THE JESUITS.* Omne ignotum pro magruftco. The Society of Jesus
by main- taining a politic reserve throughthe'centuries has unquestionably made itself -appear more formidable than it really was or is. We must congratulate the Society on what seems to be a change of policy in deference to modern public -opinion, which dislikes secrecy in statesmen, ecclesiastics or labour agitators. The change is manifested in the desire for-publicity which has caused an American Jesuit Father, with the approval of his superiors and of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New 'York, to produce the first tolerably complete and authoritative history of the Society that has been written in English—or in any other language for ninety years past—by a Jesuit. This bulky work, which runs to over nine hundred pages, sets forth the history of the Jesuits as the Jesuits see it or wish the world to see it. The author is not a practised writer or a very accurate scholar ; he uses strange words like '" liceity " and " acclimated," and his accounts of such well-known episodes in English history as the Gunpowder Plot and the Popish Plot of 1679 are by no means no precise and authoritative as one could desire. Never- theless the book is readable, and the chapters on the Jesuit missions in America and in China and Japan are particularly interesting.
Father Campbell denies that the Society was " organized for the express purpose of combating the Protestant Reforma- tion." Ignatius Loyola, born in a Pyreuean valley an 1491 and thus eight years younger than Luther, " does not seem to have been aware of 'the extent of the religious movement going on,; ' when he himself was converted and wrote his ".Spiritual Exer- cises " in 1522. " His sole purpose was to convert the Turks, and only the failure to get &Ship at Venice prevented him from carrying out that plan." With a few companions—I-aims, Francis Xavier, Peter Faber and others—he founded the Society in 1534 in a church on the hill of Montmartre. The Pope accorded his approval of the constitution in 1540, and in the following year Loyola was elected the first General of the Society. The author thinks that Loyola, in calling the new order the " Company of Jesus," was using one of the military terms familiar to him and meant the Society to be " a ;battalion of light'infantry, ever ready for service in any part of the world." All the members from the outset took the triple vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, while the professed took and still take a fourth vow of "obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff, which
* The Jansite, 1334-1021 History of the Society .of Jerue from 4U Foosociation goad Present d'isss. ihr Thomas .1...C4111140. 8.J. London Encyclopaedia Press. 125s. seta
binds -them to go wherever he sends them and to do so without excuse and without provisions for the journey." Whatever Loyola's intentions may have been, the Society was from the outset recognized and used as a powerful weapon for checking the Reformation and promoting the Counter-Reformation which was successful in Spain, Italy, France, Poland and the southern German lands as well as in Ireland, whither Jesuits were des- patched in 1541. Xavier set out for the Far East, and in the course of eleven years of incessant and toilsome journeys visited the Moluccas and Japan, dying near Canton on his way home. He founded the Japanese mission which for nearly a century flourished greatly and was -then extinguished by a bitter persecu- tion. The early Jesuit missionaries travelled all over India, entered"Tibet, and established themselves at the Chinese Imperial Court. Their adventurous journeys in North and'South America served science as well as religion ; the Jesuit Relations are of primary importance in the history of American exploration. In Europe as the generations passed the Jesuits, basing their work on education, acquired very great influence over the ruling classes. They were hated as bitterly by many of their fellow Roman Catholics as by the Protestants, and when their temporary defeat came in the eighteenth century they suffered as cruel martyrdom in Portugal as in any heathen land. Mala- grida, the leading Portuguese Jesuit—whose name became a by-word in Protestant lands and was applied as an abusive nick- name to Shelburne--was strangled and burnt as a heretic in Lisbon in 1761, by the orders of that savage reformer Pombal. FatherCampbell makes light of the Jansenist indictment reflected in the famous Provincial Letters of Pascal, who, ho thinks, was eclipsed by Bourdalone. He regards the expulsion of the Jesuits from France a century later as the work of theJansenists, actuated by a desire for revenge. When the Pope was asked by Choiseul to give the French Jesuits a semi-independent vicar, Clement XIII. replied : Sint et sunt ant non sint ("Let them be as they are or not at all "). It was the next Pope, Clement XIV., who, at the instance of the Bourbons, suppressed the Society in 1773. " Was it legitimate ? " the author asks of the Brief, and answers dutifully : " Yes, for the Holy See has a right to suppress what it has created."
We need not comment on the suppression, following the expulsion of the Society from the chief Roman Catholic countries. The -Jesuits must have made themselves peculiarly obnoxious to their fellow Churchmen. It is curious that in their extremity they should have found a refuge in Prussia and in -the dominions of the Tsar. For half-a-century Russia was their principal home, until Alexander in 1820 drove them out. But in 1814 Pope Pius VII. had restored the Society " in its pristine state " and given it a new lease of life. The author describes
its modern missions -and its literature which includes, of course, the stupendous alcla Senderens -of the Bollanclists—and gives some particulars of its membership. The present General is Father Vladimir Ledochowski, a nephew of the famous Cardinal who stood up against Bismarck in the Oulturlcampf and was imprisoned. In 1920 the Society had 8,454 priests, 4,819 scholastics and 3,977 lay brothers—a total membership of 17,250. America has the largest " assistancy " with 2,892 members. The Titriglieh " assistancy," including Canada -and Ireland, has 1,622 members of whom 793 are priests and 544 scholastics. The foreign missions employ 1,707 Jesuits. The numbers, it will be seen, are very small. The Society believes in quality rather than in quantity—in the power of a very small and highly educated body of 'resolute men to -move the world.
Previous page
