SHCT 178 Robert Aleksander Maryks - Jesuit Survival and Restoration - A Global History, 1773-1900 (2014) PDF

Jesuit Survival and Restoration
Studies in the History of Christian

Traditions
General Editor
Robert J. Bast (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
In cooperation with
Paul C.H. Lim (Nashville, Tennessee)

Brad C. Pardue (Point Lookout, Missouri)
Eric Saak (Liverpool)
Christine Shepardson (Knoxville, Tennessee)
Brian Tierney (Ithaca, New York)
Arjo Vanderjagt (Groningen)
John Van Engen (Notre Dame, Indiana)
Founding Editor
Heiko A. Oberman
VOLUME 178
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/shct

Jesuit Survival and Restoration
A Global History, 17731900
Edited by
Robert A. Maryks
Jonathan Wright
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Official stamp of the General Order of Jesuits.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jesuit survival and restoration : a global history, 1773-1900 / edited by Robert Aleksander Maryks, Jonathan
Wright.
pages cm. -- (Studies in the history of Christian traditions, ISSN 1573-5664 ; VOLUME 178)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-28238-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Jesuits--History--19th century. 2. Jesuits--History--18th
century. I. Maryks, Robert A., editor.
BX3706.3.J46 2014
271.53--dc23
2014035816
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Contents
List of Illustrationsix
Abbreviationsxi
Introduction1
Robert A. Maryks and Jonathan Wright
Part 1
The Historical Context
1 A Restored Society or a New Society of Jesus?13

Thomas Worcester, S.J.
2 Some Remarks on Jesuit Historiography 1773181434

Robert Danieluk, S.J.
Part 2
The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the
Russian Empire
3 Before and After Suppression

Jesuits and Former Jesuits in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
c. 1750179551
Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski
4 The Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire (17721820) and the

Restoration of the Order67
Marek Inglot, S.J.
5 The Poock Academy (18121820)

An Example of the Society of Jesuss Endurance83
Irena Kadulska
6 Sebastian Sierakowski, S.J. and the Language of Architecture

A Jesuit Life during the Era of Suppression and Restoration99
Carolyn C. Guile
vi Contents
Part 3
Central and Western Europe
7 The Jesuit Artistic Diaspora in Germany after 1773129

Jeffrey Chipps Smith
8 Enduring the Deluge

Hungarian Jesuit Astronomers from Suppression
to Restoration148
Paul Shore
9 Est et Non Est

Jesuit Corporate Survival in England after the Suppression162
Thomas M. McCoog, S.J.
10 The Exiled Spanish Jesuits and the Restoration of the Society of

Jesus178
Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga and Niccol Guasti
11 The Society of Jesus Under Another Name

The Paccanarists in the Restored Society of Jesus197
Eva Fontana Castelli
12 Jesuit at Heart
Luigi Mozzi de Capitani (1746-1813) between Suppression and
Restoration212
Emanuele Colombo
13 The Romantic Historian under Charles X

Evaluating Jesuit Restoration in Charles Laumiers
Rsum de lHistoire des Jsuites229
Frdric Conrod
PART 4
China and Beyond
14 Jesuit Survival and Restoration in China245

R. Po-chia Hsia
Contents vii
15 Restoration or New Creation?

The Return of the Society of Jesus to China261
Paul Rule
16 Rising from the Ashes

The Gothic Revival and the Architecture of the New Society
of Jesus in China and Macao278
Csar Guillen-Nuez
17 The Phoenix Rises from its Ashes

The Restoration of the Jesuit Shanghai Mission299
Paul Mariani, S.J.
18 The Chinese Rites Controversys Long Shadow over the Restored

Society of Jesus315
Jeremy Clarke, S.J.
19 The Province of Madurai Between the Old and New Society

of Jesus331
Sabina Pavone
Part 5
The Americas
20 The Russian Society and the American Jesuits

Giovanni Grassis Crucial Role353
Daniel Schlafly
21 John Carroll, the Catholic Church, and the Society of Jesus in Early
Republican America368
Catherine ODonnell
22 The Restoration in Canada

An Enduring Patrimony386
John Meehan, S.J. and Jacques Monet, S.J.
23 Jesuit Tradition and the Rise of South American Nationalism399

Andrs I. Prieto
viii Contents
24 The First Return of the Jesuits to Paraguay415

Ignacio Telesca
25 Jesuit Restoration in Mexico433

Perla Chinchilla Pawling
Part 6
Africa
26 Early Departure, Late Return

An Overview of the Jesuits in Africa during the Suppression and after
the Restoration453
Festo Mkenda, S.J.
27 Hoping Against All Hope

The Survival of the Jesuits in Southern Africa (18751900)467
Aquinata N. Agonga
28 The Jesuits in Fernando Po (18581872)

An Incomplete Mission482
Jean Luc Enyegue, S.J.
Index 503
List of Illustrations
1.1 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Exterior, Dome. June 201216

1.2 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Interior. June 201217
1.3 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Faade under restoration.
June 201219
1.4 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Restored. June 201420
1.5 Church of Saint-Ignace, Paris. Exterior, Apse. June 201221
1.6 Church of Saint-Ignace, Paris, Interior. June 201222
6.1 Project for the renovation of the faade of Wawel Cathedral. Elevation and
plan. Sebastian Sierakowski, 1788103
6.2 Project for a church with a single nave and two rows of chapels. Elevation.
Sebastian Sierakowski105
6.3 Jesuit church of SS. Peter and Paul, Cracow. Giovanni de Rossis, Jzef Britius,
Giovanni Trevano. 15971619, consecrated 1635106
6.4 Southeast bell tower, Collegiate Church of St. Anne, Cracow. Sebastian
Sierakowski. 1775108
6.5 Clock Tower Over the Chapter House (r; dome 1715) and Sigismund Tower
(l; dome 1899), Wawel Cathedral. Cracow109
6.6 Elevation of the short side and transverse elevation of the Cloth Hall
(Sukiennice). Sebastian Sierakowski110
6.7 Octagonal wooden chapel; plan, section, elevation. Sebastian Sierakowski. n.d.
Watercolor and ink on paper, 22.4 52.7 cm111
6.8 Piarist church of the Transfiguration, faade. Cracow. Francesco Placidi.
175961113
6.9 Piarist church of the Transfiguration, nave. Cracow. Franz Eckstein, 1733 114
6.10 Studies for capitals, plate XIII, Architektura obeymuica wszelki gatunek
murowania i budowania, Vol. 2. Sebastian Sierakowski. 1810124
6.11 Frontispiece. Architektura obeymuica wszelki gatunek murowania i budowania,
Vol. 2. Sebastian Sierakowski. 1812125
7.1 Johann Leonhard xlein, Commemorative Medal for the Suppression of the
Society of Jesus, silver, 1774. Staatliche Mnzsammlung, Munich130
7.2 Christoph Schwarz, Glorification of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, center
of the Mary Altarpiece, 15801581. Germanisches Nationalmuseum,
Nuremberg135
7.3 Johann Smissek, The Church of St. Michaels and the Jesuit College in Munich,
engraving, c. 16441650141
7.4 The Facades of the Church of Mari Himmelfahrt and the former Jesuit College
in Munich144
x List of Illustrations
6.11 Frontispiece. Architektura obeymuica wszelki gatunek murowania i budowania,

Vol. 2. Sebastian Sierakowski. 1812125
7.1 Johann Leonhard xlein, Commemorative Medal for the Suppression of the
Society of Jesus, silver, 1774. Staatliche Mnzsammlung, Munich130
7.2 Christoph Schwarz, Glorification of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, center
of the Mary Altarpiece, 15801581. Germanisches Nationalmuseum,
Nuremberg135
7.3 Johann Smissek, The Church of St. Michaels and the Jesuit College in Munich,
7.4 The Facades of the Church of Mari Himmelfahrt and the former Jesuit College
in Munich144
Abbreviations
I Reference Works
In citing works in the notes, short titles have generally been used. Reference works
frequently cited have been identified by the following abbreviations:
ahsi Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu

ar Acta Romana Societatis Iesu
arsi Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (to be distingueshed
from ahsi)
Astrain 19021925a-b Antonio Astrain, Historia de la Compaa de Jess en la
Asistencia de Espaa. Madrid: Est. Tip. Sucesores de
Rivadeneyra/Razn y Fe, 19021925, 7 vols:
I: San Ignacio de Loyola 15401556 [Astrain 1902]; 2nd ed.
(1912) [Astrain 1912]
II: Lanez Borja 15561572 [Astrain 1905]
III: Mercurian Aquaviva (primera parte) 15731615
[Astrain 1909]; 2nd ed. (1925) [Astrain 1925a]
IV: Aquaviva (segunda parte) 15811615 [Astrain 1913]
V: Vitelleschi, Carafa, Piccolomini, 16151652 [Astrain 1916]
VI: Nickel, Oliva, Noyelle, Gonzlez 16521705 [Astrain
1920]
VII: Tamburini, Retz, Visconti, Centurione 17051758
[Astrain 1925b].
Bangert 1986 William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus. St.
Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986 (2nd ed).
Burnichon 19141922 Joseph Burnichon, La Compagnie de Jsus en France.
Histoire dun sicle 18141914. Paris: Beauchesne, 1914
1922, 4 vols:
I: 18151830 [Burnichon 1914]
II: 18301845 [Burnichon 1916]
III: 18461860 [Burnichon 1919]
IV: 18601880 [Burnichon 1922].
Carrez 1900 Ludovicus Carrez, Atlas geographicus Societatis Jesu. In
quo delineantur quinque ejus modernae assistentiae, pro-
vinciae tres et viginti singularumque in toto orbe missio-
nes, necnon et veteres ejusdem Societatis provinciae
xii Abbreviations
quadraginta tres cum earum domiciliis, quantum fieri

licuit. Paris: Georges Colombier, 1900.
Cordara 1750 Julius Cesar Cordara, Historiae Societatis Jesu pars sexta
complectens res gestas sub Mutio Vitellescho, vol. 1: Ab
anno Christi mdcxvi. Societatis lxxvii. Rome: Ex
Typographia Antonii de Rubeis, 1750.
Cordara 1859 Julius Cesar Cordara, Historiae Societatis Jesu pars sexta
complectens res gestas sub Mutio Vitellescho, vol. 2: Ab
anno Christi mdcxxv ad annum MDCXXXIII. Rome:
Civilitatis Catholicae, 1859.
dhcj Diccionario Histrico de la Compaa de Jess. Biogrfico-
temtico, 4 vols. Rome/Madrid: ihsi/Universidad
Pontificia Comillas, 2001.
Duhr 19071928a-b Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern
deutscher Zunge. Freiburg, Herdersche Verlagshandlung/
Mnchen-Regensburg, Verlagsanstalt vorm. G.J. Manz,
19071928, 6 vols:
I: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern deutscher Zunge
im XVI. Jahrhundert [Duhr 1907]
II/1: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern deutscher
Zunge in der ersten hlfte des XVII. Jahrhunderts, erster
Teil [Duhr 1913a]
II/2: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern deutscher
Zunge in der ersten hlfte des XVII. Jahrhunderts, zweiter
Teil [Duhr 1913b]
III: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern deutscher
Zunge in der zweiten hlfte des XVII. Jahrhunderts [Duhr
1921]
IV/1: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern deutscher
Zunge im 18. Jahrhundert, erster Teil [Duhr 1928a]
IV/2: Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Lndern deutscher
Zunge im 18. Jahrhundert, zweiter Teil [Duhr 1928b].
Fouqueray 19101925a-b Henri Fouqueray, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jsus en
France des origines la suppression (15281762). Paris:
Picard/Bureaux des tudes, 19101925, 5 vols:
I: Les origines et les premires luttes (15281575)
[Fouqueray 1910]
II: La Ligue et le bannissement (15751604) [Fouqueray
1913]
Abbreviations xiii
III: poque de progrs (16041623) [Fouqueray 1922]

IV: Sous le ministre de Richelieu. Premire partie (1624
1634) [Fouqueray 1925a]
V: Sous le ministre de Richelieu. Seconde partie (1634
1645) [Fouqueray 1925b].
Fras 19231944 Lesmes Fras, Historia de la Compaa de Jess en su
Asistencia Moderna de Espaa. Madrid: Administracin
de Razn y Fe, 19231944, 2 vols:
I: (18151835) [Fras 1923]
II: (18351868) [Fras 1944].
Hughes 19071917 Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North
America Colonial and Federal. London/New York/Bombay/
Calcutta: Longmans, Green and Co., 19071917, 4 vols:
I: Text, vol. I: From the first Colonization till 1645 [Hughes
1907]
II: Documents (16051838), vol. I, part I: N.os 1140 [Hughes
1908]
III: Documents (16051838), vol. I, part II: N.os 141224
[Hughes 1910]
IV: Text, vol. II: From 1645 till 1773 [Hughes 1917].
Inglot 1997 Marek Inglot, La Compagnia di Ges nellimpero Russo
(17721820) et la sua parte nella restaurazione generale
della Compagnia. Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universit
Gregoriana, 1997.
Institutum IIII Institutum Societatis Iesu, Florence: Ex Typographia A.
SS. Conceptione, 18921893, 3 vols:
I: Bullarium et compendium privilegiorum.
II: Examen et Constitutiones. Decreta Congregationum
Generalium. Formulae Congregationum.
III: Regulae, Ratio studiorum, Ordinationes, Instructiones,
Industriae, Exercitia, Directorium.
ihsi Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu
Jap. Sin. IIV Albert Chan, Chinese Books and Documents in the Jesuit
Archives in Rome. A Descriptive Catalogue Japonica-
Sinica IIV. Armonk/New York/London: An East Gate
Book, 2002.
Jouvancy 1710 Josephus de Jouvancy, Historiae Societatis Jesu pars
quinta sive Claudius, vol. 2: Ab anno Christi mdxci ad
mdcxvi. Rome: Ex Typographia Georgi Plachi, 1710.
xiv Abbreviations
Krss 19101938 Ludwig Krss [Kroess], Geschichte der bmischen Provinz

der Gesellschaft Jesu. Vienna: Verlag der Buchhandlung
Ambr. Opitz Nachfolger/Verlag Mayer & Comp., 1910
1938, 2 vols:
I: Geschichte der ersten Kollegien in Bhmen, Mhren und
Glatz von ihrer Grndung bis zu ihrer Auflsung durch die
bhmischen Stnde, 15561619 [Krss 1910]
II/12: Beginn der Provinz, des Universittsstreites und
der katholischen Generalreformation bis zum Frieden von
Prag 1635/Die bhmische Provinz der Gesellschaft Jesu
unter Ferdinand III. (16371657) [Krss 19271938].
Leite 1938a1950 Serafim Leite, Histria da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil.
Lisbon: Livraria Portuglia/Rio de Janeiro, Civilizao
Brasileira, 19381950, 10 vols:
I: Sculo XVI O estabelecimento [Leite 1938a]
II: Sculo XVI A obra [Leite 1938b]
III: Norte (1) Fundaes e entradas. Sculos XVIIXVIII
[Leite 1943a]
IV: Norte (2) Obra e assuntos gerais. Sculos XVIIXVIII
[Leite 1943b]
V: Da Baa ao Nordeste. Estabelecimentos e assuntos
locais. Sculos XVIIXVIII [Leite 1945a]
VI: Do Rio de Janeiro ao Prata e ao Guapor.
Estabelecimentos e assuntos locais. Sculos XVIIXVIII
[Leite 1945b]
VII: Sculos XVIIXVIII. Assuntos Gerais [Leite 1949a]
VIII: Escritores: de A a M (Suplemento bibliogrfico I)
[Leite 1949b]
IX: Escritores: de M a Z (Suplemento bibliogrfico II)
[Leite 1949c]
X: ndice Geral [Leite 1950].
Lukcs 19871988b Ladislaus Lukcs, Catalogus Generalis seu Nomenclator
biographicus personarum Provinciae Austriae Societatis
Iesu (15511773). Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1987.
Pars I: A-H [Lukcs 1987]
Pars II: I-Q. [Lukcs 1988a]
Pars III: R-Z. [Lukcs 1988b].
Lukcs 1990a1995b Ladislaus Lukcs, Catalogi personarum et officiorum
Provinciae Austriae S.I. Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I.
III: (16411665) [Lukcs 1990a]
Abbreviations xv
IV: (16661683) [Lukcs 1990b]

V: (16841699) [Lukcs 1990c]
VI: (17001717) [Lukcs 1993a]
VII: (17181733) [Lukcs 1993b]
VIII: (17341747) [Lukcs 1994a]
IX: (17481760) [Lukcs 1994b]
X: (17611769) [Lukcs 1995a]
XI: (17701773) [Lukcs 1995b]
Martina 2003 Giacomo Martina, Storia della Compagnia di Ges in
Italia (18141983). Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003.
Mendizbal 1972 Rufo Mendizbal, Catalogus defunctorum in renata
Societate Iesu ab a. 1814 ad a. 1970. Rome: Curiam P. Gen.,
1972.
mhsi Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (series)
mhsi Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (publisher)
mmsi Monumenta Missionum Societatis Iesu (sub-series of
mhsi)
Nadal 1976 Jernimo Nadal, Scholia in Constitutiones S.I., ed. Manuel
Ruiz Jurado. Granada: Facultad de Teologia, 1976.
Orlandini 1615 Nicolaus Orlandini, Historiae Societatis Iesu prima pars.
Rome: Apud Bartholomaeum Zanettum, 1615.
Padberg 1994 John W. Padberg, Martin D. OKeefe, and John L.
McCarthy, For matters of greater moment. The first thirty
Jesuit General Congregations. A brief history and a trans-
lation of the decrees. St. Louis, Missouri: Institute of
Jesuit Sources, 1994.
Pastells/Mateos 19121949b Pablo Pastells, Historia de la Compaa de Jess en la
Provincia del Paraguay (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay,
Per, Bolivia y Brasil) segun los documentos originales del
Archivo General de Indias. Madrid: Librera General de
Victoriano Surez/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cientificas/Instituto Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, 1912
1949, 9 vols:
I: [Pastells 1912]
II: [Pastells 1915]
III: [Pastells 1918]
IV: [Pastells 1923]
V: [Pastells 1933]
VI: 17151731 [Pastells/Mateos 1946]
VII: 17311751 [Pastells/Mateos 1948]
xvi Abbreviations
VIII/1: 17511760 [Pastells/Mateos 1949a]

VIII/2: 17601768 [Pastells/Mateos 1949b].
Prez 18961898 Rafael Prez, La Compaa de Jess en Colombia y Centro-
Amrica despus de su Restauracin. Valladolid: Imp.,
Lib., Heliografa y Taller de Grabados De Luis N. de
Gaviria/ Imprenta Castellana, 18961898, 3 vols:
I: Desde el llamamiento de los pp. de la Compaa de Jess
la Nueva Granada en 1842, hasta su expulsin y disper-
sin en 1850 [Prez 1896]
II: Desde el restablecimiento de la Compaa de Jess en
Guatemala en 1851, hasta su segunda expulsin de la
Nueva Granada en 1861 [Prez 1897]
IIIIV: Desde la segunda expulsin de la Nueva Granada
en 1861, hasta la de Guatemala en 1871/Desde la expulsin
de Guatemala en 1871, hasta la de Nicaragua en 1881, con
los tres ltimos aos de existencia en Costa Rica [Prez
1898].
Prez 1901 Rafael Prez, La Compaa de Jess restaurada en la
Repblica Argentina y Chile, el Uruguay y el Brasil.
Barcelona: Imprenta de Henricii y C.a en comandita,
1901.
Polgr IIII Lszl Polgr, Bibliographie sur lhistoire de la Compagnie
de Jsus, 19011980, 6 vols. Rome: ihsi, 19811990:
I: Toute la Compagnie [Polgr I]
II/1: Les pays. Europe [Polgr II/1]
II/2: Les pays. Amrique, Asie, Afrique, Ocanie [Polgr
II/2]
III/1: Les personnes: Dictionnaires. A-F [Polgr III/1]
III/2: Les personnes: G-Q [Polgr III/2]
III/3: Les personnes: R-Z [Polgr III/3].
Poncelet 1927a-b Alfred Poncelet, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jsus dans
les anciens Pays-Bas. tablissement de la Compagnie de
Jsus en Belgique et ses dveloppements jusqu la fin du
rgne dAlbert et dIsabelle. Brussels: Marcel Hayez,
Imprimeur de lAcadmie Royale de Belgique, 1927, 2
vols:
I: Histoire gnrale [Poncelet 1927a]
II: Les uvres [Poncelet 1927b].
Poussines 1661 Petrus Poussines and Franciscus Sacchini, Historiae
Societatis Jesu pars quinta sive Claudius, vol. 1: Res extra
Abbreviations xvii
Europam gestas, et alia quaedam supplevit Petrus

Possinus. Rome: Ex Typographia Varesij, 1661.
Revuelta 19842008 Manuel Revuelta Gonzlez, La Compaa de Jess en la
Espaa contempornea. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia
Comillas, 19842008, 3 vols:
I: Supresin y reinstalacin (18681883) [Revuelta 1984]
II: Expansin en tiempos recios (18841906) [Revuelta
1991]
III: Palabras y fermentos (18681912) [Revuelta 2008].
Rodrigues 19311950 Francisco Rodrigues, Histria da Companhia de Jesus
na Assistncia de Portugal. Oporto: Apostolado da
Imprensa Emprensa Editora, 19311950, 7 vols:
I: vol. 1: A Fundao da Provincia Portugesa 15401560,
vol. I: Origens-Formao-Ministrios [Rodrigues 1931a]
II: vol. 1: A Fundao da Provincia Portugesa 15401560,
vol. II: TribulaoColgiosMisses [Rodrigues 1931b]
III: vol. 2: Aco crescente da Provincia Portugesa
15601615, vol. I: ExpansoVida internaMinistrios
[Rodrigues 1938a]
IV: vol. 2: Aco crescente da Provincia Portugesa 1560
1615, vol. II: Nas LetrasNa CrteAlm-mar [Rodrigues
1938b]
V: vol. 3: A Provincia Portugesa no Sculo XVII, 16151700,
vol. I: Nos ColgiosNas Cincias e LetrasNa Crte
[Rodrigues 1944a]
VI: vol. 3: A Provincia Portugesa no Sculo XVII, 16151700,
vol. II: Lutas na MetrpoleApostolado nas Conquistas
[Rodrigues 1944b]
VII: vol. 4: A Provincia Portugesa no sculo XVIII, 1700
1760, vol. I: VirtudeLetrasCincias [Rodrigues 1950].
Sacchini 1620 Franciscus Sacchini, Historiae Societatis Jesu pars
secunda sive Lainius. Antwerp: Typis Martini Nutii, 1620.
Sacchini 1649 Franciscus Sacchini, Historiae Societatis Jesu pars tertia
sive Borgia. Rome: Typis Manelfi Manelfij, 1649.
Sacchini 1652 Franciscus Sacchini, Historiae Societatis Jesu pars quarta
sive Everardus. Rome: Typis Dominici Manelphij, 1652.
Scaduto 19641992 Mario Scaduto, Storia della Compagnia di Ges in Italia.
Rome: Edizioni La Civilt Cattolica, 19641992, 3 vols:
I: Lepoca di Giacomo Lanez. Il governo, 15561565
[Scaduto 1964]
xviii Abbreviations
II: Lepoca di Giacomo Lanez. Lazione, 15561565 [Scaduto

1974]
III: Lopera di Francesco Borgia, 15651572 [Scaduto 1992].
Sommervogel IXII Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothque de la Compagnie de
Jsus, vols 12. Brussels: Schepens/Paris, Picard/Toulouse,
Chez lAuteur, 18901932.
Synopsis 1950 Synopsis Historiae Societatis Jesu. Leuven: ad Sancti
Alphonsi, 1950.
Synopsis actorum 1887 Synopsis actorum S. Sedis in causa Societatis Iesu 1540
1605. Florentiae, Ex Typographia a ss. Conceptione, 1887.
[L. Delplace]
Synopsis actorum 1895 Synopsis actorum S. Sedis in causa Societatis Iesu 1605
1773. Lovanii, Ex Typographia J.-B. Istas, 1895. [L.
Delplace]
Tacchi Venturi 19101951 Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Storia della Compagnia di Ges in
Italia, narrata col sussidio di fonti inedite. Rome/Milan:
Societ Editrice Dante Alighieri/Civilt Cattolica, 1910
1951, 4 vols:
I: La vita religiosa in Italia durante la prima et della
Compagnia di Ges. Con appendice di fonti inediti [Tacchi
Venturi 1910]; second ed. in two parts [Tacchi Venturi
19301931]
II/1: Dalla nascita del Fondatore alla solenne approvazi-
one dellordine (14911540) [Tacchi Venturi 1922]; second
ed. [Tacchi Venturi 1950]
II/2: Dalla solenne approvazione dellordine alla morte del
Fondatore (15401556) [Tacchi Venturi 1951].
Zubillaga 1971 Flix Zubillaga, Walter Hanisch, Gua manual de los doc-
umentos histricos de la Compaa de Jess de los cien
primeros volmenes, que tratan de los orgenes de la
Compaa, de san Ignacio, sus compaeros y colabora-
dores, legislacin, pedagoga y misiones de Asia y Amrica.
Rome: ihsi, 1971.
II Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (arsi)
Aquit. Provincia Aquitaniae

Angl. Provincia Angliae
Arag. Provincia Aragoniae
Abbreviations xix
Austr. Provincia Austriae

Baet. Provincia Baetica
Boh. Provincia Bohemiae
Bras. Provincia Brasiliae et Maragnonensis
Camp. Provincia Campaniae
Cast. Provincia Castellana
Chil. Provincia Chilensis
Congr. Congregationes
Epp. Ext. Epistolae Externorum
Epp. nn. Epistolae Generalium ad Nostros
Exerc. Exercitia Spiritualia
Franc. Provincia Franciae
Fl. Belg. Provincia Flandro-Belgica
Gall. Belg. Provincia Gallo-Belgica
Germ. Assistentia Germaniae
Germ. Sup. Provincia Germaniae Superioris
Goan. Provincia Goana et Malabarica
Gall. Assistentia Galliae
Hisp. Assistentia Hispaniae
Hist. Soc. Historia Societatis
Inst. Institutum
Ital. Assistentia Italiae
Jap. Sin. Provincia Iaponiae et Vice-Provincia Sinensis
Lith. Provincia Lithuaniae
Lugd. Provincia Lugdunensis
Lus. Assistentia et Provincia Lusitaniae
Mediol. Provincia Mediolanensis
Mex. Provincia Mexicana
Miscell. Miscellanea
Neap. Provincia Neapolitana
Opp. nn. Opera Nostrorum
Paraq. Provincia Paraquariae
Per. Provincia Peruana
Philipp. Provincia Philippinarum
Pol. Provincia Poloniae
Polem. Polemica
Quit. Provincia Novi Regni et Quitensis
Rhen. Inf. Provincia Rheni et Rheni Inferioris
Rhen. Sup. Provincia Rheni et Rheni Superioris
Rom. Provincia Romana
xx Abbreviations
Sard. Provincia Sardiniae

Sic. Provincia Sicula
Tolet. Provincia Toletana
Tolos. Provincia Tolosana
Venet. Provincia Veneta
Vitae Vitae
III Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (mhsi [selected frequenly

cited volumes])
For the corresponding number of the series, see the list of the mhsi volumes in the
appendix.
Bobadilla mhsi 46
Borgia I mhsi 2
Borgia II mhsi 23
Borgia III mhsi 35
Borgia IV mhsi 38
Borgia V mhsi 41
Borgia VI mhsi 156
Borgia VII mhsi 157
Brot mhsi 24
Chron. I mhsi 1
Chron. II mhsi 3
Chron. III mhsi 5
Chron. IV mhsi 7
Chron. V mhsi 9
Chron. VI mhsi 11
Const. I mhsi 63
Const. II mhsi 64
Const. III mhsi 65
Direct. mhsi 76
Epp. ign. I mhsi 22
Epp. ign. II mhsi 26
Epp. ign. III mhsi 28
Epp. ign. IV mhsi 29
Epp. ign. V mhsi 31
Epp. ign. VI mhsi 33
Epp. ign. VII mhsi 34
Abbreviations xxi
Epp. ign. VIII mhsi 36

Epp. ign. IX mhsi 37
Epp. ign. X mhsi 39
Epp. ign. XI mhsi 40
Epp. ign. XII mhsi 42
Epp. mix. I mhsi 12
Epp. mix. II mhsi 14
Epp. mix. III mhsi 17
Epp. mix. IV mhsi 18
Epp. mix. V mhsi 20
Exerc. Spir. 1919 mhsi 57
Exerc. Spir. 1969 mhsi 100
Favre mhsi 48
Font. doc. mhsi 115
Font. narr. I mhsi 66
Font. narr. II mhsi 73
Font. narr. III mhsi 85
Font. narr. IV mhsi 93
Lanez I mhsi 44
Lanez II mhsi 45
Lanez III mhsi 47
Lanez IV mhsi 49
Lanez V mhsi 50
Lanez VI mhsi 51
Lanez VII mhsi 53
Lanez VIII mhsi 55
Litt. quad. I mhsi 4
Litt. quad. II mhsi 6
Litt. quad. III mhsi 8
Litt. quad. IV mhsi 10
Litt. quad. V mhsi 59
Litt. quad. VI mhsi 61
Litt. quad. VII mhsi 62
Mon. paed. 1901 mhsi 19
Mon. paed. I mhsi 92
Mon. paed. II mhsi 107
Mon. paed. III mhsi 108
Mon. paed. IV mhsi 124
Mon. paed. V mhsi 129
Mon. paed. VI mhsi 140
xxii Abbreviations
Mon. paed. VII mhsi 141

Mon. Xavier I mhsi 16
Mon. Xavier II mhsi 43
Nadal I mhsi 13
Nadal II mhsi 15
Nadal III mhsi 21
Nadal IV mhsi 27
Nadal V mhsi 90
Pol. compl. I mhsi 52
Pol. compl. II mhsi 54
Reg. mhsi 71
Ribadeneira I mhsi 58
Ribadeneira II mhsi 60
Salmern I mhsi 30
Salmern II mhsi 32
Scripta de s. Ignatio I mhsi 25
Scripta de s. Ignatio II mhsi 56
Xavier I mhsi 67
Xavier II mhsi 68
Introduction
Robert A. Maryks and Jonathan Wright
Long before the chaotic events of the mid-eighteenth century, the Society of
Jesus had grown accustomed to local banishments and the cycles of exile and
return. The process that culminated in the 1773 suppression was of a different
magnitude, however. The Jesuits corporate existence had now, at least on
paper, been blotted out by papal command. There was no guarantee and, for
some time, little realistic hope that the Roman Catholic Churchs most prodi-
gious religious order would ever be fully restored.
The situation was bleak, but all was not lost. For one thing, the Society of
Jesus never entirely disappeared. In many places, the removal of the Jesuits
was abrupt, but in others there was a slow and lingering death. This was the
case, for example, in China, the subject of Ronnie Hsias chapter, and in Canada,
discussed by John Meehan and Jacques Monet, where the last Jesuit from the
pre-suppression era, Jean-Joseph Casot, breathed his last in 1800. More impor-
tantly, genuine, lasting, and vibrant survival was achieved in the Russian
Empire (discussed in the chapters by Marek Inglot, Irena Kadulska, and
Richard Butterwick): the Bourbon rulers of Europe may have attempted to
expunge the Society of Jesus, but their aspirations counted for little in the
empire of Catherine the Great and her immediate successors. Crucially, events
in Russia were a source of much needed solace and direct influence for Jesuits,
or ex-Jesuits, in other parts of the world. Daniel Schlafly looks at this phenom-
enon in the fledgling United States through a study of Giovanni Grassi: he
reached American soil in 1810, became the superior of the Maryland mission
and president of Georgetown College, and his Russian formation was always a
wellspring of guidance and inspiration.
Even when legal corporate existence was not possible, former members of
the Society worked hard to sustain the Jesuit spirit and cling to some measure
of communal identity. Thomas McCoog takes us to England, where a type of
union was possible, and Emanuele Colombo charts the career of Luigi Mozzi
de Capitani, whose books, travels, and correspondence did a great deal to
cheer ex-Jesuit spirits during the suppression years. One of the most impres-
sive achievements of the suppressed Society was its ability to maintain solidar-
ity in even the most straitened circumstances. A great deal of work remains to
be done on Jesuit exile communities, but Niccol Guasti and Inmaculada
Fernndez Arrillaga set a useful example: the Spanish branch of the Society
had been utterly broken and sent into exile. However, in their new Italian
koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004283879_002

2 Maryks and Wright
home many ex-Jesuits managed to make a significant, if conflicted, contribu-

tion to the peninsulas intellectual and cultural life.
The key point is that the experience of suppression was multifaceted. Many
Jesuits faced financial difficulties and mental anguish, but others carved out
successful new careers or continued, relatively untroubled, with their existing
intellectual endeavors. In this latter category, we might include the Hungarian
Jesuit astronomers discussed by Paul Shore, or the Polish architect Sebastian
Sierakowski studied by Carolyn Guile.
The devastation of suppression should not be underestimated: one need
only read Jeffrey Chipps Smiths chapter on the fate of German Jesuit
churches, colleges, libraries, and artistic possessions to gain a sense of this.
Nor should we imagine that there was always concord within ex-Jesuit
ranks: debates about survival strategies raged. But survival there was and
also, as the years rolled by, a growing belief that restoration might be fea-
sible. Tellingly, both processes were as closely related to political happen-
stance as the orders suppression had been. Events in the Russian Empire
are a case in point.
The survival of the Jesuits in Belarus resulted from the first partition of
the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, which took place just a few
months before the papal brief of suppression was issued. The promulga-
tion of the document was prohibited in Russian territories, including the
eastern part of Poland-Lithuania. The survival of the Jesuits in White Russia
presented serious canonical problems, yet it was surreptitiously supported
by Pope Pius VI (r. 177599) who allowed the opening of novitiates in
Poock, Parma, and Colorno, and the election of a Jesuit vicar general in
Belarus. Unsurprisingly, the same forces at the Bourbon courts which had
campaigned for the Jesuit suppression strongly opposed Pius VIs backing
of the Society. They relented, however, when Catherine the Great (r. 1762
96), who had declared her neutrality in the conflicts resulting from the
American Revolution, threatened to incorporate all Catholics within her
territory into the Orthodox Church.
There was progress elsewhere. Louis XVI went under the guillotine in 1793
and France was consequently declared a republic. Ferdinand of Parma (1751
1802), perhaps alarmed by the fate of the French monarch, began a campaign
for the restoration of the Society in 1793 and invited three Jesuits from Poock
to form a novitiate. Contrariwise, Charles IV of Spain, who began his reign in
1788, remained immune to pressure from Ferdinand and Pius VI, especially
after the latters authority was stymied by his imprisonment by French troops
in 1798: an event followed by the popes death a few months later.
Introduction 3
His successor Pius VII (r. 180023) rekindled hopes, however, and was even
more determined to restore the Society. Just one year after his election, he
issued the brief Catholicae fidei which officially sanctioned the corporate exis-
tence of the Jesuits in Russia, now stretching beyond the college at Poock.
Because of the second and third partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Com
monwealth, more former Jesuit institutions came under the control of the
Russian monarchy, including the famous University of Vilnius, and the Jesuits
of Poock expanded their activities to Odessa, the Caucasus, Siberia, and
Saratov on the Volga. The successor to Catherine, Paul I (r. 17961801), saw in
the Jesuits a force to stem the flood of impiety, Illuminism and Jacobinism in
[his] empire and supported the Jesuit superior general Gabriel Gruber in his
petitions to the pope aimed at restoring the Society worldwide. Unfortunately
for the Jesuits, the tsar was murdered two weeks after Catholicae fidei was pro-
mulgated, but his successor, Alexander I (r. 180125) showed, at least at first,
similar support for the Jesuit cause. In 1812, he raised the college of Poock to
the rank of a university.
Alexander subsequently changed his mind about the Jesuit presence in his
realms, expelling the Society from Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1815 and from
the entire empire in 1820 but, well ahead of that, momentous advances had
been made elsewhere. The papal brief of 1801 had responded positively to the
petitions of affiliation with the Russian Society that had been submitted by
groups of former Jesuits in Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Britain,
and the United States. Novitiates in Georgetown, Hodder (near Stonyhurst),
and Orvieto, among others, opened in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Meanwhile, Ferdinand of Naples, driven by the same fears as Ferdinand of
Parma, dramatically changed his position on the Jesuits. His earlier policy of
expulsion was replaced with an invitation to the Society, now sanctioned by
the papal letter Per alias (1804), to take possession of their old church in the
city in 1804. However, the occupation of the kingdom of Naples by the troops
of Joseph Bonaparte in the following year forced the renascent group of Jesuits
to move to Rome where, under the leadership of Jos Pignatelli (17371811) they
formed a new Italian province.
The presence of Napoleonic troops in the Italian peninsula caused other
troubles. Pius VII, who had traveled to France for Napoleons coronation eight
years earlier, was captured by French troops in 1812 and sent into exile at
Fontainebleau. This turned out to be only a minor setback in the cause of Jesuit
restoration. Just a few months after his return to Rome and the abdication of
Napoleon in the spring of 1814, Pius VII issued the bull Sollicitudo omnium
ecclesiarum which, following the precedent of the restoration of the Jesuits in
4 Maryks and Wright
the Russian Empire and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, expanded the res-
toration of the Society of Jesus to the rest of the world.
***
This was a moment of long-awaited celebration, but many challenges con-

fronted the restored Society of Jesus. The political, social, and intellectual cli-
mate had changed dramatically since the orders suppression in 1773 and it
would not always be easy for nineteenth-century Jesuits to find their place in
this new landscape. There were basic organizational and logistical difficulties,
too. Stalled missions had to be restarted (a process that sometimes took
decades), a new generation of Jesuits had to be recruited and trained, and tra-
ditional fields of endeavor (not least education) had to be re-established,
sometimes in the face of considerable resistance. Into the bargain, the antipa-
thy that had led to the suppression of the Jesuits showed few signs of disap-
pearing. As always, political trends and events would play a crucial role in
defining this latest chapter in Jesuit history and it is to that context that we
now turn.
The universal restoration of the Jesuits coincided with the resurgence of
Europes pre-revolutionary political order. This process was initiated in the
aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars by the Congress of Vienna (181415) under
the leadership of the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire, Klemens von
Metternich, who had been born in the year of Jesuit suppression, 1773. Europe
and the Americas had experienced events that had changed the political, eco-
nomic, and social order of the world forever: the American Revolution of 1776,
the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions in Latin America in the early
1800s, and the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The radical legacies of this era and how they were either embraced or
denounced, played havoc with the politics of the nineteenth century and the
Jesuits were routinely swept up by ever-shifting tides. Spain provides one of
the more dramatic examples. Ferdinand VII had gladly welcomed the Society
back to his kingdom and empire in 1815, but by 1820, under pressure from Major
Rafael Riego, he was forced to suppress all religious orders. The Jesuits were
back by 1823 following Riegos overthrow and execution, but suppressed once
more in 1835, with fourteen members of the order having been killed during
the previous year. And so the cycle continued: return from exile in 1848, exile
in 1868, and restoration in 1875.
Across the border in France, the situation was only slightly less chaotic.
Modest success under Charles X (r. 182430) was followed by the decidedly
anticlerical July Revolution of 1830. Life under Louis Philippe (r. 183048) was
Introduction 5
tolerable, though the era witnessed an explosion of anti-Jesuit polemic, and

then came the revolution of 1848. The Second Empire (185270) was a period of
relative calm and significant Jesuit advance, not least in the educational
sphere, but then came the Paris Commune of 1871 during which, once again,
several French Jesuits lost their lives. In his essay on the historian Charles
Laumier, Frdric Conrod offers some intriguing reflections on the earlier part
of this period. The remainder of the century was no less turbulent and similar
tales of repeated progress and setback were replicated elsewhere. In some
places the Society suffered decisive blows: it was expelled from Switzerland in
1847 and not granted official permission to return until 1973.
The Society also had to contend with the forces of nationalism. Often
inspired by Romantic ideas, several ethnic groups in Europe began to call for
national unity and autonomy. The independence of Greece from the Ottoman
Empire and of Belgium from the Dutch are obvious examples. This, too, had a
telling impact on Jesuit fortunes. One European power that was constantly
preoccupied with emerging nationalism was the leader of the post-Napoleonic
orderthe Austrian Empire: a mosaic of ethnic groups with different cultural,
linguistic, and religious roots. Among many threats to Viennese political lead-
ership within the German Confederation formed in 1815, was the second larg-
est German-speaking landPrussia. Otto von Bismarck (181598) engineered
the process of German unification by excluding multi-ethnic Austria and pro-
claiming the birth of the Second Reich at Versailles in 1871. In his vision of a
united Germany, Bismarck, unlike the emperors of Austria, attempted to elimi-
nate the influence of Catholicism as part of his Kulturkampf and, as one result,
the Society of Jesus was suppressed just a year after the German Empire was
created.
Nationalism also drove the imperial expansion of European industrialized
countries, notably Britain, Belgium, France, and Germany, followed by
nations in other parts of the world, including the United States and Japan.
Industrialization caused shifts in the distribution of power, not only in Europe
but also across the world: the mercantile empires of Portugal, Spain, and the
Dutch Republic began to fade during the nineteenth century, whereas coun-
tries that embraced industrial capitalism began to control and exploit vast new
territories, particularly in Asia and Africa. The establishment of the British Raj
in the aftermath of the Indian rebellion of 1857, the expansion of British con-
trol over Chinese port-cities in the wake of the Taiping rebellion (18501864),
and the French occupation of Algeria and Indochina are significant examples
of how the balance of power in the world was dramatically changing. This had
significant consequences for Christian missionaries, including the Jesuits, in
these parts of the world.
6 Maryks and Wright
These disparate but interlocking political trends had a profound impact on

the global stage. Latin America provides a key example, especially in the con-
text of Jesuit history. Simn Bolvar (17831830), educated in France and
inspired by Enlightenment ideas and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789, led suc-
cessful wars of independence in several Latin American countries. This was
merely the beginning of a long process, involving a staggering number of
regime changes and shifts between conservative and liberal governance. The
Jesuits were routinely caught up in the turmoil. The Society, for instance, was
fully restored in Mexico by 1853 but, in 1856, a liberal-dominated constitutional
congress once more suppressed the Jesuits. They returned under Emperor
Maximilian (r. 186467), then were forced to adopt a clandestine existence or
face expulsion. During the successive periods of rule of Porfirio Daz (begin-
ning in 1876) Jesuits were able to minister freely, although anticlerical laws
remained on the statute book. The 1910 revolution and subsequent 1917 consti-
tution spelled disaster for the Jesuits of Mexico.
Such chaos reigned across Latin America, as demonstrated by a partial list
of nineteenth-century Jesuit expulsions. The Society was forced to leave
Argentina in 1848, were expelled from Uruguay in 1859, from Colombia in 1850
and 1861, from Ecuador in 1852, from Guatemala in 1845 and 1872, and from
Peru in 1855. A number of chapters in the volume explore this whirligig. Perla
Chinchilla Pawling takes us to Mexico, which saw no less than nine govern-
ments of varying political complexions between 1814 and 1867, Ignacio Telesca
explains why the Jesuits were able to definitively return to Paraguay only in
1927, and Jean Luc Enyegue looks at the short-lived Jesuit mission on the island
of Fernando Po. Additionally, Andrs Prieto reminds us there was a measure of
irony in how the Jesuits were treated by the self-styled progressive regimes of
nineteenth-century Latin America: after all, certain eighteenth-century Latin
American Jesuits had been architects of the proto-nationalist cause.1
***
How, then, was the restored Society of Jesus to respond to this turbulent and
greatly altered landscape? There was no doubting the urgency of the question.
After all, by mid-century, the revolutionary impulse had reached the very cen-
ter of the Catholic Church. In 1848, the citizenry of Rome drove Pius IX
(r. 184678) out of the city and proclaimed a republica harbinger of the
1 In this section the editors have drawn, with gratitude, on a draft essay by Jeffrey Klaiber
whose death prevented the publication of his finished piece in this volume.
Introduction 7
founding of the kingdom of Italy in 1861 under which papal political power was
limited to the walls of the Vatican. The Syllabus of Errors, published just three
years later, and the proclamation of papal infallibility at the First Vatican
Council can sensibly be construed as loud and desperate cries against modern
understandings of hierarchy and authority that had originated, at least in part,
with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Long before this, the process set in motion at the Congress of Vienna had
taken steps to defend hereditary monarchy against republicanism, tradition
against revolution, and established religion against Enlightenment nostrums.
As soon as possible, three of the powers that had vanquished Napoleon (Russia,
Prussia, and Austria) forged a holy alliance with the pope to uphold the new
conservative system, reject the revolutionary spirit, and ensure that Christianity
would endure. Religion was to be the foundation of society and a buffer against
the perils of modernity.
In this context, the historical timing of the Jesuit restoration might suggest
it was part of a broader plan to restore both the political structures and philo-
sophical assumptions of the pre-revolutionary ancien rgime. The words of the
papal bull of restoration certainly give this impression. Amidst these dangers
of the Christian republic [] we should deem ourselves guilty of a great crime
towards God if [] we neglected the aids with which the special providence of
God has put at our disposal. The bark of Peter was tossed and assaulted so
there was good sense in turning to the Jesuits, those rigorous and experienced
rowers who volunteer their services.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Society of Jesus was often perceived
as a conservative and ultramontane obstacle by a number of new political
regimes that, as we have seen, persecuted the order and sometimes threat
enedits existence. Leading Jesuits played key roles in supporting conservative
regimes, asserting papal authority, and championing the spread of specific
devotions (notably the Sacred Heart) and doctrinal positions (notably papal
infallibility). If one were in a position to take a straw poll of nineteenth-cen-
tury Jesuits, a solid majority would be in what might be termed, with a broad
brush stroke, the conservative camp.
There is room for nuance, however. Historians often make generalizations
about the Society of Jesus. Just as it is erroneous to suggest that every early-
modern Jesuit was a probabilist in the realm of moral theology, or that every
Jesuit missionary was an advocate of accommodation, so it is wrong to assume
that every nineteenth-century member of the Society was a bred-in-the-bone
supporter of throne and altar or a sworn opponent of new theological and
philosophical trends. There were, as there always had been, various Jesuit
ways of proceeding.
8 Maryks and Wright
The only secure conclusion is that Jesuits struggled to adapt to the nine-
teenth century and nowhere was this more apparent that in the basic task of
establishing a coherent Jesuit identity. Sometimes there was excellent sense in
rejecting new trends and developments but, in a place like the United States,
ideas that, theoretically, ought to have been anathema (the separation of
church and state and religious freedom) sometimes served the Society of Jesus
very well. Catherine ODonnells chapter on John Carroll tells us a great deal
about the early stages of this fascinating story. Indeed, the United States would
prove to be one of the most dynamic arenas of Jesuit activity during the post-
restoration period. Under Superior General Jan Philipp Roothaan, for example,
some of the Societys most important American colleges were established:
including Fordham in the Bronx, Holy Cross in Worcester, Boston College,
St. Josephs in Philadelphia, and St. Louis University. There were also epic mis-
sionary adventures, perhaps best encapsulated by the travels of the Belgian
Jesuit Peter de Smet, and America would serve as a refuge for Jesuits from other
parts of the world where the Societys fortunes were troubled: the Italian
Jesuits who arrived from Italy after the Roman turmoil of 1848, recently studied
with great skill by Gerald McKevitt, are a prime example. It was not always
plain sailing, of course. Jesuits suffered greatly because of anti-Catholic senti-
ment in the young republic (one need only bring to mind the tribulations of
John Bapst) but, on balance, the Society did well in the political climate pro-
vided by Americas post-independence leaders. Not, of course, that those lead-
ers had always been great admirers of the Jesuits (men like Thomas Jefferson
held the order in contempt).2
The other great challenge faced by Jesuits around the world involved strik-
ing a balance between faithful continuity with the past and lively engagement
with the present.
In his chapter, Thomas Worcester reflects on this and asks whether the term
restoration is adequate. Were the old foundational documents still sufficient?
How was the Society to reflect on its past (a theme also developed in Robert
Danieluks analysis of post-restoration Jesuit historical writing)? Nineteenth-
century Jesuits struggled with these and other dilemmas and this goes some
way towards explaining the diversity and internal dissensions of the restored
Society.
2 This anniversary year has witnessed many efforts to chart the history of the post-restoration
Society in the United States. At the time of writing it seems likely that the highlight will be
the conference organised at Loyola University, Chicago. See http://blogs.lib.luc.edu/jesuitres-
toration2014/ (website accessed 7 July 14).
Introduction 9
As always, of course, what happened on the ground, in the revived schools

and mission fields, counted for at least as much as abstract cogitations in the
study. Many of the chapters in this volume look at the revival of the missionary
enterprise and, taken together, they encapsulate the diversity of the Jesuits
nineteenth-century experience: the relationship between the old and the new
Society. In Madurai and Canada, as Sabina Pavone, John Meehan, and Jacques
Monet reveal, continuity was the lodestone: former acres were re-ploughed.
In China, as the chapters by Paul Rule, Jeremy Clarke, Csar Guillen, and Paul
Mariani reveal, new territories and challenges lay in store. This was also true in
Africa, as explained in the contributions by Festo Mkenda and Aquinata
Agonga.
***
Given this fecund historical terrain, it is a pity that the post-restoration Society
of Jesus has tended to receive notably less scholarly attention than its pre-
suppression forebear. Perhaps the Societys glory days were over, but its
members continued to play a significant role in education, mission, the arts,
philosophy, and scientific enquiry. They were also caught up in, and helped to
define, political developments around the world. They were cast as villains by
some and heroes by others. The age-old conundrums remained entrenched.
How was the Society of Jesus to be conceptualized? What was its role in the
Roman Catholic Church and the wider culture? Above all, how were the Jesuits
to adapt to the brave, or not so brave new world? There is no more fascinating
period in the history of the Society of Jesus.
Part 1
The Historical Context

chapter 1
A Restored Society or a New Society of Jesus?

Thomas Worcester, S.J.
Many Catholic religious orders and congregations have flourished for a time
and then disappeared, have died out, or were formally suppressed by a bishop
or pope. Other orders and congregations have been reformed at one time
or another in their history, sometimes resulting in a split between reformed
and un-reformed divisions. The Franciscans are an obvious example, with
Conventuals, Observants, and Capuchins; or the Cistercians, a reformed ver-
sion of the Benedictines, and later the Cistercians of the Strict Observance
(Trappists). Yet the Society of Jesus has never been reformed in this sense of
the word, and despite no shortage of internal tensions, it has never split into
two or three orders. But the Society founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 was
suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, and was then restored by Pope Pius
VII in 1814. The question this essay explores concerns the adequacy or inade-
quacy of the term restoration for a description of the post-1814 Society of
Jesus. This is a huge topic, and my approach is thus necessarily selective.
Though I shall give some attention to several parts of the world, my main focus
is France, not merely as a possible case study among others, though it is such,
but also because of its major role in Jesuit history from the origins of the Jesuits
at the University of Paris, to Jesuit battles against Gallicans and Jansenists, to
the Relations published by Jesuit missionaries in Canada, to French Jesuit sci-
entists in China, from hot and cold relationships with the French monarchy, to
the nearly relentless opposition from Frances Third Republic, to the acclaimed
work of Jesuit scholars such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (18811955) and
Henri de Lubac (18961991). I shall not ignore the fact that the Jesuits were
international from the beginning: Ignatius was not a Frenchman, but a foreign
student in Paris, as were all of the first Jesuits. One cannot do full justice to the
history of the Jesuits without giving attention to the global reach and multina-
tional, multicultural character of the Society, from its origins to today, even if
some countries play a much larger role than others in Jesuit history.
Restoration is a term used by political historians to describe the period 1814
1830 in Europe, particularly France. With Napoleons defeat at the hands of the
Quadruple Alliance of Britain, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, the Bourbons were
restored to the French throne, and the Congress of Vienna met to redraw the
map of Europe and largely restored pre-1789 borders. Under Napoleon, Pope
Pius VII had been held as a prisoner in France; in spring 1814 he returned to

14 Thomas Worcester
Rome and within a few months he issued a decree restoring, or re-establishing

the Society of Jesus throughout the world.1 And yet, if this suggests restoration
of monarchy and restoration of the Jesuits went hand-in-hand, at least chrono-
logically, this fact remains ironic in that it was not the National Assembly
or other instances of power in the French Revolution that had suppressed
the Jesuits, but rather the pre-Revolutionary papacy, indeed a weak papacy
under intense pressure from the Catholic monarchs of Spain, Portugal, and
France.2 Two younger brothers of the guillotined Louis XVI served as king after
Napoleons defeat, Louis XVIII, 18141824, and Charles X, 18241830. But even if
the period of their reigns is commonly referred to as one of restoration, or as
the Restoration, it was not the case that the Bourbons could restore everything
to the way it was before 1789. For example, Louis XVIII agreed to a constitu-
tional charter, hardly something Old Regime absolute monarchs would have
considered. And in 1830, another revolution toppled the Bourbons in favor of
the house of Orlans and a more bourgeois style of monarchy.3
If restoration of monarchy did not mean restoration of, or reaction against,
everything pre-Revolutionary, is it likely that restoration of the Society of Jesus
meant restoration of everything Jesuit that had existed pre-1773? The obstacles
standing in the way of this seem to be many. The world had changed, and
whether Catholics liked it or not, the Church had as well. Indeed, Pope Pius VII,
in his long and eventful reign from 1800 to 1823, was no mere traditionalist,
hell-bent, as it were, on turning the clock back wherever possible. For example,
a few years before his election as pope, the future Pius VII had argued that
republican forms of secular government, such as that created by the French
Revolution, could be compatible with Christianity. As pope, he proved to be
adaptable in his views on Latin American independence from the Spanish and
Portuguese monarchies.4 Thus the pope who restored the Society of Jesus was
not a staunch reactionary, opposed to any and everything associated with the
French Revolution and its ideals, though some later popes may well have
abhorred everything even remotely related to the Revolution.
1 See Thomas Worcester, Pius VII: Moderation in an Age of Revolution and Reaction, in The
Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, eds. James Corkery and Thomas
Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 107124.
2 Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1997), 193194.
3 For an example of an excellent and concise account of French history, see Pierre Goubert,
The Course of French History, trans. Maarten Ultee (London and New York: Routledge, 1991),
on the early decades after Napoleon, 233246.
4 Worcester, Pius VII, 119.
A Restored Society Or A New Society Of Jesus? 15
The actions of Pius VII in favor of the Jesuits were not necessarily well-
received by everyone, and the history of anti-Jesuit polemics and actions
reveal a good deal of continuity pre-1773 to post-1814, perhaps especially in
Europe.5 Restoration, or re-admittance or re-establishment, of the Jesuits
was not always permanent, and in the two centuries since 1814 Jesuits have
been expelled, at least for a time, from places such as France, Switzerland,
Mexico, and Spain. Thus, careful study of the history of opposition to the
Jesuits, from 1540 to today, could reveal some significant continuity, though
not without discontinuity as well. If opposition to the Jesuits has faded in
more recent times in places such as France or Switzerland, why is that?
Because the Jesuits have changed, or because their enemies have changed?
Or is it perhaps because the Jesuits are no longer perceived as mattering very
much, in which case why bother trying to expel them or even curtail their
activities?
Restoration in parts of the world where the Society had enjoyed a major
institutional presence with many school and church buildings, could have
meant recovery of such institutional property. In reality, there was not a lot of
material recovery. The history of two Jesuit churches in Paris, one built in the
seventeenth century and one in the nineteenth century, offers an interesting
example of a kind of discontinuity and continuity between the pre-1773 and
post-1814 Society. The seventeenth-century Jesuit church was dedicated to
Saint Louis, that is, the canonized saint and thirteenth-century French king
Louis IX, ancestor of the Bourbon monarchs. In choosing this name the French
Jesuits promoted their alignment with the monarchy; Louis XIII himself laid
the cornerstone in 1627, and Cardinal Richelieu presided at the first Mass in the
completed church in 1642 with the king, queen, and their court present.6
Designed in a style that echoed both what was then contemporary Italian
Baroque, as well as an emerging French classicism, the church was built on the
right bank of the Seine, in the Marais section of Paris, at that time a neighbor-
hood rapidly rising in economic and social status. The church (Figures1.1 and
1.2) soon drew large crowds attracted by famous Jesuit preachers, such as Louis
5 For anti-Jesuits up to 1773, see Les Antijsuites: Discours, figures et lieux de lantijsuitisme
lpoque moderne, eds. Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Catherine Maire (Rennnes: Presses
Universitaires de Rennes, 2010); for examples of post-1814 anti-Jesuit polemic, see Geoffry
Cubitt, The Jesuit Myth: Conspiracy Theory and Politics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993).
6 Pierre Moisy, Les Eglises des Jsuites de lancienne assistance de France, 2 vols. (Rome: Jesuit
Historical Institute, 1958), 1:248251; see also Saint-PaulSaint-Louis: Les Jsuites Paris
(Paris: Muse Carnavalet, 1985).
16 Thomas Worcester
Figure1.1 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Exterior, Dome. June 2012

Figure1.2 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Interior. June 2012

18 Thomas Worcester
Bourdaloue, and by music commissioned from prominent composers includ-

ing Marc-Antoine Charpentier.7
Closed in the 1760s after the expulsion of the Jesuits, the church was the site
for celebration of the cult of Reason during the Revolution. In 1802, Saint-Louis
became the parish church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, thus adding the name of
a nearby parish that had been destroyed in the Revolution. The former Jesuit
church remains a parish church today, while an adjacent building, previously
the Jesuit residence, is a state school, the Lyce Charlemagne.8 Quite recently
(in 201112), the Ministry of Culture and the city of Paris sponsored a cleaning
and restoration of the faade of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, thus helping to pre-
serve and draw attention to an important piece of pre-1773 Jesuit history in
Paris (Figures1.3 and 1.4).
In the mid-nineteenth century, with no prospect of recovering their earlier
church, the French Jesuits commissioned a new church, this time on the rue de
Svres, at the junction of the sixth and seventh arrondissements (districts), on
the left bank of the Seine. Neither in name, architectural style, nor location in
Paris was continuity with the church of Saint-Louis an obvious priority.
Dedicated to the founder of the Jesuits, Saint-Ignace (Figures1.5 and 1.6) was
built between 1855 and 1858 and was modeled after the thirteenth-century
Gothic cathedral of Le Mans. Though connections with French heads of state
were not as strong as they had been at Saint-Louis in the seventeenth century,
Saint-Ignace did count among its benefactors Napoleon III, French emperor
18521870.9 And Saint-Ignace resembles Saint-Louis in that its architectural
style (neo-Gothic) was as much in vogue in its time as the architecture
of Saint-Louis was up-to-date, perhaps even avant-garde, in its era. Like
Saint-Louis, Saint-Ignace was not built to be a parish, and it still is not. Both
churches were built to serve a rapidly growing urban population, each church
in what was an increasingly fashionable Parisian neighborhood. Saint-Louis
was built not far from the elegant Place Royale (today the Place des Vosges),
commissioned by Henri IV at the beginning of the seventeenth century; in
7 On Bourdaloue, see Thomas Worcester, The Classical Sermon, in Preaching, Sermon and
Cultural Change in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Joris van Eijnatten (Leiden: Brill, 2009),
especially 153167; on Charpentier, see C. Jane Lowe, Charpentier and the Jesuits at
St. Louis, Seventeenth-Century French Studies 15 (1993), 297314.
8 Saint-PaulSaint-Louis: Les Jsuites Paris, 1112. In 1990, the 450th anniversary of the
founding of the Society of Jesus, the French Jesuits were permitted to use the church for the
priestly ordination of several of their men; I attended this exceptional event.
9 Pierre Delattre, Les Etablissements des Jsuites en France depuis quatre sicles, 5 vols. (Enghien:
Institut Suprieur de Thologie, 194957), 3:13371339. On Jesuits and the rue de Svres in the
nineteenth century, see also Burnichon, 3:92, 139, 171, 575.
Figure1.3 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Faade under restoration. June 2012

