VIII. THE ASIATIC CONTINENT
The Great Mogul--Rudolph Aquaviva--Jerome Xavier--de Nobili--de Britto--Beschi--The Pariahs--Entering Thibet--From Peking to Europe--Mingrelia, Paphlagonia and Chaldea--The Maronites-- Alexander de Rhodes--Ricci enters China--From Agra to Peking-- Adam Schall--Arrival of the Tatars--Persecutions--Schall condemned to Death--Verbiest--de Tournon's Visit--The French Royal Mathematicians--Avril's Journey.
At the very time that Queen Elizabeth was putting Jesuits to death in England, there was a remarkable pagan monarch reigning in what is now part of English India, who was inviting Jesuits to his court and making them his friends. His name was Akbar, and he is known in history as the Great Mogul. He was born in 1542, and ruled four years longer than the forceful Eliza. She was queen from 1558 to 1603; he was king from 1556 to 1605. Akbar appears first as the ruler of the Punjab and the country around Delhi and Agra; but in 1572 he drove the Afghans out of Bengal, and reunited the lower valley of the Ganges to Hindostan. Later, he annexed Cabul, Kashmir, Sind and Kandahar. He was a mighty warrior, but remarkable likewise as a civil ruler, the proof in this case being that he levied more money in taxes than England extracts at the present day from the same territory. He was very much interested in religious matters, and Christianity appealed to him, because one of his numerous wives had been a Christian; but he fancied that it was part of a general system which could be incorporated in a new cult which he had devised to conciliate the conflicting creeds of his realm. His own personal devotion was sun-worship, and he appeared every morning in public, devoutly offering up his orisons to the god of day. He fancied it was the world-soul that animates all things, a concrete form of one of the illusions of the present time.
At the invitation of Akbar, Rudolph Aquaviva, accompanied by Anthony Montserrat and Francisco Henriques, left Goa in 1579, to present himself at his court for the purpose of explaining to him the doctrines of the Christian Faith. He listened with pleasure and intelligence, but his interest was purely academic. As with other Oriental despots, nothing practical could be hoped for, on account of the harem. Seeing that it was lost time to remain there, Aquaviva returned to Goa, and was then sent down to the peninsula of Salsette, as superior of the mission established at that place. His stay there was not a long one, for on July 15, 1583, he and Alfonso Pacheco were attacked by the natives and cut to pieces. Fathers Pietro Berno, Antonio Francisco and Francisco Aranha, a lay-brother, together with twenty of their neophytes were included in the massacre.
Hearing of the tragedy, the Great Mogul despatched an embassy to the viceroy and to the superior of the Jesuits to express his sympathy, and also to urge that other missionaries might be sent to instruct his people. In compliance with the request, Jerónimo Xavier, a nephew of St. Francis Xavier, was sent there in 1595 and succeeded in winning the favor of Akbar. The "Encyclopedia Britannica" informs us that Jerónimo, at the suggestion of the monarch, translated the four Gospels into Persian. Ranke adds in his "History of the Popes" that "while the Jesuit was there the insurrections of the Mahometans contributed to dispose the emperor towards the Christians, for in the year 1599 Christmas was celebrated at Lahore with the utmost solemnity. The manger and the leading facts of the Nativity were represented for twenty days consecutively, and numerous catechumens proceeded to the Church with palms in their hands to receive baptism. The emperor read, with great pleasure, a 'Life of Christ' composed in Persian, and a picture of the Virgin, copied from the Madonna del Popolo in Rome, was by his orders taken to the palace that he might show it to the women of his household. It is true that the Christians drew more favourable conclusions from these things than the facts justified; still, great progress was really made. Indeed, after the death of Akbar, three princes of the blood royal were solemnly baptized. They rode to the church on white elephants, and were received with the sound of trumpets, kettle-drums and martial music. This took place in 1610, so that Christianity seemed gradually to acquire a position of a fixed character, although suffering from certain vicissitudes and the prevalence of fickleness in the matter of religious opinion. Political considerations, also, largely affected the public mind. In 1621 a college was founded in Agra, and a station established at Patna. In 1624 hopes were entertained that the Emperor Jehanguire would himself become a Christian."
Shortly after Jerónimo Xavier had settled down in the court of the Great Mogul, Father Robert de Nobili, a nephew of Cardinal Bellarmine, broke through the caste barrier in India in a way that, for a time, gave considerable scandal. He had gone to the mission of Madura, a territory somewhat in the interior towards the northeast of the Fisheries, and found there that Father Fernandes, a very pious and energetic missioner who had been living for fourteen years among his pagans, had never made a convert, as he could not get in touch with the influential people of the country. Two difficulties stood in the way: first, he was a Portuguese or a Prangui, and the Prangui were held in abhorrence, because they ate meat and drank wine; secondly, he mingled with the most degraded castes of India.
De Nobili determined to get rid of these obstacles. First, he insisted, that he was not a Prangui but a Roman nobleman in name and in fact; secondly, with regard to wine and meat, he would abstain from them and live on rice; thirdly, he would become a Brahmin, as far as their manner of life and dress was concerned, and, moreover, he would outdo them in the knowledge of their own language, literature and religion. Indeed, within a year, he was master of Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit. He was now equipped for his work, and in 1606 he bade good-bye to Fernandes, and shut himself up in a hut which, for a long time, no one was allowed to enter. He wanted the news to spread among the natives that a great European Brahmin had made his appearance. Curiosity, he said, would do the rest, for his rigid seclusion would make them all the more intent on seeing him. The scheme succeeded, and when, at last, visitors were admitted to speak to him, they found him to be even holier in appearance than they had imagined him to be, and were amazed to hear him converse in Tamil, and show a perfect acquaintance with the literature of the language. He made it a point, also, to recite and even to sing the songs of their poets, for he was an able musician and had a good voice.
When his reputation was established he began to discuss some of the truths of fundamental theology, not as coming from himself, but which, as he showed them, were actually set down in their own Vedas. His knowledge of Sanskrit--perhaps he was the first European to venture into that field--had given him a more thorough knowledge of the sacred books than was possessed by any of the Brahmins themselves, and hence it happened that, before a year had passed, he had baptized several persons who were conspicuous both for their nobility and learning. He permitted his converts to continue to besmear their foreheads with sandal-wood paste, to cultivate the tuft of hair on the top of their heads, and to wear a string on the left shoulder. He did this after he had thoroughly convinced himself that there was no superstition in such practices. Meantime he was living on milk, rice, herbs and water, which were handed to him once a day by the servant of a Brahmin. It was a precaution to forestall any suspicion that other food was supplied surreptitiously.
In the second year, his flock was so numerous that the hut he lived in was insufficient to contain them all, and he had to build a church. That, of course, caused some alarm among the Brahmins, but it was nothing in comparison to the storm that de Nobili's life excited in Europe. Cardinal Bellarmine, his uncle, thought he had apostatized, and wrote him an indignant letter, and the General of the Society added to it a very severe reprehension. His brother Jesuit, Fernandes, had denounced him as a traitor, because of his rejection of the name "Prangui," or Portuguese, and also of his connivance at idolatry in allowing his neophytes to retain their heathenish customs. This was the origin of the famous question of the "Malabar Rites" which created such a stir in the Church, one hundred years later. These charges gave de Nobili a great deal of trouble for some time, but at last everything was satisfactorily explained, and the cardinal, the General and the Pope told the innovating missionary to continue as he had begun. Hence in order to obviate the apparent neglect and even contempt of the lower castes, other priests were assigned to that work, and de Nobili restricted himself to his peculiar vocation for forty-two years. He then lost his sight and was sent to Jafanapatam in Ceylon, and afterwards to Mylapore, where he died on January 16, 1656.
The mission had prospered. About the time de Nobili ended his labours, it had an average of 5000 converts a year, and it never dropped below 3000, even in the times of persecution. At the end of the seventeenth century its territory had extended beyond Madura to Mysore, Marava, Tanjore and Gingi, and the Christians of the entire Madura Mission, as it was called, amounted to 150,000 souls. Besides being a field for apostolic zeal, the mission also produced eminent scholars in Tamil and Sanskrit, like Beschi, Coeurdoux, and others. In 1700 it reached into the Carnatic and probably took in what Christians had been left there by the missionaries among the Moguls. This mission glories in its great martyr, John de Britto, who arrived there twelve years after the death of de Nobili. He, too, adopted the manners of a Saniassi, and labored as such for twenty-one years. It was a life of continual and horrible martyrdom. He was finally put to death as a magician, because of the multitudes of people attracted to the Faith by his holiness and teaching. Like his predecessor de Nobili, he did not worry his converts about their tufts of hair or the cotton cords on their shoulders, and it is noteworthy that long after his death, and just while the process of his beatification was going on, the theologians were hotly discussing the liceity of the Malabar Rites. If they were condemned, how would the decision affect de Britto's canonization? Pope Benedict XIV decided that it would not stand in the way, and so de Britto was placed among the Blessed.
The companions of de Nobili and de Britto went everywhere in Hindostan, they even reconciled to the Church the community of natives who called themselves the Christians of St. Thomas the Apostle, but who were in reality commonplace Nestorians. They built the first Church of Bengal, and penetrated into the kingdoms of Arracan, Pegu, Cambogia, and Siam, all the time busy avoiding the Dutch pirates who were prowling along the coast.
The most dazzling of these picturesque missionaries was undoubtedly the Italian, Constant Beschi, who arrived in Madura in 1700, one hundred years after de Nobili, and twenty-eight after de Britto. He determined to surpass all the other Saniassis or Brahmins in the austerity of his life. He remained in his house most of the time, and would never touch anything that had life in it. On his forehead was the pottu of Sandanam, and on his head the coulla, a sort of cylindrical head dress made of velvet. He was girt with the somen, was shod with the ceremonious wooden footgear, and pearls hung from his ears. He never went out except in a palanquin, in which tiger skins had to be placed for him to sit on, while a servant stood on either side, fanning him with peacock feathers, and a third held above his head a silken parasol surmounted by a globe of gold. He was called "the Great Viramamvuni", and like Bonaparte, he sat "wrapped in the solitude of his own originality." Not even a Jesuit could come near him or speak to him. A word of Italian never crossed his lips, but he plunged into Sanskrit, Telugu, and Tamil, studied the poets of Hindostan, and wrote poems that conveyed to the Hindoos a knowledge of Christianity. For forty years he was publicly honored as the Ismat Saniassi, that is, the penitent without stain. The Nabob of Trichinopoli was so enthusiastic about him that Beschi had to accept the post of prime minister, and thenceforth he never went abroad unless accompanied by thirty horsemen, twelve banner-bearers, and a band of military music, while a long train of camels followed in the rear. If, on his way, any Jesuit who was looking after the Pariahs came across his path, there was no recognition on either side, but both must have been amused as the Jesuit in rags prostrated himself in the dust before the silk-robed Jesuit in the cavalcade, the outcast not daring even to look at the great official, though, perhaps, they were intimate friends.
Numbers of Jesuits were, meantime, besieging the General with petitions to be made missionaries among the Pariahs, for few could act the part that Beschi was playing. To be a Pariah was easy, and attempts to evangelize that class continued to be made in Madura up to the time of the Suppression. Conversions were numerous, and Bouchet, a contemporary of Beschi, heard as many as 100,000 confessions in a single year. It is said that the particularly fervent converts among the Brahmins used to cut off their hair as a sacrifice, when they were baptized, and a great number of locks, some of which were four and five feet long, adorned Beschi's church in Tiroucavalor.
But these conversions connoted persecution. Bouchet, who was Beschi's successor among the high-class Brahmins, was several times arrested and condemned to death. On one occasion, when he was sentenced to be burned alive and was being covered with oil to make the flames more active, the executioners were so startled by his apparent unconcern that they dropped the work and set him free. Bouchet thought that the Church of Madura was specially blessed by being persecuted, and that explained for him how he was able to baptize 20,000 Hindoos. He had the care of thirty churches, which meant untold labor. About the trifles of never eating meat, fresh eggs or fish, living in straw-covered cabins without beds, seats or furniture, and never having the luxury of a table or spoon or knife or fork at meal times,--that never gave the missionaries a thought. The consolation for these privations was that at times they would hear the confessions of entire villages and never have to deal with a mortal sin. Probably Simon Carvalho,--Marshall calls him Laynez--who had received 10,000 people into the Church, and was at one time almost torn to pieces by a mob, and at another hunted for five months to be put to death, would have preferred this work, in which he had been employed for thirty years, to that of administering the diocese of Mylapore, of which Clement XI made him bishop later.
"They were giants," wrote the Abbé Dubois who was a missionary in India in modern times, "and they triumphed in their day, because neither the world nor the devil could resist the might that was in them. Possessing for the most part the rarest mental endowments, so that if they had aimed only at human honors they would have encountered scarcely a rival in their path, versed in all the learning of their age, and conspicuous even in that great Society, which attracted to itself for more than a century the noblest minds of every country in Europe, they had acquired in addition to their natural gifts such a measure of Divine grace and wisdom, such perfection of evangelical virtue, that the powers of darkness fled away from before their face, and the Cross of Christ wherever they lifted it up, broke in pieces the idols of the Gentiles." And Perrin in his "Voyage dans l'Indoustan," II, 166, writes: "I confess that I have criticized the Jesuits of Hindostan with critical, perhaps with malignant temper. I have changed my mind now, and if I spoke ill of them, all India would tax me with imposture."
The hermit kingdom of Thibet was first entered by Father Antonio de Andrada. He was one of the missionaries in the kingdom of the Great Mogul, and started from Agra in 1624 to cross the Himalayas and enter, if possible, the Grand Lama's mysterious domain. He joined a troop of idolaters who were going to present their offerings at the celebrated pagoda of Barrinath, whither thousands flocked from all the kingdoms of India and even from the island of Ceylon. "That part of the trip," he says in his narrative, "was the easiest, although in ascending the valley of the Ganges I had often to creep along a narrow path cut in the face of the rock, sometimes scarcely a palm in breadth, while far below me were roaring torrents into which, from time to time, some unfortunate traveller would be hurled. Here and there we had to pass rivers with the help of ropes strung across the stream, or perhaps on heaps of snow which the avalanches had piled up in the valley, but which were especially perilous, for the mountain torrents were all the while eating through them at the base. If there was a cave-in the whole party would disappear in the depths. It was dreadful work, but when I saw my companions, many of them old men, keeping up their courage by repeating the name of Barrinath, I was ashamed not to do more for Jesus Christ than these poor pagans for their idols and pagodas."
After the shrine was reached, the valiant missionary continued his journey, and arrived at the town of Manah, the last habitation of the mountaineers on the India slope. "Before us was a desert of snow, inaccessible for any living creature for ten months of the year, and which called for a twenty days' march, without shelter and without a bit of wood to make a fire. With me were two natives and a guide. However, I had put my trust in God, for whom alone I was attempting this dangerous task. Each step costs incredible struggles, for every morning there was a new layer of snow, knee-deep or up to the waist or even to the shoulders. In some places, to get across the drifts, we had to go through the motions of a swimmer; and to avoid being smothered at night, we were compelled to remove the snow, at least every hour." He finally arrived at his destination and was well received by the Lama. He was given leave to establish a mission in the country, he then made haste to return to Agra and in the following year he established a base at Chaparang. But he himself was not to remain in the country which he had so gloriously opened to the world. He was named provincial of the Indies, and had to set out for Goa immediately. Nine years later, on March 19, 1634, he was poisoned by the Jews. Meantime the Thibet mission tottered and fell.
In 1661 Father Johann Gruber, one of Schall's assistants in Pekin, reached Thibet on his way to Europe. He could not go by sea, for the Dutch were blockading Macao, so he made up his mind to go overland by way of India and Thibet. With him was Father d'Orville, a Belgian. After reaching Sunning-fu, on the confines of Kuantsu, they crossed Kukonor and Kalmuk Tatary to the Holy City of Lhasa in Thibet, but did not remain there. They then climbed the Himalayas and from Nepal journeyed over the Ganges plateau to Patna and Agra. At the latter city d'Orville died, he was replaced by Father Roth, and the two missionaries tramped across Asia to Europe. Gruber had been two hundred and fourteen days on the road. In 1664 he attempted to return to China by way of Russia, but for some reason or other failed to get through that country. He then made for Asia but fell ill at Constantinople, finally he died either in Italy at Florence or at Patak in Hungary. Fortunately he had left his "Journal" and charts in the hands of the great Athanasius Kircher, who published them in his famous "China Illustrata."
Other missionaries entered Mingrelia, Paphlagonia, and Chaldea; in the latter place they brought the Nestorians back to the Church. Besides laboring in nearby Greece and Thessaly, at Constantinople, they were in Armenia and at Ephesus, Smyrna, Damascus, Aleppo, at the ruins of Babylon, and on the shores of the Euphrates and the Jordan, and they founded the missions of Antourah for the Maronites of Libanus, whom Henry IV of France took under his protection.
The origin of these Maronite missions reads like a romance. It is found in the French "Menology" of October 12 which tells us that one day, at a meeting of his sodalists in Marseilles, Father Amien was talking about the propagation of the Faith and incidentally mentioned Persia, which only one missionary had as yet entered. Among his hearers was a rich merchant named François Lambert, who, excited by the sermon, determined to go and put himself at the disposal of that solitary Persian apostle. He crossed the Arabian desert, reached Bagdad, embarked on the Euphrates, with the intention of getting to Ispahan in Persia and when he failed in this, he turned towards Ormuz on the straits connecting the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea. That place, however, could not keep him; it was too luxurious and too licentious; so he went over to upper Hindostan, where the Great Mogul was enthroned. He passed through Surate and Golconda, but from Mylapore, which holds the tomb of St. Thomas, he could not tear himself away for several weeks. Finally, he boarded a ship which was wrecked on the shores of Bengal, and twice he came within an inch of disappearing in the deep. After two days and two nights on the desolate sands, he and five other castaways sang the Te Deum to make them forget their sorrow. They must have struck inland after that for we are told that later they built a raft and floated down one of the great rivers of India. It was a journey of thirty-five days, and several of the poor wanderers died of hunger on the way. At last they reached a native settlement and were led to the nearest Portuguese post. Unfortunately, the geography at this part of Lambert's narrative is too vague for us to be sure of the places he saw on his journey.
From India he made his way to Rome, where he entered the Jesuit novitiate of San Andrea, and from there, after his ordination, he was sent to Syria. Again he was shipwrecked, and when picked up on the beach he was taken for a pirate and brought in chains to the chief of the mountaineer clan. Happily they were the Maronites of Libanus, and there Lambert remained till the end of his days, helping the persecuted people to keep their faith against their furious Mussulman neighbours. These Maronites had been represented, by postulatory letters at the Lateran Council as early as 1516, and later Pope Gregory XIII built for them in Rome a hospital and a college which produced some very eminent scholars. In 1616 Clement VIII sent the Jesuit, Girolamo Dandini, to preside at the Maronite council, for the purpose of introducing certain liturgical reforms; but it was the wanderer Lambert who was the first to remain permanently among this heroic people. He lived only three years after his arrival; it was long enough, however, to prepare the way for the five mission centres which were subsequently established there.
Alexandre de Rhodes, who appears at this juncture, is another of the picturesque figures in the history of the Society. According to Fénelon, it is he who inspired the formation of the great association of the Missions Etrangères, which has sent so many thousands of glorious apostles, many of whom were martyrs, to evangelize the countries from which he had come in a most unexpected and extraordinary fashion. He was born in Avignon, the old French City of the Popes, and was called by his contemporaries the "Francis Xavier of Cochin-China and Tonkin." He left Rome for the Indies when he was only twenty-six years of age, and began his missionary work in the East by looking after the slaves and jailbirds of Goa. On his way from that city to Tuticorin he baptized fifty pagans on shipboard, his eloquence being helped by the furious tempest that threatened to send the frail bark to the bottom. While waiting at Malacca for the ship to get ready, he and his companion captured another two thousand souls for the Lord, and when he arrived at his destination, other thousands came into the fold, among them the king and eighteen members of the royal household, and two hundred of the priests of the pagan temples. Nor did this rapidity denote instability, for twenty-five years later the Church of Tuticorin which he founded could count at its altars no less than 300,000 Christians.
It is said that he had even the power of making thaumaturgists out of his catechumens. By the use of holy water or the relic of the cross, they restored people to health, and as many as two hundred and seventy sufferers from various maladies were the recipients of such favors. When he was thrown into prison and loaded with fetters, as he often was, he converted his jailers and others besides. When carried off in a ship to be ejected from the country, he baptized the captain and crew and got them to put him ashore in a desolate place where he began a new apostolate. Fifteen times, in his journeys to Tonkin and Cochin-China, he crossed the Gulf of Tonkin, which had a terrible record of tempests and shipwrecks, and finally he started on his famous overland tramp to Europe in search of evangelical laborers. He achieved his purpose, though it took him three years and a half to do it.
