The Jesuits (6 page)

At just about the same time, both Aquaviva and Clement faced another problem that also arose in Spain. The Council of Trent in its Sixth Session, 1547, issued a long decree in response
to Luther's teaching of “justification by faith alone.” In its decree the council affirmed that both free will and grace were operative in the soul, but it did not try to explain just how that relationship worked, which left the question open to theologians. In 1588 the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina published his
Concordance of Free Will with the Gifts of Grace,
in which according to his major critic, Domingo Bañez, a distinguished Dominican theologian, he attributed so much to free will as to fall into the heresy known as Pelagianism.

A major battle broke out. All at once the Spanish Jesuits and the Spanish Dominicans seemed to be fighting a contest unto death, in which the Jesuits accused the Dominicans of being Calvinists, and the Dominicans accused the Jesuits of being Pelagians. The controversy escalated to such a degree that in 1594 Pope Clement ordered the affair be brought to Rome for adjudication. There for more than ten years the debate raged, with Clement reaching no decision. Finally in 1607 the new pope, Paul V, ordered a cease-fire and forbade both the Jesuits and Dominicans from ever denouncing the doctrine of the other as dangerous or heretical. For the Jesuits the controversy brought to the surface and helped crystallize a bias toward free agency that became typical of them.

These two problems that arose in Spain while Aquaviva was general obscure how well the Society was prospering there. The schools enjoyed great prestige, Jesuit confessors were sought after by high and low, and Jesuit preachers drew large crowds. The colleges and residences became hubs from which during vacation periods teams of Jesuits radiated to the countryside, moving from hamlet to hamlet among the humblest strata of society in intensive programs in preaching, teaching catechism, and working to quell vendettas.
In central Europe, the Jesuits of the German assistancy profited from the leadership that Peter Canisius provided for almost a half century. Like much of the rest of the Society, they continued to grow in numbers and public esteem. They without doubt were Catholicism's strongest bulwark against the Reformation and were uncompromising in their opposition to it. In Protestant eyes the Jesuits became the very embodiment of the dreaded Counter-Reformation.

In the early seventeenth century, the political and religious situation took an especially ugly and destructive turn with the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. Originally a contest between Catholic and Lutheran forces “in German lands,” it escalated to an international power struggle. On one side stood Catholic Austria, Bavaria, and Spain, and on the other Catholic France. The battles were fought almost exclusively on German soil and left many areas utterly devastated.

Vitelleschi's thirty-year tenure as general, 1615–1645, corresponded almost precisely with the dates of the war. Among the other problems he faced because of the war was that Jesuits were the confessors of the monarchs of all four of the great Catholic powers. He again and again forbade them to use their role in any way to influence political policy, but that was a distinction more easily drawn in theory than in practice. Wilhelm Lamormaini became Emperor Ferdinand II's confessor in 1624 and worked to convince him that his destiny was the restoration of Catholicism in all the Habsburg lands.

During his time as Ferdinand's confessor, Lamormaini had a particularly high profile and soon became regarded, with considerable justification, as the power behind the throne. His opposition to any compromise with Protestants won him enemies near and far, and it resulted in a sharp rise in anti-Jesuit feeling even among
Catholics. Vitelleschi felt helpless as long as Lamormaini enjoyed the emperor's favor. The notoriety surrounding Lamormaini and the well-known fact that Jesuits were confessors to other monarchs gained for them the reputation of political meddlers and international schemers.

In 1614, just before the Thirty Years War began, the anonymous and scurrilous
Monita Secreta
appeared in Kraków to become almost immediately one of the most influential sources of the “black legend” about the Jesuits. It was a small book that had a big impact and was published and republished in all the major vernaculars into the twentieth century. A crude forgery, it purported to be secret instructions from the superior general of the Society telling select members how to fleece widows of their fortunes, how to use confessional secrets to blackmail rulers, and how by these and other despicable means to climb to the pinnacle of political power. Refuted and denounced as soon as published, no other book, except possibly Pascal's
Provincial Letters,
so effectively poisoned opinion against the Jesuits.

