The Jesuits (11 page)

Spain soon followed suit. The monarchy had a long tradition of asserting Spanish rights against the encroachments of Rome. King Charles III, surrounded by advisers who believed the Jesuits
were subversive of those rights, became thoroughly convinced that the Society was the monster its enemies described. Encouraged by the example of Portugal and France, he decided to eject from his domains the Jesuits, notorious fomenters of rebellion. On January 29, 1767, the Extraordinary Council ordered the banishment of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territory and the seizure of all its properties.

The king declared any public protest in favor of the Jesuits an act of high treason, punishable by death. The Jesuits in Spain and overseas were forced onto ships and sent onto the high seas, destination unspecified. Only at that point did Spanish officials open negotiations about where they might deposit their unwanted cargo. The refugees themselves, which included some l,800 from the overseas missions, bounced from port to port, where one after another refused them admittance.

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples) and the Duchy of Parma were the next to banish the Jesuits, but the great prize, a general suppression by the papacy, eluded the Jesuits' enemies. Such a suppression would not only rid the whole church of the Jesuits but show to all the world the weakness of the papacy. Pope Clement XIII (reigned 1758–1769) took action many times to try to forestall the suppression in France alone, and he publicly testified to the innocence of the Jesuits and their extraordinary importance for the well-being of the church.

When on February 15, 1769, the conclave to elect his successor opened, the Jesuit question immediately dominated it, which was one of the lengthiest and most contentious conclaves in recent history. Only after three months and a virtually unprecedented 185 voting sessions was Clement XIV elected. When word arrived at the court of Charles III in Spain, a solemn Te Deum was sung in
gratitude. Although the new pope seems not openly to have promised to suppress the Jesuits, he could hardly have been elected without somehow communicating a readiness to do so. Nonetheless, he held off for four years. The pressure upon him, which included the implicit threat of schism if he failed to act, was intense. Finally, on July 21, 1773, he signed the brief
Dominus ac Redemptor
abolishing the Society of Jesus—“for the peace and tranquility of the church.”

The document, forty-five paragraphs long, consists in an indictment of the Jesuits and a justification of the pope's action. Then come the fateful words, “We suppress and abolish the said Society; we deprive it of all activity whatever, and we likewise deprive it of its houses, schools, colleges, hospitals, lands … in whatever kingdom or province they may be situated.” The document strictly forbade Jesuits to comment on the decree, criticize it, or appeal it.

In many places
Dominus ac Redemptor
became the warrant for an orgy of systematic and officially sanctioned looting. In Belgium the devastation was particularly severe. From the Jesuit houses, officials seized about thirty valuable paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel, and others and sent them to the imperial galleries in Vienna, where they remain to this day. They gutted the libraries. Of some five hundred thousand volumes, they classified 75 percent as theological rubbish and sold them for wastepaper. In Naples the avid search for Jesuit gold uncovered, instead, a debt of 200,000 ducats.

A month after the formal publication of
Dominus ac Redemptor,
papal officials and police entered Jesuit headquarters in Rome; arrested the superior general, Lorenzo Ricci, and his assistants (“the Jesuit Sanhedrin,” as their enemies called them); and, after
sequestering them briefly in the Venerable English College, imprisoned them in Castel Sant'Angelo. The jailers there refused Ricci permission to write, boarded up his windows, cut his food rations in half, and in winter denied him heat. No specific charges were ever able to be proved against him, and the 50 million scudi he was accused of hoarding turned out never to have existed. He died two years later, still a prisoner in Castel Sant'Angelo and still protesting the innocence of the Society.

T
he suppression of the Society of Jesus was a tragedy for the Jesuits but also a tragedy for the church at large. Within the space of less than fifteen years—from the Portuguese suppression in 1759 until the papal in 1773—the single greatest intellectual asset the church possessed was wiped out, as the Jesuits' libraries were dispersed and their network of more than seven hundred schools closed or passed into secular hands. The Jesuits were as a body the most broadly learned clergy in the church, no matter what may have been the limitations of their intellectual culture.