On that memorable journey he risked his life at every step, for he had to travel through countries whose language he did not understand, and where he could expect nothing but suspicion, ill-treatment and, if he escaped death, privations and sufferings of every description. On his way to Rome the Dutch in Java threw him in jail, but he converted his keepers, and was segregated in consequence and put in solitary confinement; he regarded that seclusion only as a splendid chance to make his annual retreat, and when he was let out he resumed his pilgrimage through India and Asia. As he said himself, he was carried on the wings of Divine Providence, through storms and shipwrecks, and cities and deserts, and barbarians and pagans, and heretics and Turks. He finally reached Rome in 1648, and told the Father General and the Pope what was needed in the far-away Orient. The purpose of this voyage, so replete with adventure, was of very great importance.
It was chiefly by the help of Portugal, which was then at the most brilliant epoch of its history, that missions had been extended for thousands of miles in the East, beginning at Goa and Malabar, and stretching round the Peninsula of Hindostan to Cochin-China, Corea, and Japan, in many of which splendid ecclesiastical establishments had been founded. They were all begun, supported and protected by Portugal. But unfortunately, Christianity and Portugal were so inextricably entangled, mixed and confused with one another that the religion taught by the missionaries came to be considered by the people not so much the religion of Christ as the religion of the Portuguese. Another consequence was that a quarrel between any little Portuguese official or merchant with an Oriental potentate meant a persecution of the Church. Furthermore, as Portugal's possession of the country was so exclusive that not even the most humble missionary could leave Europe unless he was acceptable to the Government, it amounted to an actual enslavement of the Church. Finally, as every other nation was debarred from commercial rights in the East, it became the practice of rivals to represent to the natives that the missionaries were merely Portuguese spies or advance agents who were preparing for invasion and conquest.
Unfortunately, in return for all that Portugal had done and was to do for the advancement of Christianity in those newly discovered lands, an arrangement had been made with the Pope that no bishop in all that vast territory could take his see unless Portugal accepted him; no new diocese could be created unless Portugal were consulted; no papal bull was valid unless passed upon by the Portuguese kings. To put an end to all that, was the reason why de Rhodes went to Europe. But he did not dare to appear before the Pope as a Jesuit, for if it were known what his mission was every Jesuit house in the Portuguese possessions would have been immediately closed, as happened later. Hence it was that he had to wait in Rome for three whole years until 1651 before he could even get his petition considered, and this explains also why he made the extravagant demand for "a patriarch, three archbishops, and twelve bishops." By asking much he thought he might at least get something.
The Pope wanted de Rhodes himself to be a bishop; he refused the honor, and then was told to go and find some available candidates. For that purpose he addressed himself to a group of ecclesiastics at Paris whom the Jesuit Father Bagot was directing in the ways of the higher spiritual life, and who were often spoken of as the Bagotists. Among them were Montmorency de Laval, the future Bishop of Quebec, and M. Olier, who was, later on, to found the Society of St. Sulpice. His appeal had no immediate result, and he then prepared to return to Tonkin, but he received an order to go elsewhere. Probably no Portuguese vessel would take him back, for the purpose of his visit to Europe must have by that time got abroad. He was, therefore, sent to Persia, although he was then over sixty years old; so to Persia he went, and we find him studying the language on his way thither, and, when travelling through the streets of Ispahan, making a fool of himself in trying to stammer out the few words he had learned, but always making light of the laughter and sometimes of the kicks and cuffs and even threats of death that he received. He was planning new missionary posts in Georgia and Tatary when death called him to his reward. But he had already won the admiration of Ispahan, and the city never saw a costlier funeral than the one which, on November 7, 1660, conveyed to the grave the mortal remains of the glorious Alexandre de Rhodes.
This journey of the great missionary is a classic in its emphasis of the earnestness the Society has always shown to have the episcopacy established in its missions. It is idle to pretend that this project of de Rhodes was due to his own initiative, and was not sanctioned by his superiors. He may, indeed, have suggested it, but no one in the Society undertakes a work from which he may be withdrawn at any moment, except he is assigned to it. Now de Rhodes continued at his task for several years, and evidently with the approval of his superiors.
Apparently unsuccessful though his effort was, it brought about some results. Mme. d'Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu, took the matter up, but even she, with her great influence, could induce the ecclesiastical authorities to do no more than create one little vicariate Apostolic. It was a far cry from the great hierarchical scheme of de Rhodes. One of the Bagotists, Pallu, was appointed, though, for a time there was a question of sending Laval also to the East; but the necessity of having a bishop in Quebec was so urgent that Pallu was sent alone to Tonkin.
Portugal, however, refused to carry him thither, although Louis XIV asked it as a special favor. In 1658 when Pallu attempted to go out at his own risk he reached not Cochin-China but Siam. He was back again in France in 1665, begging protection against the Portuguese, who were arresting his priests and putting them in jail at Goa and Macao. In 1674 he was shipwrecked in the Philippines and carried off a prisoner to Spain, and was liberated only by the united efforts of the Pope and Louis XIV. He set sail again, but was driven ashore on the Island of Formosa and never reached Tonkin.
Meantime the Jesuits had not forgotten Francis Xavier's dream about China. The Dominican Gaspar de la Cruz had found his way through its closed gates, four years after Xavier expired on the island opposite Canton, but he was promptly expelled. It was only in 1581, fully thirty-six years subsequent to the attempt of de la Cruz, that the Jesuits finally succeeded. All that time they had been waiting at Macao,--a settlement granted to the Portuguese in return for the assistance given to China in beating off a fleet of plundering sea-rovers. They had long since seen the folly of attempting to enter a new country under the shadow of some pretentious embassy, for inevitably a suspicion was left lurking in the minds of both the governments and the people that there was an ulterior political motive back of the preaching of the priests. Hence it was that Valignani, though in general believing in embassies to kings and rulers, after the new religion was well understood and accepted in a country, had become convinced that it was unwise to begin the work in that ostentatious fashion. He, therefore, took three clever young Italians, Michele Ruggieri, Francesco Pasio and Matteo Ricci, and after training them thoroughly in mathematics and in all the branches of the natural sciences, ordered them not only to master the Chinese language, but also to familiarize themselves with the literature and the history of the country. Ricci was available especially as a mathematician, having been the favorite pupil of Father Clavius, who was one of the chief constructors of the Gregorian Calendar.
According to Huc (p. 40) they gained access to the forbidden land by taking part in a comedy. A viceroy, he tells us, who lived near Canton, summoned to his tribunal on some charge or other both the bishop and the governor of Macao. This was a grievous insult to those dignitaries, but on the other hand if they refused to appear, the result might be disastrous for the whole Portuguese colony. To extricate themselves from the dilemma a trick was resorted to--one which was quite in keeping with Chinese methods. Instead of going themselves, they sent two persons who pretended to be the bishop and governor. For the former Father Ruggieri was chosen, for the latter, a layman. On the face of it, the story is absurd. It would be impossible to impersonate two such well-known functionaries as a bishop and a governor, and the discovery of such a fraud would inevitably entail condign punishment. Most probably Ruggieri and his companion went simply as representatives of the two functionaries. They were well provided with presents, which had the desired effect of making the viceroy forget his grievances, if he had any. He accepted everything very graciously and suggested a second visit. Then Ruggieri apprised him of the longing he had always entertained of passing his whole life in the wonderful land of China, with its marvellously intellectual people, and was assured that his wish might possibly be gratified later on. But when a hint was thrown out about a wonderful clock which the missionary possessed and was extremely anxious to show such an important personage as the viceroy, every difficulty about a permanent residence immediately disappeared.
The party was conducted back to the boat with great ceremony; and when Ruggieri's return was delayed by an attack of sickness, the viceregal junk was sent to the Island to convey him to Tchao-King; and also to deliver into his hands a formal authorization to establish a house in the town. Valignani, who was then at Macao, hesitated for a time about accepting the offer, but finally consented. On December 18 Ruggieri embarked, taking with him Father Pasio and a scholastic, along with several Chinese. This addition to the party somewhat surprised the viceroy, but Ruggieri told him that being a priest, it was in keeping with his dignity to have an attendant. The others were only servants, but the clock did the work, and the audacious apostles received a Buddhist temple outside the town as their place of residence, and were the recipients of frequent favors in the way of food from the delighted viceroy. He even granted permission to Ruggieri to call Ricci from Macao. Their temple-residence soon became famous, and every one in Tchao-King, from the highest civil and military functionaries down to what we now call coolies, came out to see the occupants.
Unfortunately, the viceroy was deposed and his successor, objecting to the presence of the foreigners, ordered the whole party to return to Macao. They did not obey, but made an attempt to reach Canton, which the former official had given them authority to enter. They succeeded by purposely getting themselves arrested in Hong-Kong. But in Canton no attention was paid to the document they had with them, and so they made their way back to Macao, convinced that there was no hope of remaining in China under the new incumbent. Yet to their great surprise, the very man they feared sent an envoy over to Macao to bring the three missionaries back to Tchao-King. He welcomed them effusively and gave them a beautiful site for their residence, quite close to a famous porcelain tower, which had just been erected and was considered a monument of Chinese architecture. This was the cradle of Christianity in China.
In 1589, however, there arrived a new viceroy who took a fancy to their residence, and without any ceremony dispossessed them. But as they had already won such favor by their maps and globes and astronomical instruments, when they came to Tchao-Tcheou looking for a house, they were received with the wildest demonstrations of joy. They grew more popular every day, and soon the mandarins of Canton invited Ricci to speak in their assemblies. He availed himself of all these opportunities afforded him to inject into his scientific discourses something about religion, and he noted that they showed greater attention when he broached such topics than when he restricted himself to purely human science. Troubles occurred from time to time, but the number of neophytes increased daily, and Ricci, who up to that time had worn the dress of a bonze now discarded it and assumed the garb of a Chinese man of letters.
In 1595 the news came that the Japanese emperor, Taicosama was preparing an expedition against Corea, whereupon, the general-in-chief of the Chinese troops came down to Tchao-Tcheou to consult Ricci. But it was not so much to discuss the military situation as to get him to restore a favorite child to health. Ricci promised to pray for the boy, and in return asked to accompany the general back to Pekin for he was convinced that if he could once convert the educated classes of the capital the rest of his work would be easy. The request was granted, and Ricci was thus, very probably, the first white man to travel through the interior of China and to see the people of the cities and country at close range. At Nankin, however, he noted the deep suspicion entertained for foreigners, and although he went as far as Pekin itself, he thought it wiser not to enter the city, and consequently he returned by the Yellow River to Tchao-Tcheou.
Taicosama's expedition from Japan proved a failure, and the public anxiety about foreigners ceased to be acute. This lull enabled Ricci to establish himself at Nankin, which seemed to have struck his fancy as he passed through it on his way to Pekin. The city was in a fever about the study of astronomy and astrology, and he found a hearty welcome among its learned men. He taught them in his daily intercourse many of the doctrines of the Faith, and got in return from them the real meaning of their ancestor-worship and ceremonies. Hence, he had no scruples at all about taking part in the honors paid to Confucius, who was the great legislator and teacher of China, and he never suspected that there would be later a hue and cry in the Church about the alleged idolatry of these very ceremonies.
Meantime he forwarded information about the observatory of Nankin that quite astounded scientific Europe. Nankin, however, did not satisfy him, and he made constant but unavailing efforts to reach the imperial city of Pekin. Finally, in 1600, after seventeen years of patient waiting, he succeeded. His coming produced a great sensation. He was even admitted to the palace, but really never saw the emperor, though the people at large fancied he had been accorded that privilege. However, it amounted almost to the same thing, for the effect produced and his real missionary success dated from that moment. The greatest mandarin of the court became a Christian and almost a saint, though his name was Sin. Later, Sin went about preaching Christianity. His conversion itself was a sermon, and was the beginning of many others. Meantime the five Jesuits at Canton drew multitudes around them. The upper classes flocked to hear their discourses, and began to take pride in being considered Christians, but it was hard for them to understand why the Gospel was not exclusively restricted to their set. They could not yet grasp the fact, even after baptism, that the lower classes had the same privilege of salvation as themselves. To the Chinese mind it was a social revolution, and they were right, but they were wrong in objecting to it.
Here an interesting episode occurs. Associated with Father Geronimo Aquaviva in the court of the Grand Mogul at Agra was a Portuguese lay-brother named Benedict Goes. Although engaged only in domestic service, he was in great favor with the barbarian monarch, and if the Viceroy of India was saved from disaster, it was due to Goes, who not only persuaded the Grand Mogul to desist from war with the Portuguese, but succeeded in having himself sent down to Goa with all the children who had been captured in the various raids of Akbar's armies into Portuguese territory. While he was at Agra, reports had been coming in that the Fathers had at last entered China--the Cathay of the old Franciscans of the thirteenth century, and it was deemed advisable to try to establish communications with them. Goes was chosen to carry out the project, and, in 1602, he started from Agra, which lies in the northern part of Hindostan, about south of Delhi and west of Lucknow. It meant a journey from the centre of Hindostan, across the whole of Thibet and China, among absolutely unknown nations, savage and semi-civilized, Mohammedans and idolaters, through trackless forests and over snow-clad mountains, facing the dangers of starvation and sickness and wild beasts at every step. But all that was not thought to be beyond the powers of the courageous brother. Disguised as an Armenian, he had a hard time of it from robber chiefs and barbarian princes. He was ill-treated by most of them, for he openly professed that he was a Christian. When he refused to pay respect to Mohammed, he was sentenced to be trampled to death by elephants, but he was finally pardoned and allowed to resume his journey. On he plodded for five years, and just as he was nearing the goal his strength gave out. Fortunately Father Ricci, at Pekin, had heard of his coming, and sent Father Fernandes to meet him. When Fernandes arrived, Goes was breathing his last in the frontier town of Su-Chou. It was then 1607, and the dying man told his brother Jesuit: "For five years I have been without the sacraments, but I do not remember any serious sin since I set out from Agra." He died on April 7, 1607.
In 1606 there was worry in China about certain reports originating in Macao, where the Portuguese were stationed. The Jesuits were accused of aspiring to nothing else than the imperial throne; to prove it, attention was called to the fact that all their houses were built on hills, and could be easily transformed into citadels in time of war. It was said, too, that a Dutch fleet in the offing was at their service, and that arrangements had been made with the Japanese for an invasion. The result was a general panic throughout the empire and not a few apostacies. Threats to kill the missionaries also began to be heard. Coincident with this, came an unwise act on the part of the Vicar-General of Macao, who, because of a decision against him in a dispute he had with the Franciscans, put the whole island under interdict. The result was that the political situation became still more threatening, and Father Martines was arrested at Canton, tortured in the most horrible fashion, and finally executed. This death, however, marked as it was by the heroic courage of the victim, his affirmations in the midst of his sufferings of his own innocence and that of his brethren, quelled the storm. Ricci's influence, also, contributed to calm the excited people, and he became greater than ever in their estimation. He was called another Confucius, and was even empowered by the authorities to establish a novitiate at Pekin. Ricci was well on in years by that time, but continued valiantly at his work, making saints as well as great littérateurs and mathematicians out of his Jesuit associates; he wrote treatises in Chinese on Christian ethics, while continuing his mathematical works, and all day long he was busy with the great mandarins who came to consult him. In 1610 he succumbed under these accumulated labors, and his obsequies were such as had never been accorded to any other foreigner. The funeral procession, preceded by the cross, traversed the entire city, and by order of the emperor his remains were laid in a temple, which was thenceforth transformed into a Christian church.
Mr. Gutzlaff, a Protestant missionary in China of modern times, says that "Ricci had spent only twenty-seven years in China but when he died there were more than three hundred churches in the different provinces." Gutzlaff's testimony is all the more precious, because, according to Marshall, his own associates describe him as "more occupied in amassing wealth than in making Christians." Referring to the scientific labors of Ricci and his successors, Thornton (History of China, Preface, p. 13) says: "The geographical labors performed in China by the Jesuits and other missionaries of the Roman Catholic Faith will always command the gratitude and excite the wonder of all geographers. Portable chronometers and aneroid barometers, sextants and theodolites, sympiesometers and micrometers, compasses and artificial horizons are, notwithstanding all possible care, frequently found to fail, yet one hundred and fifty years ago a few wandering European priests traversed the enormous state of China Proper, and laid down on their maps the positions of cities, the direction of rivers and the height of mountains with a correctness of detail and a general accuracy of outline that are absolutely marvellous. To this day all our maps are based on their observations." "Whatever is valuable in Chinese astronomical science," adds Mr. Gutzlaff, "has been borrowed from the treatises of Roman Catholic missionaries."
Ricci's death was a calamity to the Church, for in the following year a mandarin who was in charge at Nankin started a genuine persecution. The missionaries were summoned to his tribunal, publicly scourged and sent back to Macao--and all this with the authorization of the emperor. Matters grew worse, but at the emperor's death in 1620, there was a lull, for the Tatars were invading China and the help of the Portuguese had to be invoked; as that, however, could not be done unless the Europeans were placated by recalling the missionaries, the exiles returned to their posts. The emperor overcame the Tatars, and the tranquillity and good feeling that followed allowed the Fathers, who were scattered all over the empire, some of them 800 leagues from Pekin, to get together and decide on uniformity of methods in treating with their converts. In that congregation the doubts which met them at every step as to what they were to tolerate and what to forbid were settled. They knew the people thoroughly by this time, their ideas, their customs; and their scrupulous love of the Faith guided them in their decisions.
About this time the great Adam Schall arrived. He was a worthy successor of Ricci. His reputation had preceded him as a mathematician, and he was immediately employed by the emperor to reform the Chinese calendar. His influence, in consequence of this distinction, was unbounded in extending the field of missionary work. The pagans themselves built a church at his request in Sin-gan-fou, and he obtained an edict from the emperor which empowered the Jesuits to preach throughout the empire. The extraordinary success of Schall was the talk of Europe; and applications poured in on the General from all sides to be sent out to share the labors and the triumphs of the mission. Great numbers of Jesuits were sent there, but many perished on the way out, for shipwrecks were very common in those unknown seas, and the crowded and unhealthy ships as well as the long and difficult journey claimed throngs of victims.
The work soon became too great for the laborers and then there came a reinforcement from the Philippines, largely from the other religious orders who had been long waiting to enter China, and who now devoted themselves to the work. Not knowing the country, however, they were horrified to see that many of the practices of Confucianism were still retained by the Chinese Christians, and they denounced as idolatry what the old Jesuits had decided, after years of close scrutiny, to be nothing but a ceremonial which had been thoroughly and scrupulously purified from all taint of superstition. But the newcomers would not look at it in that light. They immediately wrote to the Archbishop of Manila and to the Bishop of Cebú that the Jesuits not only concealed from their converts the mysteries of the Cross, but permitted them to prostrate themselves before the idol of Chin-Hoam, to honor their ancestors with superstitious rites, and to offer sacrifices to Confucius. Rome was then informed of it, but some years later, namely in 1637, both the archbishop and the bishop wrote to Urban VIII that on examining the matter more carefully, they had arrived at the conclusion that the Jesuits were right. It was then too late. A series of bloody persecutions had already begun. The first explosion of wrath occurred when one of the new preachers, speaking through an interpreter, told his congregation that Confucius and all their pagan ancestors were in hell, and that the Jesuits had not taught the Chinese the truth. Public indignation followed on this unwise utterance and expulsions began.
Fortunately, the persecutions were checked for a while by fresh attempts of the Tatar element in China to seize the imperial crown. The Jesuits kept out of the strife by pronouncing for neither party. Happily, the Tatar element took a fancy to Schall, while Father Coeffler baptized the Chinese empress, giving her the Christian name of Helen and calling her infant son Constantine. The Tatars finally prevailed, and Schall was made a mandarin and president of the board of mathematics of the empire. He was given access to the emperor at all times, and might have made him a Christian had not the empress induced him to resume the pagan practices from which Schall had weaned him. Nor did the death of the troublesome lady mend matters; on the contrary, her disconsolate husband lapsed into melancholia, and in 1661 died, leaving a child of eight as his successor. In pursuance of the emperor's command, Schall was appointed instructor of the prince, but, as was to be expected, that arrangement aroused the fury of the people and especially of the bonzes. They maintained, rightfully from their point of view, that if Schall were left in position during the long minority of the prince, he would be absolute master of the future emperor--a result that must be prevented by crushing out Christianity. Forthwith all the missionaries were summoned to Pekin and thrown into prison. There was now no longer any discussion about the worship of Confucius, for the disputants were all in the dungeons of Pekin or elsewhere waiting for death.