20 Thomas Worcester
Figure1.4 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Restored. June 2014.

Figure1.5 Church of Saint-Ignace, Paris. Exterior, Apse. June 2012

22 Thomas Worcester
Figure1.6 Church of Saint-Ignace, Paris, Interior. June 2012

1869, Au Bon March, an enormous department store that was for a time the
largest such store in the world, was erected across the rue de Svres from Saint-
Ignace, and the store remains a major shopping destination today.10
Comparison of these two Jesuit churches in Paris elicits a broader question
of what Jesuit continuity or discontinuity might mean between the pre-1773
and post-1814 eras. If the post-1814 Jesuits had an agenda of restoration, what
was to be restored? Recovery of property was largely out of the question, so it
did not mean that. But perhaps re-establishment of certain Jesuit works or
ministries? Yet what model from the old Society was to be followed? From
what era? From 1540 to 1773 much had changed in the world, in the Church and
in the Society of Jesus, and thus such decisions were complex. Was the goal to
re-establish a Society of Jesus that was as similar as possible to the one that
existed at the time of the suppression? In other words, was it a matter, as it
were, of picking up where things left off in the 1770s? Or would reaching back
as far as possible be the goal, to the Society at its foundation in 1540? Was there
a golden age to recover, and if so, when was it? Was it within the lifetimes of
Ignatius and his first companions, such as Francis Xavier? From a handful of
companions in 1540, the Society had grown to about a thousand members by
the time Ignatius died in 1556obviously, quite a different organization sim-
ply by its size, but also one that had by the latter date not only papal approval,
but elaborate Constitutions.
Would those sixteenth-century documents provide the blueprint or the
construction (or re-construction) manual, for the post-1814 era? Even if some
Jesuits and others piously believed that Ignatius and other early Jesuits who
had a hand in composing the Constitutions were divinely inspired or guided,
these texts were nevertheless framed by, or limited by, the time and place in
which they were produced.11 Through the legislation adopted by its occasional
general congregations, both before and after the suppression, the Society has
at times abrogated parts of the Constitutions and/or added new rules or norms
for its governance and way of proceeding.12 Comparison with the late eigh-
teenth-century Constitution of the United States may be apt, as it may be
10 See Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge: mit Press,
1991), 57113; Michael Miller, The Bon March: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store,
18691920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
11 On how the Constitutions reflect rhetorical traditions, see J. Carlos Coupeau, From
Inspiration to Invention: Rhetoric in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis:
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2010).
12 See The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and their Complementary Norms, ed. John
Padberg (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996).
24 Thomas Worcester
amended in various ways, but it is never altogether replaced by a new constitu-

tion. In both cases the continuing validity and normative value of the original
document is affirmed even as a way of changing parts of it is made available.
Thus new Jesuit Constitutions were not created post-1814, though the sixteenth-
century text did continue to be supplemented and superseded in parts, as had
been the case pre-1773.
The Jesuit Constitutions are not the only early documents that have been
considered normative for the Society in any era. Paul IIIs 1540 apostolic letter
Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, approving the Formula of the Institute, and Julius
IIIs 1550 Exposcit debitum, confirming approval of a somewhat revised Formula
of the Institute, may be particularly significant.13 Yet the fact that in just ten years
from 1540 to 1550 changes were already seen as necessary raises the question of
what changes or adaptations Jesuits saw as necessary post-1814 in relation to pre-
1773. And even if the normative golden age was presumed to be the time of
Ignatius, what, exactly, from that time was thought to matter most, and to be
within reach of re-establishment, recovery, or restoration? Might it be the life of
Ignatius, as known in his so-called Autobiography? Or his writings in addition
to the Constitutions, such as the Spiritual Exercises, or his thousands of letters?
Or something else, such as the lives of other Jesuit saints, Francis Xavier among
them? Some twenty-five years ago Philip Endean cautioned against what he
called Jesuit fundamentalism, that is, a nave reading of Ignatius and the early
Jesuits that presumes that what they did is immediately accessible to later gen-
erations and quite directly imitable by them, all without any concern for chang-
ing historical contexts.14 How extensive has such naivet been in the Society of
Jesus post-1814?
Sometimes Jesuit history is imagined in terms of superiors general, their
eras and their governance of the Society. Such studies may be principally
biographical, such as C.J. Lightharts life of Jan Roothaan, general from 1829 to
1853, a period in which the post-1814 Society of Jesus grew dramatically, but was
also challenged from various quarters.15 Roothaan, rather obviously, is a good
focus for a case study of continuity or discontinuity across the divide of the
suppression; so too was Pedro Arrupe, general from 19651983, a prophet and a
hero for many Jesuits and others precisely for the changes he made after
Vatican II, but a villain according to some, for those same changes. But was
13 Ibid., 316.
14 Philip Endean, Who do You Say Ignatius Is? Jesuit Fundamentalism and Beyond, Studies
in the Spirituality of Jesuits 19/5 (November 1987): 153.
15 C.J. Lighthart, The Return of the Jesuits: The Life of Jan Philip Roothaan, trans. Jan Slijkerman
(London: Shand Publications, 1978).
Arrupe, like Ignatius a Basque, perhaps in greater continuity with Ignatius in

various ways than were many of the generals of the intervening centuries?16
Did Arrupe help the Society of Jesus return to its Ignatian roots and put aside
various accretions of the intervening centuries? Or did he create a new Society
of Jesus, perhaps new and better, or perhaps new and irresponsibly discon
tinuous with what had gone before? The New Jesuits, edited by ex-Jesuit George
Riemer, was published in 1971; it consists of essays by various American Jesuits
(Daniel Berrigan and John Padberg among them) reflecting on how they
thought the Society was changing at that time. It now seems dated, but it can
shed light on how, in the years of Fr. Arrupes generalate, Jesuits thought
about continuity and discontinuity in their own Jesuit lives and in Jesuit his-
tory since 1540.17
Or a study may focus more broadly on the issues at stake for the Society of
Jesus during the period of a generalate; an example is the volume edited by
Thomas McCoog entitled The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture 1573
1580.18 Claudio Acquavivas relatively long generalate, 15811615, is often cited
as a period of, among other things, consolidation or standardization, such as
with adoption of the Ratio Studiorum, and with Acquavivas publication of a
directory of the Spiritual Exercises.19 This raises a large and complex question:
does close examination of generalates from that of Ignatius of Loyola to that of
Adolfo Nicols reveal more continuity or discontinuity, especially across the
17731814 divide? To what extent have superiors general before or after the sup-
pression looked back to Ignatius, or to some other predecessor as model? And
who are the most significant generals in the Societys history, and for what rea-
sons? In the case of Ignatius, further questions to ask include which Ignatius
has been taken as model for imitation: The Roman administrator of the 1540s
and 1550s? Or an earlier Ignatius, such as the pilgrim of the 1520s, or the giver
of the Spiritual Exercises?20
16 For very positive assessments of Arrupe, see Pedro Arrupe, General de la Compaia de
Jess, Nuevas Aportaciones a su biografi, ed. Gianni Bella (Bilbao: Mensajero; Santander:
Editorial Sal Terrae, 2007).
17 The New Jesuits, ed. George Riemer (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971).
18 The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture 15731580, ed. Thomas McCoog (Rome: Jesuit
Historical Institute; St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2004).
19 For more on Acquaviva, see William Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus, revised ed.
(St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986), 97107.
20 For further discussion of Ignatius imagined variously, see J. Carlos Coupeau, Five
personae of Ignatius of Loyola, in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas
Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3251.
26 Thomas Worcester
But a superior general is not necessarily representative or typical of Jesuits

of his era. The degree to which individual Jesuits since 1814 have or have not
resembled those of the Old Society is a question that can only be answered
through a great many cases studies of both famous and relatively obscure
Jesuits. The French biographer Jean Lacouture published in 1991 and 1992 a
two-volume work entitled Jsuites: Une multibiographie, with volume one enti-
tled Les conqurants (The Conquerors) and volume two Les revenants (The
Returning); a condensed one-volume English translation was published in 1995
as Jesuits: A Multibiography.21 A large number of the Jesuits Lacouture studies
are French; his division of conquerors and returning suggests that the sup-
pression was a major divide, and it puts the Old Society in a kind of heroic light
and the post-1814 Society in a seemingly lesser light. Also, while the French
word revenant literally means returning, it sometimes refers to a person come
back from the dead, such as a ghost in a sance. In this perspective the decision
of Pope Pius VII may be thought of as in some sense resurrecting the dead
Jesuits.
Biographies of individual Jesuits abound, and they may help to clarify ways
in which the Society has or has not changed over the centuries. The Italian
Jesuit Matteo Ricci (15521610) and his work in China have garnered a great
deal of attention in recent years, especially on the occasion of the four hun-
dredth anniversary of his death.22 But was he simply an exceptional Jesuit still
worthy of an exceptional amount of attention? Or was he a type of Jesuit that
may be found in other times and places of the Societys history? Or to put it
another way, was French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin a kind of new Matteo
Ricci?23 Other examples may be found of such potential parallels, but a book
edited by Paula Findlen on Athanasius Kircher (16021680)German Jesuit,
scientist, museum curator, botanist, linguist, and other things besidesmay
suggest that there are limits to such similarities. The subtitle of this book on
Kircher is The Last Man Who Knew Everything.24
21 Jean Lacouture, Jesuits: A Multibiography, trans. Jeremy Leggatt (Washington, d.c.:

Counterpoint, 1995).
22 Of the many recent studies of Matteo Ricci, see, e.g., R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the
Forbidden City, 15521610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
23 Ronald Modras, in his book Ignatian Humanism: A Dynamic Spirituality for the 21st Century
(Chicago: Loyola Press, 2004), identifies an optimistic view of human nature and human
potential as characteristic of several Jesuits from various centuries and countries. These
Jesuits include Ricci and Teilhard, as well as Arrupe and others.
24 Athansius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, ed. Paul Findlen (New York and
London: Routledge, 2004).
But to what extent is such an individualized approach an anachronism that

reflects not so much Jesuit history since Ignatius as it does modern and post-
modern Western culture with its focus on individual choice and individual
self-fulfillment? The Society of Jesus has always claimed to be more than a
loosely connected lot of individuals, but a company, a body, with common ide-
als, commitments, and goals. And there are instances of specific associations
or organizations within the Society of Jesus, some of them focused on schol-
arly work. One is the Bollandists, a group of Jesuit scholars founded in the
seventeenth century and devoted to scholarly research and publication on
the history of the saints. The Bollandists still exist.25 Another example is the
massive Dictionnaire de spiritualit, edited by a group of French Jesuits and
published in seventeen volumes between 1932 and 1995.26 Another example is
Sources Chrtiennes, a collection of scholarly editions of early Christian texts,
most of them in Latin, together with French translations, notes and introduc-
tions. This project was begun in 1942 by several French Jesuits, Jean Danilou
(19051974) and Henri de Lubac among them, and the work continues today
under the direction of a team of Jesuits and their colleagues in Lyons.
In the decades leading up to Vatican II, Danilou and de Lubac, each even-
tually made a cardinal, were key proponents of theological ressourcement. By
ressourcement meant a going back to the written sources of Christianity, from
the first century on, and there to find resources for renewal of the church in
the modern world. Ressourcement did not mean a reactionary restoration of
some imagined golden age in the past, but a careful appropriation of early
Christian traditions judged more authentic and more life-giving than various
accretions of the intervening centuries.
A key question for Jesuit history is: has there been a similar kind of res-
sourcement in the Society of Jesus and regarding its early traditions and texts?
Has this taken place in the two centuries since 1814? Or perhaps only since
ca. 1965? Or in some other time frame? And to what extent have texts and
traditions from the Society 1540 to 1773 been re-appropriated since 1814?
The Monumenta editions of early Jesuit documents have certainly facilitated
such appropriation or re-appropriation.27 For the English speaking world, the
Institute of Jesuit Sources in St. Louis, Missouri has produced and published
25 See Bollandistes, saints et lgendes: quatre sicles de recherche, ed. Robert Godding et al.
(Brussels: Socit des Bollandistes, 2007).
26 Dictionnaire de spiritualit: asctique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, 17 vols., ed. Marcel
Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 19321995).
27 See list of Monumenta volumes in this books index.
28 Thomas Worcester
translations of many Jesuit works, as well as studies of various topics in Jesuit

history.28
Jesuit culture has always been a part of print culture, and print culture is a
key part of Jesuit ways of proceeding. Indeed the Society of Jesus without the
printing press is no more imaginable than the Protestant Reformation without
print. For Jesuit publications pre-1773, and also up to the early twentieth cen-
tury, the multi-volume reference work produced by Carlos Sommervogel (and
several other Jesuits) remains essential; Robert Danieluk has provided a thor-
ough study of it.29 Thus the history of publications by Jesuit authors, and/or on
Jesuit topics is readily accessible and may make possible a clarification or veri-
fication of a history of Jesuit ressourcement.
Here are a few examples of post-1814 editions and printings of pre-1773 texts,
each originally written in seventeenth-century France. Etienne Binet (15691639),
was a Jesuit, preacher, administrator, and prolific author of some fifty books on a
broad range of spiritual and academic topics. An example of a frequently re-
published work is his treatise, Quel est le meilleur governement le rigoureux ou le
doux? (What is the best government, the rigorous or the gentle?), first published in
1636. Not counting translations, Sommervogel lists three editions in the seven-
teenth century (1626, 1671, 1696), two during the suppression (1776, 1783), and three
post-1814: 1829, 1841, and 1884; Sommervogel also lists three in Italian (1655, 1682,
1843), and four in Latin (1658, 1675, 1731, and 1733). Only the Latin version was not
reprinted after 1814.30 And yet there may be more, in various languages, for Binets
writings may not always be obvious in catalogues and bibliographies; he some-
times published under a pseudonym (Ren Franois or Renato Francese) and
sometimes under no name at all. I have read an 1842 edition published in Avignon
(not cited in Sommervogel), now in the library of the Centre Svres in Paris.
Why was this treatise by Binet re-printed as late as nearly two and half cen-
turies after his death? Binet explains that he intended this work especially for
superiors in religious orders, and the works title in some editions makes this
clear, e.g., Idea del buon governo per i superiori religiosi (Idea of good governance
for religious superiors).31 In the post-1814 world, did Jesuit and perhaps other
superiors in Catholic religious orders find Binets advice particularly helpful?
28 See the Institutes Web page, www.jesuitsources.com.

29 Robert Danieluk, La Bibliothque de Carlos Sommervogel: le sommet de loeuvre bibli-
ographique de la Compagnie de Jsus (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 2006).
30 Sommervogel, 1:4881505. For a study of three of Binets most interesting works, see my
essay, Plague as Spiritual Medicine and Medicine as Spiritual Metaphor, in Piety and
Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque, ed. Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester
(Kirksville, mo: Truman State University Press, 2007), 224236.
31 Idea del buon governo per i superiori religiosi (Rome: Moneta, 1682).
Other texts by Binet were re-published in the nineteenth century, even in

English,32 and some of his writings more recently than that.33 The task remains
to study the reception of Binets writings since 1814.
Dominique Bouhours (16281702) was a prolific French Jesuit author from
the second half of the seventeenth century.34 Among his many works were a
life of Ignatius of Loyola and a life of Francis Xavier, and these works figure
among the works of Bouhours re-printed post-1814. For example, in 1821 an edi-
tion of his life of Ignatius came out in Avignon, and another was published in
Lyons in 1844, while an English translation appeared in Philadelphia in 1840; in
1826 an edition of his life of Francis Xavier was published in Lyons, while an
English version was published in 1841 in Philadelphia.35 A thorough study of
Bouhours could show whether or not these and other editions published in the
nineteenth century and beyond were simply reprinted earlier versions or were
revised and adapted as well, and if the latter, in what ways.36
Louis Bourdaloue (16321704) was a near contemporary of Bouhours, and
became known above all for his preaching at the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis in
Paris. With a few exceptions, Bourdaloues sermons were not published until
after his death, when they were collected and edited by Jesuit Paul Bretonneau
(16601741).37 And beyond Bretonneaus time, Bourdaloues works continued
to be published; there is an edition of his complete works from 1812, near
the end of the suppression period, and there are many post-1814 nineteenth-
century editions.38
32 Stephen Binet, Lives of Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, Parents of the Mother of God, with
notes by Joseph Ignatius Vallejo (New York: Edward Dunigan and Brother, 1860).
33 Two of Binets works originally published in the 1620s are Consolation et rjouissance pour
les malades et personnes affliges (Grenoble: Jrme Millon, 1995); Remdes souverains
contre la peste et la mort soudaine (Grenoble: Jrme Millon, 1998).
34 Sommervogel, 1:18861920.
35 Bouhours, Vie de Saint Ignace, fondateur de la Compagnie de Jsus (Avignon: Seguin An,
1821); Vie de Saint Ignace, fondateur de la Compagnie de Jsus (Lyons: Prisse frres, 1844);
The Life of St. Ignatius, Founder of the Society of Jesus (Philadelphia: E. Cummiskey, 1840);
Vie de S. Franois Xavier: aptre des Indes et du Japon (Lyons: Prisse frres, 1826); The Life
of St. Francis Xavier, of the Society of Jesus, Apostle of India: from the French of Father
Dominic Bouhours (Philadelphia: E. Cummiskey, 1841).
36 John Dryden (16311700), the English poet, did a translation of the life of Francis Xavier by
Bouhours, and it was published in London near the end of the reign of Catholic monarch
James II: The Life of St. Francis Xavier, of the Society of Jesus, apostle of the Indies, and of
Japan (London: Printed for Jacob Tronson, 1688). Was Drydens translation re-printed
post-1814, or were other English translations preferred?
37 On Bretonneau and his publications, see Sommervogel 2:139143.
38 Oeuvres compltes de Bourdaloue, de la Compagnie de Jsus, 16 vols. (Versailles: J.A. Lebel,
1812). For a list of Bourdaloues works and editions, see Sommervogel, 2:528.
30 Thomas Worcester
Binet, Bouhours, and Bourdaloue are but three examples, all from early
modern France, of prolific Jesuit authors whose influence extended well
beyond their own time and place thanks to their publications. There are abun-
dant examples of well-published Jesuits from seventeenth-century France, but
also from many other eras and countries.
In a European country such as France, where Jesuits and their institutions
and activities were prominent before the suppression, it makes some sense to
speak of restoration when considering the Society of Jesus post-1814. This
may also be true for Latin America, where the Old Society played a major
role.39 But in some other parts of the world this makes less sense. The first
Jesuits to go to Australia arrived in the mid-nineteenth century; they came
from Austria and Ireland. They could not have been restoring anything Jesuit
from pre-1773 Australia, but they no doubt drew upon the experience and his-
tory of Jesuits in Europe and elsewhere as they established missions and
schools among both Australian Aboriginal peoples and European settlers.40
Jesuits only came to various parts of Africa beginning in the nineteenth cen-
tury: Zimbabwe and Zambia are good examples.41 Though there were some
Jesuits as early as the 1630s in what has become the usa, they were few in
number and founded no colleges pre-1773.42 By the 1960s there were some
8,000 Jesuits in eleven provinces in the usa with many high schools, colleges
and universitiesall of them post-1773 establishments. In this perspective,
discontinuity, not continuity, before and after the suppression seems more
prominent.43
39 For an overview of Jesuit history in Latin America, see Jeffrey Klaiber, The Jesuits in Latin
America, 15492000: 450 Years of Inculturation, Defense of Human Rights, and Prophetic
Witness (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009). As the subtitle suggests, Klaiber
places considerable emphasis on continuity between pre-1773 and post-1814.
40 See the chronology provided on the Web page of the Australian Jesuit province, www
.jesuit.org.au.
41 See Nicholas Creary, Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of
the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 18791980 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011);
A History of the Jesuits in Zambia: A Mission Becomes a Province, ed. Edward P. Murphy
(Nairobi, Kenya: Paulines Publications, 2003).
42 On the Maryland Jesuits, both pre- and post-suppression, see, e.g., American Jesuit
Spirituality: the Maryland Tradition, 16341900, ed. Robert Emmett Curran (Mahwah, N.J.:
Paulist Press, 1988).
43 For an excellent case study of tensions between a kind of transfer of European Jesuit tra-
ditions to America, and Jesuit efforts to opt rather for adaptation to American circum-
stances, see Gerald McKevitt, Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West,
18481919 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Light may also be shed on the degree of continuity or discontinuity between

the pre-1773 and post-1814 Society of Jesus by greater attention to the ways in
which the Society survived during those forty-one years, especially within the
Russian Empire, but also in other places, often outside the boundaries of the
Catholic kingdoms that had repudiated the Jesuits.44 To what extent did such
survival help to make what followed Pius VIIs decree authorizing universal re-
establishment less a restoration than perhaps a kind of re-emergence from
geographic and political margins of the Catholic world? Also, in a country such
as France, something like the Jesuits had in fact also survived, under other
names than the Society of Jesus. Pierre-Joseph de Clorivire (17351820) stands
out, a suppressed French Jesuit who persevered in promoting Jesuit-inspired
congregations and associations, who endured years of imprisonment under
Napoleon, and who played the central role, as provincial, in the formal re-
establishment of the Society in France in the immediate years post-1814. His
exchange of letters with Fr. General Tadeusz Brzozowski (17491820) provide
insight into how both these men dealt with the delicate task of re-establishing
the Society in a country whose monarchy had turned against it and whose sub-
sequent Revolution and then Empire had proved no more favorable.45
Pre-suppression French Jesuits such as Claude La Colombire (16411682)
had played a significant role in promoting devotion to the Sacred Heart. By the
time of the French Revolution the symbolism of the Sacred Heart had been
appropriated above all by anti-Revolutionary forces, and in nineteenth-
century France it was associated with efforts to preserve and/or restore the
Bourbon monarchy, efforts that would prove to be a failure post-1830. Clorivire
was among both the Revolutions ardent opponents and the ardent promoters
of the Sacred Heart.46 Does this suggest that the Sacred Heart devotion was a
factor in promoting continuity between pre-1773 and post-1814 Jesuits? Or did
the reactionary politicization of the Sacred Heart, especially in France, rob the
Sacred Heart of its potential to undergird Jesuit chronological continuity and
geographic unity? It can hardly be the case that restoration of monarchy played
much of a role in Jesuit devotion to the Sacred Heart in the usa or in a number
of other places in the Jesuit world as it developed post-1814.
The pre-suppression Society had often been criticized for its closeness to
the papacy; in France, those that promoted what they called Gallican liberties
44 For a concise summary, see Jonathan Wright, The Suppression and Restoration, in The
Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, 263277.
45 La correspondence de P.-J. Clorivire avec T. Brzozowski 1814 1818, ed. Chantal Reynier,
ahsi 64 (1995):83167. On Clorivire, see also Lacouture, 317319; Bangert, 452, 460.
46 See Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
32 Thomas Worcester
never made peace with the Jesuits. If anything, such tensions were even more
prominent after 1814 than before, as an age of aggressive nationalism and
nation-state building, not only in France but in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere,
came into conflict with Jesuit internationalist ideals and with Jesuit support
for a growing role of the pope in the Church. Joseph de Maistre (17531821), a
layman, diplomat, and prolific writer from Savoy, was a particularly influential
spokesman not only for restoration of the Papal States and of papal authority,
but as a defender of the Jesuits and of papal infallibility.47 Thus an aspect of
Jesuit continuity or discontinuity across the divide that was the suppression
concerns Jesuits and the papacy. If Jesuits were, as de Maistre saw them, sup-
porters of an Ultramontanist ecclesiology, was this anything new, or merely the
continuation of Jesuit ideas and priorities articulated by the first Jesuits and
handed down, as it were, from generation to generation in the Society of Jesus?
Was Vatican I, with its definition of papal infallibility and its affirmation of
immediate, universal jurisdiction of the pope in the Church, a kind of vindica-
tion of a long-standing Jesuit ecclesiology?
Even if the answer is yes, all that has happened in the Church and the Society
of Jesus since Vatican I and II may alter an assessment of continuity or discon-
tinuity between the pre- and post-suppression Society and its relationship to
the papacy. Far more can and must be said on this, but this essay can but signal
the crucial nature of this topic.
Whether Vatican II (19621965) was continuous or discontinuous with the
Church up to that time has been a very much debated topic, and it has remained
so as the fiftieth anniversary of the Council is celebrated or at least marked
in some way. Those that highlight discontinuity focus on a variety of factors
including the collegial, collaborative, and conciliatory tone and style of the
Councils documents, and the friendly stance of the Council in relation to non-
Catholics, the Jews among them.48 No longer were Jews labeled Christ-killers
and the like. If the Council broke with earlier Catholic hostility toward the
Jews, was there a parallel shift in Jesuit attitudes toward the Jews? Recent
scholarly work provides a yes to this question.49
47 The literature on de Maistre is vast; for a recent study of his significance, see Carolina
Armenteros, The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 17941854 (Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 2011).
48 See John W. OMalley, What Happened at Vatican II? (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008), especially 290313; Gerald OCollins, Does Vatican II Represent Continuity
or Discontinuity? Theological Studies 73 (2012): 768794.
49 See Robert A. Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry
and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Friends on the
Way: Jesuits Encounter Contemporary Judaism, ed. Thomas Michel (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007).
Conclusion
In an article entitled Gesuitomania, Emanuele Colombo has drawn attention

to the extraordinary amount of attention given in recent years to the history of
the pre-1773 Society of Jesus.50 Not only Jesuit and other Catholic presses are
publishing a huge amount of scholarship on the pre-suppression Society, but
so too many secular presses, the top university presses among them. The Old
Society has never had it so good! But the post-1814 Jesuits have a long way to go,
historiographically speaking. To fully answer the question this essay poses,
much more work needs to be done on the last two centuries of Jesuits, includ-
ing the de-centering of Europe and the rise of other continents in the last half
century of Jesuit experience. The libraries and archives with abundant, perti-
nent resources are surely ready and willing to welcome the next generation of
scholars. In the meantime, while awaiting their discoveries, I suggest that a
combination of ressourcement and adaptation to new circumstances may have
often been in tension with a less creative restorationist agenda.
50 Emanuele Colombo, Gesuitomania: Studi recenti sulle missioni gesuitiche (15401773),

in Evangelizzazione e globalizzazione gesuitiche nellet moderna tra storia e storiografia,
ed. Michela Catto et al. (Rome: Societ editrice Dante Alighieri, 2010).
chapter 2
Some Remarks on Jesuit Historiography 17731814

Robert Danieluk, S.J.
The bicentenary of the bull Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum (7 August 1814)

invites all who are interested in the history of the Society of Jesus to reconsider
the period between the Clementinian suppression and the Jesuits universal
restoration. A key task is to re-evaluate the relationship between the so-called
old and new Societies: a division generally accepted by scholars in spite of
its limitations.1 An obvious first step involves bibliographical and archival
examination of sources and a study of the existing historiography. This article
focuses on the historiographical tradition. It does not aim for a complete
worldwide overview but, rather, offers some remarks organized around the fol-
lowing questions: What has been done in the field of 17731814 Jesuit history?;
What is being done?; and What ought to be done?
What Has Been Done?
From the outset, Jesuit historians took up the task of writing the history of
their order. Outstanding and well-known examples include the series Historia
Societatis Iesu and, more recently, the publications of the Jesuit Historical
Institute.2 A list of titles directly concerning the 17731814 period is not particu-
larly long even though the vicissitudes of the Society of Jesus were discussed
widely at the time, in spite of the brief Dominus ac Redemptor which forbade
discussion of the suppression.3 Several members of the suppressed Society
ignored these prohibitive orders and wrote memoirs and began to collect
materials related to the events they had witnessed. Among the best known
examples are the writings of the Italian Jesuit historian Giulio Cesare Cordara
1 See Robert Danieluk, La reprise dune mmoire brise: Lhistoriographie de la nouvelle

Compagnie de Jsus, ahsi 150 (2006): 269271.
2 See also Ob communem fructum et consolationem: La gense et les enjeux de lhistoriographie
de la Compagnie de Jsus, ahsi 149 (2006): 2962 and Monumenta Historica Societatis
Iesuuno sguardo di insieme sulla collana, ahsi 161 (2012): 24989.
3 Polgr I, 6164. Surprisingly there is no special section dedicated to the suppression-restora-
tion in Sommervogel.

Some Remarks On Jesuit Historiography 17731814 35
and the diaries of his Spanish confrere Manuel Luengo relating the expulsion
from Spain in 1767 and subsequent events.4 Their narratives were added to
by the writings of other expelled Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits.5 Some of
these were published long ago, such as the memoirs of missionaries in the
Philippines,6 while others, concerning Jesuits in Paraguay, have only been
offered to the public fairly recently.7 In addition, a biography of Lorenzo Ricci
written by Tommaso Termanini, an Italian Jesuit, was published in 2006.8
Early on, various ex-Jesuits engaged in polemics concerning the suppression
and the deeds of Clement XIV. In his recent study, Isidoro Liberale Gatti shows
how they inaugurated a negative historiography of Clement and helped create
a black legend.9 The Jesuit cause was also championed by some of the peri-
odicals for which members of the suppressed order had worked, e.g. Journal
Historique et Littraire in Lige and the Polish Gazeta Warszawska published in
Warsaw. On the other hand, the French Jansenist periodical Nouvelles
Ecclsiastiques wrote against the Jesuits, as did a number of pamphlets.
The historiography of the period 17731814 continued after the restoration
of the Society. One of the main preoccupations of the nineteenth-century
4 Julii Cordarae De Suppressione Societatis Jesu Commentarii, ed. Giuseppe Albertotti (Padua:
L. Penada, 19231925). English translation: On the Suppression of the Society of Jesus. A
Contemporary Account. Translation and notes by John P. Murphy S.J. (Chicago: Loyola Press,
1999). Manuel Luengo, Memorias de un exilio. Diario de la expulsin de los jesuitas de los
dominios del rey de Espaa (17671768), ed. Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga (Alicante:
Universidad de Alicante, 2002). Id., El retorno de un jesuita desterrado. Viaje del P. Manuel
Luengo desde Bolonia a Nava del Rey, ed. Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga (Alicante:
Universidad de Alicante, 2004). Id., Diario de 1769. La llegada de los jesuitas espaoles a
Bolonia, ed. Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga and Isidoro Pinedo Iparraguirre (Alicante:
Universidad de Alicante, 2010); Id., Diario de 1773. El triunfo temporal del antijesuitismo, ed.
Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga and Isidoro Pinedo Iparraguirre (Alicante, Universidad de
Alicante, 2013); forthcoming are also the Memories from 18141815.
5 Josep M. Bentez i Riera, ed., El destierro de los jesuitas de la Provincia de Aran bajo el rein-
ado de Carlos III. Crnica indita del P. Blas Larraz, S.I. (Rome: Iglesia Nacional Espaola,
2006). Jos Caeiro, Histria da expulso da Companhia de Jesus da Provncia de Portugal (sec.
XVIII). 3 vols. (Lisbon: Verbo, 1991).
6 Ernest J. Burrus, A Diary of Exiled Philippine Jesuits (17691770), ahsi 20 (1951): 269299.
7 Jos Manuel Perams, Diario del destierro ([Cordba:] Universidad Catlica de Cordba,
2004); earlier edited by Guillermo Furlong (Buenos Aires: Librera del Plata, 1952). Carlos A.
Page, Relatos desde el exilio. Memorias de los jesuitas expulsos de la antigua Provincia del
Paraguay (Asuncin: Servilibro, 2011).
8 Filippo Coralli, ed., La vita del P. Lorenzo Ricci, generale della Compagnia di Ges. Biografia
inedita del P. Tommaso Termanini S.J., Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 44 (2006): 35139.
9 Isidoro Liberale Gatti, Clemente XIV Ganganelli (17051774). Profilo di un francescano e di un
papa, vol. 1 (Padua: Centro Studi Antoniani, 2012), 7, 1718, 4546, 50.
36 Robert Danieluk
Jesuits was their fidelity to the Institute, i.e. to the orders own charisma and
procedures codified in the foundational documents and confirmed by internal
legislation. This issue was crucial since it involved the delicate question of con-
tinuity or discontinuity in the Societys history, interrupted in 1773. Thus, it is
hardly surprising that history played an important role in confronting such
preoccupations and became a privileged tool in defending the concept of the
orders uninterrupted continuity. Indeed, the theme of the suppression and
restoration emerged several times after 1814, e.g. in the middle of the nine-
teenth century when the Society was attacked by liberal writers and ecclesias-
tical milieus not friendly to the Jesuits. At that time history once again became
a defensive weapon.
Sometimes this defense was entrusted to such unsuitable hands as those of
the French writer Jacques Crtineau-Joly, the author of six volumes on the
orders history who engaged in strong polemics with Vincenzo Gioberti and
Augustin Theiner,10 whose publications portrayed the Jesuits in a negative
light.11 In response to those who attacked the Society, the French Jesuit and
preacher at Notre-Dame, Gustave-Xavier de Ravignan prepared a reply to
Theiners history of Clement XIV.12 In Italy, Giuseppe Boero reacted to the
German Oratorians publication, while his fellow brother Carlo Curci wrote
against Gioberti.13
Although these and several other attempts to promote Jesuit-authored his-
tories of the Society were made after 1814, more systematic and organized
10 Jacques Crtineau-Joly, Histoire politique, littraire et religieuse de la Compagnie de Jsus

(Paris and Lyon: Paul Mellier and Chez Guyot, 18441846).
11 Vincenzo Gioberti, Gesuita moderno. 5 vols. (Losanne: S. Bonamici e Compagni, 1846
1847); Apologia del libro intitolato Il Gesuita moderno, con alcune considerazioni intorno al
Risorgimento italiano (Bruxelles and Livorno: Meline, Cans e Comp., 1848). Augustin
Theiner, Geschichte des Pontifikats Klemens XIV, 2 vols. (Leipzig and Paris: Verlag der
Gebrder Firmin Didot, 1853; French version was published in 1852 in Paris). Jacques
Crtineau-Joly, Clment XIV et les jsuites (Paris: Librairie Religieuse de Mellier Frres,
1847); Polmique sur le pape Clment XIV. Lettres au Pre Augustin Theiner (Lige: Verhoven-
Debeur, 1853); Le pape Clment XIV. Seconde et dernire lettre au pre Augustin Theiner
(Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1853) and Bonaparte, le Concordat de 1801 et le Cardinal Consalvi,
suivi de deux Lettres au pre Theiner sur le pape Clment XIV (Paris: Plon, 1869).
12 Gustave-Xavier de Ravignan, Clment XIII et Clment XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Julien Lanier et Cie,
1854).
13 Giuseppe Boero, Osservazioni sopra listoria del pontificato di Clemente XIV scritta dal p. A.
Theiner, prete dellOratorio (Modena: Carlo Vincenzi, 1853). Carlo Curci, Fatti ed argomenti
in risposta alle molte parole di V. Gioberti intorno ai Gesuiti nei Prolegomeni del Primato
(Naples: Fibreno, 1845); Alquante parole intorno a Gioberti e Curci (Rome: Monaldi, 1846).
initiatives were only undertaken at the end of the nineteenth century. Previous
decades had not been particularly propitious for such work. The Jesuits had to
face not only ordinary problems connected to the rebuilding of structures
destroyed in 1773, but also internal tensions, conflicts, and many local expul-
sions.14 Yet, several works in Jesuit historiography were written in the hope of
continuing the scholarship that had been interrupted by the suppression. One
reason behind this was probably the fact that decree twenty-one of the general
congregation of 1829 asked the superior general of the Society to foster both
the official history of the order and its bibliography.15 To investigate how faith-
fully these projects were followed and to list relative publications would cer-
tainly be interesting.
1892 is a year of great importance because of the role played by Fr. Luis
Martn as superior general in promoting the compiling and reorganizing of
Jesuit historiography. The twenty-fourth general congregation took place in
Loyola. It not only elected Martn general, but also advised him, with its twenty-
first decree, to promote studies of the orders history: The wish of certain
provinces that writing the history of our Society should be resumed was
expressed to the assembled fathers. The congregation replied that this is
among the desires of us all and is something to be recommended strongly to
Our Father.16
Martn took this decree very seriously. He first ensured that the Jesuit
archives would be preserved and better organized. He then gathered a group of
Jesuits in Rome whose mission was to prepare not merely a simple continua-
tion of the Latin Historia Societatis, but also to study the histories of particular
provinces, assistancies, and other territorial or national units, written in mod-
ern languages.17
The period between the two Societies was not forgotten. The Maltese
Joseph Strickland, a member of the Roman province, seems to have been the
first person appointed to research the suppression period. After visiting several
archives in Italy between 1895 and 1897, he continued his studies in England,
leaving in Rome some of his research and an outline of the history of the
14 Bangert 1986, 432.

15 Padberg 1994, 442.
16 Ibid., 487.
17 About this initiative, see Robert Danieluk, Le ricerche degli storici gesuiti nellArchivio
Segreto Vaticano tra Ottocento e Novecento, in Suavis laborum memoria. Chiesa, Papato
e Curia Romana tra storia e teologia. Scritti in onore di Marcel Chappin SJ per il suo 70
compleanno/Church, Papacy, Roman Curia between History and Theology. Essays in honour
of Marcel Chappin SJ on His 70th Birthday, eds. Paul van Geest and Roberto Regoli (Vatican
City: Archivio Segreto Vaticano, 2013), 367396.
38 Robert Danieluk
suppression, including some notes for what was supposed to form part of its
first three chapters.18
Completely different was the case of Martns second appointment for the
same mission: the French Jesuit Franois-Marie Gaillard. Called to Rome in
1895, he spent the rest of his life conducting research in several European
libraries and archives, including those in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Initially,
the general only wanted him to collect material for the history of the period
17731814. Subsequently, this task was extended to the events preceding the
suppression. Early on, Martn also encouraged him to use the fruits of his
researches in writing and publishing, but in this arena Gaillard proved less suc-
cessful than in searching for documents. His huge legacy, at present preserved
in the Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu (arsi), is composed of dozens of
files with the summaries of thousands of documents, many of which he also
transcribed.19 To obey the generals orders, the French Jesuit prepared a book,
Suppression, survivance et rtablissement de la Compagnie de Jsus, 17721814,
and an article La XX Congrgation Gnrale S.J. de lan 1820, but both
remained in manuscript form. He published only an account of his trip to
Russia and some documents which were used for the preparation of the beati-
fication of Jos Pignatelli, while some of his minor writings were published
posthumously.20
Originally, the project of Fr. Martn was very ambitious. He hoped the
research conducted in Rome would locate if not all, then at least a substantial
part of the material necessary for the new histories. This plan was only partly
realized: several archives were searched, in part or entirely, from the Jesuit
point of view (some of the results of this work are preserved in the arsi). Some
researchers covered the whole period of the old Society and even parts of the
new Societys history. Such was the case of Stanisaw Zaski whose Jesuits in
Poland spanned the years between 1555 and 1905.21 Others provided a history
either of the old Society or the new Society or one period thereof. No his-
tory of the suppression as such has been published. The same Zaski, long
18 arsi, Hist. Soc. 299. See also arsi, Russia 1001-V-27 which contains a list of documents
concerning the Jesuits in Russia, found by Strickland in Naples and sent by him to Martn
on August 14, 1895.
19 arsi, Fondo Gaillard.
20 About Gaillard and his achievements, see Robert Danieluk, A Failed Mission or a Never-
ending Tertianship?Franois-Marie Gaillard S.J. (18531927) and his contribution to
the historiography of the Society of Jesus, ahsi 163 (2013): 3113.
21 Stanisaw Zaski, Jezuici w Polsce, 11 vols. (Leopoli: Drukiem i nakadem Drukarni
Ludowej, Cracow: Drukiem i nakadem Drukarni W. L. Anczyca i Sp., 19001906).
before embarking upon his main work, published a book about the survival of
the Society in Russia after 1773.22 Besides this, the official Jesuit historiogra-
phy from that time did not produce any substantial study of the period that
warrants interest. However, the theme was not forgotten and emerged in minor
works by some Jesuit authors, such as Bernhard Duhr and Sydney F. Smith.23
Their example was followed by Louis Delplace and Paul Dudon.24
The beginning of the twentieth century brought one major contribution to
the study of the period, namely the work of Ludwig von Pastor on Clement
XIV.25 Given that the German historian had several collaborators, including
some Jesuits, doubts were expressed about the extent of this collaboration and
the authenticity of Pastors authorship, especially because the judgment on
Clement was rather negative. Polemics began immediately after the publica-
tion of the Italian version of the controversial book.26 Eventually, Pius XI
imposed silence on both sides in this discussion. Perhaps the papal order had
22 Stanisaw Zaski, Historya zniesienia zakonu jezuitw i jego zachowanie na Biaej Rusi. 2
vols. (Leopoli, 18741875). In 1886, this book was translated into French by Alexandre
Vivier, Les Jsuites de la Russie-Blanche, 2 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et An) and in 1888 an
Italian translation was made from this French version by Antonio Buzzetti (I Gesuiti della
Russia Bianca. Prato: Tipografia Giachetti).
23 Bernhard Duhr, Ungedruckte Briefe und Relationen ber die Aufhebung der Gesellschaft
Jesu in Deutschland, Historisches Jahrbuch 6 (1885): 413437. Id., Die Etappen bei der
Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens nach den Papieren in Simancas, Zeitschrift fr Katholische
Theologie 22 (1898): 432454. Id., Hat Papst Klemens XIV. durch ein Breve das Fortbestehen
der Jesuiten in Russland gebilligt?, Stimmen aus Maria Laach 87/9 (19131914): 458469.
Id., Die Kaiserin Maria Theresia und die Aufhebung der Gesellschaft Jesu, Stimmen der
Zeit 56/3 (1925): 207221. Sydney F. Smith, The Suppression of the Society of Jesus, The
Month 99 (1902): 113130, 263279, 346368, 497517, 626650; 100 (1902): 2034, 126152,
258273, 366376, 517536, 581591; 101 (1903): 4861, 179197, 259277, 383403, 498516,
604623; 102 (1903): 4663, 171184. The study of Smith was recently republished by Joseph
A. Munitiz (Leominster: Gracewing, 2004).
24 Louis Delplace, La suppression des jsuites (17731814), tudes 116 (1908): 6996; 228
247. Paul Dudon, De la suppression de la Compagnie de Jsus (17581773), Revue des
Questions Historiques 132 (1938): 75107. Id., La rsurrection de la Compagnie de Jsus
(17731814), Revue des Questions Historiques 133 (1939): 2159; English translation: The
Resurrection of the Society of Jesus, Woodstock Letters 81 (1952): 311360.
25 Ludwig von Pastor, Geschichte der Ppste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, t. 16: Geschichte
der Ppste im Zeitalter der frstlichen Absolutismus von der Wahl Benedikts XIV. bis zum
Tode Pius VI. (17401799), part 2: Klemens XIV. (17691774) (Freiburg: Herder, 1932).
26 Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei papi dalla fine del Medioevo, vol. XVI: Storia dei papi nel peri-
odo dellassolutismo, dallelezione di Benedetto XIV sino alla morte di Pio VI (17401799),
parte II: Clemente XIV (17691774). Translated by Pio Cenci (Roma: Descle & C.i Editori
Pontifici, 1933).
40 Robert Danieluk
a negative effect becauseas noticed by Giacomo Martinano substantial

contribution to the historiography of Clement XIV appeared after Pastors.27 In
fact, it is only recently that significant new work has been carried out by the
aforementioned Isidoro Liberale Gatti.28
Something similar could be said about the historiography of the period
17731814. In 1938, decree thirty-five of the twenty-eighth general congregation
recommended to the general, among other suggestions concerning the Jesuit
Historical Institute, that He should be pleased to treat with the Holy See, at a
suitable time and in the proper circumstances, about completely publishing
those historical documents on the suppression of the Society that have
been collected with such great labor.29 It is important to note that two other
recommendations of the same decree actually materialized: the provinces of
the Society helped the Institute by sending Jesuits to work there and, by pro-
viding necessary financial support (first recommendation), documents about
the Jesuit missions started to be published a few years later as Monumenta
Missionum (second recommendation). Only the recommendation concerning
the suppression was never followed. Why?
Some contemporary historians provide at least partial answers. Giacomo
Martina highlights the previously mentioned intervention of the pope as a fac-
tor in ending the polemics surrounding Pastors book.30 Unfortunately, Martina
does not indicate the sources of this information, which is repeated by Maria
Guadalupe Morad in her recent Ph.D. dissertation at the Gregorian University.31
She quotes a letter by Fr. General Wodzimierz Ledchowski to the provincials
of Italy from 16 August 1935, ordering them to ensure that nothing more would
be published in regard to this polemic, for such was the will of the Holy See.32
On the other hand, Filippo Coralli reports having heard his professor Josep
Bentez quoting testimonies of the Jesuit historians Miguel Batllori and
Edmond Lamalle who, in 1967, affirmed that an instruction had been given to
27 Giacomo Martina, Storia della Chiesa da Lutero ai nostri giorni, vol. 2: Let dellassolutismo.
Rev. ed. (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1994), 306.
28 Gatti, Clemente XIV.
29 Padberg 1994, 610.
30 Giacomo Martina, Storia della storiografia ecclesiastica nellOtto e Novecento (Parte Prima)
(Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universit Gregoriana, 2008), 123124.
31 Maria Guadalupe Morad, Una historia muy necesaria e importantsima: La tarea histo-
riogrfica de Pedro de Leturia S.J. (18911955), desde los papeles del Archivo Histrico de la
Pontificia Universidad Gregoriana. Extracto de la disertacin de doctorado en Historia y
Bienes Culturales de la Iglesia (Rome: Pontificia Universidad Gregoriana, 2012), 69.
32 See a copy of this letter in arsi, Reg. Rom. XVI, 307.
the Jesuits not to publish any document relevant to the suppression in order
not to aggravate tensions already existing between the Society and the Vatican
in the context of the post-conciliar changes within the order.33 All these indi-
cations require deeper research in the archives which might help to answer
questions about the unrealized recommendation of 1938.34
More well-known are the other steps taken by the Society to continue the
initiative of Fr. Martn. After the move from Madrid to Rome the Monumenta
Historica continued under the auspices of the Jesuit Historical Institutea
new institution created by Fr. Ledchowski in 1930.35 The work of research and
publication was undertaken by an enlarged and more international group of
Jesuit historians and was recommended to the entire Society by the thirty-first
and thirty-fourth general congregations (1966 and 1995).36
To conclude: from all the titles quoted here, and many others which there is
not space to mention, there appears to be a historiographical panorama in
which the main events, dates, and names related to the problematic of sup-
pression-restoration can be studied. There are still, however, several questions
which could be asked, based on existing knowledge and available archival
material. This brings us to a second question: What is being done?
What Is Being Done?
Since the second half of the twentieth century a major change in Jesuit histori-
ography has been underway. Before this period, if we do not consider anti-
Jesuit literature, it was almost exclusively members of the Society of Jesus who
took up the task of writing the history of the order. Besides its polemical tone
(which was used to combat the orders enemies), this internal historiography
was destined for a Jesuit audience, providing a valuable contribution to the
training of its younger members and instructive readings to all, especially
because, according to long tradition, history was one of the favorite reading
topics in the dining rooms of the Societys communities. Thus, although not
secret or unavailable to non-Jesuit readers, until the second half of the
33 Coralli, La vita del P. Lorenzo Ricci, 36.

34 However, a part of such research must wait until the documents for this period are avail-
able to the public (both asv and arsi are open for the period to the end of the pontificate
of Pius XI, i.e. February 10, 1939).
35 ar 6/3 (1930): 577581.
36 ar 14/6 (1967): 962 and ar 21/2 (1996): 614.
42 Robert Danieluk
twentieth century the historiography of the Society of Jesus was practically ad

usum Nostrorum tantum (to be used exclusively by Ours).
This is no longer the case, since scholarship on the Society has been reshaped
during the past few decades: we have witnessed a surprising growth of interest
in its history among many non-Jesuit scholars who have attempted to approach
various topics either by looking at Jesuit sources or by studying themes indi-
rectly connected to the history of the order. This new approach of moving
beyond the usual limits of Jesuit historiography received the French name of
dsenclavement and as such it opened up new avenues of research for many
historians.37 The originality of this tendency does not derive exclusively from
the fact that non-Jesuits study the Societys history: equally important is the
broad use of modified perspectives and new methodologies. The provenance
of the authors and their membership (or non-membership) of the Society is of
secondary importance.
Even in this vibrant era of scholarship, however, it is interesting to note
that scholarship has tended to focus on the first two centuries of the order,
while relatively few authors have decided to study the subsequent two hun-
dred years. Yet, the Society of Jesus is no longer defensive in its own way of
writing its history, nor do its sources remain inaccessible. The statistics of
the number of scholars visiting the Jesuit Roman Archives reflect the grow-
ing interest in the orders history but also this focus on the old Society.
Between 1995 and 2011, 5,840 researchers from ninety-five countries were
admitted to study its collections. They paid 45,430 visits to the archives and
requested 60,573 archival items for consultation. Eighty-four percent of their
requests were for documents corresponding to the period of the old
Society.38
Scholarship on the Society of Jesus as a whole has moved far beyond ad
usum Nostrorum tantum (only seven percent of the scholars visiting arsi in
19952011 were Jesuits). Thus, any distinction between the internal and exter-
nal historiography of the Society of Jesus makes little sense since the entire
historiographical landscape has changed.
It would certainly be interesting to draw up a map of contemporary Jesuit
historiography, but the task is not easy for it requires a worldwide perspective.
Thus, in what follows only a few indications of what such a map would look
like are proposed.
37 Danieluk, La reprise, 269308.

38 Robert Danieluk, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu: un luogo privilegiato per lo studio
dellattivit evangelizzatrice dei gesuiti, Archiva Ecclesiae 5355 (20102012): 221254.
Rome remains an important center because of the resources preserved

there, especially the archives in the General Curia. Also, the mission entrusted
in 1930 to the Jesuit Historical Institute goes forward, albeit in new circum-
stances shaped by the drastically diminished number of Jesuits and the con-
stantly growing participation of non-Jesuit collaborators. At present, all the
editorial series of the Institute are submitted to the supervision of arsi.39
Recently, Rome also witnessed a new international initiative destined not only
to commemorate the bicentenary of 2014, but also to open up new perspec-
tives in the study of the Society of Jesus: in 2012 and 2013 a group of historians
from diverse countries gathered for a round table project De la Suppression
la Restauration de la Compagnie de Jsus: nouvelles perspectives de recher-
ches organized by the cole Franaise de Rome with the collaboration of
many other institutions, including the Pontifical Gregorian University which,
in November 2014, will host the third and final meeting of the program. As the
title of both conferences indicates, their goal is to identify possible new direc-
tions which will allow scholars to move beyond the chronological limits of
earlier Jesuit historiography and explore the period after the suppression.40
The participation of historians from France and the involvement of French
institutions in these meetings suggest that we should include this country in our
map. Indeed, for many years France has produced studies, publications, and aca-
demic events such as conferences and seminars (for instance the seminar that
was run by Pierre-Antoine Fabre and Antonella Romano at the cole des Hautes
tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris). One would be tempted to speak about a
French school in the contemporary historiography of the Society of Jesus.41
The majority presence of Italian scholars in both Roman meetings, as well
as their assiduity in visiting arsi (over forty percent of the visitors in 19952011
were Italian) at least equally significant. A special place in contemporary Jesuit
historiography of the suppression and restoration period should also be
reserved for Spain. Manuel Revuelta Gonzlez continued the work of his fel-
low Jesuit historians Antonio Astrain and Lesmes Fras, offering not only a
summary of the Societys history in Spain between 1868 and 1912 but also, more
recently, an outstanding overview of the orders restoration.42 Jos Antonio
39 See the decision of Fr. General Adolfo Nicols from 25 February 2010, in ar 24/3 (2010):
931933.
40 Sabina Pavone reported the works of the 2012 meeting in ahsi 81/162 (2012): 755760.
41 See Revue de Synthse 23 (1999) entirely dedicated to this subject.
42 Manuel Revuelta Gonzles, La Compaa de Jess en la Espaa Contempornea, 3 vols.
(Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 19842008). Id., El restablecimiento de la
Compaa de Jess. Celebracin del bicentenario (Bilbao: Mensajero, 2013).
44 Robert Danieluk
Ferrer Benimeli edited important sources concerning the expulsion of the

Jesuits in the same period and an overview of the suppression.43 Spain was also
home to some of the eighteenth-century authors who wrote about the national
expulsion and the general suppression of the order, as well as the editors of
their works which remained unpublished for more than two centuries. Besides
the already quoted publications of Josep Bentez and Inmaculada Fernndez
Arrillaga, it is worth mentioning the achievements of the university in Alicante,
where several other studies related to that problematic have recently been
published, namely works by Enrique Gimnez Lpez and Antonio Astorgano
Abajo.44 By publishing studies of the Basque Jesuits expelled from Spain and
their literary achievements, the latter continued the earlier work of Miguel
Batllori and Jos Ignacio Tellechea Idgoras concerning eighteenth-century
Spanish Jesuits.45
Elsewhere, Klaus Schatz has recently published his history of the new
Society in Germany,46 while the achievements of the Polish Jesuit Centre in
Cracow are destined to help scholars interested in the history of the order in
the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: the publica-
tions edited or directed by Ludwik Grzebie include, besides the monograph
series Studia i materiay do dziejw jezuitw polskich, an encyclopedia with
mostly biographical articles, a bibliography, and inventories of relevant arsi
documents.47 Mention should also be made of the work of Paul Begheyn in the
43 Jos Antonio Ferrer Benimeli, La expulsin y extincin de los jesuitas segn la correspon-
dencia diplomtica francesa, 3 vols. (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza/San Cristbal:
Universidad Catlica del Tchira, 19931998).
44 Enrique Gimnez Lpez, ed., Y en el tercero perecern. Gloria, cada y exilio de los jesuitas
espaoles en el s. XVIII. Estudios en homenaje al P. Miquel Batllori i Munn (Alicante:
Universidad de Alicante, 2002). Lorenzo Hervs y Panduro, Biblioteca jesutico-espaola,
ed. Antonio Astorgano Abajo, 2 vols. (Madrid: Libris, 20072009).
45 Antonio Astorgano Abajo, La literatura de los jesuitas vascos expulsos (17671815). Leccin
de Ingreso como Amigo de Nmero leda el da 26 de febrero de 2009 (Madrid: Delegacin en
Corte de la R.S.B.A.P., 2009). The book provides a bibliography of the earlier publications
by Batllori and Tellechea related to the same theme.
46 Klaus Schatz, Geschichte der deutschen Jesuiten (18141983) (Mnster: Aschendorff, 2013).
47 Encyklopedia wiedzy o jezuitach na ziemiach Polski i Litwy 15641995 (Cracow: Wysza
Szkoa Filozoficzno-Pedagogiczna Ignatianum/Wydawnictwo wam, 1996). Andrzej Pawe
Bie et al., Polonica w Archiwum Rzymskim Towarzystwa Jezusowego, 5 vols. (Cracow:
Wysza Szkoa Filozoficzno-Pedagogiczna Ignatianum-WAM, 20022008). Ludwik
Grzebie, Podstawowa bibliografia do dziejw Towarzystwa Jezusowego w Polsce, 2 vols.
(Cracow: Wydawnictwo wam/Wysza Szkoa Filozoficzno-Pedagogiczna Ignatianum,
2009).
Netherlands and the Belgian initiative of the Jesuitica online project from
Leuven (http://www.jesuitica.be).48
The importance of the United States is reflected by the Institute of Jesuit
Sources which has provided many valuable publications on Jesuit history since
its founding in St Louis in 1961 and is in the process of relocation to Boston.
More recently, two international conferences in Boston (1997 and 2002) gath-
ered with the purpose of bringing together scholars working on the Societys
history from diverse perspectives. In this attempt to study what was called
Jesuit corporate culture49 a special focus was placed on the Societys interac-
tion with diverse cultural fieldsnotably science, music, theatre, art, and,
architecture.
As demonstrated by the published proceedings of both conferences,50 obvi-
ous limitations appeared and were immediately noticed by the participants:
with few exceptions, only the pre-suppression Society was the object of study;
many areas of Jesuit activity were not discussed at all and, furthermore, there
were limits in the understanding of the themes approached. Thus, the postu-
late of studying the internal history of the order,51 including its spirituality
and the sources of its members actions, was formulated easily enough and was
accompanied by a desire to explore the Jesuit way of proceeding, but in this
regard the results of the meetings were, with some exceptions (OMalley on the
sources of the Jesuit modo de proceder in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint
Ignatius, in the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, and the relationship
between Jesuits and Renaissance culture, especially in teaching), somewhat
disappointing.52
48 Paul Begheyn, Gids voor de geschiedenis van de jezueten in Nederland 1850-2000/A Guide
to the History of the Jesuits in the Netherlands 18502000 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute,
2002). Id., Gids voor de geschiedenis van de jezueten in Nederland 1540-1850/A Guide to the
History of the Jesuits in the Netherlands 15401850 (Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute,
2006).
49 John W. OMalley et al., Preface, in The Jesuits II. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540
1773, ed. John W. OMalley et al., (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), xvii.
50 John W. OMalley et al., ed., The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 15401773 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999) and OMalley et al., Jesuits II.
51 Joseph Connors et al., Reflections: What Have We Learned? Where Do We Go from
Here?, in OMalley et al., Jesuits, 709.
52 John W. OMalley, The Historiography of the Society of Jesus: Where Does It Stand
Today?, in OMalley et al., Jesuits, 2728 and OMalley, Introduction: The Pastoral, Social,
Ecclesiastical, Civic, and Cultural Mission of the Society of Jesus, in OMalley et al., Jesuits
II, xxxixxxii.
46 Robert Danieluk
What Ought to be Done?
In regard to the historiography of the period 17731814, the issue of the Societys
restoration has always been linked to the orders suppression. Thus some of the
studies, including those which have already became classics in their genre, look
at both topics. The theme of the Jesuits survival in Russia as well as the entire
historiography of Clement XIV are a case in point. Sometimes they coincide,
and it is not easy (perhaps impossible) to distinguish between the historiogra-
phy of the Society and that of the pontiff who suppressed it. In regard to the
first theme, it already has its own bibliography summarized by Marek Inglot
and Sabina Pavone.53 As for the second, it received an elaborate summary in the
introduction to the first volume of the previously mentioned study by Gatti.54
Has everything been said about the period of our interest? I would be the
last to defend such a statement for two reasons. Firstly, the question of the
continuity (or discontinuity) of the Societys history still requires closer atten-
tion. Is it even appropriate to speak about two Societies? This might suggest
that the order re-established in 1814 was not the same or not exactly the same
as the one suppressed in 1773. If, on the contrary, there was always only one and
always the same Society of Jesusapproved by Paul III, suppressed by Clement
XIV and gradually re-established by Pius VIIwe should not speak about the
old and the new Society (or if we do, it is better to do so using quotation
marks). This issue is vital to any nuanced analysis of Jesuit history.
Secondly, the unrealized recommendation of the 1938 general congregation
is a topic of great interest. The abundance of sources from the period 17731814
raises questions about which of them deserve to be published in the current
historiographical context.55 As one example, the Jesuit Roman Archives pre-
serve considerable material related to that problematic.56 Furthermore, almost
53 Marek Inglot, La Compagnia di Ges nellimpero Russo (17721820) et la sua parte nella res-
taurazione generale della Compagnia (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universit Gregoriana,
1997), 2428; Sabina Pavone, Una strana alleaza (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2010), 123167. Both
summaries and the bibliography provided by the authors offer an excellent overview of
the question.
54 Gatti, Clemente XIV, 1209.
55 Recently, Urbano Valero edited a Spanish translation of some of such documents:
Supresin y restauracin de la Compaa de Jess. Documentos (Santander-Bilbao:
Mensajero-Sal Terrae/Madrid, Universidad Pontificia de Comillas, 2014).
56 Besides documents concerning the survival of the order in Russia (arsi, Russia 138; see its
detailed inventory: Bie, Polonica, vol. 5 and the above mentioned Fondo Gaillard also one
part of the series Historia Societatis deserves here a special attention: arsi, Hist. Soc. 182
300 (quite a detailed inventory of Hist. Soc. 182238 is provided in the reading room of the
arsi).
the entire Fondo Gesuiti of the Vatican Archives contains material related to
the same subject matter,57 while the Corsiniana Library preserves rich material
concerning the first period of the Societys restoration, including internal dif-
ficulties and tensions (copies of the most important of these documents are
also available in arsi). Many other archives are still waiting for the scholars
who will make full use of them.
We should also take heed of some of the observations made in recent years
by authors who have participated in the renewal of interest in the Societys his-
tory. In 1997, during the first of the Boston meetings, Luce Giard made an
important point:
I had the feeling that the conference, as a whole, was behaving like some-
body who wants to learn a foreign language but has no intention of ever
speaking to a native speaker, and, even more, does not really care for the
native speakers. We regarded Jesuits as producers in the realm of cul-
ture, learning, and the arts, or as patrons of producers, as collectors of
works of art and church builders, and the like. We did not study Jesuits as
persons who had taken a major decision at a certain point in their lives
and now had with greater or lesser effort and success to live their lives in
accordance with the Societys high standards.58
Some more recent studies have confirmed that criticism: many scholars,
unquestionably experts in their field, seem to neglect the Jesuit aspect of
what they describe and thus risk losing the correct perspective. There is cer-
tainly no need for any Jesuit censorship, which would be out of step with the
times, but the problem remains.
Thus, an even more interesting question could be posed here: What do schol-
ars working on Jesuit history and using Jesuit materials expect from members of
the Society now that dsenclavement has an established place in contemporary
historiography? The historians visiting arsi usually appreciate the facilities
and the openness of the Jesuit superiors policy. Is this all that contemporary
Jesuits can offer those who study their past? In 1999, the same Luce Giard sug-
gested that they could contribute a great deal to the new historiography by pub-
lishing sources, inventories, and the histories of provinces.59 A lot has been
57 asv, Fondo Gesuiti, 161. Only a general index of these volumes is available under the col-
location asv, Indici, 1077.
58 Luce Giard et al., Reflections: What Have We Learned? Where Do We Go from Here?, in
The Jesuits, 710.
59 Questions poses Louis Chtellier, Luce Giard, Dominique Julia et John OMalley,
Revue de Synthse 23 (1999): 418.
48 Robert Danieluk
done since 1999 and perhaps 2014 provides a good opportunity to ask what else
could be achieved. In previous centuries, several anniversaries provided the his-
toriography of the Society of Jesus with an opportunity to progress. Entire chap-
ters of its history were written or re-written, documents were published,
academic events, conferences, and exhibitions were organized. Will this also be
the case with the 2014 bicentenary?
Part 2
The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania
and the Russian Empire

chapter 3
Before and After Suppression

Jesuits and Former Jesuits in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
c.17501795
Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski
In some ways the Jesuits exercised more influence in the eighteenth-century

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth than anywhere else in Europe. Whereas
elsewhere the Society of Jesus provided confessors and spiritual advisors to
princes, in the Commonwealth it educated generations of nobles as republi-
cans. The Jesuits ran more schools and colleges than the other orders com-
bined, and Jesuits were more numerous than members of any other single
order. The research of numerous scholars has illuminated the multi-faceted
activity of the Society of Jesus in the decades before suppression, allowing the
revision of older verdicts on their supposedly pernicious cultural, political, and
educational role. This research is ongoing, but the present chapter endeavors
to synthesize some of it. It first reviews the condition of the Polish-Lithuanian
Jesuits in the last decades before suppression, and then considers some of the
ways former Jesuits adapted to new roles within what was left of Poland-
Lithuania. The Commonwealth was truncated by partition in 1772, reduced
again in 1793, and its remnants were dismembered completely in 1795.
Catholic Europes religious orders reached their brim of prosperity in the
middle decades of the eighteenth century.1 In East-Central Europe, the cup of
monastic prosperity continued to fill throughout the 1750s and 1760s. This ten-
dency also applies to the Society of Jesus in the Commonwealth. Following the
announcement, but before the ratification of the First Partition, the papal nun-
cio to the Commonwealth, Giuseppe Garampi, carried out a thorough survey
of its regular clergy. Among 995 male abbeys, monasteries, priories, friaries,
and other houses, he counted 137 that belonged to the Jesuits. Only the
Dominicans, with 166, had more. Garampi computed that the total number of
male religious clergy was 14,601, of whom 2,362 were Jesuitsslightly more
than any other order. In comparison, the total number of female religious was
just 3,211, in 156 houses, while latest estimates of the secular clergy are about
8,400. Therefore, Jesuits constituted nine per cent of the Polish-Lithuanian
1 The title of part I of Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in
the Age of Revolution, 16501815 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003).

