The Jesuits (10 page)

The final grievance was the Jesuits' adoption of probabilism as their preferred form of moral reasoning. Jesuits (and others) who subscribed to probabilism taught that, in a conflict of opinion among respected theologians over the morality or immorality of a given act, the confessor was obliged to give the penitent the benefit of the less rigorous opinion, even if that opinion was regarded as less probable. The Jansenists saw the Jesuits' advocacy of probabilism as proof positive of their moral laxity. Probabilism was an abomination that condoned sin and destroyed public morality. It was a devious device that enabled the Jesuits to win favor, especially with the mighty, by finding ways to let penitents wiggle out of responsibility for wrongdoing.

In 1643, just three years after the publication of the
Augustinus,
Arnauld, brilliant member of a well-known and distinguished French family, published two anti-Jesuit works,
Théologie morale des
jésuites
and
De la fréquente communion.
These were just the beginning of the anti-Jesuit works inspired by the Jansenists that henceforth poured from the presses especially in France and that became ever more vitriolic. Not vitriol, however, but understated wit and elegant style made Pascal's
Lettres Provinciales
all the more effective in their parody of the Jesuits. The
Lettres,
published between 1656 and 1657, remains one of the most accomplished satires in the history of literature.

For Pascal, as for other Jansenists, the Jesuits were compromisers who betrayed the purity of the Gospel message and preached an easy road to salvation. The most obvious manifestation of the Jesuits' moral laxity was their advocacy of probabilism. Jesuit theologians published a large number of books in which they argued about the possible moral assessments of particular cases in which there seemed to be a conflict of moral principles. These theologians, not all of whom argued their positions well, were Pascal's specific target.

In the fictitious
Lettres,
their supposed author, curious about the Jesuits, consults one of them, who turns out to be well-meaning and eager to answer questions but hopelessly naive. The Jesuit reassures his questioner that the members of his order are flexible enough to be severe with penitents who like that sort of thing but able to give wide latitude to others. As the author probes, it becomes clear that the Jesuit does not see the implications of the positions he has been schooled to defend or realize how at odds they are with the true standards of the Gospel championed by the Jansenists.

The
Lettres
along with the
Monita Secreta
turned out to be in the long run the most successful of all anti-Jesuit writings. The
light and witty style of the
Lettres,
besides embodying and promoting a shift in what constituted “good taste,” was destined to win for the Jansenists a following in readers who were otherwise repelled by their severe and rigid moral standards.

Pascal was far from being the only Jansenist to use satire against the Jesuits. Isaac-Louis Lemaistre de Sacy (1619–1684), best known for his French translation of the Bible, was a nephew of Arnauld and a close friend of Pascal's. In 1654 he published anonymously
Les enluminures du fameus almanach des PP. Iesuistes
[
sic
]. In it he in verse makes devastating fun, for instance, of the Jesuits' spiritual teaching as sweet and civilized. The style of piety the Jesuits promote is gallant, pretty, polite, and nicely coiffured. It makes people devout
à la mode
:

Elle est douce & civilisée

Et mesle aux bonnes actions

Les belles conversations,

Elle est galante, elle est jolie,

Elle est frizée, elle est polie

Elle marche avec cet agrément

Plus à l'aise & plus seurement

Elle rend devot à la mode.

But the battle went beyond words. In the wake of the furor in France over
Unigenitus,
the last major papal bull condemning Jansenism, a Jesuit preached an anti-Jansenist sermon. In retaliation Louis-Antoine de Noailles, archbishop of Paris and the leading figure in France trying to circumvent the bull, published in 1716 an edict prohibiting the Jesuits in Paris from preaching, hearing confessions, and practicing any other ministry. This extraordinarily severe edict remained in force for thirteen years, until Noailles's death in 1729.

Jansenism, though condemned by the Holy See, never lost its appeal in certain quarters and remained a small but extraordinarily powerful force in continental Catholicism until just after the French Revolution. For the Jansenists the destruction of the Jesuits grew to an obsession. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, they were able to enter into informal alliances with the Jesuits' other enemies to accomplish their goal.

