Jesuits

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Jesuits, formally the Society of Jesus, trace their beginning to a crypt beneath a church in Montmartre, outside Paris. On the 15th of August 1534, seven university students gathered there to pronounce promises of poverty, chastity and obedience. From that small meeting grew the largest male order in the Catholic Church, now at work in 112 countries. Its members teach, run retreats, serve in hospitals and parishes, and organize humanitarian projects. They have also been controversial almost from the start, clashing with governments and with fellow Catholics. How did a handful of students build something so large? Why did critics call the order's very name blasphemous? What did its members find in Tibet, in the Amazon and in the villages of the Huron? And how did a pope come to abolish the entire order, only to see it return?

  127811

• 2. Companions And A Contested Name

  ›

  Ignatius of Loyola was born Íñigo López de Loyola, a Basque nobleman from the Pyrenees region of northern Spain. His spiritual vocation took shape while he recovered from a wound received at the Battle of Pamplona. He was by then a student at the University of Paris, and six fellow students stood beside him at Montmartre. They were Francisco Xavier from Navarre, and Alfonso Salmeron, Diego Laínez and Nicolás Bobadilla from Castile. The others were Peter Faber from Savoy and Simão Rodrigues from Portugal. The meeting is commemorated in the Martyrium of Saint Denis.

  The friends first called themselves the Compañía de Jesús, and also Amigos en El Señor, or "Friends in the Lord". They felt that Christ himself had placed them together. The word company carried a double echo. It recalled the army, where Ignatius had served as a captain, and it recalled the companions of Jesus. Translated into Latin, the Spanish word became societas, from socius, a partner or comrade. That produced Societas Iesu, the Society of Jesus.

  Older orders had taken the names of men. The Franciscans honored Francis of Assisi, the Dominicans honored Domingo de Guzmán, later canonized as Saint Dominic, and the Augustinians honored Augustine of Hippo. By taking the name of Jesus, Ignatius and his followers stirred resentment among other orders, which thought the choice presumptuous. The Jesuit José de Acosta recorded this resentment in a conversation with the Archbishop of Santo Domingo. One historian wrote that "The use of the name Jesus gave great offense." Critics in Europe and in England denounced it as blasphemous. Petitions went to kings and to church and civil tribunals, and Pope Sixtus V even signed a Brief meant to abolish the name. Nothing came of it, because orders named for the Trinity and for "God's daughters" already existed.

  The word Jesuit itself began as an insult. It dates from the 15th century and described someone who used the name of Jesus too often or took it for himself. It was first applied to the society between 1544 and 1552, and Ignatius never used it. Over time, members and friends of the society adopted the word with a positive meaning. The order admits only men, yet Joanna of Austria, Princess of Portugal, favored it and is reputed to have been admitted in secret under a male pseudonym.

  91011215

• 3. Rules Of A Soldier

  ›

  In 1537 the seven travelled to Italy to ask for the pope's approval. A journey to Jerusalem had become impossible, because the Italian War of 1536-1538 involved Charles V, Venice, the Pope and the Ottoman Empire. Pope Paul III gave them a commendation and allowed them to be ordained priests. The bishop of Arbe ordained them in Venice on the 24th of June. They then threw themselves into preaching and charitable work in Italy.

  In 1540 they brought their project to Paul III again. After months of dispute, a congregation of cardinals reported favorably on the Constitution they had drawn up. On the 27th of September 1540, the pope confirmed the order through the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae, meaning "To the Government of the Church Militant". Ignatius was chosen as the first Superior General. The bull capped membership at sixty, and Julius III removed that cap in 1550 with the bull Exposcit debitum.

  Ignatius set out his vision in the Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus. It became the fundamental charter, and every later official document had to conform to it. Its opening line echoes his soldier's past: "Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the Cross in our Society". The same text lists the work to be done. It names public preaching, lectures, retreats, teaching children and unlettered people, and hearing confessions. It also calls for aid to those in prisons and hospitals.

