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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 Carthusian monastery at Seville, and
sent one to inquire concerning its way of life; but such a design is so
little in accord with his knight-errant mood that we cannot think he
seriously entertained it.

By the spring the struggle had ended and Ignatius--he exchanged his
worldly name for that of a saint-model--set out in quest of spiritual
adventure. The "sudden revolution," as Crétineau-Joly calls his
conversion, had occupied about nine months. Indeed, friends and foes
of the Jesuits have conspired to obscure the development of his
feelings: the friends in order that they may recognise a miracle in
the conversion, the foes in order that they may make it out to have
been no conversion at all, but a transfer of selfish ambition from the
camp to the Church. Whatever be the truth about Iñigo's earlier morals,
he had certainly received a careful religious education in boyhood,
and he would just as certainly not learn scepticism at the court set
up by Ferdinand and Isabella. His belief that he had a vision of St.
Peter, a few weeks after receiving his wound and before he read the
pious books, shows that he had kept a vivid religious faith in the
camp. Some looseness of conduct would not be inconsistent with this,
especially in Spain, but the darker descriptions of his adolescent ways
which some writers give are not justified. "He was prone to quarrels
and amatory folly," is all that the most candid of his biographers
says. Let us grant the hot Basque blood a quick sense of honour and a
few love-affairs. On the whole, Iñigo seems to have been an officer of
the stricter sort, and a thorough Catholic. Hence we can understand
that, as earth grows dark and cheerless for him, and the casual reading
brings before him in vivid colouring the vision of faith, his fervent
imagination is gradually won, and he sincerely devotes his arms to the
service of Christ and Mary.

Piously deceiving his brother as to his destination, he set out on a
mule in the month of March. He would go to the shrine of Our Lady at
Montserrat, to ask a blessing on his enterprise, and then cross the
sea to convert the Mohammedans in Palestine. His temper is seen in an
adventure by the way. He fell in with one of the Moors who had put on a
thin mantle of Christian profession in order that they might be allowed
to remain in Spain, and talked to him of Our Lady of Montserrat. Being
far from the town and the ears of Inquisitors, the Moor spoke lightly
of the Mother of Christ, and, when the convert showed heat, fled at
a gallop. Ignatius wondered, with his hand on his sword, whether or
no his new ideal demanded that he should follow and slay the man. He
left the point to God, or to his mule, and was taken on the road to
Montserrat.

At last he came to the steep mountain, with saw-like peaks, which rises
out of the plain some twenty miles to the north-west of Barcelona, with
the famous shrine of the Virgin on its flank. In the little town of
Iguelada, at the foot of the mountain, he bought the rough outfit of a
pilgrim--a tunic of sackcloth, a rope-girdle, a pair of rough sandals,
a staff, and a gourd--and made his way up the wild <DW72>s, among the
sober cypresses, to the Benedictine monastery which guarded the shrine.
For three days he knelt at the feet of one of the holiest of the monks,
telling, with many tears, the story of his worldly life. Then he went
again to the town, took aside a poor-clad beggar, as Francis of Assisi
had done in his chronicle, and exchanged garments with him, putting the
sackcloth tunic over his rags. It was the eve of the great festival of
Mary, the Annunciation (March 25th), and he spent the night kneeling
before the altar, as he had read of good knights doing before they
took the field. In the morning he hung his sword in the shrine and set
forth. From that moment we shall do well to forget that Ignatius had
been a soldier, and seek some other clue to his conduct.

The next step in his journey toward Rome is described at great length
in lives of the saint, yet it is not wholly intelligible. Instead of
going to Barcelona, where one took ship, he went to Manresa, and his
pilgrimage was postponed for nearly a year. He did not take the high
road to Barcelona, says his biographer, lest he should meet the people
coming to the shrine: a theory which would not only require another
theory to explain it, but which gives no explanation of the year's
delay. Others think that he heard there was plague in the port; though
the plague would not last a year, and one may question if Ignatius
would flee it. The truth seems to be that the idea of spending his
life in the East was already yielding in his mind to another design:
the plan of forming a Society was dimly breaking on him. He had studied
the monastic life in the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, and had
brought away with him a book, written by one of their abbots, over
which he would brood to some purpose. He had a vague feeling that the
appointed field of adventure might be Europe.

