This was the reply of Catholic Europe to PiusVII.In spite of the strident offer to combat liberalism which they made in tracing the Revolution to their absence, they were still excluded from three-fourths of the Catholic world. The indictment of them by ClementXIV.had not been answered by PiusVII., nor had their conduct in Russia and Prussia won esteem for them. They offered no serious guarantee of better behaviour. How they overcame this resistance and, in the course of a century, almost returned to their earlier number, and whether adversity had purified their character, are the two questions that remain for consideration.
CHAPTER XV
THE NEW JESUITS
Fora few years after the restoration the Italian Jesuits were fully occupied with the reorganisation of their body, the recovery of their property, and the absorption of the lingering Paccanarists and survivors of the older Society. It is clear that, had it not been for the partial restoration in Parma and Naples, the Society would long have remained feeble. How many still lived of the 22,589 followers of Ignatius who had been expelled from their homes forty years before we do not know, but there was by no means a rush to the colours when the regiment was reformed. It was difficult also to recover their property. In spite of the generosity of the rulers of Piedmont, Naples, and the Papal States the work proceeded slowly. It is in the year 1820 that we catch a first interesting glimpse of the reconstituted body.
At the beginning of that year General Bzrozowski died at Polotzk, a few months before the Jesuits were expelled from Russia, and the Italians hastened to hold an election. Before he died the General had appointed Father Petrucci Vicar-General, and this official came to Rome and, in conjunction with his fellow-Italians, fixed the election for 4th September. We are not, of course, permitted to know the whole truth in regard to this election, but such facts as we know clearly show that the Italians were determined to regain control of the Society. There seems, however, to have been a deeper quarrel.Some of the younger men and the ex-Paccanarists wished to reform the constitutions, and they had the support of Cardinal della Ganga, the Pope's Vicar (and later LeoXII.); the older men opposed reform. But what the precise position of Petrucci was it is impossible to decide. Crétineau-Joly, who alone has had access to the archives and has used his privilege in such a way as to make the quarrel unintelligible, offers the ridiculous suggestion that Petrucci and the cardinal wished to destroy the Society.
However that may be, Petrucci tried to have the election held before the Poles arrived, but there was a spirited Breton member of the Russian Province, Father Rozaven, in Rome at the time, and he appealed to the cardinal. Petrucci then wrote to the Poles to say that they must postpone their voyage to Rome, but Rozaven exposed the trick to them and they reached Rome early in September. There must have been a most unedifying turmoil in the Jesuit house, as, instead of an election on 4th September, we find Cardinal della Ganga intervening on the 6th to say that a commission, with him and Cardinal Galeffi at its head, had been appointed by the Pope to adjudicate on their quarrels. A week later the commission found that Petrucci was to have the powers of a general, but the two cardinals were to preside at the election. The account given us by the French historian is bewildering in its confusion, and is evidently intended to screen an angry conflict of personal and national ambitions and of reformers and anti-reformers.
The party opposed to Petrucci (and, presumably, to reform) now appealed to Cardinal Consalvi and denounced their Vicar-General. Consalvi had little interest in the Jesuits, but, as they knew, he was not disinclined to thwart della Ganga. He secured the calling of the Congregation in October. It seems tohave been the most lively and impassioned election that the old house had ever witnessed. Petrucci ruled that the voters from England and France and part of Italy had no canonical right to vote; the Congregation overruled him, and, when he protested, deposed him and excluded him and his chief supporter, Pietroboni, from the Congregation. Della Ganga appealed to the Pope, Consalvi defeated his appeal, and on 18th October Father Fortis was elected. The triumphant section then held a trial of the conduct of the minority. Petrucci and Pietroboni were pardoned on account of their age, but a number of younger men were expelled from the Society.
It must be admitted that this Congregation shows a decided continuity of the irregular features of the Society. Fortis, Rozaven, Petrucci, and the leaders of the conflicting parties were old members; Fortis, at least, an elderly Italian in his eighth decade of life, had belonged to the suppressed Society, and the conduct of him and his followers suggests that forty years of life without the restraint of discipline had not tended to improve their character. In the pacified Europe of 1820 they saw an easy field for the triumph of their order, and the Italians were ambitious to control it. The struggle against the proposal to reform the Society is equally unattractive; and the facility with which both parties appealed to rival cardinals, when the Jesuit tradition was fiercely to resent any outside interference with their Congregations, completes an unpleasant picture. The anti-reformers won, and the voters scattered to their respective provinces and missions.
Three years later PiusVII.died, and the triumphant clique at the Gesù had a momentary anxiety when Cardinal della Ganga mounted the papal throne under the name of LeoXII.Rozaven expresses their concernin a letter to a colleague, and predicts that he at least will be compelled to leave Rome. But LeoXII.was convinced that the Society had become one of the most useful auxiliaries of the Papacy, and he hastened to assure them that their intrigue against his authority was forgotten. He had, in fact, hardly been a year at the Vatican when he gratified them by restoring the Roman College to their charge, and they gathered their best teachers from all parts of the world to win back its earlier prestige. Other of their old colleges in the Papal States were secured for them by LeoXII.and the Italian Provinces quickly recovered their power.
It was known to all that the liberal feeling engendered by the revolutionary movement was still intensely alive. The secret Society of the Carbonari spread its net over Italy, and the cultivated middle class was very largely liberal and anti-clerical. At Naples, in 1820, the Carbonari had seemed for a moment about to triumph; but the rebellion was defeated, and the Jesuits returned to the task of educating the middle class in pro-papal sentiments. They had a college for the sons of nobles at Naples, and four other colleges in the Neapolitan district; while they had no less than fifteen colleges and residences in the island of Sicily. In northern Piedmont, from which few at that time expected the greatest menace to the Papacy to come, they retained great power for decades. Victor Emmanuel gave place to Charles Felix, and the Liberals took the occasion to make a violent assault on the fathers. Charles Felix replied by choosing a Jesuit confessor, Father Grassi. Charles Albert patronised them even more generously than his predecessors. He secured the return of their old house at Turin, and, when he found it impossible to get for them their old house at Genoa, which had been converted into auniversity, he granted them one of his palaces for a residence.
