The Jesuits, 1534-1921

The Portuguese had waited for fifteen years after Pius VII had re-established the Society before consenting to re-admit the Jesuits. Don Miguel issued a decree to that effect on July 10, 1829, and the Countess Oliviera, a niece of Pombal, was the first to welcome them back and to place her boys in their college. The Fathers were given their former residence in Lisbon and, shortly afterwards, the Bishop of Evora established them in their old college in that city. In 1832 they were presented with their own college at Coimbra, and on their way thither they laid in the tomb the still unburied remains of their arch-enemy, Pombal, which had remained in the morgue ever since March 5, 1782, – a space of half a century. It seemed almost like a dream. Indeed it was little else, for Dom Miguel, who was then on the throne, was deposed by his rival, Dom Pedro, soon after, and on July 20, 1833 the Jesuits of Lisbon were again expelled. The decree was superfluous, for in the early Spring, their house had been sacked, and on that occasion the inmates would have been killed had not a young Englishman, a former student of Stonyhurst, appeared on the scene. The four that were there he took on his yacht to England, the others had already departed for Genoa.

Hatred for the Society, however, had nothing to do with it. The whole affair was purely political. Had the Fathers accepted Dom Pedro's invitation to go out among the people and persuade them to abandon the cause of the deposed king, they would have been allowed to remain. They were expelled for not being traitors to their lawful sovereign. The Fathers of Coimbra contrived to remain another year, but on May 26, 1834, they were seized by a squad of soldiers and marched off to Lisbon. Fortunately the French ambassador, Baron de Mortier, interceded for them, otherwise they would have ended their days in the dungeons of San Sebastian, to which they had already been sentenced. They were released on June 28, 1834, and sent by ship to Italy and from there, along with the dispersed Spaniards were sent by Father Roothaan to France and South America.

Switzerland, which is the land of liberty to such an extent that it will harbor the worst kind of anarchists, refused to admit the Jesuits, at least in some parts of it. There were seven Catholic Cantons, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zug, Fribourg and Valais. These sections formed a coalition known as the Sunderbund. A war broke out between them and the other cantons, but the Sunderbund was defeated. The Jesuits were then expelled from the little town of Sion where they had an important school. In 1845 the people of Lucerne asked for a college, and though Father Roothaan refused, Pope Gregory XVI insisted on it. The expected happened. The Radicals arose in a rage and with 10,000 men laid siege to Lucerne. They were beaten, it is true, but that did not insure the permanency of the college. In 1847 the Sunderbund was again defeated, and in 1848 when the general European revolution broke out, the College of Fribourg was looted, and its collection of Natural History which was regarded as among the best on the Continent was thrown out in the street.

The rumblings of the storm began to be heard in France on May 1, the Feast of the Apostles Philip and James, Louis-Philippe's name-day. Someone in the Tuilleries said that the Jesuits were starting a conspiracy against the throne. Happily a distinguished woman heard the remark, and admitted that she was concerned in it, along with 300 other conspicuous representatives of the best families of France. It was a charity lottery and most of the conspirators had received a pot or basket of flowers for their participation in the plot.

When that myth was exploded, the "Journal des Débats" attacked de Ravignan for his wide influence over many important people in Paris, and though admitting his unquestioned probity, added "What matters his virtue, if he brings us the pest?" The word caught the popular fancy, but it brought out de Ravignan's famous reply: "De l'éxistence et de l'institut des Jésuites." It was received with immense favor, applauded by such men as Vatemesnil, Dupanloup, Montalembert, Barthélemy, Beugnot, Berryer and others. In this year 1844 alone, 25,000 copies were sold.

