State of the Society — The Seven Years War — Political Changes — Rulers of Spain, Portugal, Naples, France and Austria — Febronius — Sentiments of the Hierarchy — Popes Benedict XIV; Clement XIII; Clement XIV.
State of the Society — The Seven Years War — Political Changes — Rulers of Spain, Portugal, Naples, France and Austria — Febronius — Sentiments of the Hierarchy — Popes Benedict XIV; Clement XIII; Clement XIV.
Just before its suppression, the Society had about 23,000 members. It was divided into forty-two provinces in which there were 24 houses of professed fathers, 669 colleges, 61 novitiates, 335 residences and 273 mission stations. Taking this grand total in detail, there were in Italy 3,622 Jesuits, about one-half of whom were priests. They possessed 178 houses. The provinces of Spain had 2,943 members (1,342 priests) and 158 houses; Portugal, 861 members (384 priests), 49 houses; France, 3,350 members (1,763 priests), 158 houses; Germany, 5,340 members (2,558 priests), 307 houses; Poland, 2,359 members; Flemish Belgium, 542 members (232 priests), 30 houses; French Belgian, 471 members (266 priests), 25 houses; England, 274 members; and Ireland, 28. Their missions were in all parts of the world. In Hindostan, de Nobili, and de Britto's work was being carried on; in Madura, there were forty-seven missionaries. The establishments in Persia extended to Ispahan and counted 400,000 Catholics. Syria, the Levant and the Maronites were also being looked after. Although Christianity had been crushed as early as 1644, the name of the province of Japan was preserved, and in 1760 it counted fifty-seven members. There were fifty-four Portuguese Fathers attached to China at the time of the Suppression, and an independent Frenchmission had been organized at Pekin with twenty-three members mostly priests. In South America, the whole territory had been divided into missions, and there were 445 Jesuits in Brazil, with 146 in the vice-province of Maranhão. The Paraguay province contained 564 members of whom 385 were priests; they had 113,716 Indians in their care. In Mexico, which included Lower California, there were 572 Jesuits, who were devoting themselves to 122,000 Indians. New Granada had 193 missionaries; Chili had 242; Peru, 526; and Ecuador, 209.
In the United States, they were necessarily very few, on account of political conditions. At the time of the Suppression, they numbered only nine, two of whom Robert Molyneux and John Bolton survived until the complete restoration of the Society. The French had missions in Guiana, Hayti and Martinique; and in Canada, the work inaugurated by Brébeuf among the Hurons, was kept up among the Iroquois, Algonquins, Abenakis, Crees, Ottawas, Miamis and other tribes in Illinois, Alabama and Lower Mississippi. At the time of the Suppression there were fifty-five Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana.
This world-wide activity synchronized with the Seven Years War, which was to change the face of the earth politically and religiously. The unscrupulous energy of Lord Clive had, previous to the outbreak of hostilities, given Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and the Carnatic to England. Before war had been proclaimed, Boscawen, who was sent to Canada, had captured two French warships and the feeble protest of France was answered by the seizure of three hundred other vessels, manned by 10,000 seamen and carrying cargoes estimated to be worth 30,000,000 francs. In 1757 Frederick the Great won the battle of Rosbach against the French; and in the same year triumphedover the imperial forces. In 1759 he defeated the Russians, only to meet similar reverses in turn; but in 1760 when all seemed lost, Russia withdrew from the fight and became Frederick's friend. In 1758 France scored some victories in Germany, but in 1762 was completely crushed and consented to what a French historian describes as "a shameful peace." Quebec fell in 1759, and Vaudreuil capitulated at Montreal in 1760.
Peace was finally made by the treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg in 1763, in virtue of which, France surrendered all her conquests of German territory as well as the Island of Minorca. In North America, she gave up Canada with its 60,000 French inhabitants. She also lost the River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, the valley of the Ohio, the left bank of the Mississippi, four islands in the West Indies, and her African trading-post of Senegal. In return, she received the Islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie-Galande, Désirade and St. Lucia. In Asia, she was granted Pondicherry, Chandernagor and other places, but was prohibited from fortifying them. Spain yielded Florida and Pensacola Bay to England, in order to recover Cuba and the Philippines; and after a while, France made her a present of Louisiana. Thus, New France was completely effaced from the map of America; and France proper, while losing almost all her other colonial possessions, saw her maritime power, her military prestige and her political importance disappear. She was now only in the second grade among the nations. On the same level stood Spain, while Portugal had long since ceased to count. Austria had declined and Protestant England and Prussia ruled, while schismatic Russia was looming up in the North.
In Spain, Charles III had succeeded to the throne in 1759. He had previously been King of Naples,where he had reigned not without honor. It is true he made the mistake of accepting Choiseul's "Family Compact" which united the fortunes of Spain with those of the degenerate Bourbons, but he is nevertheless credited with being paternal in his administrations and virtuous in his private life. Unfortunately while in Naples, he had chosen as his minister of finance, the Marquis de Tanucci, a Tuscan who had at an early stage inaugurated a contest with the Holy See on the right of asylum. "But one seeks in vain anything on which to build the exalted reputation which Tanucci enjoyed during life and which clung to him even after death. His financial system was false; for instead of encouraging the arts, perfecting agriculture, building roads, opening canals, establishing manufactures in the fertile country over which he ruled, he did nothing but make it bristle with custom-houses. Men of science, jurists, archæologists, literary and other distinguished men, he left in prison or allowed to starve" (Biographie universelle).
Tanucci's moral character may be inferred from the fact that when entrusted with the regency at Naples, he purposely neglected the education of the crown prince, keeping him aloof from political life, and giving him every opportunity to indulge his passions. He declared war against the Holy See; he restricted the ancient rights of the nuncios; diminished the number of bishoprics; suppressed seventy-eight monasteries; named one of his henchmen Archbishop of Naples, and forbade a ceremonial homage to be paid to the Pope which had been in use ever since the time of Charles of Anjou. He governed the Two Sicilies for fifty years and took with him to the grave the execration of the nobles and the hatred of the people of the Two Kingdoms. Duclos said of him "he was of all the men I ever knew the least fitted to govern."
The Spanish ministers were very numerous and very bad. There was Wall, whom Schoell described as Irish, whereas Ranke deprives him of that distinction by classing him among the political atheists of that time. Of Squillace, little is said except that he was a Neapolitan and probably belonged to one of the branches of the Borgia family. He is the individual whose legislation caused a burlesque disturbance in Madrid about cloaks and sombreros. The Jesuits were falsely accused of being the instigators of the riot and suffered for it in consequence. Finally, after many changes, there came the saturnine and self-sufficient Aranda, "who," says Schoell, "sniffed with pleasure the incense which the French Encyclopedists burned on his altar, and whose greatest glory was to be rated as one of the enemies of the altar and the throne." A former minister of Ferdinand V with the ominous title of the Duke of Alva was his intimate and shared his many schemes in fomenting anti-Jesuitism. Aranda is described as follows, by the Marquis de Langle in his "Voyage en Espagne" (I, 27): "He is the only Spaniard of our time whose name posterity can inscribe on its tablets. He is the man who wanted to cut in the façade of every temple and unite on the same shield the names of Luther, Calvin, Mahomet, William Penn and Jesus Christ; and to proclaim from the frontiers of Navarre to the straits of Cadiz, that Torquemada, Ferdinand and Isabella were blasphemers. He sold altar-furniture, crucifixes and candelabra for bridges, wine-shops and public roads."