The Christians were without pastors, but Father Gresson, who was in China at that time, tells us in his "History of China under the Tatars" that, during the persecution, the catechists baptized 2000 converts. It is not surprising, for before the outbreak of the persecution, the Jesuits had one hundred and fifty-one churches and thirty-eight residences in China; the Dominicans twenty-one churches and two residences, and the Franciscans one establishment. The total Christian population amounted to 250,000. Up to that time the Fathers of the Society had written one hundred and thirty-one works on religious subjects, one hundred and three on mathematics, and fifty-five on physics.
While the missionaries lay in chains expecting death at every moment, a Dominican named Navarrete succeeded in making his escape. It was lucky for him in one respect, but in all probability it would mean as soon as it was discovered the massacre of all the other prisoners; to avert this calamity, the illustrious Jesuit, Grimaldi, took his place in the prison. Unfortunately, Navarrete had no sooner reached Europe than he began an attack on the methods of the Jesuits in dealing with the Chinese rites. It caused great grief to his fellow Dominicans, and when the news of the publication of his "Tratados históricos" reached China in 1668, the Dominican Father Sarpetri sent a solemn denunciation of it to Rome, declaring that the practice of the Jesuits in permitting such rites was not only irreproachable under every point of view, but most necessary in propagating the Gospel. He denied under oath that the Jesuits refused to explain the mysteries of the Passion to the Chinese, and affirmed that his protest against the charge was not in answer to an appeal, but was prompted by the pure love of truth. Another Dominican, Gregorio López, who was Bishop of Basilea and Vicar-Apostolic of Nan-King, sent the Sacred Congregation a "memoir" in favor of the Jesuits. Navarrete atoned for his act of mistaken judgment later; for when he was Archbishop of Santo Domingo he asked leave of the king and viceroy to establish a Jesuit college in his residential city, and he paid a glowing tribute to the Society.
When Schall was brought up for trial there was, at his side, another Jesuit named Ferdinand Verbiest, a native of Pilthem near Courtrai in Belgium. He had come out to China when he was thirty-six years old, and was first engaged in missionary work in Shen-si. In 1660 he was summoned to Pekin to assist Father Schall, and in 1664 was thrown into prison with him. In the court-room, Verbiest was the chief spokesman, for Schall, being then seventy-four years of age and paralyzed, was unable to utter a word. The charges against the old missionary had been trumped up by a Mohammedan who claimed to be an astronomer. They were: first, that Schall had shown pictures of the Passion of Jesus Christ to the deceased emperor; secondly, that he had secured the presidency of the board of mathematics for himself in order to promote Christianity; thirdly, that he had incorrectly determined the day on which the funeral of one of the princes was to take place. It was an "unlucky" day. Verbiest had no difficulty in proving that the accused had been ordered by the emperor to be president of the board of mathematics, and furthermore, that he never had anything to do with "lucky" or "unlucky" days. The charge about the pictures of the Passion was admitted, and that may have been the reason why, in spite of the eloquence of Verbiest, who was loaded with chains while he was pleading, Father Schall was condemned to be hacked to pieces. In this trouble, however, the Lord came to the rescue: a meteor of an extraordinary kind appeared in the heavens, and a fire reduced to ashes that part of the imperial palace where the condemnation was pronounced. The sentence was revoked, and the missionaries were set free. Father Schall lingered a year after recovering his freedom. When Kang-hi came to the throne in 1669, an official declaration was made denouncing both the trial and the sentence as iniquitous, and although Schall had then been three years dead, unusually solemn funeral services were ordered in his honor. His remains were laid beside those of Father Ricci. The emperor himself composed the eulogistic epitaph which was inscribed on the tomb.
Schall had given forty-four years of his life to China, when at the age of seventy-five, he breathed his last in the arms of Father Rho, who, like him, was to hold a distinguished position as mathematician in the imperial court. Rho had preluded his advent to China by organizing the defense of the Island of Macao against a Dutch fleet. He had new ramparts constructed around the city; he planted four pieces of artillery on the walls, and when the Dutchmen landed for an assault he led the troops in a sortie and drove the enemy back to their ships. In his "Promenade autour du Monde" (II, 266), Baron de Hübner gives an enthusiastic description of the Jesuit Observatory at Pekin.
"Man's inhumanity to man" is cruelly exemplified in a foul accusation urged against the venerable Schall, a century after he was buried with imperial honors in Pekin. In 1758 a certain Marcello Angelita, secretary of Mgr. de Tournon, the prelate who was commissioned to pass on the question of the Malabar Rites, published a story, which was repeated in many other books, that Schall had spent his last years "separated from the other missionaries, removed from obedience to his superiors, in a house which had been given him by the emperor, and with a woman whom he treated as his wife, and who bore him two children. After having led a pleasant life with his family for some years, he ended his days in obscurity." If there was even the shadow of truth in these accusations the Dominican Navarrete, who knew Schall personally, and who wrote against him and his brethren so fiercely in 1667, would not have failed to mention this fact to confirm his charges about the Chinese Rites. But he does not breathe a word about any misconduct on the part of the great missionary. Moreover, it is inconceivable that the vigorous Father General Oliva, who governed the Society at that time, would have tolerated that state of things for a single instant.
The foundation upon which the charge was built appears to be that the old missionary used to call a Chinese mandarin his "adopted grandson" and had helped to advance him to lucrative positions in the empire. The libel was written forty years after Schall's death, and was largely inspired by the infamous ex-Capuchin Norbert.
Possibly the mental attitude of Angelita's master, de Tournon, may also account in part for the publication of this calumny. De Tournon was known to be a bitter enemy of the Society, and he took no pains to conceal it when sent to the East to decide the vexed question of the Rites. Although on his arrival at Pondicherry in 1703, the Fathers met him on the shore and conducted him processionally to the city, he interpreted these marks of respect and the lavish generosity with which they looked after all his needs as nothing but policy. Not only did he refuse to give them a hearing on their side of the controversy, but he hurried off elsewhere as soon as he had formulated his decree. When he arrived in Canton, the first words he uttered were: "I come to China to purify its Catholicity," and before taking any information whatever, he ordered the removal of all the symbols which he considered superstitious. The act created an uproar, as it was only through the influence of the Fathers that de Tournon was permitted to go to Pekin; and although they managed to make his entrance into the imperial city unusually splendid, he immediately informed the emperor of a plan he had made to reconstruct the missions but, expressed himself in such an offensive fashion that the emperor immediately dismissed him. He then repaired to Canton, and on January 28, 1707, issued the famous order forbidding the cult of the ancestors, with the result that the emperor sent down officials to conduct him to Macao, where he was reported to have died in prison, on June 8, 1710.
The Mohammedan mandarin, Yang, who had trumped up the astronomical accusations against Schall, had meantime succeeded to the post as head of the mathematical board, but the young emperor was not satisfied with the results obtained, and he ordered a public dispute on the relative merits of Chinese and European astronomy. Verbiest was on one side, and Yang on the other. The test was to be first, the determination, in advance, of the shadow given at noon of a fixed day by a gnomon of a given height; second, the absolute and relative position of the sun and the planets on a date assigned; third, the time of a lunar eclipse. The result was a triumph for Verbiest. He was immediately installed as president, and his brethren were allowed to return to their missions. Verbiest's career, at Pekin, was more brilliant than that of either Ricci or Schall. There is no end of the things he did. The famous bronze astronomical instruments which figured so conspicuously in the Boxer Uprising of 1900 were of his manufacture; he built an aqueduct also, and cast as many as one hundred and thirty-two cannon for the Chinese army. The emperor followed his astronomical classes, appointed him to the highest grade in the mandarinate, and gave him leave to preach Christianity anywhere in the empire. Innocent XI, to whom he dedicated his Chinese Missal, sent him a brief in 1681, which contained the greatest praise for "using the profane sciences to promote Christianity," a commendation which was more than welcome at that time, when the book of Navarrete was doing its evil work against the Society.
In 1677 when Verbiest was appointed vice-provincial, he appealed for new laborers from Europe. He even advocated the use of the native language in the liturgy in order to facilitate the ordination of Chinese priests. It was a bold petition to make when the memory of Luther and his German liturgy was still so fresh in the mind of Europe. The reason for the petition was that otherwise the conversion of China was impossible. Brucker in his history of the Society tells us that for one hundred years no native had been ordained a priest in China. He gives as a reason for this, the disgust of the Portuguese government at the failure met with in Hindostan, where the formation of a native clergy was attempted. That alone would be sufficient to acquit the Society of any guilt in this matter; but he gives facts to his readers which go to show very plainly that this failure to create a native Chinese priesthood clearly evidences the Society's desire to have one at any cost. It is paradoxical, but it is true.
The great lapse of time that passed without any ordinations need cause no alarm. There are instances of greater delay with less excuse very near home. For instance, there were secular priests and religious in Canada as early as 1603, but there was no seminary there till 1663, although the colony had all the power of Catholic France back of it. There were Catholics in Maryland in 1634, yet there was no theological seminary until 1794, that is for a space of 160 years. After a few years' struggle with only five pupils, and in some of these years none, it was closed and was not re-opened until 1810, which is a far cry from 1634. New York did not attempt to found a seminary until the time of its fourth bishop. The house at Nyack was burned down before it was occupied; the Lafargeville project also proved a failure and it was not until 1841 that the diocesan seminary was opened at Fordham.
Moreover, in none of these seminaries was there the remotest thought of forming a native clergy in the sense of the word employed in the anti-Jesuit indictment. The seminarians were all foreigners or sons of foreigners. There were no native Indians in these establishments, as that, apart from intellectual and moral reasons, would have been a physiological impossibility. Nature rebels against the transplanting of a creature of the woods and mountains to the confinement of a lecture hall. The old martyr of Colonial times, Father Daniel, brought a number of Indian boys from Huronia to Quebec to educate them, but they fled to the forests, while the Indian girls, who were lodged with the Ursulines, died of consumption. Even in our own times, Archbishop Gillow of Oaxaca, Mexico, brought a number of pure-blooded Indians to Rome, in the hope of making them priests, but they all died before he attained any results. In brief, we in America have never formed a native clergy.
Moreover, this century-stretch of failure in China is cut down considerably when we recall the fact that for a considerable time there were only two or, at most, three Jesuits in that vast empire, and that they contrived to remain there only because they interested the learned part of the populace by their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy, never daring to broach the subject of religion, though they succeeded under the pretence of science in circulating everywhere a catechism which enraptured the literati. It was only in the year 1601 that permission was given to them to preach. Hence, the figure 100 has to be cut down to 83. In two years time, namely in 1617, there were 13,000 Christians in China. How were the rest to be reached? No help could be expected from Europe, which was being devastated by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Independently of that, the caste system prevailed in China, and the learned, even those who were converted, found it difficult to understand why the wonderful truths of Christianity should be communicated to the common people, yet it is from the people that ecclesiastical vocations usually come. Thirdly, the Chinaman has an instinctive horror of anything foreign. Yet here was a foreign creed which, moreover, could be thoroughly learned only by a language which was itself foreign even to the priests who taught it.
The audacious project was then formed to petition the Pope to have the liturgy, even the Mass, in Chinese. No other modern mission ever dared to make such a request. As early as 1617, the petition was presented, and although Pope Paul V favored the scheme, yet the undertaking was so stupendous and the project so unusual that he withheld any direct or official recognition. Whereupon the missionaries began the work of translating into Chinese not only the Missal and Ritual, but an entire course of moral theology with the cases of conscience. In addition a large part of the "Summa" of St. Thomas along with many other books which might be useful to the future priest were rendered into the vernacular. The work was begun by Father Trigault in 1615 and was continued by others up to 1682, when the Pope while accepting the dedication of a Chinese Missal by Verbiest, finally concluded that it would be impolitic to grant permission for a liturgy in Chinese. This gigantic undertaking ought of itself to be a sufficient answer to the charge that the Jesuits were averse to the formation of a native clergy. The scheme failed, it is true, but the attempt is a sufficient answer to the hackneyed charge against the Society.
It might be asked, however, why did they not foresee the possible failure of their request and provide otherwise for priests? In the first place, there were Dominicans and Franciscans in China, and it might be proper to ask them why they excluded the Chinese from the ministry? Secondly, the Jesuits had all they could do to defend themselves from the charge of idolatry for sanctioning the Chinese Rites. Thirdly when Schall arrived in 1622 there were no missionaries to be met anywhere--they were in prison or in exile. Fourthly, in 1637 there was a bloody persecution. Fifthly, in 1644 the Tatar invasion occurred with the usual havoc, and the Manchu dynasty was inaugurated. Sixthly, in 1664 Schall hitherto such a great man in the empire was imprisoned and condemned to be hacked to pieces and Verbiest was lying in chains. It is quite comprehensible, therefore, that in such a condition of things, quiet seminary life was impossible, and as the Jesuits were suspected of leaning to Confucianism it would have been quite improper to entrust to them the formation of a secular clergy.
When Verbiest wrote home for help, numbers of volunteers left Europe for China. Louis XIV was especially enthusiastic in furthering the movement, and, among other favors he conferred the title of "Fellows of the Academy of Science and Royal Mathematicians" on six Jesuits of Paris, and sent them off to Pekin. But when they arrived, Verbiest was dead. They were in time, however, for his funeral, which took place on March 11, 1688, with the same honors that had been accorded to Ricci and Schall. He was laid to rest at their side. His successors began their work by establishing what was called the French Mission of China, which lasted until the suppression of the Society. The great difficulty in sending missionaries thither by sea had long exercised the minds of the superiors of the Society, especially after a startling announcement was made by Father Couplet, who, after passing many years in China, had returned home, shattered in health and altogether unable to continue his work. He said that, after a very careful count, he had found that of the six hundred Jesuits who had attempted to enter China from the time that Ruggieri and Ricci had succeeded in gaining an entrance there, as many as four hundred had either died of sickness on the way or had been lost at sea. De Rhodes had shown that an overland route was possible from India to Europe; the lay-brother Goes had succeeded in getting to China from the land of the Great Mogul, Gruber had reversed the process, and in 1685 an attempt was made by Father Avril, to reach it by the way of Russia, but he failed.
Avril's account of his journey has been shockingly "done out of French" by a translator who prudently withheld his name. It was "published in London, at Maidenhead, over against St. Dunstan's Church, in Fleet Street." Its date is 1693. From it we learn that Father Avril started from Marseilles and made for Civita Vecchia, after paying his respects in Rome to Father General de Noyelle, he went to Leghorn, where he took ship on a vessel that was convoyed by a man-of-war called the "Thundering Jupiter." Passing by Capraia, Elba, Sardinia, and nearly wrecked off the "Coast of Candy," his ship dropped anchor in the Lerneca roadstead after three days' voyage, but without the "Thundering Jupiter." It was still at sea. He touched at Cyprus and Alexandretta, then proceeded to Aleppo, crossing the plain of Antioch in a caravan. He was fleeced by an Armenian who professed to be a friend of the Jesuits, then he crossed the Tigris or Tiger, and arrived at Erzerum in time for an earthquake. Continuing his journey through the intervening territory to what he calls the "Caspian Lake", he finally reached Moscow, after being almost burned to death on the Volga, when his ship took fire. At Moscow he was welcomed by the German Jesuits who had a house there, for Prince Gallichin (Galitzin) was then prime minister. He was soon bidden to depart, and crossed a part of Muscovy, Lithuania and White Russia, reaching Warsaw on March 12, 1686. It was eighteen months since he had left Leghorn. He made effort after effort to get back to Muscovy, but in vain. Ambassadors and princes and even Louis XIV found the Czar obdurate, and so, after two years of unsuccessful endeavor, Avril arrived at Constantinople, after being imprisoned by the Turks on his way thither. Finally, he reached Marseilles, having proved, at least, that the road through Russia would have to be abandoned; hence, it was determined to make those overland journeys in the future through the territory of the Shah of Persia.
IX. BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
Aquaviva and the Spanish Opposition--Vitelleschi--The "Monita Secreta"; Morlin--Roding--"Historia Jesuitici Ordinis"-- "Jesuiticum Jejunium"--"Speculum Jesuiticum"--Pasquier--Mariana --"Mysteries of the Jesuits"--"The Jesuit Cabinet"--"Jesuit Wolves"--"Teatro Jesuítico"--"Morale Pratique des Jésuites"-- "Conjuratio Sulphurea"--"Lettres Provinciales"--"Causeries du Lundi" and Bourdaloue--Prohibition of publication by Louis XIV-- Pastoral of the Bishops of Sens--Santarelli--Escobar--Anti-Coton --"Les Descouvertes"--Norbert.
Father Claudius Aquaviva died on January 31, 1615, after a generalship of thirty-four years. To him are to be ascribed not only all of the great enterprises inaugurated since 1580, but, to a very considerable extent, the spirit by which the Society has been actuated up to the present time and which, it is to be hoped, it will always retain. The marvellous skill and the serene equanimity with which he guided the Society through the perils which it encountered from kings and princes, from heretics and heathens, from great ecclesiastical tribunals and powerful religious organizations, and most of all from the machinations of disloyal members of the Institute, entitle him to the enthusiastic love and admiration of every Jesuit and the unchallenged right to the title which he bears of the "Saviour of the Society." Far from being rigid and severe, as he is sometimes accused of being, he was amazingly meek and magnanimously merciful. The story about forty professed fathers having been dismissed in consequence of their connection with the sedition of Vásquez is a myth. The entire number of plotters on this occasion did not exceed twenty-eight, and only a few of those were expelled. In any case, whatever penalty was meted out to them was the act of the congregation and not of Aquaviva. Indeed, Aquaviva's methods are in violent contrast with those of Francis Xavier, who gave the power of expulsion to even local Superiors, and we almost regret that Xavier had not to deal with his fellow-countrymen at this juncture. It must also be borne in mind that the great exodus from the Society which occurred in Portugal antedated Aquaviva's time, and was due to the mistaken methods of government by Simon, Rodriguez.
The congregation convened after his death met on November 5, 1615, and the majority of its members must have been astounded to find the Spanish claim to the generalship still advocated. Mutio Vitelleschi an Italian, however, was most in evidence at that time; he was forty-five years old, and had been already rector of the English College, provincial both of Naples and Rome, and later assistant for Italy. As in all of those positions of trust he had displayed a marvellous combination of sweetness and strength which had endeared him to his subjects, the possibility of his election, at this juncture, afforded a well-grounded hope of a glorious future for the Society. Nevertheless some of the Spanish delegates determined to defeat him, and with that in view they addressed themselves to the ambassadors of France and Spain, to enlist their aid; but the shrewd politicians took the measure of the plotters, and, while piously commending them for their religious zeal and patriotism, politely refused their co-operation. That should have sufficed as a rebuke, but prompted by their unwise zeal they approached the Pope himself and assured him that Vitelleschi was altogether unfit for the position. The Pontiff listened to them graciously and bade them be of good heart, for, if Vitelleschi were half what they said he was, there could be no possibility of his election. The balloting took place on November 15, and Mutio was chosen by thirty-nine out of seventy-five votes. The margin was not a large one, and shows how nearly the conspirators had succeeded. To-day an appeal to laymen in such a matter would entail immediate expulsion.
Vitelleschi's vocation to the Society was a marked one. When only a boy of eleven, he was dreaming of being associated with it, and before he had finished his studies he bound himself by a vow to ask for admittance, and, if accepted, to distribute his inheritance to the poor. But as the Vitelleschi formed an important section of the Roman nobility, such aspirations did not fit in with the father's ambition for his son, and the boy was bidden to dismiss all thought of it. He was a gentle and docile lad, but he possessed also a decided strength of character, and like the Little Flower of Jesus in our own times, he betook himself to the Pope to lay the matter before him. The father finally yielded, and on August 15, 1583, young Mutio, after going to Communion with his mother at the Gesù, hurried off to lay his request before Father Aquaviva. His great desire was to go to England, which was just then waging its bloody war against the Faith, but, as with Aquaviva himself, his ignorance of the English language deprived him of the crown of martyrdom.
Crétineau-Joly is of the opinion that the generalate of Vitelleschi was monotone de bonheur. Whether that be so or not, it certainly had its share in the monotony of calumny which has been meted out to the Society from its birth. Thus, the beginning of Vitelleschi's term of office coincided with the publication of the famous "Monita secreta" which, with the exception of the "Lettres provinciales" is perhaps the cleverest piece of literary work ever levelled against the Society. The compliment is not a very great one, for nearly all the other books obtained their vogue by being extravagant distortions of the truth. But good or bad they never failed to appear.