52 Butterwick-Pawlikowski
clergy as a whole, over ten per cent of the male clergy, thirteen per cent of the
regular clergy of both sexes, sixteen per cent of the male regular clergy, and
among the regular clerics (as opposed to true monks, mendicants and regular
canons) they constituted sixty-seven per cent. Just under half of the Jesuits
were fully ordained priestsa reflection both of their extended theological
studies and of their need for numerous non-ordained brothers (coadjutors) to
carry out various practical tasks. Given that the overall number of regulars of
both sexes in Europe peaked during the mid-eighteenth century at about
350,000 (in over 25,000 houses), while the total number of Jesuits in Europe
was less than 20,000 (about 23,000 worldwide) before the wave of expulsions
that began in 1759, it is clear that Poles were disproportionately numerous
within the Society of Jesus as a whole.2
On the eve of its suppression the Society of Jesus ran an academy at Wilno
(Vilnius), thirty-five colleges, thirty-two lower schools and eighty-eight other
educational establishments, while 556 Jesuits were engaged in pedagogical
work in the Commonwealth. This was several times the educational provision
offered by their nearest rivals, the Piarists, but was still only a quarter of the
total number of Jesuits in the Commonwealth. Most of the others, however,
would have taught for a while before being assigned other tasks.3
Between 1700 and 1773 both the total number of Polish-Lithuanian Jesuits
and the number of professors teaching in the orders schools and colleges grew
by sixty-nine per cent. The orders dynamism is also reflected by the high num-
ber of novices. In 1772/73 115 of 317 novice male regulars in the Commonwealth
were Jesuits.4 In 1756, this expansion resulted in the division of the two (Polish
2 Jan Poplatek S.J., Komisja Edukacji Narodowej. Udzia byych jezuitw w pracach Komisji
Edukacji Narodowej (wam: Cracow, 1974), 31, 415420, revises the number of personnel to 2341
and the total number of houses (colleges, residences, and mission stations) to 141. See
Ludomir Biekowski, Ankieta zakonna Garampiego z 1773 roku, in Zakony mskie w 1772
roku, eds. Ludomir Biekowski, Jerzy Koczowski and Zbigniew Suowski (kul: Lublin, 1972),
115160, and the tables between 183294; Jerzy Koczowski, Zakony mskie w Polsce w XVI
XVIII w., in Kocil w Polsce, ed. Jerzy Koczowski, vol. 2, Wiek XVIXVIII (Znak: Cracow, 1970),
483, at 559570. Garampis survey remains the best basis for comparisons between orders. For
European comparisons, see Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 2, 147. For the Jesuits worldwide:
Inglot 1997, 5.
3 Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 415420.
4 Stanisaw Bednarski S.J., Upadek i odrodzenie szk jezuickich w Polsce. Studium z dziejw kul-
tury i szkolnictwa polskiego (wam: Cracow, 1933, repr. 2003), 112118, tables IIVIII. Stanisaw
Litak, Jezuici na tle innych zakonw mskich w Polsce w XVIXVIII wieku, in Jezuici a kul-
tura polska, eds. Ludwik Grzebie S.J. and Stanisaw Obirek S.J. (Cracow: wam, 1993), 185
198, at 192; Jerzy Flaga, Formacja i ksztacenie duchowiestwa zakonnego w Rzeczypospolitej w
XVII i XVIII w. (kul: Lublin, 1998), 146147.
Before And After Suppression 53
and Lithuanian) provinces of the Society into four. The Great Polish, Little
Polish, Mazovian, and Lithuanian provinces did not correspond to the internal
boundaries of the Commonwealth, but fit the distribution of Jesuit houses and
personnel. The Lithuanian province included East Prussia and Warmia, while
the Mazovian province ran across the southern part of the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania to the border with the Russian Empire. There was one exception to
this upward trend. Of the ten diocesan seminaries in the Commonwealth that
had been run by the Jesuits, only four remained in their hands on the eve of
suppression. Bishops seem to have preferred priests trained to administer the
sacraments and to offer basic pastoral care, rather than learned defenders of
the true faith.5
The flourishing of the Society in the Commonwealth during the decades
before 1773 was marked by the construction, extension or refurbishment of
many magnificent churches and colleges. Many of the architects were them-
selves Jesuits. The crest of this wave was reached around 1750, but the works
carried out after that date, not counting the continuation of work begun ear-
lier, included the commencement of thirteen churches, ten colleges, and three
astronomical observatories. The fact that so much of the building work was
undertaken in smaller towns in the Commonwealths eastern reaches reflects
the Societys continued expansion into areas with few Latin-rite Catholics.6
An excellent example is the church and college at Iukszta (now Ilkste in
Latvia) in the Duchy of Courland, a feudal dependency of the Commonwealth,
which had a preponderantly Lutheran population. The Jesuits had first been
brought to Courland as missionaries by the newly converted Zyberk (Sieberg)
family in the mid-seventeenth century. This family, several of whose sons
joined the Society of Jesus, successively founded a residence, a new church,
5 Ludwik Piechnik S.J., Jezuickie seminaria diecezjalne w Polsce (15641773), in Jezuicka ars
educandi. Prace ofiarowane ks. Ludwikowi Piechnikowi SJ, eds. Maria Wolaczyk and Stanisaw
Obirek S.J. (wam: Cracow, 1995), 7596.
6 The new churches were at Iukszta (Ilkste), Kamieniec Podolski (Kamanets Podilskyi),
Kocieniewicze, czyca, Nowogrdek (Navahrudak), Owrucz (Ovruch), Stanisaww
(now Ivano-Frankivsk), Wacz, Wodzimierz (Volodymyr Volynskyi), Wschowa, odziszki
(Zhodzishki), uromin and ytomierz (Zhytomyr). Significant rebuilding work was under-
taken at Grodno (Hrodna), Jarosaw, Lublin, Pisk (Pinsk), Pock, Przemyl and Wilno
(Vilnius). The new colleges were at Bar, Bobrujsk (Babruisk), Dyneburg (Daugavpils), Kowno
(Kaunas), oma, Mcisaw (Mstislav), Piotrkw, Owrocz, Winnica (Vinnitsa) and odziszki.
The observatories were at the academies or colleges of Lww (Lviv), Pozna and Wilno. Jerzy
Paszenda S.J., Geografia budowli jezuickich w Polsce, in idem, Budowle jezuickie w Polsce
XVIXVIII w., 3 vols. (wam: Cracow, 1999), 1:1523. Cf. Litak, Jezuici na tle innych zakonw,
194196.
and a school. The latter was raised in status to a college in 1761, offering study
up to the level of a one-year (rather than the full, usually two-year) course of
philosophy, in new, brick-built premises. Following the destruction of the
wooden church by fire in 1748, an impressive new brick church was raised
between 1754 and 1769, again thanks to the munificence of the Zyberk family.
The architect was initially Tomasz ebrowski S.J. (17141758), professor of
mathematics and astronomy at Wilno Academy, where he had built the obser-
vatory. Although he had also studied architecture in Prague and Vienna, the
final result, following changes made by an unknown master builder, was recog-
nizably an example of the late Vilnan Baroque. Two slender, tapering towers
flanked a slightly withdrawn concave west facade, allowing for the rippling
play of light and shade. An apse formed the east end. Although the central
dome was low, not rising above the roof, the interior, richly stuccoed in the
Rococo style, was high-vaulted with elongated windows. The high altar con-
tained an early work by Franciszek Smuglewicz, depicting The Sending Out of
the Apostles. This was appropriate, given the nature of the pastoral work at
Iukszta. Sermons were preached in both Polish and Latvian, occasionally in
German. The residence was at the heart of a network of eight permanent mis-
sion stations. The effects can be seen in the rising number of confessions
recorded at Iukszta: 13,285 in 1740; 27,906 in 1769.7
In the final years before the suppression, the Jesuits undertook between
1500 and 1600 missions annuallymore than any other order. The inculcation
of the basic prayers and precepts of post-Tridentine Catholicism among the
population remained a work in progress.8 Even in the oldest heartlands of the
Catholic Church in Poland, around Gniezno, Pozna and cracow, parishes
usually included several villages. In the central areas of the Polish crown they
typically extended over a hundred square kilometers, and covered twice that in
those parts of Lithuania and Ruthenia in which the Latin rite was most firmly
established. Further east, from the right-bank Ukraine in the south through the
Polesian marshes in the middle to the lands beyond the Dvina in the north,
7 Jerzy Paszenda S.J., Koci jezuitw w Iukszcie, in idem, Budowle jezuickie, I:2552;
Kristne Ogle, Contribution of the Society of Jesus to the Heritage of Architecture of Latvia,
in Jzuitai Lietuvoje (16082008): gyvenimas, veiklas, paveldas/Jesuits in Lithuania (16082008):
Life, Work, Heritage, ed. Neringa Markauskait (Lietuvos nacionalinis muziejus: Vilnius, 2012),
105121, at 115117; Marek Inglot S.J., Kolegium ksiy jezuitw w Iukszcie (wam: Cracow,
2000). Encyklopedia wiedzy o Jezuitach na ziemiach Polski i Litwy 15641995, eds. Ludwik
Grzebie S.J. et al. (wam: Cracow, 1996), 227228. The church was ruined during the First
World War and not rebuilt.
8 Jerzy Flaga, Dziaalno duszpasterska zakonw w drugiej poowie XVIII w. 17671772 (kul:
Lublin, 1986), 159185.
Latin-rite parishes sprawled over thousands of square kilometers.9 In these

areas, the principal contest for souls was waged between the Ruthenian rite of
the Catholic Church (the Uniates) and Orthodoxy. Jesuits and other orders of
the Latin rite aided Uniate Basilian monks in conducting missions among the
rural and urban populace, but in these parts Jesuits ministered principally to
the Polonophone nobility. That said, it tended to be less erudite and perhaps
more compliant mendicant friars who were usually employed as chaplains in
noble households, and as assistants in parishes run by the diocesan clergy.
Similarly, on the eve of partition the Jesuits were responsible for twenty-five
parishes, nearly all in the east of the Commonwealth, but their contribution in
this regard was surpassed by several other orders, especially the Lateran
Canons Regular.10
Among the regular clergy in the Commonwealth, the Jesuits had a notably
high proportion of members born into the nobility (szlachta). Right up until
their suppression they were able to attract novices from aristocratic families.
The mid-eighteenth century saw the opening of elite schools with boarding
houses. The total number of boarding houses (konwikty) reached eighteen by
1773; they ranged from the house attached to the prestigious Warsaw collegium
nobilium to the modest facilities offered in provincial towns. It was also in
these decades that public performances of poetry, rhetoric and drama, given
by pupils under the direction of their teachers for the local nobility, particu-
larly flourished.11
Much of the Jesuits popularity among the szlachta derived from the rigor of
the classical education they provided. Under the Ratio studiorum the progres-
sion of classes was clear and straightforward, from grammar through poetry
and rhetoric to philosophy, although the exact arrangements varied according
to the size of the school. The most talented youths were encouraged to study
9 Stanisaw Litak, Atlas Kocioa aciskiego w Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodw w XVIII

wieku (kul: Lublin, 2006).
10 Stanisaw Zaski S.J., Historya zniesienia zakonu jezuitw i jego zachowanie na Biaej Rusi,
2 vols. (Drukarnia Ludowa: Lww, 18741875), 2:9; Flaga, Dziaalno duszpasterska
zakonw, 4180, 128138; Idem, Zakony mskie w Polsce w 1772 roku, 2:2, Duszpasterstwo
(kul: Lublin, 1991), 200201; Stanisaw Litak, Kocil aciski w Rzeczypospolitej okoo 1772
roku (kul: Lublin, 1996), 82104.
11 Zaski, Historya zniesienia, 2:22, 25. Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie, 439464. Ludwik
Piechnik S.J., Jezuickie Collegium Nobilium w Warszawie, in Z dziejw szkolnictwa
jezuickiego w Polsce. Wybr artykuw, ed. Jerzy Paszenda S.J. (wam: Cracow, 1994), 151
182; Kazimierz Puchowski, Collegium Nobilium Societatis Iesu w Wilnie. Z dziejw
ksztacenia elit politycznych w dawnej Rzeczypospolitej, in Jezuicka ars educandi,
221238.
theology and enter the Society as novices. Less gifted boys from poorer families
might take the first two or three classes and still benefit considerably. Latin,
taught as far as possible according to the system of Manuel lvares S.J.,
provided nobles either with the training they needed for legal practice or at
least with stock phrases that enabled them to cut a better figure in the socio-
political world. The corporal punishment routinely administered by the teach-
ers was entirely in line with common practice in noble households.12
The Jesuits also adapted their message to the political culture of the szlachta.
Initially, in line with their strategy elsewhere in Catholic Europe, they had sup-
ported the efforts of Stephen Bthory (15761586) and Sigismund III (1587
1632) to strengthen monarchical authority. This played into the hands of their
opponents. The revolt of part of the nobility against Sigismund III in 16061609
was accompanied by anti-Jesuit polemics. Not all of them were penned by
Protestant and Orthodox writers. The Dominicans offered an alternative ver-
sion of post-Tridentine Catholicism, which proved especially attractive to
nobles in southeastern Poland. It did not take long, however, for the Jesuits to
make noble republican ideas their own. The Polish-Lithuanian nobles who
largely replaced foreigners in the early seventeenth-century Society of Jesus
found it easier to present the Commonwealths aurea libertas as a gift of Divine
Providence. The corollary was that Poles must remain faithful, obedient, and
generous to the true church if that divine favor was to continue.13
At their best, Jesuits encouraged the Commonwealths noble citizens to put
into practice the ubiquitous slogans of patriotic virtue in public life, but many
shared the vices of those whom they educated and those from whom they
were recruited. They also participated prominently in an increasingly perva-
sive public discourse and praxis that by the early eighteenth century had
largely excluded heretics and schismatics from the body politic and sub-
stantially constricted the religious freedom permitted to non-Catholics. Some
of the Jesuits finest scholars were also among the most energetic foes of
Protestantism. For example, Jan Poszakowski S.J. (16851757) published polem-
ical histories of Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism, took the fight to
12 Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie, 98111, 156213, 393399. Ludwik Piechnik S.J.,

Dziaalno Jezuitw polskich na polu szkolnictwa (15651773), in Jezuici a kultura pol-
ska, 243259.
13 Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie, 2430. See Stanisaw Obirek S.J., Jezuici w Rzeczypospolitej
Obojga Narodw w latach 15641668. Dziaalno religijna, spoeczno-kulturalna i polityc-
zna (wam: Cracow, 1996), esp. 105149, 198199, 230244, 266273, 283289; see also Piotr
Stolarski, Friars on the Frontier: Catholic Renewal and the Dominican Order in Southeastern
Poland, 15941648 (Ashgate: Farnham, 2010).
atheism and combated the astrological prognoses that filled the almanacs,
which were extremely popular among the szlachta.14
From the 1670s leading Jesuits were only too aware that standards in their
schools had slipped since the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, however, thanks to stimulation from the Wilno
Academy, the decline was not as pronounced as in the Polish realm, and recov-
ery began earlier. From the 1730s the most promising Jesuits were again sent
abroad to study, and by the 1750s modern languages and experimental science
were being taught at Jesuit colleges across the Commonwealth. Studies in Paris
and contacts via the court of King Stanisaw Leszczyski in Lorraine played an
important role in acquainting Polish-Lithuanian Jesuits both with the achieve-
ments and the enlightened enemies of their French colleagues. Following
the attack on the Jesuits in France in 1762, twenty-six of them went to the
Commonwealth.15
Following heated discussions in the early 1750s, an eclectic approach pre-
vailed in philosophy. Various systems, including Cartesianism, Wolffianism,
and Newtonianism were taught, but the arbiter between them, judging what
was healthy and what was harmful, remained divine revelation. While some-
times criticized from strictly logical viewpoints, this approach permitted sig-
nificant and ongoing changes to the curriculum.16 In consequence, however,
philosophy was purged of much of its metaphysical content and was often pre-
sented in a stripped down fashion as little more than experimental physics and
logic.17
Stanisaw August Poniatowski was elected king of Poland in 1764. As a well-
travelled adept of les lumires, he had no taste for confessional controversies.
He also despised most regulars, especially mendicant friars, as purveyors of
14 Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie, 8485. Bronisaw Natoski S.J., Humanizm jezuicki i teo-
logia pozytywno-kontrowersyjna od XVI do XVIII wieku. Nauka i pimiennictwo, 2nd ed.
(wam: Cracow, 2003), 201; Wojciech Kriegseisen, Ewangelicy polscy i litewscy w epoce
saskiej (16961763). Sytuacja prawna, organizacja i stosunki midzywyznaniowe (Semper:
Warsaw, 1996), 176177; Rita Urbaityt, Lietuvos jzuit vaidmuo naujien perdavimo, in
Jzuitai Lietuvoje, 219231.
15 Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie, 6381, 249253, 338374; Ludwik Piechnik S.J., Przemiany
w szkolnictwie jezuickim w Polsce XVIII wieku, in Z dziejw szkolnictwa jezuickiego w
Polsce, 183209; Idem, Dzieje Akademii Wileskiej, 4 vols. (ihsi: Rome, 19831990).
16 Stanisaw Janeczek, Owiecenie chrzecijaskie. Z dziejw polskiej kultury filozoficznej
(kul: Lublin, 1994).
17 Roman Darowski S.J., Zarys filozofii jezuitw w Polsce od XVI do XIX wieku, in Wkad
jezuitw do nauki i kultury w Rzeczyspospolitej Obojga Narodw i pod zaborami, ed.
I. Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa (wam: Cracow, 2004), 119152, at 138139.
superstition and fanaticism, but he believed in a providential God, and

maintained an exemplary public piety. He also needed enlightened allies
among the clergy. Apart from the Jesuits he favored the Theatines, whose elite
Warsaw school he had attended in the 1740s, the Priests of the Mission
(Lazarists), and the Piarists, whose most respected member was the polymath
Stanisaw Konarski (17001773). Stanisaw August recruited such luminaries to
his cause of political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural reform.
Among this royal party Jesuits were the most numerous, and included the dis-
tinguished rhetorician, dramatist, and essayist Franciszek Bohomolec S.J.
(17241784). However, the king did the Jesuits an injustice by stating in his
memoirs that they had only begun to reform their schools when prompted to
do so by Piarist competition. Their prowess in astronomy (especially Professor
Marcin Poczobut S.J. in Wilno) led him to assign them the ultimately uncom-
pleted task of mapping the Commonwealth.18
Stanisaw Augusts ambitions collided with the suspicions both of the
szlachta and of Catherine II of Russia, who had gifted him the throne. The
empress was determined to keep the Commonwealth weak and manipulable.
She resolved to restore equal political rights to the Commonwealths non-
Catholic noble citizens and pursued this policy despite the fervent opposition
of the great majority of Polish nobles and the Holy See. The resulting convul-
sions led to the First Partition in 1772.19
The Commonwealth lost about a third of its territory and population. Thirty-
seven Jesuit houses with about 500 Jesuits were in the lands annexed by Russia,
Prussia, and Austria.20 These powers demanded that the Commonwealth ratify
the amputations. Under threat of further loss of territory a delegation, selected
from among the members of the parliament, or sejm, was empowered to con-
duct business on behalf of the full sejm. This was an enabling device familiar
from the previous sejm, held in 17671768, which Russia had bullied into
18 Emanuel Rostworowski, Religijno i polityka wyznaniowa Stanisawa Augusta, in ycie

kulturalne i religijno w czasach Stanisawa Augusta Poniatowskiego, ed. Marian Marek
Drozdowski (Wydawnictwo Sejmowe: Warsaw, 1991), 1124. See Bednarski, Upadek i
odrodzenie, 3132, 48, 5457, 8890, 144154, 232233, 242247; Irena Kadulska, Miejsce
Franciszka Bohomolca w osigniciach teatru jezuickiego, in Jezuici a kultura polska,
113120. Edmund Rabowicz, Poczobut Marcin, Polski Sownik Biograficzny (pan: Wrocaw,
1983), 32:5262, at 5354.
19 See Zofia Zieliska, Polska w okowach systemu pnocnego 17631766 (Arcana: Cracow,
2012); Wadysaw Konopczyski, Pierwszy rozbir Polski (Arcana: Cracow, 2010); Jerzy
Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795 (Longman: Harlow, 1999), 5281.
20 Inglot 1997, 5, 78, gives slightly higher figures for the number of Jesuits who found them-
selves in Russia than Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 415.
conceding equal political rights to non-Catholic religious dissidents. During

this second delegation sejm, which lasted from April 1773 to April 1775, news
arrived in Warsaw that Clement XIV had on 21 July 1773 signed the brief sup-
pressing the Society of Jesus, Dominus ac Redemptor. By early September 1773
it was also known that on 16 August the suppression had been executed in
Rome, and that on 18 August instructions had been sent to all papal nuncios to
proceed with the suppression in the territories under their jurisdiction. This
meant that the dissolution of the order in Galicia fell to the nuncio in Vienna,
while the question of the suppression in other former Polish-Lithuanian lands
became a matter of negotiation with Frederick II and Catherine II. It was
because of the First Partition, therefore, that the former Jesuits survived as
Jesuits until 1780 in Prussia and 1820 in Russia.
The nuncio to the Commonwealth, Giuseppe Garampi, formally delivered
the brief to the chancellor of the Polish crown, Andrzej Modziejowski, who
was also bishop of Pozna. He handed the matter to the sejms delegation,
which discussed it in mid-September, before referring it to the full sejm. On 28
September, the sejm agreed in principle to accept the suppression, despite sev-
eral speeches on behalf of the Jesuits, and a desperate offer, organized by the
rector of the Warsaw Collegium Nobilium, Karol Wyrwicz S.J. (17171793), that
the Jesuits would give up their property to the Commonwealth and depend
only on alms if the king and the sejm would prevent the implementation of the
brief.21
By the terms of the brief, the Jesuits became secular clergymen. Most Jesuits
were not directly involved in teaching at that point; we shall look at their fate
later. It was, however the Jesuit colleges that most concerned the szlachta.
Faced with an educational catastrophe if no action were taken (perhaps 20,000
pupils were taught in Jesuit schools)22 and unwilling to countenance a vast
expansion of episcopal wealth and influence if the suppression was treated as
a purely ecclesiastical matter, the sejm decided that the orders property would
become an educational fund. Similar solutions were adopted in other Catholic
statesthe Holy See had little choice but to acquiesce. On 14 October 1773, the
sejm established the Commission for National Education, chaired by the
bishop of Wilno, Ignacy Massalski. The commission enjoined the Jesuits to
stay at their posts, especially in schools, and the bishops implemented the sup-
pression in the course of November 1773. Jesuits in 104 houses were affected.
Wilno University and all the schools and colleges remaining in the truncated

22 Bednarski, Upadek i odrodzenie, 117118.
Commonwealth, forty-six institutions in all, continued their work under the

auspices of the commission.23
There was a sting in the tailthe work of the corrupt clique paid by Russia
to procure the ratification of the partition treaties. Before the former Jesuit
property was handed over to the commission, it was surveyed. The surveyors
appointed by the sejm were powerless to prevent the former Jesuits neighbors,
including several bishops, from appropriating harvests, livestock, furniture, sil-
ver, fields, woods, and even peasants. Indeed, many surveyors were among the
worst pillagers. After four months, in March 1774, the sejm delegation estab-
lished two Distributive Commissions for the Polish crown and the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania, chaired by Bishops Modziejowski and Massalski respec-
tively, to complete the surveying and sale of the former Jesuit properties. The
purchasers of landed estates would have to pay the Educational Fund four and
a half percent of the income. Thirty-two commissioners each enjoyed salaries
of 8,000 zotys a year. They failed, however, to pay the ex-Jesuits anything like
the modest annual sum of 300,000 zotys designated by the sejm for their
sustenance. The commissioners undervalued many properties, before buying
them for themselves, or else selling them to their friends and clients. In these
various ways the Educational Fund was pillaged of at least a third of its theo-
retical value, to a growing tide of criticism, before the king and his allies were
finally able to expose and halt the malefactions.24
The sejm of 1776 abolished the Distributive Commissions and entrusted the
Educational Commission with direct responsibility for the Educational Fund.
Bishop Massalski, complicit in the abuse, was sidelined. Henceforth, under the
energetic leadership of the kings youngest brother Micha Poniatowski, bishop
of Pock since 1773 and from 1785 archbishop of Gniezno and primate of Poland,
the commissions finances were administered with honesty and rigor. Former
Jesuits began to receive modest but adequate salaries as teachers in the
commissions schools, or pensions if they were deemed too infirm to continue.
Nevertheless, much damage had been done. The commission struggled to
maintain the educational provision existing in 1773, while many former Jesuit
teachers were utterly demoralized. Many left, never to return. Many of those
weakened by their tribulations probably died prematurely. Many school build-
ings lost their roofs and windows, leading to the ruin or theft of libraries and
scientific instruments. Some of the former Jesuit schools were transferred to

24 Volumina Legum, 8 vols. (Jozafat Ohryzko: St. Petersburg, 185960), 8:152157, 537538;
Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 4151; Ambroise Jobert, La Commission dEducation
Nationale en Pologne (17731794). Son oeuvre dinstruction civique (Les Belles Lettres: Paris,
1941), 164174.
other orders (the Piarists, Basilians, Benedictines, and Cistercians) along with
the responsibility for maintaining them. The Priests of the Mission took over at
Iukszta in 1787. A few schools were closed down altogether.25
Massalski, who as bishop of Wilno was also chancellor of the university,
was unable to prevent its decline after the suppression. The Educational
Commissions visitor, Jzef Wybicki, found few signs of life in 1777. However,
given that the commission lacked the funds to establish a new university in
Warsaw, it decided to transform the existing Academies of Cracow and Wilno
into the Principal Schools of the crown and Lithuania respectively. They had
their curricula and structures reformed, were given responsibilities for training
lay teachers and for visiting and supervising the commissions secondary
schools. The Vilnan reform was long compared unfavorably with that con-
ducted in Cracow. The reform in Wilno began more slowly, but after Marcin
Poczobut was appointed rector in 1780 it proceeded smoothly. Due to the
friendlier relations between ex-Jesuit visitors and teachers, the new procedures
worked with less friction than in the Polish realm, and there is no evidence of
lower standards. At Wilno University former Jesuits worked harmoniously with
Piarists, secular clergymen, and laymen. Much credit must go to the rectors
efforts and emollience. As Massalskis star waned among the clergy and nobility
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, so Poczobuts waxed. It was a pity that he now
had little time to observe the heavens from the state-of-the-art observatory.26
The Commission for National Education got to work on new curricula
and primers. The latter were the responsibility of the Society for Textbooks
(Towarzystwo do Ksig Elementarnych) established in 1775.27 Of its twenty-two
employees over two decades, ten were former Jesuits. As in Wilno, older rival-
ries were set aside as they worked fruitfully with Piarists and laymen. Two ex-
Jesuits, Andrzej Gawroski (17401813) and Szczepan Hoowczyc (17421823)
went on to become bishop of Cracow and archbishop of Warsaw respectively
toward the end of their lives.28
25 One former Jesuit, Bartomiej Rukiewicz, continued to teach rhetoric and poetry at
Iukszta until 1792. Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 291293.
26 Irena Szybiak, Szkolnictwo Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Wielkim Ksistwie Litewskim
(Ossolineum: Wrocaw, 1973), 4467, 117194; Janina Kamiska, Universitas Vilnensis.
Akademia Wileska i Szkoa Gwna Wielkiego Ksistwa Litewskiego 17731792 (wsh:
Putusk and Aspra-Jr: Warsaw, 2004); Mark OConnor S.J., Owiecenie katolickie i Marcin
Poczobut SJ, in Jezuici a kultura polska, 4149.
27 Jobert, Commission dEducation Nationale, 197202.
28 Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 8184; Irena Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa, O wsppracy
jezuicko-pijarskiej w Towarzystwie do Ksig Elementarnych. Concordia parvae res cres-
cunt, discordia vel maximae dilabuntur, in Jezuicka Ars Historica, 515537.
By far the most important member of the Society was the former Jesuit
Grzegorz Piramowicz (17351801). He was the protg of Adam Kazimierz
Czartoryski and Ignacy Potocki, both educational commissioners, whom he
advised and assisted and who presented him to two well-endowed parishes,
but nobody questioned his talent, industriousness, patriotism or character.
Besides numerous primers, including Wymowa i poezja dla szk narodowych
(Rhetoric and Poetry for the National Schools, 1792), one work stands out:
Powinnoci nauczyciela (Duties of the Teacher, 1787) remains a pedagogical
classic because of its child-centered humanity and common sense. Unlike
many of the commissioners, Piramowicz regarded primary education for the
common people as a priority. His last three works, written after the Third
Partition, were intended to console and improve the peasantry.29
Twenty-three ex-Jesuits worked for the Educational Commission as school
visitors; 119 held positions as rectors, pro-rectors and prefects of the commis-
sions schools. At least 308 taught and forty-seven preached in those schools.
At least 445, known by name, worked in various capacities for the commission
during the twenty-one years of its existence. The actual numbers may have
been twice as many. Ninety were left in 1790/91. Until the early 1780s, however,
they predominated among the teachers of the commissions own schools.30
In some schools former Jesuits managed to work concordantly with newly
trained lay teachers. Unsurprisingly however, lifestyles and belief systems did
sometimes clash, scandalizing parents. Not all the complaints against lay
teachers and new-fangled curricula should be attributed merely to the bitter-
ness of former Jesuits and the unthinking conservatism of the szlachta.31 An
instruction from the Educational Commission to the University of Wilno,
dated 9 March 1789, reacted to the scandal caused by the absence of some lay
teachers from confession for over a year by renewing the requirement of
monthly confession, made together with the pupils.32 Many highly educated
nobles were concerned by the ambitious new methods of teaching Latin,
which focused on students ability to understand classical texts and left many
of them unable to communicate orally in the language.33

30 Ibid., 394401.
31 Such was the interpretation popularized by Wadysaw Smoleski, ywioy zachowaw-
cze i Komisya Edukacyjna, in idem, Pisma Historyczne, 2 vols. (G. Gebethner: Cracow,
1901), 2:95206.
32 Pisma oryginalne Komissyi Edukacyi Narodowey do Szkoy Gwney W.X. Litewskiego z
l. 17811794, Vilniaus Universiteto Biblioteka, Fondas 2, dc 30, f. 109.
33 Smoleski, ywioy zachowawcze, 159161; Stanisaw Janeczek, Edukacja owieceniowa a
szkoa tradycyjna. Z dziejw kultury intelektualnej i filozoficznej (kul: Lublin, 2008), 101106.
During the Polish Revolution, or Four Years Parliament of 17881792, amidst

unprecedented and wide-ranging public discussions, controversies raged
around the Commission for National Education. Alarmed by threats to use the
Educational Fund to pay for the much larger army that was being recruited and
equipped, Poczobut formed an unlikely alliance with his fellow astronomer at
the University of Cracow, the radically enlightened layman Jan niadecki.
Together they lobbied the sejm so effectively that the renewed statutes for the
commission extended its autonomy and prerogatives. Then in the autumn of
1790, the ex-Jesuit Stefan uskina published an offer that former Jesuits would
teach for nothing, relying on Providence and alms, if the Commonwealth
would ask Pope Pius VI to restore the Society of Jesus. The Educational Fund
could then be applied to the army. A majority of the local assemblies (sejmiks)
of the szlachta duly called on the sejm to seek the restoration of the order,
amidst a welter of complaints against the commission. This criticism came
despite the best efforts of Marcin Poczobut, who coordinated the campaign for
restoration in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, given the evident dip-
lomatic impossibility of restoring the Society of Jesus, the king, the papal nun-
cio and their allies were able to deflect calls made in the sejm during 1791 to
make such a request to the pope. The row did however contribute to a polariza-
tion of opinion. Members of Ignacy Potockis circle spread fears that ex-Jesuits,
in constant contact with their former confreres in the Russian empire, could
spread Russian influence. While the king publicly praised the Societys contri-
bution to knowledge and religion, he privately disparaged the fanatisme jesui-
tique of those who sought the Societys restoration. In no way, however, did
the episode diminish his respect and affection for individual ex-Jesuits.34
Many if not most former Jesuits were not engaged in pedagogical work in or
after 1773. For the best connected, many opportunities opened upas they did
in Catholic parts of Germany.35 The most prominent ex-Jesuit was the poet and
historian Adam Naruszewicz (17331796). Having gained the patronage of the
Czartoryskis while a professor in Wilno, he subsequently became a favorite of
King Stanisaw August, who in 1771 entrusted him with his monthly literary peri-
odical, Zabawy przyjemne i poyteczne (Pastimes Pleasant and Useful), which
featured translations of Latin and French poetical and prose works into Polish,
accompanied by new compositions. Naruszewicz reacted to the suppression
34 Richard Butterwick, The Polish Revolution and the Catholic Church, 17881792: A Political
History (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012), 45, 162, 218229, 290294.
35 See Michael Schaich, Zwischen Beharrung und Wandel. (Ex-)Jesuitische Strategien im
Umgang mit der ffentlichkeit, Jahrbuch der sterreichischen Gesellschaft zur Erforschung
des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, 17 (2002): 193217.
with a heartfelt lament. Royal friendship brought him fame, especially as the
author of the six-volume Historia narodu polskiego (History of the Polish
Nation), but it also meant he was expected to hold time-consuming offices of
state. He became coadjutor to the bishop of Smolensk in 1774, and thereby titu-
lar bishop of Emmaus, but he achieved independence only when he became
bishop of uck (Lutsk) in 1790. The destruction of the Commonwealth contrib-
uted to the terminal melancholy of his last years.
Not dissimilar was the career of Jan Albertrandi (17311808), an assiduous
scholar who had been professor of Hebrew in Warsaw. He assisted Franciszek
Bohomolec with the kings essay periodical Monitor in the late 1760s and in
17701771 edited Zabawy Przyjemne i Poyteczne. Having spent the years 1771
1774 in Rome as preceptor to the young aristocrat Feliks ubieski, on his
return he gave his Roman and Greek medals to the king, who made him his
archivist and custodian of the royal collections of antiquities and numismat-
ics. Having joined the Society for Textbooks in 1775, Albertrandi spent long
periods abroad, searching for and copying documents relating to Poland in for-
eign archives. He became canon of Gniezno in 1785, and titular bishop of
Zenopolis, with responsibility for the Warsaw archdeaconry, in 1795. As an
ecclesiastical censor he kept a watch for signs of Jacobinism in the 1790s, and
he spent the last eight years of his life as the spiritus movens of the Warsaw
Society for the Friends of Science.36
Jowin Bystrzycki (17371821) was another royal protg. Having excelled in
astronomy at Wilno, he was recommended by Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski to
the king, who appointed him astronomer royal after the suppression, entrust-
ing him with the Royal Castles own observatory. In return Bystrzycki received
some choice benefices, including a canonry of Warsaw. His parish of Styca,
acquired in 1783, brought him a comfortable annual income of over 5,000
zotys without counting other emoluments.37
Stefan uskina (17251793), another distinguished astronomer and mathe-
matician, was the last rector of the Warsaw college. Following the suppression
he offered the king his collection of astronomical and scientific instruments
and received a lifetime privilege to publish Wiadomoci Warszawskie (Warsaw
News), of which he had succeeded Bohomolec as editor. Shortly renamed
Gazeta Warszawska (Warsaw Gazette), this twice-weekly newspaper took an
ambivalent, but increasingly critical line towards the age of enlightenment.
On the one hand uskina drew attention to new discoveries, favorably reported
the work of the Educational Commission, and criticized popular superstitions.

37 Ibid., 237238.
For the most part, however, Gazeta Warszawska reported court ceremonies
and grand funerals lengthily, but foreign news tardily and without comment,
apart from the occasional sardonic aside on the fate of the Jesuits. During the
French Revolution the Gazeta, assailed by ideologically radical competitors,
hardened its stance. uskina, together with his friend Karol Wyrwicz, also had
a sideline in the wine trade.38
Gazeta Warszawska faced some competition from the monthly Pamitnik
Historyczno-Polityczny (Historical and Political Recorder), published by
another ex-Jesuit, Piotr witkowski (17441793). Having not yet completed his
theological studies in 1773, witkowski drew a pension from the educational
fund, although he had hardly taught at all, and became a canon of Livonia. For
a decade after 1782, in the pages of Pamitnik and other, more ephemeral peri-
odicals, he campaigned in the conjoined cause of enlightenment and toler-
ance by calling attention to scientific discoveries, economic and commercial
advances, social improvements, and diverse enlightened policies all over
Europe. He was enamored of Joseph IIs ecclesiastical reforms and took a par-
ticular interest in schemes to ameliorate the condition of the Polish peasantry.
Wyrwicz took witkowski to task for his unqualified endorsement of religious
tolerance and corrected numerous errors in three volumes titled Pamitnikowi
pro memoria.39
Franciszek Bohomolec remained in charge of the Jesuits Warsaw printing
house, renamed the National Printing House, until his death in 1784. His
brother Jan (17241795), who in 1772 had published an influential, carefully
argued rational case against the great majority of alleged cases of apparitions,
vampires, witchcraft, prognosis, and such like in Diabe w swojej postaci (The
Devil in his own Guise), became tutor to the sons of the magnate Franciszek
Bieliski, before acquiring the lucrative and populous parish of Praga
a suburb of Warsaw. He dispensed considerable sums in philanthropy, much of
it benefiting the parish school.40
Most former Jesuits, however, neither achieved this degree of intellectual
celebrity, nor enjoyed comparable patronage. If they could not teach, they
were forced to seek parish work, including that of humble mansionaries
38 Ibid., 6061; Irena ossowska, Kontrowersje wok Stefana uskiny sjdziennikarza i

redaktora, in Wkad Jezuitw, 663682; Cf. Jerzy ojek, Gazeta Warszawska ks. uskiny
17741793 (Ksika i Wiedza: Warsaw, 1959).
39 Irena ossowska, Piotr witkowski, in Pisarze polskiego Owiecenia, eds. Teresa
Kostkiewiczowa and Zbigniew Goliski, 3 vols. (pwn: Warsaw, 1994), 2:305331.
40 Dorota Pietrzkiewicz-Sobczak, Jan Bohomolec SJowiecony filantrop, in Wkad
Jezuitw, 683712.
(mansjonarze), assistants (wikariusze), or employment as chaplains to wealthier

nobles. Most benefices in the Commonwealth were far from lucrative, and many
ex-Jesuits faced the prospect of a destitute old age.41
Testimony to these problems comes from the pitiful requests for pensions
from the Educational Commission, addressed to the rector of Wilno University.
Augustyn Badowski, born in 1717, who had worked as a missionary both in the
Commonwealths easternmost reaches and in Mazovia before the suppression,
pleaded for help in 1791: deprived of my presbytery on account of advanced
age, I am in the direst poverty.42 Not all of the supplicants were septuagenari-
ans. For example, Mikoaj Myszkowski, who taught in Wilno and later in
Grodno, begged Poczobut to be allowed to retire and draw a pension, citing the
poverty of his parish and his failing health and strength, for five years before he
was finally able to step down in 1791 at the age of fifty.43
At the close we return to the pivotal figure of Marcin Poczobut. After the
Third Partition he adapted the post-Jesuit university to the harsher realities of
the Russian empire. He laid the foundations of the universitys golden age,
which lasted into the 1820s, before ending his long life once again as a Jesuit, in
the house in Dyneburgannexed by Russia in 1772. He died just four years
before the general restoration of 1814. Poczobut exemplifies a balance between
religious orthodoxy and scientific curiosity characteristic of enlightened
Catholicism. His intellectual stance was at once eclectic and empirical. He
retained an unshakeable attachment to his order while engaging wholeheart-
edly in the work of the Commission for National Education at the highest level.
By word and deed he articulated a fervent Polish-Lithuanian patriotism.
Poczobuts life and work prompts two reflections. One is that the suppression
of the Society of Jesus by no means ended Jesuits diverse and distinguished
contributions to the life of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.44 The other
is that the partitions of the very country in which they had enjoyed most popu-
larity created the conditions for the continuous existence of the Society of
Jesus between suppression and restoration. That situation is explained by
Marek Inglot S.J.s contribution to this volume.

42 A. Badowski to M. Poczobut, Miku, 2 August 1791, Vilniaus Universiteto Biblioteka,
Fondas 2, dc 38, no. 8. Encyklopedia, 24.
43 Poplatek, Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, 290, 382. M. Myszkowski to M. Poczobut, Grodno,
29 December 1786, 24 February 1789, 16 April 1790, 22 July 1791, Vilniaus Universiteto
Biblioteka, Fondas 2, dc 44, ff. 189194.
44 Rabowicz, Poczobut, 5961. Irena Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa, O kondycji naukowej jezuitw
polskich, in Wkad jezuitw, 1530, at 1620.
chapter 4
The Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire

(17721820) and the Restoration of the Order
Marek Inglot, S.J.
The suppression of the Society of Jesus decreed by Clement XIV through the
brief Dominus ac Redemptor (21 July 1773) was proclaimed everywhere in the
world, except in the Russian empire of Catherine the Great (17621796).1
Through the intervention of the Russian empress, the Jesuits present in her
dominions did not share the fate of their confreres in the rest of the world
(about 23,000 in total): within the Russian state, in fact, the pontifical decree
extinguishing the Jesuit order was never canonically promulgated. Indeed, in
December 1772 Catherine II had forbidden the exequatur for all decrees, bulls,
briefs, and pastoral letters of the Holy See.2
The pope, in decreeing the suppression of the Ignatian order, also estab-
lished the mode of its canonical actuation: the pontifical decree came into
force as soon as the local ordinary or his delegate read the document before
every single community. No such act took place in the Russian empire. In this
way, the Jesuits remained in place, continuing their religious life and apos-
tolic activity in the manner proper to the Society of Jesus, according to the
Constitutions and the rules of the order. In the subsequent period, under her
extraordinary protection, the czarina guaranteed the Jesuits in her jurisdiction
the opportunity to develop and even expand beyond the Russian empires
confines. This part of the order is commonly known as The Jesuits of White
Russia and it carried out the historic task of assuring continuity between the
pre-1773 and post-1814 Society.3
1 In the dominions of Frederick II of Prussia the suppression was effected in 1776 and 1780.
2 Catherine IIs refusal to permit the promulgation of a Pontifical decreein this case the brief
abolishing of the Society of Jesuswas not a new thing. The practice of the so-called exequa-
tur did not constitute an exception in the policy of royal courts toward the pope. Catholic
sovereigns adopted it as well, limiting in this way the pontiffs liberty of action. In the instruc-
tion of the Secretariat of State for the nuncio in Warsaw, G.A. Archetti, named papal legate to
the court of St. Petersburg, mention was made of the fact that in Russia as in other places, this
great abuse was tolerated. See Marie Joseph Rout de Journel, Nonciatures de Russie daprs
les documents authentiques, vol. I, Nonciature dArchetti 17831784 (Vatican City: Biblioteca
apostolica vaticana, 1952), 3940.
3 The Jesuits themselves are an eloquent picture of this continuity. In fact, in 1814 in the
Russian Empire there were at work twenty-eight Jesuits who entered the old Society, before

68 Marek Inglot
These men continued their habitual lives as Jesuits in extraordinary condi-

tions, in an Orthodox state, from 1773 to 1820. In 1801, Pope Pius VII gave a for-
mal sanction to the existence of the Jesuits in the empirethe words of the
pontiff himself. This was a fundamental step towards the universal restoration
of the Society of Jesus by the same pope through the bull Sollicitudo omnium
ecclesiarum (7 August 1814). Ironically, just six years after the canonical re-
establishment of the Jesuits throughout the world, they were expelled from the
Russian empire.
The Society of Jesus in the Russian empire was authentically international:
in 1820, of the Societys 358 members, documents show the provenance of 307.
Of these, 142 were born in Russia (of Polish, Lithuanian, and Latvian national-
ity); forty-two in Germany; thirty-three in Lithuania; twenty-four in France;
twenty-one in Poland; twenty in Latvia; eleven in Belgium; five in Switzerland;
four in Italy; and one each in Bohemia, Dalmatia, England, the Netherlands,
and Portugal.4 After the expulsion from Russia: 158 Jesuitspriests, scholas-
tics, and lay brothersremained in Galicia (territories that had passed to the
Austrian empire after the partition of Poland), giving rise to the homonymous
province; eighty-eight went to Italy; thirty-eight to France; eighteen to various
other countries of Europe (another fourteen already worked outside the
Russian borders); seven died during the course of 1820; and thirty-five left the
order, remaining in Russia or returning to their home countries.
The Jesuits in the Russian Empire (17721820)5
The Jesuits were absorbed into the Russian empire in 1772, following the
passage of part of the territories of Poland to the dominion of the czars.6
1773; in 1820 there were seventeen. See Catalogus sociorum et officiorum Societatis Jesu in
Imperio Rossiaco ex Anno 1814 in Annum 1815, Polociae [1814]; Catalogus sociorum et offi-
ciorum Societatis Jesu in Imperio Rossiaco ex Anno 1819 in Annum 1820, Polociae [1819].
4 Catalogus primus personarum olim Provinciae Rossiacae [] comparatus a. 1820 (ARSI,
Russia 1008, IV).
5 In this presentation, I follow my own La Compagnia di Ges nellImpero Russo (17721820) e la
sua parte nella restaurazione generale della Compagnia (Rome: Pontificia Universit gregori-
ana, 1997). I complete it with a bibliography to follow. See also Sabina Pavone, Una strana
alleanza. La Compagnia di Ges in Russia dal 1772 al 1820 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2008).
6 In this period, Poland constituted a single state together with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania:
the so-called Commonwealth (res publica) of Both Nations, which comprehended a territory
of 733,200 square km with roughly 14 million inhabitants (60% of whom were Polish), includ-
ing Latin and Greek Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Jews.
The Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire 69
In the summer of that year, three European powersAustria, Prussia, and