The third great controversy concerned the reductions in Paraguay. By 1767 there were thirty of them with a population of some 110,000 natives, especially the Guaraní, in the territory of present-day Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil. They were, as mentioned, overseen by a small handful of Jesuits. This “Republic,” as they came to be known, aroused great curiosity in Europe, where it was much admired and sometimes idealized even by
philosophes.

Protection of the natives from the raids upon them by Spanish and Portuguese slave traders was a primary motivation for the establishment of the reductions. But these unarmed settlements could not resist the armed attacks of the marauders, who prowled the jungles looking for natives to enslave. In 1628 the kidnappers devastated the area of Guayrá, left intact only two of the eleven reductions, and reduced the original population from one hundred thousand to twelve thousand.

In 1637 the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya went to Madrid, where he was successful in obtaining royal permission to arm the natives, who then were able to defend themselves. The raids came virtually to an end. However, this expedient evoked fear in government circles of a potentially rebellious army, and in 1661 Philip V ordered firearms withdrawn from the reductions. The Jesuits
obeyed, but when the raids began again with great devastation, the crown had to renew the permission.

From that point forward all seemed well, but since the reductions operated virtually independently of the royal governors and even the hierarchy, those authorities resented them, envied their prosperity, and therefore wanted to wrest control from the Jesuits. As rumors spread that in the reductions the Jesuits operated secret gold mines and gunpowder plants, the pressure to intervene increased accordingly. Spanish settlers, moreover, resented the economic competition from the sale of products from the reductions, which operated much more efficiently than their competitors, and complained that the Amerindians were undertaxed.

The crisis came in 1750. That year Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Madrid for an exchange of territory in America. This treaty, not particularly momentous in itself, initiated the process that led to the complete destruction of the Jesuit achievement in Latin America and was the first step leading to the suppression of the Society itself. Located in the territory Spain ceded to Portugal were seven reductions with about thirty thousand natives. According to the treaty, the natives had to abandon their homes and move to Spanish territory.

The Jesuits protested the injustice of the terms, the violation of the Indians' rights, and the virtual impossibility of such a massive movement of humanity through jungles and over rough terrain without serious loss of life. Their appeals failed. The Jesuits were now caught between obedience to the crown, whose position their superior general supported, and their commitment to the welfare of the Indians. When they finally attempted to get the migration moving, the Indians reacted with bitterness. When
in 1754 Spanish and Portuguese troops tried to seize the reductions, the Indians replied in kind and set off the so-called War of the Seven Reductions. Not until 1756 were the Indians defeated and the seven reductions seized, which ultimately led to their dissolution.

In Lisbon the Marquis de Pombal, prime minister to King Joseph I, seized upon the war as an occasion to prove the Jesuits' disloyalty to the crown, which according to him was only one of their many crimes. He did not let up. In 1758 he demanded that Pope Benedict XIV end the Jesuits' disobedience in the church, their thirst for power, their lust for gold, and their insatiable hunger for land. A brief and cursory papal investigation of the Jesuits in Portugal ensued and, without examination of a single account book, concluded the Jesuits were guilty of financial malfeasance.

Then, on the night of September 3 that same year, an attempt was made on the king's life. Pombal saw his chance. He accused the Jesuits of complicity in a plot against the king and won Joseph I over to his side. In January the next year, 1759, the king ordered the confiscation of all Jesuit property, and on September 3, first anniversary of the failed regicide, he decreed the expulsion of the Jesuits, rebels and traitors, from his realms, which of course included the Portuguese territories overseas. Soon rallying to the government's anti-Jesuit policy were a number of high prelates, creatures of the crown, who now fixed their eyes on Jesuit buildings and other resources.

The Jesuits in Portugal were herded onto ships that carried some 1,100 of them to Italy where, uninvited, they hoped to find refuge. Another 180 from the missions were not so lucky. Transported to Portugal, they were stuffed into underground dungeons where they were left to rot away. The most publicized act to show to the world the Jesuits' disloyalty took place in Rossio Square in Lisbon on September 20, 1761, when Gabriele Malagrida, an aged and by then mentally confused Jesuit accused of plotting against the king's life, was brutally strangled and burned at the stake.