In the Papal States they entered upon their golden age with the accession of GregoryXVI., in 1831. Both LeoXII.and General Fortis died in 1829. A young Dutch Jesuit, Father Roothaan (aged forty-four), succeeded Fortis, and PiusVIII.ascended the papal throne. He died in November 1830, and GregoryXVI.assumed the tiara in the very heat of the revolutionary movement of 1830 and 1831. The "White Terror" had failed to conquer what it called the revolutionary element; its thousands of executions and its appalling jails and repulsive spies had merely fed the flame of insurrection, and the international movement for reform gathered strength. The middle class in every country—in Italy, especially, the revolutionary movements were essentially middle class—suffered with burning indignation the brutalities of Austria, the Papacy, Naples, Spain, and France, and young men of the type of Mazzini devoted their lives to reform. In 1831 the Italian rebels, fired by the success of the July Revolution in France, raised their tricolour standard and soon saw it floating over Modena, Parma, and a number of the Papal States. One of the first movements of the insurgents in every place was to assail the Jesuit residences. At Spoleto, Fano, Modena, Reggio, Forli, and Ferrara, the Jesuits were driven from their homes and colleges and hunted over the frontiers of the revolutionary provinces. But Naples and Piedmont were unshaken by the disturbance, and the Austrian troops from Venice quickly trampled out the revolutionary spirit. It was on the eve of this insurrection—a work almost entirely of the educated class—that Gregory became Pope, and his policy after the pacification was one of savage repression.
It is needless here to recall the brutal régime whichthe Austrians in Venice (to which the Jesuits were formally admitted in 1836), the Pope in central Italy, and the Neapolitan ruler in the south, spread over the land. It is enough for us that in the three States, as in Spain and Portugal, the Jesuits were the most ardent auxiliaries of the reactionary and sanguinary monarchs. GregoryXVI., the most repulsive Pope of modern times, was the most generous patron that the Jesuits had had for more than a hundred years. He went so far as to entrust to them the Urban College, the institution in which the Propaganda itself trained its missionaries. Education was the root of the revolutionary evil, and it was the place of the Jesuits to see that such education as was imparted in Italy—which sank to an appalling degree of illiteracy, and is still illiterate to the extent of 70 per cent. in the southern provinces, where the Jesuits ruled longest—was not tainted with modern culture. It is true that after 1830 the General appointed five learned fathers to revise theRatio Studiorumof the Society; but one cannot regard it as other than a somewhat humorous comment on the Jesuit system that the teachers were no longer to be bound to teach the physics of Aristotle or to slight, in favour of Latin and Greek, the tongue of the pupils whom they trained. We have, in fact, a very curious illustration of the level of culture of Gregory and his teaching Jesuits. In the year 1837 the cholera threatened Rome. The science of meeting such epidemics was, of course, still in its infancy, but the conduct of Rome was exactly what it would have been five hundred years earlier. A solemn procession was enjoined, and, amidst the masses of terrified people, a statue of the Virgin was borne across Rome to the Church of the Jesuits. Gregory and his cardinals were in the procession, and for a time the Gesù was the centre or fount of the hope of Rome.Within a few months 5419 Romans succumbed to the cholera.
Gregory died in the year 1846, and Italy sighed with relief. The misery of the working classes, the brutal treatment to which the educated classes had been exposed, and the control of education and of a very large proportion of appointments in the Papal States by the Jesuits, had engendered a hatred of him in every part of his dominion. When Mastai Ferretti ascended the throne, and took the name of PiusIX., he was greeted with wild enthusiasm. He was sufficiently known to inspire a hope that the reign of terror and the reign of the Jesuits were over, and his first acts confirmed this hope. An amnesty was granted, and the more brutal of his predecessor's coercive measures were repealed. Rossi, who, as we shall see presently, had been sent to Rome a few years before to negotiate the banishment of the Jesuits from France, was recalled and made leading minister to the Vatican; and Father Theiner was directed to vindicate the memory of ClementXIV.against the Jesuits and Crétineau-Joly, who had just published his history. The Jesuits were so notoriously discontented with the change, and with the young Pope's concessions to liberalism, that, as he passed through the streets he heard the warning cry from his people: "Beware of the Jesuits."
What part the Jesuits had in the termination of the new Pope's pose as a Liberal it would be difficult to say. The usual statement, that he was shaken by the assassination of Count Rossi and the revolution of 1848, is superficial and misleading. He had incurred the resentment of the Liberals because he had rapidly fallen from his first ideal. Some of the chief grievances of his educated subjects, such as the monopoly of all remunerative offices in the State by clerics, remaineduntouched, and it was soon perceived that he was drifting backward toward reaction. His confessor was replaced by a friend of the Jesuits, and, when the popular and somewhat insurgent priest Gioberti published a fiery and just attack on the Jesuits, PiusIX.harshly condemned him. At the same time the returned exiles and the refugees who flocked to Rome from the countries which clung to oppression assuredly had ideals which it was quite impossible for any Pope to realise in that age. Pius was alienated more and more, and a violent conflict approached. How the third revolutionary wave in 1848 spread to Rome, and the Pope fled to Gaeta, and the Jesuits returned to power in the inevitable reaction, must be reserved for the next chapter.
When we turn to consider the fortunes of the Jesuits in France during the first half of the nineteenth century, we find a very different and more interesting chronicle. They had been banished from France, it will be recalled, in 1761, and the great majority of them had actually quitted the kingdom. Many had been secularised, and remained as teachers, tutors, confessors, orcurés. During the period of suppression a large number of them found employment in France; the learned Father Boscovitch, for instance, was made director of the optical department of the Navy under LouisXVI.As in Italy and Austria, some of them sought to incorporate the spirit of their condemned Society in Congregations with other names, and a curious assortment of fraternities appeared. The "Fathers of the Faith," or Paccanarists, whose origin we have seen, found a genial atmosphere in France, and the little colony they sent from Austria was soon swelled with ex-Jesuits. Another body was significantly known as the "Victims of the Love of God." The feminine branch of the "SacredHeart" Society also spread to France, and grew into a formidable body of nuns (under the direction of ex-Jesuits) with the particular function of giving a "sound" education to the daughters of wealthy people; it remains to this day, in effect, the feminine branch of the Society, though the connection is not official. There was a "Congregation of the Holy Family" for training teachers of the poor, and a "Congregation of Our Lady" for banding together members of the middle class.