In France, conditions were still worse. During a reign of fifty-six years, Louis XV trampled on all the decencies of public and private life. He was the degraded slave of Pompadour, a woman who dictated his policies, named his ministers, appointed his ambassadors, made at least one of his cardinals, and evendirected his armies. Her power was so great that the Empress of Austria felt compelled to address her as "ma bonne amie." She was succeeded by du Barry who was taken from a house of debauch. The coarseness of this creature deprived her of much of the power possessed by her predecessor, except that Louis was her slave. It was Pompadour who brought Choiseul out of obscurity to reward him for revealing a plot to make one of his own cousins supplant her in her relations to the king. For that, he was made ambassador to Rome in 1754, where during the last illness of Benedict XIV, he was planning with other ambassadors to interpose the royal vetos in the election of Benedict's successor. Before that event, however, he was sent to Vienna, from which post, he rose successively until he had France completely in his grasp. The "Family Compact" or union of all the Bourbon princes, which was a potent instrument in the war against the Jesuits, was his conception. He was a friend of La Chalotais, one of the arch-enemies of the Society, and was an intimate of Voltaire, whose property at Ferney he exempted from taxation. The spirit of his religious policy consisted in what was then called "an enlightened despotism," or a systematic hatred of everything Christian.
Crétineau-Joly describes him as follows: "He was the ideal gentleman of the eighteenth century. He was controlled by its unbelief, its airs, its vanity, its nobility, its dissoluteness, insolence, courage, and by a levity which would have sacrificed the peace of Europe for an epigram. He was all for show; settling questions which he had merely skimmed over and sniffing the incense offered to him by the Encyclopedists, but shuddering at the thought that they might fancy themselves his teachers. He would admit no master either on the throne or below it. His life's ambitionwas to govern France and to apply to that sick nation the remedies he had dreamed would restore her to health. He could not do so except by winning public opinion, and for that purpose, he flattered the philosophers, captured the parliament, cringed to Madame de Pompadour and made things pleasant for the king. When he had gathered everyone on his side, he set himself to hunting the Jesuits."
On the throne of Portugal sat Joseph I, of whom, Father Weld in his "Suppression of the Society of Jesus" (p. 91) writes: "Joseph I united all those points of character which were calculated to make him a tool in the hands of a man who had the audacity to assume the command and astuteness to represent himself as a most humble and faithful servant. Timid and weak, like Louis XV, he was easily filled with fear for the safety of his own person, and, to a degree never reached by the French king, was incapable of exerting his own will when advised by any one who had succeeded in gaining his confidence. To this mental weakness, he also added the lamentable failing of being a slave to his own voluptuous passions. It required but little insight into human nature to see that a terrible scourge was in store for Portugal. To the evils of misrule, it pleased God to add other terrible calamities which overwhelmed the country in misery that cannot be described. The licentious habits of his father, John V had already impaired the national standard of morals. The nobility had ceased to visit their estates and had degenerated into a race of mere courtiers. The interests of the common people were neglected by the Government, and almost their only friends were the religious orders." (The Catholic Encyclopedia, XII, 304).
The real master of Portugal in those days was Don Sebastioa José Carvalho, better known as Pombal —the gigantic ex-soldier who, despite his herculean strength and reckless daring, was ignored when there was question of promotion. He left the army in disgust, and by the influence of the queen, Maria of Austria, and that of his uncle, the court chaplain, was sent as ambassador to London and then to Vienna. In both places he was a disastrous failure, probably on account of his brutal manners. Returning to Lisbon, he paid the most obsequious attention to churchmen, especially to the king's confessor, the Jesuit Carbone, who kept continually recommending him until John V bade him never to mention Carvalho's name. To the Marquis of Valenza, who also urged Carvalho's promotion, John said: "that man has hairs in his heart and he comes from a cruel and vindictive family." At the death of John and the retirement of the aged Motta, the former prime minister, the queen regent, who was fond of Carvalho's Austrian wife made Pombal prime minister: and Moreira, another Jesuit confessor, was insistent in proclaiming his wonderful ability. Never was departure from the principles and rules of the religious state by meddling with things outside the sphere of duty so terribly punished. Father Weld, however, when speaking of Moreira, who was a prisoner in Jonquiera, has a note which says that "Moreira protested to the end that he had never uttered a word in favor of Carvalho."
No sooner was Carvalho in power than the violence of his character began to display itself in the sanguinary measures he employed to suppress the brigandage that was rife in the country and even in the capital itself. The nobility, especially, were marked out for punishment; and when public criticism began to be heard, he issued furious edicts against the calumniators of the administration. He suppressed with terrible severity a rising at Porto against a wine-companywhich he had established there, and began a series of attacks on the most eminent personages of the kingdom. He dismissed in disgrace the minister of the navy, Diego de Mendoza; and de la Cerda, the ambassador to France; as well as John de Braganza, the Marquis of Marialva and many others. He gave the highest positions, ecclesiastical and political, to his relatives; forced the king to sign edicts without reading them, some of which made criticism of the government high treason, and he extended their application even to the ordinances of his minister; he silenced the preachers who spoke of public disasters as punishment of God; and forbade them to publish anything without his approbation. Though he reorganized the navy, he left the army a wreck, lest the nobles might control it. There was no public press in Portugal during his administration, and the mails were distributed only once a week. He encouraged commerce and organized public works, but always to enrich himself and his family. He flung thousands into prison without even the pretence of a trial, and at his downfall in 1782 says the "Encyclopédie catholique," "out of the subterraneous dungeons there issued eight hundred of his victims, the remnants of the nine thousand who had survived their entombment; and a government order was issued declaring that none of the victims living or dead had been guilty of the crimes imputed to them." This was the man who was declared by the Philosophers of the eighteenth century to be "the illuminator of his nation."
Nor was there much comfort to be hoped for in Austria. Maria Theresa was undoubtedly pious, kind hearted and devoted to her people, but as ruler is very much overrated. Her advisers were commonly the men who were plotting the ruin of all existing governments — Jansenists and Freethinkers. Even her courtphysicians were close allies of the schismatical Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, and they made liberal and constant use of the great esteem they enjoyed at Vienna to foment hostility to the Holy See. They even succeeded in persuading the empress, though they were only laymen, to appoint a commission for the reform of theological teaching in the seminaries; and one of their friends, de Stock, was appointed to direct the work. The Jesuits were removed from the professorships of divinity and canon law; lay professors were appointed in their stead by the politicians, in spite of the protests of the bishops; and books were published in direct opposition to orthodox teaching. At this time appeared the famous treatise known as "Febronius" by Hontheim, a suffragan bishop of Treves, who thus prepared for the coming of Joseph II. The universities were quickly infected with his doctrines; and new schools were established at Bonn and Münster out of the money of suppressed convents in order to accelerate the spread of the poison. When the University of Cologne protested, it was punished for its temerity.
It goes without saying that if Maria Theresa, with her strong Catholic instincts, was so easy to control, it was not difficult for the statesmen who governed France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to carry out their nefarious schemes against the Church. The Free-masons were hard at work, and immoral and atheistic literature was spread broadcast. It had already made ravages among the aristocracy and the middle classes, and now the grades below were being deeply gangrened. Cardinal Pacca writing about a period immediately subsequent to this, says: "In the time of my two nunciatures at Cologne and Lisbon, I had occasion to become acquainted with the greater part of the Frenchémigrés, and I regret to say that, with the exceptionof a few gentlemen from the Provinces, they all made open profession of the philosophical maxims which had brought about the catastrophe of which they were the first victims. They admitted, at times, in their lucid moments, that the overturning of the altar had dragged down the throne; and that it was the pretended intellectuality of the Freethinkers that had introduced into the minds of the people the new ideas of liberty and equality, which had such fatal consequence for them. Nevertheless, they persisted in their errors and even endeavored to spread them both orally and by the most abominable publications. God grant that these seeds of impiety, flung broadcast on a still virgin soil, may not produce more bitter and more poisonous fruit for the Church and the Portuguese monarchy." The editor of the "Memoirs" adds in a note: "They have only too well succeeded in producing the fruit."