The root of the trouble was the university's monopoly of education; which was obnoxious even to many who cared little for religion. Catholics objected to it chiefly because Cousin, the Positivist, controlled its philosophy. Many of the bishops failed to see the danger until Father Delvaux published a digest of the utterances of many of the university professors on religious subjects. Then the battle began. On the Catholic side were such fighters as Veuillot, Montalembert, Cardinal de Bonald, Mgr. Parisis. Ranged against them were Michelet, Quinet, Sainte-Beuve and their followers. The battle waxed hotter as time went on; and the Jesuits soon became the general target. Cousin introduced the "Lettres Provinciales" in the course. Villemain in his Reports denounced "the turbulent and imperious Society which the spirit of liberty and the spirit of our government repudiate." Dupin glorified Etienne Pasquier, the old anti-Jesuit of the time of Henry IV; similar eulogies of the old enemy were pronounced in various parts of France; Quinet and Michelet did nothing else in their historical lectures than attack the Society, while Eugene Sue received 100,000 francs from the editor of the "Constitutionel" for his "Juif errant," which presented to the public the most grotesque picture of the Jesuits that was ever conceived. It was however, accepted as a genuine portrait.

The anti-Jesuit cry was of course the usual campaign device to alarm the populace. It was successful, chiefly because of the persistency with which it was kept up by the press, and, from 1842 till 1845, the book-market was glutted with every imaginable species of anti-Jesuit literature. Conspicuous among the pro-Jesuits were Louis Veuillot and the Comte de Montalembert. The royalist papers spoke in the Society's defense but feebly or not at all. Finally, a certain Marshall Marcet de la Roche Arnauld, who as a scholastic had been driven from the Society in 1824, and who had been paid to write against it, suddenly disavowed all that he had ever said. Crétineau-Joly also leaped into the fray with his rapidly written six volumes of the "History of the Society."

It would have been comparatively easy to continue the struggle with outside enemies, but in the very midst of the battle, the Archbishop of Paris, Affre, ranged himself on the side of the foe. He denied that the Jesuits were a religious order, for the extraordinary reason that they were not recognized by the State; their vows, consequently, were not solemn; and the members of the Society were in all things subject to the curé of the parish in which their establishment happened to be. He even exacted that he should be informed of everything that took place in the community, and if an individual was to be changed, His Grace was to be notified of it a month in advance. The archbishop, however, was not peculiar in these views. They were deduced from Bouvier's theology which was then taught in all the seminaries of France.

Of course, this affected other religious as well as the Jesuits, and, hence, when Dom Guéranger wanted to establish the Benedictines in Paris, the archbishop had no objection, except that "they had no legal existence in France." To this Guéranger immediately replied: "Monseigneur! the episcopacy has no legal existence in England, Ireland and Belgium, and perhaps the day will come when it will not have any in France, but the episcopacy will be no less sacred for all that." The great Benedictine then appealed to the Pope, and when the reply was handed to him, the Apostolic nuncio said: "It is not an ordinary Brief I give you, but an Apostolic Constitution." In it the archbishop was told by His Holiness that the French religious had not been destroyed because of the refusal of the government to give them a legal existence. His Grace had also received a communication from Father Roothaan, the General, who, after reminding him of the provision of canon law on the point at issue, warned him that if he persisted in his view the Jesuits would simply withdraw from his diocese.

Meantime the Pope had suspended the execution of the orders of the archbishop and shortly after, sent him the following severe admonition: "We admit, Venerable Brother, our inability to comprehend your very inconsiderate ruling with regard to the faculties for hearing confessions which you have withdrawn from the Jesuit Fathers, or by what authority or for what reason you forbid them either to leave the city or to enter it, without notifying you a month in advance; especially as this Society, on account of the immense services it has rendered to the Church, is held in great esteem by far-seeing and fervent Catholics and by the Holy See itself. We know also that it is calumniated by people who have abandoned the Faith and by those who have no respect for the authority of the Holy See and we regret that they will now use the authority of your name in support of their calumnies."

Of course the archbishop could do nothing else than obey. But he did not change his mind with regard to the objects of his hostility. Possibly he was constitutionally incapable of doing so. For he treated his cathedral chapter in the same fashion and we read in a communication from the French ambassador at Rome to Guizot who was then head of the Government that the canons of Paris had complained of being absolutely excluded from all influence or authority in the administration of the diocese. This note gives an insight into the methods of Gallicanism, which conceded that the disputes or differences of the clergy with the archbishop were to be passed upon by a minister of state even if he were a Protestant.