But of all these associations which sprang up mysteriously in the soil of revolutionary France, and throve under the shelter of Napoleon, the most important was a certain "Congregation of the Holy Virgin," founded in the year 1801. It was controlled by an ex-Jesuit, and had at first some resemblance to the association of young men organised at Rome by the ex-Jesuit Caravita. The young men, very largely university students, were to visit the sick and poor—to be practical Christians, in a word. But, whereas the Italian young men had become priests and Paccanarists, the members of the Congregation of the Virgin generally remained in the world, retaining throughout life their membership of the Society and their link with its directors. A register of their names and occupations was kept, and it meant, in effect, that the Jesuits had friends and ardent secret workers in every school and profession, in the army and navy, in journalism and politics.
LouisXVIII.came to the throne and was urged by Talleyrand to restore the Society. He refused, and the Jesuits were forced to rely still on their secret organisation. Already, in 1814, the Fathers of the Faith had a house in Paris, and six other houses in the country. Their title was now a deliberate deception, as they had in 1804 secretly renounced Paccanarism,in the hands of the Papal Nuncio, and entered the Society of Jesus, as authorised in Russia. They dressed and acted externally as secular priests, and were much employed by bishops in teaching and preaching. From the Congregation of the Virgin they not only had accurate information of what was being said and done in every department of French life, but they obtained many novices; other youths joined the secular clergy, and would in time watch the interests of the Society within that body. Orders were now given that the Jesuits must work in perfect harmony with the secular clergy and in most respectful submission to the bishops.
They grew rapidly in the course of the next few years, and about 1818 they began to stand out prominently in the religious life of France. They were especially employed in what are known in English church-life as "revival services." Eloquent preachers, particularly when they were denouncing liberalism and the "bad" tendencies of the times, they passed from town to town lashing up the fervour of the Catholics. Large crucifixes were planted on the wayside as memorials of their oratory; enthusiastic processions marched through the streets; in places the churches were so crowded that one had to spend the night at the door to secure a place near the pulpit. They were the Pères de la Foi, Catholics said (with a smile); but critics maintained that they were Jesuits, and there were towns where the missionaries were assaulted and expelled. A very serious controversy raged in the French press as to whether there were really any Jesuits in France; even when, in 1822, a Liberal journal obtained and published a letter of General Fortis to one of his French subjects, it was difficult to convict them.
At this period, in the early twenties, the famousAbbé de Lamennais was seeking to form a democratic Christian body, and he made an effort to secure the support of the Jesuits. LouisXVIII.was one of the more moderate of the restored monarchs; but the democratic feeling was still strong in France and, as the clergy were generally reactionary, democracy, of which Lamennais foresaw the triumph, was allied with Voltaireanism. Lamennais was convinced that the hour of feudal monarchs was over, and the Church could be saved only by allying itself with the people. The development of French history has shown the truth of his view. Democracy has triumphed, and the Church has shrunk to—M. Sabatier tells me—less than one-sixth of the population. Seeing the apparent power of the Jesuit missionaries, Lamennais, who was very friendly with them, earnestly begged them to incorporate his policy in their preaching.
The attitude of the Jesuits toward Lamennais is interesting. They hesitated for years, broke into sections, and eventually had to forbid all public discussion of the issue. In 1821 some of their members were censured for attacking Lamennais, in the next year others were censured for supporting him; and Rozaven, the French Assistant at Rome, directed that "prudence" forbade them to take either side in public. Later, as they still wavered and contradicted each other, General Fortis sternly prohibited public expression on the subject. Fortis died in 1829, and Lamennais made a fresh appeal to the Jesuits to "turn from monarchs to the people"; but Roothaan maintained the attitude of his predecessor. When Lamennais was eventually condemned, the Jesuits eagerly pointed out that they had declined to support him.
This situation is interesting, because it exhibits the Jesuits shrinking nervously from the greatest social issueof their time. They retort that it was a political issue, and their traditions forbade them to discuss politics. It is in a sense true that the Jesuits had always abstained from political theorising, and bowed to the actual ruling power; except in cases where the ruling power incommoded them, when they might become the most violent of revolutionaries. But, apart from the question whether the issue was not moral in the finest sense of the word, it is ludicrous to affirm that the "political" nature of Lamennais's gospel prevented them from considering it when, in every country where a reactionary monarch called them to his aid, they were violent partisans of the aristocratic gospel. For twenty years they had maintained that the political storms which swept the old monarchs from their thrones at the end of the eighteenth century were directly due to the removal of their control of the schools and universities. They had been restored to life for the express purpose of reconciling Europe to the old order, and destroying the aspiration for democratic reform, and it was only in the cantons of Switzerland that they were found to hold a different theory of the social order; though, as we shall see, the Swiss cantons were then rather aristocratic than democratic. It is plain that in France they hesitated only because the future was uncertain. Their real aim was to restore the age of LouisXIV., but this new democratic movement looked formidable. They would wait and be guided by the issue.
The Catholic democrats turned angrily on the Jesuits for their attitude on this great issue, and accused them of gross ignorance of, and indifference to, social conditions: an entirely just censure. But their power was growing in every decade. New Congregations appeared,—societies for persuading lovers to marry in church, for preserving students from liberalism, andso on,—and the Congregation of our Lady now included half the nobility and higher clergy, and numbers of writers, lawyers, politicians, and officials. Their French apologist, who was himself a member of the Congregation and lived in Paris at this time, admits that the secret influence of the Congregation was such that many made a profession of religion and joined it in order to promote their material interests. CharlesX., who succeeded Louis in 1824, renewed their confidence. He opened his career with Liberal measures; but he was more reactionary at heart than LouisXVIII., and less prudent, and the Jesuits silently organised their forces for a restoration of the Society.
