FROM time to time the veil has been lifted, which hides the true character of the sons of Loyola as missionaries and educationalists, and a universal cry of indignation has been raised. The vices the members of the great secret society practiced were in harmony with their creed, and their inordinate desire to obtain wealth has begotten distrust of them in the minds of people generally.
Riches of every kind were necessary; for, without them, the Society could not pay the heavy stipends of spies at foreign courts, and of father confessors to men of influence. And without large sums of money, marriages among the nobility―so advantageous to the system―could not be arranged! Therefore the Jesuits sought and they kept the consciences of the wealthy; and as early as 1626 so successfully used the confessional as a key to money chests in all countries, that the University of Paris complained of the Society’s immense wealth Numberless instances of the fathers’ assiduity in regard to the last hours of their wealthy penitents might be quoted. Such interest did the Jesuit confessors take in rich widows, heiresses, or their relatives, that, in cases of sickness, they never stirred from the bedside; and, in the event of death taking place, a passage in the will in favor of the Order was almost always found.
It was owing to the Jesuit body that the iniquitous “Holy Office” was revived with terrors unknown to it in former ages. He who invented new instruments of torture to dislocate or mangle the limbs of “heretics” was rewarded, and throughout Europe, whilst the awful flames of the stake were ascending, the smile of the Jesuits might have been seen. The Bull re-establishing the Inquisition was published July 21st, 1542, and no small part of the success which attended the Jesuits was owing to their use of “the Holy Office of the Inquisition.”
When the deputies sent by Paul III. to the Ratisbon Conference, returned to tell that there was not a country in Christendom where Protestantism was not spreading, the Pope asked in alarm, “What, then, is to be done?”
Cardinal Caraffa (afterwards Paul IV.), and the Bishop of Toledo, to whom the question was addressed, immediately replied, “Re-establish the Inquisition.” Caraffa and Toledo were old Dominicans, the same order to whom Innocent III. had committed the working of the “Holy Tribunal” when it was first set up. “Here in Rome,” said they, “must the successors of Peter destroy all the heresies of the whole world.”
As time proceeded, a great part of Christendom began to regard the Jesuits as people who hunted to death everyone daring to oppose them.
The Jansenists, Old Catholics of France, who were antagonists of Jesuitism, in 1709 were thrown by their enemies into prison by scores, never to be released. The story of the persecuted Roman Catholic, Archbishop Palafox, whom the Jesuits mocked and excommunicated in the public streets of Mexico, is sufficient to prove that even the Papacy quails before the great secret society. “I fly,” wrote Palafox himself to Pope Innocent X., “into the mountains, and seek in the society of serpents and scorpions that security which is denied to me so perseveringly by the implacable Society of Jesus.”
In no country in the world did the Jesuits bring murder and regicide into practice as they did in France. The civil war which commenced about 1561, owed its duration and its ferocity, if not its origin, to the Jesuits.
“Brother” Sanguini commanded the Pope’s troops at the siege of Poictiers, and “Father” Augnier, in the battle of Garnac, equipped the Duke of Anjou.
The Jesuit College in Paris was the principal stronghold of the murderers who were let loose upon the Huguenots on the fearful eve of St. Bartholomew in 1572, when the streets of the French capital and towns flowed with the blood of thirty thousand Protestants. The Jesuit profess house sheltered the infamous Henri, Duc de Guise, while he superintended the carnage.
Instigated by the Jesuits, in 1589 a young Dominican monk murdered Henry III., who had allied himself with the Protestant Henry of Navarre―a crime which they pronounced “a charming deed.”
Attempt after attempt was made upon the life of his successor, Henry IV., by the same hands, until in 1594, on the discovery of a frightful plot, the Society was banished from France by imperial edict, and a public monument, erected to record for ever the vileness of the Jesuit body, was erected in Paris. Yet as soon after as the year 1603 the order for expulsion was revoked. We need not add that the same dark role again commenced, so that in 1610 Henry IV. fell a victim to the treacherous Society he had befriended. In 1745 Louis XV. was assassinated, when once more the Jesuits were driven out of France by royal command.
The Jesuits were behind the terrible scenes of the forty years’ war into which the Netherlands were plunged at the end of the sixteenth century. They practiced treachery against the Dutch, who fought for faith and freedom, and kept supplies of weapons and powder for the Spanish foe in their colleges at Antwerp,
Bruges, and elsewhere. William I., Prince of Orange, the ultimate deliverer of the Dutch from the Spanish yoke, was, of course, the object of Jesuit hatred, for no man then living frustrated more of their plans than did he. They determined to take his life by poison or dagger. In 1582 a Jesuit emissary inflicted a severe wound on the Prince, and in 1584 he succumbed to the attack of another assassin. His murderer was his private secretary, who affected great zeal for the Protestant religion! Bible in hand, he was implicitly trusted by his royal master, until the very day when his pistol terminated the life of the noble Protestant prince.
Pages could be filled with such accounts, and similar deeds have been perpetrated on English soil! In the year 1541 Pope Paul III., incensed against Henry VIII. for his apostasy, and failing in his attempts to induce either Francis I. or Charles V. to invade England, determined to send some emissaries into Ireland in order that, by working upon the ignorant and bigoted minds of its fanatic people, he might excite them to a civil war. He therefore asked from the General of the newly-established Society of Jesus two of its members to be sent thither. The two Jesuits whom Ignatius gave to the Pope for this mission were Salmeron and Brouet, who received secret instructions, and were honored (though privately) with the name of Papal Nuncios. Visiting Holyrood on their way to Ireland as they had been bidden, their influence on James 5 proved sufficient to bring about indirectly the disastrous war which quickly followed. In Ireland, whilst they devoted themselves to reforming and confirming, and granting millions of indulgences to the people, who flocked round them; at the same time they excited them against their excommunicated Sovereign. They formed the “noble plan” (says their historian, M. Cretineau) of going to London, and seeking to disarm the anger of the king by eloquently pleading the cause of the Roman
Catholic religion! “It was as well for Henry, and England too,” remarks Nicolini, “that their plan was found ‘impracticable.’ Salmeron and Brouet found it advisable to return to Rome. Thus ended the first mission to England. Would to God it had been the last!”