"I remember," continues Pacca, "that during my nunciature at Cologne, some of these distinguished "emigrés" determined to have a funeral service for Marie Antoinette, not out of any religious sentiment, but merely to conform to the fashion followed in the courts of Europe. I was invited and was present. The priest who sang the Mass preached the eulogy of the dead queen. In his discourse which did not lack either eloquence or solidity, he enumerated the causes of the French Revolution, and instanced chiefly the irreligious doctrines taught by the philosophy of the period. This undeniable proposition evoked loud murmurs of discontent in the congregation, which was almost exclusively composed of Frenchmen; and when the orator said that Marie Antoinette was one of the first victims of modern philosophy, a voice was heard far down in the church crying out in the most insulting fashion: 'That's not true.'" When laymen who professed to be Catholics were so blind to patent factsand would dare to conduct themselves so disgracefully in a church at a funeral service for their murdered queen, there was no hope of appealing to them to stand up for truth and justice in the political world.
The hierarchy throughout the Church was devoted to the Society, but it could only protest. And hence as soon as the first signs appeared of the determination to destroy the Order, letters and appeals, full of tender affection and of unstinted praise for the victims, poured into Rome from bishops all over the world. There were at least two hundred sent to Clement XIII, but many of them were either lost or purposely destroyed, as soon as the great Pontiff breathed his last. Father Lagomarsni found many of them which he intended to publish but, for one reason or another, did not do so.
Some of these papers, however have been reproduced by de Ravignan, in his "Clément XIII et Clément XIV." They fill more than a hundred pages of his second volume, and he chose only those that came from the most important sees in the Church, such as the three German Archbishoprics of Treves, Cologne and Mayence, whose prelates were prince electors of the empire. There are also appeals from Cardinal Lamberg the Prince-Bishop of Passau, from the Primate of Germany, the Archbishop of Salzburg, the Primates of Bohemia, of Hungary, and of Ireland. The Archbishop of Armagh says "he lived with the Jesuits from childhood, and loved and admired them." There are letters from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin; the Archbishops of Messina, Monreale, Sorrento, Seville, Compostella, Tarragona, and even from the far north, — from Norway and Denmark, where the vicar-Apostolic begs the Pope to save those distant countries from the ruin which will certainly fall on them if the Jesuits are withdrawn. They are alldated between the years 1758 and 1760. The Polish Bishop of Kiew begs the Pope to stand "like a wall of brass" against the enemies of the Society, which he calls areligiosissimus cætus. For the Bishops of Lombez, it is thedilectissima Societas Jesu, quæ concussa, confugit in sinum nostrum— "the most beloved Society of Jesus which, when struck, rushed to our arms." The Bishop of Narbonne declares: "It is known and admitted through all the world that the Society of Jesus, which is worthy of all respect, has never ceased to render services to the Church in every part of the world. There never was an order whose sons have fulfilled the duties of the sacred ministry with more burning, pure and intelligent zeal. Nothing could check their zeal; and the most furious storm only displayed the constancy and solidity of their virtue." Du Guesclin denounces the persecution as "atrocious; the like of which was never heard of before." "I omit," says the Archbishop of Auch, "an infinite number of things which redound to their praise." The Bishop of Malaga recalls how Clement VIII described them as "the right arm of the Holy See." The Archbishop of Salzburg bitterly resents "the calumnious and defamatory charges against them." And, so, in each one of these communications to the Holy Father, there is nothing but praise for the victims and indignant denunciations of their executioners.
The three Pontiffs who occupied the Chair of St. Peter at that period were Benedict XIV, Clement XIII and Clement XIV. Benedict died on May 3, 1758, eighteen days before Father Ricci was elected General. Clement XIII was the ardent defender of the Society during the ten stormy years of his pontificate; and finally Clement XIV yielded to the enemy and put his name to the Brief which legislated the Order out of existence.
Perhaps there never was a Pope who enjoyed such universal popularity as the brilliant Benedict XIV. His attractive personality, his great ability as a writer, his readiness to go to all lengths in the way of concession, elicited praise even from heretics, Turks and unbelievers. As regards his attitude to the Society, there can be no possible doubt that he entertained for it not only admiration, but great affection. He had been a pupil in its schools, and had always shown its members the greatest honor. He defended it against its enemies, and lavished praise again and again on the Institute. It is true that he re-affirmed the Bulls of his predecessor condemning the Malabar and Chinese Rites, but he denied indignantly that he was thereby explicitly condemning the Jesuits. It is also true that he appointed Saldanha, at the request of Pombal, to investigate the Jesuit houses in Portugal; but in the first place, that permission was wrung from him when he was a dying man; and there is no doubt whatever that in doing so, he was convinced that the concession would propitiate Pombal and not injure the Jesuits, whose conduct he knew to be without reproach. Moreover, he had put as a proviso in the Brief that Saldanha who, though the Pope was unaware of it, was an agent of Pombal, should not publish any grievous charge if any such were to be formulated, but should refer it to Rome for judgment. Finally, as the Brief was signed on April 1, 1758, and as the Pope died on May 3, Saldanha's powers ceased. That however, did not trouble him and he did everything that Pombal bade him to do, to defame and destroy the Society. He was not Benedict's agent.
Far from being prejudiced against the Society, Benedict XIV did nothing but bestow praise on it during all his long pontificate. In 1746 in the Bull"Devotam," he says that "it has rendered the greatest services to the Church and has ever been governed with as much success as prudence." In 1748 the "Præclairs" declared that "these Religious are everywhere regarded as the good odor of Jesus Christ, and are so in effect," and, in the same year, the Bull "Constantem" affirmed that "they give to the world examples of religious virtue and profound science." Benedict died in the arms of the Jesuit, Father Pepe, his confessor and friend.
Clement XIII, whose name was Carlo della Torre Rezzonico, was born at Venice, March 7, 1693; after studying with the Jesuits at Bologna, he was appointed referendary of the tribunal known as the Segnatura di Giustizia, and later became Governor of Rieti, cardinal-deacon and in 1743 Bishop of Padua. He was called a saint by his people; in spite of the vast revenues of his diocese, he was always in want for he gave everything to the poor, even the shirt on his back. On July 5, 1758, he was elected Pope to succeed Benedict XIV. The first shock he received as head of the Church was in 1758 from Pombal, who insulted him by sending back an extremely courteous letter which the Pontiff had written in answer to a demand for leave to punish three Jesuits who happened to know a nobleman against whom a charge had been lodged of attempting to assassinate the king. Pombal followed up the outrage by flinging all the exiled Jesuits on the Papal States; and then, in 1760, by dismissing the Papal ambassador from Lisbon. In 1761 Pope Clement wrote to Louis XV of France, imploring him to stop the proceedings against the Jesuits: in 1762 he protested against the proposed suppression of the Society in France; and in 1764 he denounced the government programme which he declared was an assault upon the Church itself.