The educated Frenchman now commonly united the scepticism of Voltaire with the moderate democracy of Lafayette, and an angry storm broke out in the Liberal press. The open activity of the "Paccanarists" was an affront to the Constitution, and the secret manœuvres of the Congregation, notoriously led by Father Ronsin, alarmed them. The authorities discreetly removed Father Ronsin from Paris, but the work of the Congregation proceeded. CharlesX.was suspected of favouring the Jesuits. In 1828 the Nuncio openly proposed that the Society should be restored. We may take the word of Crétineau-Joly that the ground had been so well prepared that a measure could have been passed safely through the two Houses. But Villèle, the French historian says, was so misguided as to appeal to the country first, and he lost. The question of the Jesuits was not the least of the issues at stake. Showers of pamphlets fell upon the public, and the popular feeling was such that when the King was one day reviewing the National Guard, the cry, "Down with the Jesuits," rang out from the ranks, and the review was abandoned.
The more moderate ministry of Martignac had nowto be formed, and, as it needed the co-operation of the Liberals, the plan to restore the Jesuits was abandoned. The Liberals were now encouraged, and they made a fiery assault. The "little seminaries," as the French called the preparatory colleges for the clergy, had been left under the control of the bishops, and several of them were notoriously controlled by the thinly disguised Jesuits. A commission of bishops, with the Archbishop of Paris at their head, was appointed to examine the charge, and it was determined that eight of the seminaries were really Jesuit colleges, and must be closed; it was further enacted that the seminaries were to be taken from the bishops and put under the control of the universities, that the number of pupils was to be restricted, and that no priest should henceforth be allowed to teach in them who did not take oath that he did not belong to a non-authorised Congregation. The bishops, many of whom had won their seats by Jesuit influence, protested in vain against this violation of their rights. Their protest made matters worse, since they stipulated that it should remain secret; but the Liberal press secured the text and published it.
This was a very severe blow to the French Jesuits, who had used the seminaries for training lay pupils in their spirit as well as teaching the secular priests to rely on them. While the French press was discussing the question whether they existed in the country, they had grown to the number of 436, and had two novitiates and several residences, besides the seminaries. They now determined to take bolder measures against the enemy. As I said, the question of the Jesuits was by no means the only serious issue under discussion; Martignac received only a moderate and uncertain support from his Liberal allies because his measures were not sufficiently advanced. It is, however, clear that the Jesuits,through the Nuncio, had their share in inducing the King to replace the moderate Martignac with the thoroughly conservative Polignac. This was in July 1829. The reply of the people, when the ministry returned to the old coercive measures, was the July Revolution of 1830. The chief Jesuit houses, at Montrouge and St. Acheul, were sacked by the mob, and the fathers scattered in every direction. Once more they had suffered a heavy defeat on what they believed to be the eve of victory.
The revolutionary wave spread, with devastating force, to Italy, as we saw; and there also the fathers were for a time driven contemptuously from their colleges. Their recovery in France was naturally slower than in Italy. They moved in fear of their lives for the first year or two of the reign of Louis Philippe, and generally concealed themselves in devoted Catholic houses. In 1832 the cholera swept France, and they recollected how frequently heroic conduct in such epidemics had disarmed their critics. But France was not so easily reconciled in the nineteenth century, and the few who ventured to appear during the following years were arrested. In the course of time, however, the resentment was confined to the more ardent Liberals, and they resumed the semi-public existence of the previous decade. Catholicism made great progress in the thirties, chiefly through the agency of a brilliant group of laymen, and some of the Jesuits took an open part in the revival. Father de Ravignan, their finest orator, occupied the pulpit of Nôtre Dame for several seasons, and they were assiduous in giving retreats to the clergy.
As they no longer ventured to teach,—though it was known that they had opened a college for French pupils just over the Belgian frontier,—and betrayed theircharacter in no external action, they were legally unassailable; but it was not long before they again drew on themselves the ire of the Liberals. From 1840 onwards the clergy made a vehement attack on the professors of the university. Since these included philosophers like Cousin and Jouffroy, historians like Michelet, and men of letters like Jules Simon, we can easily believe that their lectures were at times inconsistent with orthodox ideas; but the attack was gross and exaggerated, and the professors felt that the Jesuits secretly guided it; Father de Ravignan, in fact, joined in the spirited conflict of pens. The chief result was to draw on the Jesuits the sardonic humour of Michelet, the weighty censures of Cousin, the poisonous raillery of Simon, and the unrestrained diatribes of the popular Liberal press. It was during this agitation that Eugène Sue lashed them with hisJuif Errant, and George Sand wroteConsuelo. Against this fierce and brilliant onslaught the publication of Crétineau-Joly'sHistoirewas a feeble defence; it could carry no conviction except to the already convinced and uncritical Catholic. Indeed, its treatment of ClementXIV.scandalised many Catholics, and, as we saw, PiusIX.directed the Vatican Archivist to refute it.[41]
Louis Philippe was at length compelled to take action. Catholic writers treated it as an amusing scare that there were Jesuits in France, and were not a little mortified when the fathers betrayed their existence in away which entertained the Liberal pamphleteers. In 1845 one of their treasurers embezzled the funds entrusted to him, and they imprudently prosecuted. In the controversy which followed it was made plain that there were two hundred members of the forbidden Society in France, and their expulsion was stormily demanded. The King knew that if he suppressed the "Fathers of the Faith" they would do no more than change their name, and he adopted a shrewder policy. He sent Rossi to Rome to submit to the Pope that the relations of France and the Vatican would be much improved if the Jesuits were removed by ecclesiastical authority. The dignity of the Holy See was saved by a pleasant little comedy. The Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs reported that the request could not be granted, and the Pope firmly replied to the French envoy in that sense. But a private intimation was made to General Roothaan that it was desirable to meet the wishes of the King, and Rossi was instructed to see him. Whatever the precise nature of the intimation was, Roothaan submitted to his French subjects that it was expedient to dissolve their chief communities,—at Paris, St. Acheul, Lyons, and Avignon,—and they once more retreated sullenly from the field. We shall see later how they found a fitting patron in NapoleonIII., and how the third Republic put a definitive close to their activity in France.