  The Jesuit Constitutions, adopted in 1553, created a centralised organization. They stressed acceptance of any mission the pope might assign. A Jesuit professes perpetual poverty, chastity and obedience, and promises special obedience to the pope regarding missions. He must be fully available to his superiors, ready to go anywhere in the world, even into extreme conditions. Those demands explain the nicknames "God's soldiers", "God's marines" and "the Company". The order also dropped the requirement of living and praying the Liturgy of Hours in common. That looser structure let it adapt to the needs of the age.

  The unofficial motto came from the same principle: Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, "For the greater glory of God". The idea is that any work that is not evil can be meritorious for the spiritual life if done with that intention. That holds even for tasks normally thought trivial.

  The order was founded just before the Council of Trent, which ran from 1545 to 1563. Ignatius and the early Jesuits agreed that the church needed reform, and they fought corruption and spiritual weariness within it. They believed reform had to begin with the conversion of an individual's heart. Their chief tool was the Spiritual Exercises, a retreat of four weeks held in silence. Participants follow directed meditations on the purpose of life and contemplations on the life of Christ. They meet regularly with a spiritual director who guides the choice of exercises. The retreat follows a "Purgative-Illuminative-Unitive" pattern in the tradition of John Cassian and the Desert Fathers. Ignatius' innovation was to open this contemplative style to people living active lives. The Exercises became the basis of Jesuit training, and giving them to others became a central ministry. Ignatius also demanded rigorous academic preparation for clergy, at a time when much of the clergy was poorly educated.

  111314127

• 4. Schools And Stages

  ›

  In 1543 Peter Canisius entered the company, and Ignatius sent him to Messina. There he founded the first Jesuit college in Sicily. The Jesuits became the first religious order to treat running colleges and universities as a principal and distinct ministry. By the time Ignatius died in 1556, they operated a network of 74 colleges on three continents.

  Their plan of studies placed the classical learning of Renaissance humanism inside the Scholastic structure of Catholic thought. Teaching balanced Aristotelian methods with mathematics. Jesuit universities stayed open to new scientific and mathematical methods, and many important thinkers of the Scientific Revolution were educated in them. The Ratio Studiorum of 1599 standardized the study of Latin, Greek, classical literature, poetry and philosophy. It also covered non-European languages, the sciences and the arts. Because the schools encouraged vernacular literature and rhetoric, they became important training grounds for lawyers and public officials.

  In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jesuit colleges were established from the 1560s. Future writers and high-ranking state officials attended them, and the schools helped win the country back to Catholicism. The Jesuits held that God can be encountered through created things, especially art. They encouraged ceremony and decoration in worship, and many early Jesuits distinguished themselves in music and the visual and performing arts. Theater was especially prominent in their schools. During the early modern period, Jesuit priests often served as confessors to kings.

  A far humbler classroom opened in Limerick, Ireland, in the 1560s. Pope Pius IV sent David Wolfe there as apostolic visitor, with the agreement of the third superior general, Diego Laynez. Wolfe was told to set up grammar schools "as a remedy against the profound ignorance of the people". Two Jesuits, William Good and Edmund Daniel, arrived in poor health and recovered thanks to the kindness of local people. They could meet Wolfe only at night, because the Dublin Castle administration was trying to arrest him.

  In April 1566, Good sent a detailed report to Rome. The school met in one large hall with the boys split into four classes. The top class studied the grammar of Johannes Despauterius and read a few letters of Cicero. The youngest boys were taught to read. Progress was slow, since there were too few teachers to run the classes at once. In the spirit of the Roman College Ignatius had founded fourteen years earlier, no fee was charged, so the two Jesuits lived in very poor conditions. Good also reported a school play performed on the Feast of St. John in 1566.

  In late 1568, government agents sent by Sir Thomas Cusack attacked and looted the school. Daniel returned to Ireland in 1572 and was captured, and papers found on him were taken as proof of a Spanish plot. He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, and he refused a pardon offered in return for swearing the Act of Supremacy. He was executed on the 25th of October 1572. James Fitzmaurice later wrote to the Jesuit Superior General that Daniel was "cruelly killed because of me".

