Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/683

JESUITS 6f> 3 new order. Despite the approval of Coiitarini, and the goodwill of the pope himself (who is said to have exclaimed, on perusing Loyola s papers, "The finger of God is here"), there was a strong and general feeling that the monastic system had broken down utterly, and could not be wisely developed further. Cardinal Guidieeiuni, one of a committee of three appointed to examine the draft constitutions, was known to advocate the abolition of all existing orders save four, which were to be remodelled and put under strict control. And it was that very year, 1538, that a committee of cardinals, consisting of Reginald Pole, Coiitarini, Sadolet, Caratfa (afterwards Paul IV.), Fregoso, Aleauder, and Badia, had just re ported to the pope that the conventual orders were such a scandal to Christendom that they should be all abolished " abolcndos putanitis oniney." Not only so, but, when greater strictness of rule and of enclosure seemed the most needful reforms in communities which had become too secular in tone, the proposal of Loyola to make it a first principle that the members of his new institute should mix freely with the world, and be as little marked off as possible externally from secular life and usages, ran counter to all tradition and prejudice, save that Carali a s then recent order of Theatincs, from which Loyola copied some details, had taken some steps in the same direction. Loyola and his companions, however, had little doubt of ulti- mat success, and so bound themselves, on April 15, 1539, to obey any superior chosen from amongst their body, and added on May 4 certain other rules, the most important of which was the vow of speci .il allegiance to the pope for mission purposes, to be taken by all members of the society. But Guidiccioni, on a careful study of the papers, changed his mind, partly, it is supposed, because of the strong interest in the new scheme exhibited by the king of Portugal, who instructed his ambassador to press it on the pope, and to ask Loyola himself for some priests of his society for mission work in Portugal and its Indian possessions, and accordingly Xavier and Rodriguez were sent to the king in March 1540. And on September 27, 1540, the bull Eegimini militantis ccclesise was published, confirming the new order, but limiting its members to sixty, a restriction which was removed by a later bull in March 1543. In the Latin translation of the original draft constitutions, approved by the pope, the word compania, was represented by sucictds, though cohors or some such military term would have more exactly reproduced the founder s idea, and thus the Jesuit body is known indifferently as " Company " or " Society," while the title " Order" is never officially given to it. This title was finally settled by Gregory XIV. iu a bull of June 28, 1594. On April 7, 1541, Loyola was unanimously chosen superior. His refusal of this post was overruled, so he entered on his new office on April 13, and on April 15 the newly constituted society took its formal corporate vows as a religious order in the church of St Paul- vilhout-the-Valls. The general entered on his duties by holding public catechizings in Sta Maria in Strata for eight and forty days, a precedent followed ever since by his successors in office. Scarcely was the society launched when its members dispersed in various directions to their new tasks. Salmeron and Brouet were sent, clothed with the powers of papal legates, on a secret mission to Ireland, to encourage the native clergy and people in resistance to the religious changes introduced by Henry VIII. ; Bobadilla went to Naples ; Faber, first to the diet of Worms, and then to Spain ; Laynez and Le Jay to Germany, while their general busied himself in founding the convent of St Martha at Rome for female penitents, and that of St Catherine for unprotected young women, as also in perfecting the original draft of the constitutions, a task he did not finish till 1550. Success crowned these first efforts, and the earliest college of the society was founded at C oimbra in 1542 by King John III. of Portugal, who secured the appointment of Simon Rodriguez as its rector. It was designed as a training-school to feed the Indian mission, of which Francis Xavier had already taken the oversight, while a seminary at Goa was the second institution founded out of Rome in connexion with the society. In Spain, national pride in the founder aided their cause almost as much as royal patronage in Portugal, and the next house of the society iif ter Goa was opened at Gaudia under the protection of its duke, Francis Borgia ; in Ger many they were eagerly welcomed as the only persons able to meet the Lutherans on equal terms ; and only in France, of the countries still belonging to the Roman communion, was their advance checked, owing to political distrust of their Spanish origin, together with the hostility of the Sorbonne and the bishop of Paris. However, after many difficulties, they succeeded in getting a footing through the help of Duprat, bishop of Clerniont, who founded a college for them iu 1545 in the town of Billom, besides making over to them his house at Paris, the Hotel de Clermont, which became the nucleus of the afterwards famous college of Louis-le-Grand, while a formal legalization was granted to them by the states-general at Poissy in 1561. In Rome, Paul III. *s favour did not lessen. He bestowed on them the church of St Andrea, where now Cardinal Alessandro Farnese s stately erection, the Gesu, stands, and conferred on them at the same time the more valuable privilege of altering their own statutes, besides