XIV. POMBAL
Early life--Ambitions--Portuguese Missions--Seizure of the Spanish Reductions. Expulsion of the Missionaries--End of the Missions in Brazil--War against the Society in Portugal--The Jesuit Republic--Cardinal Saldanha--Seizure of Churches and Colleges--The Assassination Plot--The Prisons--Exiles-- Execution of Malagrida.
The first conspirator who set to work to carry out the plot to destroy the Society, which had long been planned by the powers, was, as might be expected, the ruthless Pombal. He was more shameless and savage than his associates and would adopt any method to accomplish his purpose. The insensate fury which possessed his whole being against the Society is explained by Cardinal Pacca, who was Papal nuncio in Lisbon shortly after Pombal's fall (Notizie sul Portogallo, 10). He writes: "Pombal began his diplomatic career in Germany where he probably drank in those principles of aversion to the Holy See and the religious orders, which, when afterwards put in practice, merited for him from the irreligious philosophers the title of a great minister, and an illuminator of his nation; from good people, however, that of a vile instrument of the sects at war with the Church. Having obtained the office of prime minister, he made himself master of the mind of the king, Don Joseph; and for a quarter of a century governed the kingdom as a despot.
"To wage war against the Holy See, and to oppress the clergy, he adopted the measures and employed the arms which, in the hands of the irreligious men of our time, have done and are still doing harm and inflicting grievous wounds on the Church. He corrupted and perverted public education in the schools and universities, especially in Coimbra which soon became a centre of moral pestilence. He took from the hands of the youth of the kingdom the sound doctrinal works which they had so far been made to study; and substituted schismatical and heretical publications such as Dupin's 'De antiqua ecclesia' which had been condemned by Innocent XII; and Hontheim's 'Febronius' condemned by Clement XIII. He also brought into Portugal the works of the régalists, and excluded those writers who maintained the rights and authority of the Holy See, in defence of which he would not allow a word to be uttered. And to the horror of all decent people, he imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon a holy and venerable bishop who had warned his flock against those pernicious publications. Meantime the notorious Oratorian Pereira, who was condemned by the Index, and others who flattered him were remunerated for their writings and could print whatever they liked. He was a Jansenist who, in the perfidious fashion of the sect, exalted the authority of the bishops in order to diminish that of the Pope; and enlarged the authority of kings in church matters to such an extent that the system differed very little from that of the Protestant Anglican Church. Queen Marìa, who succeeded Joseph on the throne, did much to improve conditions; but did not undo all the harm that Pombal had already inflicted on the nation. Disguised Anglicanism continued to exist in Portugal."
Father Weld adds his own judgment to that of the cardinal, and tells us that "the bias in Pombal's nature may be traced to his English associations when he was ambassador in London." He advances this view, probably because of a note of Pacca's, who says that he could venture no opinion about the influence of England on Pombal, merely for want of documents on that point. The author of the "Memoires pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique du xviii^e siècle" assures us that Pombal's purpose was to extend his reforms even into the bosom of the Church; to change, to destroy; to subject the bishops to his will; to declare himself an enemy of the Holy See; to protect authors hostile to the Holy See; to encourage publications savoring of novelty; to favor in Portugal a theological instruction quite different from what had been adopted previous to his time; and finally to open the way to a pernicious teaching in a country which until then had enjoyed religious peace.
This scheme did not restrict itself to a religious propaganda but got into the domain of politics; for the author of the "Vita di Pombal" (I, 145) notes the report, which is confirmed by the "Memoria Catholica secunda" that "Pombal had formed the design of marrying the Princess Marìa to the Duke of Cumberland, the butcher of Culloden--but that this was thwarted by the Jesuit confessor of the king." On this point the Maréchal de Belle Isle writes (Testament politique, 108): "It is known that the Duke of Cumberland looked forward to becoming King of Portugal, and I doubt not he would have succeeded, if the Jesuit confessors of the royal family had not been opposed to it. This crime was never forgiven the Portuguese Jesuits."
Whatever the truth may be about these royal schemes, Pombal soon found his chance to wreak his vengeance on the Society for balking his plans of making Portugal a Protestant country. A scatter-brained individual, named Pereira, who lived at Rio Janerio, raised the cry which may have been suggested to him, that the Jesuits of the Reductions excluded white intercourse with the natives because of the valuable gold mines they possessed; and that it would be a proper and, indeed, a most commendable thing in the interests of religion for the government to seize this source of wealth, and thus compel the Jesuits who controlled that territory to live up to the holiness of their profession. It was also added that the missions were little else than a great commercial speculation; and finally that the ultimate design of the Society was to make a Republic of Paraguay, independent of the mother country.
These three charges had been reiterated over and over again ever since the foundation of the Reductions, and had been just as often refuted and officially denied after the most vigorous investigation. But there was a man now in control of Portugal who would not be biased by any religious sentiment or regard for truth, if he could injure the Society. The first step was to transfer the aforesaid missions to Portuguese control. They all lay on the east shore of the Uruguay, and belonged to Spain. Hence, in 1750, a treaty was made between Spain and Portugal, to concede to Spain the undisputed control of the rich colony of San Sacramento, at the mouth of the River La Plata, in exchange for the territory, in which lay the seven Reductions of St. Michael, St. Lawrence, St. Aloysius, St. John, St. Francis Borgia, Holy Angels and St. Nicholas. According to the treaty, it was stipulated that the Portuguese should take immediate possession and fling out into the world, they did not care where, the 30,000 Indians who had built villages in the country, and were peacefully cultivating their farms, and who by the uprightness and purity of their lives were giving to the world and to all times an example of what Muratori calls a Cristianesimo felice.
To add to the brutality of the act, the Fathers themselves were ordered to announce to the Indians the order to vacate. Representations were made by the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, the Royal Audiencia of Charcas and various civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Spain that not only was this seizure a most atrocious violation of justice which could not be carried out except by bloodshed, no one could say to what extent, but that it was giving up the property of the Indians to their bitterest enemies, the Portuguese. For it was precisely to avoid the Mamelukes of Brazil that the Reductions had been originally created. Moreover, it would almost compel the Indians to conclude that the Fathers had betrayed them, and that they were not only parties to, but instigators of, the whole scheme of spoliation. Southey, in his "History of Brazil," denounces it as "one of the most tyrannical commands that were ever issued, in the recklessness of unfeeling power," and says that "the weak Ferdinand VI had no idea of the importance of the treaty."
The Jesuits appealed; but they were, of course, unheeded; and the Father General Visconti ordered them to submit without a murmur. Unfortunately, the commissioner Father Altamirano, whom he sent out was a bad choice. He was hot-headed and imperious; and according to Father Huonder (The Catholic Encyclopedia) actually treated his fellow Jesuits as rebels, when they advised him to proceed with moderation. Perhaps the fact that he was the representative of the king, as well as of the General, affected him; at all events the Indians would have killed him if he had not fled. Ten years would not have sufficed for a transfer of such a vast multitude with their women and children, and the old and infirm, not to speak of the herds and flocks and farming implements and household furniture, yet they were ordered to decamp within thirty days. Pombal would soon treat his Jesuit fellow countrymen as he had treated the Indians.
When, at last, the cruel edict was published, all the savage instincts of the Indians awoke, and it seemed for a time as if the missionaries would be massacred. It speaks well for the solid Christian training that had been given to these children of the forest that they at last consented to consider the matter at all. Some of the caciques were actually won over to the advisability of the measure, and started out with several hundred exiles to find a new home in the wilderness. A number of the children and the sick succumbed on the way. When, at last they found a place in the mountains of Quanai, they were attacked by hostile tribes. They resisted for a while, but finally returned in despair to their former abode. To make matters worse, the Bishop of Paraguay notified the Fathers that if they did not obey, they would be ipso facto suspended. "Whereas," says Weld, "if the Fathers really wished to oppose the government, a single sign from them would have sent an army of fifty thousand men to resist the Europeans; but owing to their fidelity and incredible exertions, there were never as many as seven hundred men in the field against the united armies of Spain and Portugal when hostilities at last broke out."
During the year 1754, the Indians harassed the enemy by the skirmishes and won many a victory; and they would have ultimately triumphed if they had had a leader. At last in 1755, the combined forces of the enemy with thirty pieces of artillery attacked them with the result that might have been expected. The natives rushed frantically on their foes; but the musketry and cannon stretched four hundred of them in their blood; and the rest either fled to the mountains or relapsed into savage life; or made their submission to the government, many becoming as bad as their kindred in the forests because of the corruption they saw around them. The Portuguese entered into possession of the seven Reductions, but failed to find any gold. So great was their chagrin that, in 1761, Carvalho wanted the rich territory which he had given to Spain returned to Portugal; and when Spain naturally demurred, he prepared to go to war for it. He finally gained his point, and on February 12, 1761, the territories were restored to their original owners, but nothing was stipulated, about restitution to the unfortunate natives and Jesuits who had been the victims of this shameful political deal.
Some of the Indians who fled to the forests kept up a guerilla warfare against the invaders; but the greater number followed the advice of the Fathers and settled on the Paraná and on the right bank of the Uruguay. In 1762 there were 2,497 families scattered through seventeen Reductions or doctrinas, as they had begun to be called, a term that is equivalent to "parish." But the expulsion of the Fathers which followed soon after completed the ruin of this glorious work. The Indians died or became savage again; and today only beautiful ruins mark the place where this great commonwealth once stood. At the time of the Suppression, or rather when Pombal drove the Jesuits out of every Portuguese post into the dungeons of Portugal or flung them into the Papal States, the Paraguay province had five hundred and sixty-four members, twelve colleges, one university, three houses for spiritual retreats, two residences, fifty-seven Reductions and 113,716 Christian Indians. The leave-taking of the Fathers and Indians was heart-rending on both sides.
It is a long distance from the River La Plata to the Amazon; for there are about thirty-five degrees of latitude between the two places. But they were not too far apart to check Carvalho in his work of destruction. After having done all he could for the moment at one end of Brazil, he addressed himself to the Jesuit missions at the other. A glance at the past history of these establishments will reveal the frightful injustice of the brutal acts of 1754.
One hundred years before that time, Vieira had made his memorable fight against his Portuguese fellow-countrymen for the liberation of the Indians from slavery. By so doing, he had, of course, aroused the fury of the whites, and they determined to crush him. They put him in prison; and in 1660 sent him and his companions to Portugal, in a crazy ship to be tried for disturbing the peace of the colony. Nevertheless, he won the fight, although meantime three Jesuits had been killed by the Indians, and their companions expelled from the colony, in spite of the king's protection. In this act, however, the Portuguese had gone too far. His majesty saw the truth and sent the missionaries back. That was as early as 1680. In 1725 new complaints were sent to Portugal, but the supreme governor of the Maranhão district wrote, as follows, to the king: "The Fathers of the Society in this State of Maranhão are objects of enmity and have always been hated, for no other reason than for their strenuous defence of the liberty of the unfortunate Indians, and also because they used all their power to oppose the tyrannical oppression of those who would reduce to a degraded and unjust slavery men whom nature had made free. The Fathers take every possible care that the laws of your majesty on this point shall be most exactly observed. They devote themselves entirely to the promotion of the salvation of souls and the increase of the possessions of your majesty; and have added many sons to the Church and subjects to the crown from among these barbarous nations."
With regard to their alleged commerce, the governor says: "Whatever has been charged against the Fathers by wicked calumniators who, through hatred and envy, manufacture ridiculous lies about the wealth they derive from those missions, I solemnly declare to your majesty, and I speak of a matter with which I am thoroughly acquainted, that the Fathers of the Society are the only true missionaries of these regions. Whatever they receive from their labors among the Indians is applied to the good of the Indians themselves and to the decency and ornamentation of the churches, which, in these missions, are always very neat and very beautiful. Nothing whatever that is required in the missions is kept for themselves. As they have nothing of their own, whatever each missionary sends is delivered to the procurator of the mission, and every penny of it reverts to the use of the particular mission from whence it came. Missioners of other orders send quite as much produce, but each one keeps his own portion separate, to be used as he likes, so that the quantity however great being thus divided, does not make much impression on those who see it. But as the missionaries of the Society send everything together to the procurator, the quantity, when seen in bulk, excites the cupidity of the malevolent and envious."
About 1739, Eduardo dos Santos was sent by John V as a special commissioner to Maranhão. After spending twenty months in visiting every mission and examining every detail he wrote as follows: "The execrable barbarity with which the Indians are reduced to slavery has become such a matter of custom that it is rather looked on as a virtue. All that is adduced against this inhuman custom is received with such repugnance and so quickly forgotten that the Fathers of the Society in whose charity these unfortunate creatures often find refuge and protection, and who take compassion on their miserable lot, become, for this very reason, objects of hatred to these avaricious men."
Such were the official verdicts of the conduct of the Jesuits on the Amazon a few years before Pombal came into power. But in 1753 regardless of all this he sent out his brother Francis Xavier Mendoza, a particularly worthless individual, and made him Governor of Gran Para and Maranhão, giving him a great squadron of ships and a considerable body of troops with orders to humble the Jesuits and send back to Portugal any of them who opposed his will. Everything was done to create opposition. They were forbidden to speak or to preach to the Indians except in Portuguese; the soldiers were quartered in the Jesuit settlements, and were instructed to treat the natives with especial violence and brutality.
In 1754 a council was held in Lisbon to settle the question about expelling the Society from the missions of Maranhão. The order was held up temporarily by the queen; but when she died, a despatch was sent in June 1755 ordering their immediate withdrawal from all "temporal and civil government of the missions." The instructions stated that it was "in order that God might be better served." Unfortunately the bishop of the place co-operated with Carvalho in everything that was proposed. He suppressed one of the colleges, restricted the number of Fathers in the others, to twelve, and sent the rest back to Portugal; and in order to excite the settlers against the Society, he had the Bull of Benedict XIV which condemned Indian slavery read from the pulpits, proclaiming that it had been inspired by the Jesuits. Meantime, in the reports home, the insignificant Indian villages where they labored were magnified into splendid cities and towns all owned by the Society; two pieces of cannon which had never fired a ball were described as a whole park of artillery, and a riot among the troops was set down as a rebellion excited by the Jesuits.
The first three Fathers to be banished from Brazil were José, Hundertpfund and da Cruz. José was a royal appointee sent out to determine the boundary line between the Spanish and Portuguese American possessions. But that did not trouble Pombal; nor did the German nationality of Hundertpfund, nor did he deign to state the precise nature of their offenses. A fourth victim named Ballister had had the bad taste to preach on the text: "Make for yourself friends of the Mammon of iniquity." He was forthwith accused of attacking one of Carvalho's commercial enterprises, and promptly ordered out of the country. Again, when some mercantile rivals sent a petition to the king against Carvalho's monopolies, Father Fonseca was charged with prompting it, and he was outlawed though absolutely innocent. And so it went on. Carvalho's brother was instructed to invent any kind of an excuse to increase the number of these expatriations.
While these outrages were being perpetrated in the colonies, Lisbon's historic earthquake of 1755 occurred. The city was literally laid in ruins. Thousands of people were instantly killed; and while other thousands lay struggling in the ruins, the rising flood of the Tagus and a deluge of rain completed the disaster. Singularly enough, Carvalho's house escaped the general wreck; and the foolish king considered that exception to be a Divine intervention in behalf of his great minister, and possibly, on that account, left him unchecked in the fury which even the awful calamity which had fallen on his country did not at all moderate. The Jesuits were praised by both king and patriarch for their heroic devotion both during and after the great disaster, but those commendations only infuriated Pombal the more. When one of the Fathers, the holy Malagrida, had dared to say in the pulpit that the earthquake was a punishment for the vice that was rampant in the capital, Pombal regarded it as a reflection on his administration; and the offender, though seventy years old and universally regarded as a saint, was banished from the city as inciting the people to rebellion.
However, the furious minister meted out similar treatment to others, even to his political friends. Thus, although the British parliament had voted £40,000 for the relief of the sufferers, besides giving a personal gift to the king and sending ships with cargoes of food for the people, Pombal immediately ran up the tax on foreign imports, for he was financially interested in domestic productions. Even in doling out provisions to the famishing populace, he was so parsimonious that riots occurred, whereupon he hanged those who complained. The author of the "Vita" (I, 106) vouches for the fact that at one time there were three hundred gibbets erected in various parts of Lisbon. The Jesuit confessors at the court were especially obnoxious to him and he dismissed them all with an injunction never to set foot in the royal precincts again. The anger of their royal penitents did not restrain him, so absolute was his power both then and afterwards. The plea was that the priests were plotters against the king. To increase that impression he pointed out to his majesty the number of offenders against him; all members of the detested Order who were coming back in every ship from Brazil. The General of the Society, Father Centurioni, wrote to the king pleading the innocence of the victims; but the letter never got further than the minister. The king did not even know it had been sent.
The next step in this persecution was to publish the famous pamphlet entitled: "A Brief Account of the Republic which the Jesuits have established in the Spanish and Portuguese dominions of the New World, and of the War which they have carried on against the armies of the two Crowns; all extracted from the Register of the Commissaries and Plenipotentiaries, and from other documents." A copy was sent to every bishop of the country; to the cardinals in Rome, and to all the courts of Europe. Pombal actually spent 70,000 crowns to print and spread the work of which he himself was generally credited with being the author. In South America it was received with derision; in Europe mostly with disgust. Sad to say, Acciajuoli, the Apostolic nuncio at Lisbon, believed the Brazilian stories; but he changed his mind, when on the morning of June 15, 1760, just as he was about to say Mass, he received a note ordering him in the name of the king to leave the city at once, and the kingdom within four days; adding that to preserve him from insult a military escort would conduct him to the frontier. Other publications of the same tenor followed the "Brief Account." One especially became notorious. It was: "Letters of the Portuguese Minister to the Minister of Spain on the Jesuitical Empire, the Republic of Maranhao; the history of Nicholas I." The Nicholas in question was a Father named Plantico. To carry out the story of his having been crowned king or Emperor of Paraguay, coins with his effigy were actually struck and circulated throughout Europe. Unfortunately for the fraud, none of the coins were ever seen in Paraguay where they ought to have been current. Moreover, as Plantico was transported with the other Jesuits of Brazil, he would have been hanged on his arrival in Portugal, if he had tried to set up a kingdom of his own in Paraguay. On the contrary, he went off to his native country of Croatia, and was Rector of the College of Grosswardein when the general suppression of the Society took place. Frederick II and d'Alembert used to joke with each other about "King Nicholas I"; and in Spain, that and the other libels were officially denounced and their circulation prohibited.
As for Carvalho, these hideous imaginings of his brain became realities; and the list of Jesuitical horrors which his ambassador at Rome repeated to the Pope, all, as he alleged, for the sake of the Church, almost suggest that Pombal was a madman. Long extracts of the document may be found in de Ravignan and Weld, but it will be sufficient here to mention a few of the charges. They are, for instance, "seditious machinations against every government of Europe; scandals in their missions so horrible that they cannot be related without extreme indecency; rebellion against the Sovereign Pontiff; the accumulation of vast wealth and the use of immense political power; gross moral corruption of individual members of the Order; abandonment of even the externals of religion; the daily and public commission of enormous crimes; opposing the king with great armies; inculcating in the Indian mind an implacable hatred of all white men who are not Jesuits; starting insurrections in Uruguay so as to prevent the execution of the treaty of limits; atrociously calumniating the king; embroiling the courts of Spain and Portugal; creating sedition by preaching in the capital against the commercial companies of the minister; taking advantage of the earthquake to attain their detestable ends; surpassing Machiavelli in their diabolical plots; inventing prophecies of new disasters, such as warnings of subterranean fires and invasions of the sea; calumniating the venerable Palafox; committing crimes worse than those of the Knights Templars, etc."