Spain was guilty of the next outrage when, in 1767, Charles III imitated Pombal by expelling the Jesuits and deporting them to Civita Vecchia: and then refusing to answer a letter of the Pope who asked for an explanation of the proceeding. Naples and Parma insulted him in a similar fashion. And to add injury to outrage, the Bourbon coalition seized the Papal possessions of Avignon and Venaissin in France, and Benevento and Montecorvo in Italy. Finally, when Spain, France and Naples sent him a joint note demanding the universal suppression of the Society, he died of grief on February 3, 1769. He was then seventy-five years old, and had governed the Church for ten years, six months and twenty-six days. Canova, one of the last of the Jesuit pupils, built his monument, putting at the feet of the Pontiff two lions — one asleep, the other erect and ready for the combat. It was a representation in the mind of the sculptor portraying the meekness of Clement, combined with an indomitable courage which defied the kings of Europe who were attacking the Church.
De Ravignan says of him: "Not because I am a Jesuit, but independently of that affiliation, I regard Clement XIII as endowed with the most genuine traits of grandeur and glory that ever shone in the most illustrious popes. He brings back to me the lineaments of Innocent III, of Gregory VII, of Pius V, of Clement XI. Like them he had to fight; like them he had to face the powers of earth in league against the Church; like them he knew how to unite the most inflexible firmness with the most patient moderation. Alone, as it were, in the midst of a Christendom that was conspiring against the Chair of Peter, he suffered and moaned, but he fought. He was not a politician; he was a Pope. As a worthy successor of St. Peter, he stood solidly on the indestructible rock. Alwaysin the presence of God and his duty, when every earthly interest and when the most appealing entreaties seemed to suggest to him to be silent and to yield basely, he heard within his soul the strong voice of the Church, which can never relinquish the rights with which heaven has invested it; and neither threats, nor outrages, nor spoliations nor sacrilegious assaults availed to bend his resolution to resist, or induced him to display any suspicion of feebleness for a single instant. Until he died, Clement fulfilled the august mission of a Supreme Pontiff. He fought for the Church though it cost him his life. His death was really that of a martyr."
The successor of Clement XIII was not so heroic. He was Lorenzo or Giovanni Antonio Ganganelli. He was born at Sant' Archangelo near Rimini on October 31, 1705; and received his education from the Jesuits at Rimini and from the Piarists at Urbano. At the age of nineteen, he entered the order of the Minor Conventuals, and changed his baptismal name of Giovanni to Lorenzo. His talents and virtue raised him to the dignity of definitor generalis of his order in 1741. Benedict XIV made him consultor of the Holy Office, and Clement XIII gave him the cardinal's hat at the instance, it is said, of Father Ricci, the General of the Jesuits. On May 18, 1769, he was elected Pope by 46 out of 47 votes. By eliminating a great number of possible cardinals, the veto power of the Catholic kings had restricted the choice of a Pope to four out of the forty-seven in the Sacred College. In the beginning of his career, Ganganelli was extremely favorable to the Jesuits: but when he was made a cardinal, a change of disposition manifested itself, although in giving him the honor, Clement XIII had said that he was "a Jesuit in the disguise of a Franciscan." Once on the Papal throne, he refused evenFather Ricci an audience, possibly through fear of the Great Powers; for, before Clement's accession the work of the destruction had already begun, and the new Pope found himself in the centre of a whirlwind. It was now clear that the Society could never weather the storm.
Early life — Ambitions — Portuguese Missions — Seizure of the Spanish Reductions. Expulsion of the Missionaries — End of the Missions in Brazil — War against the Society in Portugal — The Jesuit Republic — Cardinal Saldanha — Seizure of Churches and Colleges — The Assassination Plot — The Prisons — Exiles — Execution of Malagrida.
Early life — Ambitions — Portuguese Missions — Seizure of the Spanish Reductions. Expulsion of the Missionaries — End of the Missions in Brazil — War against the Society in Portugal — The Jesuit Republic — Cardinal Saldanha — Seizure of Churches and Colleges — The Assassination Plot — The Prisons — Exiles — Execution of Malagrida.
The first conspirator who set to work to carry out the plot to destroy the Society, which had long been planned by the powers, was, as might be expected, the ruthless Pombal. He was more shameless and savage than his associates and would adopt any method to accomplish his purpose. The insensate fury which possessed his whole being against the Society is explained by Cardinal Pacca, who was Papal nuncio in Lisbon shortly after Pombal's fall (Notizie sul Portogallo, 10). He writes: "Pombal began his diplomatic career in Germany where he probably drank in those principles of aversion to the Holy See and the religious orders, which, when afterwards put in practice, merited for him from the irreligious philosophers the title of a great minister, and an illuminator of his nation; from good people, however, that of a vile instrument of the sects at war with the Church. Having obtained the office of prime minister, he made himself master of the mind of the king, Don Joseph; and for a quarter of a century governed the kingdom as a despot.
"To wage war against the Holy See, and to oppress the clergy, he adopted the measures and employed the arms which, in the hands of the irreligious men ofour time, have done and are still doing harm and inflicting grievous wounds on the Church. He corrupted and perverted public education in the schools and universities, especially in Coimbra which soon became a centre of moral pestilence. He took from the hands of the youth of the kingdom the sound doctrinal works which they had so far been made to study; and substituted schismatical and heretical publications such as Dupin's 'De antiqua ecclesia' which had been condemned by Innocent XII; and Hontheim's 'Febronius' condemned by Clement XIII. He also brought into Portugal the works of the régalists, and excluded those writers who maintained the rights and authority of the Holy See, in defence of which he would not allow a word to be uttered. And to the horror of all decent people, he imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon a holy and venerable bishop who had warned his flock against those pernicious publications. Meantime the notorious Oratorian Pereira, who was condemned by the Index, and others who flattered him were remunerated for their writings and could print whatever they liked. He was a Jansenist who, in the perfidious fashion of the sect, exalted the authority of the bishops in order to diminish that of the Pope; and enlarged the authority of kings in church matters to such an extent that the system differed very little from that of the Protestant Anglican Church. Queen Marìa, who succeeded Joseph on the throne, did much to improve conditions; but did not undo all the harm that Pombal had already inflicted on the nation. Disguised Anglicanism continued to exist in Portugal."
Father Weld adds his own judgment to that of the cardinal, and tells us that "the bias in Pombal's nature may be traced to his English associations when he was ambassador in London." He advances this view, probably because of a note of Pacca's, who saysthat he could venture no opinion about the influence of England on Pombal, merely for want of documents on that point. The author of the "Memoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique du xviiiesiècle" assures us that Pombal's purpose was to extend his reforms even into the bosom of the Church; to change, to destroy; to subject the bishops to his will; to declare himself an enemy of the Holy See; to protect authors hostile to the Holy See; to encourage publications savoring of novelty; to favor in Portugal a theological instruction quite different from what had been adopted previous to his time; and finally to open the way to a pernicious teaching in a country which until then had enjoyed religious peace.
This scheme did not restrict itself to a religious propaganda but got into the domain of politics; for the author of the "Vita di Pombal" (I, 145) notes the report, which is confirmed by the "Memoria Catholica secunda" that "Pombal had formed the design of marrying the Princess Marìa to the Duke of Cumberland, the butcher of Culloden — but that this was thwarted by the Jesuit confessor of the king." On this point the Maréchal de Belle Isle writes (Testament politique, 108): "It is known that the Duke of Cumberland looked forward to becoming King of Portugal, and I doubt not he would have succeeded, if the Jesuit confessors of the royal family had not been opposed to it. This crime was never forgiven the Portuguese Jesuits."
