JESUITS, The, Sylvester Hassell The seventeenth was the great century of the prevalence of Jesuitism; and Macaulay’s unrivaled characterization of this perfection of Pharisaism and Pelagianism must now be given. In the sixteenth century “the Pontificate, exposed to new dangers more formidable than had ever before threatened it, was saved by a new religious order, which was animated by intense enthusiasm and organized with exquisite skill.”
“When the Jesuits came to rescue, they found the Papacy in extreme peril; but from that moment the tide of battle turned. Protestantism, which had, during a whole generation, carried all before it, was stopped in its progress, and rapidly beaten back from the foot of the Alps to the shores of the Baltic.”
“Before the Order had existed a hundred years it had filled the whole world with memorials of great things done and suffered for the faith. No religious community could produce a list of men so variously distinguished; none had extended its operations over so vast a space: yet in none had there ever been such perfect unity of feeling and action. There was no region of the globe, no walk of speculative or of active life, in which Jesuits were not to be found.”
“They guided the counsels of kings. They deciphered Latin inscriptions. They observed motions of Jupiter’s satellites. They published whole libraries, controversy, casuistry, history, treatises on optics, Alcaic odes, editions of the fathers, madrigals, catechisms and lampoons. The liberal education of youth passed almost entirely into their hands, and was conducted by them with conspicuous ability.”
“They appear to have discovered the precise point to which intellectual culture can be carried without risk of intellectual emancipation. Enmity itself was compelled to own that, in the art of managing and forming the tender mind, they had no equals. Meanwhile they assiduously and successfully cultivated the eloquence of the pulpit. With still greater assiduity and still greater success they applied themselves to the ministry of the confessional. Throughout Roman Catholic Europe the secrets of every government and of almost every family of note were in their keeping.”
“They glided from one Protestant country to another under innumerable disguises, as gay Cavaliers, as simple rustics, as Puritan preachers. They wandered to countries which mercantile avidity nor liberal curiosity had ever impelled any stranger to explore. They were found as Mandarins, superintending the observatory at Pekin. They were to be found, spade in hand, teaching the rudiments of agriculture to the savages of Paraguay.”
“Yet, whatever might be their residence, whatever might be their employment, their spirit was the same, entire devotion to the common cause, unreasoning obedience to the central authority. None of them had chosen his dwelling place or his vocation for himself. Whether the Jesuit should live under the Arctic circle or under the equator, whether he should pass his life arranging gems and collating manuscripts at the Vatican or in persuading naked barbarians under the Southern Cross not to eat each other, were matters which he left with profound submission to the decision of others. If he was wanted at Lima, he was on the Atlantic in the next fleet. If he was wanted at Bagdad, he was toiling through the desert with the next caravan. If his ministry was needed in some country where his life was more insecure than that of a wolf, where it was a crime to harbor him, where the heads and quarters of his brethren, fixed in the public places, showed him what to expect, he went without remonstrance or hesitation to this doom.”
“Nor is this heroic spirit yet extinct. When, in our time, a new and terrible pestilence passed round the globe, when, in some great cities, fear had dissolved all the ties which hold society together, when the secular clergy had forsaken their flocks, when medical succor was not to be purchased by gold, when the strongest natural affections had yielded to the love of life, even then the Jesuit was found by the pallet which bishop and Curate, physician and nurse, father and mother, had deserted, bending over infected lips to catch the faint accents of confession, and holding up to the last, before the expiring penitent, the image of the expiring Redeemer.”
“But, with the admirable energy, disinterestedness and self-devotion which were characteristic of the Society, great vices were mingled. It was alleged, and not without foundation, that the ardent public spirit which made the Jesuit regardless of his ease, of his liberty, and of his life, made him also regardless of truth and of mercy; that no means which could promote the interest of his religion seemed to him unlawful, and that by the interest of his religion he too often meant the interest of his society. It was alleged that, in the most atrocious plots recorded in history, his agency could be distinctly traced; that, constant only in his attachment to the fraternity to which he belonged, he was in some countries the most dangerous enemy of freedom, and in others the most dangerous enemy of order.”
