Following close on the decision in the La Valette case, parliament ordered the immediate production of a copy of the Constitutions of the Society. On the following morning, it was in their hands and was submitted to several committees made up of Jansenists, Gallicans and Atheists. These committees were charged with the examination of the Institute and also of various publications of the Society. Extracts were to be made and presented for the consideration of the court. The most famous of these reports was the one made by La Chalotais, a prominent magistrate of Brittany. He discovered that the Society was in conflict with the authority of the Church, the general Councils, the Apostolic See, and all ecclesiastical and civil governments; moreover that, in their approved theological works, they taught every form of heresy, idolatry and superstition, and inculcated suicide, regicide, sacrilege, robbery, impurity of every kind, usury, magic, murder, cruelty, hatred, vengeance, sedition, treachery — in brief, whatever iniquity mankind could commit was to be found in their writings. As soon as the report was laid before the judges, a decree was issued on May 8, 1761 declaring that the one hundred and fifty-eight colleges, churches and residences with the foreign missions of the Order were to be seized by the government; all the physical laboratories, the libraries, moneys, inheritances of its members, the bequests of friends for charitable, educational or missionary purposes — all was to go into the Government coffers.
Crétineau-Joly estimated that the total value of the property seized amounted to about 58,000,000 francs or $11,600,000. The amount of the booty explains the zeal of the prosecution. To soften the blow a concession of a pension of thirty cents a day was made by the Paris parliament to those who would take an oath that they had left the Society. The Languedoc legislators, however, cut it down to twelve. Moreover this pension was restricted to the Professed. The Scholastics got nothing; and as they were considered legally dead, because of the vows they had taken in the Society, they were declared incapable of inheriting even from their own parents. The decree also forbade all subjects of the king to enter the Society; to attend any lecture given by Jesuits; to visit their houses previous to their expulsion; or to hold any communication with them. The Jesuits themselves were enjoined not to write to each other, not even to the General. It is noteworthy that the lawmakers who issued these regulations profess to be shocked by the Jesuit doctrine of "blind obedience."
By a second decree it was ordered that the works of twenty-seven Jesuits which had been examined should be burned by the public executioner. Among them were such authors as Bellarmine, Lessius, Suárez, Valentia, Salmerón, Gretser, Vásquez, Jouvancy, — all of whom were and yet are considered to be among the greatest of Catholic theologians, but the lay doctors of the parliament held them to be dangerous to public morals; and to the peace of the nation and in order to express their horror emphatically, they called for this auto da fé. It should be noted that all of these works were written in Latin, and that their technical character as well as the terminology employed would make it absolutely impossible for even these solons of the French parliament to grasp the meaning of the text. In order to sway the public mind, a summary of the Chalotais report, commonly known as "Extraits des assertions" was scattered broadcast throughout the country. The desired effect was produced and even to-day if an attempt is made to answer any of its charges the answer is always ready, "We have the authority of La Chalotais; he was an eminent magistrate; he examined the books; the highest court in France accorded him the verdict, and any attempt to explain away the charges is superfluous!"
Yet there was in Paris at that time a higher tribunal than the one which gave La Chalotais his claim to notoriety. It was the General Assembly of the Clergy which had been convoked by the King to pass upon the character of the Jesuits as a body, before he affixed his signature to the decree of expulsion. It consisted of fifty-one prelates, some of them cardinals. They met on June 27 and with the exception of the Bishop of Angers, Allais, and especially of Fitzjames, the Bishop of Soissons, who was the head of the Jansenist party and whose pastoral utterances were condemned by the Pope as heretical, addressed a "Letter" to the king conjuring him "to preserve an institution which was so useful to the State," and declaring that "they could not see without alarm the destruction of a society of religious who were so praiseworthy for the integrity of their morals, the austerity of their discipline, the vastness of their labors and their erudition and for the countless services they had rendered to the Church.
"Charged as they are with the most precious trust of the education of youth, participating as they do under the authority of the bishops, in the most delicate functions of the holy ministry, honored as they are by the confidence of kings in the most redoubtable of tribunals, loved and sought after by a great number of our subjects and esteemed even by those who fear them, they have won for themselves a consideration which is too general to be disregarded."
"Everything, Sire, pleads with you in favor of the Jesuits: religion claims them as its defenders; the Church as her ministers; Christians as the guardians of their conscience; a great number of your subjects who have been their pupils intercede with you for their old masters; and all the youth of the kingdom pray for those who are to form their minds and their hearts. Do not, Sire, turn a deaf ear to our united supplication; do not permit in your kingdom, that in violation of the laws of justice, and of the Church and of the State an entire and blameless society should be destroyed."