Unfortunately, Cardinal Passionei who was unfriendly to the Society, exercised great power at Rome at that time. He was so antagonistic that he would not allow a Jesuit book in the library, which made d'Alembert say: "I am sorry for his library." He also refused to condemn the work of the scandalous ex-monk Norbert, who was in the pay of Carvalho. To make matters worse, Benedict XIV was then at the point of death. And a short time previously, yielding to Carvalho's importunities, he had appointed Cardinal Saldanha, who was Carvalho's tool, to investigate the complaints and to report back to Rome, without however taking any action on the premises. The dying Pontiff was unaware of the intimacy of Saldanha with the man in Portugal or he would not have ordered him in the Brief of appointment to "follow the paths of gentleness and mildness, in dealing with an Order which has always been of the greatest edification to the whole world; lest by doing otherwise he would diminish the esteem which, up to that time, they have justly acquired as a reward of their diligence. Their holy Institute had given many illustrious men to the Church whose teachings they have not hesitated to confirm with their blood." As the Pope died in the following month, Saldanha made light of the instructions. His usual boast was that "the will of the king was the rule of his actions; and he was under such obligations to his majesty, that he would not hesitate to throw himself from the window if such were the royal pleasure."
It was currently reported in Lisbon, says Weld (130), that the office of visitor had been first offered to Francis of the Annunciation, an Augustinian who had reformed the University of Coimbra; and on his refusal he was sent to prison where he ended his days. But the obliging Saldanha saw in it an opportunity for still further advancement; he accepted the work and performed it in accordance with the wishes of Pombal. Meantime, new dungeons were being made in the fortress of Jonquiera in which the offending Jesuits were to be buried. Saldanha began his work as Inquisitor on May 31, by going with great pomp to the Jesuit Church of St. Roch. Seated on the throne in the sanctuary, he gave his hand to be kissed by all the religious. When the provincial knelt before him, the cardinal told him to have confidence--he would act with clemency. When the ceremony was over, he departed abruptly without asking any questions or making any examination. But a few days afterward, the provincial received a letter bearing the date May 15, that is sixteen days before this visit to the Church, declaring that the Fathers in Portugal and in its dominions to the ends of the earth were, on the fullest information, found to be guilty of a worldly traffic which was a disgrace to the ecclesiastical state; and they were commanded under pain of excommunication to desist from such business transactions at the very hour the notification was made. The language employed in the letter which was immediately spread throughout the country was insulting and defamatory to the highest degree.
All the procurators were then compelled to hand over their books to the government. And when the horrified people, who knew there was nothing back of it all but Carvalho's hatred, manifested their discontent, it was ascribed to the Jesuits. Hence on June 6, the cardinal patriarch, at the instigation of the prime minister, suspended them all from the function of preaching and hearing confessions throughout the patriarchate. The cardinal had, at first, demurred, for he knew the Jesuits in Lisbon to be the very reverse of Saldanha's description of them, and he therefore demanded a regular trial. Whereupon Carvalho flew into such a rage that out of sheer terror, and after a few hours' struggle, he issued the cruel order. The poor cardinal, who was an ardent friend and admirer of the Society, was so horrified at what he had done that he fell into a fever, and died within a month. Before he received the last sacraments, he made a public declaration that the Society was innocent, and he drew up a paper to that effect; but Carvalho never let it see the light. When the Archbishop of Evora heard that the dying man had shed tears over his weakness, he said: "Tears are not enough. He should have shed the last drop of his blood."
Saldanha was made patriarch in the deceased prelate's place; and though his office of visitor had ceased ipso facto on the death of the Pope, he continued to exercise its functions nevertheless. He appointed Bulhoens, the Bishop of Para, a notorious adherent of Carvalho, to be his delegate in Brazil. Bulhoens first examined the Jesuits of Para, but could find nothing against them. He then proceeded to Maranhão; but the bishop of that place left in disgust; and the governor warned Bulhoens that if he persisted, the city would be in an uproar. Not being able to effect anything, he asked the Bishop of Bahia to undertake the work of investigation. The invitation was promptly accepted; and all the superiors were ordered to show their books under pain of excommunication. They readily complied, and no fault was found with the accounts. He then instituted a regular tribunal; received the depositions of seventy-five witnesses, among them Saldanha's own brother who had lived twenty-five years in Maranhão. Next he examined the tax commissioner, through whose hands all contracts and bills of exchange had to pass; and that official affirmed under oath that he had never known or heard of any business transactions having been carried on by Jesuits. The result was that the courageous bishop declared "it would be an offence against God and his conscience and against the king's majesty to condemn the Fathers." When his report was forwarded to Portugal, Carvalho ordered the confiscation of his property; expelled him from his palace, and declared his see vacant. The valiant prelate passed the rest of his days in seclusion, supported by the alms of the faithful.
In September 1758, a charge was trumped up in Lisbon in a most tortuous fashion, based on the alleged discovery of a plot to assassinate the king. Those chiefly involved were the Duke de Averio and the Marquis de Tavora, with his wife, his two sons, his two brothers and his two sons-in-law, all of whom were seized at midnight on December 12. The marchioness and her daughter-in-law were carried off to a convent in their night-dresses; the men of the family, to dens formerly occupied by the wild beasts of the city menagerie. De Aveiro, who was supposed to be the assassin-in-chief, was not taken until next day. Several others were included in this general round-up, some of them for having asserted that the whole conspiracy was a manufactured affair. At the same time, some of the domestic servants of the marquis, probably for having offered resistance at the time of the arrest, were put to death so that they could tell no tales. Not being able to have the accused parties tried before any regularly constituted tribunal, because of the lack of evidence, Carvalho drew up a sentence of condemnation himself, and presented it to a new court which he had just established, called the inconfidenza, and demanded the signatures of the judges who were all his creatures. After being stormed at for a while, all, with one exception, put their names to the paper. Then, as by the law of the land no nobleman could be condemned to death except by his peers, he constituted himself as a tribunal, along with his secretary of the Navy and the secretary of Foreign Affairs, neither of whom had any difficulty in complying with the wish of their master.
On January 11, 1759, three of the noblemen involved, Aveiro, Tavora and Antongia, were led out to execution before the king's palace. Vast multitudes had assembled in the public square; and to ensure order, fresh regiments had been summoned from other parts of the kingdom. A riot was feared, for the Tavoras were among the noblest families of the realm. The accused had not even been defended and had been interrogated on the rack. The execution was most expeditious, and the heads of the three victims quickly rolled in the dust. That night, the marchioness was taken from the convent to the new dungeons in the fort; and on January 12, she heard the sentence of death passed on her by Carvalho himself who was both judge and accuser. The scaffold was erected in the square of Belem; and long before daylight of January 13 an immense multitude had gathered to witness the hideous spectacle. The marchioness advanced and took her seat in the chair. The axe quickly descended on her neck--and all was over. She was despatched in this hurried fashion because the interference of the king was feared. Indeed, the messenger arrived just when the head had been severed from the body. The two sons of the marchioness and her son-in-law were then stretched on the rack and strangled. The father of the family, the old marquis followed next in order. As a mark of clemency, his torture was brief but effective. Four others were then executed; fire was set to the gibbet; and its blood-stained timbers along with the bodies of the victims were reduced to ashes and thrown into the Tagus. This was not a scene in a village of savages, but in a great European capital which had just passed through a terrible visitation of God but apparently had not understood its meaning. Carvalho was thirsting for more blood, but the king held him back; so he contented himself with destroying the palaces of the Aveiras and Tavoras; sprinkling the sites with salt; forbidding anyone to bear the names hitherto so illustrious, and even effacing them from the monuments and the public archives. He was not allowed to commit any more official murders for the moment; but at least he had thousands who were dying in his underground dungeons.
What had the Jesuits to do with all this? Nothing whatever. They were accused of being the spiritual advisers of the Tavora family which it was impossible to disprove, because though the persons implicated by the accusation were all arrested on the 11th, sentence of death had been already passed on the 9th. There were twenty-nine paragraphs in the indictment. The twenty-second said that "even if the exuberant and conclusive proofs already adduced did not exist, the presumption of the law would suffice to condemn such monsters." Of course, no lawyer in the world could plead against such a charge, and it is noteworthy that in the Brief of Suppression of the whole Society by Clement XIV which brings together all the accusations against it, there is no mention whatsoever, even inferentially, of any conspiracy of the Jesuits against the life of the King of Portugal. Moreover, the Inquisition and all the Bishops of Spain judged this Portuguese horror at its proper value, when on May 3, 1759 they put their official stamp of condemnation on the pamphlets with which the whole of Europe was flooded immediately after Pombal's infamous act. They denounced the charges one by one as "designed to foment discord, to disturb the peace and tranquillity of souls and consciences, and especially to discredit the holy Society of Jesus and religious who laudably labor in it to the benefit of the Church; as is known throughout the world." Over and over again as each book is specifically anathematised, the "holy Society of Jesus" is spoken of with commendation and praise. The condemned publications were then burnt in the market place. That exculpation ought to have been sufficient, coming as it did not only from all the Spanish bishops but from the Inquisition, which from the very beginning had been uniformly suspicious of everything Jesuitical. Against this utterance Pombal was powerless for it was the voice of another nation.
When the year 1759 began, three of the most conspicuous and most venerable Fathers of Portugal were in jail under sentence of death. But neither the king nor Carvalho dared to carry out the sentence of execution. Something however had to be done; and therefore a royal edict, which had been written long before, was issued. After reciting all that had been previously said about Brazil, etc. it declared that "these religious being corrupt and deplorably fallen away from their holy institute, and rendered manifestly incapable by such abominable and inveterate vices to return to its observances, must be properly and effectually banished, denaturalized, proscribed and expelled from all his majesty's dominions, as notorious rebels, traitors, adversaries and aggressors of his royal person and realm; as well as for the public peace and the common good of his subjects; and it is ordered under the irremissible pain of death, that no person, of whatever state or condition, is to admit them into any of his possessions or hold any communication with them by word or writing, even though they should return into these states in a different garb or should have entered another order, unless with the King's permission." It is sad to have to record that the Patriarch of Lisbon endorsed the invitation to the Jesuits to avail themselves of this royal clemency.
The procurators of the missions who occupied a temporary house in Lisbon had been already carried off to jail; and their money, chalices, sacred vessels, all of which were intended for Asia and Brazil, were confiscated. The Exodus proper began at the College of Elvas on September 1. At night-fall a squadron of cavalry arrived; and taking the inmates prisoners, marched them off without any intimation of whither they were going. On the following day, Sunday, they were lodged in a miserable shed, exhausted though they were by the journey, with nothing but a few crusts to eat, after having suffered intensely from the heat all day long. They were not even allowed to go to Mass. During the next night and the following day, they continued their weary tramp and at last arrived at Evora. There the young men were left at the college, and the sixty-nine Professed were compelled to walk for six consecutive days till they reached the Tagus. Many were old and decrepit and one of them lost his mind on the journey. When they reached the river, they were put in open boats and exposed all day long to the burning sun, with nothing to eat or drink. They were then transferred to a ship which had been waiting for them since the month of April. It was then late in September.
Other exiles soon joined them, after going through similar experiences, until there were one hundred and thirty-three in the same vessel. They were all kept in the hold till they were out of sight of land. There was no accommodation for them: the food was insufficient; the water was foul; there were no dishes, so that six or seven had to sit around a tin can, and take out what they could with a wooden spoon, and the same vessel had to serve for the water they drank. The orders were to stop at no port until they reached Civita Vecchia. However, after passing the Straits of Gibraltar, it became evident that unless the captain wanted to carry a cargo of corpses to Italy, he must take in supplies somewhere: for many of the victims were sixty or seventy years of age. There were even some octogenarians among them. Hence, on reaching Alicante, in Spain, one of the Fathers went ashore. There was a college of the Society in that city; and as soon as the news spread of the arrival of the prisoners, the people rushed to the shore to supply their wants, but the messenger was the only one allowed to be seen. They then sailed away from Alicante. Off Corsica, a storm caught them and so delayed their progress that a stop had to be made at Spezia for more food. At last, on October 24, more than a month after they had left Lisbon, they were flung haggard, emaciated and exhausted on the shores of the Papal States at Civita Vecchia. Of course, they were received by the people there with unbounded affection; and as Father Weld relates "none exceeded the Dominican Fathers in their tender solicitude for the sufferers." A marble slab in their church records their admiration for these confessors of the Faith with whom the sons of St. Dominic declared they were devinctissimi--"closely bound to them in affection."
On September 29, troops surrounded the College of Coimbra. The astonished populace was informed that it was because the Fathers had been fighting; that some were already killed and others wounded; and the soldiers had been summoned to prevent further disorders. That night amid pouring rain, the tramp of horses' hoofs was heard; and as the people crowded to the windows, they saw the venerable men of the college led away between squads of cavalry as if they were brigands or prisoners of war. They arrived at the Tagus on October 7, where others were already waiting. They numbered in all 121, and were crowded into two small ships which were to carry them into exile. They had scarcely room to move. Yet, when they arrived at Genoa, they were all packed into one of the boats. At Leghorn, they were kept for a whole month in close confinement on board the ship. When they started out, they were buffeted by storms, and not until January 4, 1760 did they reach the papal territory. They were in a more wretched state of filth and emaciation than their predecessors.
These prisoners were the special criminals of the Society, namely--the professed Fathers. The other Jesuits were officially admitted to be without reproach and were exhorted, both by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, to abandon the Order and be dispensed from their vows. As these non-Professed numbered at least three-fourths of the whole body, the difficult problem presents itself of explaining how the Professed who are looked up to by the rest of the Society for precept and example should be monsters of iniquity and yet could train the remaining three-fourths of the members in such a way as to make them models of every virtue.
Pombal was convinced that he could separate the youth of the Society from their elders; and he was extremely anxious to do so, because of the family connections of many of them, and because of the loss to the nation at one stroke of so much ability and talent. But he failed egregiously. They were all gathered in the colleges of Coimbra and Evora. No seclusion was observed. Everybody was free to visit them from the world outside; and inducements of every kind were held out to them to abandon the Society: family affection, worldly ambition, etc.--but without avail. They had no regular superior, so they elected a fourth-year theologian who had just been ordained a priest. Another was made minister; and a third, master of novices. The house was kept in excellent order; the religious discipline was perfect and the exercises of the community went on with as much regularity as if nothing were happening. Pombal sent commissioner after commissioner to shake the constancy of the young men, but only two of the tempted ones weakened. "Who is their superior?" he asked one day in a rage. The answer was: "Joseph Carvalho--your namesake and relative." On October 20, a letter from the cardinal was read in both houses. He expressed his astonishment that these young Jesuits did not avail themselves of the royal favor to desert; and he warned them that they were not suffering for their faith, and that "their refusal of His Majesty's offer to release them from their vows was not virtuous constancy but seditious obstinacy."
Finally, October 24 was fixed for their departure, and notice was given that they could not expect to go to any civilized land, but would probably be dropped on some desolate island off the African coast. That shook the resolution of two of the band, but the rest stood firm. In the morning, all went to Holy Communion and at an hour before sunset, the word was given to start. They sang a Te Deum and then set out--130 in all. They were preceded by a troop of cavalry; a line of foot soldiers marched on either side; while here and there torches threw their glare over this grim nocturnal procession. It took them four days to reach Oporto, where they met their brethren from Braganza and Braga. There were only ten from the former place, but sixty soldiers had been detailed to guard them. Indeed, the troopers from Braga had to keep the crowds back with drawn swords, so eager were the people along the road to express their sympathy. At Oporto the young heroes had to witness the desertion of four Professed Fathers; but that did not weaken their resolution. They were all crammed into three small craft, but the weather was too stormy to leave the port; and there they remained a whole week, packed so close together that there was scarcely room to lie side by side. The air became so foul that it was doubtful if they could survive. Even their guards took sick, and, at last, a number of the prisoners were transferred to a fort in the harbor.
At last to the number of 223 they sailed down the Douro. One of them died, and his companions sang the Office of the Dead over him and buried him in the sea. When the ship did not roll too much, Mass was said and they went to Communion. All the exercises that are customary in religious houses were scrupulously performed, and the Church festivals were observed as if they were a community at home. They were quarantined two weeks at Genoa without being permitted to go ashore. Then another scholastic died, and they found that his earthly goods consisted of nothing but a few bits of linen, that must have been foul by this time, besides a discipline and a hair shirt. They cast anchor at Civita Vecchia on February 7, having left inhospitable Portugal in October.
The band from Evora to the number of ninety-eight, of whom only three were priests, had not such a rude experience except in the distress of seeing some deserters, among them two Professed Fathers. The officer in charge of the ship, unlike most of the government employees, was tender and kind to them. How could he have been otherwise? His name was de Britto--the same as that of the Portuguese martyr in India. It meant the loss of his position, perhaps, but what did he care? When they reached Lisbon, the nineteen who had been separated from the first detachment to be kept in jail came aboard, and the little band numbered 115 all told, when the ship hoisted anchor and made for the sea. They reached Civita Vecchia where the two happy troops of valiant young Jesuits met in each others arms. Their number was then 336. They were distributed among the various establishments of Italy, the novices being sent to Sant' Andrea in Rome. Two cardinals and a papal nuncio who were making their retreat in the house at the time insisted on serving them at table, while the Pope sent a message to the General to say: "These young men have reflected great honor on the Society and have shown how well they have been trained."
The fury of Pombal was not yet sated. Not an island of the Atlantic, not a station in Africa or India, not a mission in the depths of the forests of America that was not searched and looted by his commissioners, who ruthlessly expelled the devoted missionaries who were found there. Men venerable for age and acquirements were given over to brutal soldiers who were ordered to shoot them if any attempt at escape was made. They were dragged hundreds of miles through the wildest of regions, over mountains, through raging torrents, amid driving storms; they were starved and had nothing but the bare ground on which to rest; they were searched again and again as if their rags held treasures; were made to answer the roll call twice a day like convicts in jail; and then tossed in the holds of crazy ill-provisioned ships with no place to rest their weary heads, except on a coil of rope or in the filth of the cattle; and when dead, they were to be flung to the sharks. When at last they reached Lisbon they were forbidden to show themselves on deck, lest their fellow-countrymen and their families might be shocked by their degradation. They were then spirited away to the dungeons of St. Julian and Jonquiera to rot, until death relieved them of their sufferings. Those who were not placed in the crowded jails were sent in their rags to find a refuge somewhere outside of their native land.
As has been said, there were two provinces in Portuguese South America--Brazil and Maranhão. In the former, besides the Seminary of Belem, the Society had six colleges and sixty-two residences with a total of 445 members. Orders were given to the whole 445 to assemble at Bahia, Pernambuco and San Sebastian. Everything was seized. At Bahia, the novices were stripped of their habits and sent adrift, though the families of some of them lived in far away Portugal. The rest were confined in a house surrounded by armed troops while the bishop of the city proclaimed that any one who would encourage the victims to persevere in their vocation would be excommunicated. Then, one day, without a moment's notice, all were ordered out of the house and sent to jail in different places. There they remained for the space of three months waiting for the missionaries from the interior to arrive. They came in slowly, for some of them lived eight hundred miles away, and had to tramp all that distance through the forests and over mountain ranges. Before all had made their appearance, however, the first batches were sent across to the mother country to make space. They started on March 16 and reached the Tagus on June 6. Those from Bahia had taken from April to June, and it was fully three months before the convict ship from Pernambuco arrived in port.
All this time the deported religious were kept between decks, and soldiers stood at the gangway with drawn swords to prevent any attempt to go up to get a breath of fresh air. Their food was nothing but vegetables cooked in sea-water, for there was not enough of drinking water even to slake their thirst. The result was that the ship had a cargo of half-dead men when it anchored off Lisbon; but the unfortunate wretches were kept imprisoned there for fifteen days with the port-holes closed. They were then transferred to a Genoese ship and sent to Civita Vecchia. It appears that the Provincial of these Brazilian Jesuits was named Lynch; but strange to say, there is no mention of him in any of the Menologies. The deportation from Pernambuco and San Sebastian were repetitions of this organized brutality; and the same methods were employed at Goa in India, and the other dependencies, such as Macao and China. In the transportations from these posts in the Orient, the ships had to stop at Bahia which had been witness of the first exportations; but the victims in the China ships could learn nothing of what had happened. Twenty-three of them died on one of the journeys from India. It is noted that a Turk at Algiers and a Danish Lutheran sea-captain, had shown the greatest humanity to the victims whose fellow countrymen seemed transformed into savage beasts. The prisoners had been kept in confinement twenty months before they left Goa; and when they arrived at Lisbon on October 18, 1764, they were taken off in long boats at the dead of night, and lodged in the foulest dungeons of the fortress of St. Julian.
