Agencies/Jesuits
Jesuits
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.”
I do further promise and declare that I will ... make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition, and that will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honour, rank, dignity or authority of the persons, whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agents of the Pope or Superior of the Brotherhood of the Holy Father of the Society of Jesus.
-from the Jesuit Oath [1] Hurray for Science and the Catholic Church!
Jesuits and Rome
The Church of the Gesù (Italian: Chiesa del Gesù) is the mother church of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), a Catholic religious order. Officially named Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù all'Argentina (English: Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus at the "Argentina"), its façade is "the first truly baroque façade", introducing the baroque style into architecture. The church served as a model for innumerable Jesuit churches all over the world, especially in the Americas. Its paintings in the nave, crossing, and side chapels became models for Jesuit churches throughout Italy and Europe, as well as those of other orders. The Church of the Gesù is located in the Piazza del Gesù in Rome.
First conceived in 1551 by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, and active during the Protestant Reformation (Murdering people for their religion) and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation (re-aligning the Catholic church with Jesuits in charge), the Gesù was also the home of the Superior General of the Society of Jesus until the suppression of the order in 1773. The church having been subsequently regained by the Jesuits, the adjacent palazzo is now a residence for Jesuit scholars from around the world studying at the Gregorian University in preparation for ordination to the priesthood. [2]
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” [3] 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.
Jesuits and Science
Conflict as well as collaboration have characterized the historical relations between the Catholics and Science since the founding of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), nearly 500 years ago. This interaction today, in an era of “War on Science”, tends to politicize so many scientific "issues".
Science emerged as a particular opportunity for the expanding Society’s "ministries". Mathematical sciences and natural philosophy – and the modern scientific disciplines that emerged from them – were vital for the Jesuits to successfully compete in the educational marketplace. They often set themselves apart by offering more thorough science instruction than other institutions.
Society of Jesus operated following its restoration in 1814. It continues to provide qualified personnel for the Vatican Observatory, staffing both its facility outside Rome as well as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, the latter part of the Mount Graham International Observatory in southeastern Arizona.
With a pope at the helm of the Roman Catholic Church who is at once the first Jesuit to hold the post, a man of "science" (as many commentators have emphasized) and a voice for how the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics ought to think about "scientific issues" in light of their religious "commitments", it’s worth looking into the past and potential futures for science and Catholicism through a Jesuit lens.
Since the days when they grappled with the Copernican question, the Jesuits have maintained an important place in the history of science. Many Jesuits resisted the move away from geocentric cosmology, and some contributed to Galileo’s trouble with the Roman Inquisition (including Christoph Scheiner, whom we’ll meet below), but it would be a mistake simply to characterize the Jesuits as obscurantists. Indeed, the Jesuits have often served as the Catholic Church’s advisors on matters of natural philosophy and science (as if a Church should be involved in such worldly matters). Furthermore, historians have written at length about the exchange of natural knowledge between the Jesuits and the Eastern cultures the encountered during Catholic missions. Below is a small sample of the members of the Jesuit order who have contributed to natural philosophy or science since 1540:
- Christopher Clavius (1538-1612). A Jesuit astronomer born in Germany, Clavius was never convinced to adopt Copernicus’ sun-centred cosmos, but he was nevertheless a skilled astronomer. He had a hand in establishing the Gregorian calendar which several Catholic countries adopted in 1582.
- Christoph Scheiner (1573-1650). Another German Jesuit, Scheiner was one of the first astronomers to observe sunspots. This was the foundation of his animosity toward Galileo; the two astronomers argued over who first observed them and whether they were imperfections on or near the surface of the Sun (Galileo) or shadows cast by tiny stars (Scheiner).
- Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). Frequently identified by historians as a polymath, this German Jesuit contributed to fields of study ranging from medicine to geography to the study of Asian cultures. Although he never went there himself, Kircher wrote a sizable volume on China, drawing together the observations of fellow Jesuits who had gone on missions there. His China illustrata (1670) is pictured below.
