[WORKS CONSULTED]


THE JESUITS
1534-1921


[CHAPTER I]
ORIGIN

The Name — Opprobrious meanings — Caricatures of the Founder — Purpose of the Order — Early life of Ignatius — Pampeluna — Conversion — Manresa — The Exercises — Authorship — Journey to Palestine — The Universities — Life in Paris — First Companions — Montmartre First Vows — Assembly at Venice. Failure to reach Palestine — First Journey to Rome — Ordination to the Priesthood — Labors in Italy — Submits the Constitutions for Papal Approval — Guidiccioni's opposition — Issue of the Bull Regimini — Sketch of the Institute — Crypto-Jesuits.

The name "Jesuit" has usually a sinister meaning in the minds of the misinformed. Calvin is accused of inventing it, but that is an error. It was in common use two or three centuries before the Reformation, and generally it implied spiritual distinction. Indeed, in his famous work known as "The Great Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ," which appeared somewhere about 1350, the saintly old Carthusian ascetic, Ludolph of Saxony, employs it in a way that almost provokes a smile. He tells his readers that "just as we are called Christians when we are baptized, so we shall be called Jesuits when we enter into glory." Possibly such a designation would be very uncomfortable even for some pious people of the present day. The opprobrious meaning of the word came into use at the approach of the Protestant Reformation. Thus, when laxity in the observance of their rule began to show itself in the once fervent followers of St. John Columbini — who were called Jesuati, because of their frequent use of the expression: "Praised be Jesus Christ" — their name fixed itself on the common speech as a synonym of hypocrisy. Possibly that will explain the curious question in the "Examen of Conscience" in an old German prayer-book, dated 1519, where the penitent is bidden to ask himself: "Did I omit to teach the Word of God for fear of being called a Pharisee, a Jesuit, a hypocrite, a Beguine?"

The association of the term Jesuit with Pharisee and hypocrite is unpleasant enough, but connecting it with Beguine is particularly offensive. The word Beguine had come to signify a female heretic, a mysticist, an illuminist, a pantheist, who though cultivating a saintly exterior was credited with holding secret assemblies where the most indecent orgies were indulged in. The identity of the Beguines with Jesuits was considered to be beyond question, and one of the earliest Calvinist writers informed his co-religionists that at certain periods the Jesuits made use of mysterious and magical devices and performed a variety of weird antics and contortions in subterraneous caverns, from which they emerged as haggard and worn as if they had been struggling with the demons of hell (Janssen, Hist. of the German People, Eng. tr., IV, 406-7). Unhappily, at that time, a certain section of the association of Beguines insisted upon being called Jesuits. There were many variations on this theme when the genuine Jesuits at last appeared. In Germany they were denounced as idolaters and libertines, and their great leader Canisius was reported to have run away with an abbess. In France they were considered assassins and regicides; Calvin called them la racaille, that is, the rabble, rifraff, dregs. In England they were reputed political plotters and spies. Later, in America, John Adams, second President of the United States, identified them with Quakers and resolved to suppress them. Cotton Mather or someone in Boston denounced them as grasshoppers and prayed for the east wind to sweep them away; the Indians burned them at the stake as magicians, and the Japanese bonzes insisted that they were cannibals, a charge repeated by Charles Kingsley, Queen Victoria's chaplain, who, in "Westward Ho," makes an old woman relate of the Jesuits first arriving in England that "they had probably killed her old man and salted him for provision on their journey to the Pope of Rome." No wonder Newman told Kingsley to fly off into space.