  The school survived by moving and hiding. In 1604 the Lord President of Munster, Sir Henry Brouncker, offered £7 to anyone who betrayed a Jesuit priest and £5 for a seminarian. In 1656 the college moved to a hut in the middle of a bog, which the authorities found hard to locate. When it finally closed, the cause would lie in political trouble far from Ireland.

  1219374044

• 5. Scholars Abroad

  ›

  In 1594 Alessandro Valignano founded St. Paul Jesuit College in Macau, the first Roman-style academic institution in the East. It shaped how missionary Jesuits learned Chinese and Japanese languages and culture. It also became home to the first Western sinologists, among them Matteo Ricci. The Jesuits entered China through the Portuguese settlement at Macau, and they brought Western science and astronomy with them. They translated mathematical and astronomical works into Chinese and made extensive astronomical observations. They also carried out the first modern cartographic work in China.

  The exchange ran both ways. The Jesuits came to respect the scientific achievements of Chinese culture, and their letters were how European scientists first learned of them. For over a century, men such as Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, Diego de Pantoja, Philippe Couplet, Michal Boym and François Noël refined translations of Chinese thought and sent it to Europe. Their Latin works popularized the name "Confucius". They influenced Deists and other Enlightenment thinkers, some of whom were intrigued by the attempt to reconcile Confucian morality with Catholicism.

  In 1541, Francis Xavier, one of the original companions, reached Goa in Portuguese India. In a letter of 1545 to John III of Portugal, he asked for an Inquisition in Goa to combat heresies such as crypto-Judaism and crypto-Islam. Under Portuguese royal patronage the Jesuits thrived in Goa and expanded into education and healthcare. Elsewhere in Asia they had little success, except in the Philippines. In Japan, the government granted them the fiefdom of Nagasaki in 1580, then took it back in 1587 out of fear of their growing influence.

  In 1624, the Portuguese Jesuit António de Andrade founded a mission in Western Tibet. In 1661, Johann Grueber and Albert Dorville reached Lhasa. The Italian Ippolito Desideri worked in Lhasa and central Tibet from 1716 to 1721 and gained an exceptional command of Tibetan language and culture. He wrote a long and detailed account of the country and its religion. He also wrote treatises in Tibetan that tried to refute key Buddhist ideas and establish the truth of Catholic Christianity.

  Language work followed the Jesuits everywhere. A Japanese-Portuguese dictionary, the Nippo jisho, also titled Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam, was written in 1603. Portuguese missionaries created the Vietnamese alphabet, which Alexandre de Rhodes formalized in his trilingual dictionary of 1651. José de Anchieta compiled the first grammar of the Tupi language, printed in Coimbra in 1595. In the 1740s, Jean François Pons carried out a pioneering study of Sanskrit in the West.

  The Jesuit habit of adapting to local culture eventually led to disaster. After the Franciscans and other orders arrived, Jesuit accommodation of Chinese rituals set off the long-running Chinese Rites controversy. The Kangxi Emperor and many Jesuit converts testified that honoring ancestors and Confucius was a nonreligious token of respect. In 1704, Pope Clement XI ruled in the decree Cum Deus Optimus that such behavior was idolatry and superstition. His legate Tournon and Bishop Charles Maigrot of Fujian were sent to present this to the emperor, and both showed extreme ignorance. The emperor ordered the expulsion of missionaries who could not accept the terms of Ricci's Chinese catechism. The bull Ex Illa Die of 1715 upheld automatic excommunication for violators, and the missions swiftly collapsed. The last Jesuits were expelled after 1721.

  2930242031

• 6. Huron Country

  ›

  On the 25th of October 1604, Father Pierre Coton asked his superior, Claudio Acquaviva, to send two missionaries to Terre-Neuve. That request marked the first Jesuit mission to Canada. Samuel de Champlain founded the French colony at Québec in 1608. In 1614 he brought in the Recollects, a reform branch of the Franciscans, to convert the native inhabitants. By 1624 the Recollects saw how large the task was and invited the Jesuits to help. Jean de Brébeuf, Énemond Massé and Charles Lalemant arrived in Québec in 1625.