The trouble did not end there and the Parliamentary session of 1844 marked a very notable epoch in the history of the French province of the Society and of the Church of France. M. Villemain presented a bill which proposed to reaffirm and reassure the university's monopoly of the education of the country. It explicitly excluded all members of religious congregations from the function of teaching. It is true that there was not a single word in it about the Jesuits, nevertheless in the stormy debates that it evoked, and in which the most prominent men of the nation participated, there was mention of not one other teaching body. Almost the very first speaker, Dupin, pompously proclaimed that "France did not want that famous Society which owes allegiance to a foreign superior and whose instruction is diametrically opposed to what all lovers of the country desire" nor was it desirable that "these religious speculators should slip in through the meshes of the law." His last word was: "Let us be implacable." In the official Report, however, "implacable" became "inflexible." The ministerial and university organ, the "Journal des Débats," admitted that such was the purpose of the bill.

Villemain fancied that he had silenced the bishops by leaving them full authority over the little seminaries. He was quickly disillusioned. From the entire hierarchy individually and collectively came indignant repudiations of the measure and none was fiercer than the protest of Mgr. Affre, Archbishop of Paris. He denounced the university as "a centre of irreligion" and as perverting in the most flagrant manner the youth of France. "You reproach us," he said, "with disturbing the country by our protests. Yes, we have raised our voices, but the university has committed the crime. We may embarrass the throne for the present, but in the university are to be found all the perils of the future." The excitement was so intense that the government actually put the Abbé Combalot in jail for an article he wrote against the bill, and the whole hierarchy was threatened with being summoned before the council of state if they persisted in their opposition.

Montalembert was more than usually eloquent in the course of the parliamentary war. To Dupin who exhorted the peers to be "implacable" he replied: "In the midst of a free people, we, Catholics, refuse to be slaves; we are the successors of the martyrs and we shall not quail before the successors of Julian the Apostate; we are the sons of the Crusaders and we shall not recoil before the sons of Voltaire."

There were thirty-five or forty discourses and twelve or fifteen of the speakers described the Society as "the detested congregation," while the members who admitted the injustice and the odious tyranny of the proposed legislation made haste to assure their constituents that they had no use for the Jesuits. Cousin consumed three hours in assailing them; another member of the Dupin family saw "an appalling danger to the State in the fact that Montalembert could speak of them without cursing them, and that the peers could listen to him in silence, while he extolled the poisoners of the pious Ganganelli." Others insisted that the Jesuits had dragged the episcopate into the fight; even Guizot declared that "public sentiment inexorably repudiated the Jesuits and the other congregations, who are the champions of authority and the enemies of private judgment." The great man was not aware that the same reproach might be and is addressed to the Church.

The measure was finally carried by 85 against 51, but the heavy minority disconcerted the government and better hopes were entertained in the lower house to which Villemain presented his bill on June 10th. There it was left in the hands of Thiers, and it did not reach the Assembly, as a body, for an entire month. As the summer vacations were at hand, the projet de loi was dropped. Guizot then conceived the plan of appealing directly to the Pope to suppress the French Jesuits. He chose as his envoy an Italian named Rossi, who had been banished from Bologna, Naples and Florence as a revolutionist. After a short stay at Geneva, he made his way to France where, by Protestant influence, chiefly that of Guizot, he advanced rapidly to very distinguished and lucrative positions. The country was shocked to hear that an Italian and a Protestant should represent the nation at the court of the Pope from whose dominions he had been expelled, but Guizot intended by so doing, to express the sentiments of his government. It was an open threat. Rossi arrived in Rome and presented his credentials on April 11.

The French Jesuits who had been expelled from Portugal did not return to their native country; for Charles X, discovering at last that the Liberals, as they called themselves, had played him false, resolved to have a thoroughgoing monarchical government; and, to carry out his purpose, made the inept Polignac prime minister. On July 25 he signed four ordinances, the first of which restricted the liberty of the press; the second dissolved parliament; the third diminished the electorate to 25,000. The next day, the press was in rebellion; Charles abdicated and sailed for England. Of course the Revolution was anti-religious and the Jesuits were the first sufferers. House after house was wrecked and the scholastics were gathered together and hurried off to different countries in Europe. Thus ended the first sixteen years of the Society's existence in France, after the promulgation of the Bull of Pius VII "Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum."