Russiacompleted the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian state, possessing
themselves of some of its territories. Russia annexed White Russiathe east-
ern lands of the Rzeczpospolitaand a part of Livonia, the so-called Polish
Livonia (with the city of Dyneburg): in total, 92,000 square kilometers and
roughly 1.3 million inhabitants, 900,000 of whom were Catholic (800,000 of
Greek rite, and 100,000 Latins). Catherine II, as part of her policy of integrating
new subjects, required the oath of loyalty from all. In order to keep the largest
possible part of the population, and desiring above all to secure the nobility
and the clergy, proclamations were issued that allowed religious liberty. As
early as 16 September 1772, a proclamation promised the inhabitants of
White Russia perfect and unlimited liberty of the public exercise of religious
practices.7
As regards the situation of Latin Catholics, Catherine issued a decree (ukaz)
on 14 (25) December 1772 that defined the legal status of Roman Catholics in
White Russia and throughout the entire empire.8 This was done without con-
sulting the pope. Removing the faithful from the authority of bishops resident
in Poland, the czarina announced the erection of a new, separate Latin bishop-
ric for the Russian state, desiring in time to elevate it to the level of an arch-
bishopric and metropolis. On 22 November (3 December) 1773, the empress
chose the city of Mohilev in White Russia as the seat of the new bishopric and
elected Stanisaw Jan Siestrzecewicz Bohusz as the first bishop of the see of
Mohilev.9 On 12 (23) May 1774, with a special document, the Latin bishopric for
7 Maciej Loret, Koci katolicki a Katarzyna II. 17721784 (Cracow: Gebethner & Wolff, 1910),
2021.
8 The dates are given according to the Julian calendar in force in the Russian Empire, and
according to the Gregorian calendar. The difference between them was ten days from 5
October 1582 to 28 February 1700, eleven days from 1 March 1700 to 28 February 1800, and
twelve days from 1 March 1800 to 28 February 1900.
9 Stanisaw Siestrzecewicz (17311826), elected in April 1773 by Clement XIV as titular bishop
of Mallo and destined to be auxiliary bishop of Vilnius, was consecrated on 3 October of the
same year. He obtained canonical faculties for the faithful of the diocese of Vilnius, who
came under Russian dominion in 1772. Named bishop of White Russia by Catherine II, he
obtained such faculties and jurisdiction from other bishops (of Livonia and Smolensk),
whose territories had passed to Russia. The nuncio in Warsaw, Giuseppe Garampi, conferred
on him the faculties necessary for all other Catholics within the whole territory of the empire.
On 17 (28) January 1782, the empress constituted at Mohilev, by her own authority, the
archiepiscopal see, and elevated Siestrzecewicz to the dignity of first metropolitan arch-
bishop. He was pastor of Catholics in the Russian Empire for more than fifty years. The most
complete and objective monograph on Siestrzecewicz is that of Andr Arvaldis Brumanis,
70 Marek Inglot
all White Russia was created, and Catherine II named Stanisaw Siestrzecewicz
first ordinary of the new diocese. The act of the sovereign stood in stark
contrast to the laws of the Catholic Church and challenged the rights of
the pope.
At the moment of the separation from Poland, the Society possessed eigh-
teen institutions: three colleges (Poock, Witebsk, Orsza); two residences and
three mission houses belonging to the province of Mazovia; and the college of
Dyneburg with nine mission stations belonging to the province of Lithuania.
The largest and most important was the college of Poock.
The ordinary bishops, who were competent to promulgate the suppression
brieffollowing the line of Ignacy Massalsi, bishop of Vilnius, who ordered
the Jesuits of his diocese to remain in their houses without any change (29
September 1773)commanded the Jesuits in their dioceses to maintain them-
selves in the status quo ante until further orders. From these bishops, however,
the Jesuits received no further letter, no further order. The Jesuits regarded this
explicit order to remain in their houses as the basis of their permanence, at
least in the initial period. It legitimized their existence.
News of the suppression of the Society in Poland nonetheless provoked
insecurity and concern among the Jesuits in White Russia. Though they knew
the canonical validity of this act depended upon official promulgation, the
majority of Jesuits desired to submit immediately to the brief. Nonetheless the
superior of this group, Stanisaw Czerniewicz, wanted to avoid the spontane-
ous and immediate dispersion of his men. A consultation convoked by
Czerniewicz decided to remain in statu quo ante, because the brief had not
been promulgated, in lieu of the bishops instructions. Many, however, espe-
cially young men, abandoned the order.
Stanisaw Czerniewicz was an exceptional figure, who distinguished him-
self among the Jesuits of White Russia. He was born in 1728, at Szlamowo, near
Kaunas in Lithuania. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1743, and after thirteen
years of study and formation, was ordained priest at Vilnius. He spent the years
17581768 in Rome as the secretary to the superior generals assistant for
Poland, Fr. Karol Korycki.10 Upon returning to Poland he became the archivist
for the province of Mazovia for two years. In 1769, Superior General Lorenzo
Aux origines de la hirarchie latin en Russie. Mgr Stanislas Siestrzencewicz-Bohusz, premier

archevque-mtropolitain de Mohilev (17311826) (Louvain: Bureaux du recueil, 1968. See
also Inglot 1997, passim.
10 The biographical notes on all the Jesuits of White Russia named in this essay are found
in DHCJ and in the Encyklopedia wiedzy o jezuitach na ziemiach Polski i Litwy 15641995,
ed. L. Grzebie (Cracow: WAM, 1996).
Ricci nominated him rector of the college of Poock. He died in 1785, at Stajki
(Witebsk) in White Russia.11
The position of Fr. Czerniewicz and the other Jesuits left in White Russia
was not determined by a lack of desire on their part to obey the will of the
pope. On the contrary, they would have liked to put it into effect immediately.
Until Catherines explicit interdiction prohibiting a return to the question
of the suppression, Fr. Czerniewicz tried diligently to obtain governmental
permission to effect the suppression desired by Clement XIV. After failed
attemptsundertaken in various ways and at several different timesto
obtain such permission and after receiving, subsequently, a promise regarding
the future of the order in the empire, Fr. Czerniewicz visited all the houses of
the Jesuits in 1774. Conscious of the firm decision of Catherine and of her pro-
tection, he undertook efforts for the consolidation of religious life in the houses
under him. During the visit Fr. Czerniewicz was able to secure the continuity
of works of apostolate in all the communities, but he did not make any attempt
to open the novitiate, to allow studies of philosophy and theology to recom-
mence, to allow scholastics vows to be renewed or final vows of Jesuit fathers
to be taken, nor did he appoint new rectors.
Thus things stood until 1776, the year in which the numerical situation of
the order became critical. Fr. Czerniewicz began to accept Jesuits who applied
from the mother provinces of Lithuania and Mazovia into the order. He did this
following a response from Cardinal Giovan Battista Rezzonico, whoin his
capacity of the secretary of the Segreteria dei Memorialiresponded to a sup-
plication from Fr. Czerniewicz addressed to the new pope, Pius VI, on 15
October 1775. The Jesuit asked the pontiff to indicate his wishes regarding the
future of the Jesuits in White Russia. If the response from Rezzonico (1776) can-
not be interpreted as a positive approbation, it nevertheless contains no con-
demnation of the Jesuits of Russia. In fact, the Jesuits saw it as tacit approval.12
Three years after the suppression, constrained by the will of the empress
(expressed officially in various orders) that they persist in their Institute,
assured regarding the future of the Society, and enjoying the tacit approval of
Pius VI, the Jesuits of White Russia began to organize the life of the province.
This work of reorganization was necessary to be able to face the new situation.
The first step toward remedying personnel difficulties was the admission to
holy orders of those men who had completed their theological studies. The
11 DHCJ 2:10281030.
12 Libellum tuum pro munere meo Sanctissimo Domino Nostro Pontifici Pio VI ostendi, et
perlegi. Precum tua rum exitus ut auguro, et exoptas felix. Responsum [authenticum]
Em. Card. Rezzonico ad R.P. Czerniewicz (ARSI, Russia 1001, IV-3).
72 Marek Inglot
first ordinations took place in 1776: twenty young Jesuits were ordained as
priests. The next step was the opening of a novitiate, and this was done in 1780.
Various difficulties, caused above all by the scarcity of space in the houses,
forced the Jesuits to accept only eight young men. The definitive step in this
work of reorganizing the province was the calling of the general congregation
that gathered at Poock from 1118 October 1782. The participants, all professed
fathers from the years 17441773, were thirty in number. Six sessions were held.
On 17 October, the congregation elected Stanisaw Czerniewicz as vicar-
general for life. The electors, who added the clause for life, intended that the
power of the vicar general should last until after the universal restoration of
the Society and the election of a superior general.
In the life and the history of the Society of Jesus in the Russian empire, the
first congregation of Poock constituted a true turning point. The congregation
took a position regarding the continued existence of the order and established
the identity of the Society. It decided to maintain the religious life and tradi-
tional structure of the order. With the first general congregation of Poock, the
period of uncertainty ended for the Jesuits of White Russia and the process of
re-establishment within the province (under the jurisdiction of the provincial)
began, along with that of the central governance of the order, with the vicar-
general at its head. The provincial managed the religious and the works of the
province. First the vicar general, then from 1801, the general, resolved cases of
a religious nature; conducted relations with the monarch, the imperial govern-
ment, and with ecclesiastical authorities; decided on the opening of new
houses and missions; regulated questions of order outside the Russian empire;
and dealt with the renewal of the professions of ex-Jesuits. From then, on, the
order presented itself in its customary form.
Thus reorganized, in 1783ten years after the signing of the brief of sup-
pressionthe Jesuits of White Russia were confirmed in their existence by the
successor of Clement XIV, Pope Pius VI, but only orally (vivae vocis oraculo),
for circumstances did not allow the pope to recognize them publically. This
crucial act came about during an audience granted to the envoy of Empress
Catherine II, Jan Benisawski, in 1783. On 7 March 1801, Pius VIIthe successor
of the Pope Braschiformally confirmed the Jesuits of Russia (with the brief
Catholicae fidei). From that moment, the vicar-general became praepositus
generalis [superior general] of the order already existing in the Russian
empire.13 It did not represent the approval of a new order.
13 There were five vicars general and superiors general of the Jesuits in White Russia:
Stanisaw Czerniewicz (17821785), Gabriel Lenkiewicz (17851798), Franciszek Kareu
(17991802), Gabriel Gruber (18021805), and Tadeusz Brzozowski (18051820).
The years between 1801 and 1815 were a period of blossoming for the Society
of Jesus in the Russian empire. The benevolence of Paul I (17961801) and
Alexander I (18011825), and the brief Catholicae fidei of Pius VII, assured them
a strong and secure presence. The order developed its scholastic and pasto-
ral activities: new colleges rose up (the most famous was the college of St.
Petersburg), as well as missions throughout the czars dominion. The most
important figure among the Jesuits of the Russian empire was Gabriel Gruber:
he is the most interesting and conspicuous personality that the Society had
during the almost fifty years of its existence in Russia.
Gruber was Slovenian and entered the Society of Jesus in Vienna in 1755.
Before 1773, he was a professor of mechanics and hydraulics at Ljubljana, work-
ing at the same time on the regulation of the river Sava. After the suppression,
he worked as a physicist at the court of Joseph II and in 1784 he came to White
Russia. He was sent to Poockthe scientific and educational center of the
order. He expanded the scientific base of the college and developed the exact
sciences, winning the esteem of Catherine II and Paul I. He assumed offices in
the governance of the Society of Jesus, and was elected general of the order in
1802. He gained a solidindeed unchallengedposition for the order in the
empire, and was able to obtain an official pontifical approval. He died from an
accident in 1805 in St. Petersburg.14
The Jesuits of White Russia gave principal importance to scholarly activity
and teachingnot least because this was Catherine IIs principal reason for
the conservation of the order of St. Ignatius in her realms. The central institu-
tion in this apostolate was the college of Poock. In the academic year 1772
1773, the college managed upper middle schools and held courses in
philosophy and theology for young Jesuits. The years of splendor began in the
1780s and are tied to Gruber. He was professor of architecture and agronomy,
and organized a complex of didactic facilities, among which were a museum,
a laboratory, a gallery for history and natural sciences, a physics gallery, and a
painting gallery. Moreover, the college possessed impressive collections of
medals and precious stones, as well as a laboratory for mechanical instru-
ments, some of which were designed and built for the Hermitage in St.
Petersburg.
14 See DHCJ, 2:16591660; Marek Inglot, Pater Gabriel Gruber (17401805): Student der
Tyrnauer Universitt, der Generaloberer der Gesellschaft Jesu wurde, in Die Tyrnauer
Universitt der Geschichte, Albeta Holoov and Istvn Bitskey, ed. (Cracow: Towarzystwo
Sowakw w Polsce, 2012), 256277. For a more detailed account of Grubers role, see the
chapter by Daniel Schlafly in this volume.
74 Marek Inglot
In 1812, with an imperial ukaz of Alexander I from 12 (24) January, the college
at Poock was elevated to the rank of an academy. Due to the Napoleonic wars,
the solemn inauguration of this institution took place only on 25 November
(7 December) 1813, together with the promotion of five new doctors of theol-
ogy. The academy of Poock had three faculties: theology, philosophy of exact
sciences, and languages and letters. It had the right to award doctorates in the-
ology, canon law, and civil law. In the first year eighty-four students enrolled,
while the body of teachers was comprised of twenty-five professors. The pro-
gram of studies, following the will of the government, clearly favored the exact
sciences. Before their closure in 1820, the schools of Poock contained roughly
700 students and thirty-nine professors. In its brief history, the academy pro-
moted over 100 doctors.15
The second important center of education was the college at St. Petersburg.
At the invitation of Czar Paul I, the Jesuits arrived in the city in 1800 and began
pastoral service in the parish church of St. Catherine. They preached and
catechized in four languages, for four groups of faithful (Poles, the French,
Germans, and Italians), which formed the Catholic community of the Russian
capital. From year to year, the Jesuits were noticed more and more in the envi-
rons of St. Petersburg, and their influence also reached to the Russian Orthodox,
including those who belonged to the highest spheres of society.
In 1801 the college opened its doors. After three months it had about thirty
students. At the beginning of the 1801/1802 school year, there were more than a
hundred. In subsequent years their number grew to roughly 200. The cycle of
studies lasted six years and included subjects ranging from the principles of
Russian and Latin languages to philosophy and theology. The college, fre-
quented at first by Catholics who could not afford private schooling, soon
acquired such importance that within two years a boarding house was opened
for students coming from noble families. In 1806, the boarding house was
transformed into a college of nobles (Collegium Nobilium). The number of stu-
dents varied from sixty to seventy youths coming from the highest echelons of
Russian society. In the vast program much space was dedicated to modern lan-
guages. Great care was also taken over religious education. The young Orthodox
participated in the religious functions in their own church and followed les-
sons in religion imparted by a pope.
Beyond these two great educational centers, the Jesuits managed seven
other colleges in the Russian empire, including the long-established colleges
of Dyneburg, Orsza, and Witebsk. In 1799, at the request of Metropolitan
15 For more detailed discussion of the importance of the college/academy in Poock, see the
chapter by Irena Kadulska in this volume.
Stanisaw Siestrzecewicz, the residences of Mohylew and Mcisaw were ele-

vated to the rank of colleges. In 1811, the college of Romanw opened and in
1817 Uwad opened. In the didactic program, exact sciences were emphasized,
and in all colleges teaching modern languages was introduced, particularly
French and German. The language of instruction was Latin, but from 1802 it
was Russian. Residences for nobles existed in every college: in 1805, these struc-
tures housed roughly 220 boarders. All told, in 1796 (the year of Catherine IIs
death), 726 students received free instruction; by 1815 that number had grown
to roughly 2,000.
The Jesuits of White Russia also focused on missions. From 1803 onwards,
they created six new important mission centers in the south and east of the
Russian empire for Catholics of various nations. Missions opened in Saratov on
the Volga river for German settlers (1803); in Odessa on the Black Sea for
German and Italian immigrants (1804); at Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea for
Armenians, Poles, Germans, the French, and the Dutch (1805); and at Mozdok
in the Caucasus for the faithful of various nationalities (1806). 1811 saw the
birth of the mission in Irkutsk in Siberia for exiled Polish Catholics; another
Siberian mission was established in 1815 in Tomsk. In 1820, there were seventy-
two Jesuit priests and lay brothers engaged in missionary work (including the
so-called popular missions). They worked in different geographical and social
conditions, dealing with people of diverse ethnic extraction and cultural back-
grounds. Although their activity was limited by the ban against making conver-
sions from the Orthodox faith, and although activity among Catholics was
hampered by several factors (disturbances in the vast territories of the faithful,
their difficult living conditions, the harsh Russian climate), their work was
nevertheless significant and effective. Although short, the period displayed the
most genuine characteristics of the Society and left deep traces in the popula-
tionmainly of German originto which this action was directed. In extend-
ing themselves through these vast territories, the Jesuitsthough fewshowed
their great missionary zeal and their extraordinary ability to adapt to other
cultures and different social, economic, and climatic conditions.
With their loyalty to their own Institute and to the Catholic Church, the
Jesuits brought upon themselves the hostility both of the secular authorities
and of the Orthodox Church. Under Czar Alexander I, Enlightenment nostrums
and Russian mysticism reared their heads, along with the Russian Bible Society
and Freemasonryall hostile to the Jesuits. Movements developed that were
opposed to contacts with the West and to the influence of the Catholic Church.
The worldwide restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814 handed the Russian
Jesuits opponents a new reason for hostility: it took away the Russian govern-
ments ability to control the order (the seat of the general had to be in Rome,
76 Marek Inglot
after all). All this provoked the first denial of Father General Brzozowskis
request to move to Rome, and then the expulsion of the Jesuits: first from
St. Petersburg (1815/1816) and later, in 1820, from the entire Russian empire.
The Society of Jesus in the Russian empire survived with its Constitutionsand
Institute intact. It existed as it had before 1773, performing its traditional activi-
ties. The legitimacy of this survival derived mainly from the non-promulgation
of Clement XIVs brief of suppression. It also relied on a series of pontifical acts
which at first tolerated, and then finally approved and officially confirmed this
survival.
Canonical Approval of the Society of Jesus in the Russian

Empire(1801)16
The official approval and confirmation of the Society of Jesus in the Russian
empire was obtained by the Jesuits from Pope Pius VII. In 1800the year of
Pius VIIs electionthey already enjoyed papal approval of their existence in
Russia, pronounced by Pius VI in 1783 vivae vocis oraculo, before Jan Benisawski.
The subsequent step was taken fifteen years later, in 1798. This time it was
the nuncio to St. Petersburg, Lorenzo Litta, together with the secretary of the
aged pontiff, the former Jesuit Giuseppe Marotti, who dedicated themselves
to obtaining a pontifical declaration in favor of the Jesuits in the Russian
empire.17 On 2 March 1799, Pius opened the way toward an official declaration
in favor of the Jesuits in Russia, authorizing the nuncio to undertake the steps
necessary to legitimize the existence of the Jesuits in Russia. Paul VI therefore
moved from cautious approval to a positive desire for the restoration of the
Society. Unfortunately the negotiations for the pontifical declaration so hap-
pily begun, were soon suspended. The nuncio to St. Petersburg fell into dis-
grace and was forced to abandon Russia (1799). A few months later, on the
night of 29 August 1799, the pope died while a prisoner at Valence.18
16 See Inglot 1997, 125164 and Marek Inglot, I rappresentanti del papa a San Pietroburgo e
lapprovazione canonica della Compagnia di Ges nellImpero Russo (1801), in Suavis
laborum memoria. Chiesa, Papato, e Curia Romana tra storia e teologia/Church, Papacy,
Roman Curia between History and Theology. Scritti in onore di Marcel Chappin per il suo 70
compleanno/Essays in honour of Marcel Chappin SJ on His 70th Birthday, eds. Paul van
Geest and Roberto Regoli (Vatican City: Archivio segreto vaticano, 2013), 407437.
17 The relevant correspondence between Litta and Marotti may be found in the Vatican
Secret Archive: Polonia, 344-V.
18 See Inglot 1997, 136149.
The question of the re-establishment of the Jesuits in Russia was then taken
up by the Jesuits themselves, led by Fr. Gabriel Gruber. This time, the enter-
prise was crowned with success. In February 1799 Gruber was sent to the St.
Petersburg imperial court to handle the question of the relationship of the
Society with Archbishop Siestrzecewicz who was prone to interfere with the
internal affairs of the order. An imperial audience was secured, in spite of
impediments created by the bishop metropolitan, and Fr. Gruber received
assurances from Paul I that the order would be allowed to remain in Russia, as
well as of the inviolability of the Jesuits Institute. The choice of Gruber for this
delicate mission was not accidental. He enjoyed considerable prestige in the
capitals social milieu and exercised a decisive influence on the emperor, with
whom he managed to establish a direct relationship and even win friendship:
so much so that he came to have free access in the rooms of the sovereign.
Gruber was therefore able to convince the czar to commit to the official
approval of the Society in Russia. Gruber met the emperor in June 1799. He
received, once again, assurances of the inviolability of the Institute. The czar
also welcomed the proposal of a letter to the pope.19 The sovereign was well
aware that such pontifical approval was necessary in order to draw to Russia
the ex-Jesuits spread throughout Europe. This was not without importance in
view of the monarchs designs for the educational system within his realms,
which he wanted to entrust to the Jesuits. Thus, on 11 (23) August 1800, Paul I
wrote a personal letter to the pope in which he asked for formal recognition of
the existence of the Society of Jesus in his empire.20 The new pope, Pius VII,
was favorably disposed towards the suppressed Society of Jesus and toward its
restoration. Not even a month after his return to Rome, the pope turned to the
Spanish king Charles IV asking him to support the project of worldwide resto-
ration of the order. The negative response of the king forced the pope to limit
himself to the canonical approval of the Jesuits in Russia.21
On 7 March 1801, in response to the request of Paul I and the supplications
of the Jesuit vicar general, Franciszek Kareu, who, on behalf of the Jesuits,
asked that Your Holiness will deign to grant an apostolic brief, which [] vis-
ibly approve their canonical existence in Russia,22 Pius issued the brief
19 Gruber to Paul I, June 1799: ARSI, Russia 1027, f. 148r149r (copy).

20 Coppia Litterarum Imperatoris Rossiarum Pauli Primi ad Summum Pontificem Pium VII
pro Confirmatione Societatis in Alba Russia (ASV, Nunz. Pol. 344-V, and ARSI, Russia 1004,
VI-1).
21 The relevant letters are in Inglot 1997, 288292.
22 Kareu a Pius VII, 31 July 1800. ASV, Nunz. Pol. 344-V (copy) See also de Journel, Intrim de
Benvenuti, 9293.
78 Marek Inglot
Catholicae fidei,23 which officially approved and confirmed the order of the
Jesuits in Russia. The brief was addressed to Dear Son Francis Kareu, priest
and superior of the Congregation of the Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire.
Out of respect for Clement XIV, Pius avoided any language that might have sug-
gested recognition of Jesuits existing before then in Russia as such. In the brief,
the pope emphasized the work carried out by those who were already Jesuits
in the Russian empire and the importance of perpetuating them in their pris-
tine Society for the benefit of the Catholics of the state of the Russian czars.
Giving value therefore to the recommendation and the request of the emperor,
the pontiff granted what had been asked: the opportunity to bring together in
one body all the Jesuits already dwelling there, and those who would come.
The pontiff made Fr. Kareu superior of the Society. Observance of the original
rule of St. Ignatius confirmed by Pope Paul III was prescribed. Finally, Pius VII
granted the Society of Russia broad powers to build colleges, to educate youth
and instruct them in religion and science, as well as to administer the sacra-
ments with the consent of bishops ordinary. With this act, Pius VII formally
confirmed the Jesuits of the Russian empire, as he explained in a letter to the
czar dated 9 March.24
In the Instruction on how to understand and proceed in the matter, which
the secretary of state addressed to Benvenuti, he presented the reasons for the
pontiffs caution. Cardinal Consalvi explained the popes prudence to the rep-
resentative of the Holy See at St. Petersburg. Bourbon hostility, despite the
revolutionary turmoil, persisted and could not be ignored. Nor could the mem-
ory of Pope Clement XIV, who with so much ado and to such applause
destroyed the embers of the Jesuits and scattered the body and the members.
Consequently Pius could not make the major concessions that the Emperor
might have desired. Thus he restricted the new congregation to the Russian
empire to preclude the anger of the princes who cannot so much as hear
the name Jesuits without consternation. This apprehension restricted any
23 Institutum Societatis Iesu, I, 332335.

24 Lintrt quElle prend la demande qui Nous a t faite de donner par Notre autorit
lexistence canonique la Socit de Jsus dans lEmpire de Votre Majest est pour Nous
un motif bien puissant qui Nous engage y condescendre. Nous ne doutons pas, quune
pareille dmarche ne conduise directement lavantage de la Religion Catholique dans
son Empire, la culture et lducation des sujets qui la professent, de mme qu
lextirpation de ces maximes dpraves contre la Religion, lautorit souveraine et la
socit. Toutes ces considrations qui sont propres de Notre Ministre Apostolique Nous
font concourir aux sages ves de Votre Majest Impriale, et Nous avons le plaisur de Lui
envoyer le Bref, par lequel nous venons de donner Notre sanction formelle lexistence
des Jsuites dans lEmpire de Votre Majest. ARSI, Russia 1004, VI-10 (copy).
mention to the bulls addressed to Paul III. The Holy See would protect the
Society, and the Pope personally oversee its re-establishment, confirmation,
and reform. This should delight the Jesuits, and deflect any assertion that the
papacy was ignoring all criticism of the Society. The bull does it assert that the
[accusations] are true and proven, which would discredit or offend the Jesuits:
it neither grants nor denies their privileges, but rather so disposes of things, as
to take the weapons out of the hands of their adversaries, and to prepare a total
revival of the Society in all realms and in all nations. This is what His Holiness
had in view, and if these Jesuits will not cross his views, it will do more good
than you expect, but all will be done with peace and charity, and without
directly challenging their powerful opponents, who would upset the coveted
design.25
The act of Pius VII, which constituted the canonical approval of the status
of the Jesuits in Russia, and not the approval of a new order, must be con-
nectedand therein lies its importanceto the perspective that already
appears in the words of Consalvi: the pope, in fact, wanted to prepare a total
resurgence of the Society in all kingdoms and in all nations. This is what His
Holiness had in view [] but all will be done with peace and charity, and with-
out directly challenging those powerful opponents, who would upset the cov-
eted design.
This phrase expresses the policy of Pius VII and his secretary of state in the
matter of rebuilding the Society of Jesus. The aim is clear: to restore the Society
of Jesus completely and universally. To do that they required caution and slow
work over time. Another feature of this policy was to implement the restoration
through the courts (the formula of papal diplomacy combined the reappear-
ance of the Jesuits with respect for princes, who were so dominant in the pro-
cess of suppression). The sovereigns wanted to see the Society extinguished, so
to the sovereigns had to halt the work of restoration. Already in 1799 this prac-
tice was adopted by Pius VI, who was disposed to confirm the Jesuits in Russia
upon the request of the imperial court of the czars. It would also be the formula
in 1814, though the concession was already made a priori: there was a need to
askand in fact, in that age of jurisdictionalism, this was the practice.
In addition, this papal concession, even if limited to Russia, was a precedent
that served as a model for further approval in other places. The re-establish-
ment of the order in the Russian empire was therefore vital for its future resto-
ration in the rest of the world, given that the subsequent restoration in the Two
Sicilies (Naples) and then the universal restoration were the extension of con-
cessions granted in 1801 for the Russian empire.
25 Consalvi to Benvenuti, 9 March 1801. See de Journel, Intrim de Benvenuti, 8391.

80 Marek Inglot
With pontifical approval, the vicar general of the Society of Jesus became
the superior general of the orderof the whole order, which existed canoni-
cally only in Russia. He resided at Poock (18011802 and 18161820) and
St. Petersburg (18021815). By 1815, the Jesuits in the Russian empire numbered
244 (107 priests, eighty-one scholastics, and fifty-six lay brothers).26 The order
was also present outside White Russia: ten Jesuits were active in St. Petersburg
and two (Luigi Panizzoni and Bernardino Scordial) in Italy. The brief was sent
to the Jesuits in Poock in 1802, but only privately because Czar Alexander I did
not deem it necessary to give the measure juridical status since the Jesuits had
never been suppressed in Russia.
Catholicae fidei had a twofold effect in the decade following its enactment: a
wave of petitions for membership to the Society in Russia poured into Poock,
sent by individuals or groups of ex-Jesuits from Europe and the United States,
and there was a great burst of missionary enthusiasm among the Jesuits in
Russia. The bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum of 7 August 1814 established
that the concessions and powers given solely for the Jesuits of the Russian
empire andsubsequently for the Kingdom of the Two Sicilieswere
extended equally to the entire papal state as well as to all other states and
domains. In all this we can discern the crucial role the Society of White Russia
played in the universal restoration of the Society.
Toward the Universal Restoration of the Society of Jesus (1814)27
From his election Pius VII had been favorably disposed toward the suppressed
Society of Jesus and worked for its restoration throughout the world. In 1800,
he had already written to Charles IV (17881808) of Spain, Nothing do we more
greatly desire to see than to see given anew to the Church, and to the
Principalities a genuinely valid support [the Society of Jesus], in order to rem-
edy our terrible situation. However, the pope was only able to realize this
ideal in 1814: the various obstacles and the initial resistance of Charles IV forced
him to effect the restoration initially in Russia only.28
26 Catalogus Personarum et Officiorum Societatis Jesu in Alba Russia ex Anno 1801 in Annum
1802, Polociae [1801].
27 This paragraph is based on my earlier essay: Pio VII e la ricostituzione della Compagnia
di Ges, in Pio VII Papa Benedettino: nel bicentenario della sua elezione. Atti del Congresso
storico internazionale CesenaVenezia, 1519 settembre 2000 (Cesena: Badia di Santa
Maria del Monte, 2003), 381415. I refer the reader to that piece for a detailed and contex-
tualized presentation of the subject, accompanied with relative documentation.
28 Pius VII to Charles IV, 28 July 1800. In Inglot 1997, 288290.
The next step towards the universal restoration of the Society of Jesus was
taken by Pius VII in 1804, with the canonical restoration of the order in the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Jesuits returned to Naples at the request
of the ruler who had driven them from the kingdom: Ferdinand IV. The deci-
sive push for the successful resolution of the issue of the Society in Naples
came from Father Jos Pignatelli. Father General Gabriel Gruber entrusted the
task of guiding the restoration to Pignatelli, appointing him provincial for all
Italy in 1803. Pignatelli arrived in Naples in April 1804 and obtained from the
courtfull restoration in union with the canonically existing order in Russia.
On 30 July 1804, Pius VII issued the brief Per alias,29 with which he restored
the Society of Jesus in Naples and Sicily.30 On 15 August 1804, in a solemn
ceremony in the presence of King Ferdinand and Queen Mary Caroline, the
Jesuits regained possession of the church of Ges Vecchio in Naples. The Jesuits
re-entered Palermo in 1805.
The worldwide restoration of the Society came nine years later. The decisive
factor in this rebirth of the Society of Jesus was the will of Pius VII himself,
intent on rebuilding after the revolutionary torment and set on exploiting the
order to that end, insofar as the situation allowed. As the years went by, another
obstacle introduced itself: the imprisonment and exile of the pope at the hands
of Napoleon. After he returned to Rome on 24 May 1814, the question of the
universal restoration of the Society of Jesus was soon taken into consider-
ationwith a significant role played by the entourage of Pope Pius VII (Cardinal
Bartolomeo Pacca, Lorenzo Litta, and Michele di Pietro Alessandro Mattei).
As soon as news arrived that the pope had been freed from his imprison-
ment and that there was reasonable hope of his return to Rome, Father General
Brzozowski sent a petition in which he asked for the grace so longed-for: the
universal restoration of the Society. Once the pope arrived in Rome, the pro-
vincial of Italy, Luigi Panizzoni, obtained an audience in early June 1814 and
delivered Brzozowskis plea to the pope.31
On 7 August 1814, the octave of the feast of Saint Ignatius, Pius VII signed the
bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, which restored the Society of Jesus across
the world.32

30 Ex certa scientia ac matura deliberatione Nostris, deque apostolicae potestatis plenitu-
dine, praefatas Nostras apostolicas in forma brevis litteras, pro imperio Russiaco datas, ad
regnum utriusque Siciliae extendimus (ibid.).
31 Litterae supplices A.R.P. Brzozowski, et rescriptum Pii VII, 17 junii 1814. ARSI, Italia
1012, I-5.
82 Marek Inglot
The reason behind Pius VIIs re-establishment of the Society of Jesus is

revealed in the first paragraph: his pastoral office required him to use every
means and all assistance provided by divine providence to meet the spiritual
needs of the faithful throughout the world. He therefore found it his pastoral
obligation towards the church to employ these remedies, which God by a sin-
gular providence had disposed, and stated that he would be guilty if he had
seriously neglected, in these times when the church is constantly agitated and
assaulted by storms, to make use of expert and hardy rowers that the Society
of Jesus could provide. To the Jesuits themselves, the pope spoke a word of
exhortation, inviting them to be faithful to St. Ignatius and his rule.
The promulgation of the bull took place the same day at the church of the
Ges. The pope wanted it to be enacted in the most solemn form. He himself
went to the church and celebrated Mass at the altar of St. Ignatius; later, in a
side chapel, he had the bull read and gave it to Fr. Luigi Panizzoni as a represen-
tative of Fr. Brzozowski who was residing in St. Petersburg.
The contribution of the Russian Jesuits to the restoration of the Society in
other countries (including some unsuccessful attempts) was of vast scope and
embraced different countries on two continents: the Aegean islands, the
United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States of America.33
Thus, under the leadership of the general in St. Petersburg, there was (even
before 1814) the secret organization of two provinces (in Britain and the
American colonies). We can therefore say that the Jesuits of White Russia
piloted the revival of the order all over the world.
33 Inglot 1997, 205248.

chapter 5
The Poock Academy (18121820)

An Example of the Society of Jesuss Endurance
Irena Kadulska
The history of the Jesuits Poock (Polotsk) academy, located in the eastern
borderlands of Belarus, or White Russia, can be summed up in the following
words: endurance, growth, dispersal, and rebirth.
The academy grew out of the Jesuit college in Poock, founded by the Polish
king Stefan Batory (Stephen Bthory) in 1580, and played a major role in the
orders history during the suppression era.1 A year before the orders suppres-
sion (1773), the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was
ratified. The eastern territories, including Belarus, came under the control of
the Russian empire, where Catherine II did not permit the brief of suppression
to be promulgated. Thus the Poock college persevered in its educational, pas-
toral, and cultural missions, with an additional duty to maintain a fragmented
Polish identity.
In Belarus, Jesuit activity was focused on its educational mission. The
moment it opened a novitiate in 1780, the Poock institution became a center
of possible plans for the future restoration of the Jesuit order. There was a
substantial influx of candidates for the priesthood and of former Jesuits from
many countries who wished to retain links with this surviving outpost of the
Society. Not all could be accepted.
Nonetheless, the province in Belarus became multinational. Besides Poles,
Lithuanians, and Latvians, there were Jesuits from Germany (forty-one), France
(twenty-five), Belgium (twelve), Italy (seven), and Switzerland (five). In addi-
tion, there was one Jesuit from each of the following countries: England,
Dalmatia, Bohemia, Holland, Portugal, and Hungary. In 1820, a total of 358
Jesuits were active in the Russian empire.2 In the years between 1778 and 1829,
617 members of the order were registered in Poock.
1 Stephanus Rex Poloniae, Magnus Dux Lituaniae, Russiae, Prussiae, Masoviae, Samogitiae,
Livoniae ect., Diploma Fundationis Collegij Polocensis Societatis Jesu, Ms. ATJ Kr. 1466
(Archiwum Prowincji Polski Poudniowej Towarzystwa Jezusowego, Cracow), 1415v.
2 Catalogus Personarum et Oficiorum Soc. Jesu in Alba Russia, Ms. ATJ Kr. 2445 1/8; Nomina
Patrum ac Fratrum qui Societatem Jesu ingressi Albam Russiam incoluerunt ab Anno 1773 ad
Annum 1820 et in eadem Societate Jesu vita sunt functi. Rollarii Flandrorum (1914), Ms. ATJ Kr.
2816; Inglot, 1997, 78; Miscelanea Historiae Pontificiae vol. 63 (Rome: Editrice Pontificia
Universit Gregoriana).

84 Kadulska
Those who came to Poock brought their knowledge, their skills, and their
sense of mission. They also brought their valuable collections of books and
scientific instruments. They immediately started to learn the local language in
order to communicate with the faithful and with their pupils. They exchanged
the banks of the river Daugave (or the western Dvina) for those of the Tiber,
and from 1801 Poock was the residence of the superior general of the Jesuit
order. Sometimes, however, the euphoria that accompanied these arrivals was
accompanied by a note of nostalgia, which can be seen in correspondence
from the period.
The institutions growing prestige was confirmed when the college was ele-
vated to the level of an academy. The charter was granted by Tsar Alexander I in
January 1812, and was published in March of the same year.3 The institution now
had the status of a university to which all Jesuit schools in Russia were subject.
However, these high academic privileges were suddenly and violently with-
drawn by the same Alexander I on March 13, 1820. He issued an order for all
Jesuits to leave the Russian empire. All property of the order was seized by the
state. This decision ended 240 years of Jesuit activity in Poock. Those expelled
from Belarus were forbidden by the tsar from settling in former Polish territory.
Many went to Galicia. Others were scattered all over Europe, many reached
America, and some found their way to the Middle East and Africa.4
Polish scholarship has neglected the Poock academy for decades, and the
few mentions made were influenced by the hostility of academic circles in
Vilnius which were once in competition with the academy. However, words of
high regard for the Poock college are to be found in the written recollections
of pupils, students, and alumni, who came to know the institution during their
studies and fondly recalled their professors there.5 An objective evaluation of
the academy relies on documentation and source materials that are today scat-
tered throughout many European archives and libraries.6
3 Przywilej Najmiociwszego Imperatora i Samowadcy Wszech Rossyi na Jezuick Poock

Akademi, Ms. ATJ Kr. 1364, 7073v.
4 Nomina Patrum ac Fratrum.
5 Jan Barszczewski, Szlachcic Zawalnia, czyli Biaoru w fantastycznych opowiadaniach
(Petersburg, 1844); Otto lizie, Z pamitnika Rodziny liniw, vol. 1. (Ex Libris J.M. Giycki)
Ms. ATJ Kr. 1027 XV, 141152; Edward Tomasz Massalski, Z pamitnikw, in Z filareckiego
wiata. Zbir wspomnie z lat 18161824, ed. Henryk Mocicki (Warsaw 1924), 137256; Eustachy
Antoniusz Iwanowski (Heleniusz), Wspomnienia lat minionych, vol. 1 (Cracow, 1876).
6 A list of the most important archives and libraries:
agad Archiwum Gwne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw
arsi Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome
ATJKr. Archiwum Prowincji Polski Poudniowej Tow. Jez., Cracow (formerly appp)
The Poock Academy (18121820) 85
The aim of this article is to analyze the endurance, development, and

cultural achievements of the Poock academythe Jesuits only remaining
higher-education institution in Europe after the orders dissolution. A presen-
tation of the orders work is accompanied by a consideration of the social
reception of their activities.
The academy functioned within the city of Poock, in decline after the parti-
tions of Poland, and lay on the steep right bank of the river Dvina.7 Under its
auspices were higher-education colleges in Vitebsk, Orsza, and Daugavpils,
two residential high-schools/colleges in Mogilev and Mcisaw, and three mis-
sionary houses (ozowice, Rasna, Faszczw), in addition to nine missionary
stations.8
Education in Jesuit schools and colleges was popular because it was free,
and was not restricted by religious confession or social status. A sense of sta
bility and continuity was achieved thanks to adherence to the rules of the
Ratio studiorum: a code that was supplemented by a program of experimental
education.
The Jesuits buildings changed the architectural layout of the city. A large
modern complex of buildings, in bright copper colors, formed a closed letter E,
rising high above the banks of the river Dvina. The most important buildings
included the church of Saint Stephen, the three-story academy building and
the college itself with its library, a boarding school, a seminary, a parochial
school, a dormitory for musicians, a museum with a wide range of exhibits and
B Czart. Biblioteka Czartoryskich, Cracow

bj Biblioteka Jagielloska, Cracow
bn Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw
buw Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Warsaw
cgia Centralnyj Gosudarstviennyj Istorieskij Archiv, Petersburg
lvia Lietuvos Valstybs Istorijos Archyvas, Vilnius
mab Moksl Akademijos Biblijoteka, Vilnius
nhab Nacjanalny Gistaryny Archiv Biearusi, Minsk
vub Vilniaus Universiteto Biblioteka, Vilnius
7 Krtka wiadomo o miecie Poocku [Information in Brief about the City of Poock]
Miesicznik Poocki no 1 (Poock, 1818), 8687; Poock, in Sownik Geograficzny Krlestwa
Polskiego i innych krajw sowiaskich, eds. Filip Sulimierski, Bronisaw Chlebowski, and
Wadysaw Walewski, vol. 8 (Warsaw, 1887), 714720.
8 The Jesuits of Poock had the following mission stations: Kaunata, Dagda, Indryca, aukiesa,
Prele, Pusza, Uwad and Warklany. Between 1770 and 1780, four stations were closed because
of the lack of priests. The situation changed after the novitiate was opened in 1780. See the
entry in Encyklopedia wiedzy o jezuitach na ziemiach Polski i Litwy, 15641995 [Encyclopedia of
Information of the Jesuits in the Territories of Poland and Lithuania 15641995], ed. Ludwik
Grzebie SJ (wam: Cracow, 1996).
86 Kadulska
an art gallery. There was also a building housing a printing press, a bookstore,
and a theater. Facilities offering more practical services included a large phar-
macy with its own pharmaceutical workshop, its own drying room for medici-
nal herbs, and its own botanical garden. Next to it stood a two-story hospital
for the poor. In addition, there were commercial buildings: workshops for
making cloth and felt, dyeing facilities, a rope and cable factory, a small factory
for candle-making with a workshop for producing wax-products, a brewery
for producing mead, and two bakeries. There was also a slaughterhouse, a
smoke-house, two stables, coach houses, a forge, workshops for welding and
watchmaking, a saddlers yard, a space for a cobbler, a hatmaker, a tailor, and a
carpenter, plus storerooms, an ice-house, spare study rooms in the basements,
and two fruit orchards. Outside the walls, there were cultivated fields, farms,
mills, granaries, a washing complex, and spinning workshops.9 The whole
complex of buildings was well designed to fulfill various functions. Local crafts-
men were employed there, as were specially instructed peasants who were
themselves advertisements for successful vocational training.
The order also participated in the life of the town through its involvement
with religious education, church ceremonies, public receptions of guests, and
by organizing trips, processions, religious debates, and public performances
by students. Numerous guests were invited to take part, and processions in
the market square were a form of participation in the public space of the city.
Religious fraternities were organized among the people of the town, and the
order provided them with collections of prayers. When times were hard, the
citizens were recipients of the orders charity. In addition, help was directed
toward poor young people and the handicapped. Talented young people could
avail themselves of the so-called second seminar or the musical dormitory,
receiving not only education but also board, lodging, text books, clothing, and
medical care. Graduates from this group became local village organists and
teachers.
A census indicates that in 1817, after the Napoleonic wars, the towns popula-
tion was only a little over 5,000. They were a multi-confessional group. The
order also directed its activities toward a broad spectrum of the local gentry
and aristocracy.
The Poock center offered a full range of education, from elementary school
through to higher classes at the academy. On average, 350 pupils and students
per year enjoyed an education there. Their number steadily increased. In 1817,
9 Opisy i inwentarze Kolegium Poockiego skrelone w styczniu 1820 roku [Description and
Inventory of the Poock College, Liquidated in January 1820] (Copied from the original by
Tomasz Wall, Cracow 1907). Ms. ATJ Kr. 1326.
there were 524, and at the time of the academys closure there were around 700
pupils. Educational aims and tasks were clear, set out in the works published
by the academys press and in Uwiadomienia [Notices].10 Posters were pub-
lished giving the weekly timetable of classes in the academy and its schools.
Extensive annual programs, in Polish and in Latin, have also survived. These
informational materials reached a wide audience among the inhabitants of
Belarus, and helped build up public confidence in Jesuit teaching. One form
of publicizing the results of education in Poock involved giving the names
of outstanding pupils along with a list of teachers in the annual editions of
Kalendarz Poocki [The Poock Calendar]. This goal was also served by exhibi-
tions of pupils knowledge, summarized in brochures distributed to the public.
They were included in the quarterly Miesicznik Poocki [The Poock Monthly].
Up to 1800, the Poock center operated mainly in the territories of Belarus
and through a network of affiliated schools. A growth in personnel and the
first public approbation of the Jesuits Russian enterprise by Pius VI led to an
expansion beyond the borders of the Poock area. Jesuits set up schools in
St. Petersburg, Riga, and Romanow, and missions with schools were estab-
lished in Astrakhan, Irkutsk, Odessa, Mozdok, Tomsk, and Saratov.11
At the same time, the Jesuit order moved toward founding its own academic
institution. These efforts involved a correspondence between Superior General
Tadeusz Brzozowski and the leading Russian minister Aleksy Razumowski.
Great support for the initiative was provided by the influential envoy of the
kingdom of Sardinia, Count Joseph de Maistre, and the senator from Volhynia,
August Iliski. The decision to create the academy came as a response to
requests from the public. On the part of Tsar Alexander I, political consider-
ations played a role, as he sought the Polish gentrys support on the eve of
the Napoleonic campaign. The tsars Charter to Set Up an Academy estab-
lishedthe structure of the institution and its educational scope. It also guaran-
teedfreedom from taxes, and the duty-free import of books and educational
materials.12
The ceremonial opening of the academy on June 15, 1812 gathered together
eminent guests and citizens of the town, along with the local gentry. A solemn
10 Uwiadomienie o konwikcie poockim [Information about Student Boarding School in

Poock], Miesicznik Poocki 2 (1818): 208218; Posters: Teaching Regulations in the Poock
Academy, Miesicznik Poocki no 2.
11 Inglot, La Compagnia di Ges; The Clergy of the Roman Catholic Religion in Siberia, and
in Particular the Churches in the Administrative Cities of Irkutsk and Tomsk, in Dzieje
dobroczynnoci krajowej i zagranicznej, vol. 5 (Vilnius, 1824), 757767.
12 Przywilej Najmiociwszego Imperatora i Samowadcy.
88 Kadulska
liturgy was accompanied by popular celebrations: processions, speeches, and

the awarding of doctorates to the academys first rector, Antoni Lustig, and its
first chancellor, Giuseppe Angiolini. The town resounded to the music of con-
certs and the sound of cannon. In the evening there were fireworks and the
slow passage against the night sky of a balloon with an inscription celebrating
the tsar.
The tsars Charter was supplemented by an Academic Statute written by
Superior General Brzozowski, setting out a range of provisions primarily aimed
at protecting young people from Russification. St. Luigi Gonzaga was chosen as
the colleges patron.
The first academic year began in August 1813, after the conclusion of the
Napoleonic campaign. There were three faculties: the faculty of languages,
the faculty of liberal studies, and the faculty of theology. The faculty of lan-
guages (the philological faculty) offered classes in foreign languages and litera-
ture, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Polish, Russian, French,
German, and Italian. Many of these subjects were taught by professors who
had a native command of the foreign language in question.
The faculty of liberal studies offered courses in poetic composition, oratory,
philosophy, logic, metaphysics, theoretical and experimental physics, chemis-
try, theoretical and applied mathematics, civil and military architecture, law
and legal history, and general and natural history. The faculty of theology
offered courses in dogmatic and moral theology, Bible studies, and the history
of the church.
In all faculties, courses were supplemented by lessons in drawing, music,
dance, fencing, and gymnastics. Students of all faculties also had classes in
modern foreign languages, every day throughout every year of their studies.
Education was free of charge, although students paid an annual fee of one
hundred silver rubles (from 1818, this was 150 rubles) for food and board. Fees
were charged for supplementary courses, which were conducted by lay teach-
ers. Outstanding students were eligible for grants. There was also a system of
support for poor students in the musicians dormitory. The college instilled in
young people a respect for religious values and a patriotic attitude.13
The academy published a scholarly and literary journal Miesicznik Poocki
that aimed to popularize knowledge about literature, culture, history, and
recent scientific achievements in the community. An integral part of the acad-
emy was the range of cultural institutions mentioned above: the libraries, the
13 Leszek Zasztowt, Kresy 18321864. Szkolnictwo na ziemiach litewskich i ruskich dawnej

Rzeczypospolitej (Instytut Historii Nauki pan: Warsaw, 1997), 56.
printing press with its bookshop, the theater, the museum of nature and phys-
ics, and the art gallery.
Above all, books were present in the academy and were always available.
There were several libraries: the main library, the Polish library, the clerical
library (a theological library), the library of the chancellery, and open shelvesof
books lined the corridor that formed the students library (mainly dictionaries
and periodicals). Collections of handbooks were to be found in the professors
rooms, in classrooms (on average some 900 volumes), and in student dormito-
ries. All holdings of books were carefully cataloged. The catalogs of books are
now scattered.
These collections grew very rapidly, thanks to sets of books brought by
members of the order, and thanks to gifts from Europe and America.14 From
the time of Superior General Lorenzo Ricci (elected in 1763), many books were
purchased. When the academy was established, these purchases were substan-
tial. For example, in 1819, 1,000 rubles were spent on books. The collections,
especially in Polish, were supplemented by editions produced in the academys
own printing house. Fr. Brzozowski used these collections to write his history
of Polish literature and his dictionary of Polish writers.
The main library was located in the three-story brick building that accom-
modated the college. It occupied a room on the second floor, above the refec-
tory, and took up a comparable amount of space. A specially prepared route
led to the books: stairs with a carved balustrade, a corridor hung with pictures
and maps, and at the doors of the library a copy of the Manresa Grotto, with
figures of the Holy Virgin and Child and the figure of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The
reading rooms double doors ensured silence; under-floor heating provided
warmth; six large windows offered sufficient light. Along the walls, twenty-one
large cupboards were symmetrically arranged. They were carved and glazed.
There was also a row of smaller cupboards. Long and massively constructed
tables provided places for working.
The splendor of the main library room and the value of all the Poock collec-
tions of books were underlined in the reports of a series of tsarist inspectors.15
Years later, graduates, too, wrote of them, recalling the cultural treasures that
14 Ludwik Grzebie, Organizacja bibliotek jezuickich w Polsce od XVI do XVIII wieku, in

Archiwa, Biblioteki i Muzea Kocielne (1975), 30:231239 and 31:225237.
15 Komitet szkolny. Akta, raporty, korespondencje szk etc. 8. Gub[ernia] Witebska C. Poock.
Ksiga z aktami zdawania biblioteki, kancelarii i gabinetw Akademii Poockiej z roku
1822 na mocy ukazu z roku 1820, Ms. VUB Wilno F 2 kc 608; Franciszek Radziszewski,
Wiadomo historyczno-statystyczna o znakomitszych bibliotekach i archiwach publicznych
i prywatnych (Cracow, 1875), 6263.
90 Kadulska
had been lost. Today, we know of the collection of books from the catalogs
made by ten tsarist inspectors in 1820. They spent about six months preparing
the catalogs, and they had to be accompanied by Father Micha Leniewski, the
academys librarian, with his secretary, the head of the printing house Wincenty
od, the head of the museum, Jzef Cytowicz, and Maurycy Pooski, the
head of the schools. For Father Leniewski it was a time of great tribulation. He
was the last Jesuit to see the academys collection of books in all its splendor.
The catalogs of books are scattered today and have survived in an incom-
plete state, but they can be supplemented by looking at other reports.16 Also
treated as part of the collection was the number of books listed as being trans-
ported by fifty wagons guarded by a company of jger troops from the colleges
in Uwad (Izvalta) and Vitebsk. Books from the academys printing house and
bookshop were shown separately, but were counted in the total. Thus, in the
first general catalog of 1820, 132,810 books were listed. In the second catalog,
prepared somewhat more carefully in 1822, when the academys property was
transferred to the Piarist order, this number was considerably higher.
The collection was arranged according to various groupings. The catalogs
take the form of tables with the following rubrics: order number, author, title,
year of publication, place of publication, and format.17 The catalogs con-
tainmany unique volumes, for example: Elias Hutter, Biblia Novi Testamenti,
syriace, ebraice, graece, latine, germanice, bohemice, italice, hispanice, gallice,
anglice, danice, polonice (Nuremberg, 1599); Thomas Kempis, Opera et libri
(Naumburg, 1494); H. Dionysius, Opera (Strasbourg, 1497); St. Jerome, Liber
epistolarum (1497); Peter Lombard, Sententiarum (1516); Bibliotheca maxima
Patrorum (1677); J. Bollandus, Acta Sanctorum ex latinis et graecis, aliarumque
gentium monumentis collegit (16341794), in 52 volumes; J.B. Passerio, Picturae
Etruscorum in vasculis in unum collectae (Rome, 1767); and D.V. Denon, Voyage
dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte pendant les campagnes du gnral Bonaparte
(Paris, 1802).
Here, only selected examples of folio editions are given: illustrated, multi-
volume editions, the kind of books that would grace the holdings of any library.
They are listed once more in the index of books transferred in 1831 to the
Imperial Public Library.18 It is difficult to discuss the vast Poock collection in
16 Wypis z ksigi Naukowego Komitetu Gwnego Zarzdu Szk, Ms. ARSI Rome Coll. Gaillard,
sch. 34 Russia No 6, f. 381382v, f. 388, f. 393393v, f. 427; Komitet szkolny; Ms. NHAB Misk,
F 14301, 50 171, f. 7070v, 7373v.
17 Komitet szkolny.
18 Wycig z katalogu ksiek Poockiej Biblioteki wyznaczonych do przekazania Imperatorskiej
Publicznej Bibliotece, Ms. NHAB Misk, F 31571, 83, f. 4748v, f. 8586v, f. 9494v.
its entirety. It contained editions published by presses in Amsterdam, Antwerp,

Berlin, Bologna, Frankfurt, Ferrara, Genoa, Ingolstadt, Cologne, Leipzig, Milan,
Mainz, Munich, Nancy, Naples, Nuremberg, Padua, Paris, Prague, Rome, Riga,
Vienna, and Wurttemberg. Catalogs contain texts by many major classical
authors, for example, the works of Vergil (1504), Terence (1595), and others.
The collection of the oldest editions of Polish literature include works by
Jan Kochanowski, Jakub Wujek, Piotr Skarga, and others. They are listed along-
side the works of Polish scholars, for example, the astronomers Jan Hevelius
(Selenographia of 1647 and Machinae coelestis of 1673) and Marcin Poczobut.
The first editions of the works of Polish historians such as Jan Dugosz were
part of the collection, along with editions of statutes, heraldry, geographical
texts, and sets of very old maps. A European rara avis was Szymon Syreskis
Zielnik [Herbarium], a compendium of botanical, medical, mineralogical,
zoological, and dietary information. Handbooks included those in the fields
of geometry, chemistry, physics, botany, and mineralogy, along with guides
to economy, farming, military matters, and other subjects. The collections of
works held in several volumes included grammars of ancient and modern
languages.
The individual collection of books of the Jesuit professor of theology
Aloysius Rusnati were cataloged only according to subject matter, also noting
language and format. In his room, there were 106 Bibles in various languages
and formats, Eastern Orthodox histories, theological writings, and works by
the Church Fathers. In total there were 2,496 books. In a secret catalog of for-
bidden books, there are editions of works by Martin Luther (1539), John Calvin
(1552), Philip Melanchton, and others. These catalogs allow one to draw many
conclusions of a scholarly and cultural nature. Books that are listed in numer-
ous places where they were used are the clearest indication of the intellectual
activity of the Poock community.
As has been noted above, the collection was broken up in stages. The last
distribution took place in 1831.19 The books made their way to libraries in
St Petersburg, Moscow, Mogilev, Minsk, and a variety of secondary schools in
Belarus. A small part of the holdings was granted to the corps of cadets that
took over the academy after the departure of the Piarists in 1830. In 1915, this
part of the former collection was moved to Simbirsk. The historical fate of this
collection prompts one more reflection. The books from the Poock academy
19 Ms. NHAB Misk F 31571 83; Ms. NAHB Misk F 14301, 2582; Edward Chwalewik,
Leningrad, in Zbiory polskie. Archiwa, biblioteki, gabinety, galerie, muzea i inne zbiory
pamitek przeszoci w ojczynie i na obczynie. W porzdku alfabetycznym wedug
miejscowoci uoone, vol. 12 (WarsawCracow, 19261927).
92 Kadulska
filling, after 1820, the shelves of so many libraries, did not cease to fulfill their
basic function, and became the greatest contribution of the Jesuit order to pro-
mulgating Polish culture.
The printing house in Poock started up shortly after dissolution in 1787 and
functioned up to the liquidation of the academy. It owed its rapid development
to its privileges of self-censorship and the need for Polish texts that could be
used in educational and missionary work. It was not intended to be a source of
income. Money obtained from sales was ploughed back into the enterprise.
The printing house was situated in a separate building to the left of the
church. It consisted of seven separate rooms: a press, a typesetting room, a
book-binding room, and a foundry, among others. Next door was the bookshop
with its store rooms. Under the supervision of Father od, the head of the
press, four qualified members of the order and thirteen apprentice boys
worked there. They were fully maintained by the order. It is worth noting that
the Jesuits trained young men in many professions and trades: bakers, pharma-
cists assistants, gardeners, tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, coopers, grooms,
locksmiths, blacksmiths, drapers, and others.
At the time of the confiscation of the orders property, the press was fully
operational.20 The presses were busy, as were the two machines for printing
illustrations. A fifth pressthe most modernhad not yet been installed, and
many years after the expulsion of the order no one was able to make it work.
The press had Latin, Polish, Russian, German, Greek, and Hebrew type. It
could also print French, Italian, and Latvian texts, musical scores, and mathe-
matical and chemical texts. Special type was produced in the foundry. Type
was carefully documented and organized in cases. Its weight was recorded:
there were around six and a half tons of type (that is, 382 cases). This made it
possible to produce high-quality books irrespective of the degree of difficulty.
The presss publishing plans are revealed by the stores of printing paper
(1,300 reams), organized by color, size, purpose, and place of production.21 The
wide variety of paper allowed the press to prepare different estimates of print-
ing costs. For example, the collection of prayers Zoty otarzyk [The Golden
Little Altar] (1819) was printed on white paper from Lubeka at a price of four
rubles; the same book was printed on paper with a bluish tinge at three rubles,
and on gray paper at two and a half rubles. The gray printing came out in a
20 Ms. NHAB Misk F 31571 83; Ms. VUB Wilno F 2 kc 610; Ms. ARSI Rzym Coll. Gaillard, sch.
34 Russia No 6, f. 381382v; Ms. Nacjonalnyj Poockij Istoriko-Kulturnyj Muziej
Zapawiednik PoockDzia Fondw kndf 4 2800, k.4.
21 Ms. NHAB Misk F 3187 1 83, k. 126, 137.
large second edition in 1820. Readers were informed of the presss books in a
printed Katalog. No copy of this work has survived, however.
The catalogs prepared by those sent to liquidate the academys property
also gave up-to-date numbers of books in the bookshop and stores. Cheap
books came out in large editions. For example, Nauka czytania pisma polskiego
[The Teaching of How to Read Polish] (1818) cost fifteen kopeks; there were
3,434 copies in store. Here, inexpensive religious texts predominated. These
took the form of novenas, devotions, meditations, litanies, offices, the statutes
of religious fraternities, prayer books, hymnals, etc. The devotional text Do
witego Ignacego [To Saint Ignatius] was published in Polish and German,
and in an edition for women.
Handbooks of mathematics, history, geography, philosophy, and catechisms
and primers in the presss stores were recorded in editions of, on average,
1,000 copies. Exceptionally, a German grammar, in two parts, ran to 3,207
copies, and a Latvian primer to an edition of 2,200 copies. A trilingual
primer (Polish-French-German) was also available, as was a Russian legal
dictionary. A reprint of J. Ch. Gottscheds German grammar had an edition
of 3,207 copies, twice as many as the famous Latin grammar of the Jesuit
Manuel lvares.
Belles lettres were represented by new editions of classical texts and a selec-
tion of Polish classics. Cicero, Caesar, Horace, Pliny the Younger, Suetonius, and
Phaedrus were the most frequently printed classical authors. A large edition
of Virgils Aeneid was printed in a cheap version, divided into cantos. Jan
Kochanowskis Wybr przedniejszych rymw [A Selection of the Major Poems]
(1816) is preceded by a list of printed Polish texts. The works of Piotr Skarga
came out in exquisite editions. A complete edition of the works of Ignacy
Krasicki was published, along with the Pieni nabone [Devotional Songs] and
a translation of the Psalms by Franciszek Karpiski. Further, Tassos La
Gerusalemme liberata in Piotr Kochanowskis translation was advertised, along
with many other texts. Polish editions were furnished with patriotic prefaces,
underlining the value and beauty of the Polish language. This position, on the
part of a Catholic college, unsure of its future, in the era of partition, helped to
sustain a sense of Polish national identity.
An interesting occurrence that came immediately after the departure of the
Jesuits from Poock was the theft of several thousand books from the book-
shops stores. Evidently the Jesuits had instilled a mighty love of books within
the local population.
After the tsarist authorities inspection, the books from the bookshop and
the stores were distributed among schools in Belarus. The press, however, was
initially transferred to the Piarists, and then divided up between the local
94 Kadulska
authorities of Vitebsk and Mogilev.22 Finally, in 1833, it was sent to Kiev. The
academys press, however, left behind a strong local tradition in typography. In
present-day Poock, there is a museum of books and printing, quite unique in
its holdings, which bears witness to the achievements of the Jesuit presence in
the town.
Above the bookshop and the press there was a theatrical space. The theater
served both to educate the academys pupils and to build close connec-
tions with an invited public. The productions in Poock took various forms:
ceremonies held in public spaces in the town, performances in the theater,
and theatrical performances in the recreational gardens.23 These included
public ceremonies that were integrated into the liturgy on holy days (for
example, Corpus Christi), that celebrated saints (for example, processions
with the ashes of Andrzej Bobola), declamations, parades, triumphal arches,
emblems, and light shows. These elements were usually included in all public
processions.
Alongside these was the para-theater of secular ceremonialgreeting pow-
erful figures and dignitaries. We have already mentioned the ceremony of
opening the academy. A public, theatricalized element was also part of student
demonstrations of knowledge and debating skill which took place in the
ornate public lecture hall of the school. Here public experiments in phys-
icsand chemistry were conducted, as were debates on European drama (con-
cerning Corneille, Racine, Crbilion, Molire, Regnard, Destouches, Lessing,
Bohomolec, and Bogusawski).
Two theater groupsthe academic theater company and the dormitory
companyperformed here. The stage was furnished with rich scenery that
could be changed as necessary, and also machinery for effects. Most of the
scenery was designed by the Jesuit Gabriel Gruber. As an educational institu-
tion, the theater regarded the recommendations of the Ratio studiorum as fun-
damental and lasting. The authority of the outstanding Jesuit poet Maciej
Kazimierz Sarbiewski held sway. In Poock, at the start of the seventeenth cen-
tury, he held two series of lectures. The textbooks of Joseph de Jouvancy,
Gabriel Le Jay and Charles Pore were much used in the theater at Poock.
The theatrical repertoire was varied and was supervised by the authors
of plays. A first group of dramas consisted of works brought to Poock by
Jesuitwriters. Among these was Francesco Angiolini, the translator of Italian
22 Ms. NHAB Misk 1430 1 50171, k. 2429, k. 33 77v; Ms. ARSI Rzym, Coll. Gaillard, No 6, f.
418420v, f. 470472v.
23 Irena Kadulska, Akademia Poocka. Orodek kultury na Kresach 18121820 (Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Gdaskiego: Gdask, 2004), 122162.
editions of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides. In Poock, he also wrote

several comic works in Polish, of which he had a perfect command.24 Franciszek
Borowski also presented his dramas, reworkings of Metastasios texts. Borowski
was a doctor of theology, who after the suppression of the order studied in
Rome and Paris, and then came to Poock. Karol ukiewski brought to Poock
the manuscript of his tragedy wity Alojzy albo Ludwik Gonzaga (Saint
Aloysius; or, Ludovico Gonzaga), which deals with the life and vocation of the
patron of the Jesuit order. (This play had been performed previously in Danzig
in 1770.)
A second part of the repertoire was created by young writers born in Belarus,
educated in Poock, and who later became teachers there: Nikodem Municki,
Jzef Morelowski, and Jan Mihanowicz. Their texts are neo-classical and follow
the distinguished models of Jesuit drama. Municki published a two-volume
collection entitled Zabawki teatralne (Theatrical Toys) in 1803. He included
three tragedies setting forth religious, patriotic, and moral themes, and also
eight popular comedies. For example, Muzeum fizyczne (The Physics Museum)
shows on stage how experimental subjects were taught in Poock. The carni-
valesque Pogarda nauk (The Despite of Learning) creates a world of inverted
values (the poet is king) and praises poetry and learning. In addition, the out-
standing Hellenist Jan Mihanowicz brought Polish versions of Euripidess
Orestes and The Phoenician Women and Sophocless Oedipus the King into the
repertoire.
A third group of dramas contained revivals of the work of respected
eighteenth-century European dramatists from various provinces of the order.
These included Charles Pore, Gabriel Le Jay, Giovanni Granelli, Agostino Pal
lazi, and Andreas Friz. It is here, among these works, that one can see most
clearly the continuity of the dramatic achievements of Jesuit theater.
The statute of the academy fixed Tuesday and Thursday afternoons as times
of rest. One form of recreation was a trip to the orders property outside the
town, the Spas farm. Here, in a village setting, poetic texts were recited, and
there was singing and music. Recitations were inspired by the life of the col-
lege: visits by guests, the return of members of the community, holiday dishes,
24 Angiolini, Francesco, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome, 1960), 284286;

Sebastiano Ciampi, Bibliografia critica delle antiche reciproche corrispondenze dellItalia
con la Russia, con la Polonia, vol. 1 (Adegi Graphics: Florence, 1834), 8 and 214. In 1783, the
Angiolini brothers arrived in Poock: Francesco, Gaetano, Giuseppe (Luigi did not arrive
until 1784). Only Gaetano returned to Rome, in 1805, where he worked to renew the order.
The remaining three continued to work in Poock, and died there before the expulsion of
the Jesuits (Encyklopedia wiedzy, 11).
96 Kadulska
fishing, and the birthdays of professors and friends. Patriotic songs were also
sung. Many of these recitations have survived in the form of decorated manu-
scripts. These theatrical events in Spas, creating a locus amoenus, made for a
relaxed atmosphere in which students could reveal their talents. It also created
a sense of community and of belonging to the academic world.
In their recollections of the academy, writers often mention a particular
type of theatrical event created by Gabriel Gruber, doctor of medicine, painter,
and mechanic of genius. He had come to Poock from Vienna. This involved
a moving, larger than life, speaking head of Socrates, called the Wooden
Grandfather (Drewniany Dziadek). It was a reflection of the new spirit of the
age, a time of robots and mechanical devices. The Grandfather possessed
knowledge of the future, spoke several languages, and could move. In various
places around the college, he came out from behind the wall and in interac-
tion with the students and pupils answered questions in various languages.
This was a mobile masque, close to performance because of its form, its action,
its active interaction with the spectators, and its use of space. In later work by
graduates of the academy, speaking sculpture became a symbol of the colleges
fate: after its closure it still maintained its spirit and ability to judge the world.25
When one evaluates the theater of the Poock academy, it is necessary to
understand not just its educational and pastoral function, but also how it
established cultural links with the inhabitants of Belarus. It long remained in
the memories of graduates, and kept alive the tradition of Jesuit school drama.
After 1780, the personnel of the college grew, and so did its buildings. In 1788,
a two-story building was constructed linking the press and the main building.
It was used to accommodate a museum. This created an integrated architec-
tural complex: the college, the newly created museum, and the press with its
bookshop and the theater. Nikodem Municki, whom we have already men-
tioned, the poet and author of Historia Albae Russiae Soc. Iesu, described the
museum workshops and the role of Gabriel Gruber in furnishing them. He
also itemized the costs incurred and the general publics appreciation of the
results of his efforts. The inspectors reports give an account of the muse-
umsequipment and holdings, as do students and guests recollections, articles
in the press, and also lists of requisitions.26 Another source is provided by
the volumes of lectures, in which experiments, specimens, models, and equip-
ment are described. The museums high status was a result of the growing
25 Jan Barszczewski, Drewniany Dziadek, Rubon no 8, ed. Kazimierz Bujnicki (Vilnius,

1847), 131175.
26 Ms. ARSI Rzym Coll. Gaillard, sch. 34. No 6f. 323478v; Ms. NHAB Misk F 1430 1 50171 kk.
3037v, 7073, 7885v, 8788; Ms. VUB Wilno F 4 A 652 and F 4 A 4573.
importance of mathematics and the natural sciences in the Jesuit system of

education.
The museum was made up of eight rooms. It consisted of an astronomical
observatory and a celebrated, multi-functional astronomical clock (a pan-
tadeknyon) located in the nearby garden. The first room, a chemistry labora-
tory, was arranged for conducting any kind of experiment and explaining the
underlying scientific principles. The neighboring room was for school exhibi-
tions. The third room was devoted to natural history; its collections were an
introduction to the history of the earth and its nature.
The natural history collection included a mineralogical collection (includ-
ing fossils, shells, a range of metals, minerals and precious stones), a botanical
collection, tables of plants and fruits, specimens from the animal kingdom,
and also albums and anatomical texts. There were, in addition, artistic objects
made of natural materials. Among these were four volumes written on palm
leaves from Malabar dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century. There
was also a valuable desk made out of tortoiseshell. The museums first floor was
occupied by a physics display divided among three rooms decorated with fres-
coes. Here were gathered instruments and devices used in physics, astronomi-
cal instruments, hydrostatic, mechanical, hydraulic, and pneumatic models,
and varieties of electrical apparatus. This part of the museum provides impres-
sive evidence of the high level of the teaching of modern physics, astronomy,
optics, acoustics, applied mathematics, mechanical hydrostatics, hydraulics,
and aerometry. A separate room was filled with a collection of models and
architectural plans of great use in practical training (for example, how to con-
struct a building depending on its function, from the ground up; moving mod-
els; the operation of heating systems, etc).
The corridors of the museum building formed an art gallery, augmented by
portraits of Polish royalty, Jesuit saints, popes, and copies of European paint-
ings, along with other pictures that hung in the offices, libraries, and other cor-
ridors of the academy. In the tsarist inspectors inventory, pictures from the
main church and adjacent parish churches are also included.27
The exhibition room, also part of the museum, served as a venue for public
lectures and demonstrations of student skills and abilities. For example, stu-
dents presented ways of marking the position of the stars, use of the compass,
calculating the azimuth, and climatic and astronomical phenomena (of use in
navigation). There was much focus on science related to electricity, galvanic
27 Ms. NHAB Misk F 1430 1 50171; k. 83; Ms. VUB Wilno F 4 24565 (A 652): poz. 917; ibi-
dem: 24605; M. Kaamajska-Saeed, Losy wyposaenia kocioa Jezuitw w Poocku, Ms. ATJ
Kr. 4475.
98 Kadulska
theory, steam engines, and freezing. Exhibitions were announced in the local
press and in printed programs.
As mentioned above, the buildings were initially transferred to the Piarists
in 1822, and after their departure and removal, a cadet school was installed
there in 1831. A military academy now occupied a college inspired by a European
spirit and outlook. The continuity of a Polish educational institution that had
operated for 240 years was interrupted. During this period, the Poock college
was a model of how the Jesuit order could function, a model that gave Catholics
substantial support and a feeling of community. It built links with townsfolk
and local landowners. Every year it drew to it hundreds of students and gradu-
ates. The town derived economic impetus, the prestige of a university, and ben-
efited from its charitable activities. The multi-national group of professors
gathered there transmitted Latin culture and what can be broadly understood
as the culture of the West.
The tsars decree expelling the Jesuits from Russia was read aloud in Poock
on Holy Tuesday, March 13, 1820, and it was implemented without delay.28
The people of Poock who once, in 1580, were reluctant to accept Piotr
Skarga and other emissaries of Ignatius Loyola in their midst, now, as they
bade farewell to the order in 1820, demonstrated their deep attachment to the
Jesuits, and universally expressed their regret at the passing of the towns glory
along with the departure of the Jesuits.
In the many images of the farewells given to the academys professors by the
people of Poock, descriptions recur of the peoples tears as their carriages
departed under guard. In them, the professors stand with heads uncovered
silently blessing those gathered around.29 In his account of the departure, one
student, Otto lizie, recalled the weeping crowd lifting clods of earth from the
ruts under the departing carriages, and scattering the earth between the pages
of devotional books. The earth was intended as a reminder of the role played
by members of the Society of Jesus in the communitys educational and spiri-
tual life.
28 J.N. Galicz, Wygnaniec z Biaej Rusi pisany w R[oku] P[askim] 1821 w Mont-Morilionie we
Francji, Ms. ATJ Kr. 662.
29 Otto lizie, Z pamitnika Rodziny liniw.
chapter 6
Sebastian Sierakowski, S.J. and the Language of

Architecture
A Jesuit Life during the Era of Suppression and Restoration
Carolyn C. Guile*
The Jesuit architect Sebastian Sierakowski (17431824) was thirty years old
when the Jesuit order was dissolved in 1773. He was also a witness to the sys-
tematic dismantling, known as partitions, of the Polish-Lithuanian common-
wealth by the ascendant powers of Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1772, 1793,
and 1795. While holding a post as custodian of the crown inventory, Sierakowski
was repeatedly interrogated by Russian, Prussian, and Austrian authorities
about the contents and whereabouts of the treasury. Sierakowski refused to
talk. Legend has it that with his intimate knowledge of the Wawel subterra-
nean passageways leading to the royal vault, Sierakowski and the painter
Micha Stachowicz (17681825) absconded with the royal insignia, saving it
from Austrian hands during the 1795 occupation.1
Sierakowskis patriotism took many forms. He was an intimate of the circle
that produced the 3 May 1791 constitution and in 1817 he was the designer of a
grand monument honoring his compatriot Tadeusz Kociuszko, leader of the
failed 1794 insurrection. He aligned himself with those who blamed the coun-
trys dissolution on the weakness of the commonwealths elected kingship. His
undertakings in architectural design and theoretical writing took shape at a
moment in the late-eighteenth-century commonwealth when the permanence
of statehood was elusive, and when heated debates about the nature and pro-
cess of reform took shape; as a Jesuit and, after the dissolution, as a Freemason2
he drew upon his foundations in shaping his educational philosophy, serving
the commonwealth, and directing those efforts to restorative ends after the
* I wish to thank the Colgate University Research Council for generous funding support and
the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (hecca) Publication Subvention
Grant. I would also like to express my gratitude to: the editors, Robert Maryks and Jonathan
Wright; Pawe Styrna; Anna Graff and the staff at the Jagiellonian University Library, Cracow;
and David Frick.
1 Polski Sownik Biograficzny, vol. 37 (Warsaw and Cracow: Zakad Narodowy Imienia
Ossoliskich Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 19961997), 295.
2 Ibid., 294.