The first in order was the diatribe of Morlin in 1568. This was a little before Vitelleschi's time. It was directed against the schools, and denounces the professors for having intercourse with the devil, practising sorcery, initiating their pupils in the black art, anointing them with some mysterious and diabolical compound which gave the masters control of their scholars after long years of separation. "God's gospel," they said, "was powerless before those creatures of the devil whom hell had vomited forth to poison the whole German empire and especially to do away with the Evangelicals who were the especial object of Jesuitical hatred." The immediate expulsion of the "sorcerers" was demanded, and even their burning at the stake, for "they not only deal in witchcraft themselves, but teach it to others, and impart to their pupils the methods of getting rid of their foes by poisons, incantations and the like." It was asserted that "those who send their boys to be educated by them are throwing their offspring into the jaws of wolves; or like the Hebrews of old immolating them to Moloch."
In 1575 Roding, a professor of Heidelberg dedicated a book to the elector, in which he denounces the Jesuit schools as impious and abominable, and warns parents "not to give aid to the Kingdom of Satan by trusting those who were enemies of Christianity and of God." "They are wild beasts," he said, "who ought to be chased out of our cities. Though outwardly modest, simple, mortified and urbane, they are in reality furies and atheists--far worse indeed than atheists and idolaters. The children confided to them are constrained to join with their swinish instructors in grunting at the Divine Majesty" (Janssen, VIII, 339). "They are not only poisoners but conspirators and assassins. Their purpose is to slay all those who have accepted the Confession of Augsburg. They have been seen in processions of armed men, disguised as courtiers, dressed in silks, with gold chains around their necks, going from one end of Germany to the other. They caused the St. Bartholomew massacre; they killed King Sebastian; in Peru, they plunged red hot irons into the bodies of the Indians to make them reveal where they hid their treasures. In thirty years the Popes killed 900,000 people, the Jesuits 2,000,000; the cellars of all the colleges in Germany are packed with soldiers; and Canisius married an abbess." This latter story went around Germany a hundred times and was widely believed.
The chief storehouse of all these inventions in Germany was the "Historia jesuitici ordinis," which was published in 1593, and was attributed by the editor, Polycarp Leiser, to an ex-novice, named Elias Hasenmüller, who was then six years dead--a circumstance which ought to have invalidated the testimony for ordinary people, but which did not prevent the "Historia" from being an immense success. Its publication was said to be miraculous, for it was given out as certain that any member of the Order who would reveal its secrets was to be tortured, poisoned or roasted alive. It was only by a special intervention of the Lord that Hasenmüller escaped. The readers of the "Historia" were informed that the Order was founded by the devil, who was the spiritual father of St. Ignatius. Omitting the immoralities detailed in the volume, "the Jesuits were professional assassins, wild boars, robbers, traitors, snakes, vipers, etc. In their private lives they were lecherous goats, filthy pigs." Even Carlyle says this of St. Ignatius--"The Pope had given them full power to commit every excess. If we knew them better we would spit in their faces, instead of sending them boys to be educated. Indeed it would not be well to trust them with hogs." There were other productions of the same nature, such as the "Jesuiticum jejunium" and "Speculum jesuiticum." Some of these "histories" denounced Father Gretser as "a vile scribbler, an open heretic and an adulterer who carried the devil around in a bottle." Bellarmine was "an Epicurean of the worst type, who had already killed 1642 victims; 562 of whom were married women. He used magic and poison, and pitched the corpses of his victims into the Tiber. He died the death of the damned, and his ghost was seen in the air in broad daylight flying away on a winged horse," and so on.
Etienne Pasquier was the leader of the French pamphleteers. It was he who had acted as advocate against the Jesuits of the College of Clermont. The plaidoyer presented to the court on that occasion was embodied in his "Recherches," and, in 1602, when he was seventy-three years of age, he published "Le Catéchisme des jésuites, ou examen de leur doctrine." He finds that the Order, besides being Calvinistic, is also spotted with Judaism. Ignatius was worse than Luther or Julian the Apostate; he was a sort of Don Quixote, who laughed at the vows he made at Montmartre; he was a trickster, a glutton, a demon incarnate, an ass. The first chapter in book II is entitled "Anabaptism of the Jesuits in their vow of blind obedience." Chapter 2 is on the execution of the Jesuit, Crichton, for attempting to kill the Scotch chancellor, of which he had been accused by "Robert de Bruce." In chapter 3, a Mr. Parry is sent by the Jesuits to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. In chapter 4, another attempt is made by the same person, in 1597, etc. Father Garasse wrote an answer to the book, and though he found no difficulty in showing its absurdities, yet his language was rough and abusive and quite out of keeping with the dignity of his state; besides, it centred public attention on him to such extent that later when, three pamphlets with which he had had nothing to do were written against Cardinal Richelieu, he was accused of being the author of them and had to swear in the most solemn manner that he knew nothing whatever about them. This charge against Garasse came near alienating Louis XIII from the Society.
Much harm had also been done by Mariana's alleged doctrine on regicide. On the face of it, the book could not have been seditious, for it was written as an instruction for the heir of Philip II, and it is inconceivable that an autocrat, such as he was, should not only have put a book teaching regicide in the hands of his son, but should have paid for its publication. As a matter of fact, the king conjured up by Mariana as a possible victim of assassination is a monster who could have scarcely existed. In other circumstances the book would have passed unnoticed, but it served as a pretext to attack the Society by ascribing Mariana's doctrine to the whole Society.
Now, Mariana never was and never could be a representative of the Society, for: first sixteen years before the objectionable book attracted notice in France, namely in 1584, Mariana had been solemnly condemned by the greatest assembly of the Society, the general congregation, as an unworthy son; a pestilential member who should be cut off from the body, and his expulsion was ordered. He was one of the leaders of the band of Spanish conspirators who did all in their power to destroy the Society. Secondly, his expulsion did not take place, possibly because of outside political influence like that of Philip II and the Inquisition. Nevertheless in 1605, that is five years before the French flurry, he wrote another book entitled, "De defectibus Societatis" (i. e. the Weak Points of the Society), which was condemned as involving the censure of the papal bull "Ascendente Domino." Instead of destroying the MS., as he should have done, if he had a spark of loyalty in him, he kept it, and when in 1609, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Spanish authorities for his book on Finance which seemed to reflect on the government, that MS. was seized, and subsequently served as a strong weapon against the Society. Why should such a man be cited as the representative of a body from which he was ordered to be expelled and which he had attempted to destroy?
Another harmful publication was the "Monita secreta," which represented the Jesuit as a sweet-voiced intriguer; a pious grabber of inheritances for the greater glory of God; enjoying a vast influence with conspicuous personages; working underhand in politics, and revealing himself in every clime, invariably the same, and always monstrously rich. The "Monita" appeared in Poland in the year 1612. It was printed in a place not to be found on any map: namely Notobirga, which suggests "Notaburgh," or "Not a City." It purported to be based on a Spanish manuscript, discovered in the secret archives of the Society at Padua. It was translated into Latin, and was then sent to Vienna, and afterwards to Cracow, where it was given to the public. It consists of sixteen short chapters, of which we give a few sample titles: "I. How the Society should act to get a new foundation. II. How to win and keep the friendship of princes and important personages. III. How to act with people who wield political influence or those who, even if not rich, may be serviceable. VI. How to win over wealthy widows. VII. How to induce them to dispose of their property. VIII. How to induce them to enter religious communities, or at least to make them devout."
To achieve all this the Jesuits were to wear outwardly an appearance of poverty in their houses; the sources of revenue were to be concealed; purchases of property were always to be made by dummies; rich widows were to be provided with adroit confessors; their family physicians were to be the friends of the Fathers; their daughters were to be sent to convents, their sons to the Society, etc. The vices of prominent personages were to be indulged; quarrels were to be entered into, so as to get the credit of reconciliation; the servants of the rich were to be bribed; confessors were to be very sweet; distinguished personages were never to be publicly reprehended, etc., etc. As the phraseology of these "Monita secreta" was a clever imitation of the official document of the Society known as the "Monita generalia," the forgery scored a perfect success in being accepted as genuine. It was such a cleverly devised instrument of warfare in a country like Poland, for instance, with its mixed Protestant and Catholic population, that it would be sure to strengthen the Protestants, and, at the same time, shame the Catholics, by discrediting the Jesuits, who were then in great favor. It was anonymous, but was finally traced to Jerome Zahorowski, who had been dismissed from the Society. When charged by the Inquisition with being the author, he denied it, and said he had no complaint against his former associates. The book was put on the Index, and Zahorowski's declaration that he was not the author was believed. Later, however, it was publicly declared by those who had the means of knowing the facts that he was really the guilty man. Indeed, just before he died, he confessed the authorship and bitterly regretted the crime he had committed. He recanted all that he had said in the book, but it was too late; the mischief had been done and the evil work has continued. There were twenty-two editions of it, issued during the seventeenth century, and it was translated into many languages. Its title was changed from time to time and it was called: "The Mysteries of the Jesuits;" "Arcana of the Society;" "Jesuit Machiavelism;" "The Jesuit Cabinet;" "Jesuit Wolves;" "Jesuit Intrigues," and so on. There appeared also a huge publication of six or seven bulky volumes entitled "Annales des soi-disants Jésuites," which is an encyclopedia of all the accusations ever made against the Society.
Another ex-Jesuit named Jarrige perpetrated the libel known as "The Jesuits on the Scaffold, for their Crimes in the Province of Guyenne." He, too, like Zahorowski, when he came to his senses, repented and tried ineffectually to make amends. The "Teatro jesuítico" was also a source from which the assailants of the Society drew their ammunition. It was condemned by the Inquisition on January 28, 1655, and the Archbishop of Seville burned it publicly. Arnauld borrowed from it most of his material for the "Morale pratique des Jésuites," and to give it importance, he ascribed its authorship to the Bishop of Malaga, Ildephonse of St. Thomas. Whereupon the bishop Wrote to the Pope complaining that "an infamous libel, unworthy of the light of day, and composed in the midst of the darkness of hell and bearing the title: 'Morale pratique des Jésuites' has fallen into my hands, and I am said to be the author of it,--a feat which would have been impossible, for it was published in 1654, when I was yet a student, and in ill-health." Although this solemn denial was published all through Europe, Pascal and his friends continued to impute it to the bishop, according to Crétineau-Joly; but Brou says that the mistake or the deceit was admitted. The book, however, was not withdrawn, and continued to do its evil work.
It was the Gunpowder Plot that inflicted on the English language a great number of absurdities about Jesuits. King James I of England led the way by writing a book with the curious title: "Conjuratio sulphurea, quibus ea rationibus et authoribus coeperit, maturuerit, apparuerit; una cum reorum examine," that is "The sulphureous or hellish conjuration, for what reasons and by what authors it was begun, matured and brought to light; together with the examination of the culprits." He also published a "Defence of the Oath of Allegiance" which he had exacted of Catholics. This elucubration was called: "Triplici nodo triplex cuneus," which probably means "A triple pry for the triple knot." In it he charges the Pope with sending aid to the conspirators "his henchmen the Jesuits who confessed that they were its authors and designers. Their leader died confessing the crime, and his accomplices admitted their guilt by taking flight."
Such a charge formulated by a king against the Sovereign Pontiff aroused all Europe, and Bellarmine under the name of "Matthæus Tortus" descended into the arena. Dr. Andrews replied with clumsy humor by another book entitled, "Tortura Torti;" that is "The Tortures of Tortus," for which he was made a bishop. Then Bellarmine retorted in turn and revealed the fact that his majesty had written a personal letter to two cardinals, himself and Aldobrandini, asking them to forward a request to the Pope to have a certain Scotchman, who was Bishop of Vaison in France, made a cardinal, "so as to expedite the transaction of business with the Holy See." The letter was signed: "Beatitudinis vestræ obsequentissimus filius J. R." (Your Holiness' most obsequious son, James the King.) This sent James to cover and now quite out of humor with himself, because of the storm aroused in England by the disclosure of his duplicity, he handed over new victims to the pursuivants, "so that," as he said, "his subjects might make profit of them," that is by the confiscation of estates. He then got one of his secretaries to take upon himself the odium of the letter to Bellarmine, by saying that he had signed the king's name to it. Every one, of course, saw through the falsehood.
A most unexpected and interesting defender of Father Garnet, who had been put to death by James, appeared at this juncture. He was no less a personage than Antoine Arnauld, the famous Jansenist, who was at that very moment tearing Garnet's brethren to pieces in France. "No Catholic," he said, "no matter how antagonistic he might be to Jesuits in general, would ever accuse Garnet of such a crime, and no Protestant would do so unless blinded by religious hate" (Crétineau-Joly, III, 98). James I and Bellarmine came into collision again on another point not, however, in such a personal fashion.
A Scotch lawyer named Barclay had written a book on the authority of kings, in which he claimed that their power had no limitations whatever; at least, he went to the very limit of absolutism. Strange to say, Barclay, who was a Catholic, had Jesuit affiliations. He was professor of law in the Jesuit college of Pont-à-Mousson, in France, where his uncle, Father Hay, was rector. For some reason or another he went over to England shortly after the accession of James I, whom he greatly admired, possibly because he was a Scot. There is no other reason visible to the naked eye. He was received with extraordinary honor at court and offered very lucrative offices if he would declare himself an Anglican. He spurned the bribe and returned to France where he resumed his office of teaching. Cardinal Bellarmine then appeared, refuting Barclay's ideas of kingship. The peculiarity of Bellarmine's work was that it had nothing new in it. It was merely a collation of old authorities, chiefly French jurists who cut down the royal power considerably. This threw the Paris parliament into a frenzy, for they had all along been persuading their fellow countrymen that the autocracy they claimed for their monarchs was the immemorial tradition of France. To hide their confusion, they ascribed to the illustrious cardinal all sorts of doctrines, such as regicide and the right of seizure of private property by the Pope, and they demanded not only the condemnation but the public burning of the book.
The matter now assumed an international importance. Bellarmine was a conspicuous figure in the Church, and his work had been approved by the Pope, whose intimate friend he was. To condemn him meant to condemn the Sovereign Pontiff, and would thus necessarily be a declaration of a schism from Rome. Probably that is what these premature Gallicans were aiming at. Ubaldini, the papal nuncio, immediately warned the queen regent, Mary de'Medici, that if such an outrage were committed, he would hand in his papers and leave Paris. Parliament fought fiercely to have its way, and the battle raged with fury for a long time until, finally, Mary saw the peril of the situation and quashed the parliamentary decree which had already been printed and was being circulated.
In the midst of it all, the theory of Suárez on the "Origin of Power" came into the hands of the parliamentarians, and that added fuel to the flame; Ubaldini wrote to Rome on June 17, 1614, that "the lawyer Servin, who was like a demon in his hatred of Rome, made a motion in parliament, first, that the work of Suárez should be burned before the door of the three Jesuit houses in Paris, in presence of two fathers of each house; secondly, that an official condemnation of it should be entered on the records; thirdly, that the provincial, the superior of the Paris residence and four other fathers should be cited before the parliament and made to anathematize the doctrine of Suárez, and fourthly, if they refused, that all the members of the Society should be expelled from France." The measure was not passed.
The book which did most harm to the Society in the public mind was the "Lettres provinciales" by Pascal, though the "Lettres" were not intended primarily or exclusively as an attack on the Jesuits. Their purpose was to make the people forget or condone the dishonesty of the Jansenists in denying that the five propositions, censured by the Holy See, were really contained in the "Augustinus" of Jansenius. At the suggestion of Arnauld, Pascal undertook to show that other supposedly orthodox writers, including the Jesuits, had advanced doctrines which merited but had escaped censure. The letters appeared serially and were entitled: "Les Provinciales, ou Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un Provincial de ses amis, et aux RR. PP. Jésuites, sur la morale et la politique de ces Pères." They took the world by storm, first because they revealed a literary genius of the first order in the youthful Pascal, who until then had been engrossed in the study of mathematics, and who was also, at the time of writing, in a shattered state of health. Secondly, because they blasted the reputation of a great religious order, and reproduced in exquisite language the atrocious calumnies that had been poured out on the world by the "Monita secreta," the "Historia jesuitici ordinis," Pasquier's "Catechism" and the rest. The doctrinal portion of the letters was evidently not Pascal's; that was supplied to him by Arnauld and Quinet, for Pascal had neither the time nor the training necessary even to read the deep theological treatises which he quotes and professes to have read.
To be accused of teaching lax morality by those who were intimately associated with and supported by such an indescribable prelate as the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, Gondi, was particularly galling to the French Jesuits, and unfortunately it had the effect of provoking them to answer the charges. "In doing so," says Crétineau-Joly, "the Jesuits killed themselves;" and Brou, in "Les Jésuites et la légende," is of the opinion that "more harm was done to the Society by these injudicious and incompetent defenders than by Pascal himself. It would have been better to have said nothing." On the other hand, Petit de Julleville, in his "Histoire de la langue et de la littérature française," tells us that one of these Jesuit champions induced Pascal to discontinue his attacks, just at the moment that the world was rubbing its hands with glee and expecting the fiercest kind of an onslaught. "I wish," said Morel, addressing himself to Pascal, "that after a sincere reconciliation with the Jesuits, you would turn your pen against the heretics, the unbelievers, the libertines, and the corruptors of morals." The fact is that although Pascal did not seek a reconciliation with the Jesuits, he suddenly and unaccountably stopped writing against them; and in 1657 he actually turned his pen against the libertines of France, as he had been asked (IV, 604). Mère Angélique, Arnauld's sister, is also credited with having had something to do with this cessation of hostilities, when she wrote: "Silence would be better and more agreeable to God who would be more quickly appeased by tears and by penance than by eloquence which amuses more people than it converts."
Perhaps the entrance of the great Bourdaloue on the scene contributed something to this change of attitude on the part of the Jansenist. As court preacher, he had it in his power to refute the calumnies of Arnauld and Pascal, and he availed himself of the opportunity with marvellous power and effect. In the "Causeries du Lundi" Sainte-Beuve, who favored the Jansenists, writes: "In saying that the Jesuits made no direct and categorical denial to the Provinciales, until forty years later, when Daniel took up his pen, we forget that long and continual refutation by Bourdaloue in his public sermons in which there is nothing lacking except the proper names; but his hearers and his contemporaries in general, who were familiar with the controversies and were partisans of either side, easily supplied these. Thus in his Sermon on 'Lying' he paints that vice with most exquisite skill, adding touch after touch, till it stands out in all its hideousness. As he speaks, you see it before you with its subtle sinuosities from the moment it begins the attack, under the pretence of an amicable censorship, up to the moment when the complete calumny is reiterated under the guise of friendship and religion." The following extract is an example of this method.
"One of the abuses of the age," says Bourdaloue, "is the consecration of falsehood and its transformation into virtue; yea, even into one of the greatest of virtues: zeal for the glory of God. 'We must humiliate those people;' they say, 'it will be helpful to the Church to blast their reputation and diminish their credit.' On this principle they form their conscience, and there is nothing they will not allow themselves when actuated by such a charming motive. So, they exaggerate; they poison; they distort; they relate things by halves; they utter a thousand untruths; they confound the general with the particular; what one has said badly, they ascribe to all; and what all have said well they attribute to none. And they do all this--for the glory of God. This forming of their intention justifies everything; and though it would not suffice to excuse an equivocation, it is more than sufficient in their eyes to justify a calumny when they are persuaded that it is all for the service of God."
"If Bourdaloue," continues Sainte-Beuve, "while detailing, in this exquisite fashion, the vice of lying, had not before his mind Pascal and his Provinciales, and if he was not painting, feature by feature, certain personalities whom his hearers recognized; and if while he was doing it, they were not shocked, even though they could not help admiring the artist, then there are no portraits in Saint-Simon and La Bruyère.... It would not be hard to prove that the preaching of Bourdaloue for thirty years was a long and powerful refutation of the Provinciales, an eloquent and daily drive at Pascal."
It must have been an immense consolation for the Jesuits of those days, wounded as they were to the quick by the misrepresentation and calumnies of writers like Arnauld, Pascal, Nicole and others, to have the saintly Bourdaloue, the ideal Jesuit, occupying the first place in the public eye, thus defending them. Bourdaloue had entered the Society at fifteen, and hence was absolutely its product. He was a man of prayer and study, and when not in the pulpit he was in the confessional or at the bedside of the sick and dying poor. He was naturally quick and impulsive, but he had been trained to absolute self-control; he was even gay and merry in conversation, and his eyes sparkled with pleasure as he spoke. The story that he closed them while preaching is, of course, nonsense, and the picture that represents him thus was taken from a death masque. He labored uninterruptedly till he was seventy-two and died on May 13, 1704. Very fittingly his last Mass was on Pentecost Sunday.