However that may be, he took a road that led away from Barcelona, and
as he limped and suffered, for he had discarded the mule and would
make his pilgrimage afoot, he asked where he could find a hospital (in
those days a mixture of hostel and hospital). He was taken to Manresa,
a picturesque little town in one of the valleys of the district, where
he lodged in the hospital for a few days, and then, instead of going to
Barcelona, found an apartment and became a local celebrity. The beggar
to whom he had given his clothes had, naturally, been arrested, and
Ignatius was forced to tell his strange story, in order to clear the
man and himself. The story grew as it passed from mouth to mouth, and
it was presently understood that the dirty, barefoot, ill-clad beggar,
who asked a little coarse bread at the doors, and retired to pray
and scourge himself, was one of the richest grandees of the eastern
provinces. Children followed "Father Sackcloth" about the streets; men
sneered at his uncut nails and his long, wild black locks and thin
face; women wept, and asked his prayers.

After a few months he found a cavern outside the town, at the foot
of the hills, and entered upon the period of endless prayer and wild
austerity in which he wrote his book, the _Spiritual Exercises_. He
scourged himself, until the blood came, three times a day: he ate so
little, and lived so intense a life, that he was sometimes found
unconscious on the floor of the cave, and had to be removed and nursed;
his deep black eyes seemed to gleam from the face of a corpse. Thus he
lived for six months, and wrote his famous book. I need not analyse
that passionate guide to the spiritual life, or consider the legend of
its miraculous origin. We know from Benedictine writers that Ignatius
had received at Montserrat a copy of the _Exercitatorium_ of their
abbot Cisneros, and anyone familiar with Catholic life will know that
similar series of "meditations" are, and always have been, very common.
There is an original plan in Ignatius's book, and the period during
which the mind must successively brood over sin and hell, virtue and
heaven, Christ and the devil, is boldly extended to four weeks. These
are technicalities;[1] the deeply original thing in the work is its
intensity, and for the source of this we need only regard those six
months of fierce inner life in the cave near Manresa.

In later years Ignatius claimed that the general design of his Society,
and even the chief features of its constitution, were revealed to
him in that cavern. "I saw it thus at Manresa," he used to say when
he was asked why such or such a feature was included. In this he is
clearly wrong. His Society was, in essence and details, a regiment
enlisted to fight Protestantism, and Ignatius certainly knew nothing
of Protestantism as a formidable menace to the Pope's rule in 1522;
one may doubt if he was yet aware of the existence of Luther. We may
conclude again that he had in mind a vague alternative to his mission
to the Mohammedans. Those who are disposed to believe that the Society
of Jesus was in any definite sense projected by him at Manresa will
find it hard to explain why for five years afterwards he still insisted
that his mission was to the Turks.

In January 1523 he set out for Barcelona, trimming his nails, combing
and clipping his hair, and exchanging his sack for clothes of coarse
grey stuff. He did not wish to attract too much attention, he said. He
was detained a few weeks at Barcelona, and begged his bread, and served
the poor and the sick, in the way which was to become characteristic of
the early Jesuits. On Palm Sunday he entered Rome, lost in a crowd of
other pilgrims and beggars, and from there he walked on foot to Venice,
whence he sailed in July. Within six months he was back in Venice. The
Franciscan monks who controlled the Christian colony at Jerusalem had
sent him home very quickly, fearing that his indiscreet fervour would
lead to trouble with the Turks. The whole expedition was Quixotic, if
it was really meant to be more than a pilgrimage, as Ignatius knew not
a word of any language but Basque and Castilian. He returned to Venice
in a thin ragged coat, his legs showing flagrantly through his tattered
trousers, and in this guise he crossed on foot to Genoa, in hard wintry
weather. By the end of February he was again in Barcelona.