100 Guile
political catastrophes of the 1790s. It is interesting that his architectural writ-

ings aimed to establish his conviction that government resources, through the
sponsorship of education, should play an important part in the elevation of
the citizenrys quality of life. As a guiding principle, he held that the nobility,
through the application of that education as well as the efficacious and moral
allocation of its resources, bore the responsibility of setting an example to oth-
ers through the improvement of the built environment. Durable, useful, and
tasteful architecture gave rise, he held, to dignity itself; its lessons, therefore,
must be understood and disseminated for the benefit of all. The most tangible
and practical way to do this, he believed, was via the introduction of architec-
ture into formal educational curricula:
Let the Government lend courageous assistance, let it desire that the
study of Architecture becomes part of general education, and it shall
soon notice the results stemming from this []. [T]he country would be
resurrected through its buildings []. For it is a certain thing based on
numerous experiences, that a structure built properly according to a plan
by a skilled [architect] costs just as much if not less than one built any
which way by any which artisans.3
Architectural education therefore also made good economic sense; architec-

ture itself was a matter of national survival andimportantlyrestoration.
This essay introduces Sierakowskis architectural writings and discusses his
ideas about the relationship between national restoration and an architectural
practice grounded in the lessons of the past. It takes into account his politi-
cal activity and situation, the values he embraced and promoted, and his
approaches to building in order to situate within architectural history his two-
volume Architektura obejmujca wszelki gatunek murowania i budowania
[Architecture, including every type of masonry and building] which he pub-
lished at his own expense in 1812. While Sierakowski claimed that his work was
the first of its kind to be published in the Polish language, it also belongs to a
growing discourse on architecture articulated among his associates during the
era of the commonwealths last king, Stanisaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764
1795). His work is not an anomalous event in the literature on architecture, but
is rather a product of discussions about the relationship between architecture
and national survival in the 1770s, and is an important byproduct of reform-era
activities under the aegis of the Commission of National Education, whose
3 Sebastian Sierakowski, Architektura obejmujca wszelki gatunek murowania i budowania, vol.

1 (Cracow, 1812), Przedmowa [Preface].
Sebastian Sierakowski, S.j. And The Language Of Architecture 101
many members were ex-Jesuits. Only under the last reign before the partition
of Poland, when attempts to reform government intensified, when the seed
cast by the Educational Commission began to grow, he wrote, did it become
evident that the genius of Poland, as in the case of other disciplines, had a
particular predisposition towards Architecture as well.4 It may be that the
discipline of architecture lent itself especially well to the post-suppression
condition in which Sierakowski found himself. For him, the universality of
architectural knowledge appears to have transcended the vicissitudes of poli-
tics. While the precise impact of the suppression on his work remains to be
determined definitively, a consideration of his architectural activity offers
an example of how one Jesuit was able to adapt his work within a post-
suppression climate, and to promote his educational and social values through
the language of architecture. Adaptation to the new conditions through disci-
plines that were of great interest to Jesuits, but which were not their exclu-
sivedomain, constituted a mode of productive survival; as the partitions took
place, Sierakowski joined his efforts with those of other ex-Jesuits, members of
religious orders, and public intellectuals whose shared goals were reconstruc-
tive and increasingly national in nature.
Like other early modern Polish-language writers on art and architecture,
Sebastian Sierakowski is virtually unknown outside Polish circles.5 Sierakowski
was not only a Jesuit and an architect, but also a statesman who served his
fatherland in a variety of posts.6 He entered the Society of Jesus on 12 August
1759 at the age of sixteen, becoming a novice in the fortified town of Ostrg, in
the region of Volhynia (today located in western Ukraine). A Jesuit Collegium
Nobilium was established there in 1751 with its own professors and curriculum;
architecture was likely taught there.7 Time spent in Lww (Lviv), where he
4 Ibid.
5 This is true of early modern Polish and East European architecture and architectural theory
in general. Hanno-Walter Krufts important volume, A History of Architectural Theory from
Vitruvius to the Present (London: Zwemmer, 1994) does not mention Polish developments.
6 The most important and thorough account of Sierakowskis work as an architect and theorist
remains Jzef Lepiarczyks Dziaalno Architektoniczna Sebastiana Sierakowskiego, Projekty
klasycystyczne i neogotyckie (Cracow: Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagielloskiego, 1968)
and also his Wczesna dziaalno Sebastiana Sierakowskiego, projekty barokowe, 17691775,
Prace z Historii Sztuki 9 (Cracow: Nakadem Uniwersytetu Jagielloskiego, 1971): 199229.
7 Jerzy Paszenda, Nauczanie architektury w szkoach jezuickich XVIII wieku, in Wkad
jezuitw do nauki i kultury w Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodw i pod zaborami, ed. Irena
Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa (Cracow: Wydawnictwo wam, 2004), 386. Following the Union of
Lublin in 1569 the town of Ostrg had become the seat of two prominent Polish noble
families, the Ostrowski and then the Lubomirski; Cossacks ravaged the town during the
102 Guile
undertook the study of philosophy in 17612 and mathematics in 17645, was

also seminal; Sierakowski remained in Lww until the dissolution of the Jesuit
order in 1773 and the subsequent closure of the Jesuit academy there. He then
relocated to Cracow where, over the course of his long career, he flourished as
an architect, served as a canon at Cracow cathedral, acquired the position of
custodian of the crown treasury, served as the rector of the Central School in
Cracow, and also became a senator in the Free City of Cracow during the time
of the Congress Kingdom. Early architectural projects show his interest in the
restoration of national buildings and monuments; across his career his rever-
ence for Italianate architectural forms and principles became more pro-
nounced. In 1777, he directed conservation work on the Sigismund chapel at
Wawel cathedral, where it has been said that his ideas helped preserve the sty-
listic tenor of the Renaissance decorations.8 In contrast, Sierakowskis drawing
dated from 1788 showing his design for the renovation of the Wawel cathedral
faade (Fig.6.1) is wholly Italianate and Palladian in flavor.9 In this sense, he
showed a willingness to abandon past forms and earlier styles in order to bring
greater formal coherence and a contemporary architectural vocabulary to
Wawels medieval faade. This project was influenced directly by Stanisaw
Kostka Potocki and Piotr Aigners design of 17868 for the faade of the
Chmielnicki Uprising in 1648, burning down the first Jesuit church there. Reconstruction
began around 1660, and the new Baroque complex was completed in 1736. On the Jesuits in
Ostrg see Jerzy Paszenda, Architektura kolegium jezuitw w Ostrogu, in Jerzy Paszenda,
Budowle jezuickie w Polsce, vol. 2 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo wam, 2000), 305334; Andrzej Betlej,
Niech przyjdzie tu Witruwiusz wraz ze swoim nastpcami. Kilka uwag na temat kocioa
Jezuitw w Ostrogu, Roczniki Humanistyczne kul. Historia Sztuki 54 (2006): 189224.
8 The restoration project is mentioned briefly in psb, 37, 293; see also Jzef Lepiarczyk and
Bolesaw Przybyszewski, Katedra na Wawelu w wieku XVIII. Zmiany jej wygldu architek-
tonicznego i urzdzenia wntrz na podstawie bada historyczno-archiwalnych, in Sztuka
Baroku, eds. Marcin Fabiaski, Adam Bochnak, and Jzef Lepiarczyk (Cracow: Wydawnictwo
Klubu Inteligencji Katolickiej, 1991), 2132. Recent scholarship on the Sigismund Chapel does
not treat these restorations in depth. See Stanisaw Mossakowski, King Sigismund Chapel at
Cracow Cathedral, 15151533 (Cracow: irsa, 2012).
9 For the collaboration between Aigner and Potocki, see most recently Jolanta Polanowska,
Stanisaw Kostka Potocki, 17551821: twrczo architekta, amatora, przedstawiciela neoklasy-
cyzmu i nurtu picturesque (Warsaw: Instytut Sztuki pan, 2009), 7577, 192195, 212216
and passim; see also Tadeusz Jaroszewski, Chrystian Piotr Aigner, architect warszawskiego
klasycysmu (Warsaw: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970); Stanisaw Lorentz and
Andrzej Rottermund, Klasycyszm w Polsce (Warsaw: Arkady, 1984); and Stanisaw Lorentz,
Dziaalno Stanisawa Kostki Potockiego w dziedzinie architektury, Rocznik Historii Sztuki
(1956): 450497.
Figure6.1 Project for the renovation of the faade of Wawel Cathedral. Elevation and
plan. Sebastian Sierakowski, 1788. Signed: d 18 Aug: 1788 przez X. Seb. A
Sierakowskiego kan/on/i/ka krak. Projekt Reformy Facyaty Kocioa Kathed.
Krakows. 1788. Ink drawing on paper, 47.3 30.3 cm
Photo: Graphics Collection, Jagiellonian Library, Cracow, Poland
104 Guile
Benedictine church of St. Anne in Warsaw, itself inspired by Palladios late-

sixteenth century faades of Il Redentore and San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.
When taken as a group over the span of his career, the nature and variety of
Sierakowskis extant drawings and projects demonstrate a certain degree of
experimentation with what conventionally might be called baroque, rococo
and neoclassical forms (for example, the neoclassical design for the colon-
naded presbytery executed for the St. Augustine church at the cloister complex
of the Premonstratensian nuns in Cracow, 1777), as well as with elements of
French classicism. But Sierakowskis oeuvre was governed neither by a consis-
tent or specific confessional approach to architecture (such as a Jesuit style,
the existence of which is a matter of heated scholarly controversy), nor by an
absolute adherence to a single stylistic period language. On a formal level
Sierakowskis projects, which survive in numerous drawings housed at the
Jagiellonian University library in Cracow, might be best understood in relation
to the translation of continental approaches to Latinate architecture and of
theoretical convention within a regional context. It should also be remem-
bered that as a resident of cities such as Ostrg and Lww, in the easternmost
territories of the commonwealth, Sierakowski would have been exposed to
a mixed confessional landscape where the presence of the Roman Catholic,
Greek Catholic (Uniate), Protestant, and Orthodox faiths produced a builtenvi
ronment that was typologically and morphologically varied. In that sense the
relative conservatism of his classicism stands out and suggests a desire both for
formal cohesion and for an alignment with visual expression associated with
Latinate architectural practice. In a state that lacked a long-standing native
tradition of architectural writing andas European travelers had often
notedwhere the type and condition of the built environment was wildly var-
ied, Sierakowskis ambition to impart to his countrymen a classicizing formal
language grounded in an engagement with Vitruvian principles is overtly
reconstructive and reformist in tenor.
One of Sierakowskis designs conceived prior to the dissolution of the Jesuit
order, a church in Lww dated 1772, exhibits formal relationships to earlier, sig-
nificant Jesuit buildings (Fig.6.2); that project loosely shares a formal vocabu-
lary with the faade of Il Ges in Rome, orcloser to home and itself related to
the Roman prototypeto the church of Saints Peter and Paul in Cracow (con-
secrated in 1635; Fig.6.3). Here, Sierakowski balanced formal clarity and the use
of minimal ornament to yield a tempered, symmetrical faade articulated with
a giant order; the bays of the first-story screen emanate from a pedimented
central portal with Doric capitals; scroll forms on the second story, evocative of
those that mask the transition between nave and aisles at Il Ges, are capped
with urns. These act as visually rhetorical parentheses to the semi-circular
Figure6.2 Project for a church with a single nave and two rows of chapels. Elevation. Sebastian
Sierakowski. Signed: Leopoli d 26 Jan 1772. Inv: Delin: Archit: Seb. Al: Sierakowski
SJ. Ink drawing and watercolor on paper, 46 35 cm
106 Guile
Figure6.3 Jesuit church of SS. Peter and Paul, Cracow. Giovanni de Rossis, Jzef Britius,
Giovanni Trevano. 15971619, consecrated 1635
Photo: Author
pediment whose line is broken by a cross marking the faades highest point.
The ground plan reveals a spacious three-bayed nave flanked on each side by
contained chapels arranged en filade to form a clear path for circumambula-
tion around the nave. Other projects such as his idea for a Greek-cross church
whose faade effectively masks the plan, bears two towers that evoke those
commonly used in Roman-Catholic faade designs elsewhere in the realm such
as Wilno (Vilnius) and Cracow (e.g. the basilica of St. Michael Archangel,
Cracow, whose faade dates from c.1762). The bell tower (Fig.6.4) Sierakowski
designed for the church of St. Anne in Cracow on St. Annes street, not far from
the Royal Route that connected the citys center with the Wawel castle and
cathedral complex, responds visually to the tower nad Kapitularzem (over
the chapter house) on Wawel cathedral, dating from 1715 (Fig.6.5). Sierakowskis
early sacral designs recall forms related to morphologies embraced during the
Counter-Reformationa Latin cross plan with a substantial nave and a clear
organization of spatial hierarchiesas translated into the European border-
lands; at the same time they respond to the local architectural landscape.10
Sierakowskis projects also included designs for palaces, villas, gates, wells,
tombs, public monuments (such as for Copernicus and Kociuszko), garden
pavilions in the Chinese and Turkish styles, and theaters. His plans for the ren-
ovations of Cracows Sukiennice, or Cloth Hall, the theaters in Szczepaski
Square and in the Old Town Square, as well as for the Ratusz, or town hall,
begun from about 1815, reveal his desire for a greater visual unification of the
citys major monuments according to sixteenth-century Italianate styles
plans which, had they been realized, would have resulted in a very different
architectural landscape for Cracow than that seen today. Drawings for the pro-
posed renovations of the Sukiennice from the period 18181822 (Fig.6.6) regu-
larize the entire ground-floor loggia and portals in a manner that, when seen
from their long sides, evokes the austere rhythms of Michelangelos faades on
the Capitoline hill in Rome; but within the same group of designs, he also pro-
posed an alternative which would maintain the Gothic character of the struc-
ture, both in order to preserve visual concordance with the architecture of the
neighboring town hall, and to preserve its original Gothic conception.11 In a
10 Consideration of the designs for these towers and other related projects suggests that the
influence on Sierakowski of the Dresden Baroque as represented in the works by Italian
architects Gaetano Chiaveri (16891770) and Francesco Placidi (c.17151782), both of
whom worked in Dresden before arriving in Poland, remains to be explored.
11 Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Jagielloskiego, ir 1014. For an explication of this and related
drawings see Lepiarczyk, Dziaalno architektoniczna Sebastiana Sierakowskiego, 2223
and ill. 7681.
108 Guile
Figure6.4 Southeast bell tower, Collegiate Church of St. Anne, Cracow. Sebastian Sierakowski.
1775
Photo: Author
Figure6.5 Clock Tower Over the Chapter House (r; dome 1715) and Sigismund Tower
(l; dome 1899), Wawel Cathedral. Cracow
Photo: Author
completely different vein, he also designed the renovation of the wooden

church of St. Adalbert in Dobro (near d; 177679); similarly, his plans and
elevations for an octagonal wooden chapel (of unspecified location) recall
vernacular sacral architecture in the borderlands of the commonwealth
(Fig.6.7); plans for the parish church in Pleszw (a suburb of Krakw) show a
classically-inspired faade surmounted by a belfry whose roofline and form
evoke regional wooden Latin church design.12 These projects underline
Sierakowskis broad interests in, and sensitivity to, local architectures, histori-
cal traditions, and custom, i.e. a regional proclivity for wood construction in a
sacral context, even when other more durable materials may have been avail-
able.13 These are but a few examples of the kinds of projects one can find in a
corpus of hundreds of extant drawings, chosen for the range of approaches
they embody and for what they reveal about the nature of Sierakowskis
dispositions.
12 Biblioteka Uniwersytetu Jagielloskiego, ir 999. See Lepiarczyk, Dziaalno architekton-

iczna Sebastiana Sierakowskiego, 13, 14.
13 See Adam Miobdzki, Architecture in Wood: Technology, Symbolic Content, Art,
Artibus et Historiae 10/19 (1989): 177206.
110 Guile
Figure6.6 Elevation of the short side and transverse elevation of the Cloth Hall (Sukiennice).
Sebastian Sierakowski. Inscription: La Faade des Pavilions; Par respect pour le
Grand Casimir Roi de Pologne pour conserver le gout du Siecle, et eterniser la
memoire de ce Prince, qui pendent la disette, pour soulager le people, a fait eriger,
ce grand batiment; Lubo faciata gotycka, nie iest stosowana do architektury
Rzymskie[j] zachowana iednak w swoiey cao[ci] z przyczyn, e cay rodek
Sukiennic iest gotycki. Pozostaa Monumentu takiego, od wiekow przez krla
zbudowanego, Pamitka zachowana byd powinna. Watercolor and ink on paper,
35.8 46.5 cm
The dissolution of the Jesuit order necessitated the reinvention of Jesuit

endeavors, resulting in changes in custodianship of Jesuit churches and
schoolsby other orders, reallocation of resources, and the welcoming of Jesuit
priests and scholars within commonwealth institutions at least prior to the
partitions.14 Another important facet of Sierakowskis career was his deep
14 For a list of the main modifications to public schools during the period 17731792 see
Ambroise Jobert, La Commission dEducation Nationale en Pologne (17731794) (Dijon:
Impr. de Darantire, 1941), Appendix V.
Figure6.7 Octagonal wooden chapel; plan, section, elevation. Sebastian Sierakowski. n.d.
Watercolor and ink on paper, 22.4 52.7 cm
involvement with the Polish educational agenda that emerged during the 1730s
and 1740s, associated with the activities of the Piarist Stanisaw Konarski
(17001773) and the brief reign of King Stanisaw Leszczyski (r. 173336).15
Like many Jesuits (for example, the writer Grzegorz Piramowicz; the historian,
translator, and publicist, Jan Chrzciciel Albertrandi; and the astronomer and
physicist Andrzej Gawroski, among others), Sierakowski was active in the
National Commission for Education [Komisja Edukacji Narodowej] founded in
1773 during Poniatowskis reign, and in connection with Jesuit and Piarist edu-
cational programs.16 Ex-Jesuits were among the members central to its mission
in the years following the dissolution of the order, and one can speak of the
survival or translation of the orders goals and ethos within the commissions
milieu. The Piarists emerged as its leaders, and it is interesting that the design
for the Piarist church of the Transfiguration in Cracow, the faade of which was
designed by Francesco Placidi in 17591761, was loosely inspired by designs for
Il Ges; quadrature painting by the Bohemian painter Franz Eckstein dating
from the 1730s and reminiscent of the work of Andrea Pozzo adorns the vault
of the nave. Monuments such as this with which Sierakowski would have been
familiar serve as a reminder of the wide circulation and embrace of Italianate
15 See ibid., 30164.

16 Bronisaw Natoski SJ, ,Jezuici a Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, in Z Dziejw Szkolnictwa
Jezuickiego w Polsce, ed. Jerzy Paszenda (Cracow: Wydawnictwo wam, 1994), 210240.
Originally published in Roczniki Humanistyczne tn kul 25/2 (1977): 6598. The literature
on the Commission of National Education is extensive; among others, see Jzef Lewicki,
Geneza Komisji Edukacji Narodowej, studium historyczne (Warsaw: Ksinica Polska, 1923)
and Ambroise Jobert, La Commission dEducation Nationale en Pologne (17731794).
112 Guile
approaches to architecture and representation in the region. (Figs.6.8 and 6.9).

It was within the National Commission for Educations milieu and its subse-
quent transmogrifications after the partitions that Sierakowskis architectural
writings took shape. His active membership within the commissions Society
for Elementary Textbooks (Towarzystwo Ksig Elementarnych) from 17781792,
also populated by ex-Jesuits, and his close professional and personal relations
with two important Enlightenment-era figures within itStanisaw Kostka
Potocki (17551821) and Ignacy Potocki (17501809)17provided fertile ground
and fundamental inspiration for the development of the Architektura.
Sierakowski worked on the project for over a decade and, completing it under
the aegis of the duchy of Warsaw, dedicated it to Napoleon.
The Architektura stands as a national work written in a spirit of optimism
about the possibility of national rebirth; plate XIII in volume II (Fig. 6.10)
depicts a study for a column with capitals ornamented with the Polish white
eagle. In his dedication, Sierakowski did not restrain his enthusiasm for, and
confidence in, the emperors beneficence and leadership.18 One of his stated
goals was to use his native language deliberately to advance his educative,
patriotic mission:
The publication I have undertaken of a Work on Building, or Architecture

in the national language, is the result of my desire to render a public ser-
vice and to broaden the Nations enlightenment in this subject, which in
the most glorious periods of Polish letters was heretofore untouched.19
At the end of the second volume, he included a glossary of Greek and Latin
architectural terms with translations into Polish. He confessed in the introduc-
tion that in spite of the efforts and labors I undertook to render the entire
treatise only in Polish words, I was unable to accomplish that goal. Because
there were no native equivalents for these terms, he added that such an effort
could easily turn into a joke.20 Like preceding authors in other languages, he
17 This association is mentioned in Jolanta Polanowska, Stanisaw Kostka Potocki, 17551821:

twrczo architekta, amatora, przedstawiciela neoklasycyzmu i nurtu picturesque, 163.
18 Provoked by example, warmed by the need to be useful for the Fatherland, and most
importantly, having been supported and encouraged by the gracious permission of YOUR
ROYAL MAJESTY, My Beloved Lord, I repay a debt from the modest potential of my
Fatherlands society, let it also be an homage that, along with myself and this work, I ren-
der at the base of YOUR Throne. Sierakowski, 1:1.
19 Ibid., Przedmowa [Preface].
20 Ibid.
Figure6.8 Piarist church of the Transfiguration, faade. Cracow. Francesco Placidi. 175961
Photo: Author
114 Guile
Figure6.9 Piarist church of the Transfiguration, nave. Cracow. Franz Eckstein, 1733
Photo: Author
decided to retain Greek and Latin terminology, but offered his glossary for
those purists who insisted on Polish equivalents.
Promoting an education to Polands noble youth that would both impart
skills to serve the nation and provide the moral imperative to acquire them,
Sierakowski sought formally to introduce architecture as a discreet curricu-
lar discipline; traditionally, if it were studied at all, it would be confined
within departments of mathematics. Proclaiming that at the academies of
Cracow and Wilno [t]he raising of Polish youths based on the principles of
the Commission of Education has broadened enlightenment so successfully,
even in the deepest of sciences, that for citizens of every class and of upper
and lower standing, [education] started to become universal,21 he declared
that because the practice of architecture brings benefits and beauty to the
country, it should not be neglected.22 The text, as he made clear, could not
have emerged without a necessary engagement with the lessons of past writ-
ers. Sierakowskis architectural sources shared a common engagement with
Vitruvius, the author of the only extant architectural treatise from the Western
ancient world and to whom most European architectural theoretical writing
refered to as a standard from the fifteenth century forward.23 In dividing his
work into the Vitruvian triad treating Beauty, Comfort, and Durability as
separate categories of evaluation, he also cleaved to the theoretical conven-
tions of writers such as Francesco Milizia on whose Principi di architettura
civile [Principles of Civil Architecture] he drew.24
Using foreign architectural theoretical tracts from within the Vitruvian canon
and adapting their contents to a Polish audience, Sierakowskis writing also
continued the line of inquiry embodied in projects begun and formalized by
other public intellectuals and architectural amateurs such as Ignacy and
Stanisaw Kostka Potocki, who had close contacts with professional architec-
tural practitioner-theorists (such as Piotr Aigner, and Ferdynand Nax, the latter
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Ingrid D. Rowland, Thomas Noble Howe, and Michael Dewar, Vitruvius, Ten Books on
Architecture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
24 For a discussion of Sierakowskis theoretical sources see Leszek Olszowski, Ksigozbir
ks. Sebastiana Sierakowskiego SJ i jego Opus vitae: architektura obejmuica wszelki
gatunek morowania i budowania, Analecta Cracoviensia 43 (2011): 329340. I thank
Robert Maryks and Jonathan Wright for bringing this source to my attention. For a brief
consideration of Sierakowskis place within Polish architectural theoretical writings
see Zygmunt Mieszkowski, Podstawowe Problemy Architektury w Polskich Traktatach od
Poowy XVI do pocztku XIX w. (Warsaw: Pastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1970), 2122.
116 Guile
of whom had also written a glossary of Polish, Latin, and Greek architectural
terms)25 and who were also exploring the connection between national prog-
ress, reform, and the knowledge of architecture. Though he did not mention it
by name, his own text bears a marked similarity to that of Ignacy Potocki, the
Uwagi o architekturze [Remarks on Architecture], written around 1780 within
the context of the work of the Society for Elementary Textbooks, and copied in
manuscript for dissemination.26 Sierakowskis indebtedness to Stanisaw Kostka
Potocki, who encouraged him to publish the work, is an important aspect of the
Architekturas genesis.27 Potocki, as Sierakowskis mentor in architectural mat-
ters, had been hard at work articulating his position on the central importance
of an architectural education to Polands youth. Sierakowski explained that he
was part of the group invited to Potockis residence to collaborate and share
their ideas: [I]t was in His House and under His leadership that these meetings,
to which I had the honor of being invited, commenced.28 That this activity
began before the tumultuous period of the four year Sejm (17881792) is sug-
gested by Sierakowskis acknowledgement that, unfortunately, this work was of
necessity interrupted by the need to attend to urgent political matters.29 Polish-
language writing and the improvement of the Polish language was itself of great
importance to Potocki; the appropriation of the history of art and architecture
for the Polish language in his view would enable Poles to take their rightful place
among European collectors, amateur architects, and connoisseurs, and allow
them to participate in dialogues centered on establishing unequivocal notions
of beauty, on arriving at a definitive understanding of the progress of cultures
and their histories over time, and establishing connections between regionalism
25 Ferdynand Nax, Tabela Terminw Architektonicznych, Biblioteka Uniwersytetu

Warszawskiego, Gabinet Rycin, Zb. Krol., 186/2, Warsaw.
26 Ignacy Potocki, Uwagi o Architekturze, Archiwum Publiczne Potockich, 278, Archiwum
Gwne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw. See Carolyn C. Guile, Ignacy Potockis Remarks on Architecture
The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland (Pennsylvania State up, forthcoming in
2015).
27 Polski Sownik Biograficzny, vol. 37 (Warsaw and Cracow: Zakad Narodowy Imienia
Ossoliskich and Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 19961997), 296.
28 Sierakowski, vol. 1, Przedmowa [Preface].
29 More important matters for the Fatherland during the final session of the Parliament
at times tore away our Chairman, and the partitioning of the Fatherland did not allow
[him] to again take up the effort. Sierakowski, 1:10. For Potockis position on the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealths political crisis see Stanisaw Kostka Potocki, Penses sur la
Rformation Gnrale du Gouvernement de Pologne, par Mr. LeComte Stanislas Potocki
Chevalier des Ordres de Pologne, Nonce du Palatinat de Lublin, Varsovie 1789, Biblioteka
Narodowa w Warszawie, Oddzia Rekopisw Specjalnych, W.1.3791.
and the faculties of judgment. The addition of the Polish voices to these sources,
they held, legitimized Polands status as a civilized nation utilizing the arts and
their tenets to national ends, alongside other Christian nations for whom the
classical tradition was seminal.
The context of language and education reform had been a prerogative of King
Stanisaw August Poniatowski, and the general consensus in learned circles was
that Poles did not read enough and did not publish sufficiently in their native lan-
guage. Newspapers such as the Warsaw Monitor, sponsored by the crown and pub-
lished between 1765 and 1785, printed letters, satire, and rhetorical exercises
directed toward the promotion of reading and of education in the commonwealth.
An essay entitled, About the Poverty of Writers in Poland, lamented the state of
the Polish language, discussing the difficulty of both procuring and publishing
Polish books on account of the fact that there was so little demand for them.
Who, here in our country, especially of the higher class, reads books written in the
mother tongue? The authors indictment of Polish taste was unforgiving:
Crap written abroad is worth more here than the most useful works writ-
ten in Poland. Anything that is Polish is not in our taste. As soon as a book
in Polish is published, it is ridiculed even though it is not read by anyone
and no one knows what it contains. It is a great fortune if anyone even
reads the title.30
The editors reply is worth quoting at length:
I agree with the validity of your sorrow. I lament the bad fortune of our
age. We all know about the need for education, we profess our love for it,
but that love lives only in mouths []. We, who show off our love of stud-
ies, we who are smart at home, we will not even ever buy out that handful
of books that is printed within our borders. [] Can there be a better
proof that studies have been neglected in Poland more than in any other
European nation? If we spent one hundredth on books of what we spend
on hounds, drunkenness, and ungodly pleasures, we would soon have
beautiful libraries. [] A Pole should first invest in Polish books, our lan-
guages imperfections should not scare him away from that. [] For the
same reason we should encourage our countrymen to write in Polish so
that we can enrich and improve our language.31
30 Franciszek Bohomolec? (Pseudo Literackie), O Biedzie Autorw w Polsce, Monitor Nr.

72, 9 IX 1767.
31 Ibid.
118 Guile
In the post-partition period, another of Sierakowskis associates, Prince Adam

Kazimierz Czartoryski, also connected with the Monitor, underlined the role of
the native language as the most important unifying element and guarantor of
the continuity of tradition for a broken country in his tract, Myli o pismach
polskich [Thoughts on Polish Writing]. Ultimately, the cultivation of Polish
would be seen as requisite for citizens in all areas of social, political, and cul-
tural life, and Sierakowskis remarks about the necessity of producing a book
on architecture in the Polish language should be seen within this context and
in relation to this perceived endemic problem. In this way, the Architektura
should not be seen as an anomalous feature on the landscape of Polish letters,
but as situated amongst the like-minded endeavors of his contemporaries and
close associates united under the imperative of national cultural revival.
Discussions taking place at the turn of the century in the arena of the
Towarzystwo Przyjaci Nauk [Society of Friends of Learning], established
in 1801 and of which Stanisaw Kostka Potocki was a founding member, also
forged the connections between the arts and national regeneration, for exam-
ple in Stanisaw Kostka Potockis project, O sztuce u dawnych, czyli Winkelman
Polski [On the Art of the Ancients, or the Polish Winckelmann].32 Sierakowski
became an honorary member of the society in 1815 and in the same year he
assumed his senatorial post.33 It was after this time and in his capacity as sena-
tor that he began to draught the projects for the restoration and renovation of
the key Cracow monuments described earlier.
What of the Jesuit content of Sierakowskis text, and the role that his back-
ground may have played in its formulation? In the absence of explicit lan-
guageconnecting these two ideas, we can point toward his awareness of other
Jesuit undertakings in the realm of architecture. Citing Stanisaw Solskis folio
printed in 1683 under the title, Geometry and the Polish Architect, which
also included information on mechanics and hydraulics,34 Sierakowski noted
Solskis admirable and deep grasp of mathematics, and his offering of that
32 Potocki presented the introduction at a public meeting of the Society in 1803, and
published the full text in 1815. See Carolyn C. Guile, Winckelmann in Poland: An
Eighteenth-Century Response to the History of the Art of Antiquity, 9/CCG1, Journal of
Art Historiography 9, December 2013, 124 [http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/
2013/12/guile.pdf].
33 See Alicja Kulecka, Magorzata Osiecka and Dorota Zamojska, Ktrzy nauki, cnot,
Ojczyzn kochajznani i nieznani czonkowie Towarszystwa Krlewskiego Warszawskiego
Przyjaci Nauk (Warsaw: Archiwum Polskiej Akademii Nauk and Archiwum Gwne Akt
Dawnych, 2000), 269270.
34 See Stanisaw Solski, Architekt Polski: to jest nauka ulenia wszelkich ciarw, eds. Jzef
Burszta and Czesaw uczak (Wrocaw: Zakad narodowy imienia Ossoliskich, 1959).
knowledge to his homeland. Although admirable for its discussion of the five
orders and its ideas concerning sacral architecture, Bartolomiej Wzowskis
seventeenth-century work, composed during the reign of King Jan III Sobieski
(r. 167496), was published in Latin; few could access it, making it relatively
useless to a general public. Furthermore, he continued, the illustrations were
for the most part illegible, and one could not easily grasp their meaning.35
Sierakowski both inherited and sought to expand beyond those works,
approaching his project in the spirit of Vitruvian thoroughness with regard
to firmitas, utilitas, and venustas. Importantly, the Architektura promised to
impart knowledge whose fruit would include the very buildings necessary for
the propagation of parish education housed within it, and deemed this mis-
sion the responsibility of government, as will be discussed further. Its intellec-
tual underpinnings followed from the classical Vitruvian tradition, but what
was new was that the benefits could now be universal in application. He sin-
gled out Bartolommeo Berreccis work at the Sigismund chapel at Wawel
cathedral, the palace at Wilanw (formerly the property of Jan III Sobieski
and in Sierakowskis day, the residence of Stanisaw Kostka Potocki), designed
by Agostino Locci. However, he added, [t]he buildings erected under the
Sigismunds retained traces of their good taste and good will, but these small
lights were growing dim for good taste and learning were not widely dissemi-
nated.36 The eighteenth-century Polish architects, Stanisaw Zawadzki, Jakub
Kubicki, Jan Chrystian Kamsetzer, and Johann Christoph Glaubitz in Wilno
were, for Sierakowski, especially worthy of praise.37
The Architektura gave Sierakowski a forum to air his complaints about the
poor state of rural building in the lands of the former commonwealth; the rela-
tionship of those architectural conditions to social and moral life; the prece-
dents, influences, and sources from which he drew in composing his work; and
the importance of introducing continental, theoretical ideas on architecture in
his native language to vastly increase that literatures efficacy. Knowledge
would yield improvement:
When I speak of universalization, I wish that this be understood not only

as referring to Citizens and structures of the highest order. It is admittedly
35 Sierakowski, 1:11. See Bartomiej Natan Wsowski, Callitectonicorum, seu de pulchro archi-
tecturae sacrae et civilis compendio collectorum liber unicus, in gratiam et usum matheseos
auditorum in Collegio Posnaniensi Societatis Jesu (Pozna, 1678). See also Jerzy Baranowski,
Bartomiej Nataniel Wsowski, teoretyk i architekt XVIII w. (Wrocaw: Ossolineum, 1975).
37 Ibid.
120 Guile
an even more numerous segment of the population that is less in need of

Architecture than of masonry, and that is why it is also included in this
scholarly work; churches, the houses of the well-off, castles, palaces,mon-
asteries, and, in one word, great buildings are the subject of Architecture.
But the dwellings of the common folk in towns and villages, although
they do not fall under the illustrious heading of Architecture, should be
less often excluded from that science, as their uses and needs increase.38
He was emphatic about the imprudence of excluding rural building practices

from instruction, noting the economic centrality of agriculture to the state.39
Two points connected to Sierakowskis contemporary context shed light on the
sensibility underpinning his universalist disposition and economically-ori-
ented strategies. The first concerns physiocratic writing, and the second recalls
observations on commonwealth customs and building by foreign visitors, an
example of which follows.
Sierakowskis physiocratic leanings may have been influenced early on by
his exposure to the writings of the Frenchman, tienne Rieule (d.1786), who
served the crown in his capacity as director of buildings and manufactures.
Rieule had been known in Poland for his treatises on Polish farming and Polish
soils; his Mmoire de lagriculture en gnral et de lagriculture de Pologne en
particulier (Berlin, 1764)40 concentrated specifically on botanical and agricul-
tural ideas and terminology.41 Like Sierakowski, Rieule also had been active on
the National Commission of Education; his writings earned him accolades in
1777 from Stanisaw August Poniatowski who awarded him a medal reserved
for foreign contributors to the commission. Rieules works were also published
by the Society for Elementary Textbooks; Sierakowski was charged with the
responsibility of translating them into Polish. He was forced to abandon this
work in 1782, however, when he was elected president of the Tribunal of the
Crown.42 The connection of writings such as these to national interests and
national definition across the activities of the Society for Elementary Textbooks
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Published in 1767 into Polish as O gospodarstwie ziemiaskim w powszechnoci, a osobliwie
o gospodarstwie ziemiaskim w Polszcze.
41 See also Etienne Rieule, Mmoire de lAgriculture en Gnral et de lAgriculture de Pologne
en Particulier. Par Mr. De Rieule, Gnral-Major au Service du Roi et de la Rpublique, n.d.,
and the Mmoire des Differens Sols de Pologne, n.d. For physiocratic thinking in Poland see
Ambroise Jobert, Magnats polonais et physiocrates franais: 17671774 (Paris: Droz, 1941).
42 See ibid., 292293.
are reminiscent of the scholarly momentum that characterized the commis-

sions flourishing. The Architektura, a post-partition work, continues those
national educational themes by establishing necessary links between educa-
tion, architectural practice, and national culture.
A brief consideration of commentary on commonwealth architecture shows
that Sierakowskis urgency was justified. During a five-year exile in the Polish-
Lithuanian commonwealth beginning in 1777 the ex-Jesuit Hubert Vautrin
wrote in detail about his encounter with Polish lifestyles and customs.43 His
account was later published as LObservateur en Pologne (1807) and contained
his careful observations of Polish mores, fashion, commerce, geological char-
acteristics and climate, about which he was at times unflinchingly critical. In
one passage, Vautrin proclaimed that the state of architecture in a given place
provided evidence of how far a society had progressed in relation to others. He
noted the glaring contrast between the wealthy and impoverished that
announced itself most immediately in the built environment. Many foreign
visitors to the area commented on the poor conditions they encountered, con-
ditions which Sierakowski himself acknowledged had resulted from the
absence of a satisfactory education among his countrymen in the discipline of
architecture.44 Vautrin singled out the Polish use of wood as the primary build-
ing material for dwellings across social estates; he tied this custom to the acer-
bic remark that nowhere as in Poland were there so many architects, yet
nowhere was there so little building. The magnates, he said, had absorbed the
lessons of Vitruvius to some extent, but only in theory: I doubt that in any
country other than Poland are there more architects and fewer edifices: all of
43 Hubert Vautrin (b. 1742) spent sixteen years in the Society of Jesus; following his novitiate
he studied in the Jesuit colleges of his hometown (Meurthe), which flourished under the
protection and patronage of the Polish King and Duke of Lorraine, Stanisaw Leszczyski.
After the dissolution of the Jesuit order in 1773 Vautrin found employment as a professor
in several colleges in Alsace-Lorraine. In 1777, he accepted a post to travel to Poland and
educate a young nobleman, but in 1782 returned to Nancy and took up a public career in
Metz. He was an active member of the Society of Sciences, Letters and Arts in Nancy and
was known for his curiosity and competence in several subjects, including the origins of
peoples and their migrations, as well as Polish soils. Hubert Vautrin, La Pologne du XVIIIe
sicle. Vue par un prcepteur franais, ed. Maria Cholewo-Flandrin (Paris: Calmann-Lvy,
1966), 922. See also M. Michel Marty, Voyager en Pologne Durant la second moiti du
XVIIIe sicle: le domaine franais de la littrature des voyages (PhD diss., lUniversit de
Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2001), 92.
44 In addition to Martys analysis and compendium of French travel writers observing
Poland, see also Wacaw Zawadzki, ed., Polska Stanisawowska w oczach cudzoziemcw,
2 vols. (Warsaw: Pastwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1963) for a collection of primary source
eighteenth-century travel accounts translated into Polish.
122 Guile
the lords who are somewhat studied possess the theory of architecture, but
Vitruviuss art is only in the mind.45 In light of such observations, Sierakowskis
statement carries additional weight:
It is therefore in the interest of the Government, humanity, the good of

property owners, and the entire countrys honor, embellishment, and []
its strength, for the common people to lose its [appearance] of wretched-
ness to which its current generation has been growing accustomed from
birth. They will slowly lose it once living in brick dwellings built in a
rural, easy, and non-costly manner, and this first step will predispose them
to accept the Education the parish schools are preparing for them: And
I dare assert that this should be the great mainspring of the Governments
concern for the people, which should cause its happiness to grow. Let
this opus, which I am presenting to the reader, be the first step toward
this end.46
Taste was, for Sierakowski, the enemy of good sense and utility. He privileged
the classical language of architecture precisely for its robustness in the face of
changing fashions and what he called aberrations in architecture. Novel forms
could only capture the interest with fleeting precision because they strayed
from the ideal. Taste, he wrote, changed constantly and fashionable tendencies
therefore could not form a reliable canon of durable principles. In an expres-
sion of his somewhat orthodox view on formal indulgence, Sierakowski singled
out the seventeenth-century Roman achievements of Francesco Borromini,
architect of a mode that could not survive because its novel approach to form
had inspired poor taste in others:
No famous Architect introduced fashion, since such a desire is exhibited

only by mediocre minds with little imagination. In Italy, Borromini was
sufficiently daring, but not only did he fail to find emulators, but he also
managed to turn all pens and opinions to such an extent that his taste
became a byword for bad taste.47
45 Je doute quil y ait dans aucun pays plus darchitectes et moins ddifices quen Pologne:
tous les seigneurs un peu studieux possdent la thorie de larchitecture, mais lart de
Vitruve nest que dans les ttes. Vautrin, La Pologne, 80.
47 den swny Architekt nie wprowadzi mody, chtka ta iest udzim miernych tylko
umysw i drobny imaginacyi. Odwy si we Woszech Boromini, ale nie tylko
naladwcw nie znalz, lecz natychmist wszystkie pira i zdani przeciwko sobie
obruszy tak, e gust iego wszed w przysowie zego gustu. Ibid.
With the above opinion in mind, we might understand this attitude in light of
the fact that Latinate architectural styles arrived in the outer borderlands of
the former Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth relatively late as compared to
other European territories. Furthermore, adopting that visual language in, say,
France or England, where the Greco-Roman architectural tradition and a rela-
tively large body of architectural theory had long formed an important part
of architecture culture and political identity, meant something different than
it did when that language traveled further afield, to a context where very dif
ferent architectural traditionsfor example that of Orthodox Christianity
were an important part of the built environment.
We can think of Sebastian Sierakowskis ideas as belonging to a time when
political boundaries were unstable, when the very identity and constitution of
religious institutions responsible for national education was in flux, and when
nationalist discourses on arts and architecture played a significant role in the
defense of cultural custom and tradition. Writers and practitioners like
Sierakowski and others, such as Ignacy Potocki, Ferdynand Nax, Piotr Aigner,
Stanisaw Zawadzki, and Stanisaw Kostka Potocki, sought a common point of
reference for Polish architecture when political autonomy was being eroded or
(by 1795) had been taken away. The propagation of firm architectural princi-
ples in the Architektura, Sierakowskis attitudes toward restoration and conser-
vation, his position as a Jesuit reformer with close ties to the last reigning
monarch, Stanisaw August Poniatowski, and the context within which he
worked must be considered together. His drawings and writings on architec-
ture demonstrate two important points: that his educational ideas were allied
to architectural principles that were ardently Greco-Roman and that he wrote
in order to elevate the status of architecture within the territories of the former
commonwealth expressly for a Polish readership. Sierakowski, a Jesuit, was in
essence a defender of Polish culture.
In closing, a description of the frontispiece to the Architektura makes his
architectural values and convictions about the restorative nature of his project
clear (Fig. 6.11). A view into Wawel castles Italianate courtyard designed by
Francesco Fiorentinoone of the first expressions of Italian architectural
styles north of the Alpsanchors the page. On the left side of the engraving on
the second story, the walls of the castle have been cut away to reveal the
Chamber of Deputies (Sala Poselska). The coffers of the ceiling there, he
explains, contain over 100 carved wooden heads (not visible in the engraving).
These are thought to have been carved by the German artists Sebastian
Tauerbach and Jan Janda in 15341535, and may represent subjects of the realm
in all of their variety. Below, he explains, we are shown the tomb of Casimir the
Great (r. 13331370), made [by the sculptor, Veit Stoss] of red marble in a
124 Guile
Figure6.10 Studies for capitals, plate XIII, Architektura obeymuica wszelki gatunek
murowania i budowania, Vol. 2. Sebastian Sierakowski. 1810
Figure6.11 Frontispiece. Architektura obeymuica wszelki gatunek murowania i

budowania, Vol. 2. Sebastian Sierakowski. 1812
126 Guile
completely Gothic style of excellent, durable, and delicate workmanship. In

the foreground we see the tomb of King Jan III Sobieski, erected by Stanisaw
August Poniatowski, and carved from domestic black marble ornamented
with gilded bronze, the crowns eagle affixed to its short end. The three medal-
lions represent Kings who loved Learning: Casimir the Great founded the
Krakovian Academy, Stephen Bthory [established the] Wilno [Academy], and
we know what a Lover of Learning Sigismund I was. Above these medallions
are the coats of arms of the crown (in the center), the grand duchy of Lithuania
(on the left) and the house of Sforza (with which the Jagiellonian dynasty was
joined through the marriage of Sigismund I and Bona Sforza in 1518). He inserts
a Cracow legend:
Above the Title on the Table is the fairy-tale dragon which, from the den
below Wawel [Hill] (on which the castle stands), wrought havoc and fear
in the area until a Citizen of the City tossed him a fabricated beast stuffed
with flammable things to devour, which, after igniting in the intestines of
this Monster, blew it to pieces.
A vignette through the Italianate arcade just behind the dragon, however,
might have been the most significant iconographical detail of all. For here is
shown a phoenix being reborn from its ashes signifying, he wrote, that the
Fatherland has returned and is rising again.48
48 Ibid., Przedmowa [Preface].

PART 3
Central and Western Europe

chapter 7
The Jesuit Artistic Diaspora in Germany after 1773

Jeffrey Chipps Smith
With Gods help, the [ Jesuits] will suffer the same fate of the Templars.
They harm our religion, the pious as much as the scholars.1
With these words the monks of the Benedictine monastery of Polling in south-
ern Bavaria voiced their harsh opinion of the Society of Jesus and its university
in Dillingen. The Jesuits had garnered both widespread praise and condemna-
tion almost since their official founding by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540. Two cen-
turies later and now a world-wide enterprise, the Society of Jesus faced the
animus of the rulers of Portugal (1759), France (1764), Spain (1767), and Parma
and Naples (1768) who successively banned the Jesuits in their lands and over-
seas missions. Powerful political pressure from the Bourbons and eventually
from Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (r. 17401780) ultimately prompted
Pope Clement XIV (r. 17691774) to issue Dominus ac Redemptor suppressing
the Society of Jesus and its 23,000 members on 21 July 1773.2 The following year
Johann Leonhard xlein of Nuremberg created a silver medal celebrating this
1 Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution,
16501815 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), 167.
2 For an eyewitness account of the reading of the bull to the Jesuits in Dillingen in July 1773, see
Max Springer, Die Aufhebung des Dillinger Jesuitenkollegs (1773) in Aufzeichnungen eines
Lauinger Augenzeugen, Jahrbuch des Historischen Vereins Dillingen an der Donau 77 (1975):
113114; and for a polemical Protestant reaction, see Christoph Gottlieb von Murr, Acht und
zwanzig Briefe ber die Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens (n.p., 1774). Richard van Dlmen,
Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklrung in Deutschland, Historisches Jahrbuch 89
(1969): 5280; Winfried Mller, Die Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens in Bayern, Zeitschrift fr
Bayerische Landesgeschichte 48 (1985): 285352; William V. Bangert, A History of the Society
of Jesus (Institute of Jesuit Sources: St. Louis, 19862), 363430; Bertrand M. Roehner, Jesuits
and the State: A Comparative Study of Their Expulsions (15901990), Religion 27 (1990): 165
182; Joachim Wild, Andreas Schwarz, and Julius Oswald, eds., Die Jesuiten in Bayern 15491773,
exh. cat., Staatlichen Archive Bayern, Munich (Anton H. Konrad: Weissenhorn, 1991), 284
294; Beales, Prosperity, 143169; Rita Haub, Ich habe euch nie gekannt, weicht alle von
mir: Die ppstliche Aufhebung des Jesuitenordens 1773, in Alte Klster Neue Herren, Die
Skularisation im deutschen Sdwest 1803, eds. Volker Himmelein et al., 2 vols., exh. cat., Bad
Schussenried (Jan Thorbecke: Ostfildern, 2003), 2.1: 7788; Christine Vogel, The Suppression
of the Society of Jesus, 17581773 (Institut fr europische Geschichte, 2010), www.ieg-ego.eu/
vogelc-2010-cn [accessed June 14, 2012]. For the Societys subsequent history in Germany,

130 Smith
momentous action. The profile portrait of Clement XIV adorns the obverse
while Christ, accompanied by Saints Peter and Paul, exclaims I never knew
you, depart from me as he expels three Jesuits on the reverse (Figure 7.1).3
The papal decrees full ramifications are beyond the scope of the present essay.
I wish, however, to consider briefly the subsequent fate of the Societys
churches, colleges, libraries, and artistic possessions in Germany in the years
and decades following the suppression.4 The situations in Munich and Cologne
will be addressed in somewhat greater depth at the end of the essay. The story
recounted below focuses on one specific region yet it is generally representa-
tive of the material losses suffered by the Jesuits across the world.
By the broadest gauge, the Jesuits lost everything in 1773. Even with the re-
establishment of the Society in 1814, their communities rarely regained the
property they had possessed. While many losses can be attributed directly to
the actions immediately following the suppression, the Societys artistic patri-
mony was further diminished by other events. In 17811782 Emperor Joseph II
(r. 17801790) ordered the secularization of Austrias monasteries. The armies
of the French First Republic crossed into Germany and seized control of
Figure7.1 Johann Leonhard xlein, Commemorative Medal for the Suppression of the
Society of Jesus, silver, 1774. Staatliche Mnzsammlung, Munich
Photo: Staatliche Mnzsammlung
see Hermann Hoffmann, Friedrich II von Preuen und die Aufhebung der Gesellschaft Jesu
(ihsi: Rome, 1969); Risn Healy, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (Brill: Leiden, 2003)
and Klaus Schatz, Geschichte der Deutschen Jesuiten, 5 vols. (Aschendorff: Mnster, 2013).
3 Wild et al., Die Jesuiten in Bayern, 289291, no. 249a; Michael Niemetz, Antijesuitische
Bildpublizistik in der Frhen Neuzeit (Schnell & Steiner: Regensburg, 2008), 180183. I wish to
thank Martin Hirsch for the photograph.
4 My focus is mainly on towns in the Upper Rhine, Lower Rhine, and Upper German Jesuit
provinces plus a few towns then in Austria but now within modern Germany.
The Jesuit Artistic Diaspora In Germany After 1773 131
Cologne and much of the land west of the Rhine River from 1794 until 1815.
Napoleons agents systematically looted German collections for the museums
and libraries of Paris. In 18021803 Elector Max IV Joseph (r. 17991806, king of
Bavaria 18061825) secularized Bavarias monasteries. This and further secular-
izations elsewhere in Germany and, in 1848, Switzerland may not have affected
the Jesuits directly, yet they represented a further devaluing of religious art and
institutions. Even after the re-establishment of the Society by Pope Pius VII
(r. 18001823) in 1814, the much smaller membership rarely regained posses-
sion of their former properties. The Jesuits were banished from the German
Empire once again from 1872 to 1917.
When one factors in over two centuries of wars, political upheavals, and
inevitable changes in artistic tastes and devotional practices, it is amazing how
much of the Societys artistic patrimony survives. Churches provide the most
visible reminder of the Societys former physical presence in towns across the
Catholic areas of Germany. From the 1580s until the eve of their suppression,
the Jesuits erected dozens of new churches or renovated older ones. Typically
the Societys churches were repurposed as parish churches with little or no
immediate loss of their art. Some were given new titles, such as the designation
of Dsseldorf in 1774 as the Patronatskirche (Patronage Church) and Neuburg
an der Donau as the Hofkirche (Court Church) in 1782 by Carl Theodor, Palatine
Elector (r. 17421799) and Elector of Bavaria (r. 17771799).5 St. Michaels in
Munich became the Capella Regia or Court Church on 2 October 1773, a filial of
the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome in 1774, and then the garrison parish
church in 1779.6 From 1782 until 1808 it was the seat of the Knights of Malta
before becoming once again the Court Church. On 4 December 1921, St. Michaels
was returned to the Society of Jesus, one of the rare instances of the Jesuits
regaining their former property. In August 1798 the French authorities, then
occupying Trier, confiscated the Dreifaltigkeitskirche (Trinity Church), cleared
it out, and renamed it the Dekadentempel (Temple of Decades), which they
used as a collection space.7 With the expulsion of the French, it became the
5 Inge Zacher, Der Kirchenschatz des Jesuiten- und Hofkirche St. Andreas in Dsseldorf, in
St. Andreas in Dsseldorf, ed. Dominikanerkloster Dsseldorf (Grupello: Dsseldorf, 2008),
85117, here 104; Horst Nising, in kleiner Weise Prchtig: Die Jesuitenkollegien der sd-
deutschen Provinz des Ordens und ihres Stdtbauliche Lage im 16.-18. Jahrhundert (Michael
Imhof: Petersberg, 2004), 225.
6 Lothar Altmann, Chronik von St. Michael: 17731921, in St. Michael in Mnchen. Festschrift
zum 400. Jahrestag der Grundsteinlegung und zum Abschlubaus, eds. Karl Wagner and Albert
Keller (Schnell & Steiner: Munich, 1983), 245263.
7 Hermann Bunjes et al., Die Kirchlichen Denkmler der Stadt Triet mit Ausnahme des Domes
(Dsseldorf, 1938 reprint Interbook: Trier, 1981), 58.
132 Smith
priests seminary church in 1803 only to be confiscated by the Prussian govern-

ment in 1819 for use as the Protestant parish church. In 1857 it was returned to
the Catholic seminary.
There were, unfortunately, significant material losses. Until 1773 Ingolstadt,
with 142 members, had one of the largest Jesuit communities in the German
provinces and they dominated the local university. Although some of its
adjoining college buildings still exist, the church of Heilig-Kreuz (Holy Cross)
does not.8 It was used as a granary starting in 1808 until the structure was torn
down in 1859. St. Josephs in Rottenburg am Neckar needed repairs, but was
instead torn down in 1789.9 St. Pauls in Regensburg was destroyed during
the French bombardment of 2324 April 1809; its ruins were razed in 1811.10
St. Salvator in Augsburg became a military barracks in 1808 and was demol-
ished in 1872.11 St. Josephs in Burghausen burned on 23 August 1863 but was
rebuilt by 1874.12 Bombings during World War II obliterated all but the faade of
Johannes der Taufer (John the Baptist) in Koblenz; burned the Universittskirche
(originally the Immaculate Conception) in Freiburg im Breisgau, which was
rebuilt in 195557; and severely damaged Mari Himmelfahrt (Assumption of
the Virgin Mary) in Cologne and St. Michaels in Munich, among others.13
In most of the surviving churches, Jesuit symbols, such as the ihs monogram,
and distinct iconography programs continue to signal the buildings history.14
While I suspect some vestiges of the Societys former association with a church
were removed in the decades after 1773, there was not a systematic campaign of
damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) in which the past history of
the Jesuits was wholly erased.15 Nevertheless, none of their churches retains
8 Nising, Jesuitenkollegien, 160.