Their fortunes in Spain during the nineteenth century have been more chequered than their present prosperity would suggest. On 15th May 1815, FerdinandVII. repealed the drastic sentence of his great predecessor, and ordered that their former property should be restored to the Jesuits. A hundred and fifty of the old members of the Society returned to their native land; colleges and novitiates were opened by means of the restoredproperty and the royal bounty; and, we are told, town after town demanded, and enthusiastically welcomed, its former teachers. We can well believe that the mobs which saluted the perjured Ferdinand with the cry, "Down with Liberty," would welcome the Jesuits. In the recoil due to their hatred of the French, and of the new ideas which the French had brought into Spain, the densely ignorant mass of the people fell at the feet of a brutal monarch and a corrupt clergy. The educated middle class, however, remained substantially Liberal. They had admitted Ferdinand only on condition that he promised to maintain their Liberal Constitution, and, as soon as he had attained the crown, he tore his promise and the Constitution to shreds and fell with terrible cruelty on the Liberals. Known Liberals were at once executed, imprisoned for life, or banished; the Inquisition was restored; and a network of spies spread over the kingdom. Men, women, and children were savagely punished, and a "Society of the Exterminating Angel" arose to strengthen and direct the bloody hands of the King and the Inquisitors.
Those five years of Spanish history constitute one of the most repulsive chapters in the chronicle of modern Europe. Unfortunately, it is not possible to determine what part the restored Jesuits had in this reign of terror. All the clergy and monks of Spain were allied with their monarch in prosecuting what they regarded as a holy war. It is enough that the Jesuits did not dissent from the barbaric proceedings of Ferdinand, and that they flourished and were more than doubled in number within five years. The year 1820 found them increased to 397, with several novitiates and a large number of colleges.
And the year 1820 gives us some measure of their guilt in connection with the preceding years. The middle class was still strong enough, or humane enough, to putan end to the disgraceful horrors, and reaffirm the liberal constitution of 1810. The Cortes was summoned, and, although its members were still predominantly Catholic, it was determined, with only one dissentient, to expel the Jesuits. The terrified King yielded to the deputies, and in August the four hundred Jesuits were pensioned and ordered to quit the country. Unfortunately, the French King espoused the cause of his "cousin," and his troops restored the savage autocracy of Ferdinand and the power of the Jesuits. The reign of terror returned, and even the other Catholic monarchs of Europe were shocked by the outrages committed and permitted by Ferdinand. Again it is impossible to disentangle the share of the Jesuits in this comprehensive guilt. Their chief task was to educate the young in "better" sentiments. The College of Nobles and a large military college at Segura were entrusted to them, and they reoccupied their former colleges. But neither priests nor ruler put confidence in educational methods. It is enough to note that a conservative authority on Spain, Major Hume, says of the renewed reign of terror: "Modern civilisation has seen no such instance of brutal, blind ferocity."
This appalling condition lasted, almost continuously, until the death of Ferdinand in 1833. Then the country entered upon the long Carlist war, and the Jesuits were soon expelled for the third time. While Queen Christina allied herself with the Liberals, Don Carlos rallied to his standard the absolutists and Ultramontanes, and the great majority of the clergy supported him. It is usually and confidently said that the Jesuits, like the rest of the clergy, supported Don Carlos; but when we recollect their maxim of not taking sides openly in an ambiguous conflict, or taking both sides, we shall not expect to find any proof of this in the early stages. Not only theLiberals but the mass of the people in Madrid were persuaded that they were on the side of Don Carlos, and they saw hatred gathering on every side of them. In 1834 the cholera descended on the capital. Such occasions had generally served the Jesuits, but this fresh affliction only further irritated the people against them. The cry was raised that the Jesuits and the Carlists had poisoned the water-supply, and it seems that, by some strange accident or plot, children were found on the street with small quantities of arsenic. In the afternoon of 17th July the citizens flung themselves upon the houses of the Jesuits and other religious, and a fierce riot ensued. Fourteen Jesuits, forty-four Franciscans, and fifteen Dominicans and others were slain in the struggle. Some of their provincial houses also were sacked or closed, and the inmates had to fly for their lives.
In the following year, 1835, the Society was again proscribed, by the Regent Christina, and the Jesuits were scattered. They now sided openly with Don Carlos. Alleging, as usual, that they were indifferent to politics and must discharge the spiritual services demanded of them under any banner, they followed in the rear of the advancing Carlists and opened colleges in the districts conquered by them. One Jesuit guarded the conscience of Don Carlos, another was tutor to his children, and others ministered in his camps. At length an abler Christinist General, Espartero, cleared the Carlists from the Basque Provinces and closed the Jesuit houses. By the time of the revolution of 1848 there were none but a few disguised and timid survivors of the Society in Spain.
From Portugal the Jesuits were rigorously excluded during fifteen years after the restoration of the Society. JohnVI., a constitutional and sober monarch, refused toirritate his subjects by admitting them, and had no need of their stifling influence on education in Portugal. He resisted all the pressure of Rome in their interest, and observed the Liberal Constitution which he had accepted. His granddaughter Maria succeeded to his throne and policy in 1826, under the regency of her uncle, Dom Miguel. Here again the Jesuits were admitted in virtue of an act of treachery and throve in an atmosphere of savagery. Dom Miguel intrigued for the throne, and, when he took an oath to respect the Liberal Constitution, was permitted to occupy it. "His Jesuit training," says theCambridge Modern History(x. 321), "would make it easy for him to rest content with the absolution of the Church for a breach of faith committed on behalf of the good cause." He at once violated his oath and turned with ferocity upon the Liberals. It is estimated by some of the Portuguese writers that more than 60,000 were executed, deported, or imprisoned in the next four years.
Such was the second of the leading Catholic monarchs to seek the aid of the Jesuits. None of the members of the old Portuguese Province could be discovered, or induced to resume work in a bitterly hostile world, and eight Jesuits had to be sent from France, in 1829, to begin the work of restoration. They make little pretence of an enthusiastic reception in this case. None of their former property was restored, and for a time they had to take refuge in the houses of rival orders. They had, however, their usual good fortune to attract the sympathy of noble ladies, and were enabled to secure their old house at Lisbon in the following year. When the King saw that no violent upheaval followed their arrival, he began to patronise them, and secured for them their famous college at Coimbra. In the same year they had the satisfaction of establishinga house at Pombal, where their old antagonist had died, and their superior describes, in an edifying letter, how he at once "ran to say a prayer over the tomb of the Marquis"; he was deeply pained, it seems, to find that the remains of Pombal had not even yet been interred, while the children of Ignatius were received with honour in his name-place.
