| 1838 | 3,067 members. | |
| 1844 | 4,133 " | |
| 1853 | 5,209 " | |
| 1861 | 7,144 " | |
| 1884 | 11,840 members. | |
| 1906 | 15,661 " | |
| 1912 | 16,545 [46] " |
Of the present members, 3531 are on the foreign missions; and the re-opening of these fields, under less adventurous conditions, accounts for much of the growth of the Society. The advance of the United States and the British Colonies, with their large percentage of Irish and Italian immigrants, accounts for a good deal of the remainder. The Jesuits of the United States now number 2300; and there are 373 in Canada and 100 in Australasia. It is most probable that the future of the Jesuits lies in the Protestant countries. Probably the Jesuits will, in twenty years' time, be excluded from every "Catholic" kingdom, yet number more than 20,000.
Their progress and activity in England may be more closely described in illustration of this tendency. We saw how the survivors of the old English mission joined with the Fathers of the Faith in 1814 and 1815 to re-establish the Society. They then numbered 73, and had several chapels, besides the estate and house at Stonyhurst. They advanced with the general body of the Roman Catholics, especially when the stronger current of immigration from Ireland began in the forties. The secular clergy were still very much opposed to them, however, and Dr. Griffiths, the Vicar Apostolic of the London district, refused to allow them to set up a community in the metropolis. After years of pressure at Rome they secured the interest of Dr. (later Cardinal) Wiseman, and were admitted to settle in Farm St., among the wealthiest Catholics. When Wiseman succeeded Griffiths in 1847 (and the hierarchy was established in 1850) they were cordially patronised and made greater progress. They then numbered 554. With the accession of Manning the patronage ceased and their work was restricted. They were eager to found schools for middle-class boys; but Manning sternly refused, in defiance of the favour of Pius IX., and they were compelled to establish their schools at such places as Beaumont and Wimbledon, outside his jurisdiction. When they pressed for a school of higher studies, a kind of Catholic university, Manning hastily founded his ill-fated school at Kensington and refused their co-operation, with the natural result that the wealthier Catholics, under the influence of the Jesuits, would not support it. Bishop Vaughan of Salford was not much more indulgent to them.
The secret of Manning's opposition is said by his biographer to have been his wish to raise the dignity of the secular priesthood, which Catholics are too apt to think lower than the monastic state. This was, however, not merely a mystic theory on the part of the Cardinal. He despised the comparative indolence and petty hypocrisies of the religious orders generally, and had a particular dislike of the intrigue, the secrecy, the insubordination, and the pursuit of wealthy people, of the Jesuits. [47] Manning refused sacerdotal faculties to his nephew, Father Anderdon, and forced the Jesuits to surrender a site in West London for which they had paid more than £30,000. Cardinal Vaughan, however, relaxed his coercive policy when he was transferred to Westminster.
The English Province has now (1912) 729 members, and about fifty churches; though the Catholic Directory gives only 285 English Jesuit priests, and 226 French refugees, in this country. The feeling against them amongst the secular clergy and the other religious Congregations is almost as strong as ever. Their obvious preference for the wealthier quarters of cities is sneeringly discussed in clerical circles, and it is said that they intrigue incessantly to draw the more comfortable Catholics from other parishes. The poverty of their literary and scholastic output,—mainly, a number of slight and superficial controversial works, more intent on making small points than on substantial and accurate erudition,—and their remarkable failure to produce men of distinction, are regarded as a grave reflection on their body, in view of their wealth, numbers, and leisure. It is not, however, believed that they indulge any other intrigue than an amiable zeal among the Catholic laity to add to their own comfort and prestige. [48]
Returning, in conclusion, to the question at the beginning of this chapter, we find it impossible to give a general answer and embrace all the existing Jesuits in a formula. The Jesuits of Spain, with their political machinations, their sordid legacy-hunting, and their eagerness to support the Spanish Government in the judicial murder of their enemies, are a very different body from the Jesuits of England or Germany or the United States. The Jesuits of Cuba and the Philippines were, until 1898, little different from the more parasitical Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The modern age has affected the Jesuits much as some ancient revolution in the climate of the earth modified its living inhabitants. Where the old tropical conditions more or less linger (say, in Chile or Peru) the Jesuits are hardly changed; and we find the alteration in exact proportion to the environment. There is no change in the inner principles and ideals. "All for the Glory of the Society," as Mgr. Talbot sardonically translated their Latin motto, is still the ruling principle; the Society remains the Esau of the Roman clerical world. It still chiefly seeks the wealthy and powerful; it is the arch-enemy of progress and liberalism in Catholic theology; its scholarship is singularly undistinguished in proportion to its resources; [ [49] it embarks on political intrigue, even for the destruction of State-forms, whenever its interest seems to require; it is hated by a very large proportion of the Catholic clergy and laity in every country. Let a liberal Pope again come to power and Modernism prevail, and it is not impossible that Catholicism itself will again angrily suppress the perverse and irregular construction of the Spanish soldier-diplomatist, and insist that religious ideals shall be pursued only by scrupulously clean and unselfish exertions.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [44] I use the phrase of historians, but may observe that this was, in the main, a middle-class movement to secure liberty of opinion and other elementary political rights.
[ [45] Fourteen Years, ii. 164.
[ [46] It must be borne in mind always that "members" does not necessarily mean priests. Rather less than half are priests: the remainder are scholastics or lay coadjutors.