The first successor of Father de Clorivière as vice-provincial was Father Simpson. France was made a province in 1820, and on the death of Father Simpson, the new General, Father Fortis, appointed Father Richardot, who at the end of his three years' term asked to be relieved. In 1814 Godinot was appointed, because none of those who had been proposed for the office had been more than ten years in the Society. Godinot himself had been admitted only in 1810. He had been vice-provincial of the Fathers of the Faith, and eleven years after his admission, was directing the scattered Jesuit establishments in Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Germany. In Switzerland, he had given the impulse to the college of Fribourg, which afterwards became so famous. It is worth noting that when he was a Father of the Faith he was a member of the community of Sion in Valais which enjoyed the exceptional privilege of being united as a body to the Society. Everywhere else each individual had to be admitted separately.

On April 14, the peers met to discuss a very exciting subject. A protest had come from Marseilles signed by 89 electors, against the books of Michelet and Quinet. Immediately Cousin was on his feet and ascribed it to the Jesuits. A few days later, another topic engrossed their attention. Dupin's "Manual of Ecclesiastical Law" had been condemned by Cardinal de Bonald, and more than sixty bishops concurred with him in prohibiting the book. At Rome, it was put on the Index, along with Cousin's "History of Philosophy." The anti-Catholics were in a fury, and on April 24, Cousin addressed the House. At the end of a three hour discourse which he began, unbeliever though he was, by protesting his respect for "the august religion of his country," he concluded by saying that "probably the action of the bishops was due to the Jesuits" and therefore he called for the enforcement of the law for their suppression. The question now arose, whether they could proceed to the suppression by force of law while the government actually had an envoy at Rome to dispose of the affair in a different fashion. It was decided that the non-authorized congregations would be suppressed, no matter what might be the outcome of Rossi's mission. Such a resolution was a gross diplomatic insult, but they cared little for that.

Meanwhile no news had come from Rossi. He had been left in the ante-chamber of the Pope until the Abbé de Bonnechose had succeeded in getting him an audience, a service which de Bonnechose had some difficulty in explaining when he was subsequently made a cardinal. A congregation of cardinals was named to discuss Guizot's proposition, and it was unanimously decided to reject it; and when Rossi asked what he had to do, he was told he might address himself to the General of the Society. To make it easy for him, Lambruschini, the papal secretary of state, proposed to Father Roothaan to diminish the personnel of some of the houses which were too much in evidence or remove them elsewhere. As for dissolution of the communities or banishment from France, not a word was said.

Immediately Rossi despatched a messenger to Paris with the account of what had been done, and twelve days afterwards the "Moniteur" stated: "The Government has received news from Rome that the negotiations with which M. Rossi was entrusted have attained their object. The congregation of the Jesuits will cease to exist in France and will, of its own accord, disperse. Its houses will be closed and its novitiates dissolved." On July 15, Guizot was asked by the peers to show the alleged documents. He answered that "they were too precious to give to the public." They have been unearthed since, and it turns out that Guizot's notice in the "Moniteur" does not correspond with the despatch of Rossi who merely said, "the Congregation is going to disperse;" and instead of saying "the houses will be closed," he wrote: "only a small number of people will remain in each house." In brief, the famous Guizot, so renowned for his integrity, prevaricated in this instance, and one of the worst enemies of everything Jesuitical, Dibidous, who wrote a "History of the Church and State in France from 1789 to 1870" declares bluntly that Guizot's note in the "Moniteur" was not only a lie but "an impudent lie."

A great many militant Catholics in France were indignant that Father Roothaan had not defied the government on this occasion. Yet probably those same perfervid souls would have denounced him, had he acted as they wished. He knew perfectly well that the government was only too anxious to get out of the mess in which it found itself, and the little by-play which was resorted to harmed nobody and secured at least a temporary respite.

