Jesuits

Jesuits in high places
Jesuits educated, among others, Descartes, Voltaire, Moliere, James Joyce, Peter Paul Rubens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fidel Castro, Alfred Hitchcock, and Bill Clinton—not to mention Bing Crosby, Vince Lombardi, Robert Altman, Chris Farley, Salma Hayek, and Denzel Washington.

Banned in many countries
After the Sonderbund civil war in Switzerland in 1847, the Jesuits were banned from the country. This ban was only lifted in 1973 after a constitutional referendum. Norway had a similar ban on Jews, Jesuits, and other monastic orders in the constitution. The ban on Jews was lifted in 1897 but the Jesuits had to wait till 1956 to be allowed in Norway.

The Jesuits and the World Wars
What about the twentieth century? In this century, no less than any other since the founding of the Order, the Jesuits have been extremely active, usually secretly, behind the scenes; most notably (although this hideous truth has been extremely well covered up) in both world wars! The pope, counselled by the Jesuits, supported Germany and Austria-Hungary in the First World War, hoping to use these powers to discipline France, destroy the Russian Orthodox institution, and defeat England. Jesuits in Ireland, India, Spain, and Australia worked hard for the downfall of England. When the Papal plans were thwarted by the victory of the Allies, the Jesuits began to prepare for the Second World War.

The evidence of Roman Catholic involvement in general, and Jesuit involvement in particular, in World War Two is overwhelming. Once again space does not permit a full treatment here, and the following facts will have to suffice. They are the tip of the iceberg. In 1939, Hitler placed a Jesuit named Tiso at the head of the Republic of Slovakia. Tiso declared that Romanism and Nazism “work hand in hand at reforming the world.” He did his best to eliminate Protestants and Jews in Slovakia, sending them to concentration camps. In the puppet Nazi state of (Roman Catholic) Croatia, a Jesuit named Stepinac fully supported the Croatian leader in his massacres of hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Jews. And many leaders of the Papist Croatian Ustashis, who carried out the terrible killings, were Jesuit and Franciscan priests!

Hitler himself declared: “I learned much from the Order of the Jesuits.” The Nazi, Walter Schellenberg, stated, “The S.S. organisation had been constituted, by Himmler, according to the principles of the Jesuits’ Order.” And Hitler said of Himmler: “I can see Himmler as our Ignatius of Loyola.” Within the SS Central Security Service, top posts were held by priests, particularly Jesuits. There can be no doubt that the Jesuit Order has the blood of millions upon its hands.

The role played by the Catholic Church during the Holocaust has always been a topic of heated debate. Nonetheless, fourteen Jesuits can be found in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial’s “Righteous Among The Nations,” a list of non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Twelve of them were priests.

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
The United States of America, being the bastion of freedom of religion (something Rome cannot tolerate), was, naturally enough, particularly targeted by the Jesuits. They sought to stamp out Protestantism, and turn the US into a Roman Catholic country. In 1865, they added the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln to their terrible list of murders. That his assassin was a tool of the Jesuits, was proved by Charles Chiniquy, an ex-priest and courageous Christian minister, who had been a personal friend of Lincoln’s. “But who was that assassin? Booth was nothing but the tool of the Jesuits. It was Rome who directed his arm, after corrupting his heart and damning his soul.... And, after twenty years of constant and most difficult researches, I come fearlessly today before the American people, to say and prove that the President, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated by the priests and the Jesuits of Rome.” Chiniquy provided ample evidence, as have others as well.

The Society of Jesuits
The Jesuit society was formed, members were expected to follow a set of rules written by the founder, an ex-soldier called Ignatius Loyola. Called the “Rules for Thinking with the Church,” the directives stated with stunning unambiguity, the Society’s obedience to the church. Rule number 9 says that members will do whatever it takes to “uphold the precepts of the Church.” The oft-quoted rule 13 is even stricter: “If the Church have defined anything to be black, which to our eyes appears to be white, we ought in like manner to pronounce it to be black.”

The Jesuits wasted no time, after the pope had approved of the Order, in involving themselves in everything: the education of the young, hearing of confessions, foreign missions, preaching. They went about their work with fanatical zeal. Through education, they aimed to control the future leaders of society. They particularly sought to gain control of the education of the children of political leaders and other influential people in the upper classes. Through their leniency in the confessional, as mentioned earlier, they slithered into the affections of the wealthy and powerful. Through foreign missions, they sought to convert the world to Roman Catholicism. Through preaching, they championed papal authority and other Roman Catholic doctrines, thereby strengthening the Papacy at a time when it was reeling from the devastating effects of the Reformation.

