THE GREAT SECRET SOCIETY AS PROPAGANDISTS.
NO other religious society has boasted so loudly of the results of its foreign missionary work as the Society of Jesus. Volumes have been written by Jesuits of the apostolic deeds wrought by the Black Fathers wherever they went, in Asia, Africa, or America. Placed in positions of danger by their superiors, members of the Order would occasionally fall victims to their devotion, and be glorified as saints and martyrs, and in their earlier history the Jesuits were esteemed by Roman Catholic Christendom as the only efficient priests for missionary enterprise. But after a few decades, the halo surrounding Jesuit mission work lost its sanctity, for it became evident that its real object was the gain of power and riches, not the conversion of the heathen. Roman Catholic bishops, Dominican monks, and Capuchin friars, who were eyewitnesses of the Jesuit procedure in foreign fields, testified against the character of the work of Loyola’s descendants, arid Papal Bulls were fulminated against the Jesuit-Christian heathenism in China, Japan, and East India.
Why, it was asked, did the Jesuit missionaries confine their efforts to such countries as produced great riches?
The following little story will assist us to understand their reasons! For a long time the Jesuits gave themselves no trouble in regard to the Cochin China Hindus, but when the pious fathers heard that a salt lake existed in the heart of that district, in which pearls of the first water were found and annually sold to Portuguese traders, their hearts were moved with pity for Cochin China. They proceeded thither as a missionary band, and devoting themselves especially to the heathen living around the salt lake, bought up the pearls at a higher rate than that offered by the Portuguese.
For two years they repeated this generosity, and then the traders, unable to purchase the pearls profitably, forsook the shores of the lake. The natives were thus left in the power of the missionaries, who at once lowered the price they had paid by one-half, and thus reaped for themselves an enormous profit. Eventually they treated the native Hindus as slaves, who, after twenty years’ oppression, rose in rebellion, set fire to the Jesuits’ stores, and chased them out of the country.
Loyola’s missionaries made light of the matter of conversion to the Christian faith of their converts. They preferred to adapt the heathen customs of China, Japan, India to their own teaching, with the result that the different nationalities after baptism had no reason to leave their pagan practices. It is easy to understand in the light of this fact how the greatest itinerant Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, “converted” ten thousand idolaters whom he christened in a single month in India At Goa he erected a central college, and by means of a military force he drove into it one hundred and twenty sons of the Hindoo gentry. This conversion at the point of the Portuguese bayonet, when the “padre” had retired from their midst, ended in the Brahmins reconverting the people. Xavier instituted in Goa a religious tribunal, after the pattern of the Spanish Inquisition, and proceeded with the most frightful severity against all who offered any hindrance to the Jesuit missionaries, or beguiled the baptized natives back into heathenism.
In China, that impenetrable empire, the celebrated Father Ricci at last successfully I planted himself. His talents were cultivated by the Jesuits at Goa, the headquarters of the Asiatic mission. Ricci acquired the Chinese language perfectly, and in the attire of a Lama, or Fo priest, proceeded to a small seaport town of the Celestial Empire. He commenced teaching mathematics, won the confidence of the people, and attracted attention to himself by executing the first geographical chart of China ever seen in that land. Without showing any antagonism to the Buddhism and Confucianism of China, he composed a Christian catechism expressly for the Chinese, modelled upon Chinese ideas!
A few years later Ricci became a literary professor of Confucius’ doctrine, and thus he had entrance to the upper class. He was brought before the Emperor, to whom he exhibited his wonderful “self-striking clock,” and as the Emperor had a love for machinery, Ricci obtained a commission to introduce a large number of clocks and watches. These he procured from Goa, and had them brought over by Jesuit fathers, Ricci being appointed supervisor of clocks. He received the title of “Court Mandarin,” and was presented with a college, enormously endowed, for the education of astronomers, chemists, and opticians. This scientific college was controlled by Ricci and his associates, and so long as the students consented to be baptized they were allowed to practice their heathen ceremonies.
In twenty-seven years Ricci accomplished more in China than Xavier had done in India, and he earned for himself the title of “Apostle of China.” The keys of government fell into his hands, and a letter addressed to the Pope in 1650 is extant, in which he was assured that the whole of China had subjected itself to him with the most profound devotion.
However, in the year 1702, Cardinal de Tournon, as emissary of the Pope, was sent to China to investigate matters, and after a year’s careful search he discovered the Jesuitical character of Chinese Christianity. The Jesuit “missionaries” bitterly resented his accusations, and imprisoned the Cardinal in their college, and to prevent him making his report of their doings public, they administered to him a dose of poison in a cup of chocolate.