Whatever the truth may be about these royal schemes, Pombal soon found his chance to wreak his vengeance on the Society for balking his plans of making Portugal a Protestant country. A scatter-brained individual, named Pereira, who lived at Rio Janerio, raised the cry which may have been suggested to him, that the Jesuits of the Reductions excluded whiteintercourse with the natives because of the valuable gold mines they possessed; and that it would be a proper and, indeed, a most commendable thing in the interests of religion for the government to seize this source of wealth, and thus compel the Jesuits who controlled that territory to live up to the holiness of their profession. It was also added that the missions were little else than a great commercial speculation; and finally that the ultimate design of the Society was to make a Republic of Paraguay, independent of the mother country.
These three charges had been reiterated over and over again ever since the foundation of the Reductions, and had been just as often refuted and officially denied after the most vigorous investigation. But there was a man now in control of Portugal who would not be biased by any religious sentiment or regard for truth, if he could injure the Society. The first step was to transfer the aforesaid missions to Portuguese control. They all lay on the east shore of the Uruguay, and belonged to Spain. Hence, in 1750, a treaty was made between Spain and Portugal, to concede to Spain the undisputed control of the rich colony of San Sacramento, at the mouth of the River La Plata, in exchange for the territory, in which lay the seven Reductions of St. Michael, St. Lawrence, St. Aloysius, St. John, St. Francis Borgia, Holy Angels and St. Nicholas. According to the treaty, it was stipulated that the Portuguese should take immediate possession and fling out into the world, they did not care where, the 30,000 Indians who had built villages in the country, and were peacefully cultivating their farms, and who by the uprightness and purity of their lives were giving to the world and to all times an example of what Muratori calls aCristianesimo felice.
To add to the brutality of the act, the Fathers themselves were ordered to announce to the Indians the order to vacate. Representations were made by the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, the Royal Audiencia of Charcas and various civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Spain that not only was this seizure a most atrocious violation of justice which could not be carried out except by bloodshed, no one could say to what extent, but that it was giving up the property of the Indians to their bitterest enemies, the Portuguese. For it was precisely to avoid the Mamelukes of Brazil that the Reductions had been originally created. Moreover, it would almost compel the Indians to conclude that the Fathers had betrayed them, and that they were not only parties to, but instigators of, the whole scheme of spoliation. Southey, in his "History of Brazil," denounces it as "one of the most tyrannical commands that were ever issued, in the recklessness of unfeeling power," and says that "the weak Ferdinand VI had no idea of the importance of the treaty."
The Jesuits appealed; but they were, of course, unheeded; and the Father General Visconti ordered them to submit without a murmur. Unfortunately, the commissioner Father Altamirano, whom he sent out was a bad choice. He was hot-headed and imperious; and according to Father Huonder (The Catholic Encyclopedia) actually treated his fellow Jesuits as rebels, when they advised him to proceed with moderation. Perhaps the fact that he was the representative of the king, as well as of the General, affected him; at all events the Indians would have killed him if he had not fled. Ten years would not have sufficed for a transfer of such a vast multitude with their women and children, and the old and infirm, not to speak of the herds and flocks and farmingimplements and household furniture, yet they were ordered to decamp within thirty days. Pombal would soon treat his Jesuit fellow countrymen as he had treated the Indians.
When, at last, the cruel edict was published, all the savage instincts of the Indians awoke, and it seemed for a time as if the missionaries would be massacred. It speaks well for the solid Christian training that had been given to these children of the forest that they at last consented to consider the matter at all. Some of the caciques were actually won over to the advisability of the measure, and started out with several hundred exiles to find a new home in the wilderness. A number of the children and the sick succumbed on the way. When, at last they found a place in the mountains of Quanai, they were attacked by hostile tribes. They resisted for a while, but finally returned in despair to their former abode. To make matters worse, the Bishop of Paraguay notified the Fathers that if they did not obey, they would beipso factosuspended. "Whereas," says Weld, "if the Fathers really wished to oppose the government, a single sign from them would have sent an army of fifty thousand men to resist the Europeans; but owing to their fidelity and incredible exertions, there were never as many as seven hundred men in the field against the united armies of Spain and Portugal when hostilities at last broke out."
During the year 1754, the Indians harassed the enemy by the skirmishes and won many a victory; and they would have ultimately triumphed if they had had a leader. At last in 1755, the combined forces of the enemy with thirty pieces of artillery attacked them with the result that might have been expected. The natives rushed frantically on their foes; but the musketry and cannon stretched four hundred of them in their blood; and the rest either fled to the mountainsor relapsed into savage life; or made their submission to the government, many becoming as bad as their kindred in the forests because of the corruption they saw around them. The Portuguese entered into possession of the seven Reductions, but failed to find any gold. So great was their chagrin that, in 1761, Carvalho wanted the rich territory which he had given to Spain returned to Portugal; and when Spain naturally demurred, he prepared to go to war for it. He finally gained his point, and on February 12, 1761, the territories were restored to their original owners, but nothing was stipulated, about restitution to the unfortunate natives and Jesuits who had been the victims of this shameful political deal.
Some of the Indians who fled to the forests kept up a guerilla warfare against the invaders; but the greater number followed the advice of the Fathers and settled on the Paraná and on the right bank of the Uruguay. In 1762 there were 2,497 families scattered through seventeen Reductions ordoctrinas, as they had begun to be called, a term that is equivalent to "parish." But the expulsion of the Fathers which followed soon after completed the ruin of this glorious work. The Indians died or became savage again; and today only beautiful ruins mark the place where this great commonwealth once stood. At the time of the Suppression, or rather when Pombal drove the Jesuits out of every Portuguese post into the dungeons of Portugal or flung them into the Papal States, the Paraguay province had five hundred and sixty-four members, twelve colleges, one university, three houses for spiritual retreats, two residences, fifty-seven Reductions and 113,716 Christian Indians. The leave-taking of the Fathers and Indians was heart-rending on both sides.
It is a long distance from the River La Plata to the Amazon; for there are about thirty-five degrees oflatitude between the two places. But they were not too far apart to check Carvalho in his work of destruction. After having done all he could for the moment at one end of Brazil, he addressed himself to the Jesuit missions at the other. A glance at the past history of these establishments will reveal the frightful injustice of the brutal acts of 1754.
One hundred years before that time, Vieira had made his memorable fight against his Portuguese fellow-countrymen for the liberation of the Indians from slavery. By so doing, he had, of course, aroused the fury of the whites, and they determined to crush him. They put him in prison; and in 1660 sent him and his companions to Portugal, in a crazy ship to be tried for disturbing the peace of the colony. Nevertheless, he won the fight, although meantime three Jesuits had been killed by the Indians, and their companions expelled from the colony, in spite of the king's protection. In this act, however, the Portuguese had gone too far. His majesty saw the truth and sent the missionaries back. That was as early as 1680. In 1725 new complaints were sent to Portugal, but the supreme governor of the Maranhão district wrote, as follows, to the king: "The Fathers of the Society in this State of Maranhão are objects of enmity and have always been hated, for no other reason than for their strenuous defence of the liberty of the unfortunate Indians, and also because they used all their power to oppose the tyrannical oppression of those who would reduce to a degraded and unjust slavery men whom nature had made free. The Fathers take every possible care that the laws of your majesty on this point shall be most exactly observed. They devote themselves entirely to the promotion of the salvation of souls and the increase of the possessions of your majesty; and have addedmany sons to the Church and subjects to the crown from among these barbarous nations."