The Society of Jesus as a corporate force was no more. Compounding the calamity was the fact that the suppression occurred just as European culture was rapidly moving into unprecedentedly new forms, many of which were hostile to Christianity and particularly hostile to Catholicism. This was a moment when the church needed to husband and nurture its best resources, not a moment
to see them dispersed and lost. As events turned out, the suppression of the Jesuits presaged the devastations soon visited upon other orders as a result of the social and political upheavals that in 1773 were just beyond the horizon.

If individual Jesuits were lucky enough to escape exile and prison, they were still scattered, dispossessed of their houses, and forced to fend for themselves. Although some fared reasonably well by entering the diocesan clergy or otherwise finding means to support themselves, many never recovered from the disorientation, the mental anguish, and the sense of loss the situation caused them.

The suppressions and expulsions before 1773 in Portugal, France, Spain, and elsewhere were implemented consistently and often brutally by the governments that decreed them, but the same was not always true for the papal suppression. Unlike them, this one demanded formal promulgation by the bishop of every diocese in which a Jesuit community existed. More important, this suppression did not originate with the civil authorities, to whom, however, the papacy now entrusted the responsibility for carrying it out. These authorities often felt less committed to the undertaking and perhaps even unhappy with it. They sometimes treated the former Jesuits more gently. Since, however, by the terms of
Dominus ac Redemptor
these disgraced clerics could not accept novices, they were doomed to eventual extinction.

In the English colonies in North America, soon to be the United States, the civil authorities, who were all either Protestants
or Deists, had not the slightest intention of implementing a papal brief. They therefore took no measures against the twenty or so Jesuits living there, who were still the only Catholic priests in that vast area. But in late 1773 the Jesuits themselves, upon receiving the shocking news of the suppression, signed and sent to Rome a document declaring their “obedience and submission” to the provisions of the decree.

Although the American Jesuits no longer called themselves Jesuits, they eventually organized themselves into a civilly recognized institution that enabled them to hold onto their assets and to continue their ministries to the thirty thousand Catholics there precisely as they had always done. As they looked forward to the day the Society might be restored, they, under the leadership of Bishop John Carroll, one of their number, took those ministries a step further by founding in 1789 a school on the banks of the Potomac River, Georgetown Academy. It was the first Catholic school in the United States, and it professedly opened its doors to persons of all religious faiths.

Two rulers refused outright to allow the papal brief to be implemented. By his conquests in Poland and Silesia, Frederick the Great of Prussia had absorbed into his realm thirteen Jesuit colleges and seven residences. Although he was thoroughly imbued with the principles of the Enlightenment, he had come to admire the Jesuits and did not want to lose them as teachers. The Holy See insisted with him that the Society be dissolved, but in 1776 as a compromise the new pope, Pius VI, allowed the ex-Jesuits to function corporately under the bishops. This “Institute” was, however, finally dissolved by the Prussian government in 1800.

Of lasting and pivotal significance, however, was the refusal of Catherine the Great of Russia to implement Clement XIV's decree. As a result of the First Partition of Poland, 1772, Catherine came into possession of territory in what is today Belarus and with it into possession of four colleges and two residences staffed by two hundred Jesuits. Like Frederick she appreciated the contribution the Jesuits made to cultural life, and, imperious person that she was, she saw no reason to implement in her empire a decree from a foreign government.

Catherine's refusal to carry out the suppression threw her Jesuit subjects into a moral dilemma: how were they to deal with
Dominus ac Redemptor
? Were they not obliged somehow to suppress themselves? Feeling ever more oppressed by the ambiguity of the situation, they through their superior Stanisław Czerniewicz appealed in 1776 for guidance to Pius VI. The pope worried about reaction from the western monarchies that had demanded the suppression. Although he reassured them that
Dominus ac Redemptor
was still fully in force, he at the same time seemed willing to turn a blind eye to what was happening in Catherine's realms. He replied to Czerniewicz enigmatically, “May the result of your prayers, as I foresee and you desire, be a happy one.”

