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A CANDID HISTORY OF THE JESUITS




  A CANDID HISTORY
  OF
  THE JESUITS

  BY
  JOSEPH McCABE

  AUTHOR OF
  "THE DECAY OF THE CHURCH OF ROME" ETC.

  LONDON
  EVELEIGH NASH
  1913




PREFACE


It is the historic custom of the Church of Rome to enlist in its
service monastic or quasi-monastic bodies in addition to the ordinary
clergy. In its hour of greatest need, at the very outbreak of the
Reformation, the Society of Jesus was formed as one of these auxiliary
regiments, and in the war which the Church of Rome has waged since
that date the Jesuits have rendered the most spirited and conspicuous
service. Yet the procedure of this Society has differed in many
important respects from that of the other regiments of the Church, and
a vast and unceasing controversy has gathered about it. It is probable
that a thousand times, or several thousand times, more books and
pamphlets and articles have been written about the Jesuits than about
even the oldest and most powerful or learned of the monastic bodies.
Not a work of history can be opened, in any language, but it will
contain more references to the Jesuits than to all the other religious
orders collectively. But opinions differ as much to-day as they did a
hundred or two hundred years ago about the character of the Jesuits,
and the warmest eulogies are chilled by the most bitter and withering
indictments.

What is a Jesuit? The question is asked still in every civilised
land, and the answer is a confusing mass of contradictions. The most
learned historians read the facts of their career so differently,
that one comes to a verdict expressing deep and criminal guilt, and
another acquits them with honour. Since the foundation of the Society
these drastically opposed views of its action have been taken, and
the praise and homage of admirers have been balanced by the intense
hatred of an equal number of Catholic opponents. It would seem that
some impenetrable veil lies over the history and present life of the
Society, yet on both sides its judges refuse to recognise obscurity.
Catholic monarchs and peoples have, time after time, driven the Jesuits
ignominiously over their frontiers; Popes have sternly condemned them.
But they are as active, and nearly as numerous, in the twentieth
century as in the last days of the old political world.

No marshalling of historical facts will change the feeling of the
pronounced admirers and opponents of the Jesuits, and it would be idle
to suppose that, because the present writer is neither Roman Catholic
nor Protestant, he will be awarded the virtue of impartiality. There
seems, however, some need for an historical study of the Jesuits which
will aim at impartiality and candour. On one side we have large and
important works like Crétineau-Joly's _Histoire religieuse, politique,
et littéraire de la Compagnie de Jésus_, and a number of smaller
works, written by Catholics of England or America, from the material,
and in the spirit, of the French historian's work. Such works as
these cannot for a moment be regarded as serious history. They are
panegyrics or apologies: pleasant reading for the man or woman who
wishes to admire, but mere untruth to the man or woman who wishes to
know. Indeed, the work of M. Crétineau-Joly, written in conjunction
with the Jesuits, which is at times recommended as the classical
authority on the Society, has worse defects than the genial omission
of unedifying episodes. He makes the most inflated general statements
on the scantiest of material, is seriously and frequently inaccurate,
makes a very generous use of the "mental reserve" which his friends
advocate, and sometimes embodies notoriously forged documents without
even intimating that they are questioned.

Such works naturally provoke an antagonistic class of volumes, in
which the unflattering truths only are presented and a false picture
is produced to the prejudice of the Jesuits. An entirely neutral
volume on the Jesuits does not exist, and probably never will exist.
The historian who surveys the whole of the facts of their remarkable
and romantic career cannot remain neutral. Nor is it merely a question
of whether the writer is a Roman Catholic or no. The work of M.
Crétineau-Joly was followed in France by one written by a zealous
priest, the Abbé Guettée, which tore its predecessor to shreds, and
represented the Society of Jesus as fitly condemned by Pope and kings.

It will be found, at least, that the present work contains an
impartial account both of the virtue and heroism that are found in
the chronicles of the Jesuits, and the scandals and misdeeds that may
justly be attributed to them. It is no less based on the original
Jesuit documents, as far as they have been published, and the work of
Crétineau-Joly, than on the antagonistic literature, as the reader
will perceive. Whether or no it seems to some an indictment, it is
a patient endeavour to give all the facts, within the compass of the
volume, and enable the reader to form a balanced judgment on the
Society. It is an attempt to _understand_ the Jesuits: to understand
the enthusiasm and fiery attachment of one half of the Catholic world
no less than the disdain or detestation of the other, to employ the
white and the black, not blended into a monotonous grey but in their
respective places and shades, so as to afford a truthful picture of
the dramatic fortunes of the Society during nearly four centuries, and
some insight into the character of the men who won for it such ardent
devotion and such intense hostility.

  J.M.