An excellent modern discussion of the Letters appeared in the Irish quarterly "Studies" of September, 1920. The writer, the noted author Hilaire Belloc, reminds his readers of certain important facts. First, casuistry is not chicanery nor is it restricted to ecclesiastics; it is employed by lawyers, physicians, scientific, and even business men, in considering conditions which are without a precedent and have not yet reached the ultimate tribunal which is to settle the matter. Secondly, as in the discussion of ecclesiastical "cases," the terms employed are technical, just as are those of law, medicine, science; and as the language is Latin, no one is competent to interpret the verdict arrived at, unless he is conversant both with theology and the Latin language. "I doubt," he says, "if there is any man living in England to-day--of all those glibly quoting the name of Pascal against the Church--who could tell you what the Mohatra Contract was"--one of the subjects dragged into these "Lettres." Thirdly, the "Lettres" are not so much an assault on the Society of Jesus, as on the whole system of moral theology of the Catholic Church. There are eighteen letters in all, and it is not until the fifth that the Jesuits are assailed. The attack is kept up until the tenth and then dropped. From the thousands of decisions advanced by a vast number of professors 'regular and secular' Pascal brings forward only those of the Jesuits; and of the many thousands of "cases" discussed he selects only one hundred and thirty-two, which, if the repetitions be eliminated, must be reduced to eighty-nine.
Of these eighty-nine cases three are clearly misquotations--for Pascal was badly briefed. Many others are put so as to suggest what the casuist never said, that is a special case is made a general rule of morals. Many more are frivolous, and others are purely domestic controversy upon points of Catholic practice which cannot concern the opponents of the Jesuits, and in which they cannot pretend an active interest on Pascal's or the Society's side. When the whole list has been gone through there remain fourteen cases of importance. In eight of these, relating to duelling and the risk of homicide, the opinions of some casuists were subsequently, at one time or another, condemned by the Church (seven of the decisions had declared the liceity of duelling under very exceptional circumstances, when no other means were available to protect one's honor or fortune). Pascal was right in condemning the opinions, but was quite wrong in presenting them as normal decisions, given under ordinary circumstances by Jesuits generally. Three of the remaining six decisions have never been censured; but Pascal by his tricky method of presenting them out of their context has caused the solutions to be confused with certain condemned propositions.
A just analysis leaves of the one hundred and thirty-two decisions exactly three--one on simony, one on the action of a judge in receiving presents, and the third on usury--all three of which are doubtful and matters for discussion. There is besides these, the doctrine of equivocation, which is a favorite shaft against the Society. Of this Belloc says: "This specifically condemned form of equivocation (that is, equivocation involving a private reservation of meaning), moreover, was not particularly Jesuit. It had been debated at length, and favorably, long before the Jesuit Order came into existence, and within the great casuist authorities of that Order there were wide differences of opinion upon it. Azor, for instance, condemns instances which Sánchez allows. Of all this conflict Pascal allows you to hear nothing." Finally, it may be noted that the "Provincial Letters" were not a plea for truth, but a device to distract the public mind from the chicanery of the Jansenists, who, when the famous "five propositions" were condemned, pretended that they were not in the "Augustinus" written by Jansenius.
Perhaps the commonest libel formulated against the Society is the accusation that it is the teacher, if not the author, of the immoral maxim: "the end justifies the means", which signifies that an action, bad in itself, becomes good if performed for a good purpose. If the Society ever taught this doctrine, at least it cannot be charged with having the monopoly of it. Thus, for instance, the great Protestant empire which is the legitimate progeny of Martin Luther's teaching, proclaimed to the world that the diabolical "frightfulness" which it employed in the late war was prompted solely by its desire for peace. On the other side of the Channel, an Anglican prelate informed his contemporaries that "the British Empire could not be carried on for a week, on the principles of the 'Sermon on the Mount'" (The Month, Vol. 106, p. 255). The same might be predicated of numberless other powers and principalities past and present. The ruthless measures resorted to in business and politics for the suppression of rivalry are a matter of common knowledge. Finally, every unbiased mind will concede that the persistent use of poisonous gas by the foes of the Society is nothing else than a carrying out of the maxim of "the end justifies the means."
It has been proved times innumerable that this odious doctrine was never taught by the Society, and the average Jesuit regards each recrudescence of the charge as an insufferable annoyance, and usually takes no notice of it; but, in our own times, the bogey has presented itself in such an unusual guise, that the event has to be set down as one more item of domestic history. It obtruded itself on the public in Germany in 1903, when a secular priest, Canon Dasbach, an ardent friend of the Society, offered a prize of 2000 florins to any one who would find a defense of the doctrine in any Jesuit publication. The challenge was accepted by Count von Hoensbroech, who after failing in his controversy with the canon, availed himself of a side issue to bring the question before the civil courts of Trèves and Cologne.
Apparently von Hoensbroech was well qualified for his task. He was an ex-Jesuit and had lived for years in closest intimacy with some of the most distinguished moralists and theologians of the Order: Lehmkuhl, Cathrein, Pesch and others, in the house of studies, at Exaeten in Holland; so that the world rubbed its hands in glee, and waited for revelations. He was, however, seriously hampered by some of his own earlier utterances. Thus, when he left the Society in 1893, he wrote in "Mein Austritt aus dem Jesuitenorden," as follows: "The moral teachings, under which members of the Society are trained, are beyond reproach, and the charges so constantly brought against Jesuit moralists are devoid of any foundation." Over and above this, he was somewhat disqualified as a witness, inasmuch as he not only had left the Society but had apostatized from the Faith, and, though a priest, had married a wife; he was, moreover, notorious as a rancorous Lutheran (Civiltà Cattolica, an. 56, p. 8.) But the lure of the florins led him on, only to have the case thrown out by one court, as beyond its jurisdiction, and decided against him in the other; the verdict was also heartily endorsed by conspicuous Protestants and Freethinkers. Hoensbroech is dead, but the spectre of "the end justifying the means" still stalks the earth, and may be heard from at any moment.
Pascal's "Provincial Letters" were not the only source of worry for the Jesuits in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many other calumnious publications appeared, such as "La morale des jésuites," "Disquisitions," "Nullités" etc., all of which had the single purpose of poisoning the public mind. The battle continued until an enforced peace was obtained by a joint order of the Pope and king prohibiting any further issues of that character from the press. That, however, did not check the determination of the Jansenists to crush the Society in other ways. Thus, as early as 1650, the Archbishop of Sens, who was strongly Jansenistic, forbade the Jesuits to hear confessions in his diocese at Easter-time, and three years later, he declared from the pulpit that the theology of the Jesuits was taken from the Koran rather than from the Gospels, and that their philosophy was more pagan than Christian. He called for their expulsion as schismatics, heretics and worse, and declared that all confessions made to them were invalid and sacrilegious. Finally, he proceeded to excommunicate them with bell, book and candle. They withdrew from his diocese but were brought back by the next bishop a quarter of a century later.
Another enemy of the Society was Cardinal Le Camus of Grenoble, who forbade them to teach or preach; and when Saint-Just, who had been fifteen years rector of the college, complained of it to some friends, he was suspended and accused of a grievous crime of which he was absolutely innocent. When he brought the matter to court, Father General Oliva censured him for doing so and removed him from office. Santarelli, an Italian Jesuit, launched a book on the public which produced a great excitement. He proposed to prove that the Pope had the power of deposing kings who were guilty of certain crimes, and of absolving subjects from their allegiance. In Paris it was interpreted as advocating regicide, and was immediately ascribed to the whole Society; and it was condemned by the Sorbonne. Richelieu was especially wrought up about it. Poor Father Coton, the king's confessor, who was grievously ill at the time, almost collapsed at the news of its publication. The author had not perceived that the politics of the world were no longer those of the Middle Ages.
The "Manual of Cases of Conscience" of Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, the Spanish theologian, furnished infinite material for the Jansenists of France to blacken the name of the Society. Necessarily, every enormity that human nature can be guilty of is discussed in such treatises, but it would be just as absurd to charge their authors with writing them for the purpose of inculcating vice, as it would be to accuse medical practitioners of propagating disease by their clinics and dissecting rooms. The purpose of both is to heal and prevent, not to communicate disease, whether it be of the soul or body. In both cases, the books that treat of such matters are absolutely restricted to the use of the profession, and as an additional precaution, in the matter of moral theology, the treatises are written in Latin, so that they cannot be understood by people who have nothing to do with such disagreeable and sometimes disgusting topics. To accuse the men who condemned themselves to the study of such subjects solely that they might lift depraved humanity out of the depths into which it descends, is an outrage.
This literary war crossed the ocean to the French possessions of Canada, and much of the religious trouble that disturbed the colony from the beginning may be traced to the editorial activity of the Jansenists of France. Thus, when Brébeuf, Charles Lalemant and Massé came up the St. Lawrence, after a terrible voyage across the Atlantic, they were actually forbidden to land. The pamphlet known as "Anti-Coton" had been distributed and read by the few colonists who were then on the Rock of Quebec, and they would have nothing to do with the associates of a man who like Coton, was represented as rejoicing in the assassination of Henry IV. It did not matter that Father Coton and the king were not only intimate but most affectionate friends, and that assassination in such circumstances would be inconceivable; that it was asserted in print was enough to cause these three glorious men, who were coming to die for the Catholic Faith and for France, to be forbidden to land at Quebec. This anti-Coton manifestation in the early days of the colony was only a prelude to the antagonism that runs all through early Canadian history. It was kept up by a clique of writers in France, chief of whom were the Jansenist Abbés Bernou and Renaudot. Their contributions may be found in the voluminous collection known as Margry's "Découvertes," which Parkman induced the United States government to print in the language in which they were written. They teem with the worst kind of libels against the Society. Some of them pretend to have been written in America, but are so grotesque that the forgery is palpable. Indeed, among them is a letter from Bernou to Renaudot which says: "Get La Salle to give me some points and I will write the Relation."
The missionary labors of de Nobili, de Britto, Beschi and others in Madura, a dependency of the ecclesiastical province of Malabar, had been so successful that they evoked considerable literary fury, both inside and outside the Church, chiefly with regard to the liceity of certain rites or customs which the natives had been allowed to retain after baptism. In 1623 Gregory XV had decided that they could be permitted provisionally, and the practice was, therefore, continued by Beschi, Bouchet and others who had extended their apostolic work into Pondicherry and the Carnatic. But about the year 1700 the question was again mooted, in consequence of the transfer of the Pondicherry territory to the exclusive care of the Jesuits. The Capuchins who were affected by the arrangement appealed to Rome, adding also a protest against the Rites. The first part of the charge was not admitted, but the latter was handed over for examination to de Tournon, who was titular Patriarch of Antioch.
As soon as he arrived at Pondicherry, without going into the interior of the country, he took the testimony of the Capuchins, questioned the Jesuits only cursorily, and also a few natives through interpreters. He then condemned the Rites and forbade the missionaries under heavy penalties to allow them. His decree was made known to the Jesuit superior only three days before he left the place, and hence there was no possibility of enlightening him. The Pope then ordered de Tournon's verdict to be carried out, qualifying it, however, by adding "in so far as the Divine glory and the salvation of souls would permit." The missionaries protested without avail, and the question was discussed by two successive pontiffs. Finally, Innocent XIII insisted on de Tournon's decree being obeyed in all its details, but it is doubtful if the document ever reached the missions. Benedict XIII reopened the question later, and ruled upon each article of de Tournon's decision, and a Brief was issued to that effect in 1734.
Into this question the Jansenists of France injected themselves so vigorously that even the bibliography for and against the Rites is bewildering in its extent. One contribution consists of eight volumes in French and seven in Italian. In his history of Jansenism in "The Catholic Encyclopedia" Dr. Forget of the University of Louvain says: "The sectaries [in the middle of the eighteenth century] began to detach themselves from the primitive heresy, but they retained unabated the spirit of insubordination and schism, the spirit of opposition to Rome, and above all a mortal hatred of the Jesuits. They had vowed the ruin of that order, which they always found blocking their way, and in order to attain their end they successively induced Catholic princes and ministers in Portugal, France, Spain, Naples, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Duchy of Parma, and elsewhere to join hands with the worst leaders of impiety and philosophism." Besides the Jansenists, "every Protestant writer of distinction with two or three exceptions," says Marshall (Christian Missions, I, 226), "has ascribed the success of the mission of Madura and its wonderful results to a guilty connivance with pagan superstition. La Croze, Geddes, Hough and other writers of their class in a long succession luxuriate in language of which we need not offer a specimen, and direct against de Nobili and his successors charges of forgery, imposture, superstition, idolatry, and various other crimes."
"There is one name," continues the same writer, "which invariably occurs in the writings referred to; one witness whom they all quote and to whom the whole history is to be traced. That witness is Father Norbert, ex-Capuchin and ex-missionary of India." In a work published by this person in 1744, all the fables which have since been repeated as grave historical facts are found. He is quoted, apparently without suspicion, by Dr. Grant in his "Bampton Lectures," yet a very little inquiry and even a reference to so common a book, as the "Biographie universelle" would have revealed to him the real character of the witness by whose help he has not feared to defame some of the most heroic and evangelical men who ever devoted their lives to the service of God, and the salvation of their fellow creatures.
"Norbert," says Marshall, "was one of those ordinary missionaries who had utterly failed to convert the Hindoo by the usual methods, and who was as incapable of imitating the terrible austerities by which the Jesuits prepared their success, as he was of rejoicing in triumphs of which he had no share. Stung with mortal jealousy and yielding to the suggestions of a malice which amounted almost to frenzy, he attacked the Jesuits with fury even from the pulpit. The civil power was forced to interfere, and Dupleix, the Governor of Pondicherry, though he had been his friend, put him on board ship and sent him to America. There he spent two years less occupied in the work of the missions than in planning schemes to revenge himself on the Jesuits. The publication of the mendacious work in which he treated the Society of Jesus as a band of malefactors was prohibited by the authorities; but he quitted Rome and printed it secretly.
"Condemned by his Order, though he affected to vindicate it from the injuries of the Jesuits, he fled to Holland and thence to England, in both of which countries he found congenial spirits. In the latter, he established first a candle and afterwards a carpet factory, under the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland. Thence he wandered into Germany, and subsequently, having obtained his secularization and put off the religious habit which he had defiled, he went to Portugal. Here remorse seems to have overtaken him and he was permitted by an excess of charity to assume once more the habit of a Capuchin, which he a second time laid aside. Finally, after having attempted to deceive the Sovereign Pontiff, he died in a wretched condition in an obscure village of France." The "Biographie universelle" gives some more details which are useful as a matter of history. After Benedict XIV had forbidden Norbert to print his book, he brought it out either at Lucca or Avignon; in England he assumed his old name of Peter Parisot; when he landed in Germany he was known as Curel, and when in France his pen-name was Abbé Platel. According to the "Biographie," "Norbert was dull and heavy, without talent or style and would have been incapable of writing a single page if he were not actuated by hate. All of his works have passed into oblivion."
Americans have not been troubled to any extent by such publications, except, perhaps in one instance, when a certain R. W. Thompson, who had been Secretary of the Navy, though he lived 1000 miles from the sea, warned his fellow-countrymen in 1894 that the one danger for the Constitution of the United States was the teaching of the Jesuits. Even the Church is in peril, because "their system of moral theology is irreconcilable with the Roman Catholic religion." "I refrain from discussing it," he says, "because that has been sufficiently done by Pascal and Paul Bert." No one was excessively alarmed by the "Footprints of the Jesuits."
X. THE TWO AMERICAS
1567-1673
Chile and Peru--Valdivia--Peruvian Bark--Paraguay Reductions-- Father Fields--Emigration from Brazil--Social and religious prosperity of the Reductions--Martyrdom of twenty-nine missionaries--Reductions in Colombia--Peter Claver--French West Indies--St. Kitts--Irish Exiles--Father Bath or Destriches-- Montserrat--Emigration to Guadeloupe--Other Islands--Guiana-- Mexico--Lower California--The Pious Fund--The Philippines-- Canada Missions--Brébeuf, Jogues, Le Moyne, Marquette--Maryland --White--Lewger.
In 1567 Philip II asked for twenty Jesuits to evangelize Peru. The request was granted, and in the Lent of 1568 the first band arrived at Callao and made its way to Lima. They were so cordially welcomed, says Astrain, that the provincial found it necessary to warn his men that much would have to be done to live up to the public expectation. Means were immediately put at their disposal, and they set to work at the erection of a college. While the college was being built they heard confessions, visited the jails and hospitals, gave lectures on canon law to the priests of the cathedral, and started their great training school on Lake Titicaca, to which we have already referred. There the novices were set to learn the native languages to prepare them for their future work. For the moment the population of the city also gave them plenty to do. It was made up of three classes of people: negroes, half-breeds, and wealthy Spaniards. Father López looked after the negroes, and by degrees succeeded in putting a stop to their orgies and indecent dances. Others were, meantime, taking care of the whites and mestizos. The usual Jesuit sodalities were put in working order, and soon it was a common thing to see the young fashionables of the city laying aside their cloaks and swords, and helping the sick in the hospitals, going around to the huts of the poor or visiting criminals in the jails.
A new detachment of missionaries arrived in the following year with the Viceroy Toledo, who evidently took to them too kindly on the way over, for besides their normal duties, he wanted them to assume the office of parish priests, and he immediately wrote to Philip II to that effect. They refused, of course, with the consequence of an unpleasant state of feeling in their regard on the part of the authorities. Indeed, the pressure became so great that the superior finally yielded to a certain extent, and even assigned some of his professed to the work, but he was promptly summoned to Europe for his weakness. Meantime novices came swarming in, among them Bernardin d'Acosta, whose virtues merited for him, later on, a place in the "Menology." There was also little Oviando, called the Stanislaus of Peru. He was an abandoned child whose parents had come out to America and had lost him or had died, and he was begging his bread in the streets of Lima when the Fathers picked him up. They sent him to the college and helped him to become a saint.
The great man of Peru and, subsequently, of Chile, was Father Luis de Valdivia, who was hailed by both Indians and whites as "the apostle, pacificator and liberator of Peru." The Indians had fascinated him, and he learned their language in a month or so. When he saw that the only difficulty in making them Christians was the slavery to which they were subjected, coupled with the immorality of their Spanish masters, he got himself named as the representative of the colonial authorities, and started to Spain to lay before Philip III the degraded condition of his overseas possessions. The king received him cordially, enacted the most stringent laws against the abuses, and appointed him royal visitor and administrator of Chile, where similar disorders were complained of. He also wanted to make him a bishop, but Valdivia refused. Returning to Peru from Spain, he gave 10,000 Indians their freedom. When that got abroad among the savages, all the tribes that were then in rebellion immediately came to terms, and on December 8, 1612, the grand chief Utablame, with sixty caciques and a half-a-score of pagan priests, all of them wearing wreaths of sea-weed on their heads, and holding green branches in their hands, descended from their fastnesses and the grand chief, their spokesman, addressed Valdivia as follows: "It is not fear that makes me accept the peace. Since my boyhood I have not ceased to defy the Spaniards, and I have withstood sixteen governors one after another. I yield now only to you, good and great Father, and to the King of Spain, because of the benefits you have bestowed upon me and my people."
In spite of the difficulties and dangers of the work, as well as the calumnies of the slave-hunters and even the wrong impressions of some of his brethren, Valdivia succeeded in establishing four great central Indian missions, which evoked the commendation of successive kings of Spain. Before Valdivia went to Chile, Viga, who had been there since 1593, had already compiled a dictionary and grammar in Araucanian, and Valdivia followed his example by writing other books to facilitate the work of the missionaries. The colleges founded at Arauco and also at Valdivia--a town named not after the missionary, but to honor his namesake, the governor of the province--furnished a base of operations among the Araucanian savages, a fierce and, for a long time, indomitable people, who were united against the Spaniards in a league composed of forty different tribes. The work among them was slow and hard, and three of the priests were killed by them in the wilderness. Their success also aroused the colonists to fury, and a war of extermination of the Indians was resolved upon, but Valdivia opposed it, and not only succeeded in getting the Araucanians to agree to terms of peace, but brought in the Guagas, and persuaded them to lay down their arms. The great missionary was eighty-two years of age when called to his reward.
The famous Peruvian bark was brought to Europe about this time, but it was regarded with extreme suspicion because of its sponsors, and the wildest stories were told of it. Medical treatises teemed with discussions about its properties, some condemning, others commending it. Von Humboldt says: "It almost goes without saying that, among Protestant physicians, hatred of the Jesuits and religious intolerance were at the bottom of the long conflict over the good or evil effected by the drug." The illustrious physician, Bado, gave as his opinion that "it was more precious than all the gold and silver which the Spaniards obtained in South America."