But the ferocity of Miguel had already deeply stirred the population, and in the following year the defrauded young Queen's father, Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, crossed the ocean to secure her rights and the Constitution. The Jesuits were painfully perplexed. Don Pedro seems to have felt that he could not hope for a lasting triumph without the aid of the Jesuits, and he made a secret offer to them, in an autograph letter (in March), of his protection and favour if they would desert Miguel. The issue was uncertain, and, when Don Pedro entered Lisbon in July, the Jesuits assured him that his letter had reached their hands too late for them to consider his offer. They had remained ideally neutral in the war, and had nursed the cholera victims in both camps with religious impartiality.
The people of Lisbon saved Don Pedro from the dilemma which this excellent or prudent conduct imposed on him. On 29th July a mixed throng of soldiers and citizens assaulted and sacked the Jesuit residence. It would have gone very hard with the fathers themselves had not certain English naval officers chivalrously saved them. In the following May (1834) Don Pedro renewed the sentence of suppression. From their handsome college at Coimbra they were conveyed to Lisbon, to face the hoots and taunts of a rejoicing mob, and then to be deposited in prison. The French afterwards secured their release from prison, but they have never since had a legal existence in the land of Pombal.
We turn next to England, to study the fortunes of the followers of Ignatius up to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Jesuits had availed themselves of the more tolerant spirit of the age of the Georges, and again increased to a considerable body. Their colleges in Spain, France, and Belgium received numbers of young Catholic aspirants, and we find that at the time of the suppression of the Society the English Province boasted 274 members, of whom 143 were actually in England. The suppression in Spain and France reduced their colleges; the two colleges at Bruges were violently closed by the authorities in 1773; there remained only a house at Liège and the English missions at Liverpool, Preston, Bristol, and a few other towns.
They continued to live in community in these residences after the abolition of the Society, and minister as secular priests. In 1794 their situation was again altered by the French invasion of Belgium, when the English fathers were expelled from their last continental seat, at Liège. The disaster proved, however, to be the starting-point of their more prosperous modern development in England. One of their old pupils, Thomas Weld, offered them a house and estate at Stonyhurst, near Preston, and on 29th August the refugees reached what was destined to be one of their most important centres. They opened a school—to be directed by certain "gentlemen from Liège"—and quietly awaited the future.
In the meantime the ex-Jesuits who had remained in England bore their disgrace very impatiently. One of their number, Father Thorpe, wrote in 1785 so scurrilous aSketch of the Life and Government of Pope ClementXIV.that his colleagues had to withdraw it from publication at the demand of their own admirers.In the following year the English ex-Jesuits opened a correspondence with their rebellious colleagues in Russia, and, although they could devise no pretext whatever for disobeying the Pope in England, they offered to unite with the Russians. Their proposal was declined or postponed, and they waited until the Pope officially recognised the Russian Society in 1801. By that time the Abbé de Broglie had led his little colony of Fathers of the Faith from Austria to London and opened a college at Kensington. Some of the ex-Jesuits and many emigrant French priests were attracted to this authorised Congregation, but Paccanari was now an object of suspicion to most of them, and, on the other hand, there was increasing hope of a restoration of the Society.
The proposal to enlist under the Russian General was now revived, and both ex-Jesuits and Fathers of the Faith made their way, secretly and individually, to Russia and renewed their vows. By the year 1804 there were between eighty and ninety Jesuits in England. The general and violent hatred of the French had led to much sympathy with the clerical victims of the Revolution, but England was not yet prepared for this substantial resurrection of the Jesuits. Stonyhurst was growing into a large and busy colony, owing to the continued bounty of Weld and the return of surviving members of the old province, and in 1804, and more peremptorily in 1807, the Government ordered the dissolution of their communities.
Such an order was a feeble check on their growth, and they took advantage of the successive movements which aided the restoration of Catholicism. The stream of French emigrants, the Act of Toleration of 1791, the beginning of Irish immigration, and the advocacy of Catholic Emancipation by Pitt enabled the Catholics toenter the nineteenth century in increased numbers. The Catholic Relief Act of 1829 so inflated them that they then estimated their numbers in London alone as 146,000, or nearly a tenth of the population; to-day they number about one-fiftieth of the population of London. The Jesuits shared the growth with the rest of the clergy. Between 1826 and 1835 they built eleven new churches, and in 1830 the Roman authorities made a formal province of the English group. The Irish fathers had been detached from the English in 1829, and formed a vice-province. Ten years later began the Catholic movement within the Church of England, to the considerable profit of Rome.
The early history of the Jesuits in the United States is one of the most interesting chapters in their modern story. When the Society was abolished and its members momentarily discouraged, John Carroll, a member of the suppressed English Province, led a small group of fathers to the North American Colony. He became friendly with Washington and other leaders of the insurrection, and is said to have had some influence in shaping the Liberal clauses of the new Constitution. In 1789 he became Bishop of Baltimore, and another ex-Jesuit, Father Neale, was afterwards made his coadjutor. This transferred the American mission from the control of the English Vicar Apostolic, and made Carroll head of the Church in the United States. In 1803 we find Carroll writing to General Gruber that there are a dozen aged ex-Jesuits in Maryland and Pennsylvania, with sufficient property (of the older Maryland mission) to support thirty; they wish to join Gruber's authorised Society and receive an accession of strength. The Russian Jesuits had justified their rebellion on the ground that the secular monarch had forbidden them to lay aside their habits; the Americanssaid it was enough that there was in America no secular monarch to forbid them to wear it. The Papacy counted for little with any of them.