This was known as the Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent, in the 1540's, was Rome’s answer to the Reformation – and it was dominated by the Jesuits. The popes soon realized that the Jesuits had become indispensable to the very survival of the Papacy. They literally surrendered the Roman Catholic institution into the hands of the Jesuits. The Papacy was rewarded for doing so: the Jesuits became its tireless champions, and it began to advance once again after its terrible setback in the sixteenth century; but the cost was great, for the “black pope” and his disciples became the power behind the papal throne. They still are. Step by step, their influence grew in the nations of the world. The popes granted them ever greater privileges and powers. Gregory XIII gave them the right to enter into commerce and banking, a right they were to use enthusiastically in the years ahead. By 1556, they were actively involved in fighting Protestantism in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and England; and were also to be found, hard at work, in India, China, Japan, and the New World.

And which organisation, of all the organisations that have existed upon the earth in the past four centuries, has worked with such ruthless cunning, and such tireless zeal, for the destruction of Protestantism? The Jesuit Order. And, as this Order has controlled the Papacy for centuries, this is in line with the prophetic Word, which declares that the Great Whore, the religion of the Papal Antichrist, has always been the greatest enemy of biblical Christianity in existence (Rev. 17; Rev. 19; 2 Thess. 2; Dan. 7). Before the Jesuit Order existed, Rome used other means to make war against the saints of God; but in the past four centuries, the Jesuits have been Rome’s most powerful weapon. Thus we find God’s prophetic Word, and the witness of history, agreeing together (as indeed they always do) to condemn the Jesuit Order.

Slavery and the Jesuits
In 1838, the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus, long a major slaveholder in the mid-Atlantic region, sold 272 of the men, women and children it owned to purchasers in Louisiana. The sale generated widespread criticism at the time, mainly because of its size and consequent visibility. Residents of this region, as elsewhere where slavery was then legal, were accustomed to slave sales; coffles of enslaved people were sometimes marched past the U.S. Capitol en route to a major slave market in nearby Alexandria, Va.

But large-scale sales of the enslaved by individual owners were relatively rare—the 1838 sale by the Jesuits, Rachel Swarns tells us in The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church, was “one of the largest documented slave sales in the nation”—and the Jesuits had enjoyed a reputation, not wholly deserved, as unusually humane slaveholders. (Their failings in this regard had mainly to do with the Jesuit province’s lack of financial resources, precisely the problem that provoked the 1838 sale.) Proceeds from that sale, which ultimately netted the Jesuits the equivalent of some $4.5 million in today’s dollars, did much to stabilize the province’s finances and to rescue debt-ridden Georgetown Academy—today’s Georgetown University—from probable collapse.

The Jesuits continued to own slaves, or to rely on rented slaves for labor, at various outposts in the South until 1864.

The Jesuits were hardly the only religious order in the United States to own slaves. Nearly every Catholic religious order—women’s communities as well as men’s—that resided where slavery was permitted owned at least a few slaves. But the Jesuits owned by far the most, mainly because of the peculiar circumstances of their early decades in British America.

Shortly after the arrival of the first Jesuits in Maryland in 1634, that colony’s Catholic proprietor ceded to the order vast tracts of local land, meant to provide the young community with sustenance for its ministry. And indeed, the profits generated by the Jesuits’ various Maryland “plantations” were the order’s principal source of income in the United States as late as the early 19th century. The Jesuits initially staffed their plantations not with enslaved persons but with indentured servants, most (but not all) of whom were white. It was only with a growing scarcity of indentured labor, and concomitant moves in each of Britain’s American colonies to recognize in law an explicitly racialized form of slavery, that the Jesuits began to acquire slaves of their own. The oldest known record of Jesuit slaveholding in Maryland—and hence in British North America—is from 1717.

The Maryland Jesuits took seriously their spiritual obligations to those they enslaved, often requiring them to attend Mass and policing their private behavior. A good many of their slaves, in fact, did embrace Catholicism. But those same slaves often lived in abject poverty, an almost inevitable consequence of the order’s recurrent financial crises.

The order’s need for cash also led to at least occasional slave sales. When the Jesuits did sell slaves, they normally tried to do so locally, to avoid severing kinship ties in the slave community, and they generally declined to sell spouses away from one another or dependent children away from their parents. But the fear of sale was an omnipresent cloud over life among the enslaved, even those owned by conscientious masters. That fear grew stronger in the 19th century, as seaboard agriculture began to decline and the states of the Deep South were opened to cultivation.

Nearly one million enslaved persons were forcibly transported from the states of the Upper South to the Deep South between 1800 and 1860. The Maryland Jesuits were discussing the possibility of selling significant numbers of slaves as early as the 1820s, although objections to this option were still sufficiently strong within the local Jesuit community, not to mention in Rome, to forestall any action.

The Jesuits continued to own slaves, or to rely on rented slaves for labor, at various outposts in the South until 1864. Perhaps this is one reason that the 1838 sale appears to have receded so quickly in Jesuit memory. The past decade, however, has brought that sale back to public attention, with demonstrations on the Georgetown campus, extended media coverage and, now, Swarns’s splendid book.