But these were not the only victims of Carvalho. There were prisoners from every grade of society, and their number reached the appalling figure of nine thousand. Among them were eminent ecclesiastics, bishops and canons and some of the most distinguished laymen of the kingdom. A description of the prisons in which they were confined for years or till they died has been given to posterity by some of the victims. Father Weld in his "Suppression of the Society in Portugal" quotes extensively from their letters. The jails were six in number: Belem, Almeida, Azeitano, St. George, Jonquiera and St. Julian. They had annexes, also, along the African coasts or on the remote islands of the Atlantic. Belem, the Portuguese name for Bethlehem, so called because it had once been an abbey, was about four miles from Lisbon towards the ocean. It had the distinction of keeping its prisoners behind iron bars, but exposed to the public like wild beasts in a menagerie; so that the public could come and look at them and feed them if so disposed. The Portuguese criminals were given a pittance by the government, to purchase food, but the foreigners had to beg from the spectators for the means to support life. It was admirably contrived to induce insanity.
Jonquiera lay between Belem and Lisbon. The cells were numerous in this place. Moreira, the king's former confessor, and Malagrida were among the inmates. The Marquis de Lorna who was also confined there says "there were nineteen cells, each about seven paces square, and so tightly closed that a light had to be kept burning continually; otherwise they would have been in absolute darkness. When the prisoners were first put in them, the plaster was still wet and yielded to the slightest pressure. The cold was intense. Worst of all for a Catholic country, the sacraments were allowed the prisoners only once a year." The Marquis says that during the sixteen years he spent there "he never heard Mass." In these dungeons there were 221 Jesuits, 88 of whom died in their chains. The Castle of St. Julian stood on the banks of the Tagus and the walls were washed by the tide. In this place, there were 125 Jesuits of all nations; men of high birth, of great virtue and intellectual ability. The cells were situated below the sea-level; and were damp, unventilated, choked with filth and swarming with vermin. Some of the Fathers passed nineteen years in those tombs. The drinking water was putrid; the prisoners' clothes were in rags; often not sufficient for decency; many had no under garments and no shoes; their hair and beards were never cut; the food was scant and of the worst quality, and was often carried off before there was time to eat it. The oil of the single lamp in the cells was so limited that to save it, the wick was reduced to two or three threads. The same conditions prevailed in the other prisons. Meantime the jailers were making money on the supplies supposed to be served to the prisoners. Such was prison life in Portugal during the twenty years of Pombal's administration.
One of the particularly outrageous features of these imprisonments was that Pombal preferred to hold foreigners rather than native Portuguese. The foreigners, having no friends in the country, would not, in all probability, be claimed by their relatives; and as the ministers of nearly all the nations of Europe were of the same mind as himself, he had no fear of political intervention. Thus we find in a letter of Father Kaulen, a German Jesuit, which was published by Christopher de Murr, that in one section of St. Julian, besides fifty-four Portuguese Jesuits, there were thirteen Germans, one Italian, three Frenchmen, two Spaniards, and three Chinese. These Chinese Jesuits must have made curious reflections on the meaning of the term "Christian nations." "There are others in the towers," adds Father Kaulen, "but I cannot find out who they are, or how many, or to what country they belong."
The three Frenchmen, Fathers du Gad and de Ranceau along with Brother Delsart were set free at the demand of Marie Leczinska, the wife of Louis XV; it was through them that Father Kaulen was able to send his letter to the provincial of the Lower Rhine. He himself was probably liberated later by the intervention of Maria Theresa, but there is no record of it. His letter is of great value as he had personal experience of what he writes. His experience was a long one, for he entered the prison in 1759; and this communication to his provincial is dated October 12, 1766. In it he writes:--
"I was taken prisoner by a soldier with a drawn sword and brought to Fort Olreida on the frontier of Portugal. There I was put in a frightful cell filled with rats which got into my bed and ate my food. I could not chase them away, it was so dark. We were twenty Jesuits, each one in a separate cell. During the first four months we were treated with some consideration. After that, they gave us only enough food to keep us from dying of hunger. They took away our breviaries, medals, etc. One of the Fathers resisted so vigorously when they tried to deprive him of his crucifix that they desisted. The sick got no help or medicine.
"After three years they transferred nineteen of us to another place because of a war that had broken out. We travelled across Portugal surrounded by a troop of cavalry, and were brought to Lisbon; and after passing the night in a jail with the worst kind of criminals, we were sent to St. Julian, which is on the seashore. It is a horrible hole, underground, dark and foul. The food is bad, the water swarming with worms. We have half a pound of bread a day. We receive the sacraments only when we are dying. The doctor lives outside but if we fall sick during the night, he is not called. The prison is filled with worms and insects and little animals such as I never saw before. The walls are dripping wet, so that our clothes soon rot. One of the Fathers died and his face was so brilliant that one of the soldiers exclaimed: 'That's the face of a saint.' We are not unhappy, and the three French Fathers who left us envied our lot.
"Very few of us have even the shreds of our soutanes left. Indeed we have scarcely enough clothes for decency. At night a rough covering full of sharp points serves as a blanket; and the straw on which we sleep as well as the blanket that covers us soon become foul, and it is very hard to get them renewed. We are not allowed to speak to any one. The jailor is extremely brutal and seems to make a point of adding to our sufferings; only with the greatest reluctance does he give us what we need. Yet we could be set free in a moment if we abandoned the Society. Some of the Fathers who were at Macao and had undergone all sorts of sufferings at the hands of the pagans, such as prison chains and torture say to us that perhaps God found it better to have them suffer in their own country for nothing, than among idolaters for the Faith.
"We ask the prayers of the Fathers of the province, but not because we lament our condition. On the contrary, we are happy. As for myself, though I would like to see my companions set free, I would not change places with you outside. We wish all our Fathers good health so that they may work courageously for God in Germany to make up for the little glory he receives here in Portugal.
Your Reverence's most humble servant
Lawrence Kaulen, Captive of Jesus Christ."
Pombal was determined now to make a master-stroke to discredit the Portuguese Jesuits. He would disgrace and put to death as a criminal their most distinguished representative, Father Malagrida, now over seventy years of age, who had already passed two years in the dungeons of Jonquiera. Malagrida was regarded by the people as a saint. He had labored for many years in the missions of Brazil and was marvelously successful in the work of converting the savages. Unfortunately he had been recalled to Portugal in 1749 by the queen mother to prepare her for the end of her earthly career. As Malagrida knew how Carvalho's brother was acting in Brazil, he was evidently a dangerous man to have so near the Court. Hence when the earthquake occurred and the holy old missionary dared to tell the people that possibly it was a punishment of God for the sins of the people, Carvalho banished him to Setubal and kept him there for two years. When the supposed plot against the king's life occurred, Malagrida was sent to prison as being concerned in it, though he had never been in Lisbon since his banishment. He was condemned to death with the other supposed conspirators; but his character as a priest, and his acknowledged sanctity made the king forbid the execution of the sentence. Pombal, however, found a way out of the difficulty. A book was produced which was said to have been written by Malagrida during his imprisonment. It was crammed with utterances that only a madman could have written: In any case it could not have been produced by the occupant of a dark cell, where there was no ink and no paper. When it was presented to the Inquisition whose death sentences the king himself could not revoke, the judges refused to consider the case at all; whereupon they were promptly removed by Pombal who made his own brother chief inquisitor; and from him and two other tools, promptly drew a condemnation of Malagrida for heresy, schism, blasphemy and gross immorality.
The sentence of death was passed on September 20, 1761, and on the same day the venerable priest was brought to hear the formal proclamation of it in the hall of supplication. There he was told that he was degraded from his priestly functions, and was condemned to be led through the public streets of the city, with a rope around his neck, to the square called do Rocco, where he was to be strangled by the executioner, and after he was dead, his body was to be burned to ashes, so that no memory of him or his sepulchre might remain. He heard the sentence without emotion and quietly protested his innocence. On the very next day, September 21, the execution took place. Platforms were erected around the square. Cavalry and infantry were massed here and there in large bodies; each soldier had eight rounds of ammunition. Pombal presided. The nobility, the members of the courts, and officers of the State were compelled to be present, and great throngs of people crowded the square and filled the abutting avenues and streets.
When everything was ready, a gruesome procession started from the prison. Malagrida appeared with the carocha, or high cap of the criminal, on his head, and a gag in his mouth. With him were fifty-two others who had been condemned for various crimes; but only he was to die. They were called from their cells merely to accentuate his disgrace. Having arrived at the place of execution, the sentence was again read to him; and when he was relieved of the gag, he calmly protested his innocence and gave himself up to the executioners, uttering the words of Our Lord on the Cross: "Father, into Thy hands, I commend my spirit." He was quickly strangled; then fire was set to his lifeless body and the ashes were scattered to the winds. He was seventy-two years of age, and had spent forty-one of them working for the salvation of his fellowmen.
All this happened in Portugal which once gloried in having the great Francis Xavier represent it before the world; which exulted in a son like de Britto, the splendid apostle of the Brahmans, who waived aside a mitre in Europe but bent his neck with delight to receive the stroke of an Oriental scimitar. The same Portugal which inscribed on its roll of honor the forty Jesuits who suffered death while on their way to evangelize Portugal's possessions in Brazil, now made a holiday to witness the hideous torture of the venerable and saintly Malagrida. The Jesuits of Portugal had done much for their country. They had borne an honorable part in the struggle that threw off the Spanish yoke: the magnificent Vieira was a greater emancipator of the native races than was Las Casas; and he and his brethren had won more territories for Portugal than da Gama and Cabral had ever discovered. But all that was forgotten, and they were driven out of their country, or kept chained in fetid dungeons till they died or were burned at the stake in the market-place, in the presence of the king and the people. No wonder that Portugal has descended to the place she now occupies among the nations.
XV. CHOISEUL
The French Method--Purpose of the Enemy--Preliminary Accusations--Voltaire's testimony--La Vallette--La Chalotais--Seizure of Property--Auto da fé of the Works of Lessius, Suárez, Valentia, etc.--Appeal of the French Episcopacy--Christophe de Beaumont--Demand for a French Vicar--"Sint ut sunt aut non sint"--Protest of Clement XIII --Action of Father La Croix and the Jesuits of Paris--Louis XV signs the Act of Suppression--Occupations of dispersed Jesuits--Undisturbed in Canada--Expelled from Louisiana-- Choiseul's Colonization of Guiana.
The result of Pombal's work in Portugal was applauded by his friends in France, but his methods were condemned. "He was a butcher with an axe." Their own procedure was to be along different lines. They would first poison the public mind, would enjoy the pleasure of seeing the heretical Jansenist condemning the Jesuit for heterodoxy, and the professional debauchee assailing his morality, and then they would put the Society to death by process of law for the good of the commonwealth and of the Church. There would be no imprisonments, no burnings at the stake, no exiles, but simply an authorized confiscation of property which would leave the Jesuits without a home, replenish the public purse and ensure the peace of the nation. It was much easier and more refined. Meantime, the Portuguese exhibition was a valuable object lesson to their followers, who saw a king lately honored with the title of His Most Faithful Majesty putting to death the most ardent champions of the Faith. Later on, The Christian King, The Catholic King, and The Apostolic Emperor would unite to show that "Faith" and "Christianity" and "Apostolicity" were only names.
With all their refinement, however, the French were more radical and more malignant than the Portuguese. Pombal had no other idea beyond that of a state Church such as he had seen in England, forming a part of the government machinery, and when his effort to bring that about by marrying the Protestant Duke of Cumberland to the Infanta of Portugal was thwarted by the Jesuits, he simply treated them as he did his other political enemies; he put them in jail or the grave. In France, the scheme was more comprehensive. With men like Voltaire and his associates in the literary world, and Choiseul and others of his set controlling the politics of the country, the plan was not merely to do away with the Church, but with all revealed religion. As the Jesuits were conspicuous adversaries of the scheme, it was natural that they should be disposed of first.
Such is the opinion of St. Liguori, who says: "The whole thing is a plot of the Jansenists and unbelievers to strike the Pope and the Church." The Protestant historian Maximilian Schoell is of like mind (Cours d'histoire, xliv.): "The Church had to be isolated; and to be isolated, it had to be deprived of the help of that sacred phalanx which had avowed itself to the defence of the Pontifical throne.... Such was the real cause of the hatred meted out to that Society." Dutilleul, in his "Histoire des corporations religieuses en France" (p. 279) expresses himself as follows: "The Jesuit is a missionary, a traveller, a mystic, a man of learning, an elegant civilizer of savages, a confessor of queens, a professor, a legislator, a financier, and, if need be, a warrior. His was not a narrow and personal ambition, as people erroneously suppose and assert. He was something more. He was a reactionist, a Catholic and a Roman revolutionist. Far from being attached, as is supposed, to his own interests, the Society has been in the most daring efforts of its indefatigable ambition only the protagonists of the spiritual authority of Rome."
Indeed, we have it from Voltaire himself, who wrote to Helvetius in 1761: "Once we have destroyed the Jesuits, we shall have easy work with the Pope." Rorbacher (Histoire de l'église, tom. XXVII, p. 28) holds the same view, "They are attacking the Society only to strike with greater certainty at the Church and the State." But the real, the ultimate purpose of Voltaire was expressed by his famous phrase Ecrasons l'infâme--"Let us crush the detestable thing," the detestable thing meaning God or Christ, and such has ever been the aim of his disciples. That it still persists was proclaimed officially from the French tribune by Viviani, "Our war is not against the Church, nor against Christianity, but against God." This open and defiant profession of atheism, however, would not have been possible in 1761. Hence, to conceal their purpose, they allied themselves with the most pretentious professors of the religion of the time; the only ones, according to themselves, who knew the Church's dogma and observed her moral law; the orthodox and austere Jansenists, who probably flattered themselves they were tricking les impies, whereas, d'Alembert wrote to one of his friends "Let the Pandours destroy the Jesuits; then we shall destroy the Pandours."
The programme was to compel the parliament to terrorize the king, which was very easy, because of the gross licentiousness of Louis XV. He was simply a tool in the hands of his mistresses, and Guizot in his "Histoire de France" has a picture in which Madame du Barry stands over the king and points to the picture of Charles I of England, who was beheaded for resisting parliament.
The Jansenist section of the coalition began the fight by the time-worn accusation of the "lax morality" of the Jesuits--a method of assault that was by no means acceptable to Voltaire who as early as 1746 had written to his friend d'Alembert, as follows: "What did I see during the seven years that I lived in the Jesuit's College? The most laborious and frugal manner of life; every hour of which was spent in the care of us boys and in the exercises of their austere profession. For that I call to witness thousands of men who were brought up as I was. Hence, it is that I can never help being astounded at their being accused of teaching lax morality. They have had like other religious in the dark ages casuists who have treated the pro and con of questions that are evident today or have been relegated to oblivion. But, ma foi are we going to judge their morality by the satire of the Lettres Provinciales. It is assuredly by Father Bourdaloue and Father Cheminais and their other preachers and by their missionaries that we should measure them. Put in parallel columns the sermons of Bourdaloue and the Lettres Provinciales, and you'll find in the latter the art of raillery pressed into service to make indifferent things appear criminal and to clothe insults in elegant language; but you will learn from Bourdaloue how to be severe to yourself and indulgent to others. I ask then, which is true morality and which of the two books is more useful to mankind? I make bold to say that there is nothing more contradictory; nothing more iniquitous; nothing more shameful in human nature than to accuse of lax morality, the men who lead the austerest kind of life in Europe, and who go to face death at the ends of Asia and America."
The romances about the immense wealth of the Society best appealed to the public imagination, especially as the news of an impending financial disaster was in the air. One instance of this style of propaganda may suffice. The others all resemble it. A Spaniard, it was said, had arrived at Brest with, 2,000,000 livres in his wallet and was promptly killed by the Jesuits. Soon the 2,000,000 had grown to 8,000,000. Then there was a distinguished conversion; that of a Jesuit named Chamillard who had turned Gallican and Jansenist on his death-bed; and although Chamillard a few days afterwards appeared in the flesh and protested that he was neither dead nor a Gallican nor a Jansenist, his testimony was set aside. It had appeared in print and that was enough. Such absurdities of course could do no serious harm, but at last, a splendid fact presented itself which could not be disproved; especially as a vast number of people, in France and elsewhere, were financial sufferers in consequence of it. It was the bankruptcy of Father de la Valette. In the public mind it proved everything that had ever been written about the Order. Briefly it is as follows:
At the very beginning of the Seven Years War, the British fleet had destroyed 300 French ships, captured 10,000 sailors and confiscated 300,000,000 livres worth of merchandise. Among the sufferers was Father La Valette, the superior of Martinique, who was engaged in cultivating extensive plantations on the island, and selling the products in Europe, for the support of the missions. Very unwisely he borrowed extensively after the first disaster, going deeper and deeper into debt, until at last he was unable to meet his obligations which by this time had run up to the alarming sum of 2,000,000 livres, or about $400,000. Suit was therefore brought by some of the creditors, but instead of submitting the case to a commission established long before by Louis XIV for adjusting the affairs of the missions, they laid it before the usual parliamentary tribunal in spite of the fact of its inveterate and well-known hatred of the Society. Guizot says that they did it with a certain pride, so convinced were they of the justice of their plea. Hundreds of others had suffered like themselves at the hands of the enemy in the Seven Years War, and they had no desire to avail themselves of any special legislation in their behalf. They underrated the honesty of the judges.
A verdict was, of course, rendered against them, and the whole Society was made responsible for the debt, though by the law of the land there was no solidarity between the various houses of religious orders. Nevertheless, they set to work to cancel their indebtedness. They had made satisfactory arrangements with their principal creditors, and although Martinique, where much of the property was located, had been seized by the English; yet one-third of their liabilities had been paid off when the government took alarm. If this continued, the public treasury would reap no profit from the transaction. Hence, an order was issued to seize every Jesuit establishment in France. A stop was put to the reimbursement of private individuals and the government seized all that was left. But although the Society was not to blame it incurred the hatred of all those who were thus deprived of their money. That, indeed, was the purpose of the government seizure.
Long before the crash, the superiors had done all in their power to stop La Valette, but in those days Martinique was far from Rome. Although attempt after attempt was made to reach him, it was all in vain. One messenger was crippled when embarking at Marseilles; another died at sea; another was captured by pirates, until in 1762 Father de la Marche arrived on the island. After a thorough investigation de la Marche declared (1) that La Valette had given himself up to trading in defiance of canon law and of the special laws of the Society; (2) that he had concealed his proceedings from the higher superiors of the Society and even from the Fathers of Martinique; (3) that his acts had been denounced by his superiors, not only as soon as they were made known, but as soon as they were suspected. The visitor then asked the General of the Society (1) to suspend La Valette from all administration both spiritual and temporal: and (2) to recall him immediately to Europe.
La Valette's submission was appended to the verdict of the visitor; in it, he acknowledges the justice of the sentence, although as soon as he knew what harm he was doing he had stopped. He attests under oath that not one of his superiors had given him any authorization or counsel or approval; and no one had shared in or connived at his enterprises. He takes God to witness that he did not make his avowals under compulsion or threat, or out of complaisance, or for any inducement held out to him, but absolutely of his own accord, and for truth's sake; and in order to dispel and refute, as far as in him lay, the calumnies against the Society consequent upon his acts. The document bore the date of April 25, 1762. He was expelled from the Society and passed the rest of his life in England. He never retracted or modified any of the statements he had made in Martinique.