9 Ibid., 246 and 252.
10 Ibid., 238.
11 Ibid., 9091.
12 Ibid., 99.
13 Nising, Jesuitenkollegien, 128; Karl Meisl, St. Michael in Mnchen: Apokalypse
Wiedergeburt Vollendung, in Wagner and Keller, St. Michael in Mnchen, 280296;
Wilhelm Schlombs, Die Kirche St. Mariae Himmelfahrt und die Stationen ihres
Wiederaufbaus, in Die Jesuitenkirche St. Mariae Himmelfahrt in Kln. Dokumentation und
Beitrge zum Abschlu ihrer Wiederherstellung 1980 (Schwann: Dsseldorf, 1982), 3661;
and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: The Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic
Reformation in Germany (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2002), 123, figs.107108.
14 Smith, Sensuous Worship.
15 For the removal of Jesuit art and symbols from the St. Louis church of Maison Professe on
rue St. Antoine in Paris in the 1760s and thereafter, see Richard Clay, The Expulsion of
the Jesuits and the Treatment of Catholic Representational Objects during the French
their full pre-1773 appearance. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities often greed-
ily eyed what they assumed to be Jesuit wealth immediately following the sup-
pression. Secondary properties, such as farms, mills, and breweries, were often
sold, though the proceeds frequently went to fund pensions for ex-Jesuits.16
The most infamous case of selling religious art from Jesuit churches occurred
in Belgium, not in Germany. Between 1776 and 1782 the imperial commission
established by the Austrian Habsburg government aggressively sold off paint-
ings as well as liturgical vessels and textiles.17 The painter Du Mesnil appraised
select pictures in the Jesuit communities at 118,008 florins. Although there was
an initial proposal to establish a gallery in Brussels, this was rejected by the
imperial minister, Georges-Adam, Prince of Starhemberg. Already in 17741775,
Maria Theresa and her son, Joseph II, expressed interest in acquiring certain
paintings. Joseph de Rosa, director of the Imperial Gallery in Vienna, was dis-
patched to the Low Countries to make his choices. In March 1776 he selected
about thirty paintings plus a small collection of prints from the former Jesuit
communities in Alost, Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels, Courtrai, and Namur. Maria
Theresa purchased Anthony van Dycks Madonna and Child with Sts. Rosalia,
Peter, and Paul and the Mystic Engagement of the Blessed Hermann Joseph,
both painted around 16291630, for the chapel of the Brotherhood of the
Bachelors that met in Antwerps Jesuit church of St. Carolus Borromeo (formerly
St. Ignatius). De Rosa picked Peter Paul Rubenss The Miracles of St. Ignatius and
the Miracles of Francis Xavier, both made for this churchs high altar, together
with their oil sketches, his Assumption of the Virgin from its Marian chapel, and,
from the meeting room of the Great Latin (or student) Sodality in the college,
his Annunciation. These pictures, along with the two van Dycks, are today among
the treasures of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Additional paintings
were by Jan Brueghel, Gaspard de Crayer, and Daniel Seghers, among other mas-
ters. These important devotional pictures were now valued for the fame of their
artists and their style as glories of the Flemish school of painting.
Revolution, in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 15401773, eds. John
W. OMalley et al. (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2006), 691706.
16 On the financial implications of the suppression, see D.G. Thompson, French Jesuit
Wealth on the Eve of the Eighteenth-century Suppression, in The Church and Wealth, eds.
W.J. Sheils and Diana Wood (Blackwell: Oxford, 1987), 307319.
17 Paul Bonenfant, La Suppression de la compagnie de Jsus dans les Pays-Bas Autrichiens
(1773) (Maurice Lamertin: Brussels, 1925), esp. 132143 and 232234; Karl Schtz, Die
Geschichte der flmischen Sammlung der Wiener Gemldegalerie, in Flmische Maler
eiim Kunsthistorischen Museum Wiens, eds. Arnout Balis et al. (Schweizer: Zurich, 1989),
811, also see 136137, 140143, 150155, 188191, 230, 268, 276277, nos. 57, 59, 63, 79, 80.
134 Smith
The sale of Jesuit paintings did occur in Germany. Christoph Schwarzs Mary
Altarpiece (15801581) was originally commissioned by Duke Wilhelm V of
Bavaria (r. 15791587) for the great aula of the college in Munich (Figure7.2).18
With the transfer of the college to the Bavarian state (see below), the winged
altarpiece was moved in 1804 to the Hofgartengalerie in Munich and in 1838 to
the newly erected Pinakothek. A second Virgin and Child (c. 1584) by Schwarz
adorned an altar in St. Salvator, the Jesuit church in Augsburg.19 It likely passed
into state possession around 1803 when the church was decommissioned. The
fate of other pictures from St. Salvator is unknown. Not all losses, however,
resulted from the suppression in 1773. Rubens painted the monumental Last
Judgment (1617), measuring 6.1 x 4.6m., for the high altar of the Jesuit church in
Neuburg van der Donau as well as the Adoration of the Shepherds and Pentecost,
both made in 1619, for side altars.20 In 1653, the year of the death of the church
and altars patron, Wolfgang Wilhelm, count Palatine-Neuburg and duke of
Jlich and Berg (r. 16141653), the local Jesuits commissioned Paul Bock to
paint a new high altar because of concerns about the nudity in Rubenss pic-
ture. Bocks Assumption of the Virgin long covered the Last Judgment. The Last
Judgment and the two side altars were transferred to the ducal palace in
Dsseldorf in 1691 and 1703 respectively. In 1806 the pictures, along with the
rest of the Dsseldorf Galerie, moved to Munich.
The removal or loss of large paintings is particularly noticeable. Less obvi-
ous to the modern observer is the wholesale disappearance of priestly vest-
ments, textiles, liturgical silver, monstrances, reliquaries, and a host of other
items needed for masses and other ritual celebrations. Just a small percentage
of such objects survive. Metalwork was especially vulnerable due to its mate-
rial worth. In the case of St. Michaels in Munich, 17,456 florins worth of church
18 Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen, Munich, inv. nos. 8890; on loan to the

Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, inv. nos. 900902. Kurt Lcher and Carola
Gries, Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nrnberg: Die Gemlde des 16. Jahrhunderts (Gerd
Hatje: Ostfildern Ruit, 1997), 465469; Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Rebuilding Faith through
Art: Christoph Schwarzs Mary Altarpiece for the Jesuit College in Munich in The Sensuous
in the Counter-Reformation Church, eds. Tracy E. Cooper and Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge, 2013), 230251.
19 Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemldegalerie, inv. no. 5129; since 1950 on loan to St. Anna im
Lehel in Munich. Reinhold Baumstark, ed., Rom in Bayern. Kunst und Spiritualitt in
Bayern. Kunst und Spiritualitt der ersten Jesuiten, exh. cat., Bayerisches Nationalmuseum
(Hirmer: Munich, 1997), 482486, nos. 152153; Smith, Rebuilding Faith.
20 Konrad Renger, Peter Paul Rubens: Altre fr Bayern (Staatsgemldesammlungen: Munich,
1990), 966, esp. 6466; Smith, Sensuous Worship, 150154. Bocks Assumption of the Virgin
was, in turn, replaced by Domenico Zanettis painting of the same subject in 17201721.
Figure7.2 Christoph Schwarz, Glorification of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, center of
the Mary Altarpiece, 15801581. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg
Photo: Germanisches Nationalmuseum
silver was melted down in 1796 and another 6,234 florins worth in 1799.21
Between 1602 and 1605/07, the painter Michael Miller composed the Treasury
Book of St. Michaels, an exquisite illustrated inventory of the churchs high
21 Altmann, Chronik, 246247.

136 Smith
altar tabernacle, reliquaries, chests, crosses, and other precious objects.22 Little
now exists. Some works may have been melted down for reparations or carried
off as war booty during the Swedish occupation of Munich in 1632. Often the
holy relics were kept but not their reliquaries. The Jesuit community in Cologne
was renowned for its skilled lay brother goldsmiths, such as Theodor Silling
and Antonius Klemens, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.23
Some of their reliquary chests and busts still adorn Mari Himmelfahrt but
much is lost.24 In the case of the Jesuit churches in Belgium, 452,842 florins
were raised by melting down religious metalwork and removing precious
stones in the years immediately following 1773.25
In most towns the Jesuit church and college, with its school, occupied prime
real estate. Their libraries were valuable. Typically, the Societys schools
became state or civic possessions soon after the 1773 suppression. The schools
were renamed and many of the now ex-Jesuit teachers were retained, espe-
cially in towns were the society was viewed favorably. The vital local economic
impact of the university and gymnasium students prompted many communi-
ties to make the transition as smooth as possible. The college buildings, often
subsequently repurposed, still stand in many towns. Eichsttt provides a repre-
sentative example of a local response to the suppression order.26 Prince-Bishop
Raymund Anton, count of Strasoldo (r. 17571781), received the papal letter on
1 September 1773. On 14 March 1774 he relieved the Jesuits of their vows and
their obedience to the pope. They were now placed under his episcopal
22 Monika Bachtler, Der verlorene Kirchenschatz von St. Michael, in Wagner and Keller,
St. Michael in Mnchen, 127135; Peter Steiner, Der erhaltene Kirchenschatz von
St. Michael, in ibid., 136162; Lorenz Seelig, Dieweil wir dann nach dergleichen Heiltumb
und edlen Clainod sonder Begirde tragen. Der von Herzog Wilhelm V. begrndete
Reliquienschatz der Jesuitenkirche St. Michael in Mnchen, in Baumstark, Rom, 199262,
esp. 202 on losses.
23 Annette Schommers, Rheinische Reliquiare: Goldschmiedearbeiten und Reliquienin
szenierungen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (cmz: Rheinbach-Merzbach, 1993), 5782, 9396,
207211, 239240.
24 Schommer, Reliquiare, 352358 taxation protocols of gold and silver objects listed on
December 22 1786 and 4 January 1787.
25 Bonenfant, Suppression, 138 and 143.
26 Nising, Jesuitenkollegien, 109115; Julius Oswald, Episcopale et Academicum Gymnasium
Societatis Jesu Eustettense. Geschichte der Jesuiten in Eichsttt, in Die Schutzengelkirche
und das ehemalige Jesuitenkollege in Eichsttt, eds. Sibylle Appuhn-Radtke, Julius Oswald,
and Claudia Wiener (Schnell & Steiner: Regensburg, 2011), 5471, esp. 7071; Claudia
Wiener Grund, Templum Honoris. Zur Baugeschichte von Kirche und Kollege der
Jesuiten zu Eichsttt im 17. und frhen 18. Jahrhundert, in ibid., 197217, esp. 217.
jurisdiction. The Jesuits were required to vacate their college for two days. The
ex-Jesuits then returned as secular priests and lay brothers. They resided again
in the college, which retained its name the Collegium Willibaldinum and
resumed their former activities. In 17721773, even before the suppression,
Elector Max III Joseph (r. 17451777) ordered all Jesuits originating from out-
sidethe newly created Bavarian Jesuit province to return to their homelands.
Prince-Bishop Raymund Anton sent away all ex-Jesuits who were not from
the Eichsttt Hochstift. The expansion of the college complex, the new Jesuit
building begun in 1772, was completed in 1774. An episcopal seminary was
added to the college in 1836. In Bamberg, Fulda, Ingolstadt, Mnster, Paderborn,
Trier, and in Austria, Innsbruck and Vienna, among other towns, former Jesuit
college buildings were transferred to local universities.27
Libraries
Libraries were at the heart of any Jesuit college. Peter Canisius (15211597),
often called the second apostle of Germany for his founding of Jesuit commu-
nities, remarked, better a college without a church than a college without its
own library.28 Books were vital to the Societys educational and spiritual mis-
sions. The library at the Jesuit college in Mnster, first established in 1588,
moved into an attractive two-story high room in the north wing in 1740.29 In
1773 the collection numbered around 10,000 volumes, a substantial size but
only about a third of the magnitude of their libraries in Cologne, Ingolstadt,
and Mainz. The library was renamed in that year the Bibliotheca Collegii
Professorum Gymnasii Paulini and changed, in 1780, to the Bibliotheca Gymnasii
et Universitatis. The University Library remained in this room until 1906 when
the books were transferred to a new building. Unfortunately, the bombing of
Mnster on 26 October 1944 and 25 March 1945 destroyed 300,000 volumes or
about two-thirds of the universitys collection. Only 977 books from the former
27 Bertram Resmini, Historischer berblick ber die Niederlassungen der Jesuiten im

Erzbistum Trier, in Fr Gott und die Menschen. Die Gesellschaft Jesu und ihr Wirken im
Erzbistum Trier, exh. cat., Bischfliches Dom- und Dizesanmuseum Trier (Gesellschft fr
mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte: Mainz, 1991), 205214, esp. 211213.
28 Cited by Jrg Kastner, Geistliche Rstkammer. Wissenschaften im Spiegel der Passauer
Jesuitenbibliothek, exh. cat. (Staatliche Bibliothek: Passau, 1987), 235.
29 Jrgen Coenen, Die Bibliothek des ehemaligen Jesuitenkollegs in Mnster, in Bibliothek
in vier Jahrhunderten. Jesuitenbibliothek, Bibliotheca Paulina, Universittsbibliothek in
Mnster 15881988, eds. Helga Oesterreich, Hans Mhl, and Bertram Haller (Aschendorff:
Mnster, 1988), 1149 and fig.1.
138 Smith
Jesuit library survived. In 1780 the library of the University of Innsbruck,

founded only about twenty-five years earlier, received more than 6,000 volumes
from the ex-Jesuit colleges in Innsbruck and Hall in Tirol.30 The university
library in Trier, established by Elector Franz Ludwig von Pfalz-Neuburg (r. 1716
1732) in 1722 for the faculties of law and medicine, was merged with the Societys
library in the former college following the suppression.31 Prior to this the Jesuit
library also served the theology, philosophy and humanities faculty and stu-
dents. The 1770 catalogue listed 10,075 books. The college library room was given
a stucco ceiling and a new wooden gallery in 1732. Around this date Johann
Hugo von Orsbeck, elector-archbishop of Trier (r. 16751711), donated two great
terrestrial and celestial globes, made in 1688 and 1693 by Vincenzo Coronelli in
Venice, which formerly had been in Orsbecks Kunstkammer. The globes were
displayed in this space until they and the books were moved in 1957.
Freiburg im Breisgau, part of Austria until 1805 when it was ceded to Baden,
possessed the only Catholic university in a region where Protestant universi-
ties at Basel, Zurich, Tbingen, Heidelberg, and Strasbourg dominated.32 Due
to the education reforms of 1767 championed by Maria Theresa, the Societys
influence at the University of Freiburg was sharply diminished in 176768. The
universitys philosophy faculty and library, numbering about 413 books, moved
into the newly established Jesuit college in 1620. Their holdings were mixed
with the Jesuits library. There is little mention of a separate university library
with its own space until 1745. From 1708 the Jesuit library was located in the
newly built gallery on the north side of the colleges inner court. The universi-
tys new room was added 17561758 on the ground floor in the south corner of
the college. In November 1773, Rector Johann Anton von Riegger successfully
petitioned the Freiburg government to transfer the now idle buildings of the
Jesuit college and its library to the university. By February 1775 plans were
developed for renovating the former great hall on the first upper floor into the
new university library, which opened in December 1777. Between 1775 and 1786
the university librarian was Franz Wrth, a former Jesuit who had served as the
30 Sieglinde Sepp, Sptgotische Klner Einbnde aus der ehemaligen Haller Jesuiten
bibliothek in der Universittsbibliothek Innsbruck, Codices Manuscripti. Zeitschrift fr
Handschriftenkunde, 6:1 (1980): 89111.
31 Gunther Franz, Geistes und Kulturgeschichte, in Trier in der Neuzeit, eds. Kurt Dwell
and Franz Irsigler (Spee: Trier, 1988), 203374, esp. 216217 and 283284.
32 Peter Schmidt, Die Universitt Freiburg i. Br. und ihre Bibliothek in der zweiten Hlfte des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Universittsbibliothek: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1987), 189; Magda Fischer,
Geraubt oder gerettet? Die Bibliotheken skularisierter Klster in Baden und Wrttemberg,
in Himmelein et al., Alte Klster Neue Herren, 2.2: 12631296, esp. 12661286.
colleges librarian in 17671769 and 17711773.33 His knowledge of the holdings

made him the perfect candidate. He received an annual salary of 150 florins in
addition to his Jesuit pension of 300 florins. Because of health problems, Wrth
was provided with an assistant librarian from December 1777.
The University of Freiburg librarys growth came at the expense of the hold-
ings of three former Jesuit colleges. On 13 November 1773, Freiburgs Jesuit
library was ordered sealed, a catalogue of its books was commissioned,34 and
6,174 volumes passed to the university. A court resolution of 28 January 1775
stipulated that the libraries of the suppressed Jesuit colleges in Rottenburg,
Feldkirch, and Konstanz (Constance), should be transferred to Freiburg.
Ultimately Konstanz was exempted and its holdings, most of which survive,
passed to the local gymnasium. On 18 April 1778, Wrth was instructed to travel
to Rottenburg to make selections for the university library. A decision was
made to leave some books in Rottenburg in the event that a gymnasium might
be established in the future. Later in 1778 about 1,000 volumes, including a
number of forbidden books (Lutheran and other Protestant tracts) were sent
to Freiburg. In July 1791 another 3,800 books, filling seven or eight wagons, was
shipped.35 Unfortunately, some other books in Rottenburg were stolen or sold
to an antiquarian book dealer in Tbingen. In July 1776 Wrth catalogued the
books in Feldkirch. Two years later six chests of books, of unknown contents
and quantity, were transferred to Freiburg.
The books formerly in the Jesuit libraries in the German and Austrian prov-
inces generally passed into other libraries. Losses then and in subsequent cen-
turies, as in the bombings of World War II, were inevitable. The situation was
worse in Belgium.36 A government report dated 18 March 1776 estimated the
Jesuit libraries there contained between 400,000 and 500,000 volumes.37 A sec-
ond report of 19 January 1779, however, stated that three-quarters of the hold-
ings consisted of old books on theology, law, arts, and sciences, which were not
valued more than the worth of their paper if pulped.38 Some tomes were
33 Schmidt, Freiburg, 8689.

34 Schmidt, Freiburg, 33.
35 In 1789 the remaining books in Rottenburg were catalogued. See Schmidt, Freiburg, 36 for
the categorical breakdown.
36 Bonenfant, Suppression, 141142.
37 Alan Reed, The Bibliothque Royale de Belgique as a National Library, Journal of Library
History 10/1 (January 1975): 3551, here 37. Reed states there were over 800,000 works in
the Belgian Jesuit libraries including between 25,000 and 30,000 printed books plus 100s
of manuscripts just from the Brussels college.
38 The pulping of unwanted books occurred also during the secularization of Bavarias
monasteries in 1803.
140 Smith
already damaged. Occasionally Jesuit fathers cut out derogatory passages

about either Rome or the Society of Jesus. In 1778, the government-appointed
committee charged with the distribution first determined which books should
be allocated to the Bibliothque Royale in Brussels, which had opened to the
public in 1772. Other texts were offered at a discount price to the University of
Leuven (Louvain), the chapter at Tournai, and the Episcopal Seminary in
Ghent. The Imperial Library in Vienna also acquired some volumes. Books
deemed dangerous because of their subjects, such as justifying regicide, were
discarded. The sale of books netted 110,100 florins for the Jesuit fund.
Munich and Cologne
The Jesuit communities in Munich and Cologne ranked among the largest and
most important in the German provinces. The fates of their buildings and
collections exemplify the impact of the suppression of 1773 and subsequent
historical events. At the invitation of Albrecht V, duke of Bavaria (r. 15501579),
the first Jesuits arrived in Munich in 1559.39 As seen in Johann Smisseks
engraved view of c. 164450, the church of St. Michaels (15831597) and the
adjoining college formed a huge complex with multiple courtyards and wings
(Figure7.3).40 At its suppression, there were forty-five priests and masters plus
twenty-seven lay brothers living here. In 1769, there were also 1,043 enrolled
students.41 Munich was also designated the seat of the provincial of the
new Bavarian Jesuit province that Elector Max III Joseph established on
30 December 1769.42 With the demise of the Society of Jesus, new uses for the
church and college buildings were quickly determined: St. Michaels became
the parish church of the garrison from 1779 and the seat of the Maltese Knights
from 1782 to 1808. From 1775 until 1803 part of the college housed the Bavarian
Electoral Corps of Cadets. The police directorate occupied another section.
In 17831784 the Bavarian Academy of Science with its collection plus the
39 Wagner and Keller, St. Michael in Mnchen; Nising, Jesuitenkollegien, 2004, 207222; Smith,
Sensuous Worship, 57101.
40 Baumstark, Rom, 388390, nos. 8889.
41 Georg Schwaiger, Mnchen eine geistlichte Stadt, in Monarchum Sacrum, eds. Georg
Schwaiger and Hans Ramisch, 2 vols. (Deutscher Kunstverlag: Munich, 1994), 1:1289, here
180182; Nising, Jesuitenkollegien, 210.
42 In 1770 the Bavarian Province consisted of twelve sites, including nine colleges, with a
total membership of 238 priests, 149 lay brothers, and over 100 novices. Schwaiger,
Mnchen, 181.
Figure7.3 Johann Smissek, The Church of St. Michaels and the Jesuit College in Munich,
Photo: Author
Hofbibliothek (court library) moved to another section of the college.43

Between 1783 and 1785 building renovations included a new library, the
Ernestine Hall, occupying the two floors above the Academy rooms. The library
measured 37.5 by 11.4 meters with a height of 8.34m. Designed by Augustin
Egell, the court sculptor, the two-story room included a gallery, book cases lin-
ing the walls, and ten windows. The court library included the holdings of the
former Jesuit library as well as books and manuscripts transferred to Munich
following the secularization of Bavarian monasteries in 1803.44 The library was
43 Franz Georg Kaltwasser, Die Bibliothek als Museum. Von der Renaissance bis Heute, darg-
estellt am Beispiel der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden, 1999), 85,
and, for what follows, 8586, 110120.
44 Claus Grimm, Kunstbewahrung und Kulturverlust, in Glanz und Ende der alten Klster,
eds. Josef Kirmeier and Manfred Treml, exh. cat., Kloster Benediktbeuren (Sddeutscher
Verlag: Munich, 1991), 7885.
142 Smith
expanded in 1804 into the hall formerly used by the Marian Sodality of Students.
By 1812 the library occupied some 54 rooms. Six years later the library con-
tained around 420,000 books, 220,000 duplicates, and 22,000 manuscripts.
Although the Court Library moved to its own building in 1843, this main library
room existed until 25 April 1944.45 Other occupants of the college building
included the State Archive, the Academy of Fine Arts from 1809 to 1885, the
office of the court steward, the royal coin and print collections, and from 1826
the Universittsbibliothek.46
The Munich Jesuit college possessed a substantial collection of prints.
According to Stephan Brakensiek, nine great albums from the Jesuit library are
documented in a pre-1835 record of prints.47 None of these volumes is trace-
able today. On 6 November 1834, Franz Brulliot, the director of the Bavarian
Royal Print Collection (Kupferstichkabinett) ordered all independent wood-
cuts and engravings transferred from the Hof- und Staatsbibliothek to his
department. The Jesuit print albums are recorded there on 7 March 1835. The
individual prints were most likely removed from the albums and merged with
the rest of the collection long before the c. 1895 listing of print volumes.
Brakensiek estimated that these nine volumes contained about 12,400 sheets
or roughly 1,370 prints per album.48 Based on the registers inclusion of Raphael
Sadelers etched Ex-libris of Elector Maximilian I (r. 15971651), which adorn
his books between 1623 and 1651, it is likely the Bavarian prince gave these print
albums to the Jesuits.49 Additional prints were inserted into the albums at least
as late as the 1660s.
The albums contents were arranged first by theme and then by the artist or
designers family name. Volume one contained Old and New Testament scenes
and portraits of popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots, provosts, and
even adversaries such as Jan Hus, John Calvin, and Erasmus. Then came repre-
sentations of Catholic ceremonies plus views of church buildings, including
45 Kaltwasser, Bibliothek, 86 (with photograph).

46 The University of Ingolstadt, founded in 1472, was moved to Landshut in 1800 and then to
Munich in 1826. The University Library includes parts of the Jesuit libraries of Ingolstadt
and Landshut.
47 Stephan Brakensiek, Vom Theatrum mundi zum Cabinet des Estampes. Das Sammeln
von Druckgraphik in Deutschland 15651821 (Georg Olms: Hildesheim, 2003), 186209, here
186. Also see Michael Semff and Kurt Zeitler, eds., Knstlerzeichnen Sammler stiften: 250
Jahre Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Mnchen, 3 vols. (Hatje Cantz: Ostfildern, 2008), 1:
109, 128, 132, 160, 166; 3: 7880, 102; and Gisela Goldberg, Die Standorte der Staatlichen
Graphischen Sammlung im Verlauf ihrer Geschichte in Mnchen, in ibid., 3: 735.
48 Brakensiek, Theatrum, 198.
49 Brakensiek, Theatrum, fig.30.
those in Rome and the Jesuit college in Munich. A total of 1,912 prints were
mounted on 534 folio-size pages. The contents of the other volumes are
recorded as follows: II (portraits of nobles, beginning with emperors and
empresses, and others of high standing; 2,061 prints on 580 folios); III (subjects
unknown; est. 1,100 prints on 570/578 folios); IV (portraits of nobles from France,
Venice, and Holland; patricians from Augsburg and Nuremberg; plus the like-
nesses of German philosophers, jurists, mathematicians and doctors, engravers
and painters, poets and writers; 2,391 prints on 750 folios); V (images of war
such as sieges and sea battles, the engravings of Joseph Furtenbach the Elders
Architectura universalis [Ulm, 1635], the Dance of Death, Four Ages of the World
and the Four Parts of the World; 572 prints on 596 folios); VI (maps and personi-
fication of the planets; 218 prints on 312 folios); VII (maps and city views begin-
ning with Paris, various German towns, Italy organized from north to south,
and ending with Rhodes, Constantinople, Aden, Calicut, Goa and Mexico City;
966 prints on 640 folios); VIII (landscapes, gardens, animals, fish, ships, the
months, peasant scenes, images of daily life, among other topics; 1,611 prints on
742 folios); and IX (virtues and vices, emblems, planetary and Olympian gods,
liberal arts, masks, and Jacques Callots La Misere de la Guerre [1633]; 1,581 prints
on 672 folios). If the albums were initially assembled at the command of Elector
Maximilian I, the comprehensiveness of the collection reflects the sorts of
visual information he deemed relevant to the Jesuits and their students.
Besides the library, these nine print albums, and the Mary Altarpiece
(Figure7.2), little is known about the fate of the former contents of the Munich
college.50 Other paintings including wall murals, sculptures, prints, textiles, met-
alwork, and furniture that once adorned its rooms are either lost or untraced.51
Given the size of the Munich complex, the scale of these losses is significant.
The situation in Cologne was somewhat better. The Society established its
first community in Germany here in 1544. It remained the center of the
Societys efforts in the Rhineland and Westphalia until 1773. The church of
Mari Himmelfahrt, completed in 1629, retains some of its lavish artistic
decorations, although much was destroyed in the bombing of World War II
50 The Burgher Sodality, founded in the Munich college in 1610, met there until its own sepa-
rate building, the Brgersaal, was finished in 1719. They retained their own property after
1773. Vorstand der Kongregation, ed., 400 Jahre Marianische Mnnerkongregation am
Brgersaal zu Mnchen (Schnell & Steiner: Regensburg, 2010).
51 The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum and the Bayerische Staatsgemldesammlungen in
Munich possess the remains of a series of paintings from the later seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries depicting the Upper German Jesuit colleges and churches. Nising,
Jesuitenkollegien, 348398.
144 Smith
Figure7.4 The Facades of the Church of Mari Himmelfahrt and the former Jesuit College in
Munich
Photo: Author
(Figure 7.4).52 Since the famous Gymnasium Tricoronatum (School of the

Three Kings) was founded by the city of Cologne in 1450 before it was run by
the Jesuits and ex-Jesuits from 1557 until 1778, the college and its possessions
were claimed by the city following the Societys suppression. The detailed
inventories ordered in 1774 reveal the Tricoronatum possessed the richest col-
lections of art, scientific instruments and naturalia, and other treasures of any
of the German Jesuit communities. The main library, which then included
twenty-seven painted author portraits, became the Gymnasial-Bibliothek,
and subsequently it was incorporated into the Universitts- und Stadtbibliothek
Kln. The account mentioned a separate library used by the priests and teach-
ers on the upper floor of the college and a smaller one housing forbidden
books.
The Jesuits in Cologne might have been inspired by the celebrated museum
that Athanasius Kircher assembled in the Societys Collegium Romanum in
Rome.53 The Tricoronatum contained a separate room described as a natural
52 Die Jesuitenkirche St. Mariae Himmelfahrt in Kln; Smith, Sensuous Worship, 165187.
53 Eugenio Lo Sardo, Athanasius Kircher. Il Museo del Mondo, exh. cat., Palazzo di Venezia,
Rome (Luca: Rome, 2001).
room or museum of antiquities and curious things.54 It contained more than

3,000 rare prints and drawings; a strong collection of over 1,400 silver and
bronze ancient Greek and Roman coins; a mineral collection with all sorts of
agates and marbles; several petrified items; sea shells and other objects from
the ocean; insects; heathen items; and many books. There was a separate
Museum Mathematicum filling three rooms that included numerous scientific
instruments and its own set of books.55 The 1774 inventory listed over 200 opti-
cal lenses including microscopes and telescopes plus four celestial and terres-
trial globes by Vincenzo Maria Coronelli.
The Tricoronatums collection of prints and drawings was the largest of any
Jesuit community in the German provinces. A separate catalogue, the Stampe
e disegni, che si trovano nel museo del Collegio Tricoronato a Colognia, compiled
by Jacob Heyder, a professor of mathematics and physics as well as the curator
of the library and the Musei Naturalium, was published in 1778.56 Heyder was
aided by Johannes Bartholomus de Peters, the Cologne city painter. It tallied
26,949 prints and 6,113 drawings with particular strengths in German,
Netherlandish, and Italian masters. Already in 1773 Heinrich Frings urged the
government to keep the collection since its contained works by the best paint-
ers from all parts of Europe.57 The city officials, who had through financial mis-
management incurred significant debts, ordered Heyders catalogue with the
intention of selling the graphic works. Ultimately, however, Cologne retained
possession. The prints and drawings were stored in 208 albums, including ten
volumes with 1,523 drawings by Carlo Maratti (16251713), which had been
acquired in Rome. The catalogue lists the works first in the order of appear-
ance in the specific volume and second alphabetically by the name of the artist
or designer.
French troops occupied Cologne in October 1794 and the following month
claimed possession of all lands west of the Rhine river. The army sent agents
54 Gunter Quarg, Die Sammlungen des Klner Jesuitenkollegiums nach der Aufhebung des
Ordens 1773, Jahrbuch des Klnischen Geschichtsverein 62 (1991): 154173.
55 Quarg, Sammlungen, 155, 158173.
56 Dietmar Spengler, apports de Cologne. Zeichnungen und Graphiken aus der ehemali-
gen Klner Jesuitensammlung in Paris wiederentdeckt, Klner Museums-Bulletin 1 (1993):
1828; Dietmar Spengler, Die graphische Sammlung des ehemaligen Jesuitenkollegs
in Kln, in Lust und Verlust. Klner Sammler zwischen Trikolore und Preussenadler, eds.
Hiltrud Kier and Frank Gnter Zehnder, exh. cat., Museen der Stadt Kln (Wienand:
Cologne, 1995), 3745; Dietmar Spengler, Spiritualia et pictura: Die graphische Sammlung
des ehemaligen Jesuitenkolleges in Kln: Die Druckgraphik (sh: Cologne, 2003).
57 Quarg, Sammlungen, 155156 with quote.
146 Smith
charged with selecting books and works of art pour enricher la Rpublique.58
By the end of November, twenty-five crates of books, manuscripts, prints,
drawings, and other art objects were removed from the Tricoronatum and
transported on four packed wagons to the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris.
From there the prints were sent to the librarys Dpartement des Estampes and
the Dpartment des Imprimes while the drawings were transferred to the
Muse des Arts (the Louvre). Cologne officials petitioned repeatedly and
unsuccessfully for the return of these and other items taken from the city. The
situation changed with Napoleons defeat in 1815 and Prussias assumption of
political control of Cologne and its region. Following the entry of Prussian
troops into Paris on 8 July 1815, the issue of restitution assumed renewed
importance. Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, in the name of the city, appealed to
Prussian authorities in 1815. Eberhard von Groote, a Prussian officer represent-
ing Colognes interests in Paris, secured Rubens Crucifixion of St. Peter, which
had been taken from the Peterskirche, but just 52 of the 208 volumes of prints
and drawings from the Jesuit college. Another twenty albums were returned in
the twentieth century. Today these graphic works, numbering 7,470 prints and
523 drawings, are in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne.59 Many are
marked Col[ogne]. The losses include 19,211 prints and 5,583 drawings, most
of which are still in Paris. These were integrated into the collections of the
Bibliothque Nationale and the Muse du Louvre in the nineteenth century
often with the vague provenance of military conquest in Holland or in
Germany under the First Empire or collected during the first years of the
Revolution.
Many objects from the Tricoronatums other collections survive or did until
World War II.60 The mineral collection, which formed part of Ferdinand Franz
Wallrafs gift to the city, was housed in the Naturkunde-Museum in the
Stapelhaus until it was destroyed in the bombing. Many of the natural objects,
58 Max Braubach, Verschleppung und Rckfhrung rheinischer Kunst- und Liter

aturdenkmale 1794 bis 1815/16, Annalen des Historischen Vereins fr den Niederrhein 176
(1974): 93153; Bndicte Savoy, Kunstraub. Napoleons Konfiszierungen in Deutschland und
die europischen Folgen, trans. Tom Heithoff (Bhlau: Vienna, 2011), esp. 4754, 182191,
316317.
59 Spengler, apports de Cologne, 20. Spengler, Spiritualia et pictura, 369 gives the num-
ber of prints and drawings in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum as 5,907, which is different
than the earlier citation. These are on permanent loan from the Klner Gymnasial- und
Stiftungsfonds.
60 Only about a tenth of the roughly 1,000 original objects exist. Quarg 1991, 161162; Gunter
Quarg, Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen in Kln, in Kier and Zehnder, Lust und
Verlust, 315321, esp. 315316, and 517526, nos. 1851.
however, were never repatriated from Paris in 1815. What remains of the collec-
tion of the colleges scientific instruments was transferred to the Historisches
Museum (now the Stadtmuseum).
The Jesuits suppression in 1773 abruptly ended one of the greatest stories in
the history of Early Modern German art. Communities were dispersed and
buildings were rebranded. For over two centuries art had been a central tool in
defining the Jesuits and their missions. The diaspora of their artistic patrimony
challenges efforts to address the fullness of their holdings and their use on a
daily basis in promoting the Societys educational and spiritual goals. Although
many of their churches, including some retaining the core of their original
decorations, still stand and the contents of several of their libraries may be
consulted in other institutions, much more of the Societys material history
has been lost. The original context, the continuity of purpose, and the total
aesthetic experience of the art that is, its human dimensions were irrepara-
bly ruptured by those who carried out the rapid dismantling of the Society
of Jesus.
chapter 8
Enduring the Deluge

Hungarian Jesuit Astronomers from Suppression to Restoration
Paul Shore1
The first engagement of Hungarian Jesuits with astronomy occurred in the

years following the relief of the siege of Vienna in 1683. This was part of the
broader involvement of the Society of Jesus in debates over cosmology that
had begun decades earlier with the trial of Galileo2 and was carried forward
by the work of the polymath Athanasius Kircher (16021680). Several Baroque-
era Jesuits of the Austrian province of the Society (an administrative unit
eventually embracing all of Hungary), none of whom had extensive experi-
ence as practicing observational scientists, put forth cosmographies drawing
upon Tycho Brahes model of the solar system. Martinus Szentivnyi (1633
1703) presented a model that incorporated modifications to the Brahian model
introduced by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli (15981671).3 In 1702,
Gabriel Szerdahelyi (16601726) published a Dissertatio that featured three
systems (Ptolemaic, Copernican, and Brahian) and portrayed God as prime
mover setting the cosmos in motion by striking it like a tennis ball.4 Both the
Baroque Societys tendency to anthropomorphize the forces moving the cos-
mos and the churchs rejection of Copernican cosmology were overriding
influences on Hungarian Jesuit astronomy until the last third of the eigh-
teenth century.
1 The writer acknowledges the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, the University
of Toronto for its support during the completion of this essay. Lynn Whidden also provided
valuable assistance.
2 At the trial Melchior Inchofer (15841648), a Jesuit of Hungarian origin, offered his opinion
regarding Galileos endorsement of the Copernican theory. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The
Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 264;
Sommervogel et al., Bibliothque de la Compagnie de Jsus, 11 vols. (Bruxelles: O. Schepens;
Paris: A. Picard, 18901932), 4:561.
3 Horvthy Pter and Nmet Gbor, A jezsuita kozmogrfia emlkei a zirci knyvtrban,
Magyar Tudomny 8 (2007): 10341044; Joannes Nepomuk Stoeger, Scriptores Provinciae
Austriacae Societatis Jesu (Viennae: Typis Congregationis Mechitharisticae, 1855), 351353.
4 However, decades later the Jesuit Paulus Bertalanffy derided Copernicus. Tibor Berend,
History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 32.

Enduring The Deluge 149
The accomplishments of Maximilian Hell (Hll) (17201792) were of an

entirely different order from those of these Baroque Hungarian Jesuits. One of
the most important astronomers ever to work in Hungary, Hell established
observatories in Cluj, Transylvania and Trnava (now in Slovakia).5 His carefully
collected data appeared in widely circulated publications.6 Hell, like many of
his Jesuit contemporaries, straddled two worlds. A committed Jesuit, he never
openly rejected any of the cosmological positions held to be true by the church.
Hells inclusion among the Hungarian Jesuit astronomers of his day is inevi-
table, but far from straightforward. He lived and worked within the historic
lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, although Bansk Bystrica, Trnava, and Cluj
all lie outside of Hungary today. Many of his most important accomplishments
were achieved in the service of the Habsburg dynasty, which was regarded as a
foreign oppressor by many Hungarians. While he may have spoken very little
Hungarian and had no Hungarian ancestry, Hell trained some of the leading
lights of late eighteenth-century Hungarian science and shared his colleagues
interest in the earliest history of the Magyars.7
Like his Bohemian contemporary Joseph Stepling, Hell maintained contacts
with the wider world of astronomers who had long since discarded the older
theories.8 Hell disliked Protestant institutions but did not spurn the products
of such schools. What might seem to moderns (acclimated to academic free-
dom) like hypocrisy or at least cowardice was actually in Hells case something
more complex: the fourth vow of obedience, taken by all pre-suppression
Jesuits occupying important academic positions located Jesuits (at least in the-
ory) in a role within a hierarchically organized Society that had been especially
well equipped to engage the polemical culture of the late sixteenth century.
5 Augstn Udas Vallina, Searching the Heavens and the Earth: The History of Jesuit Observatories
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 31. However, Hell later wrote that he had been unable to complete
the construction and equipping of the Cluj facility.
6 Ephemerides astronomicae ad meridianum Vindobonensem anni 1765 (Viennae: Typis et
Sumptibus J.T. de Trattern, 1764). Sequels to this volume were produced between 1791 and 1803.
7 Hell produced a historical map of Hungary from the years 886 to 907. Walter Goffart,
Historical Atlases: The First Three Hundred Years, 15701870 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 487.
8 Late in the day, Jesuit astronomy had received a boost when the 1759 edition of the Index
Prohibitorum cancelled the decree against the Copernican hypothesis. Juan Casanovas, The
Teaching of Astronomy in Jesuit Colleges in the 18th Century, padeu 16, 57 (2006): 5765; at
62. However, the Ptolemaic model would continue to appear in Jesuit-produced textbooks
until shortly before the suppression. E.g., Andreas Jaszlinszky, Institutiones physicae generalis
et particularis (Tyrnaviae: Typis Academicis Societatis Jesu, 1756), figure 4; Sommervogel
4:759. Thanks to Justine Hyland for her assistance in accessing this image.
150 SHORE
The achievements of individual Jesuits were intended to be subordinated to the

advancement of the Church over its rivals. Almost two centuries later, the orga-
nization of the Society had changed little, but the European scientific commu-
nity was no longer preoccupied with inter-confessional debates, and had long
since abandoned Ptolemaic cosmology. Yet Jesuits such as Hell who remained
convinced of the churchs teachings (something that Hells correspondence
confirms) and who wanted to pursue astronomy had three choices. They could
proceed, if their discoveries warranted it, to challenge the churchs position, or
they could work to reconcile differences between the older and newer models,
as Kircher had done when he incorporated the moons of Jupiter into his earth-
centered model.9 The third option was to recognize the elegance and power of
the newer cosmographies while making no public demand that the Church
alter its position when that position could not be reconciled with new knowl-
edge. In the pre-suppression Society the first option was almost never consid-
ered by Jesuits, and the second had ceased to be viable by the close of the
seventeenth century. The third option, which often involved correspondence
with practitioners of Newtonian physics and also reflected the baroque Jesuit
search for equivalencies,10 was the only truly viable way forward for Jesuit
astronomers in the decades before 1773.
A curious sidelight to Hells post-suppression career as an astronomer was
his interest in the alleged healing powers of magnets. Hell claimed a number of
successes in his attempts to treat patients in this way, and was an acquaintance
of Franz Anton Mesmer, who would take this work in controversial and eventu-
ally discredited directions.11 A far more damaging blow to Hells reputation
occurred decades after his death, when one of his successors to the directorship
of the Vienna observatory, Carl Ludwig von Littrow, accused the Jesuit of having
made ex post facto erasures and corrections in the journal Hell kept while
observing the transit of Venus in Vard, Lapland in 1769. These charges signifi-
cantly damaged Hells reputation until the American astronomer Simon
Newcomb established that von Littrow had misinterpreted the variations in the
darkness of the ink used by Hell, since von Littrow himself was colorblind.12
9 Athanasius Kircher, Iter exstaticum cleste (Wrzburg: Endter, 1660).

10 This felicitous phrase was coined by Peter Davidson in The Universal Baroque (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2007), 11.
11 James D. Livingston, Driving Force: The Natural History of Magnets (Cambridge, ma:
Harvard University Press, 1996), 203. Hell eventually debunked some of the claims made
by Mesmer.
12 George Sarton, Second Preface to Volume XXXV: Vindication of Father Hell, Isis 35/2
(1944): 97105; at 103104.
Joannes Nepomucene Sajnovics (17331785) occupies an equally unusual

place in the history of Hungarian Jesuit astronomy, since, while a practicing
astronomer, he is best known for his work in linguistics. Born to a noble family,
Sajnovics was Hells assistant when the two set out to what is now northern
Norway in 1768 on their expedition to observe the transit of Venus. Sajnovics
was trained in theology and had also studied mathematics and astronomy,
already serving as assistant (socius) to the distinguished Jesuit astronomer
Franciscus Xavier Weiss (17171785).13 While in Vard, Sajnovics noted similari-
ties between the Hungarian and Smi (Lapp) languages, and after his return to
Hungary published Demonstratio idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse
(Tyrnaviae: Typis Collegii Academici Societatis Jesu, 1770). Sajnovics was not
the first to recognize this relationship, and his theory was proven true, but he
was subject to attacks during his lifetime from Hungarians who resented the
implied biological connection with this remote, primitive, and supposedly
unwarlike northern people. This controversy probably helped stall the advance-
ment of his career after the suppression.14 The interdisciplinary ties that
had typified the late Baroque Society were continued by Sajnovics and his
colleagues after 1773: he corresponded with the greatest Hungarian historian
of his day, the ex-Jesuit Georgius Pray (17231801), about Hungarian orthogra-
phy.15 Sajnovicss most significant literary contribution to astronomy was a
diary that he maintained on his arctic travels, apparently with an eye to later
publication.16 In it, he noted the aurora borealis and procedures taken to col-
lect astronomical data. Sajnovics continued the Societys tradition of writing
accounts of distant lands aimed to win the interest and support of a lay public.
Yet by the time Sajnovicss diary appeared, it was too late to rally much support
for the ventures of a Society that would very shortly be suppressed.
A number of former Jesuits became bishops during the years after 1773.17
They included Josephus Mrtonfi (Mrtonffy) (17461815), who was created
13 Hm Sndor, Sajnovics Jnos lete s Demonstratioja (Esztergom: Buzrovits Gusztv,

1889), 6.
14 Hadobs Sndor, Hell Miska s Sajnovics Jnos bibliogrfija (Rudabnya: rc-s
svnybnyzazti Mzeum Alaptvny, 2008).
15 Cited in Stephanus Katona, Historia Critica Primorum Hungariae Ducum (Pestinii:
Sumtibus Ioannis Michaelis Wiegand, 1778), 20. Katona, himself a former Jesuit, served in
the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Buda with Sajnovics and other former
Jesuits. Calendarium Regi Universitatis Budensis ad annum Jesu Christi M.D.CC.LXXIX.
(Budae: Typis Regi Universitatis, [1779]), 10.
16 Trulls Lynne Hansen and Per Pippen Aspaas, Maximilian Hells Geomagnetic Observations
in Norway, 1769 (=Troms Geophysical Observatory Reports No. 2) (2005), 12.
17 Wilhelm Kratz, Exjesuiten als Bischfe (17731822), ahsi 6 (1937): 185215.
152 SHORE
bishop of Transylvania in 1799.18 Mrtonfis predecessor, Count Ignatius

Batthyny, had built an observatory adjacent to his residence in Alba Iulia.
Batthyny, Mrtonfis brother (some authorities identify him as a nephew)
Antonius (17501799),19 also a former Jesuit and a student of Hell, not only
served as director of the observatory, but published an illustrated descrip-
tion of the telescope, Initia Astronomica speculae Batthyaninae Albensis in
Transilvania (Albae Carolinae: Typis Episcopalis, 1798), said to be the first work
of its kind produced in Europe.20 Bishop Mrtonfi himself conducted astro-
nomical observations and played the role of enlightened Mcenas through the
remaining years of the suppression.21
Eight years younger than Sajnovics, Joannes Madarassy (17411814) spent
most of his career as an astronomer after the suppression. Arriving in Vienna
in 1774, he worked under Hell for two years and then returned to Eger where he
was eventually made provost.22 Before Joseph II forbade the further develop-
ment of a university in Eger in 1784, Maradassy strove to lay the groundwork for
an advanced astronomical observatory connected with the planned academy
and equipped with a large telescope. The observatory was also fitted with a
periscope, which enabled an image of the town to be projected onto a white
table.23 Although the planned university never opened its doors, the former
Jesuit did conduct observations of the eclipse of stars by the Moon and of the
moons of Jupiter. Madarassy does not seem to have groomed any successor for
his role, and after about 1785 we hear no more of his scientific undertakings.24
18 Stoeger, Scriptores, 220.

19 Jzsef Szinnyei, Magyar rk lete s munki, 14 vols. (Budapest: Hornynszky, 18911914),
8:749.
20 Bir Vencel, Grf Batthyny Ignc 17411798: emlkeszs szletsnek ktszzves
vfolduljn (Kolozsvr: Minerva, 1941), 11. Antonius Mrtonfi had been a professor of
Canon Law at the seminarium in Alba Iulia from 1782 to 1788. Elvira Botez and Tiberiu
Oproiu, About Some Astronomical Instruments from Batthyanian Observatory in Alba
Iulia, Highlights of Astronomy 12 (2002): 361364; at 362.
21 Vass Jzsef, Mrtonfi Jzsef, Vrsrnapi jsg 5/8 (21 February 1858); 8586.
22 [Magyar Tudomnyos Akadmia], Hazai s klfldi folyiratok: Magyar tudomnyos rep
ertriuma (Budapest: Athanaeum, 1874), 243.
23 Gudrun Wolfschmidt; Cultural Heritage and Architecture of Baroque Observatories,
paper delivered at the 2009 annual meeting of the European Society for Astronomy and
Culture, 19; at 6, accessed 1 March 2012, http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/spag/ign/
stw/seac09-obs-barock_wolfschmidt.pdf.
24 Kelnyi B. Ott, Az egri pspki Lceum s a gyulafehrvri csillagvizsgl, accessed 2
March 2012 (http://www.ekonyvkereso.net/file/05300/05391/pdf/Kelenyi_Eger_Gyulafeh_
Csill.pdf).
In 1799, Carolus Esterhzy, the bishop of Eger who had planned the develop-
ment of the university, died, and Madarassy subsequently held a series of posts
in the Eger diocese, eventually becoming provost of Eger Castle a year before
his death.
Franciscus Xavier Bruna (17451817) is claimed by both Hungarians and
Croatians, a not uncommon fate of Jesuits working east of the River Leitha. After
service as the socius of two Jesuit astronomers, Bruna gained a post-suppression
position as professor of mathematics at the University of Buda.25 During this
period the ex-Jesuit made observations of the newly discovered planet Uranus,
which had also attracted the interest of Maximilian Hell and Rogerius
Boskovich.26 In the late eighteenth century, meteorological and astronomical
observations were often undertaken by the same researcher, and from 1785
Bruna also made meteorological observations for the Mannheim Meteorological
Society.27 Bruna ended his career as the Rector of the University of Buda and was
one of the very few former Jesuits who lived to see the restoration of the Society
by the pope, although not its re-establishment within the Austrian Empire.28
Throughout the eighteenth century Hungarian Jesuits sought the Indies,
i.e. they asked for assignments that would take them outside of Europe. With
the collapse of the Societys missions in the Portuguese and Spanish colonial
empires in 1759 and 1767 respectively, many of these missionaries came to grief.
Born in Croatia, Ignatius Szentmartny (1718-1793?) was already an astronomer
of note when he was sent in 1749 to Brazil with the title of Royal Astronomer
to Joo V of Portugal with the task of determining the boundary between
Portuguese and Spanish territory.29 His timing was unfortunate, as both
colonial powers were preparing to destroy the Societys reductions that lay
near this boundary line. Expelled and imprisoned in 1760, he was released
through the intercession of Maria Theresia nine (or according to some sources

26 . Dadi, Croatian Astronomers in Hungary by the End of the 18th and the Beginning of
the 19th Century, Hvar Observatory Bulletin Supplement 6/1 (1982): 115122; at 116117. Hell
honored Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus, with two now-discarded constellations,
Tubus Herscheli Major and Tubus Herscheli Minor. Michael E. Bakisch, The Cambridge
Guide to the Constellations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48.
27 Szinnyei Jzsef et al., Magyarorszg termsztudomnyi s mathematikai knyvszete
14721875 (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1878), 92.
28 Francis I issued a decree to this effect in 1821. Alan Reinerman, The Return of the Jesuits
to the Austrian Empire and the Decline of Josephinism, 18201822, The Catholic Historical
Review 52/3 (1966): 372390; at 387.
154 SHORE
seventeen) years later30 and in 1777, returned to Croatia. Along with many
other ex-Jesuits Szentmrtonyi kept a rather low profile, but in 1783, he pro-
duced an anonymous text on Croatian grammar.31 Like Bruna, Szentmrtonyi
is claimed by both Hungarians and Croatians. This former Jesuit exemplified
the extreme diversity of experience that the Society might provide to its mem-
bers, as well as the possibility that one of its more promising practicing
scientists might never publish his findingseven after the suppression. This
obscurity is echoed by the experience of Ferdinandus Hartman, S.J., men-
tioned in one of Hells letters as an astronomer, and who appears as a Professor
physices experimentalis in the Societys collegium in Cluj during 17721773, but
disappears from sight thereafter, a fate shared by many of his confreres.32
Considered together, the post-suppression careers of these men form nei-
ther a school of thought nor a coordinated program of investigation. Nor did
the modest infrastructure that these Jesuits left behind play a great part in the
subsequent development of astronomy in Hungary.33 Rather these former
Jesuits were astronomers being acted upon by forces that not only destroyed
the old Society but also accelerated changes already underway in formal schools
and in government involvement in scientific inquiry throughout Europe. In the
Habsburg lands in particular, natural sciences were passing through a period
when their practitioners were ceasing to be drawn from the ranks of the clergy
and when the universities in which they worked were becoming largely free of
the control of the church. This decoupling of religion and science had special
importance in a kingdom long said by the Jesuits to be ruled by the Virgin Mary
and where cultural institutions other than religiously-affiliated ones were still
developing. Simultaneously the relationship of astronomy to theology was
changing for good: Jesuits might well continue to hold their own private beliefs
30 Iran Abreu Mendes, A Astronomia de Igncio Szentmrtonyi na Demarcaao das Fronteiras

da Amazinia no Sculo XVIII, Anais do XI Seminrio Nacional de Histria da Matemtica
112, accessed 12 February 2013 (http://www.each.usp.br/ixsnhm/Anaisixsnhm/Comunicacoes/
1_Mendes_I_A_Astronomia_de_Ign%C3%A1cio_Szentm%C3%A1rtonyi.pdf).
31 Antun ojat, Prva objavljena gramatika kajkavskoga knjievnog jezika, Rasprave Insti
tuta za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje 1011 (19841985): 201221; at 202.
32 Per Pippin Aspaas, Maximilianus Hell (17201792) and the Eighteenth-Century Transits
of Venus: A Study of Jesuit Science in Nordic and Central European Contexts (Ph.D. Diss.,
University of Troms, 2012), 167.
33 Bernoullis visits to the Trnava observatory in 1774 and 1775 are virtually the only docu-
mented visits of a notable astronomer to a Hungarian astronomical research site during
the suppression. Zdenek Horsk, Astronomick pozorovn na univerzitn observatoi v
Trnav, in Trnavsk univerzita na slovenskch dejinch, ed. Viliam iaj (Bratislava: veda,
1987), 170179; at 171172.
regarding the role of an active God in history, but such views could no longer
frame the presentation of their astronomical findings to a wider community.
The years before Dominus ac Redemptor saw two other developments that
affected all the Societys scientific endeavors in Hungary. The first was the loos-
ening of Jesuit dominance over higher education throughout the Habsburg
realms. Individual Jesuits such as Hell and Rogerius Boskovich commanded
immense respect and occupied prestigious positions both before and after
1773, but the Societys system of schooling that identified and advanced tal-
ented young men was increasingly regarded as outdated after 1760. In Hungary
during the decades before the suppression, the Piarists, who were rivals of the
Jesuits in education, also began to produce astronomers of note. Viennas long-
standing support for Jesuit education began to shift towards the creation of
professional schools beyond the control of religious orders. As Per Pippin
Aspaas notes, The dominant ideology [utilitarian and avoiding Baroque theat
rum] during Joseph IIs reign had little respect for the heritage of Jesuit sci-
ence.34 At the University of Vienna, Jesuits ceased to be directors of studies in
1758, only three years after the decision was taken to establish a great central
observatory of which Hell was soon appointed head.35
Simultaneous with and influenced by these changes were subtle but
telling trends within the Society itself. The pacification of Hungary and
Transylvania, and the disappearance of effective Protestant resistance to
Catholicization altered the spectrum of tasks undertaken by Jesuits.
Eighteenth-century Jesuits working in the Austrian province east of the
Leitha still sought to bring non-Catholics into the churchs fold, but such
campaigns had approached a stalemate.36 Missionary fervor was steadily
supplanted by the more bureaucratic task of maintaining a network of
schools and residentiae: this commitment aided Jesuit science by providing
venues for endeavors such as Hells Cluj observatory and for the influential
press in Trnava that produced Andreas Jaszlinszkys Institutiones.37 But the
commitment of Jesuit resources to secondary schools, to a quasi-university
in Koice, as well as to the ongoing projects of the Uniate churches in
34 Aspaas, Maximilianus Hell, 177.

