The Jesuits (4 page)

After ministries of the Word in the
Formula
came administering the sacraments, which for the Jesuits meant especially hearing confessions and distributing Holy Communion. Then came the corporal works of mercy such as acting as chaplains in prisons and hospitals, which in the history of the Society were much more important than is generally recognized. The list ended with the all-inclusive category: “… and any other works of charity according to what will seem expedient for the glory of God and the common good.”

Not even the 1550 version of the text mentions the schools. That ministry was in its infant stages at the time, and the overwhelming importance it was soon to assume was not yet recognized. Experience outpaced text. This striking omission in the papal bull stands as a warning of the limitations of normative documents in trying to understand the Jesuits. It is imperative to go beyond them to see how the Jesuits put norms into practice—or ignored or went beyond them.

Even before Paul III's approval of the Society, young men were knocking at the door seeking admission. By 1549 Jesuits lived and worked in twenty-two cities but had houses of their own in only seven—Goa, Lisbon, Coimbra, Gandia, Rome, Padua, and Messina. Many more sprang up in the next year, especially in Spain. The Jesuits had meanwhile entered Brazil, India, and Japan. In 1552 alone, eleven new colleges were opened, including one north of the Alps, in Vienna.

As the numbers grew, Ignatius followed the example of older orders and divided the Society into provinces, each headed by a
superior known as the provincial who had oversight of the various Jesuit communities in the area he governed. By the middle of 1553, six provinces were in full operation—Aragon, Brazil, Castile, India, Italy, and Portugal. Shortly thereafter six more were added—Andalusia, France, Sicily, Ethiopia, and Upper and Lower Germany, but the Ethiopian province existed only on paper. The most prosperous province in numbers and prestige was Portugal, due largely to the favor of King John III. The king of Spain, Philip II, was cooler toward this new order, but that did not prevent, after a slow start, a considerable influx of members.

The largest single concentration of Jesuits was in Rome, where in 1555 some 180 lived, largely because the Roman College, founded just three years earlier, had already become a premier school for the training of Jesuits themselves on an international basis. The Roman College was, however, also on the road to becoming the school of choice for the sons of aristocratic families who did not envisage for themselves an ecclesiastical career. Its reputation for academic excellence soon outstripped that of the older University of Rome, the
Sapienza.

One of the great ironies in the early history of the Jesuits is that, although they became known as “the shock-troops of the Counter-Reformation,” the Reformation was for almost a decade peripheral to their concerns. Of course, from the beginning they opposed “Lutheranism,” as they designated virtually every kind of Protestantism, and they worked against it wherever they happened to find it. Their primary focus, however, was elsewhere—on overseas missions and on the Mediterranean lands from which most of them came. They continued to assign a high priority to the missions, but especially in northern Europe they gradually began to focus more and more on combating the Reformation.

In 1543 a young Dutch student of theology at the University of Cologne named Peter Canisius entered the Society. A few years later Ignatius sent him to Messina as a member of the ten-man team that there founded the first Jesuit school. Then in 1550 he sent him, along with Jay and Salmerón, to the University of Ingolstadt. That was a turning point. For all practical purposes Canisius, who did not die until 1597, never again left “German lands.” In no other part of Europe did the Society owe its success and identity so manifestly to a single individual, and in no other part of Europe did the Jesuits come to play such a pivotal role in determining the character of modern Catholicism.

Another turning point occurred in 1555. At the request of Pope Julius III, Ignatius dispatched Laínez and Nadal to the Diet of Augsburg. It was the first time Nadal had set foot in Germany. He was utterly dismayed at what he found. His sense of disaster was only intensified by the terms of the Peace of Augsburg that made Lutheranism legal in those parts of the Empire where the local ruler willed it to be so—
cuius regio, eius religio.
From that moment forward he labored with all his might to make Germany a special priority among his brethren in southern Europe. “Woe to us,” he wrote, “if we do not help Germany.”
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In that same year, Ignatius named Canisius the first provincial of a German province. Canisius took up the cause with utter dedication and began to dun Ignatius and his successors for reinforcements. Meanwhile, first as a small trickle but then in some numbers, Germans began to enter the order. Under Canisius's leadership the Jesuits engaged in controversy with Lutherans, but their main effort was with Catholics. In that regard they took the long view in seeing the schools as the key factor in preparing
future generations—laymen who would be both devout and well educated.