  The Jesuits joined the Huron mission in 1626 and lived among the Huron peoples. Brébeuf learned the language and created the first Huron dictionary. Charles Lalemant is considered the first author of one of the Jesuit Relations of New France. Those reports chronicled the missionaries' work and were published annually from 1632 to 1673. The English captured Québec in 1629, forcing the Jesuits out. The Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye returned the colony to France in 1632, and the Jesuits went back to Huron territory.

  Epidemics of European diseases began in 1634. Some Huron grew suspicious and accused the Jesuits of being sorcerers who cast spells from their books. In 1639, Jerome Lalemant founded Sainte-Marie near present-day Midland, Ontario, as a replica of European society. It became the Jesuit headquarters. Through most of the 1640s the Jesuits had modest success. They established five chapels and baptized more than one thousand Huron, out of a population that may have exceeded 20,000 before the epidemics.

  In 1648 the Iroquois of New York attacked Huron villages. They were rivals of the Hurons and envied their wealth and their control of the fur trade. They killed missionaries and burned villages, and the Hurons scattered. Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were tortured and killed, and both were canonized as martyrs. Paul Ragueneau burned down Sainte-Marie himself rather than let the Iroquois destroy it. By late June 1649, the French and some Christian Hurons built Sainte-Marie II on Christian Island. Facing starvation and constant threat of attack, they abandoned it in June 1650. The Huron, also known as the Wyandot, today have a First Nations reserve in Quebec and three major settlements in the United States.

  After the Huron nation collapsed, the Jesuits turned to the Iroquois. A first attempt in 1642 had met with little success. In 1653 the Iroquois fell out with the Dutch and signed a peace treaty with the French, and a mission followed. The Iroquois soon turned on the French again, and the Jesuits worked under constant threat of torture or death. They abandoned their permanent posts in the Iroquois homeland in 1687. Jacques Gravier, vicar general of the Illinois Mission in the Mississippi River valley, compiled a Miami-Illinois-French dictionary before his death in 1708. It is considered the most extensive of the missionaries' language works. By 1700 the Jesuits were only maintaining Québec, Montreal and Ottawa, without founding new posts.

  6061676263

• 7. Estates And Reductions

  ›

  By 1603 there were 345 Jesuit priests in Mexico alone. They educated the sons of elite families in colegios such as the Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo, the Colegio de San Ildefonso and the Colegio de San Francisco Javier at Tepozotlan. To pay for these schools, the Jesuits held landed estates, many of them donated by wealthy elites, and ran them as one integrated system. Bishop Don Juan de Palafox of Puebla claimed that just two Jesuit colleges owned 300,000 sheep and six sugar plantations worth a million pesos. The plantations, he said, earned 100,000 pesos in income. The huge hacienda of Santa Lucía produced pulque, a drink made from fermented agave sap. The Jesuit haciendas in Mexico also used a significant number of enslaved people of African descent.

  Palafox fought the Jesuits over the tithe, the ten percent tax on agriculture that supported the church hierarchy. When a hacienda was donated to the Jesuits of Puebla, it dropped off the tithe rolls and the hierarchy lost revenue. The Jesuits argued that special pontifical privileges exempted them. Palafox was so thoroughly defeated that he was recalled to Spain and became bishop of the minor Diocese of Osma.

  Further south, the Jesuit Rafael Ferrer explored the Aguarico, Napo and Marañon rivers from 1602 to 1610. He set up missions among the Cofane people and was killed in 1610 by an apostate native. In 1639, Cristóbal de Acuña joined an expedition down the Amazon from the Napo river. His 1641 memoir, published in Madrid, became a fundamental reference on the Amazon region. Samuel Fritz founded 38 missions, called the Omagua Missions, along the river between the Napo and Negro. In the vast territory of Maynas, the Jesuits of Quito made contact with peoples speaking 40 different languages and founded 173 missions for 150,000 inhabitants. Epidemics of smallpox and measles and warfare cut the number of missions to 40 by 1744. The missions offered Christianity, iron tools and a little protection from slavers. In return, residents had to accept Jesuit discipline, and expeditions captured people from the jungle to settle there.

