less than fifteen colleges and residences in the island of Sicily. In northern Piedmont, from which few at that time expected the greatest menace to the Papacy to come, they retained great power for decades. Victor Emmanuel gave place to Charles Felix, and the Liberals took the occasion to make a violent assault on the fathers. Charles Felix replied by choosing a Jesuit confessor, Father Grassi. Charles Albert patronised them even more generously than his predecessors. He secured the return of their old house at Turin, and, when he found it impossible to get for them their old house at Genoa, which had been converted into a university, he granted them one of his palaces for a residence.