It was in 1586, eighteen years after their arrival in Peru, that the work of the Jesuits in Paraguay was inaugurated. Francisco de Victoria, Dominican Bishop of Tucumán had invited them to his diocese, which lay east of the Andes, and his brother in religion, Alonso Guerra, Bishop of Asunción, which was on the Rio de la Plata or Paraná River, also summoned them to his aid, both for the whites and Indians of his flock. They obeyed, and without delay colleges, residences, and retreats for the Spiritual Exercises were instituted in Santiago del Estero, Asunción, Córdoba, Buenos Aires, Corrientes, Tarija, Salta, Tucumán, Santa Fe and elsewhere. These were for the civilized portion of the community, while a new system was devised to save the Indians from their white oppressors. These poor wretches knew the colonists only as slave-dealers and butchers; hence, every attempt to teach them a religion which the whites were alleged to follow was futile.
On the other hand, when it was represented to the authorities that Indian slavery had to cease before the natives could be pacified, angry protests were heard on all sides, even from some of the resident priests who maintained that the proper thing for a savage was to be a Spaniard's slave. The missionaries took the matter in their own hands, as they had done in Peru. They went to Spain and applied for royal protection. They obtained what they wanted, so without waiting for the edict to arrive, began their work by plunging into the woods, where cougars, pumas, serpents and savages met them at every step. But this vigorous act only enraged the colonists the more, and the inhuman method of cutting off the missionaries' food-supplies was resorted to in order to force them into submission.
In this group of heroic apostles there was, curiously enough, an Irish Jesuit whom Crétineau-Joly calls Tom Filds, which is probably a Spanish or French attempt at phonetics for Tom Fields, or O'Fihily, or O'Fealy, a Limerick exile. Paraguay was the second field of his missionary labors, for he had previously been associated with the Venerable José Anchieta in the forests of Brazil. He had left Ireland when very young, and after studying at Paris, Douay and Louvain, had gone to Rome to begin his novitiate. Six months of trial were sufficient to prove the solidity of his virtue, and he then walked all the way from Rome to Lisbon, to take ship for America. He reached the Bay of All Saints in 1577, and spent ten years in the wilderness, with sufferings, privations and danger of death at every step. From thence he was sent to Paraguay, but was captured by pirates at the mouth of the Rio Plata, and then, loaded with chains, he and his companion, Manuel de Ortega were cast adrift in a battered hulk which drifted ashore at Buenos Aires, where their help as missionaries was gladly welcomed. He was at Asunción when the plague broke out, and the way in which he faced his duty won "Father Tom" as great a reputation among the white men as he had already acquired among his copper-colored brethren. When the plague was over, he again became a forest ranger, and in 1602 found himself all alone among the Indians, his companion, Father de Ortega, having been cited before the Inquisition on some ridiculous charge or other. O'Fealy finally died at Asunción on May 8, 1624, at the good old age of seventy-eight, after fifty hard years as a South American missionary--ten in Brazil and forty in Paraguay.
These journeys among the wandering tribes in the wilderness gave occasion, it is true, for extraordinary heroism, and saved many a soul, but the results were far from being in proportion to the energy expended. Hence, at the suggestion of Father Aquaviva, the missionaries all met at Saca, far out under the Andes, and determined to gather the Indians together in separate colonies which no white man, except the government officials, would be allowed to enter. Such was the origin of the "Paraguay Reductions," which have won such enthusiastic admiration from writers like Chateaubriand, Buffon, de Maistre, Haller, Montesquieu, Robertson, Mackintosh, Howitt, Marshall, Muratori, Charlevoix, Schirmbeck, Grasset, Kobler, du Graty, Gothain, and even Voltaire. The most recent eulogist of all is Cunninghame-Graham in his "Vanished Arcadia." The villages in which these converted Indians lived were called "reductions," because the natives had been brought back (re, ducir) from the wilds and forests by the preaching of the missionaries to live there in organized communities under Christian laws.
The first reduction was begun in 1609, in the province of Guayará, approximately the present Brazilian territory of Paraná. In 1610 another was inaugurated on the Rio Paranapanema; in 1611 the Reduction of San Ignacio-miní, and, between that year and 1630, eleven others with a total population of about 10,000 Indians. The savages flocked to them from all quarters, for these reservations afforded the only protection from the organized bands of man-hunters who scoured the country--the Mamelukes, as they were called because of their relentless ferocity. They were also described as "Paulistas," probably because they generally foregathered in the district of lower Brazil, known as St. Paul. These wretches, half-breeds or the offscourings of every race, made light of royal decrees or the angry fulminations of helpless governors, and when they could find no victims in the forests, did not hesitate to attack the Reductions themselves. These raids began in 1618. In 1630 alone, according to Huonder (in the Catholic Encyclopedia) no less than 30,000 Indians were either murdered or carried off into slavery in what is now the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul.
This led to the great exodus. Father Simon Maceta abandoned the northern or Guayará mission altogether, and taking the survivors of the massacres, along with the Indians who were every day hurrying in from the forests, led them to the stations on the Paraná and Uruguay. It was a difficult journey, and only 12,000 reached their destination, but they served to reinforce the population already there, and in 1648 the Governor of Buenos Aires reported that in nineteen Reductions there was a population of 30,548; by 1677 it had risen to 58,118. He found also that they had determined to live no longer as sheep, waiting to be devoured by the first human wolves that might descend on them, but were fully armed and disciplined by their Jesuit preceptors. Indeed, in 1640 ten years after the Guaraní massacre, they could put a well-trained army in the field, not only against the Mamelukes, but against the Portuguese, who, from time to time, attempted an invasion of Spanish territory from Brazil. This military formation was not only permitted but encouraged by the king. He repeatedly sent the Indians muskets and ammunition, and later they built an armory themselves, and made their own powder. They had their regular drills and sham battles, with both infantry and cavalry, which did splendid service year after year in repelling invasions and suppressing rebellions. Nor did they ever cost the crown a penny for such services. Loyalty to the king was inculcated, and Philip V declared in a famous decree that he had no more faithful subjects than the Indians of Paraguay.
The Indians of the Reductions were taught all the trades, and became carpenters, joiners, painters, sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, tailors, weavers, dyers, bakers, butchers, tanners etc., and their artistic ability is still seen in the ruins of the missions. They were also cultivators and herdsmen, and some of the stations could count as many as 30,000 sheep and 100,000 head of cattle. They built fine roads leading to the other Reductions, and, on the great waterways of the Paraná alone, as many as 2000 boats were employed transporting the merchandise of the various centres. They were, above all, taught their religion, and their morals were so pure that the Bishop of Buenos Aires wrote to the king that he thought no mortal sin was ever committed in the Reductions. The churches occupied the central place in the villages, and their ruins show what architectural works these men of the forest were capable of accomplishing. The streets were laid out in parallel lines, and the principal ones were paved. In course of time the primitive huts were replaced by solid stone houses with tiled roofs, and were so constructed that connecting verandas enabled the people to walk from house to house, under shelter, from one end to the other of the settlement.
The Reductions extended as far as Bolivia on one side, and to northern Patagonia on the other, and from the Atlantic to the Andes. Altogether there were about a hundred of them, and as their formation required the subduing and transforming of the wildest type of savage into a civilized man, it is not surprising that in effecting this stupendous result as many as twenty-nine Jesuits suffered death by martyrdom.
In 1598 the Jesuits Medrano and Figuero were in Nueva Granada or what is now called The United States of Colombia. They also buried themselves in the forests, after having done their best to reform the morals of the colonists at Bogotá. Not that they had abandoned the city; on the contrary, they established a college there in 1604, and others later in Pamplona, Mérida and Honda. At first the natives fled from them in terror, but little by little, the presents which these strange white men pressed on them won their confidence, and helped to persuade them to settle in Reductions. Three of the Fathers lost their lives in that work, devoured by cougars or stung by venomous serpents. Unfortunately, the bishop was persuaded that the Indian settlements were merely mercantile establishments gotten up by the Jesuits for money-making, and all the fruit of many years of dangers and hardships was taken out of their hands and given to others.
There was no one, however, to covet the place of Peter Claver, who was devoting himself to the care of the filthy, diseased, and brutalized negroes who were being literally dumped by tens of thousands in Cartagena, to be sold into slavery to the colonists. He had come out from Spain in 1610, after the old lay-brother, Alfonso Rodriguez, had led him to the heights of sanctity and determined his vocation in the New World. His work was revolting, but Claver loved it, and as soon as a vessel arrived he was on hand with his interpreters. They hurried down into the fetid holds with food, clothing and cordials, which had been begged from the people in the town. It did not worry Claver that the poor wretches were sick with small pox or malignant fevers; he would carry them out on his back, nurse them into health, and even bury them with his own hands when they died. The unfortunate blacks had never seen anything like that before, and they eagerly listened to all he had to say about God, and made no difficulty about being baptized, striving as well as they could to shape their lives along the lines of conduct he traced out for them.
He was on his feet night and day, going from bed to bed in the rude hospitals, with supplies of fruit and wine for the sick. He even brought bands of music to play for them, and showed them pictures of holy scenes in the life of Christ to help their dull intellects to grasp the meaning of his words. No wonder that often when he was among the lepers, who were his especial pets, people saw a bright light shine round him. His biographers tell us that he did not find these ordinary sufferings enough for him, and though he wore a hair-shirt and an iron cross with sharp points all day long, he was scourging himself to blood at night and praying for hours for his negroes. He died on September 8, 1654, and is now ranked among the saints, like his old master, Brother Alfonso.
To the long line of islands, alternately French and English, which form, as it were, the eastern wall of the Caribbean Sea, and are known as the Lesser Antilles, the French Jesuits were sent in 1638. They are respectively Trinidad, Grenada, Saint-Vincent, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and near the northern extremity of the line, one that is of peculiarly pathetic interest, Saint Christopher, or, as it is sometimes popularly called, Saint Kitts. When the French expedition under d'Esnambuc landed at Saint Kitts in 1625, they found the English already in possession, but like sensible men, instead of cutting each other's throats, the two nationalities divided the island between them and settled down quietly, each one attending to its own affairs. In 1635 the French annexed Guadeloupe and Martinique, and, later still, Saint-Croix, Saint-Martin and a few others.
The population of these islands consisted of white settlers and their negro and Indian slaves. They were cared for spiritually by two Dominicans, one of whom, Tertre, has written a history of the islands. But these priests had no intercourse with the savages, whose languages they did not understand, and hence to fill the gap, three Jesuits, one of them a lay-brother, were sent to Martinique, arriving there on Good Friday, 1638. They began in the usual way, namely by martyrdom. Two of them were promptly killed by the savages. Others hurried to carry on their work but many succumbed to the climate, and others to the hardships inseparable from that kind of apostolate. An interesting arrival, though as late as 1674, was that of Father Joseph-Antoine Poncet, one of the apostles of Canada, who is remembered for having brought the great Ursuline, Marie de l'Incarnation, to Quebec, and also for having been tortured by New York Mohawks at the very place where Isaac Jogues had suffered martyrdom a few years before. Poncet was old when he went to Martinique and he died there the following year. The names of de la Barre, Martinière, de Tracy and Iberville, all of them familiar to students of Canadian history, occur in the chronicles of the Antilles.
For people of Irish blood these islands, especially Saint Kitts and Montserrat, are of a thrilling interest. On both of them were found numbers of exiled Irish Catholics held as slaves. As early as 1632 Father White on his way to Maryland saw them at Saint Kitts. He tells us in his "Narrative" that he "stopped there ten days, being invited to do so in a friendly way by the English Governor and two Catholic captains. The Governor of the French colony on the same island treated me with the most marked kindness." He does not inform us whether or not he did any ministerial work with them but in all likelihood he did. He is equally reticent about Montserrat, and contents himself with saying that "it is inhabited by Irishmen who were expelled from Virginia, on account of their Catholic Faith." He remained at Saint Kitts only a day, and on this point his "Relation" is very disappointing. In 1638 the Bishop of Tuam sent out a priest to the island, but he died soon after. He was probably a secular priest, for in the following year the bishop was authorized by Propaganda to send out some religious. But there is no information available about what was done until 1652, when an Irish Jesuit was secured for them. In the "Documents inédits" of Carayon he is called Destriches, which may have been Stritch, but there is no mention of either name in any of the menologies; Hughes, in his "History of the Society of Jesus in North America" (I, 470), calls him Christopher Bathe. He was not, however, the first choice. A Father Henry Malajon had been proposed, but the General did not allow him to go. A Welshman named Buckley was then suggested, but though his application was ratified he never left Europe. Next a Father Maloney offered himself, but was kept in Belgium; finally, however, Father Christopher Bathe or Stritch arrived.
The missionary found there a very great multitude of enslaved Irish exiles, for on April 1, 1653, the London Council gave "license to Sir John Clotworthie to transport to America 500 natural Irishmen." On September 6, 1653, he asked leave to transport 400 Irish children. Ten days later liberty was granted to Richard Netherway of Bristol to transport from Ireland one hundred Irish tories. When Jamaica was captured by the English in 1655, one thousand Irish girls and a like number of Irish boys were sent there. The earlier throngs had been sent first to Virginia, but had been driven over to the islands, as we learn from White's "Narrative." The English authorities in Ireland wrote to Lord Thurlow: "Although we must use force in taking them up, yet it being so much for their own good and likely to be of great advantage to the public, it is not the least doubted but that you may have as many as you wish." He offers to send 1500 or 2000 boys. "They will thus," he said, "be made good Christians." The first of these "good Christians" were found by Father Bathe when he arrived in Saint Kitts in 1652 and they eagerly came to the little chapel which he built on the dividing line between the English and French settlements. For three months he was busy from dawn till nightfall saying Mass, hearing confessions, baptizing babies and preaching. After that he started for Montserrat which was entirely under English control and hence he was compelled to go there disguised as a lumber merchant who was looking for timber. As soon as he landed he passed the word to the first Irishman he met and the news spread like wildfire. A place of meeting was chosen in the woods where every day Mass was said and the people went to confession and communion. That took up the whole morning, and in the afternoon they began chopping down the trees so as to carry out the deception. Unfortunately, the Caribs found them one day, and killed some of them, but we have no more details of the extent of the disaster.
By the time Father Bathe got back to Saint Kitts, the English had taken alarm and had forbidden their Irish slaves ever to set foot on the French territory. But there must have been disobedience to the order, for one night, after they had returned home, a descent was made upon their houses, and one hundred and twenty-five of the most notable among them were flung into a ship and cast on Crab Island, two hundred leagues away, where they were left to starve, while those who remained behind at Saint Kitts were treated with the most frightful inhumanity. One instance is cited of a young girl who, for having refused to go to the Protestant church, was dragged by the hair of her head along the road, and treated with such brutality that some of the more timid of the victims were terrified and obeyed the order about keeping away from the chapel. The greater number, however, came to Mass secretly, walking all night through dense forests and at the edge of precipices, so as to escape the sentries posted along the ordinary road. Two very old men were conspicuous in this display of faith.
The castaways on Crab Island kept life in their bodies for a few days by eating what grass or roots they could find or by gathering the shell-fish on the beach. At last to their great delight a ship was sighted in the distance and when they hailed it, came to take them off. Unfortunately, however, it was too small for such a crowd, and only as many as it was safe to receive were allowed on board. The rest had to be abandoned to their fate. What became of them nobody ever knew. It is supposed that they made a raft and were lost somewhere out on the ocean. Even those who sailed away came to grief. When they reached Santo Domingo, they were not permitted to land, because they came from Saint Christopher, which made the Spaniards in the fort suspect a trick. Then they were caught by a tornado and carried four hundred leagues away. At one time hunger had brought them so low that they were on the point of casting lots to see who should be killed and eaten, but fortunately they caught some fish and that sustained them till they reached the land. What land it was we do not know.
A characteristic example of Irish feminine virtue is recorded in this very interesting account, which is worth repeating here. A young girl, for her better protection, had been disguised as a boy by her father when both were exiled. After he died, she obtained work in the household of a respectable family where her efficiency so charmed the mistress of the household that the husband grew jealous of the friendship of his wife for this estimable man-servant. To avert a domestic disaster, the good girl had to make known her identity and she was then more esteemed than ever. What became of her ultimately is not recorded. Meantime, Father Bathe had gathered what was left of his poor people and carried them off to Guadeloupe, where there were no English. God spared him for five years more, and he went from island to island under all sorts of disguises, if there was danger of meeting the English. He even succeeded in converting not a few of the persecutors.
Hughes informs us further that in 1667 an Irish priest named John Grace returned to Europe from the islands, and reported on the deplorable condition of his compatriots in the Caribbean. Passing through Martinique, Guadeloupe and Antigua he heard the confessions of more than three hundred of them. He related, also, that fifty of the three hundred had died while he was there. In Barbadoes there were many thousands who had no priests and were conforming to Protestantism. In St. Bartholomew, there were four hundred Irish Catholics who had never seen a priest. At Montserrat, however, Governor Stapleton was an Irishman and a Catholic, and consequently there was no difficulty in having a priest go there. There were as many as four hundred Catholics at that place and they formed six to one of the population. These islands of the Caribbean were the favorite hiding places of the "filibusteros," a set of abandoned men of various nationalities, French, Dutch and English, who were lying in wait for the rich galleons of Spain, on their way from the silver mines of Peru to the palaces of Madrid. Their life was a continued series of daring adventures, robberies, massacres and wild debauchery. They were ready for any expedition and against any foe. With them nothing could be done, but with the great numbers of negro slaves who were sold at Martinique and elsewhere there was ample opportunity for apostolic work. It was a most revolting task; the whites, regarded them as devils, but the Fathers took care of them and sent many of them to heaven.
It was from the Antilles that the French Jesuits went to Guiana. Its conversion had been attempted in 1560 by two Dominicans, but they were both martyred almost on their arrival. No other effort was made until late in the following century, when in 1643 two Capuchins essayed it, only to be killed. Four years before that, however, the Jesuits Meland and Pelliprat entered the country at another point and succeeded in subduing the savage Galibis, who were particularly noted for ferocity. In 1653 Pelliprat published a grammar and a dictionary of their language; in the following year Aubergeon and Gueimu were killed; then the Dutch took possession of the country, expelled the Jesuits and obliterated every vestige of Catholicity. Nevertheless, the missionaries returned later and renewed their work with the intractable natives. In 1674 Grillet and Béchamel started for the interior, and were followed later by Lombard, who, after fifteen years of heroic toil, erected a church at the mouth of the River Kourou to the northwest of Cayenne. There he labored for twenty-three years, and in 1733 was able to report to his fellow missionary, de la Neuville: "Acquainted as you are with the fickleness of our Indians, you will no doubt be surprised to hear that their inconstancy has been overcome. The horror with which they now regard their former superstitions, their regularity in frequently approaching the sacraments, their assiduity in assisting at the Divine service, the profound sentiments of piety which they manifest at the hour of death, are effectual proofs of a sincere and lasting conversion."
Father Grillet's story of the capture of the French fort in Guiana makes interesting reading. He went out with the garrison to meet the English who were landing from their ships, but the French commander was killed and his men fled. Grillet, with some others, made his way to the forests and swamps of the interior, but was finally captured at the point of the pistol. He was ordered to hand over his money, but as he had none, he would probably have been killed had not a party of English officers recognized him as the priest who had rendered them some service over in the Antilles some time before. They led him to Lord Willoughby the governor, who showed him every attention. It will be of interest to know that these gentlemen carried on their conversation with the priest, in French and Latin. When the ship arrived at Barbadoes, Grillet was lodged with a Scotch gentleman whose son-in-law was a Protestant minister; "a clever man, a good philosopher and well up in his theology," says Grillet. They discussed religious questions amicably, and on Sunday the priest had the satisfaction to hear that the parson told his congregation how he "wished they had the same sorrow for their sins as Catholics have when they go to confession."
Grillet remained a month with his Protestant friends, Lord Willoughby coming occasionally to visit him. From Barbadoes he was conducted to Montserrat, where "Milord, after celebrating Christmas ten days later than we do," notes Grillet, "for the English did not accept the Gregorian Calendar," then handed him over to a Catholic colonel of a Yorkshire regiment, who finally delivered him safe and sound to the French Governor de la Barre. This was the de la Barre who was afterwards to figure in Canadian history. Grillet then returned to his old mission work at Cayenne, for the English had abandoned it, and with Father Béchamel set out to explore the interior, with a view to future missionary establishments. With no other provision than a little cassava bread, and no other escort than a negro and a few Indians, they began a journey of 1920 miles, through forests and swamps and across mountains and down rivers which were continually broken by cataracts merely to find where the Indians were living, so as to send them missionaries later. They had started from Cayenne on January 25, 1674, and returned there on June 27. Both died shortly after.