During his long lifetime, Canisius himself was directly or indirectly responsible for the founding of eighteen Jesuit schools. This included a college in Prague, which in 1556 opened with twelve Jesuits, who were almost immediately joined by thirteen more. When Canisius visited Poland a few years later, he was just as appalled by the situation there as Nadal had earlier been in Germany. The Reformation had made such great inroads, especially among the nobility, that the country seemed inexorably destined to become Protestant. Nine years later, at the invitation of Cardinal Stanislaus Hosius, the Jesuits opened a school in Braniewo (Braunsberg) and shortly thereafter another in Pułtusk (Pułtask), some miles north of Warsaw. From that point forward they played a crucial role in the reestablishment of Catholicism in Poland.

But overseas missions held greater attraction for Jesuits from the Mediterranean world than did Germany. Nadal spurred them on by his explanations of the missionary character of the Fourth Vow, in which he proclaimed, “The world is our house.” It was not in the relative comfort of their communities that the Jesuits should find themselves most at home, he said, but “when they are constantly on the move, when they travel throughout the earth … only let them strive in some small way to imitate Christ Jesus, who had nowhere on which to lay his head and who spent all his years of preaching in journey.”
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At this point the Jesuits were having their best success in Brazil, due in the first place to the superior of the mission, the talented and energetic Portuguese nobleman Manuel da Nóbrega. Within two weeks of his arrival in Bahia de todos os Santos in 1549, he had organized children of the Portuguese colonists and natives into
catechism classes that included singing and learning to read and write. Among the early Jesuits in Brazil, however, none was more important than José de Anchieta, a badly crippled nineteen-year-old Basque, who arrived in 1553. He became the energy center for Jesuit work among the natives, with whom he labored until his death forty-four years later. He had hardly set foot on Brazilian soil before he had composed a rough draft of a grammar in Latin characters of the Tupi language. His skill in rhyme and verse enabled him to set Christian beliefs to native tunes and to capitalize on the Indians' marvelous musical talent.

Not all the Jesuits were as skilled linguists as Anchieta, which posed a problem especially in hearing confessions of the Indians whom they had converted. They soon devised a practical solution by training boys to act as interpreters: penitents told their sins to the boy, who in turn related them to the Jesuit, and the boy then related back to the penitents what the Jesuit said. The bishop objected, but Nóbrega countered that the boys were well trained and scrupulous about keeping secret what they heard. The bishop would have been shocked had he heard that the Jesuits occasionally used Brazilian women for this task, about one of whom a Jesuit wrote in 1552, “I think she is a better confessor than I am.”
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But here, as elsewhere, native customs challenged the Jesuits and left them unsure how to proceed. They soon realized, for instance, that the Indians had no idea of marriage as a stable and monogamous union and that both men and women changed partners frequently and capriciously. They became extremely cautious, therefore, about admitting adult Brazilians to baptism and adamant about not admitting them to the Society. But despite such problems, they laid the foundations for perhaps the most enduringly successful of the Jesuits' overseas missions. Except for Goa, other
missions in the East were, at best, inchoate, and not until a few decades later would Philip II allow the Jesuits to enter Spanish America.

Despite the many successes the Society achieved during these early years, difficulties and problems abounded. In almost every way, for instance, the Jesuits were unprepared to open in rapid-fire fashion so many schools. The schools were too many, the Jesuits too few. Some Jesuits performed poorly in the classroom, while others protested they did not enter the Society to spend their lives teaching Latin grammar to adolescent boys. Local schoolmasters threw obstacles in their path, and, as mentioned, funding was never sufficient. Schools opened, but, sometimes hardly opened, they closed.