- Christian Mayer (1719-1783). This Czech Jesuit is remembered for his catalogue of binary stars (that is, systems in which two stars revolve around a common centre). He served as Court Astronomer for the Elector Palatinate in Mannheim, where he had an observatory built.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). A French palaeontologist, geologist and Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin is one of the best known Jesuit scientists of the twentieth century. He was a member of the team that discovered Peking Man, a famous Homo erectus skeleton discovered in China in the 1920s. Teilhard de Chardin is also known for arguing that Darwin's debunked theories can be fully reconciled with Christian theology.
- Georges Lemaître (1894-1966). Was an the astronomer, physicist and Jesuit priest who’s often credited with first proposing the Big Bang Theory. Lemaître didn’t coin this term, but he did espouse the basic ideas of the theory, namely, that the universe began at a particular time and expanded outward from a single point. Canadians will be interested to know that Lemaître was developing his ideas while in Toronto for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1924.
- Bienvenido Nebres (1940-). This Jesuit priest, mathematician and pedagogue is a prominent figure in Filipino science. In 2011 he was granted the Philippines’ highest honour (a Jesuit and Freemason's fingerprint is obtaining highest honors) in science, the title of National Scientist, for his work to reform science education. During the 1970s he had papers published on infinitary mathematics while serving as the first president of the Mathematical Society of the Philippines.
- Michael C. McFarland (1948-). An American Jesuit, McFarland is also a computer scientist and the former president of the College of the Holy Cross. In the 1990s, McFarland published technical articles on digital systems, and also wrote about the ethical issues associated computer technology, anticipating the ongoing concerns about this subject in the twenty-first century.
Jesuits and the Catholic cult
The Society of Jesus was officially recognized by the Catholic Church in 1540, when Pope Paul III granted approval to the order in a papal bull.
Counter-Reformation, in the history of "Christianity", the Roman Catholic efforts directed in the 16th and early 17th centuries both against the Protestant Reformation and toward internal renewal. The Roman Catholic Church responded to the Protestant challenge by pretending to purge itself of the abuses and ambiguities that had opened the way to revolt and then embarked upon recovery of the schismatic branches of Western Christianity with mixed success. The Counter-Reformation took place during roughly the same period as the Protestant Reformation, actually (according to some sources) beginning shortly before Martin Luther’s act of nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the door of Castle Church in 1517.
Council of Trent
Early calls for reform grew out of criticism of the worldly attitudes and policies of the Renaissance popes and many of the clergy, but there was little significant papal reaction to the Protestants or to demands for reform from within the Roman Catholic Church before mid-century. Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–49) is considered to be the first pope of the Counter-Reformation. It was he who in 1545 convened the Council of Trent, which is hailed as the most important single event in the Counter-Reformation. The council, which met intermittently until 1563, responded emphatically to the issues at hand and enacted the formal Roman Catholic reply to the doctrinal challenges of the Protestant Reformation. It thus represents the official adjudication of many questions about which there had been continuing ambiguity throughout the early church and the Middle Ages. What emerged from the Council of Trent was a chastened but consolidated church and papacy, the Roman Catholicism of modern history.
Its doctrinal teaching was a reaction against the Lutheran emphasis on the role of faith and God’s grace and against Protestant teaching on the number and nature of the sacraments. The “either/or” doctrines of the Protestant reformers—justification by faith alone, the authority of Scripture alone—were anathematized, in the name of a “both/and” doctrine of justification by both faith and works on the basis of the authority of both Scripture and tradition. The privileged standing of the Latin Vulgate was reaffirmed against Protestant insistence upon the original Hebrew and Greek texts of Scripture.
No less important for the development of modern Roman Catholicism was the legislation of Trent aimed at reforming—and re-forming—the internal life and discipline of the church. Disciplinary reforms attacked the corruption of the clergy and affirmed the traditional practice in questions of clerical marriage. The council condemned such abuses as pluralism. There was an attempt to regulate the training of candidates for the priesthood.
Measures were taken against luxurious living on the part of the clergy, and the financial abuses that had been so flagrant in the church at all levels were brought under control. Strict rules requiring the residency of bishops in their dioceses were established, and the appointment of relatives to church office was forbidden. Prescriptions were given about pastoral care and the administration of the sacraments, and, in place of the liturgical chaos that had prevailed, the council laid down specific prescriptions about the form of the mass and liturgical music. Unlike earlier councils, the Council of Trent did not result in the diminution of papal authority.