  The Guaraní of eastern Paraguay were in crisis in the early 17th century. Epidemics had cut their population by up to 50 percent, and forced labor under the Spanish had made many of them virtual slaves. The first Jesuits reached Asunción in 1588 and founded the reduction of San Ignacio Guazú in 1609. Slave-raiding Bandeirantes from Brazil then found the populous missions. Beginning in 1631, the Jesuits moved their missions about 500 km southwest. About 10,000 of the 30,000 Guaraní in the missions chose to go with them. In 1641 and 1642, Guaraní armies armed by the Jesuits defeated the Bandeirantes. At the peak in 1732, the Jesuits presided over 141,000 Guaraní in about 30 missions.

  Historians disagree about what these missions were. Admirers, among them Voltaire, who called them "a triumph of humanity", saw protection of the Guaraní and survival of their language. Detractors say the Jesuits took away freedom, changed lives by force and subjected people to abuse and disease. They add that the missions' economic success depended on subsidies and royal privileges. From 1721 to 1735, the Comunero Revolt saw Spanish and mestizo Paraguayans protest violently against Jesuit control of Guaraní labor. In 1756 the Guaraní fought and lost a brief war against Spain and Portugal over the relocation of seven missions. In 1767, Charles III of Spain expelled the Jesuits from the Americas as part of the Bourbon Reforms. Seventy-eight Jesuits left, and 89,000 Guaraní remained in 30 missions.

  2167707173

• 8. Suppression And Return

  ›

  In 1759 the powerful Marquis of Pombal, Secretary of State in Portugal, expelled the Jesuits from Portuguese territories. By 1767 the order had been suppressed in Portugal, France, the Two Sicilies, Parma and the Spanish Empire. Pope Clement XIII, the society's defender, was deeply troubled. In Mexico the haciendas were sold off. The exiled Mexican-born Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero wrote an important history of Mexico while living in Italy.

  On the 21st of July 1773, the next pope, Clement XIV, issued the brief Dominus ac Redemptor. It declared that "the name of the Company shall be, and is, for ever extinguished and suppressed." The suppression was carried out on political grounds almost everywhere. Prussia held out for a time. In Russia, Catherine the Great forbade the brief from being published. Millions of Catholics, including many Jesuits, lived in Polish provinces recently part-annexed by Prussia. That let the Society keep its continuity through the storm. Pope Pius VI later permitted the Society to continue in Russia and Poland, and Stanisław Czerniewicz was elected superior of the province in 1782.

  In the colonies, the effects were severe. Royal authorities seized the profitable Jesuit reductions, and the natives were enslaved. Jesuits such as Juan Pablo Vizcardo y Guzmán openly called for wars of independence against the imperial powers.

  The local effects were smaller but just as final. In New France, only 21 Jesuits were stationed in 1763, and only 11 remained in 1773. The British crown declared the Society dissolved there. Its estates, worth an income of roughly £5,000 a year, were handed to the authorities, who put the money chiefly toward schools. In Limerick, Fr. Joseph Morony had taught at a "high class school" on Jail Lane since 1746. In 1773 he was ordered to close the school and oratory, 208 years after Wolfe founded it. Morony moved to Dublin and worked as a secular priest.

  Pope Pius VII had resolved during his captivity in France to restore the Jesuits. On the 7th of August 1814, he reversed the suppression with the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum. Tadeusz Brzozowski, elected superior in Russia in 1805, thereby gained universal jurisdiction. After his death in 1820, Tsar Alexander I expelled the Jesuits from Russia.

  The Jesuits then returned country by country. They were allowed back into Mexico in 1840 under President Antonio López de Santa Anna, to help educate the poorer classes. Much of their property was restored. The mission in Quebec was re-established in 1842, and one of its colleges grew into present-day Laval University. In Ireland they began again at Kildare and Dublin, and in 1859 Bishop John Ryan invited them back to Limerick. The decades after 1814 brought tremendous growth. In the United States, 22 of the society's 28 universities were founded or taken over by the Jesuits during the 19th century.

  9798366575