"Most Illustrious and Most Reverend Lord and Brother.
"From the printed copy herein contained of the Apostolic Letters in the form of a Brief, under the date of the 21st of the preceding month of July, your lordship will learn of the suppression and extinction for just causes of the Regular Clerics hitherto called "of the Society of Jesus" by the most holy Lord Clement XIV; you will also learn by what legal process His Holiness has decreed that the suppression should be carried out in every part of the world. For the complete destruction of the same, he has established a special congregation of their eminences, the Cardinals Corsini, Marefoschi, Caraffa, Zelada, and Casali, together with the Reverend Macedonio and Alfani, who possess the most ample faculties for what is necessary and proper. The Brief establishing this congregation, under date of the 18th of the current month of August, is herein enclosed.
"By command of His Holiness the same congregation transmits the present letters to your lordship, in order that in each house and college and place where the individuals of the aforesaid suppressed Society may be found, your lordship shall assemble them in any house whatever (in qualibet domo) and you shall regularly (rite) announce, publish and intimate, as they say, and force and compel them to execute these letters; and your lordship shall take and retain possession for the use afterwards to be designated by His Holiness, of all and each of the houses, colleges and places of the same, with the lawful rights to their goods and appurtenances, after having removed the aforesaid individuals of the suppressed Society; and in their execution, your lordship will do whatever else is decreed in the letters of suppression and will advise the special congregation that such execution has been carried out. Your lordship will see to it. Meantime we entreat the Lord that all things may prosper with you.
"Yours with brotherly devotedness.
"Rome, Aug. 18, 1773."
Carayon gives us the personnel of this congregation (Doc. inédits, xvii). Cardinal Marefoschi, who had been for sixteen years secretary of the Propaganda, had made a digest of all the complaints uttered by missionaries in various parts of the world against the Jesuits, omitting, however, all that had been said in their favor. The Pope had named him visitor of the Irish College, which had been entrusted to the Society by Cardinal Ludovisi, and he immediately removed the Jesuits. Among other professors he put in a certain Tamburini, who had been expelled from Brescia for Jansenism. In Marefoschi's report to the Pope, the former professors (the Jesuits) were accused of neglect of the studies, alienation of ecclesiastical property and swindling, with a consequent diminution of the revenues. He was then sent to visit the College of Tuccioli and similar disastrous results ensued. In June, 1772, he and the Cardinal of York expelled the Jesuits from the Roman Seminary and in the same year from Frascati. The entire city addressed a petition to the cardinal begging him not to drive out the Fathers, but his royal highness was so wrought up by the audacity of the request that he was on the point of putting some of the chief petitioners in jail, magistrates though they were.
With Marefoschi were three other cardinals, Casali, Caraffa, and Zelada, all three of whom had been raised to the purple in the month of May at the suggestion of Mgr. Bottari, who had been filling Rome with defamatory books against the Jesuits. In spite of the entreaties of his family, young Cardinal Corsini accepted the presidency. Macedonio was made secretary, and Alfani, assessor; both of these clergymen were subsequently charged with pillage of the sequestrated property. Finally, to give an appearance of acting in conformity with canon law, two theologians were added to the commission; Mamachi, a Dominican, and de Casal, a Minor Reformed; both were avowed enemies of Probabilism and Molinism, and, singularly enough, were bitterly opposed to the Apostolic Constitution "Unigenitus" in which Clement XI condemned the Jansenistic errors of Pasquier Quesnel.
The Protestant historian Schoell (xliv, 83) speaking of the brief of suppression says: "This Brief does not condemn the doctrine nor the morals, nor the rules of the Jesuits. The complaints of the courts are the sole motives alleged for the suppression of the Order, and the Pope justifies himself by the precedents of other Orders which were suppressed to satisfy the demands of public opinion." As he was about to sign it, he heard the bells of the Gesù ringing. "What is that for?" he asked. "The Jesuits are about to recite the Litany of the Saints," he was told; "Not the Litany of the Saints," he said, "but the Litany of the Dead." It was July 21, 1773.