The Archbishop of Paris, the famous Christophe de Beaumont was not satisfied with this general appeal. He was the chief figure in France at that time; and every word he uttered was feared by the enemies of the Church. He was great enough to be in correspondence with all the crowned heads of Europe, and Frederick the Great said of him: "If he would consent to come to Prussia, I would go half way to meet him." Louis XV had forced him to accept the See of Paris, but had not the courage to support him when assailed by his foes. He was a saint as well as a hero; he lent money to men who were libelling him, and would give the clothes on his back to the poor. When a hospital took fire in the city, he filled his palace and his cathedral with the patients. Hence, he did not hesitate, after parliament had condemned the Society, to issue a pastoral which he foresaw would drive him from his see. "What shall I say, Brethren," he asks, "to let you know what I think of the religious society which is now so fiercely assailed? We repeat with the Council of Trent that it is 'a pious Institute;' that it is 'venerable,' as the illustrious Bossuet declared it to be. We spurn far from us the 'Extraits des assertions' as a resumé of Jesuit teaching; and we renew our declaration that in the condition of suffering and humiliation to which they have been brought that their lot is a most happy one, because in the eyes of religious men, it is an infinitely precious thing to have no reproach on one's soul when overwhelmed by misfortune." As he foresaw he was expelled from his see for this utterance, not by parliament but by Louis XV whose cause he was defending.
Perhaps this treatment of the great Archbishop of Paris explains the silence maintained through all the uproar by the Jesuits themselves. One would expect some splendid outburst of eloquence in behalf of the Society from one of its outraged members; but not a word was uttered by any of them. Their protests would not have been printed or published. Even Theiner who wrote against the Society says: "All France was inundated with libellous pamphlets against the Jesuits. The most notable of all was the one entitled 'Extracts of the dangerous and pernicious doctrines of all kinds which the so-called Jesuits have at all times, uninterruptedly maintained, taught and published.' Calumny and malice fill the book from cover to cover. There is no crime which the Jesuits did not teach or of which they are not accused. Never was bad faith carried to such extremes. And yet there is no book that is so often cited as an authority against the Society and its spirit."
Meantime, the government had approached the Pope for the purpose of obtaining for the French Jesuits a special vicar who should be quasi-independent of the General. It was harking back to the old scheme of Philip II and Louis XIV. His Holiness replied in the memorable words: "Sint ut sunt aut non sint" (Let them be as they are or not at all.) We find in a letter of the procurator of Aquitaine that in case a vicar was appointed every member of the province of Paris would leave the Order, which under such an arrangement would be no longer the Society of Jesus. Again in his letter to the king, after declaring that the appointment of a French Vicar would be a substantial alteration of the Institute which he could not authorize, the Pope says: "For two hundred years the Society has been so useful to the Church, that, though it has never disturbed the public tranquillity either in your kingdom or in any one else's, yet because it has inflicted such damage on the enemies of religion by its science and its piety, it is assailed on all sides by calumny and imposture when fair fighting was found insufficient to destroy them." Finally, on January 9, 1765, after the final knell had sounded, Clement XIII issued his famous Bull "Apostolicum." It is given at length in de Ravignan's "Clément XIII et Clément XIV," but a few extracts will suffice.
After enumerating the glories of the Society in the past, and calling attention to the fact that it had been approved by nineteen Popes, who had most minutely examined their Institute, Clement XIII continues: "It has, nevertheless, in our days been falsely and malignantly described both by word and printed book as irreligious and impious, and has been covered with opprobrium and ignominy until even the Church has been denounced for sustaining it. In order, therefore, to repel these calumnies and to put a stop to the impious discourses which are uttered in defiance of both reason and equity; and to comfort the Regular Clerks of the Society of Jesus who appeal to us for justice; and to give greater emphasis to our words by the weight of our authority and to lend some solace in the sufferings they are undergoing; and finally to defer to the just desires of our venerable brothers, the bishops of the whole Catholic world, whose letters to us are filled with eulogies of this Society from whose labors the greatest services are rendered in their dioceses; and also of our own accord and from certain knowledge, and making use of the plenitude of our Apostolic authority, and following in the footsteps of our predecessors, we, by this present Constitution, which is to remain in force forever, say and declare in the same form and in the same manner as has been heretofore said and declared, that the Institute of the Society of Jesus breathes in the very highest degree, piety and holiness both in the principal object which it has continually in view, which is none other than the defence and propagation of the Catholic Faith, and also in the means it employs for that end. Such is our experience of it up to the present day. It is this experience which has taught us how greatly the rule of the Society has formed up to our day defenders of the orthodox Faith and zealous missionaries who animated by an invincible courage dare a thousand dangers on land and sea, to carry the light of the Gospel to savage and barbarous nations.... Let no one dare be rash enough to set himself against this my present approbative and confirmative Constitution lest he incur the wrath of God."