Along both banks of the Oyapoch, throughout its whole course, missions were established by other valiant apostles who, as a French historian relates, had formed the gigantic project of uniting by a chain of stations both extremities of Guiana. Indeed, the church on the Kourou was only an incident in this work. Eleven years before that, Arnaud d'Ayma had fought his way to the Pirioux, the remotest of all the known tribes. There he lived like the savages in a miserable hut, spending every moment among them in studying their language and teaching them in turn the truths of salvation. He then founded a mission on the Oyapoch where he collected the entire tribe of the Caranes. Meantime, D'Ausillac looked after the Toeoyenes, the Maowrioux, and the Maraxones on the Ouanari. Up to the time when de Choiseul, minister of Louis XV, drove the Jesuits out of Guiana, one hundred and eleven of them had devoted their lives to the evangelization of that country.
Bandelier, writing in "The Catholic Encyclopedia" (IV-123), tells us that in the district in which Cartagena was situated, "the religious of the Society of Jesus were the first during the Colonial period to found colleges for secondary instruction; eight or ten colleges were opened in which the youth of the country and the sons of Spaniards were educated. In the Jesuit College of Bogotá the first instruction in physics and mathematics was given. In the expulsion of the Jesuits by Charles III the Church in New Granada lost her principal and most efficacious aid to the civilization of the country.... To this day the traveller may see the effects of this arbitrary act, in the immense plains of the regions of Casanare, converted in the space of one century into pasture lands for cattle, but which were once a source of great wealth, and which would have been even more so. It is only within the last ten years that the Catholic Church, owing to the peace and liberty which she now enjoys, has turned her eyes once more to Casanare; a vicariate Apostolic has been erected there, governed by a bishop of the Order of St. Augustine, who with the members of his order labours among the savages and semi-savages of these plains."
The first Jesuits, as we have already said, arrived in Mexico in September, 1572. They were sent out at the expense of the king, but as he did nothing more, a wealthy benefactor immediately put his money at their disposal and gave them a site for a college and church. The latter was erected with amazing expedition at a trifling expense, for three thousand Indians who had heard that the Fathers were going to take care of their spiritual welfare worked at it for three months. The structure was declared to be muy hermoso por dentro, but as much could not be said of the exterior. It was simply a thatched structure and was long known by the name of Japalteopan. Their college, which took more time, was called St. Ildefonso. Guadalajara, Zacatecas and Oaxaca also became Jesuit centres, while Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Sonora, and, later Lower California were their fields of labor among the savages. It may be noted here that Father Sánchez was one of the presiding engineers in the work of the Nochistongo tunnel on which 471,154 men were employed. The purpose of the work was to drain the valley of Mexico.
Among the very early missionaries of Mexico was an Irish Jesuit named Michael Wadding, though he was known among the Spaniards as Miguel Godinez. He was born at Waterford in 1501, but his mother was a Frenchwoman, named Marie Valois. He made his studies in Salamanca and entering the Society April 15, 1609 was sent to Mexico in the following year. He labored for a long time in the rude missions of Sinaloa and won to the Faith the whole tribe of the Basirvas, and then taught for several years in the colleges. He was famous as a director of souls, and wrote a "Teologia mística" which, was not published until forty years after his death; however, it made up for the delay by going through ten editions. His editor, Manuel La Reguera, S. J., says that he also wrote a "Life of Sister Mary of Jesus," a holy religious whom he was directing in the way of perfection.
The Jesuit mission work in Mexico which has attracted most attention is that of Fathers Kino, Salvatierra, Ugarte and their associates. They were engaged mostly in the evangelization of the Peninsula of Lower California and the vast northern district of Mexico, known as the Pimería, or land of the Pima Indians, which extended into what is now the State of Arizona. The success achieved there and the resources of the "Pious Fund" which Salvatierra had gathered made the work of Junípero Serra and the Franciscans in Upper California possible in later days.
Gilmary Shea (Colonial Days, p. 527) maintains that Eusebio Kino is one of the greatest of American missionaries. Many historians claim that he was a German and say that his name "Kino" was an adaptation of Kühn. That such is not the case is shown by Alegre in his history of the Jesuits in Mexico; by Sommervogel in his "Bibliothèque des écrivains" and by Bolton, who has just published Kino's long lost "Autobiography." Hubert Bancroft pronounces for Kühn, but he publishes an autograph map which is signed "carta autoptica a Patre Eusebio Chino;" Huonder, in "The Catholic Encyclopedia," declares him to be a German of Welch Tyrol, but the "Welch" Tyrol is precisely that part of the country where there are no Germans. The Chino family still exists, near Trent and has never spoken anything but Italian. The change from Ch to K had to be made to prevent the Spaniards from thinking he was a Chinaman; furthermore the ch in Spanish being always soft would not represent the Italian letters when they are pronounced k.
Kino was born on August 10, 1644, and entered the Society of Jesus in Bavaria on November 20, 1665. He subsequently taught mathematics at Ingolstadt, and while occupying that post applied for the foreign missions. He left the university in 1678, but did not reach Mexico until late in 1681. The reason of the delay was his assignment as an observer of the famous comet of 1680 and 1681. During that time, he lived in Cadiz, but he did not publish the result of his observations until after his arrival in Mexico. The book has a very portentous title and is listed in Sommervogel as: "Exposicion Astronomica de el Cometa, que el año de 1680, por los meses de Noviembre y Diziembre, y este año de 1681 por los meses de Enero y Febrero, se ha visto en todo el mondo, y le ha observado en Ciudad de Cadiz el P. Eusebio Francisco Kino, de la Compañi de Jesus, con licencia en Mexico por Francisco Rodriguez Lupercio, 1681." Possibly this pompous announcement was intended as an apology for Kino's audacity in questioning the findings of a famous astronomer of the period who rejoiced in the name and title Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Gongora, Cosmógrafo y Mathemático Regio en la Academia Mexicana.
The settlement of Lower California had been attempted as early as 1535 by a Franciscan who landed with Cortes at Santa Cruz Bay near the present La Paz. "After a year of privations", says Engelhardt, "which had cost the famous conqueror $300,000, the project had to be abandoned. Another effort was made in 1596, but the mission did not last a single year. Almost a century later, namely in 1683, the Jesuit Fathers Kino and Goni, along with Fray José Guijosa of the Order of St. John of God, accompanied Admiral Otondo on an expedition to that unhappy country." They embarked on the "Limpia Concepción" and the "San José y San Francisco Javier" and set sail on January 18. A sloop with provisions was to accompany them, but it never left port. The voyage lasted until March 30, and on that day they entered the harbor of La Paz, but not until April 5 did the admiral set foot on shore to take solemn possession of the land. The mission, however, lasted only a short time; and thus Spain failed for the third time to establish a post in desolate Lower California. Kino then applied for work among the Pima Indians. His offer was welcomed by the provincial, who would have sent him thither immediately, if a government permission as well as a royal assignment of funds had not been prerequisites. Neither difficulty dismayed Kino; he immediately interviewed the viceroy and was so eloquent in his plea that he received not only permission and financial aid to work in the new field, but authorization for whatever post he might choose among the Seris of Sonora. When that much was accomplished, he set off for Guadalajara, where the royal audiencia was in session, to address it on another matter which was very close to his heart, namely the abrogation of the stupid policy of imposing labor on the convert Indians in the mines and haciendas, while the others who refused to be Christians were allowed to go scot free. It was putting a premium on paganism. All that he could get, however, from the audiencia was a five-year exemption, in spite of the fact that as far back as 1607 Philip III had ruled that for ten years after baptism every convert should be exempt from compulsory labor. The same royal order had been renewed in 1618, and was most faithfully observed where there were no mines or haciendas to put the converts at work.
In 1764 the Pimería was the northern limit of Spain's possessions, about 400 leagues from the city of Mexico and about 130 from Sinaloa. On the east a mountain range separated it from Taurumara, and on the west the Gulf of California bathed its shores from the Yaqui River to the Colorado. Its northern boundary was the Hila, Gila, or Xila River, and its southern, the Yaqui. According to Alegre "the soil is rich, there is no end of game, such as lions, tigers, bears, deer, boars, rabbits and squirrels. The woods are full of serpents, poisonous or otherwise, but there are herbs and plants innumerable," which possessed most wonderful healing powers. The birds were numerous and "two-headed eagles," the reader is assured, "were not rare." Kino, as far as we can find, makes no mention of "two-headed eagles."
The people were robust and lived to an extreme old age, except where the fogs of the lowland prevailed. There all sorts of ailments occur. The Pimas were composed of a number of tribes such as the Opas, Cocomaricopas, Hudcoacanes, and the Yumas. They lived on both sides of the Gila River in rancherias, which the missionaries united into pueblos. They numbered in all about 30,000. The Seris who were found along the Gulf coast were mostly identified with the Giuamas. To the north were the savage Apaches.
None of these people had any means of recording the doings of the past, such as the hieroglyphics of the Mexicans, but they made much of certain traditions which they refused to impart to strangers. As far as could be ascertained, they had no sacrifice or idols, no land of worship and no priests except the wizards, whom they regarded with abject terror. Tatooing around the eyes was universal, even for children. At birth a sort of sponsor for the child was summoned, and he was given more authority than the parent. At death all the trappings and household belongings of the departed were buried with him. They believed in divinations like the ancient Greeks and Romans, with the difference that the creature inspected was not a bird but a lobster. Statues and emblems were placed on the roadsides, before which every passer-by had to leave an offering. Alegre gives a long list of their superstitions, some of which Bancroft denounces as hideously obscene. The initiation of the warrior resembled the horrible ritual common among the northern Mandans, and the torture of captives, even of little children, by old squaws, was as fiendish as similar practices among the Iroquois.
The Jesuit missions among these people were inaugurated as early as 1637 or 1638, by Father Castano, who had been trained in the Sonora district by Méndez, but the Pima section to which Kino betook himself was a new field. He called his first post Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, and it may be found on the map just north of Cucurpé at the source of the river called Horcasitas or San Miguel. From there he developed dependent stations, and before 1691, he had three at San Ignacio, Remedios, and San José, in each of which he built a fine church.
"The work which Father Kino did as a ranchman or stockman," says Bolton, "would alone stamp him as an unusual business man and make him worthy of remembrance. He was easily the cattle king of his day and region. The stock raising industry of nearly 20 places on the modern map owes its beginnings to this indefatigable man. And it must not be supposed that he did this for private gain for he did not own a single animal. It was to furnish a food supply for the Indians of the missions established and to be established and to give these missions a basis of economic prosperity and independence. Thus we find Saeta thanking him for the gift of 115 head of cattle, and as many sheep to begin a ranch at Caborca. In 1700 when San Xavier was founded, Kino rounded up 1400 head of cattle on the ranch of his own mission at Dolores, and dividing them into droves, sent one of them under his Indian overseer to San Xavier. In the same year he took 700 cattle from his own ranch, and sent them to Salvatierra, across the Gulf at Loreto--a transaction which was several times repeated."
Kino had often spoken to Salvatierra about the failure of the attempt to evangelize Lower California, to which his heart still clung, and he suggested to his companion that in his capacity of official visitor he might make another effort to redeem the unfortunate people who lived there. It was true, he admitted, that the country was so barren that it could not be self-sustaining, but he was convinced that it would be an easy matter to convey provisions from fertile Pimería to the starving Californians if a ship could be constructed to transport to the other side of the Gulf whatever the future missionaries and people might need. Salvatierra took fire at the idea, and, before they parted, ordered Kino to build the barque at any point he might select along the west coast of Mexico and assured him that he himself would further the project with all the power at his disposal.
It was not until 1694 that Kino attempted to build the ship. He was then among the Sobas on the Gulf, and with him were Father Campo and Captain Manje, the latter of whom has left a diary of that journey. He began to cut his timber on March 16, 1694, but he was informed that Lower California was not an island, but a peninsula, and he then inaugurated a series of amazing overland journeys to reach the head of the Gulf. His companion Captain Manje had told him of the wonderful structures on the Gila River and thither he directed his steps. He is said to have celebrated Mass in the largest of those ruined buildings, the famous Casa Grande. It was quadrilateral in form and four stories high. The rafters were of cedar and the walls of solid cement and masonry. It was divided into various compartments, some of them spacious enough for a considerable assembly. The tradition among the people was that Montezuma's predecessors built it on the way from the north to the southern countries where they ultimately settled.
At a distance of three leagues from this Casa and on the other side of the river are the ruins of another edifice, which appears to have been still more sumptuous. Indeed the ruins at that place would indicate that at one time there had been not merely a palace but a whole city, and the natives assured the missionaries that there were other buildings further north which were marvelous for their symmetry and arrangements. Among them was a labyrinth which appears to have been a pleasure house of some great king. Excavators have discovered in various places, sometimes leagues away from these great buildings, shapely and variously colored slabs, and two leagues from the Casa Grande there was found the basin of a reservoir large enough to supply a populous city and to irrigate the fertile plains around for great distances; while to the west was a lagoon which was emptied by a narrow sluice. The regularity of the circular form of this lagoon and its rather contracted dimensions would suggest that it was the work of men were it not for its extraordinary depth. Holes had been cut into the solid rock which subsequently were found large enough to be used as storehouses for provisions for troops.
These ruins, however, do not appear to have interested Kino to any great extent. There were other ruins that worried him about that time. His own missions seemed to be facing universal destruction. He himself was being denounced in Mexico as conveying false information to the government about his Indians; they were accused of being in secret alliance with the Apaches, who were destroying the country and defying the Spaniards. Kino again and again had denied the truth of these charges, but he was not only not believed but was held up as a deliberate liar.
On March 29, 1695, the Pimas of Tubutama burned the priest's house and church, profaned the sacred vessels and then, starting down the river to Caborca, had, after murdering Father Saeta and desecrating the church, killed four servants of the mission. An armed force was quickly sent after them and succeeded in killing a certain number in the battle that ensued. Fifty of them then gave themselves up on a promise of immunity, but on arriving in camp they were brutally murdered. The troops then hastened to Cocospera, fancying that they had restored peace, but they were no sooner out of sight than the Pimas laid waste the whole Tubutama Valley and destroyed every town on the San Ignacio River. Where was Kino all this time? Quietly waiting to be killed at Dolores. He had concealed the sacred vessels in a cave and was kneeling in prayer, expecting the tomahawk or a poisoned arrow. But no one came. He was too much beloved by all the Indians to be injured in the least, even in their wildest excess of fury.
Of course the Spaniards ultimately won. They ravaged the whole country and slaughtered the savages until the entire tribe was terror-stricken and forced by hunger or fear of annihilation to sue for peace. Through the influence of the missionaries, a general pardon was granted, and then the work of reconciling the red men to the terrible whites had to be begun all over again. When Kino returned to Dolores, he was received with the utmost enthusiasm by his people. Not only the Pimas, but the Sobas and Sobaipuris came out to welcome him. They loaded him with gifts and made all sorts of promises of future good behavior, and he then set himself to the task of rebuilding the devastated rancherias. Notwithstanding this return, however, to normal conditions and the great increase of his influence over the Indians, Kino still longed to devote himself to the regeneration of the degraded Californians, and he asked to be associated with Salvatierra, who had gone thither in 1697, but owing to the protest of the Pimas, the Mexican government positively refused to permit him to leave the district where his presence was so essential for peace.
After endless journeys up and down the country, providing for the material and spiritual wants of his own flock, but ever keeping in his mind the great project of reaching Lower California by land, Kino at last climbed the mountain of Santa Brigida and saw quite near to him the Gulf of California with a port or bay which, because it was in latitude about 31° 36' must have been what the old cosmographers called the Santa Clara range. "From its summit," says Kino himself, "I clearly descried the beach at the mouth of the Colorado, but as there was a fog on the sea I could not make out the California coast." On another occasion, however, namely in 1694, he and Juan Mates had seen the other side from Mt. Nazarene de Caborca, lower down the coast. A point of identification left by Kino was that the mountain on which he stood in 1698, had been once a volcano. The marks of it were all around him.
Kino could not then pursue his exploration to the mouth of the river. His guides and companions refused to go any farther, so he had to turn homeward. On the way back, however, he was consoled by discovering more than "4,000 souls," to use Alegre's expression, "in rancherias which were until then unknown to him. He baptized about four hundred babies and sent little presents to his Indian friends along the Colorado and Gila," or, as Kino spells it, Hila. After making arrangements for future explorations he set out for Dolores, which he reached on October 18 after a journey of three hundred leagues. In 1699 he was joined by his friend Captain Manje, and they resolved to reach the Colorado itself and go down the stream to the mouth. But they failed to find guides, for it was an unfriendly country, and so the disappointed men again returned to Dolores. Kino was seriously ill on his arrival, but was on his feet again in October when the visitor, Father Leal, wanted to inspect the country. The official got no farther than Bac, while Kino and Manje started west, but they did not succeed in going far, and were at the mission again in November.
On September 24, 1700, Kino attempted a new route. Striking the Gila east of the bend, he followed its course down to the Yuma country. After settling a quarrel between the Yumas and their neighbors, he climbed a high hill to explore, but saw only land. He then crossed to the north bank of the Gila with some Yumas and journeyed on to their principal rancheria, which he called San Dionisio, because he arrived there on the feast of that saint, October 9. There he ascended another mountain and this time he was rewarded. The sun was setting as he reached the summit, but he clearly saw the river running ten leagues west of San Dionisio and, after a course of twenty leagues south, emptying into the Gulf. From another hill to the south he saw before his eyes the sandy stretches of Lower California. The wonderful old man, however, was not yet satisfied. He would make one more attempt and with Father González, a new arrival in the missions, he set his face to the west, reaching San Dionisio by the way of Sonoito and from there went down to Santa Isabel. "From this point," says Bancroft (XV, p. 500), "they were in new territory. Going down the river they reached tide-water on March 5, 1702, and on the 7th, the very mouth of the river. Nothing but land could be seen on the south, west and north. Surely, they thought there can be no estrecho, and California is a part of America."
According to Clavigero these journeys totalled about twenty thousand miles. It is almost incredible, but Bolton tells us that "Kino's endurance in the saddle was worthy of a seasoned cowboy." Thus when he went to the City of Mexico in 1695, he travelled on that single journey no less than 1500 miles; and he accomplished it in fifty-three days. Two years later, when he reached the Gila on the north, he did seven or eight hundred miles in thirty days. In 1699, on his trip to and from the Gila he made seven hundred and twenty miles in thirty nine days; in 1700, a thousand miles in twenty-six days; and in 1701, eleven hundred miles in thirty-five days. He was then nearly sixty years of age.
Meantime, Salvatierra had been painfully establishing missions all along the barren peninsula, but was so woefully discouraged that he was on the point of returning to Mexico. At this juncture Father Juan Ugarte arrived on the scene. He had been Salvatierra's agent in Mexico for collecting funds, but when he heard of the threatening condition of things in California he had himself relieved of his rectorship in San Gregorio and became a missionary. It was really he who saved the whole enterprise from destruction. He was born in Honduras about the year 1660, and entered the Society at Tapozotclan. As soon as he set foot on the Peninsula, he began a reorganization of the whole economic system of the missions. With St. Paul, he believed that a man who did not work should not eat, and consequently that Salvatierra's benignant method of feeding every savage who would come to the "doctrina," or catechism, was psychologically, religiously and economically wrong. Hence, when he found himself fixed at San Javier, he taught the natives how to cultivate the land, to dig ditches for irrigation, to plant trees, to trim vines and to raise live stock.
Of course, the savages were surprised at the new system, but although Ugarte was very kind, he was very positive and his bodily strength astounded and appalled his neophytes. The result was that while other missions were starving, San Javier had fields of corn, rich pastures and great herds of cattle. It took a long time to make this system acceptable everywhere on the Peninsula; when it was adopted it was difficult to make it a success--even Ugarte's own fields were devastated and his cattle stolen. Indeed, conditions grew so desperate in 1701, that Salvatierra at last determined to abandon California and go back to Mexico. Ugarte stood out against it and protested that he would never give up until his superiors called him back. To show that he meant what he said, he went to the church and laid a vow to that effect on the altar.