Gruber complied, and the foundations were laid of the prosperity of the Jesuits in the United States. In the early years little progress was made. The newcomers were young foreigners, and the population was scattered and generally hostile. One of the German fathers was actually arrested and tried for not betraying the confession of a thief, but the controversy which followed rather promoted their interest. They shrewdly established their chief college and centre at Georgetown, near Washington, and gradually won the regard of American statesmen, who visited and granted privileges to the college. By the year 1818 there were 86 Jesuits in the United States, and recruits were arriving from Europe. A novitiate had been opened at White Marsh in 1815, but few novices could be secured in America. In fact, as they followed their usual custom of making no charge for education, they had a severe struggle with poverty everywhere. In 1822 the authorities at Rome ordered them to close the school at Washington, as it could no longer maintain itself without charging. The rector, Father Kelly, defied his superiors for a time, and maintained the school on the fees of pupils; but Americanism was not yet sufficiently developed to sustain this, and Father Kelly was expelled from the Society.
Memories of the "black robes" lingered among the Indians, and it was suggested, time after time, that the fathers should return to their work among them, and amongst the blacks of the south and the islands. Their historian makes a lengthy and very earnest apology for their refusal, during ten or twenty years, to listen to this suggestion. They remembered how their work amongstthe Indians had been "misinterpreted"; they were too few in number to spare men for distant fields; in time, they foresaw the greatness of the United States and "preferred the certain to the uncertain." The truth seems to be that commerce in blankets and beaver-skins was not possible in the nineteenth century. After 1840, however, they sent missionaries among the Indians, and won a great affection among them. By that time the Missouri Province alone had 148 Jesuits, and the Maryland Province 103.
It is clear that the early Jesuits laboured devotedly to arrest the enormous lapse from the Church of Rome in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. We need pay little attention to their boasts of conversions. Catholic immigrants were now arriving in millions, and were passing out into the lonely districts and small towns, where their faith was quickly forgotten. In 1636 the Bishop of Charlestown estimated the loss at nearly four millions in his diocese alone. Many of the Jesuits went out among the struggling pioneers and led lives of great self-sacrifice. Their energies were, however, mainly concentrated on the aggrandisement of their schools and conciliation of politicians in cities like Washington. They made sure of power in the great Republic they foresaw. It may be added that the Society was at the same time spreading in Mexico. Restored under Ferdinand, they undertook, as in Spain, to check or destroy the Liberal principles which had taken root in Mexico. For this they were banished in 1821, when the news came of the Liberal triumph in Spain, and did not return to open activity until 1843.
In the Germanic lands, except Belgium, the restored Jesuits had a severe struggle throughout the nineteenth century. Austria and Bavaria refused to publish thebull of restoration or comply with it, to the great mortification of the Jesuits. Metternich, at least, retained the spirit of JosephII., and FerdinandII.was not yet disposed to tempt his subjects by readmitting them. Prussia was, of course, still closed against the Jesuits as Jesuits. The first serious attempt to gain a footing in Germany was made in 1820, when the fathers who had been driven from Russia appeared on the Austrian frontier and humbly asked permission to cross the Emperor's territory. They might "cross," he drily answered; and when they secured the customary intervention of noble dames, he permitted them to go and teach loyalty among his poor subjects in Galicia and his restless subjects in Hungary. He granted funds for this purpose, and they soon had a flourishing Province in Galicia, and a general control of education. Even here they were subject to the bishops, and the imperial decrees intimate that there was much suspicion and hostility. In 1829, Styria and other provinces were opened to them, though the opposition was so violent that at Gratz we find them complaining of having to lodge in some kind of inn, with an actress for neighbour.
FerdinandII.died in 1836, but his successor could do little for them in face of the prevailing hostility. Father Beckx, the future General, was in Vienna at the time. A Jesuit had at last brought a ray of hope into the German camp by converting the Duke and Duchess of Anhalt-Köthen, and Father Beckx was confessor to the Duchess at Vienna—and secret agent of the Society. He writes in 1837 that their enemies are very powerful, and Josephite principles triumphant; the Jesuits have only one public institution in Austria, and are forbidden to teach. Ferdinand, however, was not indisposed to enlist their aid in fighting Liberalism, and they quietly spread in the outlying provinces. The Tyrol was openedto them in 1838, and from their old college at Innspruck they proceeded to capture its schools. We shall see presently how the revolutionary storm of 1848 drove them from their new acquisitions.
In Switzerland the fortunes of the Jesuits were more romantic. During the suppression they continued to live in communities, and carefully concealed the offensive title from the eyes of Protestant citizens. After 1814 they began to induce their lay followers to petition the authorities to sanction their return to life, and the long and bitter struggle over the Society began. The canton of Solothurn was then more than eighty per cent. Catholic, and in 1816 the Grand Council was urged to restore the Society. It refused, and they then made cautious efforts in Valais and Freiburg. I am aware that in all these cases the Jesuits do not appear in connection with the petition; a few influential Catholics appeal for the return, and the Jesuits are depicted as serenely aloof from the negotiations. We are accustomed to pretences of this character. In 1818 the Grand Council of Freiburg (which also was nearly ninety per cent. Catholic) decided by sixty-nine votes to forty-two to readmit the Jesuits and entrust its schools to them. At the same time they recovered their old house at Brigue, and began to spread in Catholic Valais.
From the beginning of the third decade of the nineteenth century the Radicals began their attacks on the growing Jesuits. In 1823 the fathers secured their old college at Freiburg, which they had long coveted. Since their settlement in Freiburg this college had been in the hands of the Franciscan monks, who had adopted the ideas of Pestalozzi, the great Swiss educationist, and were doing admirable work. The bishop complained to the authorities of the friars' innovations, and they were replaced by the Jesuits. The Radicals of thetown were malicious enough to suggest that the Jesuits had intrigued to bring about this result,—of which, of course, there is no proof,—and on the night of 9-10th March they attacked the college, and were with difficulty prevented from burning it. In the following year the Jesuits were expelled from the Netherlands (which formed one Province with Switzerland and Saxony) and came to swell the number of their colleagues in Valais and Freiburg.