Czerniewicz now felt reasonably confident that the pope's reply allowed him in good conscience to move ahead. He shortly thereafter informed the empress that because the Jesuits' numbers had fallen by 25 percent since 1773, they could not continue their work unless they were allowed to receive novices to replenish their ranks. Through Catherine's clever diplomacy, the Holy See was maneuvered into granting permission for the founding of a novitiate. The Jesuits' enemies in Portugal, France, and especially Spain fell into a rage and protested to the empress, but she refused
to back down. On February 2, 1780, just seven years after
Dominus ac Redemptor,
the novitiate opened at Połotsk with eight novices.

Within another three years, Pius VI gave to Catherine's envoy in Rome his verbal approval of what was taking place in Russia. With that, the Jesuits mounted a full program of training and education for new members that replicated the program in force in the Society prior to 1773. They now assumed that they constituted the Society of Jesus in miniature and elected Czerniewicz as, in effect, the superior general of the order. When Catherine died in 1796, her successor Paul I continued to support the Jesuits. Suppressed worldwide, the Society by a strange twist of fate survived intact in Russia—or, perhaps better put, in Poland.

When the French Revolution broke out, the Society's enemies—the kings and their ministers in France, Spain, and Portugal—had a more pressing and immediate problem than the survival of the Jesuits: their own survival was now in mortal danger. At least regarding the Jesuits, this situation left the papacy freer to act than before. On March 17, 1801, Pope Pius VII, the newly elected successor to Pius VI, officially confirmed in his brief
Catholicae fidei
the existence of the Society in Russia and thus dispelled any doubts about the legitimacy of what had taken place.

With
Catholicae fidei
Pius VII took the crucial step toward what he hoped to accomplish, the full restoration of the Society. Groups of former Jesuits as well as younger men with no previous association with the Society now had an institution with which they could affiliate. Thus did the Society become officially reestablished, for instance, in England in 1803, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1804, and with the few ex-Jesuits still surviving in the United States in 1805.

Even some former enemies of the Society who had demanded its suppression regretted what had happened and petitioned the pope to bring back the Jesuits. In the Catholic world, now shaken to its depths by the French Revolution and its Europe-wide aftermath, the tide had turned in the Jesuits' favor. Finally, on August 7, 1814, Pius VII, after celebrating mass in Rome at the altar of Saint Ignatius in the church of the Gesù, decreed through the bull
Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum
the universal restoration of the Society of Jesus.

The Society had been reborn, but reborn into a world vastly different from the world at the time of the suppressions. The Industrial Revolution was under way and gaining force, with the radical changes it would bring about in almost every aspect of human life. But more dramatic and more immediate in awareness was the French Revolution. It had toppled monarchs from their thrones and proclaimed an era of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Even though with less devastating impact than in France, the Revolution affected every country in western Europe, as well as in French, Portuguese, and Spanish America. It shook the foundations of all their institutions.

To save itself from bankruptcy, the new government in France confiscated the entire property of the French church and engaged in a massive sell-off not only of sacred vessels, paintings, and furnishings but even of real estate. With the Reign of Terror, recalcitrant bishops and priests were guillotined or drowned as punishment for their treason. Churches were sacked, some left in
ruins. In 1798 the French occupied Rome and took Pius VI prisoner to France, where he died the next year. In 1809 Napoleon did the same to Pius VII and held him at Savona and then Fontainebleau until 1814.

In that very year of 1814, the counterrevolutionary forces brought Napoleon to his knees and thus stopped the seemingly unstoppable French juggernaut. Those forces met in the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815, where they restored to their thrones all monarchs, including the papal monarch, and in other ways tried to turn the clock back to the institutions and values of the
ancien régime.
But the clock and large numbers of people resisted, which meant that nineteenth-century Europe experienced a seesaw between forms of republican and monarchical government, which partisans in each camp defended with intransigent ideologies.