“The mighty victories which he boasted he had achieved in the cause of the church were, in the judgment of many illustrious members of that church, rather apparent than real. He had indeed labored with a wonderful show of success to reduce the world under her laws; but he had done so by relaxing her laws to suit the temper of the world. Instead of toiling to elevate human nature to the noble standard fixed by Divine precept and example, he had lowered the standard till it was beneath the average level of human nature.”
“He gloried in multitudes of converts who had been baptized in the remote regions of the East; but it was reported that from some of those converts the facts on which the whole theology of the gospel depends had been cunningly concealed, and that others were permitted to avoid persecution by bowing down before the images of false gods, while internally repeating Paters and Aves. Nor was it only in heathen countries that such arts were said to be practiced.”
“It was not strange that people of all ranks, and especially of the highest ranks, crowded to the confessionals in the Jesuits temples; for from those confessionals none were sent discontented away. There the priest was all things to all men. He showed just so much rigor as might not drive those who knelt at his spiritual tribunal to the Dominican or the Franciscan Church.”
“If he had to deal with a mind truly devout, he spoke in the saintly tones of the primitive fathers; but with that large part of mankind who have religion enough to make them uneasy when they do wrong, and not religion enough to keep them from doing wrong, he followed a different system. Since he could not reclaim them from vice, it was his business to save them from remorse.”
“He had at his command an immense dispensary of anodynes for wounded consciences. In the books of casuistry which had been written by his brethren, and printed with the approbation of his superiors, were to be found doctrines consolatory to transgressors of every class. There the bankrupt was taught how he might, without sin, secrete his goods from his creditors. The servant was taught how he might, without sin, run off with his master’s plate. The pander was assured that a Christian man might innocently earn his living by carrying letters and messages between married women and their gallants. The high spirited and punctilious gentlemen of France were gratified by a decision in favor of dueling. The Italians, accustomed to darker and baser modes of vengeance, were glad to learn that they might, without any crime, shoot at their enemies from behind hedges.”
“To deceit was given a license sufficient to destroy the whole value of human contracts and of human testimony. In truth, if society continued to hold together, if life and property any security, it was because common sense and common humanity restrained men from doing what the Order of Jesuits assured them that they might with safe conscience do.”
“The Jesuits unfolded the doctrine of moral Probabilism in such manner and measure,” says Gieseler, “that, while they condemned sin in general, yet in its particular manifestations they very frequently excused and palliated it. At the same time, they so defined the difference between mortal and venial sins, and made such statements upon the sufficiency of repentance, that men’s minds were cradled in complete carnal security.”
They elevated the papal power above everything, since their own rested on it. Bishops and councils might err, but the pope was infallible, and could never lapse into heresy; indeed, he was so far the lord of Christendom that sin itself, enjoined by him, would be a duty. Thus he was elevated so far above the human sphere that he must be looked upon as a demi-god. As it was with the doctrine about the pope, so the other doctrines assailed by Protestants were for the most part carried to excess—the celibacy of the clergy, their independence of the civil power, the worship of saints, of Mary, and of images, the multiplication of indulgences. To keep dangerous light away, not only were the Indexes of Prohibited Books set to work, but the Indexes of Expurgated Books were also published, mutilating and falsifying the ancient writings.
In 1622 Gregory XV., the first pope who had been a pupil of the Jesuits, established the first great Missionary Board in the world, the prototype of all other Missionary Boards, whether Catholic or Protestant, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith), consisting of cardinals, and having in charge the entire Roman Catholic Missionary System. This body is still in existence.
The object of this organization was and is the conversion of heathens and Protestants to Roman Catholicism and the extirpation of heretics. For this latter purpose the civil power has been employed in Catholic countries, and will be also employed in all Protestant countries wherever Roman Catholicism gains the supremacy. To promote the same purpose of Catholicizing the world, the next pope, Urban VIII., established, in 1627, the Seminarium or Collegium de
Propaganda Fide (Seminary or College for Propagating the Faith), “to which young men from all nations are brought at an early age, and gratuitously instructed in languages and sciences, and fitted out for the missionary work.
This College was subordinated entirely to the Congregation of Cardinals or Missionary Board, and a splendid palace was built for both institutions. To the Propaganda no small part of the aggressive power of the Church of Rome is due. It has complete military power, under the pope, over the whole missionary field, not only to send missionaries wherever it is the interest of the church to send them, but to give them special training adapted to their special work. (Hassell’s History ppg 513-516)