With regard to their alleged commerce, the governor says: "Whatever has been charged against the Fathers by wicked calumniators who, through hatred and envy, manufacture ridiculous lies about the wealth they derive from those missions, I solemnly declare to your majesty, and I speak of a matter with which I am thoroughly acquainted, that the Fathers of the Society are the only true missionaries of these regions. Whatever they receive from their labors among the Indians is applied to the good of the Indians themselves and to the decency and ornamentation of the churches, which, in these missions, are always very neat and very beautiful. Nothing whatever that is required in the missions is kept for themselves. As they have nothing of their own, whatever each missionary sends is delivered to the procurator of the mission, and every penny of it reverts to the use of the particular mission from whence it came. Missioners of other orders send quite as much produce, but each one keeps his own portion separate, to be used as he likes, so that the quantity however great being thus divided, does not make much impression on those who see it. But as the missionaries of the Society send everything together to the procurator, the quantity, when seen in bulk, excites the cupidity of the malevolent and envious."
About 1739, Eduardo dos Santos was sent by John V as a special commissioner to Maranhão. After spending twenty months in visiting every mission and examining every detail he wrote as follows: "The execrable barbarity with which the Indians are reduced to slavery has become such a matter of custom that it is rather looked on as a virtue. All that is adduced against this inhuman custom is received with such repugnanceand so quickly forgotten that the Fathers of the Society in whose charity these unfortunate creatures often find refuge and protection, and who take compassion on their miserable lot, become, for this very reason, objects of hatred to these avaricious men."
Such were the official verdicts of the conduct of the Jesuits on the Amazon a few years before Pombal came into power. But in 1753 regardless of all this he sent out his brother Francis Xavier Mendoza, a particularly worthless individual, and made him Governor of Gran Para and Maranhão, giving him a great squadron of ships and a considerable body of troops with orders to humble the Jesuits and send back to Portugal any of them who opposed his will. Everything was done to create opposition. They were forbidden to speak or to preach to the Indians except in Portuguese; the soldiers were quartered in the Jesuit settlements, and were instructed to treat the natives with especial violence and brutality.
In 1754 a council was held in Lisbon to settle the question about expelling the Society from the missions of Maranhão. The order was held up temporarily by the queen; but when she died, a despatch was sent in June 1755 ordering their immediate withdrawal from all "temporal and civil government of the missions." The instructions stated that it was "in order that God might be better served." Unfortunately the bishop of the place co-operated with Carvalho in everything that was proposed. He suppressed one of the colleges, restricted the number of Fathers in the others, to twelve, and sent the rest back to Portugal; and in order to excite the settlers against the Society, he had the Bull of Benedict XIV which condemned Indian slavery read from the pulpits, proclaiming that it had been inspired by the Jesuits. Meantime, in the reports home, the insignificant Indian villages wherethey labored were magnified into splendid cities and towns all owned by the Society; two pieces of cannon which had never fired a ball were described as a whole park of artillery, and a riot among the troops was set down as a rebellion excited by the Jesuits.
The first three Fathers to be banished from Brazil were José, Hundertpfund and da Cruz. José was a royal appointee sent out to determine the boundary line between the Spanish and Portuguese American possessions. But that did not trouble Pombal; nor did the German nationality of Hundertpfund, nor did he deign to state the precise nature of their offenses. A fourth victim named Ballister had had the bad taste to preach on the text: "Make for yourself friends of the Mammon of iniquity." He was forthwith accused of attacking one of Carvalho's commercial enterprises, and promptly ordered out of the country. Again, when some mercantile rivals sent a petition to the king against Carvalho's monopolies, Father Fonseca was charged with prompting it, and he was outlawed though absolutely innocent. And so it went on. Carvalho's brother was instructed to invent any kind of an excuse to increase the number of these expatriations.
While these outrages were being perpetrated in the colonies, Lisbon's historic earthquake of 1755 occurred. The city was literally laid in ruins. Thousands of people were instantly killed; and while other thousands lay struggling in the ruins, the rising flood of the Tagus and a deluge of rain completed the disaster. Singularly enough, Carvalho's house escaped the general wreck; and the foolish king considered that exception to be a Divine intervention in behalf of his great minister, and possibly, on that account, left him unchecked in the fury which even the awful calamity which had fallen on his country did not atall moderate. The Jesuits were praised by both king and patriarch for their heroic devotion both during and after the great disaster, but those commendations only infuriated Pombal the more. When one of the Fathers, the holy Malagrida, had dared to say in the pulpit that the earthquake was a punishment for the vice that was rampant in the capital, Pombal regarded it as a reflection on his administration; and the offender, though seventy years old and universally regarded as a saint, was banished from the city as inciting the people to rebellion.
However, the furious minister meted out similar treatment to others, even to his political friends. Thus, although the British parliament had voted £40,000 for the relief of the sufferers, besides giving a personal gift to the king and sending ships with cargoes of food for the people, Pombal immediately ran up the tax on foreign imports, for he was financially interested in domestic productions. Even in doling out provisions to the famishing populace, he was so parsimonious that riots occurred, whereupon he hanged those who complained. The author of the "Vita" (I, 106) vouches for the fact that at one time there were three hundred gibbets erected in various parts of Lisbon. The Jesuit confessors at the court were especially obnoxious to him and he dismissed them all with an injunction never to set foot in the royal precincts again. The anger of their royal penitents did not restrain him, so absolute was his power both then and afterwards. The plea was that the priests were plotters against the king. To increase that impression he pointed out to his majesty the number of offenders against him; all members of the detested Order who were coming back in every ship from Brazil. The General of the Society, Father Centurioni, wrote to the king pleading the innocence of thevictims; but the letter never got further than the minister. The king did not even know it had been sent.
The next step in this persecution was to publish the famous pamphlet entitled: "A Brief Account of the Republic which the Jesuits have established in the Spanish and Portuguese dominions of the New World, and of the War which they have carried on against the armies of the two Crowns; all extracted from the Register of the Commissaries and Plenipotentiaries, and from other documents." A copy was sent to every bishop of the country; to the cardinals in Rome, and to all the courts of Europe. Pombal actually spent 70,000 crowns to print and spread the work of which he himself was generally credited with being the author. In South America it was received with derision; in Europe mostly with disgust. Sad to say, Acciajuoli, the Apostolic nuncio at Lisbon, believed the Brazilian stories; but he changed his mind, when on the morning of June 15, 1760, just as he was about to say Mass, he received a note ordering him in the name of the king to leave the city at once, and the kingdom within four days; adding that to preserve him from insult a military escort would conduct him to the frontier. Other publications of the same tenor followed the "Brief Account." One especially became notorious. It was: "Letters of the Portuguese Minister to the Minister of Spain on the Jesuitical Empire, the Republic of Maranhao; the history of Nicholas I." The Nicholas in question was a Father named Plantico. To carry out the story of his having been crowned king or Emperor of Paraguay, coins with his effigy were actually struck and circulated throughout Europe. Unfortunately for the fraud, none of the coins were ever seen in Paraguay where they ought to have been current. Moreover, as Plantico was transported with the other Jesuits of Brazil, he would have been hangedon his arrival in Portugal, if he had tried to set up a kingdom of his own in Paraguay. On the contrary, he went off to his native country of Croatia, and was Rector of the College of Grosswardein when the general suppression of the Society took place. Frederick II and d'Alembert used to joke with each other about "King Nicholas I"; and in Spain, that and the other libels were officially denounced and their circulation prohibited.