Following close on the decision in the La Valette case, parliament ordered the immediate production of a copy of the Constitutions of the Society. On the following morning, it was in their hands and was submitted to several committees made up of Jansenists, Gallicans and Atheists. These committees were charged with the examination of the Institute and also of various publications of the Society. Extracts were to be made and presented for the consideration of the court. The most famous of these reports was the one made by La Chalotais, a prominent magistrate of Brittany. He discovered that the Society was in conflict with the authority of the Church, the general Councils, the Apostolic See, and all ecclesiastical and civil governments; moreover that, in their approved theological works, they taught every form of heresy, idolatry and superstition, and inculcated suicide, regicide, sacrilege, robbery, impurity of every kind, usury, magic, murder, cruelty, hatred, vengeance, sedition, treachery--in brief, whatever iniquity mankind could commit was to be found in their writings. As soon as the report was laid before the judges, a decree was issued on May 8, 1761 declaring that the one hundred and fifty-eight colleges, churches and residences with the foreign missions of the Order were to be seized by the government; all the physical laboratories, the libraries, moneys, inheritances of its members, the bequests of friends for charitable, educational or missionary purposes--all was to go into the Government coffers.
Crétineau-Joly estimated that the total value of the property seized amounted to about 58,000,000 francs or $11,600,000. The amount of the booty explains the zeal of the prosecution. To soften the blow a concession of a pension of thirty cents a day was made by the Paris parliament to those who would take an oath that they had left the Society. The Languedoc legislators, however, cut it down to twelve. Moreover this pension was restricted to the Professed. The Scholastics got nothing; and as they were considered legally dead, because of the vows they had taken in the Society, they were declared incapable of inheriting even from their own parents. The decree also forbade all subjects of the king to enter the Society; to attend any lecture given by Jesuits; to visit their houses previous to their expulsion; or to hold any communication with them. The Jesuits themselves were enjoined not to write to each other, not even to the General. It is noteworthy that the lawmakers who issued these regulations profess to be shocked by the Jesuit doctrine of "blind obedience."
By a second decree it was ordered that the works of twenty-seven Jesuits which had been examined should be burned by the public executioner. Among them were such authors as Bellarmine, Lessius, Suárez, Valentia, Salmerón, Gretser, Vásquez, Jouvancy,--all of whom were and yet are considered to be among the greatest of Catholic theologians, but the lay doctors of the parliament held them to be dangerous to public morals; and to the peace of the nation and in order to express their horror emphatically, they called for this auto da fé. It should be noted that all of these works were written in Latin, and that their technical character as well as the terminology employed would make it absolutely impossible for even these solons of the French parliament to grasp the meaning of the text. In order to sway the public mind, a summary of the Chalotais report, commonly known as "Extraits des assertions" was scattered broadcast throughout the country. The desired effect was produced and even to-day if an attempt is made to answer any of its charges the answer is always ready, "We have the authority of La Chalotais; he was an eminent magistrate; he examined the books; the highest court in France accorded him the verdict, and any attempt to explain away the charges is superfluous!"
Yet there was in Paris at that time a higher tribunal than the one which gave La Chalotais his claim to notoriety. It was the General Assembly of the Clergy which had been convoked by the King to pass upon the character of the Jesuits as a body, before he affixed his signature to the decree of expulsion. It consisted of fifty-one prelates, some of them cardinals. They met on June 27 and with the exception of the Bishop of Angers, Allais, and especially of Fitzjames, the Bishop of Soissons, who was the head of the Jansenist party and whose pastoral utterances were condemned by the Pope as heretical, addressed a "Letter" to the king conjuring him "to preserve an institution which was so useful to the State," and declaring that "they could not see without alarm the destruction of a society of religious who were so praiseworthy for the integrity of their morals, the austerity of their discipline, the vastness of their labors and their erudition and for the countless services they had rendered to the Church.
"Charged as they are with the most precious trust of the education of youth, participating as they do under the authority of the bishops, in the most delicate functions of the holy ministry, honored as they are by the confidence of kings in the most redoubtable of tribunals, loved and sought after by a great number of our subjects and esteemed even by those who fear them, they have won for themselves a consideration which is too general to be disregarded."
"Everything, Sire, pleads with you in favor of the Jesuits: religion claims them as its defenders; the Church as her ministers; Christians as the guardians of their conscience; a great number of your subjects who have been their pupils intercede with you for their old masters; and all the youth of the kingdom pray for those who are to form their minds and their hearts. Do not, Sire, turn a deaf ear to our united supplication; do not permit in your kingdom, that in violation of the laws of justice, and of the Church and of the State an entire and blameless society should be destroyed."
The Archbishop of Paris, the famous Christophe de Beaumont was not satisfied with this general appeal. He was the chief figure in France at that time; and every word he uttered was feared by the enemies of the Church. He was great enough to be in correspondence with all the crowned heads of Europe, and Frederick the Great said of him: "If he would consent to come to Prussia, I would go half way to meet him." Louis XV had forced him to accept the See of Paris, but had not the courage to support him when assailed by his foes. He was a saint as well as a hero; he lent money to men who were libelling him, and would give the clothes on his back to the poor. When a hospital took fire in the city, he filled his palace and his cathedral with the patients. Hence, he did not hesitate, after parliament had condemned the Society, to issue a pastoral which he foresaw would drive him from his see. "What shall I say, Brethren," he asks, "to let you know what I think of the religious society which is now so fiercely assailed? We repeat with the Council of Trent that it is 'a pious Institute;' that it is 'venerable,' as the illustrious Bossuet declared it to be. We spurn far from us the 'Extraits des assertions' as a resumé of Jesuit teaching; and we renew our declaration that in the condition of suffering and humiliation to which they have been brought that their lot is a most happy one, because in the eyes of religious men, it is an infinitely precious thing to have no reproach on one's soul when overwhelmed by misfortune." As he foresaw he was expelled from his see for this utterance, not by parliament but by Louis XV whose cause he was defending.
Perhaps this treatment of the great Archbishop of Paris explains the silence maintained through all the uproar by the Jesuits themselves. One would expect some splendid outburst of eloquence in behalf of the Society from one of its outraged members; but not a word was uttered by any of them. Their protests would not have been printed or published. Even Theiner who wrote against the Society says: "All France was inundated with libellous pamphlets against the Jesuits. The most notable of all was the one entitled 'Extracts of the dangerous and pernicious doctrines of all kinds which the so-called Jesuits have at all times, uninterruptedly maintained, taught and published.' Calumny and malice fill the book from cover to cover. There is no crime which the Jesuits did not teach or of which they are not accused. Never was bad faith carried to such extremes. And yet there is no book that is so often cited as an authority against the Society and its spirit."
Meantime, the government had approached the Pope for the purpose of obtaining for the French Jesuits a special vicar who should be quasi-independent of the General. It was harking back to the old scheme of Philip II and Louis XIV. His Holiness replied in the memorable words: "Sint ut sunt aut non sint" (Let them be as they are or not at all.) We find in a letter of the procurator of Aquitaine that in case a vicar was appointed every member of the province of Paris would leave the Order, which under such an arrangement would be no longer the Society of Jesus. Again in his letter to the king, after declaring that the appointment of a French Vicar would be a substantial alteration of the Institute which he could not authorize, the Pope says: "For two hundred years the Society has been so useful to the Church, that, though it has never disturbed the public tranquillity either in your kingdom or in any one else's, yet because it has inflicted such damage on the enemies of religion by its science and its piety, it is assailed on all sides by calumny and imposture when fair fighting was found insufficient to destroy them." Finally, on January 9, 1765, after the final knell had sounded, Clement XIII issued his famous Bull "Apostolicum." It is given at length in de Ravignan's "Clément XIII et Clément XIV," but a few extracts will suffice.
After enumerating the glories of the Society in the past, and calling attention to the fact that it had been approved by nineteen Popes, who had most minutely examined their Institute, Clement XIII continues: "It has, nevertheless, in our days been falsely and malignantly described both by word and printed book as irreligious and impious, and has been covered with opprobrium and ignominy until even the Church has been denounced for sustaining it. In order, therefore, to repel these calumnies and to put a stop to the impious discourses which are uttered in defiance of both reason and equity; and to comfort the Regular Clerks of the Society of Jesus who appeal to us for justice; and to give greater emphasis to our words by the weight of our authority and to lend some solace in the sufferings they are undergoing; and finally to defer to the just desires of our venerable brothers, the bishops of the whole Catholic world, whose letters to us are filled with eulogies of this Society from whose labors the greatest services are rendered in their dioceses; and also of our own accord and from certain knowledge, and making use of the plenitude of our Apostolic authority, and following in the footsteps of our predecessors, we, by this present Constitution, which is to remain in force forever, say and declare in the same form and in the same manner as has been heretofore said and declared, that the Institute of the Society of Jesus breathes in the very highest degree, piety and holiness both in the principal object which it has continually in view, which is none other than the defence and propagation of the Catholic Faith, and also in the means it employs for that end. Such is our experience of it up to the present day. It is this experience which has taught us how greatly the rule of the Society has formed up to our day defenders of the orthodox Faith and zealous missionaries who animated by an invincible courage dare a thousand dangers on land and sea, to carry the light of the Gospel to savage and barbarous nations.... Let no one dare be rash enough to set himself against this my present approbative and confirmative Constitution lest he incur the wrath of God."
These splendid approvals of their labors did much to keep up the courage of the harassed Jesuits, but if what Father de Ravignan and Crétineau-Joly relate be true, they had ample reason to keep themselves in a salutary humility or rather bow their heads in shame. On December 19, 1761, we are told, the provincial of Paris, Father de La Croix and one hundred and fifteen Fathers addressed a declaration to the clergy assembled in Paris, by order of the king, which ran as follows: "We the undersigned, provincial of the Jesuits of the province of Paris, the superior of the professed house, the rector of the College of Louis Le Grand, the superior of the novitiate and other Jesuits professed, even of the first vows, residing in the said houses, and renewing as far as needs be the declarations already made by the Jesuits of France in 1626, 1713 and 1757, declare before their Lordships the cardinals, archbishops and bishops now assembled in Paris, by order of the king, to give their opinion on several points of the Institute: (1) That it is impossible to be more submissive than we are, or more inviolably attached to the laws, maxims and usages of this kingdom with regard to the royal power, which in temporal matters depends neither directly nor indirectly from any power on earth, and has God alone above it. Recognizing that the bonds by which subjects are attached to their rulers are indissoluble, we condemn as pernicious and worthy of execration at all times every doctrine contrary to the safety of the king, not only in the works of some theologians of our Society who have adopted such doctrines but also those of every other theologian whosoever he may be. (2) We shall teach in our public and private lessons of theology the doctrine established by the Clergy of France in the Four Articles of the Assembly of 1682, and shall teach nothing contrary to it. (3) We recognize that the bishops of France have the right to exercise in our regard what, according to the canons of the Gallican Church, belongs to them in their dealings with regulars; and we renounce all the privileges to the contrary that may have been accorded to our Society or may be accorded in the future. (4) If, which may God forbid, it happens that we are ordered by our General to do anything contrary to the present declaration, persuaded as we are that we cannot obey without sin, we shall regard such orders as unlawful, and absolutely null and void; which we could not and should not obey in virtue of the rules of obedience to the General such as is prescribed in the Constitutions. We, therefore, beg that the present declaration may be placed on the official register of Paris, and addressed to the other provinces of the kingdom, so that this same declaration signed by us, being deposited in the official registers of each diocese may serve as a perpetual memorial of our fidelity.
Etienne de la Croix, Provincial."
Quoting this document and admitting its genuineness Father de Ravignan exclaims: "In my eyes nothing can excuse this act of weakness. I deplore it; I condemn it; I shall merely relate how it came to pass" (Clément XIII et Clément XIV, I 135). He goes on to say:--
"In a personal letter the original of which is in the archives of the Gesù at Rome, Father La Croix, provincial of Paris explains to the General the circumstances and occasion of this unfortunate affair. He tells how the royal commissioners came to him with the aforesaid declaration already drawn up and accompanied by a formal order of the king to sign it immediately. It was a most unforeseen demand, for although the Jesuits of France had already suffered considerable trouble about the question of the Four Articles in 1713, and also in 1757, when Damiens attempted to assassinate Louis XV, they had been compelled on both occasions to sign only the first article which dealt with the temporal independence of the king. Shortly afterwards, a new royal decree had been brought to their attention. It consisted of eighteen articles, the fourth of which was as follows: 'Our will is that in every theological course followed by the students of the Society, the propositions set forth by the Clergy of France in 1682, should be defended, at least in one public discussion, to which the principal personages of the place shall be invited, and over and above that, the arrangements laid down by the edict of March 1682 shall be observed.'
"While these matters were being debated by the king and his ministers on one side and by parliament on the other, a royal order was despatched to the Jesuits of Paris to affix their signatures to the disgraceful capitulation given above. It is said that Louis XV imagined that he could mollify the recalcitrant parliament by this new concession: and, hence, La Croix and his associates were foolish enough to imagine that such a result could ensue."
Continuing his indictment of La Croix and his one hundred and fifteen associates, de Ravignan informs his readers that "an unpublished document which no writer has so far made mention of, furnishes important details about the matter. It is entitled 'An exact relation of all that took place with regard to the interpretation of the decree of Aquaviva in 1610, which was sent to Rome in 1761 and rejected by the General; and also the declaration which the General refused to approve.' The author is M. de Flesselles, who was charged by the commission to report to Choiseul whose agent he was.
"With regard to the declaration about Gallicanism" says de Flesselles "the Jesuits, after some difficulties regarding its form, determined to sign it, and even when urged by the royal commissioners they undertook to send it to their General for approbation. Soon after, when the Jesuits received the reply of their General, the provincial came to tell me that when the Pope was made aware of the declaration which the French Jesuits had made and of the one they proposed to make, His Holiness angrily reprimanded the General for permitting the members of the Society in France to maintain doctrines which are in conflict with the teachings of the Holy See."
Now it is unpleasant to contest the authority of such an eminent man as de Ravignan, but, on the other hand, his conclusions that this letter was a Jesuit production or received a Jesuit endorsement are by no means convincing. In the first place, no Jesuit would ever sign a paper which began with the words: "We the Professed, even of the first vows." There is no such category in the Society. Secondly, no Jesuit or indeed any one in his senses would ever ask a superior for a permission to teach error, and say, in the same breath, that it was a matter of indifference whether the permission was granted or not. Thirdly, as all the Jesuits of the province had announced their intention of leaving the Society if Louis XV imposed on them a commissary General independent of their superior at Rome--as we recited above from an extant letter from the procurator of the province of Aquitaine--it is inconceivable that those same men, at that very same time should solemnly declare themselves rebels against the Father General at Rome. Fourthly, as no association rewards a man who attempts to destroy it, one finds difficulty in understanding how, after this revolt, the leader in the rebellion, La Croix, was not only not expelled from the Society but was retained in his responsible post of provincial and later was made assistant general of the Society.
Moreover, it is difficult to understand why, when de Flesselles says that "the Fathers determined to sign the document," de Ravignan should go one step further and say that "they signed it." Nor does it help matters to say that this was "un acte de faiblesse," when, it was a wholesale, corporate and deliberate crime of cowardice and treason; nor will it avail to suggest that the Pope and General must have been intensely, grieved--"Ils durent être amèrement affligés." History does not deal with conjectures but with facts. The question is not whether they must have been, but whether they were really grieved over an act which had really occurred and which reflected such discredit on the Society? Again, as one of the greatest glories of the French Jesuits was their long and successful battle against Gallicanism, it is inconceivable that they should suddenly reverse and stultify themselves at the very moment when all the bishops of France, save one, had abandoned Gallicanism and had united in eulogizing the Society; and to do it at a time when the greatest friend they ever had, Pope Clement XIII, glorified them for their orthodoxy and pronounced the famous words: "Let them be as they are or not at all!"
To have declared for Gallicanism would have stripped them of their priestly functions, it would have aroused the intense disgust and contempt of the hierarchy of France and of the world and would have called down on them the anathema of the Pope. Indeed, is it likely that Pope Clement XIV would have omitted to note the defection in his Brief of Suppression, if they had been guilty? Fortunately, we may refer to the explicit declaration of the Protestant historian, Schoell (Cours d'histoire, xl, 53), who says: "These men who are accused of playing with religion, refused to take the oath to sustain the principles of the Gallican Church. Of 4000 Fathers who were in France, hardly five submitted." If there were "hardly five" Gallicans in all the provinces of France, it is a justifiable conclusion that 116 Jesuits of the provinces of Paris did not sign the famous "Statement" of de Flesselles.
Louis XV made a feeble attempt to save the situation by withdrawing the decree of expulsion from the jurisdiction of parliament, but Mme. de Pompadour and Choiseul so effectively worked on his fears that he ignominiously rescinded his order. The Pope had meantime delivered an allocution in a consistory on September 3, 1762; and had sent a letter to Cardinal Choiseul, the brother of the minister, on September 8 of the same year, in both of which he declared that "by a solemn decree, he had quashed and nullified the proceedings of the various parliaments against the Jesuits." He enjoined upon the cardinal "to use all his episcopal power against the impious act which was directed against the Church and against religion." He wrote to other bishops in the same tone of indignation and anger. It was not, however, until the November of 1764 that Choiseul succeeded in extorting the royal signature which made the decree irrevocable. Of course, Mme. de Pompadour was to the fore in securing this shameful surrender of the royal prerogative. The poor king cuts a sorry figure in signing the document. After making some feeble scrawls on the paper, he complained that the preamble was too long and that it would have sufficed to state that "the Jesuits had produced a great tumult in his kingdom." He added he did not think the word "punish" should be used; it was too strong; "he never cordially liked the Jesuits, yet they had the glory of being hated by all heretics.... I send them out of my kingdom against my will; at least, I don't want people to think that I agree with everything the parliament said or did against them." He ended by saying: "If you do not make these changes, I will not sign, but I must stop talking. I would say too much and I do not want anyone in France to discuss it." One could hardly say of Louis that "he was every inch a king."
The desire to close the mouths of every one of his subjects on a matter that concerned them all as intelligent beings and as citizens was carried out with extreme rigor. Thus, when two secular priests had the temerity to condemn the decree, they were promptly hanged. The audacity of the ministers and parliament went still further; and on December 3 the Duke de Praslin sent a note to Aubeterre, the French ambassador at Rome to advise him that "under the circumstances, it would be very futile and still more dangerous for the Pope to take any measures either directly or indirectly in contravention of the wishes and intention of his majesty; and hence His Holiness must, out of zeal for religion and out of regard for the Jesuits, observe the same silence which His Majesty had ordered to be observed in his states." The Pope replied to the insult by the Bull "Apostolicum," which was a splendid proclamation of the absolute innocence of the proscribed Order. It aroused the fury of the Governments of France, Portugal, Naples and other countries. In France it was burned in the streets of several cities by the public executioner. In Portugal, any one who circulated it or had it in his possession was adjudged guilty of high treason; but on the other hand, from the bishops of the entire Catholic world came enthusiastic letters of approval and praise for the fearless Pope who dared to stand forth as the enemy of tyranny and injustice.
Böhmer-Monod, in their "Jésuites," are of the opinion that the Pope was "injudicious, and that out of the hundreds of Catholic bishops, only twenty-three assured him of their approbation." De Ravignan, who is better informed, tells us that "almost the whole episcopacy of the world were a unit in this manifestation of loyalty to the supreme Pastor." Before the event, two hundred bishops had sent their appeals to the Pope, in favor of the Society; and the Pope himself says in the Bull: "Ex omni regione sub coelo est una vox omnium episcoporum" (From every region under the canopy of heaven, there is but one voice from the episcopal body). After the Bull appeared, other bishops hastened to send him their adhesions and felicitations. Even in France itself, in spite of the terrorism exercised by parliament, the assembly of the clergy of 1765, by a unanimous vote, protested against the condemnation of the Jesuits, extolled "the integrity of their morals, the austerity of their lives, the greatness of their labors and science"; and declared that their expulsion left a frightful void in the ministry, in education, and in the sublime and laborious work of the missions. Not only that, but they wanted it put on record that "the clergy would never cease to pray for the re-establishment of the Order and would lay that plea at the feet of the king."
