In 1637 the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya went to Madrid, where he was successful in obtaining royal permission to arm the natives, who then were able to defend themselves. The raids came virtually to an end. However, this expedient evoked fear in government circles of a potentially rebellious army, and in 1661 Philip V ordered firearms withdrawn from the reductions. The Jesuits obeyed, but when the raids began again with great devastation, the crown had to renew the permission.
From that point forward all seemed well, but since the reductions operated virtually independently of the royal governors and even the hierarchy, those authorities resented them, envied their prosperity, and therefore wanted to wrest control from the Jesuits. As rumors spread that in the reductions the Jesuits operated secret gold mines and gunpowder plants, the pressure to intervene increased accordingly. Spanish settlers, moreover, resented the economic competition from the sale of products from the reductions, which operated much more efficiently than their competitors, and complained that the Amerindians were undertaxed.
The crisis came in 1750. That year Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Madrid for an exchange of territory in America. This treaty, not particularly momentous in itself, initiated the process that led to the complete destruction of the Jesuit achievement in Latin America and was the first step leading to the suppression of the Society itself. Located in the territory Spain ceded to Portugal were seven reductions with about thirty thousand natives. According to the treaty, the natives had to abandon their homes and move to Spanish territory.
The Jesuits protested the injustice of the terms, the violation of the Indians’ rights, and the virtual impossibility of such a massive movement of humanity through jungles and over rough terrain without serious loss of life. Their appeals failed. The Jesuits were now caught between obedience to the crown, whose position their superior general supported, and their commitment to the welfare of the Indians. When they finally attempted to get the migration moving, the Indians reacted with bitterness. When in 1754 Spanish and Portuguese troops tried to seize the reductions, the Indians replied in kind and set off the so-called War of the Seven Reductions. Not until 1756 were the Indians defeated and the seven reductions seized, which ultimately led to their dissolution.
CALAMITY
In Lisbon the Marquis de Pombal, prime minister to King Joseph I, seized upon the war as an occasion to prove the Jesuits’ disloyalty to the crown, which according to him was only one of their many crimes. He did not let up. In 1758 he demanded that Pope Benedict XIV end the Jesuits’ disobedience in the church, their thirst for power, their lust for gold, and their insatiable hunger for land. A brief and cursory papal investigation of the Jesuits in Portugal ensued and, without examination of a single account book, concluded the Jesuits were guilty of financial malfeasance.
Then, on the night of September 3 that same year, an attempt was made on the king’s life. Pombal saw his chance. He accused the Jesuits of complicity in a plot against the king and won Joseph I over to his side. In January the next year, 1759, the king ordered the confiscation of all Jesuit property, and on September 3, first anniversary of the failed regicide, he decreed the expulsion of the Jesuits, rebels and traitors, from his realms, which of course included the Portuguese territories overseas. Soon rallying to the government’s anti-Jesuit policy were a number of high prelates, creatures of the crown, who now fixed their eyes on Jesuit buildings and other resources.
The Jesuits in Portugal were herded onto ships that carried some 1,100 of them to Italy where, uninvited, they hoped to find refuge. Another 180 from the missions were not so lucky. Transported to Portugal, they were stuffed into underground dungeons where they were left to rot away. The most publicized act to show to the world the Jesuits’ disloyalty took place in Rossio Square in Lisbon on September 20, 1761, when Gabriele Malagrida, an aged and by then mentally confused Jesuit accused of plotting against the king’s life, was brutally strangled and burned at the stake.
Pombal’s action against the Jesuits must be explained on several levels. It fed his pride and ambition by showing he was able to bring down such an established institution. It enriched the crown through the seizure of the Jesuits’ properties and institutions. For Pombal, a creature of the Enlightenment, the elimination of the Jesuits fit a larger plan to eradicate from the land the superstition that was Catholicism and to humiliate the papacy by showing it was powerless to protect the Jesuits. His success had an impact far beyond Portugal and the Portuguese dominions. It demonstrated to Europe both the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful Society of Jesus and the papacy’s impotence to protect it.
The first step in the destruction of the Jesuit pest had been taken. The next step was taken by France, the key nation on the continent, where the Gallican sentiments of both clergy and laity sat ill with a religious order whose headquarters were in Rome. Pervasive though Gallican sentiments were, they were only one of the forces that, though often at odds with one another, made common cause against the Jesuits. The philosophes, for instance, despised the Jansenists but found themselves in the same camp with them when it came to the Jesuits.
The magistrates of the Paris Parlement, moreover, looked for occasions to put restraints on the absolute authority claimed by the Bourbon monarchs. Like his predecessors beginning with Henry IV, the reigning Louis XV favored and protected the Jesuits. To force him to act against them would be a triumph for the magistrates, many of whom were Jansenists. The hour was ripe. The king’s prestige and authority had been severely damaged by defeats during the Seven Years War, just when he badly needed his Parlements to approve new taxes.
Two events provided the anti-Jesuit forces with the catalyst they needed to go into action. In January 1757, Louis XV was stabbed in the courtyard of Versailles by a man who had been a pupil of the Jesuits. Although the man claimed he was inspired to his deed from what he had heard from a Jansenist magistrate, public opinion was manipulated to incriminate the Jesuits. After all, the propaganda ran, the Jesuits had been proved responsible for the attempt on Joseph I of Portugal. When news of Malagrida’s execution in Lisbon in 1761 reached Paris, it was greeted as vindication of the accusations against the Jesuits.
The second was a notorious case that had dragged on in the law courts for six years until finally decided against the Jesuits by the Paris Parlement in 1761. The Jesuit Antoine Lavalette (or Valette), superior of the French mission in Martinique, began taking dangerous chances in order to relieve the heavy debt of the mission. His ability to meet payments to his debtors depended on selling the produce of the mission in Europe. Unfortunately, in 1756 English corsairs swooped down on the thirteen ships he had hired for a shipment, so that only one of his cargoes reached Cádiz. Creditors demanded payment and sued the Society of Jesus in France. Not only did the Jesuits lose the case, but “the Lavalette affair” was paraded as proof positive of the Jesuits’ loose morals and lust for gold.
Three months after the decision against Lavalette, the Paris Parlement took action. It ordered that the Jesuits’ schools be closed and that the works of twenty-three Jesuit authors, including Bellarmino and Suárez, be burned. The king intervened, and in the ensuing months the royal council devised several plans to save the Society, which were repugnant to both the Jesuits and the Parlement and, hence, unavailing.
On August 6, 1762, the Paris Parlement declared that the Society of Jesus, destroyer of religion and morality, was barred from France. In separate decrees it ordered Jesuits to abandon all relations with the Society and made them ineligible for any academic or civic positions unless they publicly repudiated it. Just as severe and laden with almost irreversible consequences, another decree declared all Jesuit buildings, institutions, and properties confiscated.
In Paris steps were immediately taken to implement the decrees, but at least for a while in other parts of France, some parlements resisted the pressure from Paris. But the die was cast. Finally, in November 1764, Louis XV, his hand forced, took the final step and issued the
royal decree of suppression. In it he mitigated the conditions the Parlement had laid down for the Jesuits, but even the mitigation could not save some three thousand Jesuits from destitution. Ejected from their communities and all their assets seized, they had to find food and shelter wherever they could, as best they could.
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.
4
THE MODERN AND POSTMODERN ERA
The 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 ROAD TO RESTORATION
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 a
nd 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.
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