35 Hell (or Hll), Maximilian, in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 2008, accessed
23 January 2012, http://encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2830901921.html.
36 Cf. Paul Shore, Narratives of Adversity: Jesuits on the Peripheries of the Eastern Habsburg
Realms (Budapest: ceu Press, 2012), 310314.
37 The Trnava press produced over 3,000 titles, a number on scientific subjects. T. Spail,
Universitas Tyrnaviensis in Slovakia et Catholici Ritus Orientalis, Orientalia Christiana
Periodica 3 (1937), 275278; at 275.
156 SHORE
Transylvania and Transcarpathia left little space for the creation of obser-
vatories or scientific libraries on par with those in Western Europe. As the
technology associated with astronomy advanced, the importance of access
to resources sufficient to support this technology also increased. The
brightest lights in Jesuit science were inevitably drawn towards places
where such resources were available: Boskovich to Rome, Hell to Vienna
and where audiences waited to learn of the latest discoveries.
Underlying the practical issue of material support for natural science was
the deeper question of how advances in the sciences might be reconciled with
the idea of a God who intervened in history. This tension was not confined to
astronomy, or to Jesuit science, but it was one of the central questions of eigh-
teenth-century natural philosophy. French Jesuits endeavored to engage (if not
embrace) the newer mechanistic theories in such publications as the Journal
de Trvoux.38 But the Austrian Habsburg lands remained less directly affected
by these currents, and Jesuits there did not feel compelled to debate or to
incorporate challenges in their traditional worldview. The newer philosophy
developed by Jesuit scientists by the mid-eighteenth century was a genuine
achievement,39 but it seemed to exist in a world set apart from the remote
communities and schoolrooms where many Jesuits of Hungary were working
in 1773. In contrast to the handful of practitioners of the exact sciences, the
majority of Jesuits of the eastern Austrian province at least outwardly pre-
served a piety that paid little attention to scientific advances and that looked
backwards for its models and metaphors.
Thus on the eve of the suppression, Jesuit astronomy in the historic lands of
the Crown of St. Stephen occupied a doubtful position both in the institutional
culture of the Society and in Hungarian national life. The association of Jesuits
worldwide with astronomy remained visible until and even beyond 1773: in
China Jesuit observatories continued to operate after the Societys suppres-
sion40 and in Hungary Jesuits such as Franciscus Borgia Kri (17021769) had
been active as astronomers and instrument builders only a few years before.41
But astronomy was not part of the curriculum of the Ratio Studiorum (which in
38 The Journal de Trvoux, which ceased publication in 1767, published astronomical obser-
vations from China, South America, and the Cape of Good Hope. Dante Lnardon, Index
du Journal de Trvoux (Genve: Editions Slatkine, 1986), 156.
39 Robert Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c. 16831867
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33.
40 Jean Joseph Marie Amiot (17181793) directed the Jesuit observatory in Bejing for more
than a decade after the suppression. Vallina, Searching, 52.
41 Stoeger, Scriptores, 180181. Kri, somewhat anachronistically, combined the Baroque
Jesuit roles of historian and scientist.
fact includes no mention of science).42 Nor was the growing interest of the
Viennese court in astronomy easily reconciled with the Societys conflicted
position regarding the study of the natural sciences.
The suppression spelled the end of a distinctly Jesuit approach to science,
but not of the activities of former Jesuits engaged in science, although Hungary
was not the most promising location for their work. The kingdom during the
last years of the dual reign of Maria Theresia and Joseph II, and during the first
years of Josephs sole rule, was no longer a frontier province, but neither was
the region moving towards becoming a center of scientific activity on the
Enlightenment model. In comparison with the monarchies of Western Europe,
Hungarys cities were small (if growing rapidly), its scientific institutions in
their infancy,43 and its scholarly traditions still recovering from the disruptions
of Ottoman occupation, Habsburg liberation, and civil war. The suppression of
the Society and the seizing of its assets provided Vienna with the funds to
reshape higher education, a project that had already begun with the reorgani-
zation of the Jesuit university in Trnava. The relocation of this university to
Buda and the establishment of an observatory there in 1777 under the leader-
ship of Weiss continued the link between Jesuits and state-supported astro-
nomical research.44 Weiss was succeeded by his protg Franciscus Taucher
(17381820), who had remained in Trnava as the curator of the observatory
after his mentor had left for Buda.45 Taucher, who had taught controversiae in
42 The Societys Constitutions did make reference to the teaching of mathematics in so far
as [these topics] are in accord with the end proposed by us. Cited in Dennis C. Smolarski,
S.J., The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, Christopher Clavius, and the Study of the Mathematical
Sciences in Universities, Science in Context 15, 3 (2002): 447457; at 453. The only signifi-
cant curricular reformer in the Austrian Province, Franciciscus Molindes, Instructio pri
vata seu Typus cursus annui(Tyrnaviae: Typis Academicis, 1735), did almost nothing to
advance the teaching of natural sciences. Thanks to the National Library of Slovenia for
providing an image of this volume.
43 The ancestor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a Learned Society founded
by Count Istvn Szchenyi, was not established until 1825. R.J.W. Evans, Szchenyi and
Austria, in History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales, eds. T.C.W. Blanning
and David Cannadine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 113131; at 123.
44 Weiss had been praefectus of the observatory in Trnava since 1762. Stoeger, Scriptores, 393.
The ex-Jesuit also produced the first work on Newtonian physics by a Hungarian, Astronomiae
physicae juxta Newtoni Principia(Tyrnaviae: Typis Academicis Societatis Jesu, 1759).
45 Stoeger, Scriptores, 361; Franciscus Xavier Linzbauer, Codex Sanitario-Medicinalis
Hungariae, tomus II (Budae: Typis Caesero-Regiae Scientaorum Universitatis, 1852), 715.
The Trnava observatory, which possessed only a modest fund of 2,290 florins at the time
of the suppression, remained open until 1785. Bartha Lajos, A nagyszombati egyetem
csillagvizsgljnak kezdetei, padeu 16/7 (2006): 838; at 35; John Schreiber, Jesuit
Astronomy, Popular Astronomy 12 (1904): 9020; at 17.
158 SHORE
Trnava, seems to have moved seamlessly into a position at the Buda University
once the Trnava observatory was shuttered.46 The original manuscripts of
Tauchers observations were lost, probably during the revolution of 1848, but
his lectures as an adjunctus at the Pest University (recently relocated from
Buda) from the years 1788 to 1806, the year of his retirement, survive.47 Taucher,
whose piety seems to have been as authentic as Hells,48 spent his last years as
the praefectus of the seminarium generale, a far cry from the schools the Society
had created in its heyday.
Any survey of Hungarian Jesuit astronomers during this period must at least
mention one of greatest Hungarian scientists of the era, who was also an
implacable adversary of the Society: Franz Xaver Zach (17541832). Despite (or
perhaps as a cause of) this dislike, Zach seems to have received his early train-
ing in mathematics at a Jesuit school.49
The story of Jesuit astronomy in the eastern Habsburg lands from the land-
marks of suppression to restoration provokes questions about a discernible
Jesuit way of proceeding in the sciences and about the relation of Hungarian
Jesuit astronomy to the Societys other endeavors, particularly history. Were
men such as Sajnovics and Hell talented scientists who just happened to be
Jesuits, or did they share approaches to empirical data and to questions of cos-
mology that link them to broader currents of Jesuit thought? A clue can be
found in another area of Jesuit research. Hungarian Jesuit historiography in the
eighteenth century shows a marked movement away from interpretations of
events that rely on Divine intervention, and a diminishing use of the framing of
narratives around ecclesial landmarks such as the life spans of primates. Instead
these Jesuits began to compose a more confessionally neutral account of recent
local history that preserved the attention to detail and skill in Latin prose fos-
tered in the curriculum of the Ratio. After about 1720, successive generations of
46 Calendarium Regi Universitatis Budensis ad annum Jesu Christi M. D.CC. LXXIX. (Bud:
Typis Regiae Universitatis, anno ut supra), 28. Taucher fared far better than many ex-
Jesuits, receiving a stipend of 600 florins for his appointment as mechanicus of the obser-
vatory. Pauler Tivadar, A Budapesti Magyar kir. tudomny-egyetem trtnete. Els Ktet
(Budapest: Nyomatott a Magyar Kirlyi Egyetemi Knyvnyomdban, 1880), 109.
47 Taucher Ferenc, accessed 7 January 2013 (http://leveltar.elte.hu/tanarok.php?fak=PhIG&t
ev=1802/03&tnev=Taucher%20Ferenc). See also Petrovay Kristf, A Csillagszati Tanszk
trtnete, padeu 16, 69(2006): 6998; at 76.
48 Taucher even wrote a sentimental account of festivities associated with the Societys
Founder. Aspaas, Maximilianus Hell (17201792) and the Eighteenth-Century Transits of
Venus, 172, footnote 385.
49 Briefe Franz Xaver von Zachs in sein Vaterland, eds. Peter Brosche and Magda Vargha
(Budapest: Deparment of Astronomy, L. Etvs University, 1984), 13.
Jesuit and ex-Jesuit historians accommodated non-metaphysical notions of

causality, while sustaining their identification with the Society, although, sig-
nificantly, no post-restoration school of Hungarian Jesuit historiography
emerged.50 Astronomy was less dependent than history on the libraries and
schools lost by the Society in 1773: even in the early nineteenth century work-
ing as an isolated astronomer remained a viable option. But the relationship
between the pursuit of knowledge ad maiorem Dei gloriam and the reality of
a Society and church now in a defensive posture was far more freighted with
difficulties than it had been sixty years earlier.
The restored Society faced a post-Napoleonic Europe in which the position
of all Catholic orders was diminished and impoverished. In the Austrian
Empire, the desacralized successor to the Holy Roman Empire, the role of the
Catholic teaching orders in intellectual life had been drastically reduced by the
edicts of Joseph II.51 The prolonged crisis of the subsequent Napoleonic Wars
retarded scientific inquiry and reduced university enrollments. The Society
that returned after 1821 to Hungary had neither the desire nor the capacity to
engage in many of the scientific debates of the day. Loyal to a papacy suspi-
cious of most manifestations of liberal and scientific thought, and lacking its
former world-spanning network of communities from which to collect data,
the Society had to scale back astronomical research, although individual
Jesuits still pursued this field of inquiry.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Jesuit contributions were once
more enriching Hungarian astronomy, but two elements that had character-
ized Jesuit science of the previous century were missing. The first was the
search for equivalencies and the desire to accommodate and even reconcile
disparate data. The presentation of multiple cosmologies vanished from Jesuit
textbooks. Jesuitsor anyone else who wished to engage with the broader
community of astronomershad to do so on its own terms, which left no room
for theories emphasizing an interventionist God or even an Enlightenment
theist architect.52
The second missing element was Jesuit polymaths who dabbled in astron-
omy, and who had already become an anachronism when Hell and Sajnovics
50 Kpeczi Bla, Fggetlensg s halads: politiakai gondalkods a rgi magyar fggetlensge

harcok szzadaiban (Budapest: Szpirodalmi Kiad, 1977), 95.
51 Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in 18th-century Europe (London: I.B. Tauris,
2005), 245249.
52 Edwards Amasa Park could still write in 1885 of the great Architect who had designed
the heavens, but Park was a theologian, not an astronomer. Thomas E. Jenkins, The
Character of God: Recovering the Lost Literary Power of American Protestantism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 22.
160 SHORE
were commencing their observations. Not only had the explosion of knowl-
edge made the mastery of multiple disciplines almost impossible, but the evo-
lution of disciplinary tools and methodologies further encouraged a
specialization incompatible with the pattern of rotating work assignments
found in the Austrian province. For Jesuits, the uncoupling of astronomy from
both theology and salvation history was a much deeper change than the mere
multiplication of academic specializations. Products of a rigorous theological
formation, and, in a post-Waterloo Europe, defenders of a church in reaction,
Jesuits suffered from the loss of cosmology and history as buttresses to their
theological arguments. Biedermeier Hungary found Jesuit scientists confined to
working in secondary schools, inhabiting a political environment in which the
church was increasingly seen by liberal politicians as an obstacle to progress.
There could be no return to the adventure and innovation of the Societys sev-
enteenth-century undertakings, including creative cosmological theorizing.
The asymmetrical before and after picture of Hungarian Jesuit astronomy
just sketched is the consequence of many factors, most of which originated out-
side of the Society. One factor, however, had deep roots within the intellectual
climate Baroque Jesuits had helped create. This is the decline of the emblem and
of the employment of a particular species of visualization that emblematics fos-
tered.53 The construction of cosmographies requires the visualization of rela-
tionships that can never be seen with the eyes. The trained reader of an emblem
possessed the ability to visualize a relationship for which the emblem was a
metaphor. Many emblems convey a moral message, but others contain elements
of physics, or even accurate representations of the earth in space.54 When
astronomy moves beyond the exact recording of data and the application of
mathematical formulae to communicate with a wider audience, relationships
among concrete objects and vectors must be visualized and then made visible to
others. Emblematics contributed to the development of schematic models in
many fields throughout seventeenth-century Europe. For Jesuits, the connection
between the moral universe posited by emblems and the cosmos revealed
through observation and calculation was real and important, giving meaning
not merely to scientific inquiry but to an entire way of proceeding.
Didactic emblematics declined sharply in the eighteenth century, but lin-
gered, along with other expressions of the Baroque, in the eastern reaches of
53 Richard Dimler, Jesuit Emblem Theory, in European Iconography East and West: Inter
national Conference: Selected Papers, ed. George E. Sznyi (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 209222.
54 An emblem from 1640 connects the burial of St. Francis Xavier in China with the sun fill-
ing the entire earth with light. Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis Jesu (Antwerp: ex off.
Plantiniana Balthasaris Moreti, 1640), 721.
the Austrian province.55 The final flowering of pre-suppression Hungarian

Jesuit astronomy took place as this connection broke down completely.
Hungarian Jesuits made their most enduring contributions to the science at
the point when their approach to the field could no longer be readily identified
as distinctly Jesuit. This separation of the identities of Jesuit and scientist
(the latter a coinage unknown to the pre-suppression Society) continued after
the Societys restoration, complicated by the alliance of throne and altar to
which Jesuits were institutionally committed.
The trajectory of Jesuit astronomy in these lands thus differs in fundamental
ways from the narratives of the Societys literary, pedagogical or missionary
achievements. The characteristic Jesuit experiences of solitude and de facto
autonomy were perpetuated in the act of collecting astronomical data, but as
the gap between the system of beliefs that had defined the early Society and
the theistic or completely mechanistic worldview of post-Newtonian astron-
omy widened, Baroque techniques of visualization were of little use in investi-
gating or communicating the secrets of the skies. Indeed, although the
undertaking of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius has remained the touchstone
of Jesuit experience, the reader will search in vain among the writings of
Hungarian Jesuits of the restored Society for a hint of their influence on the
recording or interpretation of data. In the hearts of Hungarian Jesuits, faith
and astronomy were never estranged,56 but the audible conversation between
them had fallen silent forever.
55 One of the last original emblematic creations of a Jesuit along this frontier was Ratio sta
tus animae immortalis symbolice, ascetice et polemice expressa, quatuor in principatu
Transylvaniae receptarum religionum aeternae saluti accomodata ab infinita societatis
Jesu, Coronensi missione. Etvs Lornd Tudomnyegyetem Knyvtr Ms A 155, composed
by Franciscus Partinger between 1710 and 1715.
56 Astronomy and theology could still come together in the minds of former Jesuits. Georgius
Szerdahelyi (17401804) published Elegia epidictica per quam demonstrator: primum homi
nem Adamum fuisse primum et maximum astronomum seu, musam Uraniam esse ominium
musarum primogenitam Urani(Viennae: Typis Joan. Thom. nob. de Trattnern, 1789).
chapter 9
Est et Non Est

Jesuit Corporate Survival in England after the Suppression
Thomas M. McCoog, S.J.
We flattered ourselves that the dissolution of the Society was at a great

distance, tho we likewise often apprehended it to be near. Like affectionate
children we could not abandon all hopes of our dearest Mothers Recovery
even when she was despaired of by every one else. We fondly imagined the
destruction of what we loved so much to be impossible. I am sure I did tho
I often told your Lordship how much others feared it. Every thing that was
done at this Court plainly tended to convince us that destruction was not
far off, but like St. Thomas we could not believe untill we saw & felt it.1
This unsigned, undated fragment preserved among the miscellanea of John

Thorpe, an English ex-Jesuit and a copious correspondent, was probably writ-
ten by Thorpe himself, perhaps as a first draft of a letter, soon after the actual
suppression, to Henry, Lord Arundell of Wardour for whom he negotiated vari-
ous transactions regarding works of art in Rome. But English Jesuits were not
as blind as Thorpe suggests. Indeed, because of their colleges in France and
Spain, they experienced the approaching universal suppression and devised
means to prevent its complete implementation.
Gathering Clouds
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English Jesuits established
a novitiate at Watten, a tertianship at Ghent, and a college at St. Omer, all in
what was then the Spanish Netherlands, and a philosophate/theologate in the
prince-bishopric of Lige. St. Omer and Watten passed to the French crown in
1678. In April 1762, the parlement of Paris ordered the closure of all Jesuit schools
within France; in August the Society was banned.2 The Jesuit community and
1 Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu [=absi], Miscellaneous Papers of John Thorpe, MY/4,
chronological order, no foliation.
2 On the implementation of the decrees in the regions under the jurisdiction of the parlement
of Paris, see Charles R. Bailey, The French Clergy and the Removal of Jesuits from Secondary
Schools, 17611762, Church History 48 (1979): 305319.

est Et Non Est 163
their students migrated from St. Omer to Bruges in early August in anticipation
of their expected expulsion.3 Because the parlement of Douai, in whose jurisdic-
tion Watten was located, held out as long as it could against the Parisian par-
lement, the Jesuits did not abandon Watten for Ghent until 1765.
English Jesuits administered two colleges/seminaries at Valladolid and
Seville (a third college at Madrid existed more as a journal entry than an edu-
cational institution). On the eve of the Societys expulsion from Spain in 1767,
few students studied at Valladolid, and none at Madrid and Seville. As events
unfolded in Spain, the English vicars apostolic approached the Spanish ambas-
sador in London to argue that these three colleges in fact belonged to the
English church and not to the Society of Jesus.4 Consequently, King Charles III
ordered their consolidation into one college at Valladolid. A secular priest,
Philip Mark Perry, was nominated rector as new students arrived.5
John Thorpe retained vestigial hope despite the almost daily confirmation
of the Societys apparent inevitable fate as he, and perhaps others, addressed
its survival in England after the final blow. Thorpe opined that the English
province might survive as a congregation in which perhaps as much of the
genuine original spirit of the Society might with Gods grace be preserved as
amongst any other assembly whatever, that should be collected out of the
whole wreck. He foresaw problems, but not from the civil governments of
3 On the general subject see Henry Foley, S.J., Records of the English Province of the Society of
Jesus, 7 vols. in 8 parts (Manresa/Burns and Oates: Roehampton/London, 18771884), 5:169
173; 7/1: xlxlii, livlv; Hubert Chadwick, S.J., St. Omers to Stonyhurst (Burns and Oates:
London, 1962), 281333; Geoffrey Holt, S.J., Bishop Challoner and the Jesuits, in Bishop
Challoner and His Church: A Catholic Bishop in Georgian England, ed. Eamon Duffy (Darton,
Longman & Todd: London, 1981), 137151; Maurice Whitehead, Con grandi difficolt: le sfide
educative della Compagnia di Ges nella restaurata provincia inglese (18031842), in Morte
e resurrezione di un ordine religioso. Le strategie culturali ed educative della Compagnia di Ges
durante la soppressione (17591814), ed. P. Bianchini (Vita e Pensiero: Milan, 2006), 89108;
Paul Shore and Maurice Whitehead, Crisis and Survival on the Peripheries: Jesuit Culture,
Continuity and Change at Opposite Ends of Continental Europe, 17621814, History of
Universities 24 (2009): 173205.
4 Until the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, vicars apostolic governed the Roman
Catholic Church in England under the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. From the
reign of King James II (16851688) until 1840, there were four vicars. In 1840 the four districts
became eight.
5 Michael Williams, St. Albans College Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence
(C. Hurst and Company/St. Martins Press: London/New York, 1986), 7173; Michael Williams,
St Albans College, Valladolid and the Events of 1767, Recusant History 20 (1990): 223238;
Michael Williams, Philip Perry, Rector of the English College, Valladolid (17681774),
Recusant History 17 (1984): 4866.
164 Thomas M. McCoog
England, Flanders, and Lige: We shall remain upon the same terms with the
first as we have always been, & in regard of the other two, we shall always be
too insignificant a number in each to create any alarm in their politics, & too
advantageous to the interests of the towns to draw upon us any publick ill
treatment. Nor did he anticipate any difficulty from the continental bishops,
specifically the prince-bishop of Lige. He did however worry that the vicars
apostolic could, if they set their mind to it, destroy the remnant. But, interest-
ingly, Thorpe feared unnamed members of the province would be the greatest
obstacles. Admittedly he may have been out of touch because of his long
absence from the province (he had arrived in Rome in November 1756), but he
worried that many would abandon the Societys spirituality and Institute and
without qualm or hesitation become secular priests.6 In vain Thorpe awaited
some instruction from the English provincial Thomas More.7
Thorpes correspondent John Jenison, then active on the English mission,
eased his apprehensions. Apparently by the spring of 1773, at least one project
had been discussed. Membership in some as yet undefined post-suppression
congregation would, of course, be optional, but Jenison believed the over-
whelming majority of English Jesuits would opt for it. Thorpe confessed that
he would infer that anyone who failed to join had never in fact had a true voca-
tion. Before the final bell tolled, Thorpe suggested that any English Jesuit who
had lost or perhaps never had the genuine characteristick Spirit of the Society,
be identified and charitably but swiftly removed from positions of authority.8
Universal Suppression
The blow fell. Pier Francesco Foggini, an anti-Jesuit ecclesiastical historian

nominated by his patron Cardinal Andrea Corsini, was appointed procurator
of the English College, Rome, and Giovanni Giovanucci, vice-rector. But
Cardinal Corsini, cardinal protector of England and a member of the congrega-
tion of cardinals entrusted with the enforcement of the brief Dominus
ac Redemptor, retained full powers.9 The English college situated at Bruges
6 Thorpe to Jenision, 20 January 1773, absi, John Thorpe, Miscellaneous Letters, 17541792, ff.
147rv.
7 Thorpe to Jenison, 13 February 1773, absi, John Thorpe, Miscellaneous Letters, 17541792, f. 152r.
8 Thorpe to Jenison, [17 March 1773], absi, John Thorpe, Miscellaneous Letters, 17541792, f. 159v.
9 See Michael E. Williams, The Venerable English College, Rome. A History, 2nd ed. (Gracewing:
Leominster, 2008), 8186; Vaughan Lloyd, Decline and Fall. I. The Last Years of Jesuit Rule,
17701773, The Venerabile 15 (19501952): 248258; Vaughan Lloyd, Decline and Fall. II. The
Bad Boys Diary, 17731779, The Venerabile 16 (19521954): 216.
est Et Non Est 165
merged with the former theologate/philosophate at Lige10 to become the

Acadmie anglaise under the patronage of Prince-Bishop, Franois-Charles de
Velbruck. John Howard (vere Holme), the last Jesuit rector of the theologate,
became the first president of the academy. On 9 September, the bishop
enforced the brief of suppression with remarkable leniency: having eschewed
their former dress and customs in favor of those of diocesan clergy, the ex-
Jesuits remained within the principality as educators. The academy was offi-
cially established in December 1773. On 15 September 1778, Pope Pius VI
confirmed the new institution in Catholici praesules: the academy enjoyed the
rights and privileges of a pontifical college; its president would be elected by
the senior members of staff and he, in turn, would nominate officials; all nomi-
nations and elections were subject to the approval of the prince-bishop.11 The
brief also dictated that the presidents election should be approved by the vic-
ars apostolic and by the British Catholic nobility. Thomas Glover, S.J., in his
unpublished history of the provinces re-establishment, commented that this
clause never gave any trouble either because it was little known or not
remarked.12
The Suppression within England
On the eve of the suppression, the English province consisted of approximately

280 Jesuits.13 The 140 Jesuits in England and Wales were organized into geo-
graphical districts constituted as colleges or residences according to the rules
of the Society: the College of St. Ignatius (the London district), the College of
10 On the implementation of Dominus ac Redemptor in Bruges, see Chadwick, Omers to

Stonyhurst, 334359. For attempts by Bishop Jean-Robert Caimo to keep the college open
in Bruges, see Holt, Bishop Challoner, 149150.
11 See Geoffrey Holt, S.J., William Strickland and the Suppressed Jesuits (British Province of
the Society of Jesus: London, 1988), 11; and Maurice Whitehead, A Prolific Nursery of
Piety and Learning: Educational Development and Corporate Identity at the Acadmie
Anglaise, Lige, and at Stonyhurst, 17731803, in Promising Hope: Essays on the Suppression
and Restoration of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. Thomas M. McCoog, S.J.
(ihsi: Rome, 2003), 127149, at 138. Copies of the brief can be found at Stonyhurst College,
Stonyhurst Archives, Pamphlets 3/20, and arsi, Angl. 1001, I-1.
12 absi, A Collection of Notes, Memoires, and Documents Respecting the Re-establishment of
the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 10.
13 See Geoffrey Holt, S.J., The State of the English Province on the Eve of the Suppression of
the Society of Jesus, in McCoog, Promising Hope, 2735. The last extant catalogue can be
found in the same volume, 333360.
St. Thomas of Canterbury (the Hampshire district), the College of St. Aloysius
(the Lancashire district), the College of St. Francis Xavier (the southern Wales
district), the College of the Holy Apostles (the Suffolk district), the College of
the Immaculate Conception (the Derby district), the College of St. Chad (the
Stafford district), the College of St. Hugh (the Lincoln district), the Residence
of St. Michael (the York district), the Residence of St. Mary (the Oxford dis-
trict), the Residence of St. Winifrid (the north Wales district), the Residence
of St. Stanislaus Kostka (the Devon district), the Residence of St. George
(the Worcester district), and the Residence of St. John the Evangelist (the
Northumberland district). Distinct Jesuit communities within England were
few if any: the majority, if not all, Jesuits lived alone or with a few others in
thehouses of their patrons, or in houses owned or rented by Jesuits or their
trustees. The provincial and his staff resided in London.
As news of the publication of Dominus ac Redemptor reached England, one
Jesuit observed:
The Society of Jesus is now no more! The Bull [sic], which carried with it
destruction has been pronounced! Permit me on this tragical revolution,
which will be the astonishment of posterity, to write to you as a fellow-
sufferer and as a friend. Not a word, not a sign, not a breath of murmur or
complaint. Respect incapable to alter or to be diminished in regard of the
See Apostolic and the reigning Pontiff. Perfect submission to the rigorous,
yet always adorable decrees of Providence, and to the authority which it
employs in the execution of its designs, the depth of which it becomes
not us to fathom. Let us not pour forth our grief, our sighs, our tears,
unless before the Lord and in his Sanctuary. Let us express our just afflic-
tion before men no otherwise than by our silence, meekness, modesty
and obedience. Never let us forget the instructions, nor the example of
piety we enjoyed when Jesuits and for which we are indebted to the
Society. Let us show by our conduct and behaviour that it deserved a bet-
ter destiny; let the discourse, the lives and actions of her children become
an apology for their Mother. This way of justifying the Society will be
found the most persuasive; it is the only one now proper, the only one
now lawful and permitted. Our desire has been to serve Religion by our
zeal and by our talents. Now let us endeavour to do the same by our Faith
and by our sufferings.14
14 An extract from an undated letter of Father de Neuville to another Jesuit, absi, Varia
17061815, f. 116r. The author may have been one of the Scarisbricks who employed the
name of Neville as aliases.
est Et Non Est 167
Thorpe meanwhile awaited news on the briefs implementation in England.

Because the acts of praemunire (1353, 1365, and 1393) drafted to prevent Roman
involvement in English ecclesiastical affairs forbade recognition of papal
authority, the briefs publication and execution could be deemed high trea-
son.15 On August 18, 1773, Cardinal Corsini as president of the special congrega-
tion for the implementation of the suppression, informed all bishops of
Dominus ac Redemptor and instructed them to confiscate all Jesuit possessions
and property and to hold on to them until they had received further directions
from Rome.16
John Stonor, a brother of Christopher Stonor, Roman agent of the secular
clergy, carried the brief to England. The vicars apostolic (Richard Challoner for
London; Francis Petre for the northern district; John Hornyold, the middle dis-
trict; and Charles Walmesley, O.S.B., the western district) informed the Jesuits
of the orders demise and, as instructed by Rome, demanded their submission.
Regarding the provinces financial assets, the vicars agreed that the ex-Jesuits
continued to be masters of the property which had hitherto belonged to the
English province of the Society of Jesus with the liberty of ultimately disposing
of it to such heirs as we [ex-Jesuits] might chuse [sic] to appoint for the benefit
of the Mission17 despite the congregations injunction that such goods should
be confiscated. All Jesuits complied and placed themselves under their appro-
priate vicar apostolic.18 Regarding their future, Christopher Stonor presented
the Propaganda Fide with a memorial that may have represented the views of
the vicars apostolic. It recommended the continuation of the educational
work of the colleges at Bruges and Lige for the success of the mission, and for
the formation of the ex-Jesuits into a congregation, with or without secular
vows, that would supervise the assets of the former province.19 Possible diffi-
culties, Thorpe argued, should not deter the ex-Jesuits from making this
15 Thorpe to Jenison, 3 September 1773, absi, John Thorpe, Miscellaneous Letters, 17541792, ff.
172r173r.
16 See Sydney F. Smith, S.J., The Suppression of the Society of Jesus, ed. Joseph A. Munitiz, S.J.
(Gracewing: Leominster, 2004), 260261. The text can be found in Gustave Franois Xavier
La Croix de Ravignan, S.J., Clment XIII et Clment XIV, 2 vols. (Julien, Lanier et Cie: Paris,
1854), 1:560561.
17 absi, Restoration, Paccanarists, Stonyhurst, &c., f. 8r (published in McCoog, Promising
Hope, 385).
18 Holt, State of the English Province, in McCoog, Promising Hope, 3233.
19 See Edwin H. Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (16911781), 2 vols. (Longman,
Green, and Co.: London, 1909), 2:169170. Thorpe commented on Stonors proposal on
12 October 1773 (absi, John Thorpes Newsletters from Rome, MZ/3C, chronological order,
unfoliated).
attempt: if the Jesuits maintain a perfect unity of harmony with no other pre-
tensions than that of doing good, & if charity or honour be found in the pres-
ent heads of the English clergy, time will heal many a sore, & produce &
perpetuate many solid advantages to religion.20 Thorpe wondered if the cardi-
nals of the congregation, on whom all regarding the suppression depended,
would agree to this proposal, especially because they would not approve any-
thing without Spains consent.21
With or without Spains knowledge and the congregations approval, the vic-
ars apostolic permitted the ex-Jesuits to retain a type of union.22 Bishop Charles
Walmesley, O.S.B., appointed Thomas More, the last provincial, vicar over the
former Jesuits within his district. Bishop Challoner had earlier named More his
vicar for the London district. Walmesley granted More
the same powers you enjoyed before, of granting faculties to any of the
late Society whom you may send into my District, and of removing any of
them from one place to another as prudence may require; desiring you
will not fail to acquaint me of all such changes. Youll please also to
appoint Rectors in different parts as there were before.23
He deferred decisions regarding ex-Jesuits to More, and remained open to sug-

gestions for what may contribute to the government of your people and the
improvement of the M[ission]n.24 In a belated reply to three letters from an
unnamed ex-Jesuit, Bishop John Joseph Hornyold, vicar apostolic of the
Midland district, admitted that Mr More is still deemed to be the superior of
20 12 October 1773, absi, John Thorpes Newsletters from Rome, MZ/3C, chronological order,
unfoliated.
21 6 November 1773, absi, John Thorpes Newsletters from Rome, MZ/3C, chronological order,
unfoliated.
22 Ronald A. Binzley discusses ex-Jesuit politics, a conscious policy preoccupied with the
conservation and restoration of the Society, in Ganganellis Disaffected Children: The
Ex-Jesuits and the Shaping of Early American Catholicism, 17731790, u.s. Catholic
Historian 26 (2008): 4777. In his doctoral thesis Ganganellis Disaffected Children: The
Suppressed English Jesuit Province and the Shaping of American Catholicism, 17621817
(Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2011), Binzley argues that the fundamental
purpose of their politics was to preserve the English Provinces corporate existence in
order to facilitate an eventual Jesuit restoration (91). I agree with him that the English
ex-Jesuits worked and hoped for the Societys eventual restoration, but I think their strat-
egy was more ad hoc than he suggests.
23 Walmesley to More, 31 October 1773, absi, Letters of Bishops and Cardinals 17531853, f. 36r.
24 Walmesley to More, 31 October 1773, absi, Letters of Bishops and Cardinals 17531853, f. 36r.
est Et Non Est 169
those who once did belong to it [the English province], as he is a Gentleman in

every way worthy & qualified for that Office, & one also whose Authority over
you, the Bishop never did, nor doth in any Manner desire to diminish. Thus
the bishop referred the petition to More with the promise that he would grant
whatever More recommended.25 No wonder that someone had scribbled the
note Est et non est: wonderful existence of the Society after its extinction on
a letter in 1777.26 For the moment at least, Rome acquiesced to the arrange-
ments made between the vicars apostolic and More.27
Concern about the financial assets of the former Jesuit province prompted
the convocation of an assembly of former Jesuits at the Turks Head Tavern,
Gerrard Street, Soho, London, from 29 April to 7 May 1776. Thomas More had
proposed a meeting to discuss the current situation in a circular letter.28
Whether he acted on his own or in cooperation with the vicars apostolic is not
known. News of the Societys continuation in Russia and the expectations gen-
erated by the election of Pope Pius VI on 15 February 1775 fanned hope for the
eventual, and possibly imminent, restoration of the Society and the province.
Until then, the ex-provinces resources must be preserved. Representatives
from the districts and Lige gathered at the tavern. They elected Thomas More
chairman of the assembly; Thomas Nixon and Joseph Reeve, secretaries. More
and Thomas Talbot (vere Mansell) were elected administrators. The assembly
decided that each district would manage its own portfolio, with wealthier dis-
tricts aiding the poorer ones. In the event that any district fell to two members,
it would be abolished and its funds transferred by bill or legal conveyance to
the administrators. Since the ex-Jesuits were no longer bound by a vow of pov-
erty, they could dispose of personal and private property as they chose. The
fathers resolved with the greatest Unanimity that the same Bonds of
Friendship and Charity be kept entire, that the same Communion of Prayers
and merits be still maintained amongst us with the same Union of Spirit which
formerly subsisted.29 Until the desired restoration, friendship, charity, prayer,
and administrators would unite the ex-Jesuits.
25 James Wyke to [?], Longbirch, 20 October 1777, absi, Letters of Bishops and Cardinals
17531853, f. 38r.
26 absi, Letters of Bishops and Cardinals 17531853, f. 38v.
27 Thorpe to Henry, Lord Arundell, 19 March 1774, Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon
Archives, Correspondence from Father John Thorpe to Lord Arundell, 2667/20/22, chrono-
logical order, unfoliated.
28 absi, Restoration, Paccanarists, Stonyhurst, &c., f. 9v (published in McCoog, Promising
Hope, 387).
29 A copy of the minutes can be found in absi, Letters, etc. 17731804, ff. 42r47v, at 45v (pub-
lished in McCoog, Promising Hope, 369374, at 373). Ex-English Jesuits, specifically
In 1778, Parliament passed the first Catholic Relief Act (18 George III c. 60).30
Catholics willing to take an oath in which they not only declared their loyalty
to the current monarch but also repudiated Stuart pretensions and the tempo-
ral power of the pope, would be allowed to practice their faith; open schools;
possess, own and inherit property (as private individuals if not as corpora-
tions); and have public churches. Despite some misgivings that Catholics could
swear that the pope had no temporal authority, the vicars apostolic took the
oath as did most of the clergy and gentry.
A second assembly met at the Queens Head Tavern, Holborn, London, from
8 to 21 July 1784.31 The assembled fathers elected Charles Lucas (vere Burke)
presider, and Reeve and Joseph Tyrer, secretaries. The first session concerned
the current state of affairs and whether the instructions formulated at the pre-
vious assembly had actually been implemented. After long debates the second
session decided that one administrator, paid 150 per annum, would be suffi-
cient. More declined the position; his associate Talbot did not attend the
assembly. William Strickland, who had succeeded Howard as president of
Lige after the latters death in 1783, volunteered and was elected by one vote.
Attention then turned to the estates. The fathers unanimously decreed That it
is and always was the opinion of every district since the dissolution of the
Society, that the property of the different districts as well as of Office, is of such
a nature, that it cannot be alienated from the use originally intended, and such
has all along been their invariable practice.32 Fiscal matters dominated the
agenda as the assembly decided on proper procedure and financial responsi-
bility for the arrival and departure of ex-Jesuits from specific districts, care for
the elderly and infirm, and the nature of the assistance that wealthier districts
could provide to poorer ones. On 15 July the fathers finally addressed the often
postponed question of Lige. The fathers unanimously agreed the academy
was essential to the mission. Thus the mission would support it: bursaries for
John Thorpe and Charles Plowden, actively participated in what has been called the
Ex-Jesuit International, by which ex-Jesuits retained a type of union through the
exchange of pertinent information in an adaptation of the traditional annual letters. For
more information see Binzleys thesis Ganganellis Disaffected Children, 142, note 77.
30 The Qubec Act of 1774 provided a precedent by granting freedom of religion to French
Roman Catholics and proposing a modified and acceptable new oath of allegiance.
31 The minutes can be found in absi, Letters etc. 17731804, ff. 67r70v (published in
McCoog, Promising Hope, 375381). Reeves historical narrative in absi, Restoration,
Paccanarists, Stonyhurst, &c., ff. 13r18r (published in McCoog, Promising Hope,
390395).
Hope, 392).
est Et Non Est 171
the formation of young ecclesiastics would be sought, and district moneys

would be given to Lige because it would benefit the mission. The assembly
reconnected the mission and the academy,33 and allowed Strickland to remain
as Liges president to bring its governance in line with the norms laid down.
Talbot served as Stricklands vicar in London, but he was obliged to admit
such advice and direction as Mr Strickland shall judge expedient for the mutual
advantage of the Mission and the Academy.34 After the suppression, ex-Jesuits
in Lige and in England apparently cooperated but remained distinct: the for-
mer existed as an ecclesiastical entity recognized by the prince-bishop and the
pope; the latter had a more nebulous existence dependent on the vicars apos-
tolic. Henceforth, the two were joined with the academy in some undefined
way dependent on the mission. Geographically, at least, the former province
was being re-constituted.
On 15 July 1786, Leonardo, Cardinal Antonelli, prefect of the Propaganda
Fide, complained that former members of the now extinct Society of Jesus
were of the opinion that they have the right dispose of goods belonging to the
said Society. The congregation warned that this opinion contradicted sacred
canons and constitutions: they could not dispose of any goods, chapels or
estates even if they intend to devote the money received to pious uses.
Current holders could enjoy the fruits of these assets during their lives but at
their death, everything should pass to the vicars apostolic.35 On 16 January
1787, William Strickland explained to the vicars apostolic: we thought the
Property of the Parent should devolve nowhere with so great propriety as to
the Children of that Parent, but at no time did they believe they had unlim-
ited power in the Disposal of it. The ex-Jesuits restricted their expenditures to
their own personal care and maintenance, and to the good of the mission. As
ex-Jesuits died, Strickland contended that they had the right to convey it
[estates and moneys] to such Trustees, Individuals or Bodies, as we shall with
Impartiality judge best qualified to fulfill the obligation of applying it to its
original uses.36 Episcopal dissatisfaction with possible conveyance of assets to
33 The minutes can be found in absi, Letters etc. 17731804, f. 69r; absi, Restoration,
Paccanarists, Stonyhurst, &c., f. 17r (published in McCoog, Promising Hope, 379, 394).
Hope, 395). See also absi, Letters etc. 17731804, f. 70r (published in McCoog, Promising
Hope, 381).
35 This letter, addressed presumably to the vicars apostolic, was included in a letter from
Thomas Talbot, bishop of the Midland District, to Strickland, Longbirch 22 January 1787,
absi, Letters, etc. 17731804, ff. 114v115r (published in McCoog, Promising Hope, 382383).
36 absi, Letters, etc. 17731804, ff. 114rv (published in McCoog, Promising Hope, 382).
trustees and not to the vicars apostolic as dictated in the cardinals elucidation
prompted Strickland to rattle his saber. Expressing considerable surprise that
the authority and influence of a foreign tribunal had been sought and recog-
nized contrary to the oath of allegiance pronounced by many Catholics, includ-
ing the vicars apostolic, after the Relief Act of 1778, Strickland sought legal
advice. The lawyer replied that any person applying to a Roman congregation
or implementing a decision made by such a congregation would have been
liable to the severest Censure of our Laws, and would have incurred the penal-
ties of a Praemunire. Without further comment Strickland ended the letter
with an implied verbum sapienti sat est.37 No battle was waged over the ex-
Jesuit assets.
Restoration38
Stanisaw Czerniewicz, vicar general, reluctantly denied John Howards 1783

petition for the affiliation of the ex-Jesuits in Lige with the Jesuits in Russia in
foro externo because his jurisdiction was restricted to Russia. But in foro interno,
all ex-Jesuits throughout the world striving to adhere to Ignatian ideals and
spirituality were true companions of Jesus, sons of our Holy Father Ignatius.39
Eighteen years later, William Strickland repeated the request to Franciszek
Kareu, superior general, because he had heard of papal confirmation of the
Societys existence. Kareu delayed disclosing the full contents of the edict lest
37 Strickland to Talbot, n.p., n.d., absi, Letters, etc. 17731804, ff. 115rv (published in McCoog,
Promising Hope, 384).
38 In this article I shall not discuss another form by which the Society of Jesus survived in
England: the Paccanarists. Further study of them in England is especially needed after the
thorough investigations of Eva Fontana Castellis La Compagnia di Ges sotto altro nome:
Niccol Paccanari e la Compagnia della fede di Ges (17971814) (ihsi: Rome, 2007). Until
then, we must rely on Hubert Chadwick, S.J., Paccanarists in England, in McCoog,
Promising Hope, 151175.
39 Czerniewicz to John Howard, Poock October 14, 1783, absi, Epistolae Generalium (1750
1853), ff. 5r6r (published in Marek Inglot, S.J., La Compagnia di Ges nell Impero Russo
(17721820) e la sua parte nella Restaurazione Generale della Compagnia [Editrice Pontificia
Universit Gregoriana: Rome, 1997], 316317). An English translation of this important
monograph shall be published by Saint Josephs University Press in late 2014. An undated
copy of Howards request can be found in arsi, Fondo Gaillard, Transcriptions, Filza 11,
unfoliated. On Gaillard and his collection see Robert Danieluk, S.J., A Failed Mission or
an Ever Ongoing Tertianship?Franois-Marie Gaillard, S.J., and his Contribution to
the Historiography of the Society of Jesus, ahsi 82 (2013): 3113.
est Et Non Est 173
his letter fall into the wrong hands, but he assured the Englishman that Pope
Pius VII allows us, united in one body under a General and under the immedi-
ate protection of the Apostolic See, notwithstanding any decrees to the con-
trary, in particular those of Pope Clement XIV, to press on in seeking the end
proposed to us, however within and not beyond the boundaries of Russia.
Thus he could not grant Stricklands petition. But, he informed Strickland, Pius
had recently granted a request for Jesuits from Charles Emmanuel IV, king of
Sardinia. Perhaps the pope would listen kindly to a comparable request from
England. So he counseled the English to seek favour from the Vicar of Christ,
through your diocesan bishop or other men of importance.40 In 1802, Cardinal
Cesare Brancadoro presented Pius with petitions from ten ex-Jesuits, and from
twenty-two English nobles and gentlemen.41 Father General Gabriel Gruber
notified Strickland on October 12, 1802 that Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, papal
secretary of state, had approved the affiliation. Henceforth it would be permis-
sible for ex-Jesuits in Catholic countries to aggregate themselves to the Jesuits
in Russia.42 The general, however, advised caution and discretion because
Spain had already protested to the pope regarding his correspondence with
them. Permission, he clarified, to accept companions outside the Russian
Empire had been conveyed first by Cardinal Consalvi and then by ex-Jesuit
Vicenzo Giorgi with privilege of access to his Holiness.43 Pope Pius VII had
conceded everything requested except the now customary prohibition against
the Societys traditional attire. Although the amalgamation was licitly and
validly effected, Gruber believed it would disturb the vicars apostolic, but
he promised that Rome would instruct them to remain quiet.44 He named
40 Kareus reply of 10 September 1801 was included in a letter by Strickland to, in all probabil-
ity, Marmaduke Stone shortly thereafter (absi, Miscellaneous 17711820, ff. 71rv [published
in McCoog, Promising Hope, 421423]).
41 The two petitions along with the cardinals contribution can be found in arsi, Angl. 1001,
II-11 and Angl. 1001, I-3. Unfortunately the copies of the two supplications do not contain
any names. An undated copy of Stricklands letter to Brancadoro can be found in absi,
Letters of Bishops and Cardinals 17531853, ff. 229rv.
42 Gruber to Strickland, 12 October 1802, absi, Epistolae Generalium (17501853), ff. 15rv. See
also his letter of 28 October 1802 absi, Epistolae Generalium (17501853), ff. 16rv. Consalvi
conveyed his approval in a letter to the interim nuncio in St. Petersburg Monsignor
Benvenuti, Rome 17 July 1802 (Nonciature de Russia daprs les documents authentiques. IV.
Intrim de Benvenuti 17991803, ed. Marie Joseph Rout de Journel [Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana: Vatican City, 1957], 275277; the relevant section can be found in Inglot,
Compagnia di Ges, 220).
43 Gruber to Stone, St. Petersburg 1 March 1803, absi, Epistolae Generalium (17501853), ff.
19r21v (published in McCoog, Promising Hope, 437441, at 439).
44 Ibid.
Strickland provincial procurator, and Stone provincial of England, Ireland,

Scotland, and of those places linked with England. Gruber predicted that the
devil and the world would throw many obstacles in the provincials path. For
this reason he named a provincial immediately. Together, he exhorted Stone,
Let us spurn these and turn all our attention to repairing the damage which
the false philosophy and the loss of faith have brought about.45 And obstacles
there were.
The new provincial advised the vicars apostolic of the provinces re-founda-
tion and of papal reluctance to make a public announcement because of
continued Spanish opposition.46 But someone sought proof47 and Consalvi
backtracked. He informed the new nuncio Tommaso Arezzo, archbishop of
Seleucia, on July 30, 1803, that Pope Pius VII had granted candidates from out-
side Russia the right to aggregate themselves to the Society only in foro interno
and not in any public, canonical way.48 On 3 December Cardinal Stefano Borja,
prefect of the congregation, instructed the vicars apostolic not to recognize
those who wished to be Jesuits in England, nor to admit their privileges, sup-
posing they claim any, unless the vicars apostolic are first certified of the
legitimate existence [of the Society] and this by the Holy See through the
Congregation de Propaganda Fide.49 To the disappointment of the English
Jesuits, Pius VIIs Per alias, which reinstituted the Society in the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies in 1804, said nothing about England.50
Persistent requests for authentication went unheeded. Gabriel Gruber died
on 7 April 1805; Tadeusz Brzozowski succeeded him as superior general. The
latter continued to petition Rome for a rescript for the English. Until one was
45 Ibid., 437441, at 440.

46 Stones copies of the letters can be found in absi, Prov. Angl. Letters from Marmaduke
Stone, etc., ff. 31r34v.
47 The initial query apparently came from the pro-Jesuit Archbishop John Troy of Dublin.
See John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., An Unobserved Centenary, The Month 115 (1910):
449461, at 460.
48 Consalvi to Arezzo, Rome 30 July 1803, Nonciature de Russia daprs les documents
authentiques. Nonciature dArezzo 18021806, ed. Marie Joseph Rout de Journel, 2 vols.
(Imprimerie Polyglotte Vaticane: Rome: 1922, 1927), 1:206209. See Inglot, Compagnia di
Ges, 225.
49 The letter can be found in Bernard Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation, 3 vols.
(Longmans, Green and Co.: London, 1912), 3:286287. I use the translation found in Pollen,
Unobserved Centenary, 460.
50 Per alias, Rome 30 July 1804, in McCoog, Promising Hope, 319322, here 321. An earlier
attempt had failed. In the summer of 1801, Pius revoked permission for the re-foundation
of the Society in Naples and the opening of a novitiate because of pressure from Spain.
See Pollen, Unobserved Centenary, 458.
est Et Non Est 175
forthcoming, the general reminded Strickland of Vincenzo Giorgis account of

Piuss reply to the petitions in support of the Societys reestablishment. Giorgi
claimed that Pius replied Agant sane, procedant sane in Anglia (Jesuitae), sed
in habitu Saeculari, quemadmodum prius, et hoc praesenti sufficit [Let the
Jesuits act, let them by all means proceed, but in the attire of secular clergy just
as before and that is sufficient for the moment].51 The current turmoil dis-
pleased the general but he exhorted the English not to be discouraged.52
The anti-Jesuit King Charles IV of Spain abdicated in March 1808; his son
Ferdinand VII abdicated in May. Napoleons brother Joseph became king in
June. Pius VII was taken prisoner by Napoleon in July 1809. In the summer of
1813, the pope delegated English affairs to the nuncio in Vienna, Antonio
Gabriele Severoli. In response to a direct question regarding the English Jesuits,
the nuncio finally issued a rescript on 24 December 1813: the Jesuits in England
belong to the Society in such a manner that servatis servandis [with all due
observances], they should be admitted to ordination titulo paupertatis [with
the title of poverty], the others truly enjoy the same privileges as are enjoyed
by their members in Russia.53
The Irish Jesuit Charles Aylmer was among the Jesuits and dignitaries,
including Bishop John Milner, vicar apostolic of the Midlands, and Bishop
Daniel Murry, coadjutor bishop of Dublin, in the Sodality Chapel of the Nobles
at the Ges when Pope Pius VII announced the restoration of the Society on 7
August 1814. I cannot pretend to comment [on] it as I heard it but imperfectly,
Aylmer wrote to Charles Plowden, but I know that it extends the Society
already established in Russia Naples and Sicily, to the whole world. It says
nothing of Privileges in our favor. Little did Aylmer ever expect to be present
at such a ceremony. Tearfully he observed: Never was any order established in
this manner; never such marked attention paid by any Pope; never so great a
triumph. O truly how sweet is victory after a long fought battle!!!!54
In the bull Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum, Pius commended to
the nobility of princes and temporal lords, and also our venerable brother
archbishops and bishops, and others in any seat of honour, this oft men-
tioned Society of Jesus, and each of its members, and we plead with them
51 This is the statement attributed to Giorgi in Brzozowski to Stone, St. Petersburg 25

November 1809, absi, Epistolae Generalium (17501853), f. 116v.
52 Brzozowski to Strickland, St. Petersburg 13 October 1809 absi, Epistolae Generalium (1750
1853), ff. 112r113r.
53 The original petition and the rescript can be found in Inglot, Compagnia di Ges, 228. The
rescript can also be found in Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, 3:289.
54 Charles Aylmer to Charles Plowden, Rome 8 August 1814, absi M.S.S. Varia, A.II.21/49.
and exhort them not only to accept them, not allowing them to be dis-
turbed by anyone, but to receive them kindly and, as is becoming, with
charity.55
And if the powers secular and ecclesiastical did not? Only Milner offered the
English Jesuits any form of recognition. On 2 December 1815, Cardinal Lorenzo
Litta, prefect of the Propaganda Fide, replied to Bishop Poynters query:
although Rome desired the Societys restoration in England, it had not in fact
been restored because the civil powers had not agreed to it. According to the
prefect, the bull restored the Society only where civil powers agreed to receive
and recall it [in quibus civiles potestates illam recipere ac revocare con-
senserint].56 Cardinal Consalvi was especially worried that the governments
hostility towards the Society and its restoration would impede current negotia-
tions for Catholic emancipation.57 Writing to Richard Thompson, a secular
priest then working in Weldbank, Lancashire, on 8 July 1818, Bishop William
Gibson stated clearly in order to remove all doubts, if any doubt can exist,
and to make all clear, that the Order of the Society of Jesus is not restored.
Consequently, he informed the Gentlemen of Stonyhurst they were to con-
sider themselves in no other light than as Secular Clergymen.58 On 18 April
1820, Cardinal Consalvi in reply to another direct question from Bishop Poynter,
declared that the Society of Jesus is to be considered as not yet restored in
England as the civil power refuses to receive & recall it, although it be so far
restored generally, that if the British government wish to admit it, a particular
apostolical grant is not necessary for its reception in England.59
The tug of war continued. The Franciscan bishop Peter Collingridge, vicar
apostolic of the western district, and his coadjutor Peter Baines, O.S.B., argued
for complete recognition of the Societys restoration. On the back of Bainess
petition, Pope Leo XII wrote:
Having considered the present state of affairs, We grant the request of the
petitioner and of the Bishop of Thespia, whose coadjutor he is,And We
55 The text of Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum, with an English translation, can be found in
McCoog, Promising Hope, 323330, at 329330.
56 An appropriate extract from this letter is published in Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipa
tion,3:289290. I use the English translation cited in John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., The
Restoration of the English Jesuits, 18031817, The Month 115 (1910), 585597 at 591.
57 Pollen, Restoration of the English Jesuits, 592593.
58 Gibson to Thompson, Durham 8 July 1818, absi, Letters of Bishops and Cardinals 17531853,
ff. 260rv.
59 absi, Letters of Bishops and Cardinals 17531853, f. 266v.
est Et Non Est 177
declare the constitution of Our predecessor of holy memory, Pope Pius

VII, beginning Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum, to have force in England
as regards all spiritual and canonical effects,Wherefore it is allowable
for Our Venerable Brothers, the Vicars Apostolic in England, both to pro-
mote to sacred orders the alumni of the Society of Jesus (from whatever
place they come) under the title of religious poverty,And also to allow
the said Society to enjoy all the privileges spiritual and canonical (accord-
ing to the form of the breve of Benedict XIV.,60 also Our predecessor),
which the other Religious Orders enjoy in England,Notwithstanding
anything to the contrary, even if special and worthy of special mention.
We also commission the petitioner to make known this Our mind as he
shall think expedient in the Lord, to Our said Venerable Brothers the
Vicars Apostolic. Given at Rome at the Vatican, on the first day of the year
1829.61
Finally, twenty six years after the re-establishment of the province and fifteen
after the Societys universal recognition, a papal rescript legitimated Jesuits in
England. The British government was another matter. The 28th clause of An
Act for the Relief of His Majestys Roman Catholic Subjects, enacted on
13 April 1829, made provision for the gradual Suppression and final Prohibition
of Jesuits and members of other religious orders within the United Kingdom.
Among other restrictions, any Jesuit entering the kingdom could be found
guilty of a misdemeanor and banished.62 These limitations, violated more
often than observed, were more an inconvenience than a burden. The English
province numbered 109 members in 1829: fifty-four priests, forty-seven scholas-
tics, and eight brothers.63 The Society of Jesus had survived much harsher leg-
islation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It would do so again.
60 Regulae observandae in Anglicanis missionibus (sometimes known as Apostolicum

ministerium).
61 The bull can be found in Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, 3:310. I use the translation
cited in John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., The Recognition of the Jesuits in England, The
Month 116 (1910): 2336 at 35.
62 The act can be found on-line at http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/The_Emancipation_Bill
(22 January 2013). See also Ward, Eve of Catholic Emancipation, 3:258259.
63 The English Province, 17941914: Brief Chronological Notes, Letters and Notices 32
(191314): 294309, at 301.
chapter 10
The Exiled Spanish Jesuits and the Restoration

of the Society of Jesus
Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga and Niccol Guasti
The Exile of the Spanish Jesuits
This essay offers an analysis of the role played by the exiled Spanish Jesuits in
the process which led to the restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. The
long Italian exile imposed on the Spanish Jesuits can be divided into three
phases. The first began with the expulsion, ordered by Charles III (17161788)
in April 1767, and the subsequent arrival of Jesuit contingents in the Papal
States, and ended in the summer of 1773 with the promulgation of the papal
brief Dominus ac Redemptor. The second phase lasted for twenty years
(17731793). The third and final period began with the re-founding of the
Jesuit residences in the duchy of Parma (1793) and ended with the worldwide
restoration of the order in 1814 and the return of the few still-living Spanish
Jesuits to the Iberian peninsula and Spanish overseas territories during the
following years. This essay focuses primarily on the latter period, though
references to the two earlier stages are necessary to better understand the
role of the Iberian and South American Jesuits who took an active part in the
process of reconstituting the order.
During the first phase of the exile (April 1767August 1773), the superiors of
the eleven provinces of the Spanish assistancy in exilefour of which were
Iberian (Andalusia, Aragon, Castile, and Toledo) and seven of which were
located overseas (Chile, New Spain, Paraguay, Peru, Quito, Santa Fe, and the
Philippines)tried to develop a survival strategy.1 While on Corsica (between
the summer of 1767 and the autumn of 1768), the provincials had committed
themselves to reconstituting the administrative structure of their communi-
ties by trying to re-found each provinces headquarters. Not infrequently, mem-
bers of different colleges and houses had to associate together. This was due to
the growing number of secularizations (incentivized by monetary rewards
from Madrids government), the small number of novices, and the deaths of
1 Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro de los jesuitas castellanos (17671815) (Salamanca:

Junta de Castilla y Len, 2004), 25135.