The exiles lingered for a while in various parts of France; for some of the divisional parliaments were not at one with Paris in their opposition to the Society. Indeed, in many of them, the proscription was voted only by a small majority. Thus at Rennes, there was a majority of three; at Toulouse two; at Perpignan one; at Bordeaux five; at Aix two; while Besançon, Alsace, Flanders and Artois and Lorraine pronounced in their favor and proclaimed "the sons of St. Ignatius as the most faithful subjects of the King of France and the surest guarantees of the morality of the people." On the other hand, Brittany, the country of Chalotais, author of the "Extraits," was especially rancorous in its hate. Thus, it voted to deprive of all civil and municipal functions those parents who would send their children abroad to Jesuit schools; and the children on their return home were to be punished in a similar fashion. The Fathers lingered for a few years here and there in their native country employed in various occupations; but in 1767 a decree was issued expelling them all from the territory of France.
An interesting manifestation of affection by the pupils of St. Omers for their persecuted masters occurred when the parliament of Paris issued its order of expulsion in 1767. St. Omers was founded by Father Persons in 1592 or 1593. It was not for ecclesiastics as were the colleges of Douai, Rome and Valladolid, but to give English boys an education which they could not get in their own country. It was twenty-four miles from Calais and in territory which at that time belonged to the King of Spain. Shortly after its transfer from Eu in Normandy where an attempt had been made to start it, there were one hundred boys on its register and, thirty years later, the number had doubled. For years it was a favorite school for English Catholics and it rejoices in having had twenty of its students die for the Faith. It continued its work for a century and a half. When the expulsion of the Jesuits left the college without teachers it was handed over to the secular clergy, but when they arrived there were no boys. They had all decamped for Bruges in Belgium, and there the classes continued until the general suppression of the Society in 1773. Even after that, the English ex-Jesuits kept the college going until 1794, when the French Revolution put an end to it. By that time, however, one of the former students, Mr. Thomas Weld, had established the Fathers on his property at Stonyhurst in England, so that St. Omers and Stonyhurst are mother and daughter.
The buildings and land at St. Omers were handed over by the French government to the English secular priests, who were at Douai. Alban Butler, the author of the "Lives of the Saints," was its president from 1766 to 1773. At present a military hospital occupies the site.
In Louisiana, which still owed allegiance to France, the dismissal of the Fathers was particularly disgraceful. For no sooner had the news of Choiseul's exploit in the mother-country arrived than the superior council of Louisiana set to work. "This insignificant body of provincial officers" as Shea calls them (I, 587), "issued a decree declaring the Society to be dangerous to the royal authority, to the rights of bishops, to the public peace of society" and pronounced their vows to be null and void. These judges in matters ecclesiastical, it should be noted, were all laymen. They ordered all the property to be seized and sold at auction, though personal books and clothes were exempted. The name and habit of the Society were forbidden; the vestments and plate of the chapel at New Orleans were given by the authorities to the Capuchins; but all the Jesuit churches in Louisiana and Illinois were ordered to be levelled to the ground. Every Jesuit was to embark on the first ship that set sail for France; and arriving there, he was to report to Choiseul. Each one was given about $420--to pay for his passage and six month's subsistence.
There was a deviation in some cases about going to France, for Father Carette was sent to San Domingo; and Father Le Roy made his way to Mexico. A difficulty arose about Father Beaudoin, who was a Canadian. Why should he be sent to France where he had no friends? Besides, his health was shattered by his privations on the missions, and he was at that time seventy-two years old. He was to go to France, however, but just as he was about to be dragged to the ship a wealthy friend interceded for him and gave him a home. Another Father in Alabama did not hear of the order for several months; and when at last he made his appearance in New Orleans, he was arrested like a criminal and packed off to France.
On September 22, a courier reached Fort Chartres, which was on English territory; and in spite of the danger of embroiling the government, Father Watron who was then sixty-seven years old was expelled, and with him his two fellow missionaries. The official from Louisiana gave the vestments to negro wenches and the altar-plate and candelabra were soon found in houses of ill-fame. The chapel was then sold on condition that the purchaser should demolish it. At Vincennes, the same outrages were perpetrated and Father Duvernay, who had been for six months confined to his bed, was carried off with the others to New Orleans and despatched to France. Two only were allowed to remain, owing to the entreaties and protests of friends. One of the exiles was Father Viel, who was a Louisianian by birth. The most conspicuous personage enforcing this expulsion was a certain Lafrenière, but he soon met his punishment. In 1766 Louis XV made a gift of the entire province to his cousin of Spain, and when Count Alexander O'Reilly was sent out with three thousand soldiers to quell the disturbance that ensued, Lafrenière and three associates were taken into the back yard of the barracks and shot to death. Others were sent in chains to Havana.
Thus the Suppression of the Society in France was not carried out with the same brutality as in Portugal. There were no prisons, or chains, or deportation, and they had not the glory of suffering martyrdom. They were merely stripped of all they had and told to go where they wished. Whether they lived or died was a matter of unconcern to the government. It was merely a difference of methods; but both were equally effective. The Portuguese Jesuits were scourged; their French brethren were sneered at. Perhaps the latter was harder to bear.
There is a curious sequel to all this. Choiseul, proud of his achievement in expelling the Jesuits from France and its colonies, now conceived the magnificent project of colonizing Guyana on lines quite different from those followed by the detested Order. He induced 14,000 deluded French people to go and take possession of the rich and fertile lands of Guyana. They found one poor old Jesuit there, who because he was not a subject of France, had refused to obey the decree of expulsion. His name was O'Reilly, but what could he do with 14,000 people? He simply disappeared from the scene. Very likely, he joined the Indians, who fled into the forests at the sight of this immense army of Frenchmen, who now had the country to themselves without striking a blow. But two years later, Chevalier de Balzac had to report back to France, that of the 14,000 colonists only 918 were alive. Thus, expelling 6,000 Jesuits from France, Choiseul had murdered 13,000 of his fellow-countrymen (Christian Missions, II, 168).
In 1766, M. de Piedmont, the governor wrote to the Duc de Praslin, that he had already informed the Duc de Choiseul how necessary it was to send priests to this colony. He then described the destruction of the mission posts, the flight of the Indians, the growth of crime amongst the negroes and the rapid ruin of the colony, and added that religion was dying out among the whites as well as among the colored races. For ten years, he kept on repeating this complaint, but no heed was paid to him. At length, Louis XVI, who was so soon to be himself a victim of Choiseul's iniquity sent there, three Jesuits, not Frenchmen, perhaps he had not the heart to ask any of them, but three Jesuits, who had been expelled from Portugal by Pombal, Choiseul's accomplice. They were Padilla, Mathos, and Ferreira. They accepted the mission and the "Journal" of Christopher de Murr says: "The poor savages beholding once again men clothed in the habit which they had learned to venerate, and hearing them speak their own language, fell at their feet, bathing them with tears, and promised to become once more good Christians, since the Fathers, who had begotten them in Jesus Christ, had come back to them." No doubt, these three holy men remained till they died with their poor abandoned Indians.
France's folly in this governmental act was summed up in a letter of d'Alembert to Choiseul, just before the expulsion. In it he says: "France will resort to this rigorous measure against its own subjects at the very moment she is doing nothing in her foreign policy, and in the chronological epitomes of the future we shall read the words for the year 1762: 'This year France lost all her colonies and threw out the Jesuits.'"
XVI. CHARLES III
The Bourbon Kings of Spain--Character of Charles III-- Spanish Ministries--O'Reilly--The Hat and Cloak Riot-- Cowardice of Charles--Tricking the monarch--The Decree of Suppression--Grief of the Pope--His death--Disapproval in France by the Encyclopedists--The Royal Secret-- Simultaneousness of the Suppression--Wanderings of the Exiles --Pignatelli--Expulsion by Tanucci.
Spain had begun to deteriorate in the seventeenth century; it lost all of its European dependencies in the eighteenth, and in the beginning of the nineteenth was stripped of almost every one of its rich and powerful colonies in America. During two-thirds of that period, it was governed by foreigners, none of whom had any claim to consideration, much less respect. Until 1700 it owed allegiance to the house of Austria; after that, the French Bourbons hurried it to its ruin.
Its first Bourbon king, Philip V, had already, in 1713, succeeded in losing Sicily, Milan, Sardinia, the Netherlands, Gibraltar, and the Island of Minorca; that is one-half of its European possessions. Meantime, Catalonia was in rebellion. But little else could be expected from such a ruler. He was not only constitutionally indolent, but apparently mentally defective. His queen kept him in seclusion, and he did nothing but at her dictation; he was professedly devout, but was racked by ridiculous scruples; "outwardly pious," says Schoell, quoting Saint-Simon, "but heedless of the fundamental principles of religion; he was timid and hence sporadically stubborn; and when not in temper, he was easily led. He was without imagination, except that he was continually dreaming of conquering Europe, although he never left Madrid; he was satisfied with the gloomiest existence, and his only amusement was shooting at game, which his servants drove into the brush for him to kill." His conscience often smote him for the sin he said he had committed when he renounced his claim to the throne of France; and, in consequence, he made a vow to lay aside the Spanish crown until what time he should be summoned by England to be King of France. To help him keep his vow, he built the palace of San Ildefonso, which cost the nation 45,000,000 pesos. He appointed his son Louis, a lad of 17, to reign in his stead, and the boy, of course, did nothing but enjoy himself, and died of small-pox in six months' time, having first gone through the ridiculous farce of making his father his heir. Philip then began to doubt whether he could resume his duties as king after having vowed to relinquish them. Besides being thus troubled with scruples, he was in constant dread of catching the disease which carried off his son; he died of apoplexy, July 9, 1764 at the age of 53.
Ferdinand VI, who succeeded him, was as indolent as his father, and with less talent and strength of will; he was afflicted with melancholia, and like his father was haunted by the fear of death. He took no part in the government of the kingdom, but spent most of his time listening to the warblings of the male-soprano, Farinelli, who was so adored by the king that he was sometimes consulted on state affairs. The queen was another of his idols, and when she died, he shut himself in, saw no one, would eat next to nothing; never changed his linen; let his hair and beard grow, and never went to bed. An hour or two in a chair was all he allowed himself for rest. He died at the end of the year, leaving a private fortune of 72,000,000 francs. He was only forty-seven years old. Like the king, the queen was dominated by fear, not however of death, but of poverty. To guard against that contingency she hoarded all the money she could get; accepted whatever presents were offered; and let it be known that the easiest way to win her favor was to have something to give. It is gravely said that though she was very corpulent she was extravagantly fond of dancing.
Ferdinand VI was succeeded by his brother Charles III, who had been King of Naples for twenty-four years. He had six sons, the eldest of whom, Philip Anthony was then twelve years of age, but a hopeless imbecile. The right of succession, therefore, devolved on his second son. The third, who was then eight years old, was to succeed to the crown of Naples, and was left in the hands of Tanucci to be trained for his future office. As Tanucci was a bitter enemy of Christianity, this act of Charles, who had a Jesuit confessor and was regarded as a pious man, would imply that he also was mentally deficient. Like his forebears, he was haunted by a fear of death, a weakness that revealed itself in all his political acts, notably in the suppression of the Society. That was one of the reasons why, long after France and Portugal would have willingly ended the fight with the expulsion of the Jesuits, the supposedly pious Charles persisted until he had wrung the Brief of Suppression from the unwilling hands of Clement XIV.
The ministers of state who controlled the destinies of Spain at this period are of a species whose like cannot be found in the history of any other nation. They begin with the Italian Alberoni who started life as a farm laborer; then became an ecclesiastic, and ultimately a cardinal. "He was destined to trouble the tranquillity of the world for years," says Schoell. According to Saint-Simon, he prevented the restitution of Gibraltar to Spain which England was willing to grant; he was banned by the Pope; and was subsequently turned out of office, chiefly by the intrigues of two Italian ecclesiastics. The queen's nurse, old Laura Piscatori, also figures in the amazing diplomacy of those days, and is charged with an ambition to be as important as Cardinal Alberoni, who came from her native village. The next prime minister was the Biscayan Grimaldi, whose physical appearance Saint-Simon describes, but which we omit. It will suffice to say that "he was base and supple when it suited his convenience, and he never made a false step in that direction." Following him, came Ripperda, who was born in the Netherlands and educated by the Jesuits at Cologne, but became a Protestant in Holland, and a Catholic in Spain, where he lasted only four months, as minister. He turned Protestant a second time, on his return to Holland, and subsequently led an army of Moors against Spain. It is not known whether he died a Christian or a Mohammedan.
Patino and de la Quadra followed each other in quick succession, one good, the other timid and weak. Enseñada, though skilful, was greedy of money, and was considered the head of the French faction in court. Carvajal is next on the list, and displays the English propensities which were natural to him, for he belonged to the house of Lancaster. Indeed, his policy was entirely pro-English and he was in collusion with Keene, the British ambassador. Wall, an Irishman, then flits across the scene, and has with him two associates: Losada and Squillace, both Italians. When Wall quarrelled with the Pope and the Inquisition, he fell, and then another Grimaldi came to the fore; not a Biscayan, like his namesake, but a Genoese. Squillace, apparently from the Italian branch of the Borgias, was next in order, and then in rapid procession came the Spaniards: Roda, de Alva, Aranda, Roda, Moniño, Campomáñez, either as prime ministers or prominent in the government, and nearly all of them under French influence. Finally, the generalissimo of the army and the most popular man in Spain was an Irishman, Alexander O'Reilly. The native Spaniards counted for little; even the king's bodyguard was made up of Walloons.
O'Reilly was probably not in sympathy with the free-thinking politicians who then ruled the nation, for the reason that he was born in Ireland and had all his life been a soldier. Moreover, he was hated by the Aranda faction and retained his post, at the head of the army, only because the king thought that no one could shield the royal life as well as O'Reilly. He was born in 1735, and when still a youth was sub-lieutenant in the Irish Regiment serving in Spain. In 1757 he fought under his countryman de Lacy in Austria, and then followed the fleur-de-lys in France. He so distinguished himself, that the Maréchal de Broglie recommended him to the King of Spain. There he soon became brigadier and restored the ancient prestige of the Spanish army. He was made a commandant at Havana, and rebuilt its fortifications, and from there went to Louisiana to secure it to the Spanish crown. His only military failure was in Algiers, but that was not due to any lack of wisdom in his plans, but because his fleet did not arrive at the time appointed. Even then, there was no one so highly esteemed as O'Reilly, and when he died at an advanced age in 1794, the people all declared that the disasters which fell on the nation would have been averted if he had lived. He is credited with possessing besides his military ardor a sweet and insinuating disposition which may explain how he could easily win over the mob which so terrified King Charles at Madrid.
Meantime, the sinister Choiseul in France had all the ministers of Spain in his grip, and he then determined to capture the king. He first made him a present of what up to that time, had been the special pride of France; the precedence of its ambassadors in public functions over those of all other countries, the German Empire excepted. Charles naturally took the gift, but apparently failed to fathom its significance. The next move was to get rid of the court confessor; and his majesty was given a confidential letter from Pombal of Portugal accusing Father Ravago of having fomented the insurrection of the Indians of Paraguay, against the Spanish troops at the time of the transfer of that territory. The plot failed, however, for Charles knew Ravago too well, and then something more drastic was resorted to. Squillace was at that time in power and under him occurred the historic riot which, in the course of time, assumed such dimensions in the king's imagination, that it was one of the three or four things, besides his "royal secret," which he urged on the Pope as a reason for suppressing the Society.
The story of the riot is as follows: Squillace was very energetic in developing the material resources of the kingdom, but always with an eye to his personal and pecuniary profit. He promoted public works; established monopolies even in food stuffs; loaded the people with taxes; and being intensely anti-clerical, was very active in curtailing ecclesiastical privileges. The people and clergy meekly submitted, but something happened which brought Squillace's career to an end; though it had much more serious consequences than that. It scarcely seems credible, but the incident became one of the serious events of the time. Though none suspected it, the whole thing had been deliberately planned, and was the initial step in the plot to expel the Jesuits from Spain. Squillace objected or pretended to object to the kind of dress especially affected by the people of Madrid: a slouched sombrero and an all-enveloping cloak; and he gave orders to change it. Naturally, this exasperated the people, for although they had patiently submitted to the imposition of taxes; the creation of oppressive monopolies; the curtailment of ancient rights and privileges, etc., the audacity of a foreigner interfering with the cut of their garments brought about a popular upheaval. On March 26, 1766, the mob stormed the residence of Squillace, and he ignominiously took to flight. All night long, the excited crowds swarmed through the streets shouting, "Down with Squillace." On the following morning, they surrounded the palace of the king himself and he, in alarm, called for O'Reilly to quell the disturbance. When it was represented to his majesty that it might entail bloodshed, he deprecated that and hurriedly left Madrid. Had he shown himself to the people, they would have done him no harm, for reverence for royalty was still deep in the popular heart, and the age of royal assassinations had not yet come. But the king was not a hero, and he thrust his subaltern into what he fancied was a post of danger. Thereupon, unarmed and unattended, O'Reilly faced the excited mob.
Delighted by his trust in them, they greeted him with cheers, but demanded a redress of their grievances. Unfortunately, while he was keeping them in good humor, the Walloons, who were guarding another gate of the palace, got into an altercation with some of the rioters. Hot words were exchanged, shots were fired and several persons were killed. The whole scene changed instantly, and the capital would have been drenched in blood, and perhaps Charles would have been dethroned, had not a number of Jesuits headed by the saintly Pignatelli, hurried through the crowd and held the rioters in check. Finally, when a placard was affixed to the palace walls, granting all their demands, the mob dispersed, cheering for the Jesuits--a fatal cry for those whom it was meant to honor. They were accused of provoking the riot; and, from that moment, the king's hatred for the Society began. It was made more acute by the consciousness of his own cowardice. Thus, a farce was to introduce a tragedy. Ten years afterwards, the Duke of Alva, a descendant of the old tyrant of the Netherlands, confessed that it was he, who had planned the sombrero and cloak riot to discredit the Jesuits (de Murr, "Journal," ix, 222).
Towards the end of January 1767, another episode in this curious history presents itself. Like the affair of the riot it seems to be taken from a novel, but unfortunately it is not so. Its setting is the principal Jesuit residence at Madrid. The provincial and the community are at dinner, when a lay-brother enters with a package of letters, which he places before the provincial. It is not the usual way of delivering such communications in the Society, but the story is told by de Ravignan in "Clément XIII et Clément XIV" (I, 186), and he is quoting from Father Casseda, who is described as "a Jesuit Father of eminence and worthy of belief." The package was handed back to the brother, along with the keys of the provincial's room, where it was left. Immediately afterwards, an officer of the court arrived, searched the room and extracted one of the letters, said to be from Father Ricci, the General of the Jesuits, who among other things, declared that the king was an illegitimate son and was to be superseded by his brother, Don Luis. That such a letter was really written, is vouched for by several historians: Coxe, Ranke, Schoell, Adam, Sismondi, Darras, and others; and it is generally admitted to have been the work of Choiseul in France though he covered up his tracks so adroitly that no documentary evidence can be adduced to prove it against him. His intermediary was a certain Abbé Beliardy an attaché of the French embassy in Madrid.
According to Carayon (XV Opp., 16-23) and Boero ("Pignatelli" Appendix) there is a second scene in this melodrama. Two Fathers are leaving Madrid for Rome. A sealed package is entrusted to them, purporting to be from the papal ambassador in Spain. On the road they are held up and searched; the package is opened, and a letter is found in it reflecting on the king's legitimacy. Precisely at the same moment, the trick of the refectory letter was being played in the Jesuit residence at Madrid, and thus a connection was established. With this scrap of paper and the "cloak and sombrero riot" at their disposal, the plotters concluded that they had ample material to carry out their scheme, and the next chapter shows Aranda, the prime minister, Roda, Moniño and Campomáñez meeting frequently in an old abandoned mansion in the country. With them was a number of boys, probably pages about the court, who were employed in copying a pile of documents whose import they were too unsophisticated to understand. Older amanuenses might have betrayed the secret.
