Then an event took place that brought their situation to full crisis. An emotionally disturbed young man, a former student at the Jesuits’ Collège de Clermont, made an attempt on Henry IV’s life. His connection with the Jesuits, tenuous though it was, gave the Society’s enemies the excuse they needed to expel it from Paris and environs. On September 17, 1595, Clement gave absolution to Henry, and a year and a half later requested that the Jesuits be readmitted to the capital. The king was gradually won over and in fact became a friend of the Society. On September 1, 1603, he issued the Edict of Rouen, formally reestablishing it in France.
The edict’s importance can be gauged from the fact that within five months of its publication, thirty-two towns requested Jesuit colleges. From the thirty-two the king chose eighteen and made his favorite the one he started at La Flèche, near Angers. Converting the graceful and elegant Châteauneuf into the school, he envisaged it as “the most beautiful in the world,” and the Collège Royal Henry-Le Grand at La Flèche did indeed become one of the most esteemed and prestigious of the Jesuit schools in the whole Jesuit network. René Descartes entered La Flèche at the age of eight as one of its first students and remained for twelve years. It was the only formal schooling he ever had.
For the moment, therefore, all seemed well for the Jesuits in France. A strong and enduring bond had been formed between them and the crown, which guaranteed them royal favor. But such favor was not without its liabilities, as events would show.
In perhaps no other territory did the Society prosper as much in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as in Belgium. By 1592 the Jesuits already ran eleven colleges there and were engaged in a massive program of catechizing that reached deep into the population. They formed a close and cordial relationship with the community of artisans and artists that soon produced works of art that the Jesuits distributed in every part of the world, most especially to the missions overseas. They were especially close to Peter Paul Rubens, who decorated for them the interior of their great church in Antwerp, the first in the world dedicated to Saint Ignatius. They produced a Jesuit artist of distinction, Daniёl Seghers (1590–1661). In 1612 Aquaviva divided Belgium into two provinces according to language and pronounced it “the flower of the Society of Jesus.”
The Jesuits were compulsive record keepers, as demonstrated by the figures the Flemish Jesuits made public about their ministries in the single year 1640. They and their lay helpers, for instance, taught catechism 10,045 times to 32,508 children and adults. The province had ninety Marian congregations with almost 14,000 members. Antwerp alone had ten with some 3,000 members, which included Rubens. The Professed House in Antwerp provided twenty-six confessors on call for the adjacent church, where within the space of a year Jesuits administered communion 240,000 times. In Brussels over the course of fifteen years, the Jesuits gave spiritual comfort to 344 men as they prepared for their execution. Although Belgium itself had no overseas missions, the Jesuits there claimed a share in the merits of the English and Scots martyrs—Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, John Ogilvie, and others—because their schools educated these (and many other) English recusants.
In 1580 three English Jesuits—Campion, Robert Persons, and Ralph Emerson—entered England in disguise. They eventually were joined by others, but even by 1610 the number had grown to only fifty-two. Their situation, always difficult and dangerous, worsened considerably in 1605 when they were suspected of collusion in the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I. The “English mission” of the Jesuits ran into ever more difficulties, including opposition from other priests. Somehow it managed to continue and in an utterly unexpected turn of events to father a mission of great importance for the future of Catholicism.
George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore, converted to Catholicism, at least partly due to the ministrations of the Jesuit Andrew White. His son Leonard wanted to colonize lands held by the family in the area of the Chesapeake Bay in North America. In so doing he also wanted to provide a refuge for Catholics where they might worship freely. He enlisted Andrew White and two other Jesuits to accompany the expedition, which was made up of both Catholics and Anglicans. On March 25, 1634, the colonists arrived on St. Clement’s Island in what was to become, first, the English colony of Maryland and then, after the American Revolution, one of the original thirteen states in the new United States.
Although the colony was founded on a principle of religious toleration, waves of bitter anti-Catholicism periodically broke out. Still, some Catholic families prospered and were regarded with respect and deference. The Jesuits, the only Catholic priests in the colony, continued to grow by small increments through entry into the Society of young men from Maryland itself. They worked to convert the ever diminishing number of aborigines and to minister to the relatively small Catholic population, which they did by providing them with mass, the sacraments, and basic catechesis. Compared to other overseas undertakings by the Society, Maryland was among the least venturesome and the least promising for the future.
THE SOCIETY OVERSEAS
Ever since the late fifteenth century, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians had sailed with the galleons of Portugal and Spain as they set out to explore and exploit “the Indies,” the generic term of the era to indicate Asia and the Americas. The Jesuits came late on the scene but soon began to play an important and in some places a dominant role. Despite their massive commitment to the ministry of formal schooling, they never forgot that they were founded as a missionary order and that their professed members pronounced a special (Fourth) vow “concerning missions.”