In time the Jesuits took steps to ensure adequate resources for prospective schools, and the situation improved. But they faced other internal problems. In Portugal Simão Rodrigues's governance of the province proved arbitrary, and Ignatius had to remove from office this old companion from student days in Paris, one of the original ten founders. Rodrigues resented how he had been treated and never quite forgave Ignatius. Meanwhile, Nicolás Bobadilla, another of the original “friends in the Lord,” made known his displeasure in the authority Ignatius granted to Polanco and Nadal, and he took it upon himself to complain to the pope about Ignatius's “tyranny” in governing the Society.

The Jesuits in the meantime suffered criticism and attack from fellow Catholics, including bishops, because of their pastoral practices, none of which was more controversial in the sixteenth century than their advocacy of frequent reception of the Eucharist. In Spain they were criticized and decried for admitting “New Christians” into the Society, that is, Catholics of Jewish ancestry. No
attack shocked them more, caused them greater dismay, and presaged more serious difficulties for them than the condemnation of the Society by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris.

In trying to establish itself in Paris, the Jesuits had made political miscalculations that set the bishop, the Parlement, and the Faculty against them. In the overheated political and religious atmosphere of the French capital, the Jesuits' mode of religious life was sufficiently untraditional to arouse fear and suspicion. On December 1, 1554, the Faculty of Theology, still considered the most prestigious in the Catholic world, published its decree, which concluded: “This Society appears to be a danger to the Faith, a disturber of the peace of the church, destructive of monastic life, and destined to cause havoc rather than edification.” To its well-known condemnations of Erasmus and Luther, the Faculty now added the Jesuits.

The decree stunned the members of the Society, especially those who were graduates of the university. It was an extraordinarily serious blow to the reputation of this institution still in its infancy. Ignatius decided to react positively by seeking testimonials from around Europe about the good work the Jesuits were doing and the esteem in which they were held. A number of such letters flowed in, and they mitigated the sting. But the decree sowed suspicion of the Jesuits' orthodoxy, their style of life, and their pastoral practices that from this time forward they were never able fully to dispel.

In the face of such problems, the Jesuits found support from the highest possible authority, the papacy. In 1555, however, that source of security turned insecure when Giampietro Carafa became Pope Paul IV. Carafa, a reformer of fanatical zeal, distrusted all novelty and, because of Spanish occupation of his native
Naples for over a half century, nursed a deep antagonism for all things Spanish. He had many years earlier met Ignatius in Venice, and for reasons still obscure, the meeting had not gone well. According to a contemporary witness, when Ignatius heard of Paul's election as pope, he “shook in every bone in his body.”
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Paul gave ear to Bobadilla's complaints about Ignatius, but not until a few months after his election did he show open hostility to the Society. Probably out of his chronic fear of Spanish conspiracies against him, he sent the papal police to search Jesuit headquarters in Rome for weapons, of which of course they found none. It was, however, only after Ignatius's death the next year when the First General Congregation met to elect his successor that the relationship with the pope devolved into a full crisis. Paul demanded that the new general's term be limited to three years instead of for life, and he imposed upon the Jesuits the daily obligation to chant the Liturgical Hours in choir.

The Jesuits had no choice but to comply. When Paul died in 1559, however, Diego Laínez, who succeeded Ignatius as general, followed the opinion of the canon lawyers he consulted that, since the pope's action regarding the Hours was at variance with the
Formula,
it was valid only during his lifetime unless the next pope solemnly insisted upon it. The new pope, Pius IV, did not insist and, moreover, issued a formal abrogation of Paul's limitation of the general's term. The crisis was thus overcome. For the next two centuries, although the Jesuits experienced difficult moments with the successors of Saint Peter, they by and large enjoyed their favor and found in them protection from their enemies.