The chain of evidence was finally completed, and these grave statesmen then presented themselves before his majesty and, with evidence in hand, proved to him the undoubted iniquity of the religious order which up to that moment he had so implicitly trusted. He fell into the trap, and a series of cabinet meetings ensued in which information previously gathered or invented about every Jesuit in France was discussed. The result was that on January 29, 1767 a proposal was drawn up by Campomáñez and laid before his majesty to expel the Society from Spain, and advising him, first, to impose absolute silence on all his subjects with regard to the affair, to such an extent that no one should say or publish anything either for or against the measure, without a special permission of the government; secondly, to withhold all knowledge of the affair, even from the controller of the press and his subordinates; and finally to arrange that whatever action was taken, should proceed directly from the president and ministers of the extraordinary council.
The advice was assented to by the king, and a decree was issued in virtue of which silence was passed on 6,000 Spanish subjects who not only had no trial but who were absolutely unaware that there was any charge against them. They had been as a body irreproachable for two hundred years, had reflected more glory, and won more territory for Spain than had ever been gained by its armies. They were men of holy lives, often of great distinction in every branch of learning; some of them belonged to the noblest families of the realm; and yet they were all to be thrown out in the world at a moment's notice, though not a judge on the bench, not a priest or a bishop, not even the Pope had been apprised of the cause of it, and, as we have seen, it was forbidden even to speak of the act. A more outrageous abuse of authority could not possibly be conceived.
It was arranged that on the coming second of April, 1767, a statement should be made throughout Europe by which the world would be informed: first, that for the necessary preservation of peace, and for other equally just and necessary reasons (though the world is not to be told what they are), the Jesuits are expelled from the king's dominions, and all their goods confiscated; secondly, that the motive will forever remain buried in the royal heart; thirdly, that all the other religious congregations in Spain are most estimable and are not to be molested. The decree was signed by Charles and countersigned by Aranda and then sent out. The ambassador at Rome was ordered to hand it to the Pope and withdraw without saying a word. The despatches to the civil and military authorities in both worlds were enclosed in double envelopes and sealed with three seals. On the inner cover appeared the ominous words, as from a pirate addressing his crew: "Under pain of death this package is not to be opened until April 2, 1767, at the setting sun." The letter read as follows: "I invest you with all my authority and all my royal power to descend immediately with arms on the Jesuit establishments in your district; to seize the occupants and to lead them as prisoners to the port indicated inside of 24 hours. At the moment of seizure, you will seal the archives of the house and all private papers and permit no one to carry anything but his prayer-book and the linen strictly necessary for the voyage. If after your embarcation there is left behind a single Jesuit either sick or dying in your department, you shall be punished with death."
"I, the King."
The motive that prompted Charles to keep the secret of this amazing proceeding "shut up in his royal heart" has been usually ascribed to his intense resentment at the suspicion cast on his legitimacy, and his fear that even the mention of it would lead people to conclude that there was some foundation for the charge. Davila, quoted by Pollen in "The Month" (August, 1902), finds another explanation.
"Charles III," he says, "had become an extravagant regalist, and was convinced by his Voltairean ministers, mostly by Tanucci, whom he had left in charge of his son at Naples, that in all things the Church should be subject to the State. It was on that account that he kept the reasons for the expulsion of the Jesuits 'buried in his royal heart.' The sole cause of this act was his change of policy; a true reason of state such as, on some occasions, covers grave acts of injustice--for it must be always a grave injustice to charge a religious society with having conspired against the fundamental institutions of a country, and yet not be able to point out in any way the object and plan of so dark a conspiracy. If such be the case," continues Davila, "it is easy to understand why his majesty could not reveal this 'secret of his royal heart' even to the Pope, or perhaps least of all to him, for it would be a painful avowal that his Catholic Majesty was a yoke-fellow with the Voltaireans of Europe whose avowed purpose was to destroy the Church."
Clement XIII was overwhelmed with grief when he read the king's decree and wrote to him as follows: "Of all the blows I have received during the nine unhappy years of my pontificate the worst is that of which your majesty informs me in your last letter, telling me of your resolution to expel from all your vast dominions the religious of the Society of Jesus. So you too, do this, my son, Tu quoque fili mi. Our beloved Charles III, the Catholic King, is the one who is to fill up the chalice of our woe and to bring down to the grave our old age bathed in tears and overwhelmed with grief. The very religious, the very pious King of Spain, Charles III, is going to give the support of his arm, that powerful arm which God has given him to increase his own honor and that of God and the Church, to destroy to its very foundation, an order so useful and so dear to the Church, an order which owes its origin and its splendor to those saintly heroes whom God has deigned to choose in the Spanish nation to extend His greater glory throughout the world. It is you who are going to deprive your kingdom and your people of all the help and all the spiritual blessings which the religious of that Society have heaped on it by their preaching, their missions, their catechisms, their spiritual exercises, the administration of the sacraments, the education of youth in letters and piety, the worship of God, and the honor of the Church.
"Ah! Sire! our soul cannot bear the thought of that awful ruin. And what cuts us to the heart still deeper perhaps is to see the wise, just King Charles III, that prince whose conscience was so delicate and whose intentions were so right; who lest he might compromise his eternal salvation, would never consent to have the meanest of his subjects suffer the slightest injury in their private concerns without having their case previously and legitimately tried and every condition of the law complied with, is now vowing to total destruction, by depriving of its honor, its country, its property, which was legitimately acquired, and its establishments, which were rightfully owned, that whole body of religious who were dedicated to the service of God and the neighbor, and all that without examining them, without hearing them, without permitting them to defend themselves. Sire! this act of yours is grave; and if perchance it is not sufficiently justified in the eyes of Almighty God, the Sovereign Judge of all creatures, the approval of those who have advised you in this matter will avail nothing, nor will the plaudits of those whose principles have prompted you to do this. As for us, plunged as we are in inexpressible grief, we avow to your majesty that we fear and tremble for the salvation of your soul which is so dear to us.
"Your Majesty tells us that you have been compelled to adopt these measures by the duty of maintaining peace in your states,--implying we presume that this trouble has been provoked by some individual belonging to the Society of Jesus. But, even if it were true, Sire, why not punish the guilty without making the innocent suffer? The body, the Institute, the spirit of the Society of Jesus, we declare it in the presence of God and of man, is absolutely innocent of all crime, and not only innocent, but pious, useful, holy in its object, in its laws, in its maxims. It matters not that its enemies have endeavored to prove the contrary; all calm and impartial minds will abhor such accusers as discredited liars who contradict themselves in whatever they say. You may tell me that it is now an accomplished fact; that the royal edict has been promulgated and you may ask what will the world say if I retract? Should you not rather ask, Sire, what will God say? Let me tell you what the world will say. It will say what it said of Assuerus when he revoked his edict to butcher the Hebrews. It accorded him the eternal praise of being a just king who knew how to conquer himself. Ah! Sire, what a chance to win a like glory for yourself. We offer to your majesty the supplications not only of your royal spouse, who from heaven recalls to you the love she had for the Society of Jesus, but much more so, to the Sacred Spouse of Jesus Christ, the Holy Church, which cannot contemplate, without weeping, the total and imminent extinction of the Society of Jesus, which until this very hour has rendered to her such great assistance and such signal services. Permit, then, that this matter be regularly discussed; let justice and truth be allowed to act, and they will scatter the clouds that have arisen from prejudice and suspicion. Listen to the counsels of those who are doctors in Israel; the bishops, the religious, in a cause that involves the interests of the State, the honor of the Church, the salvation of souls, your own conscience and your eternal salvation."
How Charles could resist this appeal, which is among the most admirable and eloquent state papers ever given to the world, is incomprehensible. But he did. He merely replied to the Pope: "To spare the world a great scandal, I shall ever preserve as a secret in my heart the abominable plot which has necessitated this rigor. Your Holiness ought to believe my word, the safety of my life exacts of me a profound silence."
Not satisfied with writing to the king himself, the Pope also pleaded with the greatest prelate in the realm, the Archbishop of Tarragona as follows: "What has come over you? How does it happen that, in an instant, the Society of Jesus has departed so far from the rules of its pious Institute, that our dear Son in Jesus Christ, Charles III, the Catholic King, can consider himself authorized to expel from his realm all the Regular Clerks of the Society? This is a mystery we cannot explain; only a year ago, the numberless letters addressed to us by the Spanish episcopacy afforded us some consolation in the deep grief that affected us when these same religious were expelled from France. Those letters informed us that the Fathers in your country gave an example of every virtue, and that the bishops and their dioceses received the most powerful support by their pious and useful labours. And now, behold, in an instant, there come dreadful charges against them and we are asked to believe that all these Fathers or almost all have committed some terrible crime; nay the king himself, so well known for his equity, is so convinced of it, that he feels obliged to treat the members of that Institute with a rigor hitherto unheard of."
Addressing himself personally to the king's confessor he says: "We write to you, my dear son, that you may lay this before the prince who has taken you for his guide, and we charge you to speak in our name and in virtue of the obligations which the duty of your office imposes, and the authority it bestows on you. As for us, we do not refuse to employ measures of the severest and most rigorous justice against those members of the Society of Jesus who have incurred the just anger of the king, and to employ all our power to destroy and to root out the thorns and briars which may have sprung up in a soil hitherto so pure and fertile. As for you, it is part of your sacred ministry to consider with fear and trembling as you kneel at the feet of the image of Jesus Christ, to compel the king to consider the incalculable ruin that religion will suffer, especially in pagan lands, if the numberless Christian missions which are now so flourishing, are abandoned and left without pastors." Evidently the confessor could do nothing with his royal penitent.
This mad act of Charles did not please some of his friends in France. Thus, on May 4, 1767, D'Alembert wrote to Voltaire: "What do you think of the edict of Charles III, who expels the Jesuits so abruptly? Persuaded as I am that he had good and sufficient reason, do you not think he ought to have made them known and not to 'shut them up in his royal heart?' Do you not think he ought to have allowed the Jesuits to justify themselves, especially as every one is sure they could not? Do you not think, moreover, that it would be very unjust to make them all die of starvation, if a single lay-brother who perhaps is cutting cabbage in the kitchen should say a word, one way or the other in their favor? And what do you think of the compliments which the King of Spain addresses to the other monks and priests, and curés and sacristans of his realm, who are not in my opinion less dangerous than the Jesuits, except that they are more stupid and vile? Finally, does it not seem to you that he could act with more common sense in carrying out what after all, is a reasonable measure?"
In spite of the royal order enjoining silence on his subjects high and low, there was a great deal of feeling manifested at the outrage. Roda, an agent of the ministry at Madrid, tried to conceal it and wrote to the Spanish Embassy at Rome on April 15, 1767: "There is not much agitation here. Some rich people, some women and other simpletons are very much excited about it, and are writing a great deal of their affection for the Jesuits, but that is due to their blindness. You would be astounded to find how numerous they are. But papers discovered in the archives and libraries, garrets and cellars, furnish sufficient matter to justify the act. They reveal more than people here suspect." And yet not one of these incriminating documents "found in archives and libraries and garrets and cellars" was ever produced.
Among "the simpletons" who denounced the act was the Bishop of Cuenca, Isidore de Carvajal, who told the king to his face, what he thought of the whole business. The Archbishop of Tarragona did the same, but they both incurred the royal displeasure. The Bishop of Terruel published a pamphlet "The Truth unveiled to the King our Master" and he was immediately confined in a Franciscan convent, while his Vicar-general and chancellor were thrown into jail. The Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal de Córdova, wrote to the Pope and the contents of his letters were known in Spain, for Roda, the individual above referred to, hastened to tell the Spanish ambassador on May 12, 1767: "In spite of all their tricks, the Archbishop of Toledo and his vicar-general have written a thousand stupid things to the Pope about this affair. We would not be a bit surprised if the Bishop of Cuenca, Coria, Cuidad Rodrigo, Terruel and some others have done the same thing, but we are not sure." A year and a half after the blow was struck something happened which again threw the timid Charles into a panic about his royal life. According to custom, he presented himself on November 4, 1768, on the balcony of his palace to receive the homage of his people, and to grant them some public favor out of his munificence. To the stupefaction of both king and court, one universal cry arose from the vast multitude. "Send us back the Jesuits!" Charles withdrew in alarm and immediately investigations began with the result that he drove out of the kingdom the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and his vicar on the charge that they had prompted the demand of the people (Coxe, "Spain under the Bourbons," v, 25).
With regard to the supposed letter of Father Ricci which brought on this disaster, it may be of use to refer here to what was told thirty years after these events, in a work called "Du rétablissement des Jésuites et de l' éducation publique" (Emmerick, Lambert, Rouen). The author says: "It is proper to add an interesting item to the story of the means employed to destroy the Society of Jesus in the mind of Charles III. Besides the pretended letter of Father Ricci, there were other supposititious documents, and among these lying papers was a letter in the handwriting of an Italian Jesuit which had been perfectly imitated. It contained outrageous denunciations of the Spanish government. When Clement XIII insisted on having some proof to throw light on the allegations, this letter was sent to him. Among those who were commissioned to examine it, was a simple prelate, who afterwards became Pius VI. Glancing at the missive he remarked that the paper was of Spanish manufacture, and he wondered why an Italian should send to Spain for writing material. Looking at it closer and holding it up to the light he saw that the water-mark gave not only the name of a Spanish paper-factory, but also the date on which it was turned out. Now it happened that this date was two years after the letter was supposed to have been written. The imposture was manifest, but the blow had already been struck. Charles III was living at the time, yet he was not man enough to acknowledge and repair the wrong he had done." (Crétineau-Joly, v, 241).
On the day appointed by the king, April 2, 1767, every ship selected to carry out the edict was in the harbor assigned to it, in every part of the Spanish world, where there happened to be a Jesuit establishment. The night before at sundown the captain had opened the letter which had the threat on its envelope: "Your life is forfeited if you anticipate the day or the hour." He obeyed his instructions; and early in the morning the Fathers in the college of Salamanca, Saragossa, Madrid, Barcelona and all the great cities, as well as in every town where the Jesuits had any kind of an establishment, heard the tramp of armed men entering the halls. The members of the household were ejected from their rooms, seals were put on the doors, and the community marched down like convicts going to jail. Old men and young, the sick and even the dying, all had to go to the nearest point of embarcation. Not a syllable were they allowed to utter as they tramped along, and no one could speak in their defence without being guilty of high treason. When they reached the ships, they were herded on board like cattle and despatched to Civita Vecchia, to be flung on the shores of the States of the Pope, whose permission had not even been asked; nor had any notice been given him. It was a magnificent stroke of organized work, and incidentally very profitable to the government, for at one and the same moment it came into possession of 158 Jesuit houses, all of considerable value as real estate and some of them magnificent in their equipment. How much was added to the Spanish treasury on that eventful morning, we have no means of computing.
There was one difficulty in the proceedings, however. The supply of ships was insufficient, for 2,643 men had to be simultaneously cared for; but their comfort did not interfere with the progress of the movement. "They were piled on top of each other on the decks or in the fetid holds," says Sismondi, "as if they were criminals." It was worse than the African slave-trade. Saint-Priest thinks "it was a trifle barbarous, but the precipitation was unavoidable." It was indeed a trifle barbarous and the precipitation was not unavoidable.
In rounding up the victims, the king and the ministers were naturally anxious about the effect it might have upon many of the best Spanish families who had sons in the Order; notably the two Pignatellis, who were of princely lineage. Inducements were held out to both of them to abandon the Society, but the offer was spurned with contempt. Indeed very few even of the novices failed in this sore trial. As for the Pignatellis they were the angels of this exodus, particularly Joseph, whose exalted virtue is now being considered in Rome in view of his beatification. He was at Saragossa when the royal order arrived, and though suffering with hemorrhages, he started out afoot on the weary journey to Tarragona, and from there to Salu, nine miles further on, where nineteen brigantines were assembled to receive this first batch of 600 outcasts. He was so feeble that he had to be carried on board the ship.
From there, they set sail for Civita Vecchia, where they arrived on May 7, but were not allowed to land. Even the generally fair Schoell describes the Pope's action in this instance as "characterized by the greatest inhumanity." On the contrary, it would have been an act of the greatest inhumanity to receive them. There were some thousands of Portuguese Jesuits there already, who had been flung on the shore unannounced, and in that impoverished region there was no means of providing them with food or medicine or even clothes and beds. To have admitted this new detachment of 600 who were merely the forerunners of 4,500 more, and who, in turn were to be followed by all the Jesuits whom Tanucci would drive out of the Neapolitan Kingdom, and those whom Choiseul would hasten to gather up in France, the result would have been that ten or fifteen thousand Jesuits without money or food or clothing, some of them old and decrepit and ill, would have to be cared for and the native population in consequence would be subjected to a burden that would have been impossible to bear. It was "inhuman" no doubt, but the inhumanity must be ascribed to Charles III who had plundered these victims, and not to Clement XIII who would have died for them. His first duty was to his own people and his next was to proclaim to the world and to all posterity, the grossness of the insult as well as the injustice inflicted on the Vicar of Christ by the Most Catholic King, Charles III. Nor were the "unhappy wretches," as Böhmer-Monod call them, "received by cannon shot, at the demand of their own General, who had trouble enough with the Portuguese already on his hands;" (p. 274) nor did the Jesuits, as Saint-Priest adds: "vent their rage against Ricci and blame his harsh administration, as the cause of all their woes." Ricci was begging for bread to feed his Portuguese sons at that time, and he certainly would not have received those from Spain with a cannon shot; nor would the Jesuits have vented their rage against him and blamed his harsh administration, especially as his administration was the very reverse of harsh; and, finally, Jesuits were not accustomed to vent their rage against their superior.
Sismondi (Hist. des Français, xxix, 372) says that "many of them perished on board ship, and Schoell describes them as lying on top of one another on deck for weeks, under the scorching rays of the sun or down in the fetid hold." The filthy ships finally turned their prows towards Corsica where arrangements had been made for them to discharge their human cargo. It took four days to reach that island, but Paoli was just then fighting for the independence of his country, and French ships which were aiding Genoa occupied the principal ports. At first the exiles remained in their ships, but, later, they were allowed to go ashore during the day. Meantime, a vessel had been despatched to Spain for instructions and when it returned on July 8, the "criminals" were ordered to go to Ajaccio, Algoila or Calvi. They reached Ajaccio on July 24, and as they were then in a state of semi-starvation, Father Pignatelli went straight to the insurgent camp, though at every step he risked being shot or seized and hanged, but he did not care, he would appeal to Paoli's humanity. He was well received, help was sent to the sufferers, and they were given liberty to go where they chose on the island.
They remained there a month and were then sent to the town of Saint-Boniface, where they bivouacked or lived in sheds until the 8th of December, when they were ordered to Genoa. This time the number of brigantines in which they embarked had been reduced from thirteen to five, though the number of the victims had considerably increased; but that mattered little; they finally reached the mainland but were not permitted to go ashore. Meantime, other Jesuits had arrived and they now numbered 2,000 or 2,400. After a short delay in the harbor, they made their way separately or in groups to different cities in the Papal States, chiefly to Bologna and Ferrara.