But from the moment when Loyola dispatched his associates on Papal errands to England up to the present day, the Jesuits have devoted themselves to the extinction of Protestantism in Great Britain.
The murder of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, could not be anything but desirable in the eyes of the Jesuits, since she was the only impediment preventing the accession to the throne of England of one who would yield Rome obedience. Numerous attempts were made on the life of Queen Elizabeth from the year 1553, which resulted in bringing the Jesuit agents one by one to the scaffold. So many and so intriguing were these plots against Elizabeth, that the English Roman Catholics themselves denounced them for their wickedness.
In 1557, upon the execution of Mary “Queen of Scots” —Rome’s chosen successor to the English throne—the Jesuits’ rage reached its height. They instigated Philip II. of Spain to prepare and launch the “Invincible Armada,” which, nevertheless, by the interposition of our omnipotent God, was destroyed. The Pope issued a Bull of Excommunication, empowering any of the “faithful” to deliver over, alive or dead, the heretic sovereign of England to King Philip; but in vain, and Elizabeth at her death declared by edict that the Jesuits should forever be outlaws of her kingdom.
James I, son of the Queen of Scots, ungratefully declared on his accession that England should remain still closed against the Order. In their rage they determined to annihilate the King, the Royal Family, and the heads of Protestantism at one blow. It should never be forgotten, that the “Fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” in 1605, was the work of the Jesuits. The ringleaders―men of position and wealth―headed by their Provincial, Garnet, the director of Anglo-Jesuit affairs, were guided by an English Roman Catholic nobleman. The conduct of Garnet after the discovery of the crime was an apt illustration of the doctrine, “The end sanctifies the means.” He and his colleagues were hanged. But they were beatified by the Church of Rome.
No reader of this “Story of the Jesuits” will wonder that at last the whole of Christendom longed to be rid of men who were disturbers of the public peace, and by reason of whose secret workings, life and property were unsafe. Expelled by royal decrees from every country into which they had entered, Pope Clement XIV. dealt them a death blow. He dissolved the Society. In 1773 the famous Brief of Abolition of the Jesuit Order issued from the Vatican. Its tenor may be gathered from the following extracts: “§ 17. . . There were never wanting accusations of the greatest consequence which were made against members of this Society, especially that such, from their audacious, vehement, and persecuting zeal, were continually disturbing the peace and quiet of Christendom. § 21 . . . We have remarked that our admonitions to them not to mix themselves up with secular and political as well as many other practical measures, have been almost powerless and of no effect. Our predecessors had to undergo much vexation on that account; indeed, Pope Innocent XI., driven by necessity, went so far as to forbid the Society to receive and invest novices. § 23 . . . There occurred still more dangerous outbreaks as long as Clement XIII. sat upon the Chair of St. Peter . . . and it lastly went so far that our beloved sons in Christ, the Kings of Spain, France, Portugal, and the Two Sicilies, saw themselves constrained to banish and expel the members of the Order out of their kingdoms. § 25 ... In consideration that it is scarcely possible, as long as the: Society exists to re-establish durable peace in the Church . . . we, in the plenitude of Apostolic power, ABOLISH the said Society, suppress it and dissolve it, and do away with and abolish all and every one of their houses, schools, colleges, hospitals, and all their places for assembling, in whatever kingdom they may be situated. . . . So that from this day henceforth the Society of Jesus no longer exists.”
Thus spoke the infallible voice from the Vatican, uttered by a successor of Pope Clement XIII., who by a similarly “apostolic” document had extolled the Society! Pope Clement XIV. was well aware that in condemning an Order, more gigantic than any institution the world had ever seen, numbering at that moment 22,792 professed members, besides a multitude of associates, novices, and lay brothers, wealthy, wide spreading, and powerful enough to shake the world, he would sign his own death warrant. It is an undisputed fact that Clement met his death by poisoning, and that of the most awful character ; and when it was asked who had poisoned the Pope, the people of Rome exclaimed, as with one lip, “This the Jesuits: have done!”
In spite of the abolition, apparently meant to last forever, Pope Pius VII. restored the Order by a Bull dated August 7th, 1814. This nineteenth century Pope revived the Society in order to prop up the sinking fortunes of the Popedom. “We should deem ourselves,” says he, “guilty of a great crime towards God, if we neglected the aids which the special providence of God has put at our disposal; and if, placed in the bark of Peter, tossed and assailed by continual storms, we refused to employ the VIGOROUS and EXPERIENCED ROWERS who volunteer their services, in order to break the waves of a sea which threaten every moment shipwreck and death.”
What a practical exemplification of what Rome means when she plumes herself upon being semper idem― “ALWAYS THE SAME!”
It will be remembered that it was in a moment of danger to the Church of Rome that the Jesuits received the benediction of the Pope and began their first career. And again it is at a moment of peril to the Papacy that they are revived, and let loose upon the world once more to pursue their terrible scheme. But let us clearly note that whatever crimes they now commit must be laid to the charge of the Church of Rome. She deliberately resuscitated the Order with the clearest record of its guilt before her eyes. And never let us forget that Papal power and Jesuitism are henceforth one and the same.