As for Carvalho, these hideous imaginings of his brain became realities; and the list of Jesuitical horrors which his ambassador at Rome repeated to the Pope, all, as he alleged, for the sake of the Church, almost suggest that Pombal was a madman. Long extracts of the document may be found in de Ravignan and Weld, but it will be sufficient here to mention a few of the charges. They are, for instance, "seditious machinations against every government of Europe; scandals in their missions so horrible that they cannot be related without extreme indecency; rebellion against the Sovereign Pontiff; the accumulation of vast wealth and the use of immense political power; gross moral corruption of individual members of the Order; abandonment of even the externals of religion; the daily and public commission of enormous crimes; opposing the king with great armies; inculcating in the Indian mind an implacable hatred of all white men who are not Jesuits; starting insurrections in Uruguay so as to prevent the execution of the treaty of limits; atrociously calumniating the king; embroiling the courts of Spain and Portugal; creating sedition by preaching in the capital against the commercial companies of the minister; taking advantage of the earthquake to attain their detestable ends; surpassing Machiavelli in their diabolical plots; inventing prophecies of new disasters, such as warnings of subterranean fires and invasionsof the sea; calumniating the venerable Palafox; committing crimes worse than those of the Knights Templars, etc."
Unfortunately, Cardinal Passionei who was unfriendly to the Society, exercised great power at Rome at that time. He was so antagonistic that he would not allow a Jesuit book in the library, which made d'Alembert say: "I am sorry for his library." He also refused to condemn the work of the scandalous ex-monk Norbert, who was in the pay of Carvalho. To make matters worse, Benedict XIV was then at the point of death. And a short time previously, yielding to Carvalho's importunities, he had appointed Cardinal Saldanha, who was Carvalho's tool, to investigate the complaints and to report back to Rome, without however taking any action on the premises. The dying Pontiff was unaware of the intimacy of Saldanha with the man in Portugal or he would not have ordered him in the Brief of appointment to "follow the paths of gentleness and mildness, in dealing with an Order which has always been of the greatest edification to the whole world; lest by doing otherwise he would diminish the esteem which, up to that time, they have justly acquired as a reward of their diligence. Their holy Institute had given many illustrious men to the Church whose teachings they have not hesitated to confirm with their blood." As the Pope died in the following month, Saldanha made light of the instructions. His usual boast was that "the will of the king was the rule of his actions; and he was under such obligations to his majesty, that he would not hesitate to throw himself from the window if such were the royal pleasure."
It was currently reported in Lisbon, says Weld (130), that the office of visitor had been first offered to Francis of the Annunciation, an Augustinian who had reformed the University of Coimbra; and onhis refusal he was sent to prison where he ended his days. But the obliging Saldanha saw in it an opportunity for still further advancement; he accepted the work and performed it in accordance with the wishes of Pombal. Meantime, new dungeons were being made in the fortress of Jonquiera in which the offending Jesuits were to be buried. Saldanha began his work as Inquisitor on May 31, by going with great pomp to the Jesuit Church of St. Roch. Seated on the throne in the sanctuary, he gave his hand to be kissed by all the religious. When the provincial knelt before him, the cardinal told him to have confidence — he would act with clemency. When the ceremony was over, he departed abruptly without asking any questions or making any examination. But a few days afterward, the provincial received a letter bearing the date May 15, that is sixteen days before this visit to the Church, declaring that the Fathers in Portugal and in its dominions to the ends of the earth were, on the fullest information, found to be guilty of a worldly traffic which was a disgrace to the ecclesiastical state; and they were commanded under pain of excommunication to desist from such business transactions at the very hour the notification was made. The language employed in the letter which was immediately spread throughout the country was insulting and defamatory to the highest degree.
All the procurators were then compelled to hand over their books to the government. And when the horrified people, who knew there was nothing back of it all but Carvalho's hatred, manifested their discontent, it was ascribed to the Jesuits. Hence on June 6, the cardinal patriarch, at the instigation of the prime minister, suspended them all from the function of preaching and hearing confessions throughout the patriarchate. The cardinal had, at first, demurred,for he knew the Jesuits in Lisbon to be the very reverse of Saldanha's description of them, and he therefore demanded a regular trial. Whereupon Carvalho flew into such a rage that out of sheer terror, and after a few hours' struggle, he issued the cruel order. The poor cardinal, who was an ardent friend and admirer of the Society, was so horrified at what he had done that he fell into a fever, and died within a month. Before he received the last sacraments, he made a public declaration that the Society was innocent, and he drew up a paper to that effect; but Carvalho never let it see the light. When the Archbishop of Evora heard that the dying man had shed tears over his weakness, he said: "Tears are not enough. He should have shed the last drop of his blood."
Saldanha was made patriarch in the deceased prelate's place; and though his office of visitor had ceasedipso factoon the death of the Pope, he continued to exercise its functions nevertheless. He appointed Bulhoens, the Bishop of Para, a notorious adherent of Carvalho, to be his delegate in Brazil. Bulhoens first examined the Jesuits of Para, but could find nothing against them. He then proceeded to Maranhão; but the bishop of that place left in disgust; and the governor warned Bulhoens that if he persisted, the city would be in an uproar. Not being able to effect anything, he asked the Bishop of Bahia to undertake the work of investigation. The invitation was promptly accepted; and all the superiors were ordered to show their books under pain of excommunication. They readily complied, and no fault was found with the accounts. He then instituted a regular tribunal; received the depositions of seventy-five witnesses, among them Saldanha's own brother who had lived twenty-five years in Maranhão. Next he examined the tax commissioner, through whose hands all contractsand bills of exchange had to pass; and that official affirmed under oath that he had never known or heard of any business transactions having been carried on by Jesuits. The result was that the courageous bishop declared "it would be an offence against God and his conscience and against the king's majesty to condemn the Fathers." When his report was forwarded to Portugal, Carvalho ordered the confiscation of his property; expelled him from his palace, and declared his see vacant. The valiant prelate passed the rest of his days in seclusion, supported by the alms of the faithful.
In September 1758, a charge was trumped up in Lisbon in a most tortuous fashion, based on the alleged discovery of a plot to assassinate the king. Those chiefly involved were the Duke de Averio and the Marquis de Tavora, with his wife, his two sons, his two brothers and his two sons-in-law, all of whom were seized at midnight on December 12. The marchioness and her daughter-in-law were carried off to a convent in their night-dresses; the men of the family, to dens formerly occupied by the wild beasts of the city menagerie. De Aveiro, who was supposed to be the assassin-in-chief, was not taken until next day. Several others were included in this general round-up, some of them for having asserted that the whole conspiracy was a manufactured affair. At the same time, some of the domestic servants of the marquis, probably for having offered resistance at the time of the arrest, were put to death so that they could tell no tales. Not being able to have the accused parties tried before any regularly constituted tribunal, because of the lack of evidence, Carvalho drew up a sentence of condemnation himself, and presented it to a new court which he had just established, called theinconfidenza, and demanded the signatures of the judgeswho were all his creatures. After being stormed at for a while, all, with one exception, put their names to the paper. Then, as by the law of the land no nobleman could be condemned to death except by his peers, he constituted himself as a tribunal, along with his secretary of the Navy and the secretary of Foreign Affairs, neither of whom had any difficulty in complying with the wish of their master.