Their ejection from the Two Sicilies was a foregone conclusion, for it was ruled by the terrible Bernardo Tanucci, whom Charles III on his accession to the throne of Spain had left as regent during the minority of Ferdinand IV. Tanucci was a lawyer who began his career in a most illegal fashion by exciting riots in Pisa against his rival Grandi. They had quarrelled about the discovery of the Pandects of Justinian. He next drew the attention of Charles by assailing the right of asylum for criminals, which he maintained was in contravention of all law human and divine. "He attacked the prerogatives of the Court of Rome and of the nobles of Naples, with more fury than prudence," says de Angelis (Biographie universelle). Subsequently he showed himself the enemy of the Church in every possible way, and, meantime, so neglected to provide for the security of the State that during the war of the Pragmatic Sanction, King Charles had to sign an act of neutrality at the mouth of the cannons of a British man-of-war. His political incapacity continued to injure the country during the reign of Ferdinand until it was no longer reckoned among the military powers of Europe. Meantime, he kept the young king in ignorance of everything so as to maintain himself in power. He robbed the courts of justice of their power; drew up the Caroline Code which was never published; ruined the finances of the country, as well as its industry and agriculture, and allowed men of the greatest ability and learning to die in penury. In brief, says his biographer, "Tanucci's reputation both before and after his death is a mystery. It is probably due to his prominence as a bitter enemy of the Holy See. He seized Beneventum and Pontecorvo which belonged to the Patrimony of Peter; he suppressed a great number of convents, distributed abbeys to his followers, fomented dissensions against the bishops and, of course, persecuted the Jesuits."
When Charles III of Spain expelled the Society from Spain everyone knew what was going to happen in Sicily, and news was eagerly expected from the peninsula. While they were waiting, an eruption of Vesuvius took place, which the excitable Italians regarded as a sign of God's wrath. Penitential pilgrimages were organized to avert the danger and angry murmurs were heard against the government. To quell the tumult, Tanucci sent out word that the Jesuits would be undisturbed, though ships were at that time on their way to carry off the victims. The young king's signature to the decree had, however, to be procured, but he angrily refused to give it until the official confessor, Latelle, the retired Bishop of Avellino entreated him to yield, saying that he himself would answer for it on the Day of Judgment. The prelate did not know that he himself was to die at the end of the month. The expulsion took place in the usual dramatic fashion. At midnight of November 3, 1767, squads of soldiers descended on every Jesuit establishment in the land. The doors were smashed in; the furniture shattered; all the papers seized, both official and personal, and then surrounded by platoons of soldiers, the Fathers were led like criminals through the streets to the nearest beach with nothing but the clothes on their backs. The whole affair was managed with such lightning-like rapidity, that though the prisoners had been taken from their houses at midnight, they were out at sea before dawn and were heading for Ferrara.
At Parma another Spanish prince ruled. He was still a child, however, but his minister was du Fillot, a statesman of the school of Tanucci and Choiseul. The expulsion took place simultaneously on the night of February 7, 1768 at Piacenza, Parma, San Domino and Busseto. In the first city, all the available vehicles of the place had been requisitioned. At seven o'clock at night a dozen soldiers entered the house. Later, an officer, two adjutants and a magistrate appeared, read the decree, the fourth article of which declared that any one not a priest or professor who would take off the habit of the society would be received among the faithful subjects of his royal highness. The fifth announced that the innate clemency of his highness accorded an annual pension of sixty scudi to the professed and forty to the brothers who were his subjects. The scholastics were to get nothing. In a quarter of an hour they were hurried to the citadel where carriages and carts were waiting and were driven all night at top speed to Parma, where they arrived at day break. Passing through the city they caught up with those who had been expelled from the other places. Half an hour's rest and a bite to eat were allowed and then the journey was continued on to Reggio and Bologna. Not to be outdone in zeal for the king, the Knights of Malta drove them from the island on April 22, 1768. The expulsion at Parma was disastrous not only to the Jesuits but to the Pope. Parma was his fief, and he protested against the action of the duke. It was precisely what the plotters were waiting for. France immediately seized the Comtat Venaissin, and Naples took possession of Beneventum, both of which belonged to the Patrimony of St. Peter. Of course, the Jesuits were immediately expelled and their property confiscated.
The expulsion in Spanish America meant the seizure of at least 158 establishments belonging to the Jesuits in Mexico, New Granada, Ecuador, Peru and Chili. It involved the flinging out into the world of 2,943 Jesuits, some of them old and infirm and absolutely unable to earn their living. Of those who embarked at Valparaiso sixty were drowned in the wreck of the ship "Our Lady of the Hermitage." Carayon gives some interesting diaries of the journeys of these exiles (Doc. inédits, xvi), while Hubert Bancroft in his monumental work of thirty-nine volumes about the Pacific Coast furnishes abundant and valuable information about the exodus from the missions of Mexico. The victims underwent the same sufferings as their Portuguese brethren in the long journeys over mountains and through the primeval forests and in the long, horrible crossing of the ocean to their native land, which they were thought unworthy to enter.
XVII. THE FINAL BLOW
Ganganelli--Political plotting at the Election--Bernis, Aranda Aubeterre--The Zelanti--Election of Clement XIV-- Renewal of Jesuit Privileges by the new Pope--Demand of the Bourbons for a universal Suppression--The Three Years Struggle --Fanaticism of Charles III--Menaces of Schism--Moñino-- Maria Theresa--Spoliations in Italy--Signing the Brief-- Imprisonment of Father Ricci and the Assistants--Silence and Submission of the Jesuits to the Pope's Decree.
As early as 1768, the Bourbon courts let it be known that they would make a formal demand for the suppression of the Society throughout Christendom. On January 14 of that year, Cardinal Torregiani wrote to the papal nuncio at Madrid as follows: "His Holiness is horrified at the attitude of the king, and indignant that the demand should be accompanied by threats to force his hand, so as to wring from him a concession which is in violation of divine, natural and ecclesiastical law. If any mention of it is made to you again, dismiss immediately the person who dares to suggest it." That stinging rebuke, however, did not halt the stubborn Charles, and in the January of 1769 the coalition began its attack. First came the Spanish representative who presented himself for an audience on the eighteenth. The Pope received him with dignified reserve; gave expression to the intense pain caused by the request, and then, bursting into tears, withdrew. On the twentieth and twenty-second respectively, Orsini, representing Naples, made his appearance and after him Aubeterre, on behalf of France. They were both abruptly dismissed. The French document was especially insulting. It advised the Pope to admit the demand on the ground that it was based on a sincere and well-informed zeal for the progress of religion, the interest of the Roman Church, and the peace of Christendom. The use of the expression "Roman" Church was an evident hint at schism.
On January 25, a formal reply was sent to the three courts, informing them that "the Pope could not explain the deplorable audacity they had displayed in adding to the sorrows that already overwhelmed the Church, a new anguish the only purpose of which was to torture the conscience and distress the soul of His Holiness. An impartial posterity would judge if such acts could be regarded as a new proof of that filial love which these sovereigns boast of having for His Holiness personally, and an assurance of that attachment which they pretend to show for the Holy See." On January 28, Cardinal Negroni told the ambassadors: "You are digging the grave of the Holy Father." The prophecy was almost immediately fulfilled, for on February 2 Clement XIII died of a stroke of apoplexy. He had officiated at the ceremonies of that day, and had shown no sign of illness. The blow was a sudden one, and there is no doubt that this joint act of the Bourbon kings had caused his death. De Ravignan does not hesitate to describe him as a martyr who died in defence of the rights of the Church. He is blamed by some for "his lack of foresight in not yielding to the exigencies of the times." But there were other "exigencies of the times" besides those formulated by the men "who knew not the secrets of God, nor hoped for the wages of justice, nor esteemed the honor of holy souls," and the Pope's foresight was not limited by the horizons of Pombal, Choiseul and Charles III. "His pontificate," as has been well said, "affords the spectacle of a saint clad in moral strength, contending alone against the powers of the world. Such a spectacle is an acquisition forever." For it should not be forgotten that those arrayed against him in this fight were not aiming merely at the annihilation of the Society of Jesus. That was only a secondary consideration. Their purpose was to destroy the Church, and in its defence Pope Clement XIII died.
A new Pope was now to be elected and the alarming influence wielded by the statesmen of Europe in ecclesiastical affairs now assumed proportions which seemed to menace the destruction of the Church itself. In his "Clément XIII et Clément XIV" (p. 552) de Ravignan gives an extract from Theiner which is startling. In 1769, that is before the election, we find all the cardinals tabulated as "good;" "bad;" "indifferent;" "doubtful;" "worst;" "null." Their ages are given; their characters, their political tendencies. Among those marked "good" is Ganganelli; Rezzonico, the nephew of Clement XIII is in the category of the "worst;" the Cardinal of York is "null." There are eleven who are labelled "papabili," ten to be excluded and fourteen to be avoided. It is even settled who is to be secretary of State. Weekly instructions in this matter were sent from the court of Spain to its agents at Rome, whose motto was: "nec turpe est quod dominus jubet--nothing is base if the king orders it." They were at that time precisely the kind of men that the implacable Charles III needed to sustain him in his iniquitous measure: unprincipled clerics like Sales, or savages like Moniño, or Aspuru, who could write: "What matter that the charges are not proved? The accused has been condemned. We have not to establish his guilt." As for the flippant Bernis and the infidel Aubeterre, they were good enough for the royal debauchee, Louis XV. Aubeterre had been a soldier, was now a diplomat and had lost his faith by contact with the revolting indecencies of the regency, while Bernis, says Carayon, was "a distinguished type of French vanity who talked much, schemed continually and fancied he controlled the conclave though he was only a fly on the wheel. He was not ashamed to admit that he owed his red hat to la Pompadour."
Bernis' correspondence with his government is valuable not only in showing how unscrupulous were the methods of coercion employed but in revealing the ultimate purpose of the conspirators, viz. the establishment of state churches in their several kingdoms. He and de Luynes were instructed to insist that the new Pope should: first, annul the Brief of Clement XIII against Parma; secondly, recognize the independent sovereignty of the Prince; thirdly, relinquish Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin to France, and Beneventum to Sicily; fourthly, exile Cardinal Torregiani, the prime minister of Clement XIII; fifthly, completely abolish the Society of Jesus; secularize its members, and expel Father Ricci, the General, from Rome. They let it be known that there would be no backing down on these five points.
It was chiefly to secure the suppression of the Society that the fight was to be made. The other matters could be left, if necessary, for future adjustment. If every other means failed, intimidation was to be resorted to. Indeed, as a preparation, veiled threats began to be heard from several quarters. Thus, for instance, Louis XV put his name to the following insulting letter: "My sincere and constant wish is," he said, "that the Barque of Peter should be entrusted to a pilot who is enlightened enough to appreciate the necessity of having the Head of the Church remain in the most perfect harmony with all the sovereigns of the Roman Faith; and of being wise enough to avoid every inconsiderate measure prompted by indiscreet and extravagant zeal; in brief, one who will shape his policy by the rules of moderation, prudence and sweetness in keeping with divine wisdom and human politics." Such language from the "Most Christian King" was an outrage on the memory of Clement XIII; and the words "Roman Faith" contained, as on a previous occasion, a threat of schism. Schoell, the Protestant historian, says that "the formation of State Churches in the three kingdoms was clearly the avowed purpose of these plotters."
The "Zelanti" were in the majority, but that difficulty was soon disposed of by the veto power which had been granted to the Catholic sovereigns. Making full use of it, they shamelessly forbade the consideration of any candidate who was suspected of being unfriendly to them, with the result that the number of eligible candidates was speedily reduced to eleven; and as most of these latter were old or infirm they could not be even considered by the electors. At this point, Bernis protested against being excessive in the eliminations. Finally there were only two cardinals who could be considered papabili: Ganganelli and Stoppani.
On March 7, 1769, instructions arrived from Madrid emphatically insisting that the election of no Pope would be recognized who would not first bind himself to grant the five points insisted upon by the Bourbon kings, but when the two Spanish cardinals at Rome represented to Charles III that such a proposal to the electors would involve serious risks, the obstinate king insisted, nevertheless, that he would yield on three of the points, but that he would have to exact absolutely as a condition of election that the new Pope would promise to cancel the previous Pontiff's action with regard to the Duke of Parma, and also suppress the whole Society of Jesus. He wanted the conclave to pass a decree to that effect. Even in the Parma affair, he was willing to relent, because as Clement XIII was dead, his ruling might be considered as having lapsed, but as for the Society of Jesus, nothing would satisfy him except its absolute extinction. That much was due, he said, to the three powerful monarchs on whom the Church depended for support. On the other hand, as it would not be proper to compromise the reputation of these kings by letting it be known that such a deal was being made, for it might happen to fail; it was thought better not to give any precise orders, but to leave to the discretion of those who were on the spot to determine what means should be employed for bringing about the desired results.
The project of getting a distinct decree from the conclave in the sense of the King of Spain was abandoned, but while the political cardinals would not hear of exacting a written promise, the ambassadors who were working on the outside, openly avowed that they had no scruples about it. Indeed, Aubeterre, the French ambassador, wrote to Choiseul in France complaining that he and his fellow-diplomats felt hurt that their proposal should be rejected for moral reasons, especially as they had secretly consulted an excellent canonist, who ruled that there would be no harm in imposing on the new Pontiff the obligation of fulfilling the contract inside of a year, dating from the day of his election. Not only was it permissible, he said, but, in the circumstances, it was imperatively urgent for the good of the Church. "The excellent canonist" here referred to was Azpuru, the Spanish ambassador, but as Cardinals Orsini, Bernis and de Luynes insisted that such a contract would be simoniacal, they were informed that if an unacceptable Pope was elected there would be an immediate rupture of relations with the Holy See and the representatives of the three Powers would withdraw from Rome. They were further told that it was hoped that the fanatics, or Zelanti, would not drive them to such an extremity. D'Aubeterre who voiced the opinion of his associates went so far as to say, that any election which had not been arranged beforehand with the court would not be recognized.
Finally, after the conclave had been in session from February 13 to May 19, Cardinal Ganganelli was elected Pope and took the name of Clement XIV. He was considered "acceptable," especially by Spain. According to Cordara, however, his elevation to the pontifical throne was not due to the influence or the manipulations of the Spanish cardinals but was brought about as follows:--"From the beginning of the conclave two or three votes were deposited in his favor, but he was never seriously thought of as Pope. Indeed, Cardinal Castelli, whose learning and piety gave him great influence in the Sacred College, was strongly opposed to him. Suddenly, however, he changed his opinion and declared that, having considered the matter more thoroughly, he was convinced that in the actual circumstances, no one was better fitted for the post than Ganganelli. From that moment, those who had been opposed to him regarded him favorably. Even Rezzonico, the nephew of Clement XIII, who had many reasons to vote against him said he would take the opinion of the majority of the cardinals. Hence the only one against him was Orsini who said that "the Franciscan was a Jesuit in disguise." He was, therefore, after the fight had raged for 100 days, elected by forty-six out of forty-seven votes. The forty-seventh was his own, which he cast in favor of Rezzonico. It is not true that he had made a promise to suppress the Society in case of election. Azpuru, the Spanish agent, wrote on May 8: "No one has gone so far as to propose to anyone to give a written or verbal promise"; and after May 13, he added: "Ganganelli neither made a promise nor refused it." Unfortunately some of his written words were interpreted as implying it.
Ganganelli was born in the town of Sant' Arcangelo, near Rimini, on October 31, 1705, and was baptised Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio, but took the name of Lorenzo when he became a Conventual of St. Francis. His life as a friar was characterized by piety and intense application to study. He was noted for his admiration of everything pertaining to the Society of Jesus, and, indeed, Pope Clement XIII when making him a cardinal said, "there is now a Jesuit in the Sacred College in the habit of a Franciscan." But "the purple seemed to change him," says Cordara, "and from that out he was more reserved in his manifestations of friendship." As Pope he was as simple in his way of life as when living with his community; he was gentle, affable, kind, rarely ruffled, never precipitate and never carried away by inconsiderate zeal. He would have made an admirable Pope in better times. But when he was given control of the Barque of Peter a wild storm was sweeping over the world. Venice, Parma, Naples, France, Spain and Portugal were arrayed against him--some of them threatening separation from the Church. Austria, the only Catholic government that remained, observed neutrality at first, but finally went to the wrong side. In brief, a fierce and united anti-religious element dominated all Catholic Europe, and the rest was Protestant.
Of course, immediately after his election, felicitations rained upon him, but as de Ravignan expresses it, "they were like flowers on the head of the victim that was to be immolated." Indeed, even in the congratulations harsh notes were heard, as when France expressed its hope that the Holy See would show more condescension to the powers than usual, and when Spain "urgently called the attention of His Holiness to certain petitions which had been presented to him." The Spanish ambassador, Azpuru, reminded him in the very first audience that application had already been made to his predecessor for the suppression of the Jesuits. The representatives of France, Portugal and Naples chanted the same dirge. Before three months had elapsed, there was an explosion that shook Christendom. Following an accepted custom, the Pope issued the septennial Brief of indulgences in favor of the missionaries "to bestow the treasures of heavenly blessings on those who, to our knowledge, are laboring with indefatigable zeal for the salvation of souls. We include among these fervent apostles, the Religious of the Society of Jesus, and especially those whom our beloved son, Lorenzo Ricci, is to assign this year and afterwards, in various provinces of the Society, to that work; and we most certainly desire to promote and increase by these spiritual favors the piety and the active and enterprising zeal of those Religious."
It was a thunderbolt. Fierce protests were made in Spain, Naples, Parma and France. Choiseul, who, up to that time, had been suave in his malice, lost his temper completely and ordered the Ambassador Bernis not only to make a public demand for the suppression of the Society but to order the Pope to begin it inside of two months. "This Pope is trifling with us," he said; "and if he does not come to terms he can consider all relations with France at an end." He became grossly insulting and declared that "he had enough of this monkery;" he would upset the plans of the Fratacci; and annihilate his Roman finesse. "A monk was always a monk," he said, "and it was very hard for an Italian monk to be honest and frank in business matters." Choiseul's varnish of courtesy had been all rubbed off by the incident, and he wanted to know "who were going to win in the fight? the kings or the Jesuits? If I were ambassador at Rome," he wrote to Bernis, "I would be ashamed to see Father Ricci the antagonist of my master."
Bernis, Cardinal though he was, meekly replied: "Of course the kings must win, but only the Pope can make them win. However, he has to do it according to the prescriptions of canon law, and must save his own reputation as well as that of the clergy. Moreover, as he is a temporal sovereign, he has to consider the courts of Vienna, Turin and Poland, and all that takes time. Personally, he means to keep the promise already given to the three crowns to suppress the Society, and has shown his mind on that point by public acts against the Fathers. He will renew the promise explicitly and immediately, in a letter written in his own hand to the King of Spain. He is not feeble or false as you seem to think. Time will show that such is his purpose. But, first, the way to lose the battle with the Jesuit General is to begin now. The Pope cannot and will not do it without preparation. Secondly, France and Spain must agree on the time and manner of arriving at the extinction of the Jesuits. Thirdly, it would be wiser to restrict the suppression to the Papal States, and not attempt it in countries that are favorable to the Society. Fourthly, a good preliminary would be to forbid the reception of novices, as the Pope has already done in his own dominions. Marefoschi and I put that into his head. Fifthly, I also proposed the seizure of the archives, the appointment of a Vicar General, to whom Father Ricci will render an account of his administration."
Bernis' temporising, however, only exasperated the foes of the Society, especially Charles III. Nevertheless, he succeeded in inducing the Pope to write to Louis XV on September 30, and in this communication a promise was made to do all the king wanted. But that was not enough for Charles. To force the issue, he ordered all the Jesuit property in Spain to be put up at auction, and a copy of the decree was sent to the Pope. That was on November 8, and on November 13, a joint letter was sent by the three powers requesting Clement to publish a Brief motu proprio that is on his own initiative, as if they had had nothing to do with it, approving all that the Bourbon princes had done against the Society; and also to send to their majesties the plan he proposed to follow in carrying out its complete suppression. Clement humbly submitted to the outrage, and seven days later, Bernis was able to write to Choiseul: "His Holiness has renewed in the strongest manner the two promises he had made to the Bourbon kings with regard to the Brief approving the missionaries, and the plan to suppress the Jesuit Order. He has commissioned me to positively assure the ministers of the powers on that point."
