THE JESUIT IN FACT AND FICTION

New Zealand Tablet, 21 January 1915, Page 17

THE JESUIT IN FACT AND FICTION

The centenary of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus was solemnly observed on a recent Sunday at St. Ignatius’ Jesuit Church, Stamford Hill, London, when a Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated. Special sermons were preached by the Very Rev. Dr. Kendal, 0.5.8., of Downside Abbey. The Jesuit, said Dr. Kendal in the course of his impressive morning sermon, had ever been a fighting man. He had ever despised the pomp and circumstance of earthly grandeur and bound himself to refuse all dignities unless called by obedience ; and asked for nothing better than to stand in the forefront of the battle line where the fight was thickest. Imbued with the chivalrous spirit of its noble founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, at a time when the Church was face to face with a great apostasy ; when the spirit of revolt against authority was threatening to carry away the whole of Europe; when the Church of God had to face the direst crisis in her history; the Society of Jesus offered itself to spend itself. and be spent in waging war against this vast array of hostile forces. llow nobly its children had fulfilled their task might be seen from the fact that the brunt of all the attacks against the Church had been borne by the Jesuit that the great obstacle in the way of the Church’s enemy had been the Jesuit : that the central point in every plan of campaign had been the removal of the Jesuit. Had the object been to sap the Christian Faith, to drive God from the school and the home, * Away With the Jesuit ’ had been the rallying-cry. If an attempt had been made under the pretence of pure religion to sap and to minimise the authority of the —away first with

the Jesuit. - When the ignorant and the . gullible were to be fed with preposterous fables against the morality of the Church and the. priesthood, it was round the name of the i Jesuit that * the absurdest products of diseased imagination had clustered. If the Church was to be branded as enslaving: men's minds with the basest of. tyrannies; to be the mark for all the mud that industrious malevolence could gather, it was the Jesuit who was selected of the very type of all that is execrated. Did persecution break outthe Jesuit was the first to be driven forth as an outcast; he was the hostile force. On all sides vilified and slandered by the enemies of truth, the Jesuit has stood forth before the Divine Master and exclaimed: ‘ The reproach of them that reproached Thee fell upon me,’ At length the time came (continued the preacher) when this great Order. was to lay down its life. Not as a coward dies, perished the Society of Jesus'; not through inward decay; not through dearth of members; but in the very high tide of its vigor and observance. See the forces gathered together for its destructiona strange and motley crew ! To compass the destruction of Christ, the Pharisee, and Sadducee principles of life as different as the winds of Heaven. In like manner there were ranged against the Society of Jesus the needy adventurer, lusting for gold, who found the way to the exploitation and enslavement of the poor Indians blocked by the Jesuits; the infidel who wished to destroy all religion; the Jansenist who, under

The Pretence of a Strict Morality,

deprived the people of the food of their —the body and blood of Christ; 'the Erastian and legalist who wished to make the Church the creature of the State, who attacked the prerogative of the —Pombal, Tannuci, the Parliament of Paris, and, to complete the tale —that sinister figure, the curse of France, the scandal of the world, Mme. de Pompadour, mistress of the French king, who hated the Jesuits because a Jesuit confessor had refused to grant her request of a sacrilegious absolution. All these forces .joined together. And again another resemblance to the Divine Master; as the witnesses got together against Christ contradicted one another hopelessly, so these witnesses of evil could not agree as to what the evil was. The Jesuits were good and blameless men, but their constitution was hopelessly bad was the verdict in one quarter ; the constitution was good but the men wicked, the verdict in another; constitution and rank and file good, but the superiors hopelessly bad, in another. Add to this charges of enslaving the natives brought by those whom the Jesuits had prevented from so doing; lax in their morals ; exciters of sedition. So far the Jesuit could smile with contempt, strengthened by the approval of ten centuries, of Pope after Pope, of Bishop after Bishop, with the love of the countless souls which they had led to sanctity. The preacher having dwelt at length on the events leading up to the suppression of the Order by Clement XIV., in the year 1773, continued; after Calvary, the Resurrection. But, as in the case of Christ, that which looked like failure was magnificent success; what looked like the end

Was Only the Beginning.

And so in the year 1814 under Pius Yll — a Pontiff whom the preacher was proud to claim as a son of St. Benedict—the Society rose again. Whatever work the sons of St. Benedict had ever accomplished for religion, they had done no nobler work than Pius VII. when he raised up again the fallen Society. Once again this great Order embarked on its beneficial work its head encircled with the halo of martyrdom, once again it had taken its .place before the successor of St. Peter. How fruitful had been its labors during this century, said Dr. Kendal in conclusion. In science, in history, in theology, in the direction of souls, in the education of the young, the Society of Jesus had won a lasting fame. Let them pray God to bless its career, to raise up in the future, as‘in the past, men eminent in every branch, and let them wonder at the marvellous providence of God, who showed them in the history of the Jesuit the glory of suffering in the cause of Christ.