On January 11, 1759, three of the noblemen involved, Aveiro, Tavora and Antongia, were led out to execution before the king's palace. Vast multitudes had assembled in the public square; and to ensure order, fresh regiments had been summoned from other parts of the kingdom. A riot was feared, for the Tavoras were among the noblest families of the realm. The accused had not even been defended and had been interrogated on the rack. The execution was most expeditious, and the heads of the three victims quickly rolled in the dust. That night, the marchioness was taken from the convent to the new dungeons in the fort; and on January 12, she heard the sentence of death passed on her by Carvalho himself who was both judge and accuser. The scaffold was erected in the square of Belem; and long before daylight of January 13 an immense multitude had gathered to witness the hideous spectacle. The marchioness advanced and took her seat in the chair. The axe quickly descended on her neck — and all was over. She was despatched in this hurried fashion because the interference of the king was feared. Indeed, the messenger arrived just when the head had been severed from the body. The two sons of the marchioness and her son-in-law were then stretched on the rack and strangled. The father of the family, the old marquis followed next in order. As a mark of clemency, his torture was brief but effective. Four others were thenexecuted; fire was set to the gibbet; and its blood-stained timbers along with the bodies of the victims were reduced to ashes and thrown into the Tagus. This was not a scene in a village of savages, but in a great European capital which had just passed through a terrible visitation of God but apparently had not understood its meaning. Carvalho was thirsting for more blood, but the king held him back; so he contented himself with destroying the palaces of the Aveiras and Tavoras; sprinkling the sites with salt; forbidding anyone to bear the names hitherto so illustrious, and even effacing them from the monuments and the public archives. He was not allowed to commit any more official murders for the moment; but at least he had thousands who were dying in his underground dungeons.
What had the Jesuits to do with all this? Nothing whatever. They were accused of being the spiritual advisers of the Tavora family which it was impossible to disprove, because though the persons implicated by the accusation were all arrested on the 11th, sentence of death had been already passed on the 9th. There were twenty-nine paragraphs in the indictment. The twenty-second said that "even if the exuberant and conclusive proofs already adduced did not exist, the presumption of the law would suffice to condemn such monsters." Of course, no lawyer in the world could plead against such a charge, and it is noteworthy that in the Brief of Suppression of the whole Society by Clement XIV which brings together all the accusations against it, there is no mention whatsoever, even inferentially, of any conspiracy of the Jesuits against the life of the King of Portugal. Moreover, the Inquisition and all the Bishops of Spain judged this Portuguese horror at its proper value, when on May 3, 1759 they put their official stamp of condemnationon the pamphlets with which the whole of Europe was flooded immediately after Pombal's infamous act. They denounced the charges one by one as "designed to foment discord, to disturb the peace and tranquillity of souls and consciences, and especially to discredit the holy Society of Jesus and religious who laudably labor in it to the benefit of the Church; as is known throughout the world." Over and over again as each book is specifically anathematised, the "holy Society of Jesus" is spoken of with commendation and praise. The condemned publications were then burnt in the market place. That exculpation ought to have been sufficient, coming as it did not only from all the Spanish bishops but from the Inquisition, which from the very beginning had been uniformly suspicious of everything Jesuitical. Against this utterance Pombal was powerless for it was the voice of another nation.
When the year 1759 began, three of the most conspicuous and most venerable Fathers of Portugal were in jail under sentence of death. But neither the king nor Carvalho dared to carry out the sentence of execution. Something however had to be done; and therefore a royal edict, which had been written long before, was issued. After reciting all that had been previously said about Brazil, etc. it declared that "these religious being corrupt and deplorably fallen away from their holy institute, and rendered manifestly incapable by such abominable and inveterate vices to return to its observances, must be properly and effectually banished, denaturalized, proscribed and expelled from all his majesty's dominions, as notorious rebels, traitors, adversaries and aggressors of his royal person and realm; as well as for the public peace and the common good of his subjects; and it is ordered under the irremissible pain of death, thatno person, of whatever state or condition, is to admit them into any of his possessions or hold any communication with them by word or writing, even though they should return into these states in a different garb or should have entered another order, unless with the King's permission." It is sad to have to record that the Patriarch of Lisbon endorsed the invitation to the Jesuits to avail themselves of this royal clemency.
The procurators of the missions who occupied a temporary house in Lisbon had been already carried off to jail; and their money, chalices, sacred vessels, all of which were intended for Asia and Brazil, were confiscated. The Exodus proper began at the College of Elvas on September 1. At night-fall a squadron of cavalry arrived; and taking the inmates prisoners, marched them off without any intimation of whither they were going. On the following day, Sunday, they were lodged in a miserable shed, exhausted though they were by the journey, with nothing but a few crusts to eat, after having suffered intensely from the heat all day long. They were not even allowed to go to Mass. During the next night and the following day, they continued their weary tramp and at last arrived at Evora. There the young men were left at the college, and the sixty-nine Professed were compelled to walk for six consecutive days till they reached the Tagus. Many were old and decrepit and one of them lost his mind on the journey. When they reached the river, they were put in open boats and exposed all day long to the burning sun, with nothing to eat or drink. They were then transferred to a ship which had been waiting for them since the month of April. It was then late in September.
Other exiles soon joined them, after going through similar experiences, until there were one hundred and thirty-three in the same vessel. They were all keptin the hold till they were out of sight of land. There was no accommodation for them: the food was insufficient; the water was foul; there were no dishes, so that six or seven had to sit around a tin can, and take out what they could with a wooden spoon, and the same vessel had to serve for the water they drank. The orders were to stop at no port until they reached Civita Vecchia. However, after passing the Straits of Gibraltar, it became evident that unless the captain wanted to carry a cargo of corpses to Italy, he must take in supplies somewhere: for many of the victims were sixty or seventy years of age. There were even some octogenarians among them. Hence, on reaching Alicante, in Spain, one of the Fathers went ashore. There was a college of the Society in that city; and as soon as the news spread of the arrival of the prisoners, the people rushed to the shore to supply their wants, but the messenger was the only one allowed to be seen. They then sailed away from Alicante. Off Corsica, a storm caught them and so delayed their progress that a stop had to be made at Spezia for more food. At last, on October 24, more than a month after they had left Lisbon, they were flung haggard, emaciated and exhausted on the shores of the Papal States at Civita Vecchia. Of course, they were received by the people there with unbounded affection; and as Father Weld relates "none exceeded the Dominican Fathers in their tender solicitude for the sufferers." A marble slab in their church records their admiration for these confessors of the Faith with whom the sons of St. Dominic declared they weredevinctissimi— "closely bound to them in affection."
On September 29, troops surrounded the College of Coimbra. The astonished populace was informed that it was because the Fathers had been fighting; that some were already killed and others wounded;and the soldiers had been summoned to prevent further disorders. That night amid pouring rain, the tramp of horses' hoofs was heard; and as the people crowded to the windows, they saw the venerable men of the college led away between squads of cavalry as if they were brigands or prisoners of war. They arrived at the Tagus on October 7, where others were already waiting. They numbered in all 121, and were crowded into two small ships which were to carry them into exile. They had scarcely room to move. Yet, when they arrived at Genoa, they were all packed into one of the boats. At Leghorn, they were kept for a whole month in close confinement on board the ship. When they started out, they were buffeted by storms, and not until January 4, 1760 did they reach the papal territory. They were in a more wretched state of filth and emaciation than their predecessors.
These prisoners were the special criminals of the Society, namely — the professed Fathers. The other Jesuits were officially admitted to be without reproach and were exhorted, both by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, to abandon the Order and be dispensed from their vows. As these non-Professed numbered at least three-fourths of the whole body, the difficult problem presents itself of explaining how the Professed who are looked up to by the rest of the Society for precept and example should be monsters of iniquity and yet could train the remaining three-fourths of the members in such a way as to make them models of every virtue.