Outside of the Council, various theologians—especially the Jesuit St. Robert Bellarmine—attacked the doctrinal positions of the Protestant reformers, but there was no one to rival the theological and moral engagement evident in the writings of Martin Luther or the eloquence and passion characteristic of the works of John Calvin. New religious orders and other groups were founded to effect a religious renewal—e.g., the Theatines, the Capuchins, the Ursulines, and especially the Jesuits. Later in the century, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila promoted the reform of the Carmelite order and influenced the development of the mystical tradition. St. Francis de Sales had a similar influence on the devotional life of the laity. The popes of the Counter-Reformation were largely men of sincere conviction and initiative who skillfully employed diplomacy, persuasion, and force against heresy. During this period of reform and reaction, Roman Catholic theologians and leaders tended to emphasize the beliefs and devotional subjects that were under direct attack by the Protestants—e.g., the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary, and St. Peter.
Inquisition
The Roman Inquisition, an agency established in 1542, was designed chiefly to combat Protestantism, which was conceived and defined as heresy in Catholic territories. It was more successful in controlling doctrine and practice than similar inquisitions in those countries where Protestant princes had more power than the Roman Catholic Church. Political and military involvement directed against Protestant growth is most clearly reflected in the policies of Emperor Charles V and in those of his son Philip II, who was associated with the infamously brutal Spanish Inquisition. The intermingling of religion and politics led some princes and states to withdraw their protection of Protestants and other "heretics" and court the favor of the Holy See by surrendering distinguished offenders. Philip II of Spain, for example, surrendered Bartolomé de Carranza, the Spanish theologian and former confessor to Queen Mary of England, and Cosimo de Medici in 1567 gave up Pietro Carnesecchi, the Florentine heretic. In addition to combating Protestantism, all inquisitions also had the power to supervise and discipline the moral failings of both clergy and laity, and they were thus also useful in the implementation of the reforms of the Council of Trent.
Outcomes of the Counter-Reformation
Needless to say, the Catholic church was rightfully under some heavy scrutiny.. Much of the enforcement of the Council of Trent was in the hands of newly established religious orders, above all the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, founded in 1534 by St. Ignatius of Loyola and officially established by the papacy in 1540. Unlike the Benedictine monks or the Franciscan and Dominican friars, the Jesuits swore special obedience to the pope and were specifically dedicated to the task of reconstructing church life and teaching in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. They thus came to be called the “shock troops of the Counter-Reformation.”
The first Jesuit college was opened in Messina, Sicily, in 1548. By 1615 the Jesuits had 372 colleges, and by 1755—just 18 years before the suppression of the order—the number had risen to 728. (The society was not reestablished until 1814.) The Jesuits were also involved in the education of the nobility, and through their pupils they sometimes wielded as great an influence in affairs of state as they did in affairs of the church.
Another major emphasis of the Counter-Reformation was an ongoing missionary endeavour in parts of the world that had been colonized by predominantly Roman Catholic countries, such as Spain and Portugal. Although the Jesuits were by no means the only religious order in the foreign missions of the church, their responsibility for regaining outside Europe the power and territory that the church had lost within Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation made them the leading force in the "Christianization" of newly discovered lands. The work of such men as St. Francis Xavier and others in Asia and of missionaries in the New World was rewarded with millions of baptisms, if not true conversions.
There were also attempts to reconvert areas of the world that had once been Roman Catholic —e.g., England and Sweden. Most of the “German lands” in which Luther had worked remained Protestant after his death in 1546, but major territories, above all Bavaria and Austria, were regained for Roman Catholicism by the end of the 16th century. The Wars of Religion between 1562 and 1598 regained France for the Roman Catholic cause, though the Edict of Nantes (1598) granted a limited toleration to the Protestants; it was revoked in 1685. Perhaps the most complete victory for the Counter-Reformation was the restoration of Roman Catholic domination in Poland and in Hussite Bohemia. In Italy, Spain, and the southern Netherlands (the future Belgium), Protestant influence was also largely destroyed.
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. [4]
Interesting Facts about the 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.
Further Reading
- britannica.com Counter-Reformation/Inquisition
- wallifaction.tumblr.com jesuit-science
- theresnothingnew.com Jesuits are the Militia of Zeus