By the time Ignatius died in 1556, Jesuits had not only set foot in India, Japan, and Brazil but also in the Congo and were on their way to Ethiopia. The moving force behind these ventures was King John III of Portugal, and it was under his aegis and in his domains that the Jesuits first made their mark as missionaries. In Africa the Jesuits became engaged in five large areas: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, the Congo, and Cape Verde. Although from the days of Saint Ignatius himself, Jesuit hopes were high for bringing the Coptic church in Ethiopia into the Roman fold, they despite repeated efforts over a long period made little headway. In the other areas of Africa the missions stalled especially because of lack of manpower but also because the Jesuits were so ill informed about the situations they met and therefore were ill prepared to deal with them effectively. Moreover, they sometimes made the fatal mistake of identifying themselves too closely with the Portuguese military.
The situation was very different in the Far East. When Xavier took leave of King John III on April 7, 1541, to begin his long voyage to India, he had in hand four papal briefs from Pope Paul III appointing him papal nuncio in the Indies and recommending him to the princes ruling in the East. Thirteen months later he arrived in Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, which would become the first headquarters for Jesuit missionary activity in that part of the world.
Xavier remained in Goa only four months, then worked for two years among the poor pearl fishers on the eastern side of Cape Comorin (Kanyakumari), the southern extremity of India. After that he traveled to the outmost bounds of Portuguese influence in the Far East, present-day Indonesia, four thousand miles beyond India. He returned to Goa to organize the mission. At that time there were about thirty Jesuits in India, but within five years another twenty-five had arrived. The Jesuits divided their labors between working for the conversion of the native population and ministering to the relatively large Portuguese population in those parts. The Jesuits blamed the greed and bad example of the Portuguese for their failure to make many converts.
The Jesuits’ most exotic venture in India was the mission to the court of the Great Mughal, the emperors Akbar (1556–1605) and Jahangir (1605–1627). Northern India was at the time enjoying a climate of remarkable creativity and cultural openness. Its worldly rulers invited scholars, priests, and other holy men from around the world to their courts, where they engaged them in weekly interfaith debates into the s
mall hours of the morning. The emperors and their guests expounded on the texts and traditions of faiths as varied as Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism.
Akbar, a man of insatiable intellectual curiosity and, though professedly a Muslim, an eclectic in religion, in 1578 requested “two learned priests” to come from Goa to Fatehpur to serve as representatives there of Catholicism. In 1580 three Jesuits arrived led by Rodolfo Aquaviva, whose uncle Claudio would be elected superior general the next year. At the insistence of Akbar, they plunged immediately into the debates over which he presided. They soon came to realize that, though the Great Mughal treated them with respect and kindness, they were for him more a source to satisfy his curiosity than serious contenders for his religious allegiance.
Nonetheless, the Jesuits founded a permanent mission there in 1598 and remained, with a few interruptions, until the suppression of 1773. They served the emperors well, bringing with them to northern India engravings, printed books, and oil paintings. Akbar himself was fascinated by Christian altarpieces and by the way the Jesuits used taffeta curtains, incense, and candles to enhance the spiritual power of their images. The urbanity of the Mughal court contrasted with the hostility the Jesuits faced elsewhere, due in large part to their being identified in the popular mind with the hated Portuguese.
In 1570 the mission to Brazil suffered a tragic loss of life. In that year, forty Jesuits set out for Brazil under the leadership of Ignacio de Azevedo. They were intercepted on the high seas by the Huguenot corsair Jacques Sourie. When Sourie discovered who the Jesuits were, he ordered them executed and their bodies cast into the sea. Back in Catholic Europe, they were immediately celebrated as saints, and they were in fact beatified in 1854.
Despite this loss of reinforcements, the mission to Brazil continued to prosper as it had from the beginning. Its prosperity was due to a number of factors but not least to the marvelous leadership provided early on by Nóbrega and Anchieta. The broad scope of Jesuit action in Brazil was twofold: the seacoast towns and the deep forests. In the towns the colleges, directed to the Portuguese and Creole population, were here as elsewhere the center of Jesuit operations. They soon became mature institutions. When in 1566 the Portuguese wrested Rio de Janeiro from the French, Nóbrega transferred Jesuit headquarters there, where he soon opened a novitiate and a house of studies for the training of Jesuit scholastics. At Bahia in 1572, the college introduced philosophy into its curriculum and a few years later conferred its first master’s degrees. Firm foundations for the future were thus laid.
Among the Indians, the Jesuit objective was to settle them in fixed communities, known as aldeias, where they could be weaned from superstition, drunkenness, and cannibalism and be instructed in the Christian faith. When Anchieta was involved in the process, it went reasonably well through his amazing output of lively and attractive songs, hymns, and religious plays. Even as Anchieta was molding the spiritual temper of early Brazil, he was laying the foundations for a national culture.
Although such efforts smack of paternalism and were inspired by a sense of cultural superiority, they were not engaged in by the Jesuits without some feeling of mutuality, and they contrast favorably with the attitudes and practices of many other Europeans who had settled there. In Brazil Jesuits took courageous stands against the enslavement of the natives and evoked great wonderment as word sped through the jungles that among the Portuguese there were some who defended them.
Although the Jesuits arrived in Brazil in 1549, they did not enter the Spanish domains of the western hemisphere until nineteen years later, 1568. The delay was due to the wary attitude toward the Society of Philip II. Unlike in Brazil, where the Jesuits were the first missionaries to arrive, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and other orders had arrived in Spanish territories some seventy-five years before they did and were well established. This situation brought the Jesuits the advantage of being able to learn from the experience of the others but the disadvantage of being drawn into the sometimes unseemly, even vicious, competition among religious orders.