At about the same time in Poland, where Calvinism had won the minds and hearts of the nobility, the Jesuits found support for their efforts in King Sigismund III, who reigned in the crucial years 1587–1632. The alliance of the Jesuits with the monarchy won them enemies among the nobility and helped foster an atmosphere where the
Monita
seemed credible. Important though royal support was, the Jesuits could not have been as well received as they generally were had it not been for their own merits. The schools, attended by many students whose parents were not Catholic, were, again, a crucial factor. In 1626 there were twenty-eight in the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

But the schools are not the whole story. The Jesuits found a particularly warm response to their preaching. To listen to a Jesuit sermon became a fashionable pastime even for Protestants. Careful to master the Ruthenian and Lithuanian languages, the preachers by constant use helped keep these tongues alive. Piotr Skarga's
Lives of the Saints,
1579, and Jakub Wujek's elegant translation of the Bible, 1599, were widely read and contributed to the development of the Polish language. In time the Jesuits were accepted, therefore, as true Poles.

However, the suspicion that the Jesuits were foreigners dogged them in France almost from the beginning and added to the difficulties that the Faculty of Theology's condemnation in 1554 continued to cause them. The Jesuits did their best to carry on as they did elsewhere, despite the immense problems thrust upon them with the outbreak in 1562 of almost thirty years of religious conflict between Catholics and Huguenots that tore the country apart. Even in this difficult situation, there were in 1575 more than three hundred men divided into two provinces, and by 1580 they were conducting fifteen colleges.

In contrast to the welcome Jesuits received in some parts of the country, in Paris the university and Parlement kept up a barrage of accusations and denunciation. The Jesuits, supported by the crown, got caught in the cross fire between the monarchy and its enemies. Matters only got worse. The assassination of King Henry III in 1589 brought to the throne the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. Although Navarre converted to Catholicism, the Jesuits were forbidden by Aquaviva to take the required oath of loyalty until the papacy lifted Henry's excommunication. The Jesuits' abstention from the oath put them in a compromised position and added to the persuasion that they were not true Frenchmen.

Then an event took place that brought their situation to full crisis. An emotionally disturbed young man, a former student at the Jesuits' Collège de Clermont, made an attempt on Henry IV's life. His connection with the Jesuits, tenuous though it was, gave the Society's enemies the excuse they needed to expel it from Paris and environs. On September 17, 1595, Clement gave absolution to Henry, and a year and a half later requested that the Jesuits be readmitted to the capital. The king was gradually won over and in fact became a friend of the Society. On September 1, 1603, he issued the Edict of Rouen, formally reestablishing it in France.

The edict's importance can be gauged from the fact that within five months of its publication, thirty-two towns requested Jesuit colleges. From the thirty-two the king chose eighteen and made his favorite the one he started at La Flèche, near Angers. Converting the graceful and elegant Châteauneuf into the school, he envisaged it as “the most beautiful in the world,” and the Collège Royal Henry-Le Grand at La Flèche did indeed become one of the most esteemed and prestigious of the Jesuit schools in the whole Jesuit network. René Descartes entered La Flèche at the age of eight as one of its first students and remained for twelve years. It was the only formal schooling he ever had.

For the moment, therefore, all seemed well for the Jesuits in France. A strong and enduring bond had been formed between them and the crown, which guaranteed them royal favor. But such favor was not without its liabilities, as events would show.

In perhaps no other territory did the Society prosper as much in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as in Belgium. By 1592 the Jesuits already ran eleven colleges there and were engaged in a massive program of catechizing that reached deep into the population. They formed a close and cordial relationship
with the community of artisans and artists that soon produced works of art that the Jesuits distributed in every part of the world, most especially to the missions overseas. They were especially close to Peter Paul Rubens, who decorated for them the interior of their great church in Antwerp, the first in the world dedicated to Saint Ignatius. They produced a Jesuit artist of distinction, Daniёl Seghers (1590–1661). In 1612 Aquaviva divided Belgium into two provinces according to language and pronounced it “the flower of the Society of Jesus.”

