The canonization of saints proceeds very slowly in the modern Church. Years and years are spent in preliminary investigations of the life, the holiness, the doctrines, and the miracles of the one who is to be presented to the public recognition of the Church. Theologians and canonists have to pass on all those points and those who testify speak only under the most solemn oaths and the threat of dire censure if they witness to what they know to be false. Infinite labor has been expended before the question is presented to the Holy See. Very many of these causes never reach even that stage, for everywhere, in its progress, stands an official called the Promoter of the Faith, but popularly known as the "Devil's Advocate," whose work consists in doing his utmost to throw obstacles in the way of the canonization. Nevertheless, the Society has a sufficient number on its roll of fame, in spite of its comparatively brief and perpetually perturbed existence, to convince the world that it is not the maleficent organization that it is credited with being.
At the head of the list come the two friends, Ignatius and Xavier, dying within four years of each other: the latter in 1552, the former in 1556. The third is Borgia, who died in 1572. He had set aside all the honors of the world, except that of actual royalty, in order to take the lowest place in the Society, but he became its chief. In charming contrast with these three great men, are the three boy saints: Stanislaus, Aloysius, and Berchmans, dying respectively in 1568, 1591 and 1621. Stanislaus, the little Polish noble, travelled all the way from Vienna to Rome on foot, a distance of 1500 miles, to enter the novitiate. He had no money, or guide, or friends, but he arrived safely, for the angels gave him Communion on his journey, and he has ever since been the darling of the beginners in religious life. Aloysius was of princely blood, but died nursing the sick in the hospital. He is the patron of youthful purity, and was never a priest, though an unwise writer makes a missionary of him. The third, John Berchmans, was neither prince nor noble. On the contrary, it used to be the delight of foreigners, when rambling through the little Flemish town of Diest, to see the name of "Berchmans" on the humble shops of hucksters and grocers, and to fancy that some of the little lads who clattered about in their sabots, on their way to school, were relatives of his. His sanctity has made his family name famous in the world. His beatification was especially welcome, because, as Berchmans was the very incarnation of the Jesuit rule, the Order cannot have been the iniquitous organization it is frequently said to be.
Then there are three Japanese Jesuits who were crucified at Nagasaki in 1597; and in 1616 came Alfonso Rodríguez, who had prepared Peter Claver to be the Apostle of the negro slaves in America, and who went quietly from his post at the gates of the College of Minorca to the gates of heaven. Peter Claver had to wait for thirty-eight years before going to join his venerable friend. Besides the two St. Francises of the early days, there are two more of that name in the Society: the Frenchman, John Francis Regis, who died in 1640, and the Italian, Francis Hieronymo, whose work ended in 1716. They were both preachers to the most abandoned classes. Hieronymo could gather as many as 15,000 men to a regular monthly Communion, and when he entered the royal convict ships, he converted those sinks of iniquity into abodes of peace and resignation.
It may be noted here that St. Francis Regis had a distinction peculiarly his own. Long after his canonization as a saint, he was proclaimed to have been actually expelled from the Society, and that the public disgrace was prevented only by his death, which occurred before the official papers arrived from Rome. This accusation is trident-like in its wounding power or purpose. It transfixes Regis, and kills his reputation for virtue; then it inflicts a gash on the Society by making it present to the Church, as worthy of being raised to the altars, a man whom it was unwilling to keep in its own houses; finally, it assails the Church and attempts to show that no respect should be had for its decrees of canonization. It was almost unnecessary for the learned Bollandist, Van Ortroy, to show that there is no foundation whatever for this story of the dismissal of St. John Francis Regis from the Society of Jesus.