two others procured in 1546, which Loyola had still more at heart, as touching the very essence of his institute, namely, exemption from ecclesiastical offices and dignities, and from the task of acting as directors and confessors to convents of nuns. The former of these measures effectually stopped any drain of the best members away from the society, and limited their hopes within its bounds, by putting them more fully at the general s disposal, especially as it was provided that the final vows could not be annulled, and that only the joint action of the general and the pope could dismiss a professed member from the society. The regulation as to convents seems due partly to a desire to avoid the worry and expenditure of time involved in the discharge of such offices, and partly to a con viction that penitents of the kind would be of no effectual use to the society ; whereas Loyola, against the wishes of several of his companions, laid much stress on the duty of accepting the post of confessor to kings, queens, and women of high rank, when oppor tunity presented itself. And the year 1546 is notable in the annals of the society as that in which it embarked on its great educational career, especially by the annexation of free day-schools to all its colleges. The council of Trent did much to increase the reputation of the new society, for the pope- chose three of its members, Laynez, Faber, and Salmeron, to act as his theologians in that assembly, and they had no little influence in framing its dogmatic definitions and decrees. In 1548 the company received a valuable recruit in the person of Francis Borgia, duke of Gandia, afterwards third general, while two important events marked 1550, the foundation of the Collegio Romano, and a fresh confirmation of the society by pope Julius III. The German college, for the children of poor nobles, was founded in 1552, and in the same year Loyola firmly settled the discipline of the society by putting down with promptness and severity some attempts at independent action on the part of Rodriguez at Coimbra ; while 1553 saw the despatch of a mission to Abyssinia, and the first quarrel of the society with the pope, who thought that the Spanish Jesuits were taking part with the emperor against the Holy See, but was reconciled by the good offices of Ferdinand, king of the Romans. Paul IV. (whose election at first alarmed the Jesuits, for they had found him not very friendly as Cardinal Caraffa) proved as favourable to them as his predecessors ; and, when Ignatius Loyola died in 1556 under his pontificate, the society already counted forty-five professed fathers and two thousand ordinary members, distributed over twelve provinces, with more than a hundred colleges and houses. After two years in terregnum, Laynez, who had acted as vicar in the meanwhile, was elected general in 1558, and was successful in a struggle with the pope, who desired to enforce the recitation of the breviary on the society, and to limit the tenure of the generalship to a term of three years, but could effect neither object. Laynez also succeeded in increasing further the already enormous powers of the general by adding these four clauses to the constitutions : that the general alone can make contracts binding the society ; that he can authori tatively gloss and interpret the rules and laws, can enact new or repeal old laws, and may have prisons for the incarceration, of refractory members. He took a leading part in the colloquy of Poissy in 1561 between the Catholics and Huguenots, and obtained, as already said, a legal footing from the states-general for colleges of the society in France. He died in 1564, leaving the society in creased to eighteen provinces, with a hundred and thirty colleges, and was succeeded by Francis Borgia, It was during his generalship that the greatest favour yet vouchsafed the company was bestowed by Pius V., who not only confirmed by bull all former privileges, and extended to it further every privilege that had been or might afterwards be granted to any order with vows of poverty, but also decreed that these letters should at no time be capable of being revoked, limited, or derogated from by the Holy See, nor be included within any revocation of similar or dissimilar privileges, but be for ever excepted therefrom. It was a trilling set-off to such a grant that the pope in 1567 again enjoined the fathers to recite the canonical hours in choir, and to admit only the professed to priest s orders, especially as Gregory XIII. rescinded both these injunction^ in 1573 ; and indeed, as regards the hours, all that Pius V. was able to obtain was the nominal concession that the breviary should be recited in the professed houses only, and that not of necessity by more than two persons at a time. Eberhard Mercurian, a Fleming, succeeded Borgia in 1572 (being forced on the company by the pope, in pre ference to Polanco, Loyola s secretary and their vicar-general, who was rejected partly as a Spaniard, and still more because he was a "New Christian" of Jewish origin, and therefore objected to in Spain itself), and .jvas in turn followed by Claudio Acqtiaviva, an able and strong-willed man, who sat from 1581 to 1615, a time almost exactly coinciding with the high tide of the great and suc cessful counter-Reformation movement, chiefly due to the Jesuits, which had begun under Borgia. It was, however, during his generalship that the company s evil reputation began to eclipse its good report, that they first had the pope their avowed enemy, and that tlwy were driven from England (whither they had come chiefly from the seminary founded at Douay by Cardinal Allen in 1568),