Spain wanted even more than that; and on November 22d, Azpuru told the Pope that if he did not send a manuscript letter to the king promising the suppression, extreme measures would be resorted to, and the rupture of relations which had been begun in 1767 and which was so disastrous to the Church in Spain would be carried to its limit. He was not exaggerating, and the nuncio at Madrid wrote that the king was so set on his purpose, that they did not know what mad thing he might do to gain his point. The general impression was that Charles was on the verge of insanity.
To quiet him, the Pope wrote, on November 30, to say positively that he would carry out the will of the courts. "We have gathered all the documents," he said, "that are needed for writing the motu proprio agreed upon; so as to justify to the whole world, the wise conduct of your majesty in expelling the Jesuits, as troublesome and turbulent subjects. As we are carrying on our government, unaided, although crushed by the weight and multiplicity of questions that have to be settled, you will understand that it is not forgetfulness but merely the unavoidable delay required to bring this important matter to a successful issue." Indeed at that time Clement had secluded himself from everyone. He was in constant fear of being poisoned, and had his food prepared by a Cordelier lay-brother. "We beg Your Majesty," he continued, "to put your entire confidence in us, for we have fully resolved to act, and we are preparing to give to the public incontestable proofs of our sincerity. We shall submit to the wisdom and intelligence of Your Majesty a plan for the total extinction of this Society; and Your Majesty will receive it shortly. We shall not cease to give genuine proofs of our attachment and our veneration for Your Majesty to whom in the plenitude of our paternal affection we give our apostolic benediction" (De Ravignan, "Clément XIII et Clément XIV," I, 295).
Bernis gave himself the credit of having got the Pope to write this letter, and said that now: "His Holiness could not escape carrying out his promise. He will be forced to do it, in spite of his unwillingness, for he knows that the king is too intelligent not to publish the letter, and the Pope will be disgraced if he does not keep his word" (Saint-Priest, p. 131). Thus six months after his election, he was bound by a written and absolute promise to suppress the Society; though he was continually saying "questa supressione mi darà la morte" (this suppression will kill me). At this stage of the proceedings little Naples was becoming obstreperous. Tanucci had seized the Greek College and expelled the Jesuits. He then claimed the property of all religious communities, and when remonstrated with, he replied that "he was going to keep on thwarting every order that came from Rome, until the Society of Jesus was abolished." In 1770 the Pope cancelled the excommunication of the Duke of Parma to gratify the sovereigns, but the satisfaction that ensued did not last long. Cardinal Pacca, who was quasi-nuncio at Lisbon just then, notes the disorders prevalent in the country especially in the University of Coimbra, where the worst kind of teaching was permitted.
On July 3, 1770, Bernis wrote to Choiseul: "I heard that the Founder of the Passionists, Paul of the Cross, has warned the Pope to watch over his kitchen, and hence Brother Francisco who looks after the Pope's household has redoubled his vigilance. I do not know if it is on account of this warning, but in any case the Pope has gone to some mineral springs for treatment and is to be there for the next fortnight." Ten days afterwards, Choiseul replied: "I cannot imagine the Pope is so credulous or so cowardly as to be so easily frightened by reports about attempts on his life. The Society of Jesus has been looked upon as dangerous because of its doctrines, its Institute and its intrigues in the countries from which they have been expelled; but they have not been accused of being poisoners. It is only the base jealousy and fanatical hatred of some monks that could suspect such a thing. The General of the Passionists might have dispensed himself from giving such indiscreet advice to the Pope, which seems to have aggravated the illness of which he was already complaining." As this General of the Passionists was no other than the saintly Paul of the Cross, who has been since raised to the honors of the altar, one may form some idea of the infamous devices resorted to in all this business. Far from being unfriendly, Paul of the Cross writes: "I am extremely pained by the sufferings of the illustrious Company of Jesus. The very thought of all those innocent religious being persecuted, in so many ways, makes me weep and groan. The devil is triumphing; God's glory is diminished, and multitudes of souls are deprived of all spiritual help. I pray, night and day that, after the storm is passed, God who gives both life and death may resuscitate the Society with greater glory than before. Such have been always, and such still are, my feelings towards the Jesuits."
The fact is, however, that the Pope was really frightened. His cheerfulness had vanished, his health had failed, and his features wore an anxious and haunted look. He kept in seclusion, and, as has been said, would let no one prepare his meals but his fellow-friar, Brother Francisco, who remained with him till the end. He was evidently fighting for time; hoping, no doubt, that something might occur to absolve him from his promise. But his enemies were relentless. Charles III was more than fanatical in his insistency, and finally Clement appointed Marefoschi, an open enemy of the Jesuits, to prepare the Brief. The task was joyfully accepted, but the Pope discovered that it was not written in the usual pontifical style. That excuse, however, was regarded by his assailants, as a trick, and they complained of it bitterly. Then it was alleged that the Empress Maria Theresa, who was not averse to the Jesuits, had to be consulted. Indeed, she had given out that as long as she lived they had nothing to fear in her dominions, but she failed to keep her word. Subsequently, a promise was given not to allow Father Ricci to have a successor or to admit novices into the Order; then a general council was proposed to decide the question, but all was of no avail.
At this point, December 25, 1770, Choiseul fell from power, and the world began to breathe for a short spell, hoping that this might affect the situation, but d'Aiguillon, his successor, was just as bad. Moreover, Saint-Priest, in his "Chûte des Jésuites" (p. 127) uses the incident for a nasty insult. He attributes Choiseul's fall to the regard that Madame du Barry had for the Society. "Thank God!" exclaims de Ravignan, "the Society has never had such a protectress." She was admired by Voltaire, who hailed her as another Egeria, but no Jesuit ever sought her protection. Their only advocate at the court at that sad period was the saintly daughter of the king, who became a Carmelite nun to expiate her father's sins. The real cause of Choiseul's downfall was that Maupeou showed to Louis XV some of Choiseul's letters urging parliament "not to yield in the fight, for the king would sustain the Society with all his power." "It was not hard," says Foisset in "Le Président des Brosses" (p. 302), "for du Barry to persuade the king that those letters were meant to incite the parliament to rebellion against him." She hated Choiseul who, though willing to pay court to Pompadour, had no respect for the low and coarse du Barry.
At this point, the Pope offered another inducement to the King of Spain: the canonization of Palafox, whom Charles III worshipped, but that failed, though a little respite was gained by the help of the king's confessor; and certain discussions with regard to the restitution of the papal territories also contributed to delay the disaster. The year 1771 had now been reached, and to afford some satisfaction to the foe, the Pope established a commission or congregation of cardinals to examine the financial conditions of the Society. At its head was the fierce Marefoschi, who began by seizing the Roman Seminary. Thus matters dragged on till 1772. Up to that time very little progress had been made, and people were beginning to talk about the impossibility of abolishing the whole Order, or even a part of it without "proper juridical investigation." Even Bernis told his government that "there was too much heat in this Jesuit affair to permit the Pope to explain his real thoughts about the suppression;" but, though Aranda was out of office and Choiseul likewise, the implacable Charles III was determined to put an end to the delay and instead of Azpuru, he sent the fierce José Moñino, otherwise known as Florida Blanca to be his ambassador in Rome.
Under an affable and polished exterior Moñino was in reality very brutal. He simply terrorized the Pope, who put off receiving him for a week after his arrival and invented all sorts of excuses not to see him. When at last they met, the Pope was pale and excited but Moñino had resolved to end the siege. He dismissed absolutely all question of a reform of the Order. What he wanted was suppression, or else there would be a rupture with Spain. In vain the Pope entreated him to wait for Ricci's death; but the angry minister rejected the offer with scorn, and the Pope after being humiliated, insulted and outraged, withdrew to his apartments, exclaiming with sobs in his voice: "God forgive the Catholic King." "It was Moñino," said a diplomat then at Rome, "who got the Brief of 1773; but he did not obtain it; he tore it from the Pope's hand." Under instructions from Charles III, Moñino told the Pope, "I will disgrace you by publishing the letter you wrote to the king," and he laid before the Pontiff a plan drawn up by himself and the other ministers of Charles III to carry out the suppression. De Ravignan condemns Crétineau-Joly for having published this paper. "It would have been better to have left it in the secret archives."
In Moñino's plan of action he declares that "it was not advisable to enter into details; so as not to allow any ground for discussion, as it would do harm to religion and uselessly defame the character of the Jesuits." The king's reasons had already been made known to the Holy See. They were three in number. The first was "they had caused the Sombrero Riot in Madrid;" the second: "their moral and doctrinal teaching was bad;" the third, and this was the most extraordinary of all: "they had always persecuted the holiest bishops and persons in the Kingdom of Spain." The last item probably referred to Palafox. His Majesty had not yet revealed the important secret which he kept "locked in his royal heart." All the terrible statements of the documents alleged to have been seized by Marefoschi were to be of no use, when compared with the Riot of the Sombreros.
Meantime conditions were every day growing worse in Europe. The publications of Voltaire and his friends were destroying both religion and morality. The fulminations of the Pope against these books availed little, and meantime he was about to crush the men who were best able to face the enemy. Finally, poor Poland was being cut up by Prussia, Russia and Austria and the Pope was powerless to prevent it. On the other hand, there were some consolations. Thus in 1771 the Armenian patriarch and all his people renounced Nestorianism and returned to the unity of the Church. Between 1771 and 1772 seven thousand families and their ministers in the country of Sickelva abandoned Socinianism, and became Catholics. Again, wonderful conversions were made in Transylvania and Hungary, not only among Protestants but among the schismatical Greeks. Similar triumphs had been achieved in Armenia and Syria among the subjects of the Grand Turk, and the whole peninsula of Italy under the eyes of the Pope was in a transport of religious zeal. The peculiarly interesting feature about all this was that it was the work of the members of the Society of Jesus. But that did not check the progress of the anti-Christian plot of the Catholic kings of Europe to obliterate from the face of the earth the organization which even in its crippled condition and in the very last moments of its existence was capable of such achievements. Cardinal Migazzi, the Archbishop of Vienna, called the Pope's attention to this fact, but without avail.
Up to this time, Maria Theresa had been the devoted friend of the Society. She had even said she would never cease to be so, but yielding to the influence of her son, Joseph II, and of her daughter, the Queen of Naples, she consented to their suppression, on condition that she could dispose arbitrarily of their property (Clément XIII et Clément XIV, I, 362.) The illustrious queen displayed great worldly prudence in withdrawing her affections. This desertion destroyed the last hope that the Pope had cherished of putting off the Suppression. Moñino returned to the attack again and received an assurance from Clement that the document of suppression would be ready in eight days, and copies would be sent to the Kings of Spain, France and Naples. Meantime, as a guarantee, he began the work in his own States. Under all sorts of pretexts, individuals and college corporations were haled to court; and official visits were made of the various establishments. On March 10, 1773, Malvezzi, the Archbishop of Bologna, applied to the Pope for "permission to dissolve the novitiate, if it would seem proper to do so. If you think well of it, I shall carry that measure into effect, as soon as I arrive. I also judge it advisable to shut up St. Lucia, by dismissing the Jesuit theologians and philosophers. In doing so, Your Holiness will be dispensed from the trouble of investigating and will thus avoid the publicity of any notable offence which an examination might reveal."
There were two difficulties in the way, however. The people objected to the expulsion, and the Jesuits refused to be released from their vows. The latter obstacle was thought to be overcome by tearing off the cassocks of the young men and sending them adrift as laymen, and when the rector, Father Belgrado, who besides being a theologian was one of the foremost physicists and mathematicians of the day, and had been the confessor of the Duke and Duchess of Parma, informed the archbishop that dispensation from substantial vows must come from the Pope and from no one else, that did not stop Malvezzi. He had the rector arrested and exiled; and with the help of a band of soldiers expelled the scholastics from the house. He then wrote to the Pope regretting that he had not proceeded more rapidly. Besides this, Frascati was taken from the Jesuits and given to the Cardinal of York, who asked for it, though his royal pension had made him already immensely wealthy. Similar visitations were made in Ferrara and Montalto, and the looting became general.
In Poland, as we learn from "Les Jésuites de la Russie blanche," the spoliation had started even before the promulgation of the edict. Libraries were broken up and the books were often used to kindle bonfires; the silver of the churches was melted down and sold, and medals and chains from statues were seen on the necks of abandoned women. Even the cattle on the farms were seized. The Jews were especially conspicuous in these depredations.
All this was the prelude of the fatal Brief, which was signed on July 21, 1773, but was not promulgated until August 16 of that year. Theiner is the only author who gives August 17 as the date. As a matter of fact it was held up by Austria so as to gain time to prevent the secular clergy from seizing the property. The preparation of the Brief was conducted with the profoundest secrecy. Even on July 28, the French Ambassador wrote to D'Aiguillon: "the Pope is doing nothing in the Jesuit matter." He was unaware that not only was the Brief already signed but that a Congregatio de rebus extinctæ Societatis (a Committee on the affairs of the Extinct Society) had been appointed, and that its members had been bound under pain of excommunication not to reveal the fact to any one. However, Bernis found it out on the 11th, and complained that he had not been consulted. He wrote as follows: "Last Friday, the Pope summoned Cardinals Marefoschi, Casali, Zelada, Corsini and Caraffa, and after having made them take an oath, he put a Brief in their hands, which constituted them members of a congregation which was to meet every Monday and Thursday to discuss whatever concerned the Jesuit establishments, their benefices, colleges, seminaries, foundations, and such matters. It held its first meeting last Monday. Macedonio, the Pope's nephew, was the secretary; Alfani, a prelate, was the assessor; and Fathers Mamachi, a Dominican, and de Casal, a Recollect, were consulting theologians. The last two mentioned are men of repute."
"The 16th day of August 1773, the day of sad memories," writes de Ravignan, "arrived. Towards nine at night, Macedonio went to the Gesù and officially notified the General of the Brief that suppressed the Society throughout the world. He was accompanied by soldiers and officers of the police to keep order, though no one dreamed of creating any trouble. At the same hour, also by command of the Pope, other distinguished prelates and ecclesiastics gave notice of the Brief to the various Jesuit rectors in Rome. They also were accompanied by soldiers and notaries. Seals were put on the archives, the accounts, the offices of the treasurers and the doors of the sacristies. The Jesuits were suspended from all ecclesiastical functions such as confessions and preaching, and they were forbidden, for the time being, to leave their houses. The Father General and his assistants were carried off to jail." "Such," said Schoell (xliv, 84), "was the end of one of the most remarkable institutions that perhaps ever existed. The Order of the Jesuits was divided into five nations, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French and German, each one of which had a representative living with the General. In 1750 the organization comprised 39 provinces, had 84 professed houses, which were residences where the most experienced members worked unceasingly for the Order without being distracted by public instruction. There were 679 colleges, 61 novitiates, 176 seminaries, 335 residences, and 273 missions. There were 22,589 members of whom 11,293 were priests."
This official act of the Pope really added very little to the temporal injury already done to the Order in Spain, France and Portugal where they had already been robbed of everything. But to be regarded as reprobates by the Pope and branded as disturbers of the peace of the Church was a suffering with which all they had hitherto undergone bore no comparison. Nevertheless, they uttered no protest. They submitted absolutely and died without a murmur, and in this silence they were true to their lifelong training, for loyalty to the See of Peter had always been the distinctive mark of the Society of Jesus from the moment that Ignatius Loyola knelt at the feet of the Sovereign Pontiff, for his approval and blessing. When the blow fell, the Society was found to be faithful. If it had during its lifetime achieved something for the glory of God and the salvation of souls; if it had been constantly appealed to for the most dangerous missions and had accepted them with enthusiasm; if it had poured out its blood lavishly for the Faith; if it had given many glorious saints to the Church, now, in the last terrible crisis which preceded the French Revolution and perhaps precipitated it, when the ruler of the Militant Church judged that by sacrificing one of his legions he could hold back the foe, the Society of Jesus on being chosen did not hesitate; it obeyed, and it was cut to pieces. Not a word came from the heroic band to discuss the wisdom or the unwisdom of the act. Others protested but not they. Those who condemned Clement XIV were not Jesuits, though their enemies said they were. On the contrary, the Jesuits defended and eulogized him and some of them even maintained that in the terrible circumstances in which he found himself, he could not have done otherwise. The Suppression gave them the chance, which they did not miss, to prove to the world the solidity of virtue that reigned throughout the Order, and to show that their doctrine of "blind obedience" was not a matter of mere words, but an achievable and an achieved virtue. They would have stultified themselves had they halted when the supreme test was asked for, and so they died to uphold the judgment of the Vicar of Christ, and in similar circumstances would do it again. They had preached sermons in every part of the world, but never one like this. Nor was it a sublime act such as some individual saints might have performed. It was the act of the whole Society of Jesus.
Silent themselves, they did their best to persuade others to refrain from all criticism. One example will suffice. It was after the Pope's death when the ex-Jesuits at Fribourg held a funeral service in their collegiate Church of St. Nicholas. The whole city was present, and the preacher, Father Matzel, amid the sobs of the congregation uttered these words: "Friends! beloved Friends of our former Society! whoever and wherever you may be! If ever we have had the happiness to be of help and comfort to you by our labor in city or country; if ever we have contributed anything to the cause of Christianity in preaching the word of God or catechising or instructing youth, or laboring in hospitals or prisons, or writing edifying books now, on this occasion, although in our present distress we have many favors to ask of you, there is one we ask above all and we entreat and implore you to grant it. It is never to speak a word that would be harsh or bitter or disrespectful to the memory of Clement XIV, the Supreme Head of the Church of Christ."
The famous Brief is designated by its first words, Dominus ac Redemptor. Its general tenor is as follows: It begins by enumerating the various religious orders which, in course of time, had been suppressed by successive Popes, and it then gives a list of the privileges accorded to the Society by the Holy See, but it notes that "from its very cradle" there were internal and external disagreements and dissensions and jealousies, as well as opposition to both secular and ecclesiastical authority, chiefly because of the excessive privileges that had been granted to it by the different Sovereign Pontiffs. Its moral and dogmatic theology also gave rise to considerable discussion, and it has frequently been accused of too great avidity in the acquisition of earthly goods. The Pontiff merely declares that such "charges" were made against the Society; he, in no place, admits that the "charges" were based on truth. These accusations, he continues, caused much chagrin to the Holy See, and afforded a motive for several sovereigns of Europe to range themselves in opposition to the Society; while, on the other hand, a new confirmation of the Institute was obtained from Pope Paul IV of happy memory. That, however, did not succeed in putting an end to the disputes with the ordinaries or with other religious orders on many points, and notably with regard to certain ceremonies which the Holy See proscribed as scandalous in doctrine, and subversive of morality; nor did it avail to quell the tumult which ultimately led to the expulsion of the Society from Portugal, France, Spain and the Two Sicilies, and induced the kings of those countries to ask Clement XIII for its complete suppression. "Hence, finding that the Society of Jesus can no longer produce the abundant fruits for which it was instituted, and for which it was approved by so many Popes, and rewarded by so many privileges, we now abolish and suppress it. But as the purpose which we have set for ourselves and are eager to achieve is the general good of the Church and the tranquillity of the people, and, at the same time, to give help and consolation to each of the members of this Society, all of whom we tenderly cherish in the Lord, we ordain as follows with regard to them." He then explains the various ways in which each section of the Society is to be dealt with.
Such in general is the substance of this very long Brief. In it, however, there is not one word about the decadence of the Society in its morality or its theology. The Pontiff merely says that many have "charged" them with such offenses. He even goes so far as to say that "he tenderly loved all of the individuals who composed the Society." The real purpose of it was to bring peace to the Church. Cahours in his "Des Jésuites par un Jésuite," (II, p. 278) says, "Every judge who passes a sentence affirms two things: the existence of a crime and the fitness of the penalty. Clement XIV pronounces on the second, but says nothing of the first. Hence the sentence is not something exacted by justice, but is merely an administrative measure called for by the embarrassment of the moment."
Was it legitimate? Yes; for the Holy See has a right to suppress what it has created.