In 1836, however, when the second revolutionary wave was passing over Europe, the Radicals won power in the majority of the cantons (including Lucerne, Freiburg, and Solothurn). They were not yet in a position to dislodge the Jesuits, but there was constant friction, and a serious struggle for the federal authority began. The aim of the Radicals was to capture and strengthen the federal government, and expel the Jesuits (and other religions) from the whole of Switzerland. They and the "young Swiss" were part of the international Liberal movement, which was everywhere anti-clerical.[42]In 1844 the struggle became more violent. The Jesuits of Valais refusing to admit government control of their schools, a band of armed Radicals marched upon Sion and had to be defeated by the armed inhabitants. In the same year the Jesuits entered Lucerne for the first time. A wealthy Catholic farmer named Leu threw all his energy into their cause, and the Jesuits aided by sending a preacher occasionally to show, by suave and conciliatory sermons, that the suspicion of them was wholly unfounded. In face of a storm of Protestantand Radical threats the Council decided to admit the Jesuits.
There now spread through the country a struggle of passion which was soon to culminate in a deadly civil war. Leu was murdered, and Catholics and Radicals faced each other with intense hatred. Opinions may differ as to the conduct of the Jesuits in pressing their ministry, since it is clear that the purely political differences would not have stained the hills and valleys of Switzerland with blood. The war that followed was a religious war, and mainly a war over the Jesuits. In the spring of 1845 it was announced that an army of 11,000 Radicals was marching on Lucerne. The Catholic Confederation sent round the fiery cross, and gathered an army sufficiently strong to defeat and scatter the Radicals. It was over the corpses of these opponents that the Jesuits entered Lucerne and began to teach, with passion still seething on every side. A graver struggle impended, and both sides hastily organised. The seven Catholic cantons (to whose enterprise the French Jesuits contributed 98,000 francs) formed a Sonderbund [Separate Alliance], and aimed at setting up a Catholic Republic. The Federal Diet at Berne ordered them to dissolve, and when they refused, pitted the federal army against the Catholic troops. A bloody and disastrous war ended in a victory for the federal troops in 1847, the Sonderbund was destroyed, and the Jesuits (with the other religious orders) were excluded from Switzerland by the Constitution of 1848. The Jesuits had not waited for the troops to enter Freiburg and Lucerne; they had fled to the Tyrol and Austria.
In the Netherlands the story of the Jesuits during the nineteenth century has been one of great prosperity, checked only by a few early reverses. No sooner hadthe Pope issued the bull of restoration, and the French rule been destroyed, than the ex-Jesuits who lingered in the country as secular priests and the Fathers of the Faith (who had at last entered the Society) proceeded to organise their body. A novitiate was opened at Rumbeke and another at Destelbergen, in Belgium. The Congress of Vienna, however, placed the united Netherlands under the control of William of Nassau, and he watched the progress of the Jesuits with uneasiness. The former father of the Faith, the Count de Broglie, was now bishop of Ghent, and he and other prelates and nobles sedulously assisted the Jesuits. The controversies which were bound to arise after the union of Protestant Holland and Catholic Belgium under one crown soon raged furiously, and William, in the summer of 1816, ordered the Jesuits to close their novitiate at Destelbergen. They were forced to retire, but de Broglie encouraged them to resist the King, and lent them his palace for the maintenance of their community. De Broglie himself was afterwards banished for assailing the Constitution, and the fathers were put out of the palace at the point of the bayonet in 1818. As William threatened to expel them from the country, they removed the novitiate to Switzerland, and assumed an appearance of submission. As, however, they continued to stir the Catholics, William ordered the bishops in 1824 to forbid them to give retreats to the clergy, and in the following year he closed two of their residences.
This succinct account will suffice to introduce the Catholic revolution of 1830, in which Belgium won its independence. We are again asked to regard the Jesuits as idle spectators of the fierce Catholic agitation which ended in the rebellion; but, in view of their experience under William, it seems wiser to accept theDutch assurance that they played a large, if secret, part in it. The revolution was just, however, and there were other grounds than religion in the dissatisfaction of the Belgians.[43]From that date Belgium has been a golden land for the Jesuits, and Protestant Holland has suffered them to prosper in peace. After 1830 they literally overran Belgium; they numbered 117 in 1834, and 454 in 1845. After that date came the great revolutionary storm of 1848, and Belgium was almost the one land in which the hunted Jesuits could find refuge. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg was too prudent a Protestant to interfere with them, and from the Belgian frontier they maintained the strength of their struggling colleagues in France. In Holland they were treated with leniency by the successor of William; and, when the storm broke upon their German colleagues in 1872, they were able to receive the refugees and maintain houses on the frontier for the invasion of Germany, as they do to-day.
It is needless to show, in fine, how the restored Jesuits spread again over the foreign missions. After 1830 especially, when their number had increased, they began to regain their lost Provinces. In 1834 six fathers landed at Calcutta to restore the Indian Province, and when the Portuguese missionaries and authorities tried to expel them, they succeeded in getting the protection of the English authorities. Madaura, the richest of their old fields, was restored to them in 1837. Here again the existing missionaries protested so violently that for many years the few Jesuits led a hard and almost fruitless existence. In 1842 some of theJesuit missionaries secured the charge of a native college in Bengal, but the prince was compelled to evict them after a few years. There was an angry feeling and great outcry against them in India well into the middle of the century. In 1854 they received charge of the vicariate of Bombay, in 1858 of Poonah, and in 1859 of Bengal.
China was re-entered, very modestly, in 1841, and the various Republics of South America admitted them whenever the Catholics alternated in power with the Liberals. They entered Argentina in 1836, but were banished again in 1843; they were permitted to settle in Guatemala in 1853, and expelled when the Liberals came to power in 1871. But it would be little more than a calendar of dates to record their appearances and disappearances in the South American States, and on the foreign missions generally. In 1845, of 5000 Jesuits, 518 were missionaries: in 1855 there were 1110 on the missions: in 1884 they counted 2575 on the missions. They no longer presented to the historian the interesting features of their early years; Jesuits no longer flaunted the silk robes of a mandarin or the mythological vesture of a Saniassi, no vast estates or commerce sent gold to their European brethren, no troops of soldiers marched at their command, no quaint rites or rebellions against bishops engaged the Roman Congregations. They had entered the age of prose.