For several years yet Ignatius will continue to speak of the conversion
of the Turks as his chief mission, but his actions suggest that the
alternative in his mind was growing larger. The year's experience had
taught him that the knight of the Lord needed education, and he sat
among the boys at Barcelona learning the Latin grammar and startling
them by rising into literal ecstasies over the conjugation of the verb
"to love." He now dressed in neat plain clothes, but begged his bread
on the way to school and took every occasion to preach the gospel.
Once, when he had converted a loose community of nuns, the fast young
men of Barcelona, who were angry at this interference with their
pleasures, sent their servants to waylay him. They nearly killed him
with their staves. Many jeered at him as a hypocrite or a fanatic: many
revered him, and a few youths became his first disciples. With three of
these he went, after two years' study in Barcelona, to the University
of Alcalà, and began his higher studies. But he was so eager to make an
end of this intellectual preparation, and so busy with saving souls and
gaining proselytes, that he tried to take simultaneously the successive
parts of the stately mediæval curriculum, and learned very little.

His first attempt to found a Society also ended in disastrous failure.
Opinion in Alcalà was divided about "the sackcloth men." Some
picturesque figures were known in the religious life of Spain, but no
one had yet seen such a thing as this little band of youths, led by a
pale and worn man of thirty-two, who went barefoot from house to house,
begging their bread, and passed from the schools in the evening to
the hospitals or the homes of the poor, or stood boldly in the public
squares and told sinners to repent. It was an outrage on the dignity
of ecclesiastical life, and so they were denounced to the Inquisition,
and two learned priests were sent from Seville to examine them. Mystics
were hardly less obnoxious to the Inquisition than secret Jews and
Moors, and then there was this new device of Satan which was said to
be spreading in Germany. Ignatius and his grey-coated young preachers
were arrested and brought before the terrible tribunal. Their doctrine
was found to be sound, but they were forbidden to wear a uniform dress
and were ordered to put shoes on their feet. They dyed their coats
different colours, and returned to their work; as Jesuits have often
done since.

Four months afterwards, the officers of the Inquisition fell on them
again and put them in prison. Among the women who sought the spiritual
guidance of Ignatius were some ladies of wealth, who wished to follow
his example. It is said that he did not consent, and they set out,
against his will, to beg their bread and tend the sick. This was too
much for respectable folk in Alcalà, and Ignatius was closely examined
to see whether he was not a secret Jew, since Christians did not do
these things. The inquiry ended in the companions being ordered to
dress as other students did, and to forbear preaching for four years.
It is important to notice how from the first Ignatius, relying on his
inner visions, will not bend to any authority if he can help it. He
and his youths walked to Salamanca, and resumed their ways, but the
eye of the Inquisition was on them, and they were imprisoned again.
The authorities now fastened on them a restriction which may puzzle a
layman: they were forbidden to attempt to distinguish between mortal
and venial sin until their theological studies were completed. It
meant, in practice, that they must not disturb the gay sinners of Spain
with threats of hell, and for the time it entirely destroyed the design
of Ignatius. His disciples fell away, and Ignatius fled to a land where
there were no Inquisitors. He crossed the Pyrenees and went the whole
length of France on foot.

The seven years which he spent at Paris were of the greatest importance
in the life of Ignatius. Of his studies little need be said. He now
took the university courses in proper succession, and won his degree
in 1534. But these studies were only a means to an end, and he never
became a scholar. He discarded books, wrote a very poor Latin, and took
long to master Italian. For secular knowledge he had a pious disdain.
His followers were to be learned just in so far as it was needed to
capture and retain the control of youth and promote the authority of
the Pope. The chief interest of the long stay in Paris is that he there
founded his Society, and the manner of its foundation is of great
importance.

He had not been long at the University before his strange ways set
up the usual conflict of opinion. Was he a hypocrite, or a fool, or
a saint? From the youths who took the more complimentary view of his
ways he picked out a few to form the little band of disciples he was
always eager to have, and put them through the Spiritual Exercises.
They came out of this fiery ordeal in heroic temper,