Pombal's action against the Jesuits must be explained on several levels. It fed his pride and ambition by showing he was able to bring down such an established institution. It enriched the crown through the seizure of the Jesuits' properties and institutions. For Pombal, a creature of the Enlightenment, the elimination of the Jesuits fit a larger plan to eradicate from the land the superstition that was Catholicism and to humiliate the papacy by showing it was powerless to protect the Jesuits. His success had an impact far beyond Portugal and the Portuguese dominions. It demonstrated to Europe both the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful Society of Jesus and the papacy's impotence to protect it.

The first step in the destruction of the Jesuit pest had been taken. The next step was taken by France, the key nation on the continent, where the Gallican sentiments of both clergy and laity sat ill with a religious order whose headquarters were in Rome. Pervasive though Gallican sentiments were, they were only one of the forces that, though often at odds with one another, made common cause against the Jesuits. The
philosophes,
for instance, despised the Jansenists but found themselves in the same camp with them when it came to the Jesuits.

The magistrates of the Paris Parlement, moreover, looked for occasions to put restraints on the absolute authority claimed by the Bourbon monarchs. Like his predecessors beginning with Henry IV, the reigning Louis XV favored and protected the Jesuits. To force him to act against them would be a triumph for the magistrates, many of whom were Jansenists. The hour was ripe. The king's prestige and authority had been severely damaged by defeats during the Seven Years War, just when he badly needed his Parlements to approve new taxes.

Two events provided the anti-Jesuit forces with the catalyst they needed to go into action. In January 1757, Louis XV was stabbed in the courtyard of Versailles by a man who had been a pupil of the Jesuits. Although the man claimed he was inspired to his deed from what he had heard from a Jansenist magistrate, public opinion was manipulated to incriminate the Jesuits. After all, the propaganda ran, the Jesuits had been proved responsible for the attempt on Joseph I of Portugal. When news of Malagrida's execution in Lisbon in 1761 reached Paris, it was greeted as vindication of the accusations against the Jesuits.

The second was a notorious case that had dragged on in the law courts for six years until finally decided against the Jesuits by the Paris Parlement in 1761. The Jesuit Antoine Lavalette (or Valette), superior of the French mission in Martinique, began taking dangerous chances in order to relieve the heavy debt of the mission. His ability to meet payments to his debtors depended on selling the produce of the mission in Europe. Unfortunately, in 1756 English corsairs swooped down on the thirteen ships he had hired for a shipment, so that only one of his cargoes reached Cádiz. Creditors demanded payment and sued the Society of Jesus in France. Not only did the Jesuits lose the case, but “the Lavalette
affair” was paraded as proof positive of the Jesuits' loose morals and lust for gold.

Three months after the decision against Lavalette, the Paris Parlement took action. It ordered that the Jesuits' schools be closed and that the works of twenty-three Jesuit authors, including Bellarmino and Suárez, be burned. The king intervened, and in the ensuing months the royal council devised several plans to save the Society, which were repugnant to both the Jesuits and the Parlement and, hence, unavailing.

On August 6, 1762, the Paris Parlement declared that the Society of Jesus, destroyer of religion and morality, was barred from France. In separate decrees it ordered Jesuits to abandon all relations with the Society and made them ineligible for any academic or civic positions unless they publicly repudiated it. Just as severe and laden with almost irreversible consequences, another decree declared all Jesuit buildings, institutions, and properties confiscated.

In Paris steps were immediately taken to implement the decrees, but at least for a while in other parts of France, some parlements resisted the pressure from Paris. But the die was cast. Finally, in November 1764, Louis XV, his hand forced, took the final step and issued the royal decree of suppression. In it he mitigated the conditions the Parlement had laid down for the Jesuits, but even the mitigation could not save some three thousand Jesuits from destitution. Ejected from their communities and all their assets seized, they had to find food and shelter wherever they could, as best they could.