CONTENTS


    CHAP.                                             PAGE

     I. The Origin of the Society                        1

    II. The First Jesuits                               27

   III. Early Storms                                    55

    IV. General Francis Borgia                          80

     V. Progress and Decay under Acquaviva             106

    VI. The Early Jesuits in England                   142

   VII. The First Century of Jesuitism                 167

  VIII. Under the Stuarts                              195

    IX. The Struggle with the Jansenists               220

     X. The Expulsion from Portugal and Spain          253

    XI. The Foreign Missions                           279

   XII. In the Germanic Lands                          311

  XIII. The Suppression of the Society                 334

   XIV. The Restoration                                364

    XV. The New Jesuits                                390

   XVI. The Last Phase                                 424

        Index                                          445




A CANDID HISTORY OF THE

JESUITS




CHAPTER I

THE ORIGIN OF THE SOCIETY


In the early summer of the year 1521, some months after Martin Luther
had burned the Pope's bull at Wittenberg and lit the fire of the
Reformation, a young Basque soldier lay abed in his father's castle
at the foot of the Pyrenees, contemplating the wreck of his ambition.
Iñigo of Loyola was the youngest son in a large family of ancient
lineage and little wealth. He had lost his mother at an early date, and
had been placed by a wealthy aunt at court, where he learned to love
the flash of swords, the smile of princes, the softness of silk and of
women's eyes, and all the hard deeds and rich rewards of the knight's
career. From the court he had gone to the camp, and had set himself
sternly to the task of cutting an honourable path back to court.
Fearless in war, skilful in sport and in martial exercises, refined
in person, cheerful in temper, and ardent in love, the young noble
had seen before him a long avenue of knightly adventure and gracious
recompense. He was, in 1521, in his thirtieth year of age, or near
it--his birth-year is variously given as 1491 or 1493; a clean-built,
sinewy little man, with dark lustrous eyes flashing in his olive-tinted
face, and thick black hair crowning his lofty forehead. And a French
ball at the siege of Pampeluna had, at one stroke, broken his leg and
shattered his ambition.

It took some time to realise the ruin of his ambition. The chivalrous
conquerors at Pampeluna had treated their brave opponent with
distinction, and had, after dressing his wounds, sent him to the Loyola
castle in the Basque provinces, where his elder brother had brought the
surgeons to make him fit for the field once more. The bone, they found,
had been badly set; it must be broken again and re-set. He bore their
operations without a moan, and then lay for weeks in pain and fever.
He still trusted to return to the camp and win the favour of a certain
great lady--probably the daughter of the Dowager-Queen of Naples--whose
memory he secretly cherished. Indeed, on the feast of the Apostles
Peter and Paul, he spoke of it with confidence; he told his brother
that the elder apostle had entered the dark chamber and healed him on
the eve of the festival. Unhappily he found, when the fever had gone,
that the second setting of his leg had been so ill done that a piece
of bone projected below the knee, and the right leg was shorter than
the left. Again he summoned the mediæval surgeons and their appalling
armoury, and they sawed off the protruding piece of bone and stretched
his leg on a rack they used for such purposes; and not a cry or curse
came from the tense lips. But the right leg still refused to meet its
fellow, and shades gathered about Iñigo's glorious prospect of life. A
young man who limps can hardly hope to reach a place of honour in the
camp, or the gardens of the palace, or the hearts of women. Talleyrand,
later, would set out on his career with a limp; and Talleyrand would
become a diplomatist.

Iñigo lay in the stout square castle of rugged stone, which is now
reverently enclosed, like a jewel, in a vast home of the Jesuits. It
then stood alone in a beautiful valley, just at the foot of the last
southern <DW72>s of the Pyrenees, about a mile from the little town
of Azpeitia. The mind of the young Basque heaved with confused and
feverish dreams as he lay there, in the summer heat, beside the wreck
of his ambition. He called for books of knight-errantry, to while
away the dreary days, but there were none in the Loyola castle, and
someone--a pious sister, perhaps--brought him a _Life of Christ_ and a
_Flowers of the Saints_. For lack of anything better he read them: at
first fingering the leaves with the nearest approach to disdain that a
Christian soldier dare admit, then starting with interest, at length
flushing with enthusiasm. What was this but another form of chivalry?
Nay, when you reflected, it was the only chivalry worth so fierce a
devotion as his. Here was a way of winning a fair lady, the Queen of
Heaven, whose glances were worth more than the caresses of all the
dames in Castile: here was a monarch to serve, whose court outshone
the courts of France and Spain as the sun outshines the stars: here
were adventures that called for a higher spirit than the bravado of the
soldier.

The young Basque began to look upon a new world from the narrow windows
of the old castle. Down the valley was Azpeitia, and even there one
could find monsters and evil knights to slay in the cause of Mary.
Southward were the broad provinces of Spain, full of half-converted
Moors and Jews and ever-flourishing vices. Across the hills and the
seas were other kingdoms, calling just as loudly for a new champion of
God and Mary. One field, far away at the edge of the world, summoned
him with peremptory voice; after all the Crusades the sites in the Holy
Land were still trodden by the feet of blaspheming Turks. The blood
began to course once more in the veins of the soldier.

During the winter that followed his friends noticed that he was
making a wonderful chronicle of the lives of Christ and His saints.
He was skilled in all courtly accomplishments--they did not include
learning--and could write, and illuminate very prettily, sonnets to
the secret lady of his inner shrine. Now he used his art to make a
pious chronicle, with the words and deeds of Christ in vermilion and
gold, the life of Mary in blue, and the stories of the saints in the
less royal colours of the rainbow, and his dark pale face was lit by a
strange light. There were times when this new light flickered or faded,
and the fleshly queen of his heart seemed to place white arms about
him, and the sunny earth fought with the faint vision of a far-off
heaven. Then he prayed, and scourged himself, and vowed that he would
be the knight of Christ and Mary; and--so he told his followers long
afterwards--the heavy stone castle shook and rumbled with the angry
passing of the demon. He told them also that he had at the time a
notion of burying himself in the Carthus