Reference has been made to the support invariably rendered by the Court of Portugal to the Jesuits. Simon Rodriguez laid the foundation of the truly extraordinary system which, for two hundred years, the Jesuits pursued in Portugal― science, faith, and customs being completely under their control. The Jesuits came with the Portuguese into Asia, Africa, and America. In South and Central America they obtained huge possessions, while the splendid dominion of Paraguay―twice as large as Italy―fell under their power. Paraguay in the sixteenth century embraced La Plata. It was one of the most magnificent territories in the world. Over it the ecclesiastical Order elevated itself to the position of a sovereign king. The Jesuit missionaries erected Paraguay into a “Christian republic,” over which the General in Rome ruled as absolute monarch. The subjects of this “republic” were the abject slaves of the Jesuits. But in the end the Jesuit army was defeated by the united Spanish and Portuguese forces, and an end was made of the Jesuit State of Paraguay.
As our earlier pages were concerned with the great Reformation battlefield of Europe―Germany―we will follow the Jesuit missioners and controversialists thither.
In 1554 there appeared “The Summary of Christian Teaching,” which the Emperor of Austria ordered to be introduced into all schools and educational institutions within his dominions.
The character of this Jesuit “Christian teaching” will be gathered from this extract: “The good Catholic must avoid every Protestant as he would a person tainted with leprosy. He must, indeed, not only shun him, but he must fight against him as one who has to contend with the wicked.”
This teaching culminated in a Protestant persecution, commencing in 1570 but, six years afterwards, the Jesuits were forcibly expelled for their oppressive conduct, However, in 1602, they were reinstated by Rudolph II., and they continued to prosecute their old craft―the extinction of Protestantism.
During the years 1598-60, the Protestants of Inner Austria submitted to them, in face of the Inquisition set up in their midst, and in five years’ time the Jesuits had consigned more than forty thousand Lutheran Bibles to the flames, and by gunpowder they had converted a number of Protestant churches into ruins. At the beginning of the year 1600 they boasted of having re-converted the whole of the heretics with the exception of about 30,000 who had emigrated! But the Thirty Years’ War was to ensure the complete annihilation of the Protestants of Inner Austria. At length the earnestly desired peace was concluded by the memorable Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; but what pen can adequately describe the terrible result the Jesuits had produced by fire and sword!
Let us go back to the year 1556, and take our last look at the great founder of the Society of Jesus.
Even such a one as Loyola was immortal only till his work was done. Not long after he had attained his coveted notoriety, and the pinnacle of power, his bodily strength began to wane. His former flagellations and fasts, his later cares and fears, and the strain of anxieties in holding the gigantic office he had assumed, compelled him, in shattered health, to hand over the greater part of the business of Jesuit General to his Vicar, Pater Jerom Natalis, in 1556. Near to the picturesque ruins of the Villa of Mercena, and surrounded by a charming park, was a country house presented to Loyola by a wealthy patron. Notwithstanding his vow of perpetual poverty he withdrew to the comfort and luxury it afforded in order to gain strength. But he was not destined to recover. He was brought back to Rome that he might die in the profess house among his followers and companions, and passed away, as the sun set, on Friday, 31st July, 1556, aged sixty-five years.
It is a singular fact that although there are slightly different versions given by Jesuit authors of the scene at his deathbed, it is undisputed that Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, died without absolution from a priest, and without extreme unction―the two sacraments which the Church of Rome declares to be indispensable to eternal salvation. Although one of his disciples, Bartoli, endeavors to excuse the irreverence in the departure of his master, by attributing it to the saint’s spirit of obedience to his physician, who had not warned him of imminent death, we may ask the question, Did he care for the rites of the Church ? Was his soul laid bare at that awful moment?
It would seem that he was not permitted to prolong his lifelong deceptions with his dying breath. “Go and ask the Pope,” said he to his secretary, “for a blessing for me, and an indulgence for my sins, in order that my soul may have more confidence in this terrible passage.” But, before the messenger returned, he had been summoned into the presence of his Judge.
A German chronicler, Steinmetz, observes: “At his death Ignatius was in his sixty-fifth year, his Society in its sixteenth, and the entire world was gazing upon her―some with love, some with desire only, some with suspicion, and others with implacable detestation.”
Extravagant indeed were the praises heaped upon the memory of the founder by the members of the Order after his death. With great pomp, he was buried in their own church of Maria de Strada, at Rome, but, subsequently―in 1587―was re-entombed in the more splendid edifice then erected by the Society. At the removal of the coffin, such remarkable miracles took place (according to the Jesuit account) that, in 1609, the deceased man was pronounced “holy,” and thirteen years afterwards was translated among the “saints” by Gregory XV. Two thousand altars have since been dedicated to him, and about fifty churches. His history after death, as related in the progress of his notorious Jesuit band, is sufficiently significant of the real moral worth of the man. But his followers, honoring him with a profane religious worship, declared that their holy Loyola was equal to the apostles, and in heaven would hold intercourse with no one except popes, empresses, and monarchs—or, with Peter, Mary, and Christ!