Just when the sky was darkest, information came that Philip V had ordered 6000 pesos a year to be allotted to the missions. The first payment however, was made with extreme reluctance by the viceroy. But the royal example stimulated the piety of others, with the result that the Marquis of Villapuente gave an estate of 30,000 pesos for three missions; Ortega and his wife came forward with 10,000; and other friends hastened with their contributions. In 1704 Salvatierra went over to Mexico to collect the usual subsidy. He was rejoiced at being told on his arrival that not only would he receive the stipend, but that his majesty had ordered that the churches should be supplied with whatever was necessary for Divine services, that a seminary was to be founded in California, that a presidial force of thirty men was to be stationed on the coast to protect a galleon, a sort of mission ship for provisions and exploration, and that 7000 pesos a year were to be added to the former allowance. It was a splendid example of royal munificence; however, not only were none of these royal orders carried out, but even the original grant of 6000 pesos could not be collected. "It may be fairly stated," says Bancroft (XV, 432) "that the missions of California were from the first to the last founded and supported by private persons whose combined gifts formed what is known as the Pious Fund."
Salvatierra was absent from California for a little over two years while filling the office of provincial, "a flattering honor," says Bancroft, "that would be gladly accepted by most Jesuits." Before the end of his term, however, he hastened back to labor in the land of desolation to which he had consecrated his life. He lasted only a short time, and died in 1717 in Guadalajara. "His memory," says Bancroft, "needs no panegyric; his deeds speak for themselves, and in the light of these, the bitterest enemies of his religion or of his Order cannot deny the beauty of his character and the disinterestedness of his devotion to California. The whole city assembled at his funeral and his remains were deposited amidst ceremonies rarely seen at the burial of a Jesuit."
Meantime, Ugarte's methods were being followed elsewhere than in San Javier, and a new impetus was given to them when he succeeded Salvatierra as general superior. It must have been hard to keep the pace that he set; thus, for instance, he used 40,000 loads to make a road from San Javier to one of the out-lying missions; he built a reservoir there and carted to it 160,000 loads of earth to make a garden and executed many similar works. He was also very eager to carry out Salvatierra's purpose of exploring the coast, but he was not satisfied with the antiquated ships which had been in use up to that time--"worn out and rotten old hulks," he said, "only fit to drown Jesuits in." He determined to have a ship of his own built in California and after his own ideas. For that purpose he hired shipwrights from the other side of the Gulf, where also he proposed to get his timber. But hearing of some large trees thirty leagues above Mulege he went thither in 1718 to look them over. He found the trees, but they were in such inaccessible ravines that the shipbuilder declared it was impossible to get them.
Ugarte was not swayed from his purpose by this difficulty; he went down to Loretto and returned with three mechanics and all the Indians he could induce to follow him. After four months of hard work he not only had all the trees felled and shaped, but he had opened a road for thirty leagues over the mountains and with oxen and mules hauled his material to the coast. He built his "Triumph of the Cross," as he called it, in four months. The provincial was told meanwhile, that it was going to be used for pearl fishing, and sent the supposed culprit a very sharp letter in consequence. No doubt he made amends for this when he was disabused. The "Triumph of the Cross" was not to carry a cargo of pearls but was intended to explore the upper Gulf, so as to realize the dream of Kino and Salvatierra.
The good ship left Loretto on May 15, 1721, with twenty men, six of whom were Europeans, the captain being a William Stafford. It was followed by the "Santa Barbara," a large open boat carrying five Californians, two Chinese and a Yaqui. They made their first landing at Concepción Bay, and then, after creeping along the shore northward, crossed the Gulf to Santa Sabina and San Juan Bautista on the Seri coast. The sight of the cross on the bow-sprit delighted the natives and assured the travellers of a hearty welcome. Tiburon was the next stop, and while there Ugarte felt his strength giving out; but despite his sixty-one years he continued his voyage, and headed the "Triumph" for the mouth of the Colorado, while the "Santa Barbara" hugged the shore. Meantime, a few men were landed and made for the nearest mission. They found the trail to Caborca and soon the Jesuits of that place and of San Ignacio hurried down with provisions for the travellers.
While the "Santa Barbara" was being loaded, the "Triumph" was nearly stranded at the mouth of the river, so it was decided to cross to the other side, which they reached only after a hard three days' sail. There the "Santa Barbara" met them and both ships pointed north, crossing and recrossing the gulf until finally they anchored at the mouth of the river on the Pimería side. There was some talk of going up the stream, but the ship's position in the strong current was dangerous, the weather was threatening, and besides, Ugarte had achieved his purpose; he had seen the river from the Gulf and had added a convincing proof to Kino's assertion that California was a peninsula. On July 16 they started south; the storm they had feared broke over them and the sloop nearly went to the bottom. The sailors, who were nearly all sick of the scurvy, got confused in the Salsipuedes channel, and it was only on August 18 that they cleared that passage so aptly called "Get out if you can." But a triple rainbow in the sky that day comforted them, just as they had been cheered when the St. Elmo's fire played around the mast head during the gale. But they were not free yet. Another storm overtook them and they had great difficulty in dodging a waterspout, but they finally reached Loretto in the month of September.
Besides its original purpose, this voyage resulted in furnishing much valuable information about the shores, ports, islands and currents of the Upper Gulf. The original account of the journey with maps and a journal kept by Stafford was sent to the viceroy for the king, but Bancroft says they have not been traced. Ugarte lived only eight years after this eventful journey. Picolo, Salvatierra's first companion had preceded him to the grave, dying on February 22, 1729, at the age of 79, whereas Ugarte's life-work did not cease till the following December 29. Perhaps Lower California owes more to him than to the great Salvatierra.
A classic example of the influence of ignorance in the creation of many of the false statements of history is furnished by a publication about these missions in the "Montreal Gazette" of 1847, under the title of "Memories of Mgr. Blanchet." "The failure of the Jesuits in Lower California," he says, "must be attributed to their unwillingness to establish a hierarchy in that country. Had they been so disposed, they might have had a metropolitan and several suffragans on the Peninsula. They failed to do so, until at last, in 1767, word came from generous Spain to hand over their work to some one else." In the first place, "generous Spain" had not the slightest desire to establish a hierarchy on that barren neck of land when it expelled the Jesuits in 1767. Again as "generous Spain" appointed even the sacristans in its remotest colonies, the Society must be acquitted of all blame in not giving an entire hierarchy to Lower California. Finally, one hundred and fifty-one years have elapsed since the last Jesuits left both Mexico and Lower California and there is nothing there yet, but the little Vicariate Apostolic of La Paz down at the lower end of the Peninsula.
In describing the work of the Jesuits in Mexico, Bancroft (XI, 436) writes as follows: "Without discussing the merits of the charges preferred against them, it must be confessed that the service of God in their churches was reverent and dignified. They spread education among all classes, their libraries were open to all, and they incessantly taught the natives religion in its true spirit, as well as the mode of earning an honest living. Among the most notable in the support of this last assertion are those of Nayarit, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua and lower California, where their efforts in the conversion of the natives were marked by perseverance and disinterestedness, united with love for humanity and prayer. Had the Jesuits been left alone, it is doubtful whether the Spanish-American province would have revolted so soon, for they were devoted servants of the crown and had great influence with all classes--too great to suit royalty, but such as after all might have saved royalty in these parts." Indeed, when the Society was re-established in 1814, Spain had already lost nearly all of its American colonies. The punishment had rapidly followed the crime.
Although Mexico and the Philippines are geographically far apart, yet ecclesiastically one depended on the other. Legaspi, who took possession of the islands in 1571, built his fleet in Mexico, and also drafted his sailors there. Andrés de Urdaneta, the first apostle of the Philippines, was an Augustinian friar in Mexico who accompanied Legaspi as his chaplain. Twenty years after that expedition, the Jesuits built their first house in Manila, and Father Sánchez, who was, as we have said, one of the supervisors of the great tunnel, was sent as superior from Mexico to Manila. One of his companions, Sedeño, had been a missionary in Florida, and it was he who opened the first school in the Philippines and founded colleges at Manila and Cebú. He taught the Filipinos to cut stone and mix mortar, to weave cloth and make garments. He brought artists from China to teach them to draw and paint, and he erected the first stone building in the Philippines, namely the cathedral, dedicated in honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin. His religious superior, Father Sánchez had meanwhile acquired such influence in Manila as to be chosen in 1585, by a unanimous vote of all the colonists, to go to arrange the affairs of the colony with Philip II and the Pope. He brought with him to Europe a Filipino boy who, on his return to his native land, entered the Society, and became thus the first Filipino Jesuit.
The college and seminary of San José was established in Manila in 1595. It still exists, though it is no longer in the hands of the Society; being the oldest of the colleges of the Archipelago, it was given by royal decree precedence over all other educational institutions. During the first hundred years of its educational life, it counted among its alumni, eight bishops and thirty-nine Jesuits, of whom four became provincials. There were also on the benches eleven future Augustinians, eighteen Franciscans, three Dominicans, and thirty-nine of the secular clergy. The University of St. Ignatius, which opened its first classes in 1587, was confirmed as a pontifical university in 1621 and as a royal university in 1653. Besides these institutions, the Society had a residence at Mecato and a college at Cavite, and also the famous sanctuary of Antipole. They likewise established the parishes of Santa Cruz and San Miguel in Manila.
France began its colonization in North America by the settlement of Acadia in 1603. De Monts, who was in charge of it, was a Huguenot and, strange to say, had been commissioned to advance the interests of Catholicity in the colony. Half of the settlers were Calvinists, and the other half Catholics more or less infected with heresy. A priest named Josué Flesché was assigned to them; he baptized the Indians indiscriminately, letting them remain as fervent polygamists as they were before. The two Jesuit missionaries, Pierre Biard and Enemond Massé, who were finally forced on the colonists, had to withdraw, and they then betook themselves, in 1613, to what is now known as Mount Desert, in the state of Maine, but that settlement was almost immediately destroyed by an English pirate from Virginia. Two of the Jesuits were sentenced to be hanged in the English colony there, but thanks to a storm which drove them across the Atlantic, they were able, after a series of romantic adventures, to reach France, where they were accused of having prompted the English to destroy the French settlement of Acadia.
Meantime, Champlain, who had established himself at Quebec in 1608, brought over some Recollect Friars in 1615. It was not until 1625 that Father Massé, who had been in Acadia, came to Canada proper with Fathers de Brébeuf, Charles Lalemant, and two lay-brothers. With the exception of Brébeuf, they all remained in Quebec, while he with the Recollect La Roche d'Aillon went to the Huron country, in the region bordering on what is now Georgian Bay, north of the present city of Toronto. The Recollect returned home after a short stay, and Brébeuf remained there alone until the fall of Quebec in 1629. As the English were now in possession, all hope of pursuing their missionary work was abandoned, and the priests and brother returned to France. Canada, however, was restored to its original owners in 1632, and Le Jeune and Daniel, soon to be followed by Brébeuf and many others, made their way to the Huron country to evangelize the savages. The Hurons were chosen because they lived in villages and could be more easily evangelized, whereas the nomad Algonquins would be almost hopeless for the time being.
The Huron missions lasted for sixteen years. In 1649 the tribe was completely annihilated by their implacable foes, the Iroquois, a disaster which would have inevitably occurred, even if no missionary had ever visited them. The coming of the Jesuits at that particular time seemed to be for nothing else than to assist at the death agonies of the tribe. The terrible sufferings of those early missionaries have often been told by Protestant as well as Catholic writers. At one time, when expecting a general massacre, they sat in their cabin at night and wrote a farewell letter to their brethren; but, for some reason or other, the savages changed their minds, and the work of evangelization continued for a little space. Meantime, Brébeuf and Chaumonot had gone down as far as Lake Erie in mid-winter and, travelling all the distance from Niagara Falls to the Detroit River, had mapped out sites for future missions. Jogues and Raymbault, setting out in the other direction, had gone to Lake Superior to meet some thousands of Ojibways who had assembled there to hear about "the prayer."
The first great disaster occurred on August 3, 1642. Jogues was captured near Three Rivers, when on his way up from Quebec with supplies for the starving missionaries. He was horribly mutilated, and carried down to the Iroquois country, where he remained a prisoner for thirteen months, undergoing at every moment the most terrible spiritual and bodily suffering. His companion, Goupil was murdered, but Jogues finally made his escape by the help of the Dutch at Albany, and on reaching New York was sent across the ocean in mid-winter, and finally made his way to France. He returned, however, to Canada, and in 1644 was sent back as a commissioner of peace to his old place of captivity. It was on this journey that he gave the name of Lake of the Blessed Sacrament to what is called Lake George. In 1646 he returned again to the same place as a missionary, but he and his companion Lalande were slain; the reason of the murder being that Jogues was a manitou who brought disaster on the Mohawks. Two other Jesuits, Bressani and Poncet, were cruelly tortured at the very place where Jogues had been slain, but were released.
In 1649 the Iroquois came in great numbers to Georgian Bay to make an end of the Hurons. Daniel, Gamier and Chabanel were slain, and Brébeuf and Lalemant were led to the stake and slowly burned to death. During the torture, the Indians cut slices of flesh from the bodies of their victims, poured scalding water on their heads in mockery of baptism, cut the sign of the cross on their flesh, thrust red-hot rods into their throats, placed live coals in their eyes, tore out their hearts, and ate them, and then danced in glee around the charred remains. This double tragedy of Brébeuf and Lalemant occurred on the 16th and 17th of March, 1649. After that the Hurons were scattered everywhere through the country, and disappeared from history as a distinct tribe.
As early as 1650 there was question of a bishop for Quebec. The queen regent, Anne of Austria, the council of ecclesiastical affairs, and the Company of New France all wrote to the Vicar-General of the Society asking for the appointment of a Jesuit. The three Fathers most in evidence were Ragueneau, Charles Lalemant and Le Jeune. All three had refused the honor and Father Nickel wrote to the petitioners that it was contrary to the rules of the Order to accept such ecclesiastical dignities. The hackneyed accusation of the supposed Jesuit opposition to the establishment of an episcopacy was to the fore even then in America. The refutation is handled in a masterly fashion by Rochemonteix (Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle France, I, 191). Incidentally the prevailing suspicion that Jesuits are continually extolling each other will be dispelled by reading the author's text and notes upon the characteristics of the three nominees which unfitted them for the post. "Le Jeune," he says, "would be unfit because he was a converted Protestant who had never rid himself of the defects of his early education." It was not until 1658 that Laval was named.
Meantime in 1654, through the efforts of Father Le Moyne to whom a monument has been erected in the city of Syracuse, a line of missions was established in the very country of the Iroquois. It extended all along the Mohawk from the Hudson to Lake Erie. Many of the Iroquois were converted such as Garagontia, Hot Ashes and others, the most notable of whom was the Indian girl, Tegakwitha, who fled from the Mohawk to Caughnawaga, a settlement on the St. Lawrence opposite Lachine which the Fathers had established for the Iroquois converts. The record of her life gives evidence that she was the recipient of wonderful supernatural graces. These New York missions were finally ruined by the stupidity and treachery of two governors of Quebec, de la Barre and de Denonville, and also by the Protestant English who disputed the ownership of that territory with the French. By the year 1710 there were no longer any missionaries in New York, except an occasional one who stole in, disguised as an Indian, to visit his scattered flock. There were three Jesuits with Dongan, the English governor of New York during his short tenure of office, but they never left Manhattan Island in search of the Indians.
Attention was then turned to the Algonquins, and there are wonderful records of heroic missionary endeavor all along the St. Lawrence from the Gulf to Montreal, and up into the regions of the North. Albanel reached Hudson Bay, and Buteux was murdered at the head-waters of the St. Maurice above Three Rivers. The Ottawas in the West were also looked after, and Garreau was shot to death back of Montreal on his way to their country, which lay along the Ottawa and around Mackinac Island and in the region of Green Bay. The heroic old Ménard perished in the distant swamps of Wisconsin; Allouez and Dablon travelled everywhere along the shores of Lake Superior; a great mission station was established at Sault Ste. Marie, and Marquette with his companion Joliet went down the Mississippi to the Arkansas, and assured the world that the Great River emptied its waters in the Gulf of Mexico. A statue in the Capitol of Washington commemorates this achievement and has been duplicated elsewhere.
The beatification of Jogues, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Daniel, Gamier, Chabanel and the two donnés, Goupil and Lalande, is now under consideration at Rome. Their heroic lives as well as those of their associates have given rise to an extensive literature, even among Protestant writers, but the most elaborate tribute to them is furnished by the monumental work consisting of the letters sent by these apostles of the Faith to their superior at Quebec and known the world over as "The Jesuit Relations." It comprises seventy-three octavo volumes, the publication of which was undertaken by a Protestant company in Cleveland. (See Campbell, Pioneer Priests of North America.)
On March 25, 1634, the Jesuit Fathers White and Altham landed with Leonard Calvert, the brother of Lord Baltimore, on St. Clement's Island in Maryland. With them were twenty "gentlemen adventurers," all of whom, with possibly one exception, were Catholics. They brought with them two hundred and fifty mechanics, artisans and laborers who were in great part Protestants. It took them four months to come from Southampton and, on the way over, all religious discussions were prohibited. They were kindly received by the Indians, and the wigwam of the chief was assigned to the priests. A catechism in Patuxent was immediately begun by Father White, and many of the tribe were converted to the Faith in course of time, as were a number of the Protestant colonists. Beyond that, very little missionary work was accomplished, as all efforts in that direction were nullified by a certain Lewger, a former Protestant minister who was Calvert's chief adviser. The adjoining colony of Virginia, which was intensely bitter in its Protestantism, immediately began to cause trouble. In 1644 Ingle and Claiborne made a descent on the colony in a vessel, appropriately called the "Reformation." They captured and burned St. Mary's, plundered and destroyed the houses and chapels of the missionaries, and sent Father White in chains to England, where he was to be put to death, on the charge of being "a returned priest." As he was able to show that he had "returned" in spite of himself, he was discharged.
Calvert recovered his possessions later, and then dissensions began between him and the missionaries because of some land given to them by the Indians. In 1645 it was estimated that the colonists numbered between four and five thousand, three-fourths of whom were Catholics. They were cared for by four Jesuits. In 1649 the famous General Toleration Act was passed, ordaining that "no one believing in Jesus Christ should be molested in his or her religion." As the reverse of this obtained in Virginia, at that time, a number of Puritan recalcitrants from that colony availed themselves of the hospitality of Maryland, and almost immediately, namely in 1650, they repealed the Act and ordered that "no one who professed and exercised the Papistic, commonly known as the Roman Catholic religion, could be protected in the Province." Three of the Jesuits were, in consequence, compelled to flee to Virginia, where they kept in hiding for two or three years. In 1658 Lord Baltimore was again in control, and the Toleration Act was re-enacted. In 1671 the population had increased to 20,000, but in 1676 there was another Protestant uprising and the English penal laws were enforced against the Catholic population. In 1715 Charles, Lord Baltimore, died. Previous to that, his son Benedict had apostatized and was disinherited. He died a few months after his father. Benedict's son Charles, who was also a turncoat, was named lord proprietor by Queen Ann, and made the situation so intolerable for Catholics that they were seriously considering the advisability of abandoning Maryland and migrating in a body to the French colony of Louisiana. As a matter of fact many went West and established themselves in Kentucky.
Of the Jesuits and their flock in Maryland, Bancroft writes: "A convention of the associates for the defence of the Protestant religion assumed the government, and in an address to King William denounced the influence of the Jesuits, the prevalence of papist idolatry, the connivances of the previous government at murders of Protestants and the danger from plots with the French and Indians. The Roman Catholics in the land which they had chosen with Catholic liberality, not as their own asylum only, but as the asylum of every persecuted sect, long before Locke had pleaded for toleration, or Penn for religious freedom, were the sole victims of Protestant intolerance. Mass might not be said publicly. No Catholic priest or bishop might utter his faith in a voice of persuasion. No Catholic might teach the young. If the wayward child of a Catholic would become an apostate the law wrested for him from his parents a share of their property. The disfranchisement of the Proprietary related to his creed, not to his family. Such were the methods adopted to prevent the growth of Popery. Who shall say that the faith of the cultivated individual is firmer than the faith of the common people? Who shall say that the many are fickle; that the chief is firm? To recover the inheritance of authority Benedict, the son of the Proprietary, renounced the Catholic Church for that of England, but the persecution never crushed the faith of the humble colonists."
The extent of the Jesuit missions in what is now Canada and the United States may be appreciated by a glance at the remarkable map recently published by Frank F. Seaman of Cleveland, Ohio. On it is indicated every mission site beginning with the Spanish posts in Florida, Georgia and Virginia, as far back as 1566. The missions of the French Fathers are more numerous, and extend from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, and west to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. Not only are the mission sites indicated, but the habitats of the various tribes, the portages and the farthest advances of the tomahawk are there also. Lines starting from Quebec show the source of all this stupendous labor.