The Jesuits were compulsive record keepers, as demonstrated by the figures the Flemish Jesuits made public about their ministries in the single year 1640. They and their lay helpers, for instance, taught catechism 10,045 times to 32,508 children and adults. The province had ninety Marian congregations with almost 14,000 members. Antwerp alone had ten with some 3,000 members, which included Rubens. The Professed House in Antwerp provided twenty-six confessors on call for the adjacent church, where within the space of a year Jesuits administered communion 240,000 times. In Brussels over the course of fifteen years, the Jesuits gave spiritual comfort to 344 men as they prepared for their execution. Although Belgium itself had no overseas missions, the Jesuits there claimed a share in the merits of the English and Scots martyrs—Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, John Ogilvie, and others—because their schools educated these (and many other) English recusants.

In 1580 three English Jesuits—Campion, Robert Persons, and Ralph Emerson—entered England in disguise. They eventually were joined by others, but even by 1610 the number had grown to only fifty-two. Their situation, always difficult and dangerous,
worsened considerably in 1605 when they were suspected of collusion in the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I. The “English mission” of the Jesuits ran into ever more difficulties, including opposition from other priests. Somehow it managed to continue and in an utterly unexpected turn of events to father a mission of great importance for the future of Catholicism.

George Calvert, first Baron of Baltimore, converted to Catholicism, at least partly due to the ministrations of the Jesuit Andrew White. His son Leonard wanted to colonize lands held by the family in the area of the Chesapeake Bay in North America. In so doing he also wanted to provide a refuge for Catholics where they might worship freely. He enlisted Andrew White and two other Jesuits to accompany the expedition, which was made up of both Catholics and Anglicans. On March 25, 1634, the colonists arrived on St. Clement's Island in what was to become, first, the English colony of Maryland and then, after the American Revolution, one of the original thirteen states in the new United States.

Although the colony was founded on a principle of religious toleration, waves of bitter anti-Catholicism periodically broke out. Still, some Catholic families prospered and were regarded with respect and deference. The Jesuits, the only Catholic priests in the colony, continued to grow by small increments through entry into the Society of young men from Maryland itself. They worked to convert the ever diminishing number of aborigines and to minister to the relatively small Catholic population, which they did by providing them with mass, the sacraments, and basic catechesis. Compared to other overseas undertakings by the Society, Maryland was among the least venturesome and the least promising for the future.

Ever since the late fifteenth century, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians had sailed with the galleons of Portugal and Spain as they set out to explore and exploit “the Indies,” the generic term of the era to indicate Asia and the Americas. The Jesuits came late on the scene but soon began to play an important and in some places a dominant role. Despite their massive commitment to the ministry of formal schooling, they never forgot that they were founded as a missionary order and that their professed members pronounced a special (Fourth) vow “concerning missions.”

By the time Ignatius died in 1556, Jesuits had not only set foot in India, Japan, and Brazil but also in the Congo and were on their way to Ethiopia. The moving force behind these ventures was King John III of Portugal, and it was under his aegis and in his domains that the Jesuits first made their mark as missionaries. In Africa the Jesuits became engaged in five large areas: Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, the Congo, and Cape Verde. Although from the days of Saint Ignatius himself, Jesuit hopes were high for bringing the Coptic church in Ethiopia into the Roman fold, they despite repeated efforts over a long period made little headway. In the other areas of Africa the missions stalled especially because of lack of manpower but also because the Jesuits were so ill informed about the situations they met and therefore were ill prepared to deal with them effectively. Moreover, they sometimes made the fatal mistake of identifying themselves too closely with the Portuguese military.

The situation was very different in the Far East. When Xavier took leave of King John III on April 7, 1541, to begin his long voyage to India, he had in hand four papal briefs from Pope Paul
III appointing him papal nuncio in the Indies and recommending him to the princes ruling in the East. Thirteen months later he arrived in Goa, the capital of Portuguese India, which would become the first headquarters for Jesuit missionary activity in that part of the world.