"To gain the support of the Catholics against the anarchical elements which were everywhere revealing themselves," says the Cambridge History (XI, 34) "Guizot had tolerated the unauthorized Congregations. This had the immediate consequence of concentrating popular attention upon those religious passions whose existence the populace, if left to itself, might have forgotten. Even the colleagues of Guizot, such as Villemain and the editors of the "Journal des Débats," the leading ministerial organ, began by declaring that they saw everywhere the finger of the Jesuits. In each party, men's minds were so divided on the subject of the Jesuits or rather that of educational liberty which was so closely linked with it, that nothing of immediate gravity to the Government would for the moment arise." Liberals, or rather Republicans, such as Quinet and Michelet, in their lectures at the Collège de France took up the alarm and spread it broadcast.

Bournichon in his "Histoire d'un Siècle," (II, 492) calls attention to the fact that this attack was apparently against the Jesuits, but in reality against the Church. The "Revue Indépendante" did not hesitate to make the avowal that "Jesuitism is only a formula which has the merit of uniting all the popular hatred for what is odious and retrograde in a degenerate religion." Cousin started the hue and cry, in this instance, and Thureau-Dangin in his "Histoire de la monarchie de Juillet" (p. 503-10) says that "Quinet and Michelet transformed their courses into bitter and spiteful diatribes against the Jesuits. Both were hired for the work, and did not speak from conviction." "Quinet," says Bournichon (II, 494) "was quite indifferent to religious matters and had passed for a harmless thinker and dreamer up to that moment. As for Michelet, he had obtained his position in the Ecole Normale from Mgr. Frayssinous, yet he forgot his benefactor, and maintained that not only the Jesuits but Christianity was an obstacle to human progress; paganism or even fetichism was preferable, and Christ had to be dethroned."

Guizot removed Villemain from the office of Minister of public instruction and reprimanded Michelet and Quinet. Then Thiers seized the occasion to denounce Guizot for favoring the religious congregations and succeeded in defeating the minister's measure for educational freedom. It was at this stage that Guizot sent his envoy Rossi to Rome to induce Pope Gregory XVI to recall the Jesuits so as to extricate the French government from its difficulty. The Pope refused, as we have seen, and Father Roothaan merely gave orders to the members of the Society in France to make themselves less conspicuous.

In 1847 Gioberti published his "Gesuita Moderno" which unfortunately had the effect of creating in the minds of the Italian clergy a deep prejudice against the Society. Gioberti was a priest and a professor of theology. He first taught Rosminianism, and then opposed it. Under the pen-name of "Demofilo" or the "People's Friend" he wrote articles for Mazzini in the "Giovane Italia," and was the author of "Del Buono" and "Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani." His first attack on the Society appeared in 1845 in the "Prolegomeni al Primato;" "Il Gesuita Moderno," a large sized pamphlet full of vulgar invective, appeared in 1847. It was followed in 1848 by the "Apologia del Gesuita Moderno." He was answered by Father Curci. Deserting Mazzini, Gioberti espoused the cause of King Charles Albert, and founded a society to propagate the idea of a federated Italy with the King of Piedmont at its head. His last book, "Rinnovamento civile d'Italia" showed him to be the enemy of the temporal power of the papacy. His philosophy is a mixture of pantheistic ontology, rationalism, platonism and traditionalism. Though a revolutionist, he denied the sovereignty of the people. His complete works fill thirty-five volumes.

Of course the Society felt the shock of the Italian Revolution of 1848. Gioberti's writing had excited all Italy and as a consequence the Jesuit houses were abandoned. At Naples, the exiles were hooted as they took ship for Malta; they were mobbed in Venice and Piedmont. The General Father Roothaan left Rome on April 28 in company with a priest and a lay-brother, and as he stood on the deck at Genoa, he heard the cry from the shore, "You have Jesuits aboard; throw them overboard." There was nothing surprising in all this, however, for Rossi, the Pope's prime minister, was stabbed to death while mounting the steps of the Cancelleria. On the following day, the Pope himself was besieged in the Quirinal; Palma, a Papal prelate, was shot while standing at a window; and finally on November 24, Pope Pius fled in disguise to Gaeta.