Such are the canonized Jesuits. The Blessed are more numerous. There are ninety-one of them. First in time are the forty Portuguese martyrs under Ignatius de Azevedo, who were slain by the French Huguenots in a harbor of the Azores in the year 1570. Then follow the English witnesses to the Truth. The first to die was Thomas Woodhouse, who was executed in 1573. Between that date and 1582 four others were put to death; among them the illustrious Edmund Campion. Of those who died in the persecutions of Japan, between 1617 and 1627, there are thirty-one Japanese as well as European Jesuits. Rudolf Aquaviva was put to death in Madura in 1583, and John de Britto in 1693. Two Hungarians, Melchior Grodecz and Stephen Pongracz were slain in Hungary in 1619, and Andrew Bobola was butchered by the Cossacks in 1657. There are others among the Society's Blessed who were not martyred, but would have been willing to win their crown in that way, if God so wanted. They are Peter Faber, the first priest of the Society; Peter Canisius, the Apostle of Germany; and the Italian Antonio Baldinucci, a great missionary who used to whip himself to blood, to move the hearts of the hardened sinners around him, and who lighted bonfires of bad books and pictures and playing cards in the public squares to impress his excitable fellow-countrymen. His missionary methods were somewhat like those of Savonarola.
Those who are ranked as Venerable are fifty in number, including Claude de la Colombiére, the Apostle of the devotion to the Sacred Heart; Cardinal Bellarmine; Nicholas Lancicius, the well-known ascetical writer; Julien Maunoir, the apostle of his native Brittany; and José Anchieta, the thaumaturgus of Brazil. There are, however, a great many others under consideration, among them being the heroes of North America — Jogues, Goupil, Lalande, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, Daniel, Chabanel — who were slain by the Iroquois. In the conclaves of 1605, which elected Clement VIII and Leo XI, Bellarmine was very seriously considered as a possible pope, but the fact that he was a Jesuit was an obstacle in the eyes of many. When he died in 1621, there was a general expectation that he would be canonized for his extraordinarily holy life. In fact, Urban VIII who was so rigid in such matters placed him among the "Venerable" six years after his death. His case was re-introduced for beatification in 1675, 1714, 1752 and 1832, but nothing was done chiefly because it would have angered the French regalist politicians, as his name was associated with a doctrine most obnoxious to them. In 1920 the case was again taken up.
We omit the countless thousands of Jesuits who ever since the Society was established have striven in every possible way to realize its ideals; the heroes who have hurried with delight to the most disgusting and dangerous missions they could find in the farthermost parts of the world; who have died by thousands of disease and exhaustion in the pest-laden ships that carried them to their destination or flung them dead on some desolate coast; or those who have been slain by savages or devoured by wild beasts; or who died of starvation in the forests and deserts where they were hunting for souls; or have given their lives with joy for the privilege of ministering to the plague-stricken. Nor do we mention here the great phalanxes of the unknown who, without a single regret for what they might have been in the world, have endeavored to obey, to some extent, at least, that startling admonition that they hear so often: Ama nesciri et pro nihilo reputari: "Love to be unknown and to be reputed as nothing," — the men who have truly lived up to that ideal in the repulsiveness of hospitals and jails and asylums, or in the ceaseless drudgery and obscurity of the class-room and the unchanging routing of household occupations.
These men have seen themselves time and time again robbed of all their possessions, hounded out of their own countries and cities as if they were criminals, their names branded with infamy and a by-word for all that is vile, and they understood better and better, as time went on, what is meant by that page which stares at them from their rule book and which is entitled: "The Sum and Scope of Our Constitutions," and which tells them: "We are men crucified to the world, and to whom the world is crucified; new men who have put off their own affections to put on Christ, dead to themselves to live to justice; who, with St. Paul, in labors, in watching, in fastings, in chastity, in knowledge, in long-suffering, in sweetness, in the Holy Ghost, in charity unfeigned, in the word of truth, shew themselves ministers of God; and, by the armor of justice, on the right hand and on the left, by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report, by good success and ill success, press forward with great strides to their heavenly country, and by all means possible, and with all zeal, urge on others also, ever looking to God's greatest glory."