Once arrived the Jesuits soon entered three major areas claimed by the Spanish crown—Florida, Mexico, and Peru. In the first they suffered incredible hardships, made no headway with the Indians, and met death at their hands. The survivors retreated either to Havana, where they and their confreres soon opened a college, or to Mexico City to begin another successful chapter in the Society’s history. In Mexico by 1574 the Jesuits had, with their church and school for six hundred boys in Mexico City and their schools at Oaxaca and Patzcuaro, entered as an important force into the cultural and religious life of the colony.
Among the first to arrive in the Viceroy of Peru was Alonso Barzana, who penetrated into the wilds of upper Peru and then into the eastern valleys of the Andes. These experiences allowed him to produce a dictionary and a prayer book in five Indian dialects. He was not alone among the Jesuits in his mastery of such languages and dialects. But the most enduring of the Jesuit undertakings in these early years was the founding of the college of San Pablo in Lima almost as soon as they arrived in the Viceroy. The oldest Jesuit school in Spanish America, San Pablo developed into a nerve center in the New World for the entry of European intellectual currents, and for two centuries it sparked the cultural life of Peru.
With the native populations in the forests of this vast territory, the Jesuits for the most part met hostility, identified as they perforce were with the Spanish aggressors. However, the mission among the more peaceful Guaraní was an exception, and it was among them that the Jesuits developed the famous reductions, permanent settlements that were meant to protect the Indians from slave traders, teach them skills so that they might support themselves and pay the onerous taxes imposed by the government, and, finally, provide an atmosphere conducive to the practice of Catholicism.
Although Madrid set down the firm policy that none but Spaniards emigrate to “the Spanish Indies,” the Jesuits somehow circumvented it. Their work there almost from the beginning had a remarkably international character, reflective of the international character of the Society of Jesus itself. Of those sent to Mexico, for example, between about 1575 and 1625, thirty-seven of the Jesuits came from Italy, seventeen from Portugal, seven from France, five from the Low Countries, and others from other places, including Denmark and Ireland. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the influx of German Jesuits especially in the Viceroy of Peru was considerable.
Regarding international staffing, the Portuguese were more tolerant than the Spaniards. The crown had no problem, for instance, that Xavier, a Spaniard, was the first priest to open the mission to Japan, where he arrived on August 15, 1549, accompanied by Father Cosmé de Torres, Brother Juan Fernández, and a Japanese recently converted to Catholicism named Paul of the Holy Faith. After several ill-advised ventures in trying to reach persons of authority who might help him, Xavier approached Ouchi Yoshitaka, daimyo of Yamagochi, a prince of real power, who, Xavier immediately realized, would be impressed only with a display of grandeur.
Xavier abandoned the simple clerical attire he had worn elsewhere and appeared in court finely robed. He presented his credentials as an ambassador of Portugal and gave Yoshitaka an elaborate assortment of gifts, including a clock, eyeglasses, a music box, wine, and more still. The daimyo, fascinated and delighted with the gifts, gave Xavier permission to preach and also put an unused Buddhist temple at his disposal.
With that incident the Japanese mission got under way and did so with considerable success almost from that moment. Official approval of these visitors from a strange land made the difference. Xavier was deeply and favorably impressed with the Japanese. He wrote back to Goa that the Japanese “are the finest yet discovered. … They are good and not malicious, with a marvelous sense of honor and esteem for it.”1 Xavier’s assessment was shared by others and made the Japanese mission attractive to members of the Society. Within thirty years, some sixty Jesuits were active there, an unmistakable sign of a successful venture. An even more u
nmistakable sign was the thousands of converts the Jesuits won.
In 1579 the young, talented, and decisive Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano arrived, armed by the superior general with the official title of Visitor, which gave him almost plenipotentiary powers. As he assessed the situation in Japan, he too was struck by the high level of Japanese culture and the need for a policy that took it into account. He determined that the missionaries abandon European dress, diet, and customs so as to conform themselves as far as possible with the culture of Japan. He opened a novitiate for the training of Japanese recruits to the Society, for he saw that the future of Christianity in Japan rested with a native clergy. In 1602 two Japanese Jesuits were ordained priests. More followed.
The most visible and physical evidence of the degree to which the Jesuits tried to adapt to their new land was the way they built their churches, which were utterly different from any style prevailing in Europe. They adopted many features of Buddhist temples and built in the Japanese style of post-and-lintel wooden architecture, with hipped-gable roofs. Rather than a single freestanding building, the church proper formed part of a complex that might contain ablution fountains, fishponds, and gardens.
At the instigation of Valignano, the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Niccolò in 1583 founded an art school and studio that had an extraordinary impact on Japanese art outside the mission community. The school grew over the course of the years, and by the end of the century may have employed as many as forty artists. Students painted in oil on copper and wood and occasionally on canvas. They also executed paintings in Japanese watercolors. The school had a foundry, where small statues were cast. The school also made bells, clocks, and musical instruments.
The Jesuits Page 5