The Exiled Spanish Jesuits 179
many of the eldest or weakest members during the deportation. There were
many vacancies on the staffs of each community so it had become impossible
to replicate pre-expulsion organizational structures. The main instrument
which allowed the Iberian community to carry out its plans for reconstitution
was financial: the superiors skillfully resisted the repeated attempts of both the
Consejo Extraordinario (the commission of the Castile council in charge of
Jesuit affairs) and of Bourbon officers (who were in charge of controlling the
exiles, first in Corsica and later in Emilia-Romagna) to impose the individual
drawing of annuities. Instead, the superiors pursued the common manage-
ment of lifelong pensions for all Jesuits.2
The Spanish Jesuits deployed other strategies, of an ideological and cultural
nature, to preserve the original identity of their community. These included
adherence to cults and devotional practices that were typical of the Society, the
diffusion of prophecies predicting an immediate return to Spain,3 the circula-
tion of edifying letters that memorialized deceased Jesuits, and the writing of
diaries, memories and storiesboth personal and collectiveconcerning the
exile.4 There was also an attempt to maintain secret epistolary contacts with
relatives (initially prohibited by the Pragmatic Sanction that decreed the expul-
sion) and to ordain members of the next generation and of the few novices who
had secretly accompanied their masters to Italy or had joined them later. It is
worth noting that, in this period, the contribution of the secretariat of state of
the Holy See and the general curia of the order (including Superior General
Lorenzo Ricci) was minimal. In fact, after endorsing the decision of Clement
XIII to deny the Spanish fathers hospitality in the Papal States (May 1767),
Ricci and the Italian Jesuits limited their help to logistic matters, such as the
negotiations to rentat exorbitant ratesthe buildings that should have
2 Tefanes Egido, La expulsin de los jesuitas de Espaa, in Historia de la Iglesia en Espaa,

ed. by Ricardo Garca Villoslada (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1979), 4:745792;
Expulsin y exilio de los jesuitas espaoles, ed. by Enrique Gimnez Lpez (Alicante:
Universidad de Alicante, 1997); Y en el tercero perecern. Gloria, cada y exilio de los jesuitas
espaoles en el siglo XVIII, ed. by Enrique Gimnez Lpez (Alicante: Universidad de
Alicante, 2002); Niccol Guasti, Lotta politica e riforme allinizio del regno di Carlo III.
Campomanes e lespulsione dei gesuiti dalla monarchia spagnola (17591768) (Florence:
Alinea, 2006); Jos Antonio Ferrer Benimeli, Expulsin y extincin de los jesuitas (17591773)
(Bilbao: Mensajero Editorial, 2013). See also http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/
expulsion_jesuitas/.
3 Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga, Profecas, coplas, creencias y devociones de los jesuitas
expulsos durante su exilio en Italia, in Y en el tercero, 513530.
4 Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga, Manuscritos sobre la expulsin y el exilio de los jesuitas
(17671815), in ibid., 495511.
180 Arrillaga and Guasti
accommodated the Spanish Jesuits.5 This stemmed from a fear that the new
Jesuits arrival might provoke the financial collapse of the Italian assistancy. As
a result, by the end of 1768 all the provinces of the exiled Spanish assistancy
were distributed throughout pontifical territory, mainly in the three legations.6
Despite the many organizational difficulties faced by the Spanish superiors,
the compactness of the Spanish assistancy in exile stymied attempts by
Madrids government and Bourbon diplomats to undermine its internal soli-
darity. In June 1769, Madrid ordered that the names of the individual provinces
should be changed. The goal was to erase the Jesuits bonds with their native
territories, but this unwelcome measure did not have a significant impact on
the solidarity of the exiled Spanish community.
Far more traumatic was the canonical suppression of the order, communi-
cated to the superiors of the individual provinces by the bishops of the cities
belonging to the papal legations.7 Even more damaging, however, were the reso-
lutions made by the Madrid government and by the congregation of cardinals
which had been appointed on 13 August 1773 to deal with Jesuit living arrange-
ments. In particular, in summer 1773 the Consejo Extraordinario issued an order
confirmed at the beginning of 1774 by Jos Moino (17281808), the Spanish
ambassador in Rome8which forbade more than three Jesuits from sharing the
same residence and insisted that members of the same rank should mix together:
that is to say, the professed could no longer reside with the coadjutors or their
5 Manuel Luengo, Memorias de un exilio. Diario de la expulsin de los jesuitas de los dominios del
Rey de Espaa (17671768), ed. by Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga (Alicante: Universidad de
Alicante, 2002); Manuel Luengo, Diario de 1769. La llegada de los jesuitas espaoles a Bolonia,
ed. by Isidoro Pinedo Iparraguirre and Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga (Alicante: Universidad
de Alicante, 2010); Josep M. Bentez i Riera, El destierro de los jesuitas de la Provincia de
Aragn bajo el reinado de Carlos III. Crnica indita del P. Blas Larraz, si (Rome: Iglesia
Nacional EspaolaPontificia Universit Gregoriana, 2006).
6 For a list of Emilia-Romagnas cities assigned to single provinces, see Miquel Batllori, La cul-
tura hispano-italiana de los jesuitas expulsos espaoles-hispanoamericanos-filipinos, 17671814
(Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1966), 6367, 72, 7681, 316, 351352, 449450; Fernndez Arrillaga,
El destierro, 2839. On the other hand, the secularized Jesuits concentrated themselves in
Rome, while a community of expelled fathers, belonging to several provinces, settled in the
city of Genoa and expanded in the following years.
7 Manuel Luengo, Diario de 1773. El triunfo del antijesuitismo, ed. by Isidoro Pinedo Iparraguirre
and Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2013).
8 Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 3944; Enrique Gimnez Lpez, Misin en Roma. Flor
idablanca y la extincin de los jesuitas (Marcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2008); Conde de
Floridablanca. Cartas desde Roma para la extincin de los jesuitas. Correspondencia, julio 1772
septiembre 1774, ed. by Enrique Gimnez Lpez (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 2009).
former pupils. This measure was clearly aimed at undermining the spirit of com-
munity and the memory of the former hierarchy. It also sought to prevent the
hidden survival of small congregations of ex-Jesuits in which the communitarian
life of the dissolved order could be replicated. Nevertheless, this prohibition was
systematically avoided by the ex-Jesuits and it proved difficult for the Spanish
government to implement the ban. The natural aging of the exiles and the pro-
gressive devaluation of the purchasing power of their life annuities made it nec-
essary for between five and ten Jesuits to congregate in the same house, where
the youngest (generally ex-coadjutors and novices) took care of the more elderly.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Spanish communitys long exile
was its capacity to keep alive two senses of identity: a common onederived
from being members of a national assistancyand a more specific one,
related to the Jesuits connections with the regional territories in which they
had served. Unexpectedly, the experience of exile often strengthened this dual
identity of the expelled. The rediscovery of the cultural peculiarities of their
homelands (each Jesuits place of origin inside the Spanish monarchy) went
alongside the maturation of a proto-nationalism bearing a Romantic imprint.
In this second period of exile, the exiles took several measures to keep the
memory of their order alive. First, during the months before and after the brief
of suppression, some of the most prominent personalities of each province
such as Francisco Javier Clavigero (17311787) from the Mexican province, and
Domingo Muriel (17181795) from Paraguaycirculated handwrittenletters
inviting their brothers to sustain a sense of belonging both to their own prov-
ince and to the whole order.9 In addition, accounts of each provinces exile were
writtenoften at the behest of superiorswith the explicit intention of provid-
ing future generations with documentary material that could be used to produce
an official history of the community. Bibliographical catalogs and edifying collec-
tive biographies of the most eminent fathers of the provinces were also drawn up,
and some of them were printed between the 1790s and the first two decades of
the following century.10 Through long-distance correspondence, ties with the
9 Charles E. Ronan, Francisco Javier Clavigero, S.J. (17311787), figure of the Mexican
Enlightenment: his life and works (Rome: Institutum historicum S.I.Loyola University
Press, 1977), 95; Fabrizio Melai, I gesuiti del Paraguay espulsi in Italia. Mitologia politica e
sociologia dellesilio (Ph.D. diss., Scuola Normale Superiore di PisaEcole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2012), 101127.
10 See, for example, Onofre Prat de Saba, Vicennalia sacra peruviana sive de viris peruvianis
religione illustribus hisce viginti annis gloriosa morte functis (Ferrara: Ex typographia
F. Pomatelli, 1788); Josef Manuel Perams, De vita et moribus tredecim virorum Paraguaycorum
(Faventinae: Ex typographia Archii, 1793); Lorenzo Hervs y Panduro, Biblioteca jesutico
espaola (17591799), ed. by Antonio Astorgano Abajo (Madrid: Imprenta Taravilla, 2007).
Iberian and Creole aristocratic families close to the Society grew stronger and,
finally, several expelled fathers actively committed themselves to anti-Bourbon,
anti-Enlightenment and philo-Jesuit polemic literature (questioning, for
instance, the validity of the suppression brief), thus continuing propagandist
activity that had already emerged during the years prior to the expulsion.11
This attachment to their origins and traditions did not prevent many of the
expelled from experiencing the canonical suppression as a true liberation, not
only because they hoped to be allowed to live with more tranquility and fewer
controls, but also because the dissolution of the order opened up new oppor-
tunities to integrate into Italian society and the republic of letters. This was
especially true of the younger generation. It is not by chance that during this
second phase of the Italian exile a group of expelled Jesuits distinguished itself
by pursuing a dialogue with the European Enlightenment and Italian reformist
circles.12 The same dynamics were visible in other assistancies, notably the
French and the Austrian.13 It was during these twenty years (17731793) that
many of the Spanish ex-Jesuits could integrate within local social contexts,
especially by serving in the numerous dioceses of the Papal States and by
inserting themselves into the fluid market of private and public education
(secular as well as religious). Thus, many of the Spanish ex-Jesuits incorporated
themselves into the main sites of Italian literary sociabilitybeginning with
universities, academies, and librariesand found employment as tutors and
preceptors to the aristocratic families of central and northern Italy.14 In the
11 Miguel Luis Lpez-Guadalupe Muoz, Jesuitas espaoles expulsos: stiras y escritos de

autodefensa, in Los Jesuitas. Religin, poltica y educacin (siglos XVIXVIII), ed. by Jos
Martnez Milln, Henar Pizarro Llorente and Esther Jimnez Pablo (Madrid: Universidad
Pontificia Comillas, 2012), 3:176786.
12 Franco Venturi, Settecento Riformatore (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), 4:1, 239328.
13 Antonio Trampus, I gesuiti e lIlluminismo. Politica e religione in Austria e nellEuropa cen-
trale (17731798) (Olschki: Florence, 2000); Morte e resurrezione di un ordine religioso. Le
strategie culturali ed educative della Compagnia di Ges durante la soppressione (1759
1814), ed. by Paolo Bianchini (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2006).
14 Miquel Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana; Miquel Batllori, La Compaa de Jess en la
poca de la extincin, ahsi 37 (1968): 20131; Pierangelo Bellettini, Tipografi romagnoli
ed ex gesuiti spagnoli negli ultimi decenni del Settecento, in Il libro in Romagna.
Produzione, commercio e consumo dalla fine del secolo XV allet contemporanea, ed. by
Lorenzo Baldacchini and Anna Manfron (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 2:557657; La presenza
in Italia dei gesuiti iberici espulsi. Aspetti religiosi, politici, culturali, ed. by Ugo Baldini and
Gian Paolo Brizzi (Bologna: Clueb, 2010); Niccol Guasti, I gesuiti spagnoli espulsi e le
lites italiane di fine Settecento, Annali di storia delleducazione e delle istituzioni scolas-
tiche 20 (2013): 147178.
same period, there was a boom in publications by the expelledwhich was

encouraged by Madrid for opportunistic reasonsand some of the authors
took part in Italian (and European) literary debates. This increase in publica-
tions should be regarded as a mirror and a direct proof of the above-mentioned
process of social and cultural integration.15
Things changed around 17911792, due to the republican shift of the French
Revolution and the subsequent pan-European wars. The polarization caused
by ideological conflict had a direct impact on the political and cultural lean-
ings of the expelled. In particular, groups that had previously pursued dia-
logue with the Enlightenment and Italian reformist circles underwent a
sudden conservative shift. Not only the great intellectuals of the ex-Spanish
assistancysuch as Juan Andrs (17401817), Juan Francisco Masdeu (1744
1817), Francisco Xavier Llampillas (17311810), Vicente Requeno (17431811),
Lorenzo Hervs y Panduro (17351809), Juan de Osuna (17451818)but also
the ex-Jesuit abbots, who had been sensitive to the ideas, trends and expres-
sive forms of the Enlightenment in previous years, rapidly realigned them-
selves. In pamphlets and journalistic articles they defended the church and
the absolute monarchies against the new barbarians and unbelievers on
the other side of the Alps. The same process characterized many Italian
intellectuals and reformers of the period (such as the playwright Vittorio
Alfieri, 17491803), which demonstrates this was not a symptom of alleged
Jesuit opportunism, but rather a common reaction among the ruling classes
who did not seek to overturn the ancien rgime, even if they strove to reform
it from the inside.
The Spanish Jesuits in Parma
During the third period of its Italian exile (17931814), a section of the ex-Span-
ish assistancy made an active contribution to the restoration of the order, in
close collaboration with the refrattari Jesuits of the Russian Empire. This was
the path taken by Jos Pignatelli (17371811)16 and about a hundred Spanish
15 Niccol Guasti, Lesilio italiano dei gesuiti spagnoli. Identit, controllo sociale e pratiche cul-
turali (17671798) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006).
16 For information on Pignatelli see Agustn Monzn, Vita del Servo di Dio P. Giuseppe M.
Pignatelli (Rome: Tipografia Salviucci, 1833); Jaime Nonell, El V.P. Jos Pignatelli y la
Compaa de Jess en su extincin y restablecimiento, 3 vols. (Manresa: Imprenta de San
Jos, 18931894); Camillo Beccari, Il beato Giuseppe Pignatelli della Compagnia di Ges
ex-Jesuits who, between the beginning of the 1780s and the first decade of the
nineteenth century, confirmed their vows and achieved the de facto restora-
tion of the Society, first in the duchy of Parma and Piacenza (17931806) and
later in the kingdoms of Naples (18041806) and Sicily (18051814).17
The readmission of the Jesuits to the duchy of Parma has been regarded
as the first stage of the long process that led to the canonical restoration of
the Society of Jesus. The initiative was taken by Ferdinand (17511802),
duke of Parma, who in 1787 had already asked (in vain) his uncle Charles III
for permission to readmit the Jesuits to the educational institutions of
the duchy. After the fall of Floridablanca in September 1792, Ferdinand
wasted no time entrusting the ex-Jesuit Enea de Porzia (17391795) with the
direction of the school for young noblemen, the Convitto dei Nobili di
Santa Caterina, which had been managed by the Jesuits up to 1768. The fol-
lowing December the duke authorized the adoption of the Ratio studio-
rum. In July 1793 Ferdinand sent letters to Catherine II (17291796) and
Vicar General Gabriel Lenkiewicz (17221798) requesting them to send a
few fathers to Parma to found a vice-province dependent on the Russian
Society.18 Both the czarina and the general complied, and at the end of
December 1793 three JesuitsAntonio Masserati (17311796), appointed
vice-provincial; Luigi Panizzoni (17291820); and Bernardino Scardial
(17371811) (Rome: Universit Gregoriana, 1933); Jos Mara March, El restaurador de la

Compaa de Jess, beato Jos Pignatelli y su tiempo, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Imprenta Revista
IbricaEditorial Librera Religiosa, 19351944); Celestino Testore, Il restauratore della
Compagnia di Ges in Italia: S. Giuseppe Pignatelli S.I., 17371781 (Rome: Curia
Generalizia della Compagnia di Ges, 1954); Jos Antonio Ferrer Benimeli, Jos Pignatelli
(17371811). La cara humana de un santo (Bilbao: Ed. Mensajero, 2011). See also Romana
beatificationis et canonizationis Ven. Servi Dei Josephi Mariae Pignatelli, sacerdotis professi
e Societate Jesu. Summarium additionale (Rome: Congregatio Sacrorum Ritum, 1907);
Romana seu Neapolitana beatificationis et canonizationis Ven. Servi Dei Josephi Mariae
Pignatelli, sacerdotis professi Societatis Jesu. Novum Summarium Additionale (n. pl.
[Rome]: n. prin. [Congregatio Sacrorum Ritum], n. y. [1933?]).
17 Marek Inglot, La Compagnia di Ges nellImpero russo (Rome: Universit Gregoriana,
1997); Marek Inglot, Rapporti fra esiliati e la Compagnia in Russia: alcune indicazioni per
la ricerca, in La presenza in Italia, 495508; Sabina Pavone, Una strana alleanza. La
Compagnia di Ges in Russia dal 1772 al 1820 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2008).
18 March, El restaurador, 2:94128, 163173, 179186; Inglot, La Compagnia, 166179; Pavone,
Una strana alleanza, 187203; Giuseppe Olmi, Sulla presenza e rimarchevole attivit
dei gesuiti spagnoli espulsi nel ducato di Parma e Piacenza, in La presenza in Italia,
509539.
(17371802)left Poock and arrived in Parma on 8 February of the follow-

ing year.
Although Ferdinand had repeatedly urged Pius VI (17171799) to approve
his measures, the pope preferred not to sanction them officially, fearing
with good reasona violent diplomatic reaction from Charles IV (17481819)
and the Spanish government. Therefore, he chose to dissimulate the Jesuits
existence in the duchy and asked the Bourbon sovereign prince not to give
too much solemnity to their return.19 The strategist behind this maneuver
was the Venetian Carlo Borgo (17311794), author of the famous polemical
treatise Memoria Cattolica (1780), which asserted that the suppression brief
had no validity. Not only had he advised the duke on how to proceed, but he
had also planned his own strategy in consort with Superior General
Lenkiewicz: he explicitly proposed restoring the order by creating a series of
colonies of the Russian congregation in other European states.20 Not sur-
prisingly, it was this Italian ex-Jesuit who, since 1792, had been asking Jos
Pignatelli to contact all those within the Spanish assistancy who were willing
to move to the duchy as educators. His plan to recruit ex-Jesuits was ratified
by the vicar general, who authorized Masserati to include Spanish ex-Jesuits
in the Parma vice-province.
As a result, the first Italian colony of the Russian congregation held
strong appeal both for ex-Jesuits and for those who wished to become
Jesuits: about forty ex-Jesuits decided to re-affiliate with the new vice-
province before 1802. Pignatelli, who had previously carried out some
pastoral missions in the Parmesan countryside and personally knew the
duke, accepted the overall strategy as well as Borgos specific proposal.21 In
the following years, he used his own charisma and his wide network
of acquaintances and friends to encourage several Spanish ex-Jesuits to
move to the duchy. After renewing his vows in Bologna (6 July 1797), he
moved to Parma.
Napoleons Italian campaign of 1796 and the revolutionary wave that swept
across Italy between 1796 and 1799 (the so-called revolutionary triennium)
further motivated the immigration of Spanish ex-Jesuits to the duchy of Parma.
Even those fathers who were not entirely convinced that they would benefit
19 March, El restaurador, 2:109110; Inglot, La Compagnia, 172173, 311; Pavone, Una strana
alleanza, 202.
20 Pavone, Una strana alleanza, 195198.
21 Inglot, La Compagnia, 176.
from rejoining the refractory Society in those convulsive yearssuch as Juan

Andrsfound a safe harbor in the small state in the center of Italy.22 Since
1793, Ferdinand had also been financing the college or boarding school of San
Pietro in Piacenza, the college of San Donnino, the residence of San Rocco in
Parma, and the old House of Third Probation in Busseto. Finally, in the
November-December 1799 period, a novitiate was opened in Colorno, and the
leaders of the Society in Belarus decided to entrust its direction to Pignatelli,
appointing him novice master. This decision, imbued with strong symbolic
value, was probably helped by the death of Pius VI (29 August 1799)because
he had explicitly forbidden the creation of a Jesuit novitiate. It also reflected
the desire to limit the influence of Niccol Paccanari (17741811), who had
moved to Parma that same year to negotiate the possible fusion of the two
Jesuit communities. In fact, the novitiate was an anomalous seminary
because the novices, as well as dressing like members of the secular clergy,
could not profess full vows at the end of their two-year training, but only the
simple vows of devotion.23
However, that same November, five novices (with Luigi Mozzi de Capitani,
17461813) arrived from the recently suppressed seminary in Bergamo.
Among them were distinguished figures such as Angelo Mai (17821854) and
Giovanni Grassi (17751849), who received their first educational training
from Pignatelli and the Iberian Jesuits who had followed him to Colorno, and
who would stand out as some of the most significant personalities of the
new Society in the early nineteenth century. In the 18011803 period, four of
them were sent to Belarus to complete their education and profess the sol-
emn vows.24
There is no doubt about the relevance of the contribution made by the
ex-Spanish assistancy to the activities of the Jesuit establishments in the
duchy of Parma and Piacenza between 1793 and 1801. The presence of
Spanish ex-Jesuits was important more from a qualitative than from a
quantitative point of view (they represented only a quarter of the teaching
staff of the colleges and Colornos novitiate).25 Some of the finest intellec-
tuals within the ex-Spanish assistancy came to Parma (particularly from the
22 Juan Andrs, Epistolario, ed. by Livia Brunori (Valencia: Biblioteca Valenciana, 2006),
vol. 2.
23 March, El restaurador, 2:163166, 167173.
24 Ibid., 165, 250252.
25 Considering sporadic visits as well as more than decade-long sojourns, it has been calcu-
lated that about thirty Spanish ex-Jesuits stayed in the duchy during the 17931806 period:
see Olmi, Sulla presenza, 522533.
Aragonese province), and figures such as the brothers Jos Antonio (1739
1810) and Baltasar Masdeu (17411820) made an essential contribution to
reestablishing the Italian Thomistic-Scholastic tradition in the philosophical-
theological field. Others, such as Josef Serrano (17651822), Antonio Ludea
(17401820) and Juan Andrs, contributed to raising the standards of scientific,
humanistic, and literary studies in the Convitto dei Nobili.
The Spanish role was also detectable in the far more difficult process of
adapting the original rule to a changed political, social, and religious context.
As well as carrying out the pedagogic mission that had officially justified their
re-admission to the Bourbon duchy, the Spanish Jesuits made an active and
conscious contribution to the project of re-founding the order.26 Theirs was a
difficult challenge, because they had to deal not only with the stubborn oppo-
sition of the Spanish government and Napoleons anti-Catholic policy (espe-
cially after Ferdinands death in October 1802 and the French military
occupation of the duchy, according to the Treaty of Lunville), but also with
the competition from Paccanaris Company of the Faith of Jesus. Pignatelli,
together with the Spanish fathers who had followed him to Parma and then
Naples, tried to reconstitute the Jesuit rule around three elements: first, the
absolute centrality given to the Spiritual Exercises and to Spanish theolo-
gianssuch as Luis de Molina (15351600)in the training of the new Jesuits;
second, an active commitment to pastoral activities, mass catechesis, and
charitable work at Colornos hospital and the ducal prisons; and third, the pro-
motion of typical Jesuit devotions (for instance, to the Sacred Heart of Jesus)
and of congregations of the duchys ruling class.27 These three elements were
replicated during the Neapolitan stay, which demonstrates that it was a well-
developed and efficient strategy.
The success of the Jesuits educational and training activities in Parma was
one of the factors that led the new pope Pius VII (17421823), elected in
March 1800, to officially recognize the Society in Russia by means of the brief
Catholicae Fidei (7 March 1801). The brief confirmed the Jesuit rule only for
Russia. On the one hand, such a measure reinvigorated the process of reconsti-
tuting the order, but on the other, it provoked a new diplomatic crisis with
Spain. Three years earlier Charles IV and Manuel Godoy (17771847) had agreed
to readmit the Jesuits to Spain in order to tackle the French invasion of Italy,
and 654 Jesuits had decided to return to their motherland at that time. But Pius
VIIs brief provoked an adverse reaction from the Spanish government which
26 Archivo Histrico de Loyola (ahl), Manuel Luengo, Diario de la expulsin de los jesuitas
[], XXXV, fols. 282285.
27 March, El restaurador, 2:158, 165, 191196; 201, 205206, 215, 222226, 232.
issued a new decree of expulsion on 15 March 1801: 312 fathers who had returned
were deported again to Italy, whereas the remainder, too old or sick to travel,
were secluded in convents.28 Subsequently, what remained of the original
Spanish community was divided into three main groups: the first in Spain,
scattered in convents; the second residing in Rome, mainly in the former
Roman College; and a third in Emilia-Romagna (in the cities of the former
legations and in Parma). In June 1806, the foreign Jesuits (that is to say, those
not native to the duchy) were also expelled by the French government.
Pignatelli and the Russian Jesuits
On 7 May 1803, Superior General Gabriel Gruber (17401805) had appointed

Pignatelli as provincial of Italy in place of the aged Father Panizzoni. After
some months of hesitation, in August 1803 the Aragonese Jesuit accepted the
appointment. The first task he faced related to the request of the bishop of
Viterbo to send some Jesuits to the new seminary he had opened. Pignatelli
accepted and sent eight priestsincluding the Aragonese Jos Doz (17381813)
as superior, Gaspar Osorno and Pedro Roca (17441826)and three coadjutors
to the city. Unfortunately, the new Jesuit community could not take root, not
only because of the bishops refusal to fund it, but also because of internal
conflicts between Spanish and Italian members concerning teaching meth-
ods.29 This tension between the Italian and the Spanish elements inside the
Russian colony in Italy sharpened during the following years. Tensions were
also heightened by the egocentric and poor diplomatic behavior of the general
procurator, Gaetano Angiolini (17481816), who in May 1803 had been sent to
Rome by Gruber in order to ask the pope to restore the Society in Italy and to
seek his support for the missionary strategy that the Russian Jesuits were devel-
oping in Europe, the United States, and China.30
This conflict between the procurator and the provincial dragged on until the
restoration of the Society in 1814 and was only definitively settled with the
twentieth general congregation in 1820. At this time, the expulsion of Angio
linis two close collaboratorsLuigi Pancaldi and Luigi Maria Rezzi (1785
1857)was ordered in the hope of eliminating any internal dissension within
28 Jess Pradells Nadal, La cuestin de los jesuitas en la poca de Godoy: regreso y segunda
expulsin de los jesuitas espaoles (17961803), in Y en el tercero, 531560; Fernndez
Arrillaga, El destierro, 4748, 8889.
29 March, El restaurador, 2:257258; Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 187.
30 March, El restaurador, 2:276314, 335362; Inglot, La Compagnia, 179191.
the new Society.31 There is documentation available, and more attention

should be devoted to analyzing the conflict between the Jesuit group led by
Angiolini and the Spanish ex-Jesuits (both Pignatellis supporters and critics,
such as Manuel Luengo).32 It is important to highlight two issues. Firstly, it
seems evident that when the process of reconstitution of the Society began in
Italy, there arose a generational conflict, which overlapped with the national
antagonism between the young Russian-trained Italian Jesuits and the old
Spanish ex-Jesuits: both groups regarded themselves as heirs to the authentic
Jesuit spirit.33 In this perspective, the conflict between Angiolini and Pignatelli
takes on new significance: it was due to a different conception of the orders
nature. Angiolini worked on the assumption that the new Society was not the
same as the order suppressed in 1773, but a congregation that should have been
led by a general and some superiors (that is to say, without the creation of a
real order based on provinces). Therefore Angiolinis strategy only aimed at the
restoration of the Constitutions of the former order.34 On the other hand, the
old Jesuits like Pignatelli preferred not only the resurgence of the former
administrative structure, but also the restoration of the privileges that had
been granted by the popes throughout the two-hundred year history of the
order. From this point of view, Angiolinis underlying thesis was not too distant
from what Paccanari expressed in the same period, believing that the only true
legacy of the former order that was worth saving was the Constitutions.35
Secondly, the group of Spanish ex-Jesuitsin particular, the Castilians resid-
ing in Rome, such as Manuel Luengo (17351816)had at first refused to enter
the new order and offered a different interpretation of the conflict between
Angiolini and Pignatelli. They criticized the Italian Jesuit, who they regarded as
an inexperienced, vain, and imprudent man. Their judgment derived from the
fear that his unwise behavior (for instance, he had gone to Rome dressed like a
Jesuit and had stayed at the Ges) might provoke an adverse reaction from the
31 March, El restaurador, 2:344362; Giacomo Martina, Storia della Compagnia di Ges in

Italia (18141983) (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2003), 2021.
32 ahl, Luengo, Diario, XXXIX, fols. 114 and sq. Our research is now focusing on documents
which belong to some Roman archives like the Biblioteca dellAccademia Nazionale dei
Lincei e Corsiniana, the Archivio di Stato, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and, obvi-
ously, the arsi (Ital., Russ., Hist. Soc. and the Archivio della Postulazione Generale).
33 Pietro Pirri, Angelo Mai nella Compagnia di Ges. Suo diario inedito del collegio di
Orvieto, ahsi 23 (1954): 234282, especially 241244; Pavone, Una strana alleanza, 201fn420.
34 March, El restaurador, 2:356; Inglot, La Compagnia, 199.
35 Eva Fontana Castelli, La Compagnia di Ges sotto altro nome: Niccol Paccanari e la
Compagnia della Fede di Ges (17971814) (Rome: ihsi, 2007), 117128.
Spanish government and the suspension of the lifelong pensions upon which
the existence of the expelled Jesuits depended. However, Luengo (17351816)
went as far as to openly criticizing the behavior of Pignatelli and the Aragonese
and American Jesuits who supported his strategy.
In fact, in his diary of the years 18041806, the Castilian Jesuit censured
Pignatellis quarrelsome behavior and his favoritism towards the Aragonese ex-
Jesuits, which had sharpened the antagonism between Angiolini and the
Italian Jesuits (old and new). Undoubtedly, behind his criticism there was evi-
dent disapproval of the entire strategy of restoring the order if it were only to
be conceived as a direct affiliate of the Russian congregation. In fact, Luengo
maintained that the cooperation offered by numerous members of the
ex-Aragonese province and by some American provinces (Mexican and
Paraguayan) resulted from the common liberal and progressive leanings that
they shared with the young Italian Jesuits trained in Belarus.36 In other words,
Luengo not only proposed an alternative interpretation of the process of resto-
ration of the order, but based it upon ideological elements that completely
reverse our interpretative perspective.
The restoration of the Society in the kingdom of Naples and in Sicily
occurred in the shadow of this dual conflict between the two souls of the new
order, but also within the ancient Spanish assistancy. Before his June 1804
arrival in Naples, Pignatelli had made at least three exploratory trips to the
city. However, the delicate diplomatic negotiations were conducted by
Angiolini, who had already travelled to Naples in March and had found a use-
ful ally in Maria Carolina of Austria (17521814). The negotiations almost
came to a standstill due to the cautious attitude of the pope, who, in order to
take precautions against any possible Spanish retaliation, had asked
Ferdinand IV (17511825) to write a letter in his own hand in which he explic-
itly requested the return of the Jesuits to his kingdom. As a matter of fact, the
Bourbon kingand the British prime minister John Acton (17371811), unlike
the duke ofParma, had not sought the restoration of the order, but had only
wanted secular priests to be employed in the higher educational institutions
of the kingdom.
Eventually, stances softened and the Jesuits, even though always dependent
on the Russian congregation, were readmitted to the kingdom. After entrusting
the directorship of Colornos novitiate to the Mexican Jesuit Ignatius Prez,
Pignatelli went to Rome to confer directly with Pius VII. He made the most of
his trip by passing through Bologna and Ferrara, where he recruited some
36 Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 184, 188190. See also ahl, Manuel Luengo, Coleccin de
papeles varios, 13, fols. 4346.
Jesuits who were willing to follow him to the south of Italy. On 8 June 1804
Pignatelli finally arrived in Naples.37 After having partially solved the thorny
problem of the restitution of the buildings and goods confiscated from the
Jesuits after 1767, Pignatelli was able to reopen four establishments: the Collegio
Massimo of the Ges Vecchio, the Noblemens College and the Casa Professa
with the novitiate of the Ges Nuovo (the so-called Conocchia) in Naples, and
a residence in Sora; in the following year, the college of Bari was reopened.
On 15 August 1804, the Jesuits return was symbolically celebrated in the
presence of the king with a solemn ceremony in the Ges Vecchio.38 Pius VII
officially ratified the restoration of the Society in the kingdoms of Naples and
Sicily by his brief Per alias (30 July 1804) addressed to Superior General Gruber:
he extended to the two Italian territories the dispensation granted by
Catholicae Fidei. In retaliation, the Spanish government decreed the suspen-
sion of life annuities to all the Spanish ex-Jesuits who had joined the Neapolitan
province.39
In the following years, the Neapolitan and Sicilian provinces, despite their
formal dependence on the Russian administration, often acted independently,
especially after the resumption of the conflict between Napoleon and the anti-
French coalition, which hampered epistolary correspondence with Russia. As
had previously happened in Parma, Pignatelli could immediately count on
some of the best intellectuals of the ex-Spanish assistancy, beginning with the
Aragoneseamong whom Francisco Gust (17441816), Vicente Requeno, Jos
Doz, and Juan Andrs stood out. He offered them the most prestigious aca-
demic positions as well as important directorships. His choice was surely moti-
vated by the need to count on trusted people in that crucial period but,
according to Luengo, this only exacerbated the antagonism with Angiolini and
some of the Italian Jesuits.40
37 ahl, Luengo, Diario, XXXVIII, fols. 262267.

38 Michele Volpe, I gesuiti nel napoletano. Note ed appunti di storia contemporanea da docu-
menti inediti e con larghe illustrazioni (18141914) (Naples: Tipografia di M. dAuria, 1914),
vol. 1; March, El restaurador, 2:275362; Inglot, La Compagnia, 191200; Filippo Iappelli,
Francesco de Gregorio e Giuseppe Pignatelli. Due uomini fra vecchia e nuova Com
pagnia, Societas 31, no. 45 (1987): 107118; Francesco Carlo Dandolo, La propriet monas-
tica in Puglia nella prima met dellOttocento (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi
Filosofici, 1994), 2427; Emma Abate, La Compagnia di Ges a Napoli durante la prima
restaurazione borbonica (30 luglio 18042 luglio 1806), Clio. Rivista trimestrale di studi
storici 32, no.1 (1996): 1950.
39 Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 90, 186191, 193.
40 ahl, Luengo, Diario, XXXIX, fols. 114116.
Pignatelli entrusted Juan Andrs with the directorship not only of the
Noblemens College, but also of the library of the Ges Vecchio. Since the
expulsion had caused the dispersion of the former Jesuit colleges book hold-
ings, the new library of the college resulted from the merging of the personal
libraries that Andrs, Pignatelli, and the Castilian Roque Menchaca (17431810)
had carried with them to Naples.41 A few months after its foundation, the Jesuit
community in Naples began to hold a powerful attraction for the Spanish ex-
Jesuits, and in order to make their affiliation to the Neapolitan province easier,
they decided that an eight-day practice of the Spiritual Exercises was suffi-
cient.42 At the end of 1804 there were only eight ex-Jesuits belonging to the
former Spanish assistancy (a Filipino, two Paraguayans, two Mexicans and
three Aragonese), but during the following year thirteen Aragonese, ten
Castilians, five Toledans, one Andalusian, and seven Jesuits from the South
American provinces arrived. This data allows us to state that the Spanish ex-
Jesuits were the pillars of the new Neapolitan province which, during 1806, had
up to 124 members, including fifty-seven foreigners (mainly Spanish) and forty-
two novices.43
From a practical point of view, Pignatelli drew on his experiences in Parma
and promoted several congregations (including Marian ones), catechetical
and missionary activities, and Jesuit devotions. In this regard, it was particu-
larly significant that on 11 May 1806, Pius VII beatified Francesco de Geronimo
(16421716), a Jesuit native of Apulia who had died in Naples in 1716. The popes
intention was to support the restoration of the Neapolitan community by
offering its members an icon around whom they could aggregate and rebuild
their own identity. Pignatelli was able to take advantage of this to consolidate
his heterogeneous community, especially during the Roman exile. As for the
cultural aspect, the philosophical and theological education given to scholas-
tics and novices in Naples was essentially Spanish-oriented, whereas Pignatelli
tried to organize the cursus studiorum of the Jesuits and of the boarders at the
Noblemens College around a restored Ratio studiorum. It was no coincidence
that, in 1805, the provincial commissioned the reprinting of the text of the
Ratio together with the Regulae Societatis Jesu. His choice was significant,
41 Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 190; Vincenzo Trombetta, La libreria del collegio dei
nobili e la biblioteca dei gesuiti a Napoli tra Sette e Ottocento, in Educare la nobilt.
Atti del convegno nazionale di studi, Perugia, Palazzo Sorbello, 1819 giugno 2004, ed. by
Gianfranco Tortorelli (Bologna: Pendragon, 2005), 12363, especially 158159.
42 March, El restaurador, 2:294295.
43 Iappelli, Francesco de Gregorio, 112. See also Volpe, I gesuiti nel napoletano, 295296;
Inglot, La Compagnia, 195; Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 186187.
because it indicated a desire to recover the two cornerstones of the former

Society (in addition to the Spiritual Exercises).44 On the other hand, there were
some omissions in this edition of the Regulae and a focus on the subject of
management and directorship of the colleges, houses, and novitiates con-
firmed an awareness that the reconstitution of Jesuit identity depended on the
Societys educational activities under changed conditions.
A few months after their arrival in Naples, the Jesuits prepared for their
return to Sicily. This mission was also led by Angiolini, who arrived in Palermo
on 30 April 1805 at the head of about thirty Italian and Spanish Jesuits.45 In
Palermo, the fathers retook possession of the Casa Professa (where they also
opened a novitiate and a boarding school) and of the Collegio Massimo, and in
the following year they reopened the college in Alcamo.46 After a few months
many of the Jesuits who had remained on the island joined this nucleus and
welcomed thirty-four novices. Since the Sicilian community was part of the
Neapolitan province until the middle of 1806, Pignatelliwhose position had
been confirmed in September 1805 by the new general Tadeusz Brzozowski
(17491820)was formally appointed as provincial of the fathers who had
moved to the island.47 However, being far away from his superior soon sharp-
ened the conflict between Angiolini and the Aragonese nobleman. A rift devel-
oped not only between the Sicilian and Neapolitan superiors, but also inside
the Sicilian community, and it was widened by subsequent events. After the
Jesuits expulsion from the kingdom of Naples, ordered by Joseph Bonaparte
(17681844), the group of Sicilian fathers became practically independent from
the leaders of the province, who had been exiled to Rome, and from the Russian
administration (that was far away and difficult to reach by letter). Neither the
official separation of the Sicilian community, which became an autonomous
vice-province in July 1807, nor the appointment of a Spanish vice-provincial,
Manuel Ziga (17431820) in September 1809, led to a reconciliation.
On 15 February 1806 Joseph Bonaparte, leading the French army, arrived in
Naples. Even though Pignatelli and the superiors of the new Jesuit institutions

45 Ibid., 308310, 348359; Inglot, La Compagnia, 196197.
46 Alessio Narbone, Annali Siculi della Compagnia di Ges (Palermo: Stab. Tip. G. Bond e C.,
1908), vol. 1 (18051814). For information on the activities carried out by F. Gust in Sicily,
see Miquel Batllori, Francisco Gust. Apologista y crtico (Barcelona 1744Palermo 1816)
(Balmesiana: Barcelona, 1942).
47 In the official correspondence, Pignatellis title underwent a change: Gruber addressed
Pignatelli as provincial of Italy, while Brzozowski called him provincial of the Two
Sicilies: see March, El restaurador, 2:347348.
of the kingdom consented to all the invaders demands (including those of a

financial nature), their expulsion was just a matter of time. In June 1806,
Pignatelli signed, in the name of his community, an oath of allegiance to the
new sovereign and the new political regime, but all was in vain. On 3 July 1806
the French ordered the immediate dissolution of the Society of Jesus and the
expulsion of all foreign Jesuits from the kingdom. At the same time the library
of the college of the Ges Vecchio, which Pignatelli and Andrs had estab-
lished with many sacrifices, was requisitioned. The only concession Pignatelli
could obtain from the new government was a few days deferment of the expul-
sion measure: on 8 July Pignatelli headed for Rome.48 The only Spanish Jesuit
who remained in Naples (until 1816) was Andrs, to whom Bonaparte offered
the directorship of the royal library; the Valencian scholar accepted the request
in order to preserve the Jesuit books and manuscript collection in the library,
which he augmented over the next ten years.49
The Restoration of the Society of Jesus
We know far less about the final years of the third phase of the Italian exile
imposed upon the Spanish Jesuits. However, pending more exhaustive studies,
a few facts can been ascertained. First of all, Pignatelli, who held his position
as provincial of the Two Sicilies until his death, initially seemed to replicate the
strategy adopted by the superiors of the Spanish provinces in 1768: dispersing
his community throughout the small villages in the Roman countryside, begin-
ning with Velletri. On the other hand, he must have felt as disappointed by Pius
VIIs reception as he had been, forty years earlier, by Clement XIIIs reluctant
welcome. While the residents of the Roman College received their brethren
hesitantly (fearing that living together in the same place might worsen their
situation), the pope, rather than offering help, seemed anxious to convince the
provincial that the Neapolitan Jesuits should wear secular clothes to avoid
offending Napoleons and the Spanish ambassadors sensibilities.50 The situa-
tion was complicated by the fact that the Spanish Jesuits who had rejoined the
Society had lost their lifelong pensions. However, after initial dismay the
Spanish group who had entered the Neapolitan province was able to reorga-
nize itself, not least because of the financial contributions of a substantial
48 Ibid., 374385.
49 Ibid., 313 e 379380; Trombetta, La libreria, 159163. Andrs, Epistolario, vol. 3.
sector of the Papal States secular clergy and of many aristocratic families, both
Spanish (such as the Villahermosas) and local.
The latter was a feature that characterized the entire third phase of the exile
of the expelled Spanish Jesuits. Although some novices were hosted in the
Roman College, the community headed by Pignatelli, which was still formally
dependent on the Russian Society, moved to a residence of its own in 1807 at
the ancient convent of the Basilians; later, a House of Third Probation was
opened in the vicinity. However, most members of the Neapolitan province
particularly those Spanish Jesuits (including the distinguished Requeno and
Menchaca) who were still able to teachwere assigned to the main Latian
cities (Orvieto, Tivoli, Amelia, Sezze, Anagni, Marino, Palestrina, Civita Cas
tellana, Orte, and Giove) where they swelled the ranks of the teaching staff of
diocesan seminaries, colleges, and public elementary schools, while still devot-
ing themselves to catechesis, pastoral missions, and the care of souls.51 The
desire of some bishops who were close to the Society to avail themselves of the
undeniable educational and spiritual expertise of the Spanish fathers, was
decisive in fostering integration into the social fabric of the Papal States.52
When Pignatelli died (15 November 1811), Luigi Panizzoni took his place.53
But neither Pignatellis death nor the new exile imposed on Pius VII by
Napoleon (6 July 1809) modified the situation of the expelled Spanish Jesuits.
Only when the pope returned to Rome (24 May 1814) was the issue of the resto-
ration of the Society of Jesus tackled, this time definitively.54 After a new peti-
tion was submitted by Superior General Brzozowski in June and approved by
many cardinals of the Curia, Pius VII signed the bull Sollicitudo omnium eccle-
siarum (7 August 1814), by which he canonically restored the Society of Jesus:
essentially, he extended to the whole world the prerogatives until then exclu-
sively accorded to the Jesuits in Russia and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.55
Nevertheless, the exiled Spanish Jesuits, longing to return to their motherland,
had to wait almost a full year. Francisco Gutirrez de la Huerta, fiscal to the
Castilian Council, wrote his Dictamen in favor of the readmission56in which
he upturned the arguments his predecessor Pedro Rodrguez de Campomanes
51 March, El restaurador, 2:400404, 419420; Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 194195.

52 See Manuel Luengo, Diario de 1808. El ao de la conspiracin, ed. by Enrique Gimnez
Lpez and Inmaculada Fernndez Arrillaga (Universidad de Alicante, Alicante: 2010).
53 ahl, Luengo, Diario, XLV, fols. 11041107.
54 Pierre Antoine Fabre and Patrick Goujon, Suppression et restauration de la Compagnie de
Jsus (17731814) (Brussels: Lessius, 2014).
55 Inglot, La Compagnia, 249251.
56 Francisco Gutirrez de la Huerta, Dictamen sobre el restablecimiento de los jesuitas
(Madrid: Imp. de A. Espinosa y Compaa, 1845).
(17231803) had presented in 1766 and on 15 July 1815 Ferdinand VII (1784
1833), by his real orden, readmitted the Society to the dominions of the Spanish
monarchy.57
Conclusion
During the third phase of their exile, the expelled Spanish Jesuits made a sig-
nificant contribution to the restoration of the Society. Led by Jos Pignatelli,
about one hundred fathers, after renewing their vows, reconstructed the Italian
province, firstly in Parma, then in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and finally
in Rome. Though the province was formally dependent on the refrattari Jesuits
of the Russian Empire, Pignatelli and the superiors of the new Jesuit commu-
nity often made independent decisions, especially after the resumption of the
war between Napoleon and the anti-French coalition, which hampered episto-
lary correspondence with Russia. One of the distinguishing features of this
period was the level of internal dispute, particularly between the Italian group
and the Spanish Jesuits, but also between the more elderly fathers and the
younger generation, trained in Belarus. Moreover, not all of the older Spanish
Jesuits agreed with Pignatellis strategy: some Castilian fathers, like Manuel
Luengo, regarded Pignatelli (at least until 1806) as dominated by the agenda of
the Russian Jesuits and too inclined to support the Aragonese fathers. Such
tensions remind us that the process of restoration, a goal that was far from
inevitable, took place in an unusually complex and conflicted political context.
The exploration of other exiled Jesuit communities, and deeper analysis of
the Spanish experience in Italy, will only add to our understanding of this
fascinating subject.
57 ahl, Luengo, Diario, il; Fernndez Arrillaga, El destierro, 5354; I. Fernndez Arrillaga,
La restauracin de la Compaa de Jess en primera persona: el P. Manuel Luengo,
Manresa 86 (2014), 7382; Manuel Revuelta Gonzlez, El restablecimiento de la Compaa
de Jess. Celebracin del bicentenario (Bilbao: Mensajero Editorial, 2013), 225359. The
old Spanish Jesuits who decided to rejoin the new order numbered 182: 127 died in Spain,
six in Mexico and 49 in Italy. See ibid., 243245.
chapter 11
The Society of Jesus under Another Name

The Paccanarists in the Restored Society of Jesus
Eva Fontana Castelli
Among the attempts to preserve and revive the Ignatian spirit in the aftermath
of the suppression, a significant part was played by the Society of the Faith of
Jesus (or Fathers of the Faith), particularly after its union with the Society of
the Sacred Heart. However, the Societys role in the restoration of the Society
of Jesus has largely remained underappreciated in historiographical studies.
This oversight is in part due to the widespread contempt in which his contem-
poraries held the founder of the Society, Niccol Paccanari, primarily on
account of the gravity of the charges brought against him by the Holy Office in
1807.1 Equally significant, however, was the attitude of those in Jesuit and
philo-Jesuit quarters who regarded the Paccanarist institute as a dangerous
competitor to the real Society, which continued to survive in the Russian
empire. This assessment, predominant in nineteenth-century Jesuit historiog-
raphy, overshadowed the role of Paccanarism, often dismissed as a marginal
and dangerous deviancy.2
The prejudice against the Society was also a direct consequence of the dire
situation in which the Jesuits had found themselves in the aftermath of the
papal brief Domininus ac Redemptor. For a long time the word Paccanarist
had a highly derogatory connotation and alluded to the exceptionally strong
bond that existed between the members of the Society of the Faith and their
charismatic and controversial founder. Additionally, it is possible to detect in
this area of historiographical studies an underlying trend to cast in a more
positive light the French Institute and the work of its members as opposed to
those of Paccanari and his brethren, and to accentuate the differences and the
contrasts between the two institutes.
1 The congregation of the Holy Office, gathering in the Quirinal Palace in Rome on June 30,
1808, found Niccol Paccanari guilty of pretense of holiness (affectata sanctitate) with
regard to spreading prophecies and visions and of committing sexual acts with penitents of
both sexes (sollicitatio ad turpia). In addition to being sentenced to ten years in prison and
barred from holding religious offices in perpetuity, Paccanari was also forbidden to engage in
any kind of relationship with both male and female members of the institutes he had
founded.
2 Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei Papi, XIV, II (Descle: Roma, 1955), 259; Banghert 1986, 43.

198 Castelli
This intellectual undertaking appeared to be justified by the considerable

number of former members of the Society of the Sacred Heart who later joined
and held leading positions in the Society of Jesus. Above all, these assessments
aimed to portray the priests of the Sacred Heart as regarding their institute as
a provisional experience, all the while aspiring to rejoin the Society, which
still survived within the Russian empire. In contrast, Paccanari saw his insti-
tute as a re-formation, a re-constitution as it were, of the dissolved order.
Recently however, a more positive overall assessment of these events has
emerged, even on the part of Jesuit historians. This has led to the recognition
that the importance of all these congregations lies in their contribution to
keeping the spirit of the order of St. Ignatius alive amidst the devastation
wreaked by the French Revolution.3
Once we relinquish the Paccanarist bias, by setting aside the violent con-
troversies surrounding the figure of the founder, it is possible to regard mem-
bership in the Society of the Faith of Jesus as an important educational
experience for those of its members who would later become the recruits of
the reborn Ignatian order. Such an a posteriori outlook, by virtue of removing
the perspective distortion of the conflict with the real Society and its mem-
bers, allows us to see these events in a different light and to focus on their most
interesting aspects which, paradoxically, are the most relevant to an exhaus-
tive history of the restored Society.
While the continuity between the old and the new Society of Jesus was
guaranteed by the presence of those Jesuits who had entered the order prior
to its suppression, they were also joined by many former Paccanarists. The lat-
ter were, for the most part, clerics who had different experiences within the
revolutionary and Napoleonic contexts and who made a particularly signifi-
cant contribution from an intellectual, spiritual, devotional, and pastoral point
of view, helping to reformulate the identity of the Society of Jesus in the age of
the Restoration. Among those who transited through the Society of the Faith
and later became Jesuits are figures of historical significance such as Jean-
Baptiste Gury, Anton Kohlmann, Luis Rozaven, and Joseph Varin.
The make-up of the new Society of Jesus was heterogeneous thanks to the
presence of these young clerics who adhered to it in successive stages and who,
after 1814, took part in the difficult process of its restoration. Unlike the Jesuits
who had stayed behind in the Russian empire and who had acted in a context
of conservative isolationism, the members of the Society of Faith had mili-
tated in revolutionary Europe, showing a particular pastoral zeal in the differ-
ent circumstances in which they had operated and exhibiting an affinity for
3 Inglot 1997, 33.

The Society Of Jesus Under Another Name 199
what would now be called umweltseelsorge.4 The former, isolated in an

autocratic state, had remained distant from European affairs, but the
Paccanarsists developed a pastoral practice appropriate to the revolutionary
context, adopting methods and forms typical of late-eighteenth-century
religous sensibility.
They brought to the new Society of Jesus existential and cultural sensibil
ities nurtured in institutions which had been informed by the Ignatian
Constitutions and spirituality, but where no former Jesuits had actually been
present. The starting point of this study is an analysis of the characteristics of
the Society of the Sacred Heart and of the Society of the Faith, of their indis-
putable differences, and of the common elements that distinguished them
from the Society of Jesus, in order to best ascertain, through a prosopographi-
cal approach, the actual contribution of their members. The genesis of the two
institutes was indeed different, and even more significant was the social back-
ground of their respective affiliates.
The Society of the Sacred Heart was founded in Leuven in 1794 by two clerics
from the prestigious seminary of St. Sulpice, Franois Leonor de Tournely and
Charles de Broglie.5 They were soon joined by other migr priests who can be
best described as the product of the French counter-revolutionary milieu. The
subsequent events in which they were involved link this group of men to
Diesbachs Amitis Chrtiennes movement and its diffusion.6 Whereas the
Sulpicians were aristocratic and erudite, the Society of Faith had earthier roots.
It was founded in Rome in the period immediately preceding the proclamation
of the Jacobin Roman Republic by a group of laymen and clerics. At their
head was elected a layman who had fought in the papal army, Niccol Paccanari.
To the younger members of both foundations, most of them born after 1773,
the Society of Jesus and the ideal of Ignatian spirituality represented a model
to be followed. Lack of first-hand knowledge of the sons of St. Ignatius, how-
ever, caused them to approach its Constitutions, its Institute and the Spiritual
Exercises without the mediation of the Jesuits. Having assimilated the
4 Theresa Clements, Reflection on apostolic spirituality. A study of the Father of the Faith in
France (18011814), Milltown Studies 15 (1985): 5764.
5 The seminary of St. Sulpice was founded in Paris in 1641 by Jean Jacques Olier. It was succes-
sively structured as a society of apostolic life whose superior was also superior of the semi-
nary and was elected for life. The Sulpicians were dissolved after the revolution and many of
them took refuge in Baltimore. Their superior, Father Jacques-Andr Emery remained in
France and in 1801, reconstituted the Paris seminary and the society.
6 Carlo Bona, Le Amicizie. Societ segrete e rinascita religiosa (17701830) (Deputazione
Subalpina di Storia Patria: Torino, 1962).
200 Castelli
criticisms directed at the Jesuits from various sources, these young men sought
a direct return to the original source of Ignatiuss vision.
Another aspect common to the affiliates of both institutes was their famil-
iarity with members of monastic orders, in particular Trappists, Capuchins,
and Carmelites. The coexistence of members of different orders or even, at
times, the simultaneous affiliation to several religious orders, was a secondary
effect of the revolutionary crisis which only intensified when a large number of
clerics found themselves displaced by the Napoleonic wars. In the founding
group of the Society of the Sacred Heart, the contemplative and penitential
element was particularly pronounced, some would even say all-encompassing.
This was in accord with the approach theorized in the seminary of St. Sulpice
which strongly advocates the flight from the mundane, and the formation of
an almost disembodied personality.7
The Roman foundation, on the other hand, had its origin in the Oratory of
the Caravita, previously the seat of the urban mission of the Jesuits, in the
peculiar political and religious climate of the capital of Christianity where
apocalyptic tensions coexisted with prophecies of a possible resurgence of the
Ignatian order. The foundation enjoyed the strong support of the Cardinal
Vicar Giulio Della Somaglia, a future Black Cardinal; even in later years notable
Black Cardinals can be found among the Paccanarists supporters. At the risk
of simplification, we can say that the Society of the Faith, in contrast to the
more elitist Society of the Sacred Heart, was the popular answer to the vac-
uum created by the absence of the Jesuit order. It was part of the project of
Catholic reconquest promoted by the Roman Curia, and it took the form of
an enthusiastic group,8 tightly-knit around the charismatic figure of its founder.
The unmistakable differences between the two groups became more evi-
dent at the time of their merging in Vienna in 1799. The two institutes nonethe-
less shared common traits that resulted, as previously mentioned, from their
being born in that precise historical moment when the suppressed Ignatian
order had become a model for some to follow. In many ways, the historical
experience of the Society of the Faith of Jesus in its entirety can be defined as
an eighteenth-century edition of the old Society.
Niccol Paccanari reached the Austrian capital in 1799, after many vicissi-
tudes and preceded by his reputation. He carried commendatory letters from
reputable religious figures and, significantly, had received several privileges
7 Maurilio Guasco, I rapporti del sacerdote con il mondo in epoca moderna, in Preti cittadini
del mondo, ed. Francesco Zenna (Paoline: Milano, 2004), 37.
8 Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm. A Chapter in the Story of Religion, with special reference to the XVII
and XVIII Centuries (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1959).
from Pope Pius VI. The latter had personally invited him to merge his group
with the Society of the Sacred Heart that had found refuge in Hagenbrunn.
Negotiations regarding the fusion were complex because they led to the de
facto dissolution of the French order in spite of its numerical superiority and
the quality of its members training (since the initial ranks of the Sulpicians
had been strengthened by many members of the French migr clergy).
One of the main points of contention was the vow of consecration to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus that was the essence of the French institute, its mission
rooted in the propagation of a devotion of which the Jesuits had been the main
proponents.9 Their position contrasted with the Paccanarists, for whom this
controversial devotion, easily identifiable with the suppressed Society, was a
potential hindrance to the propagation of the Institute. Another difference
was the manner of life of the priests of the Sacred Heart, deemed too monas-
tic and austere by Paccanari who imposed profound changes, not all of them
welcomed by their recipients.
On one point, however, the two groups were in full agreement: the particu-
lar wording of the vow of obedience to the pope. The French priests were the
strongest supporters of this modification of the Ignatian Institute through a
reformulation that stressed aspects of the ultramontane position. Varin him-
self considered this change a necessary refinement. In addition, the new for-
mulation vastly broadened the meaning of the vow circa missiones, as it was
now meant to apply to any pronouncements by the pontiff, even those not
publicly expressed, on any subject. To further strengthen the vow, it was also
decided to extend it to all members of the institute, contrary to the custom of
the old Society.
The formulation itself turned out to be particularly unpopular with the
members of the dissolved Ignatian order, who interpreted it as an unaccept-
able alteration of their Institute. Another trait shared by both institutes, which
set them apart from the old Jesuits, was the presence of a parallel female
branch, considered by both Tournely and Paccanari as a necessary comple-
ment to their institutes.10 This provision was also common to other eighteenth-
century foundations, such as the Passionists and the Redemptorists. This
alteration was bitterly criticized by the Jesuits. Their opposition would not pre-
vent many members of the Society of the Faith, once they became Jesuits, from
9 Raymond Jonas, France and the cult of Sacred Heart (Univesity of California Press: Berkley,
2000); Daniele Menozzi, Sacro Cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cris-
tiana della societ (Viella: Rome, 2001), 77.
10 See my Dalle Dilette di Ges di Niccol Paccanari alle Sorelle della Sacra Famiglia, ahsi
81(2012): 159191.
202 Castelli
developing very close ties with female congregations, especially in France, and
even contributing to the foundation of such groups.
Another feature of the Fathers of the Faith which clearly distinguished them
from the old Jesuits and which they regarded as the heart of their institute, was
the emphasis on a communitarian lifestyle and the separation of active and
contemplative life.11 Particularly helpful to understanding who the Paccanarists
were and how they were perceived by the Jesuits is the following passage by
Antony Simpson: I acknowledge they are Jesuits, but they are also something
more; and that more I dont like.12
Following the fusion with the French society, the Society of the Faith experi-
enced a considerable expansion in European countries, thanks in part to the
vast network of connections of the ex-alumni of St. Sulpice. Houses were opened
in Augusta, Dilligen and Paderborn on imperial soil, in London, Amsterdam,
Sion, and in France. Integral to the institutes expansion was the unconditional
support it received from the emperors sister, Archduchess Maria Anna who,
from this time on, became a generous patron and benefactor of the order. Her
generosity made possible the opening in Rome of the mother house of the insti-
tute in St. Sylvester on Quirinal Hill in 1801, and of a boarding-school for young
nobles in the Salviati Palace, near St. Peters. The novitiate of St. Sylvester was
placed under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Gury, while Giuseppe Sineo della
Torre was appointed head of the Collegio Mariano boarding-school.
The Roman period was central to the history of the Society. After engaging
primarily in spiritual assistance in military hospitals, it began to carry out numer-
ous popular missions and to hold spiritual exercises and retreats in the church of
St. Sylvester. The Paccanarists popular missions, though modeled after the Jesuits,
incorporated elements borrowed from eighteenth-century religious orders and
featured blunt and direct language of popular extraction: the Paccanarists spoke
the language of their audience. The Marian devotion also played a central role.
This was the period of maximum growth and success of the institute: its func-
tions and spiritual exercises were very popular and even the small nucleus of
what was to have been the female branch, the Dilette di Ges (Beloved of Jesus),
took part in the activities of the Fathers of the Faith on many occasions.
Among the documents from this period, the Catologi are invaluable to an
understanding of the life of the institute as they allow us to assess the numeri-
cal strength of the Society of the Faith and the role played by its members.13
11 arsi, Paccan.,3, C, Libro delle Regole e preci dellIstituto de paccanaristi.

12 Hubert Chadwick, Paccanarists in England, ahsi 20 (1951): 157.
13 arsi, Paccan., 8, Catalogus B. The data in these Catalogues were cross-referenced with
those of Mendizbal 1972.
Almost all the members of the Society of Faith passed through the house of St.
Sylvester and were then dispatched to the various European countries into
which the Society was expanding. In particular, a catalog, apparently compiled
soon after the union with the Society of the Sacred Heart, provides the names
of the twenty members of the latter, listing the characteristics of each indi-
vidual: the data of the soul.14 Interestingly, the document identifies in some
of them a certain rigidity in moral matters, highlighting a difference that
emerged occasionally between the Roman group of the Paccanarists, closer to
anti-rigoristic positions, and their counterpart from across the Alps. The issue,
however, calls for further study, including its connection to the diffusion of the
moral theology of Alfonso de Liguori.15
The documents reveal that in the period between 1802 and 1803 the Fathers
of the Faith, including scholastics and priests, amounted to about 130 individu-
als, with the addition of thirty temporal coadjutors; in later years their number
grew to about 300. Further research could show the number of those who later
became Jesuits to be higher still. No information has reached us on the role of
the houses on foreign soil, except for a catalog of the House of London of 1803,
by which it appears that there were thirty people in the Kensington house.
In the catalog of the Collegio Mariano we find the names of the teachers of
specific subjects. Many of them moved to France where, under the leadership
of Provincial Joseph Varin, they founded many boarding schools. The boarding
schools curriculum specified that the method of study would be different from
the old Society. Here too, the Society of Faith seemed keen on amending the
Jesuit boarding schools traditional approach with themes from eighteenth-
century culture. The Catalogi are particularly relevant to this study as they help
quantify and identify the clerics who subsequently moved on to the Society of
Jesus. The circumstances of their joining the Society of Jesus varied with the
events that led to the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum and with the specific
ways the order was reintroduced in individual states.
As far as it has been possible to ascertain, almost fifty members of the Fathers
of the Faith became Jesuits. Fourteen of them, and this is a definite figure, came
from the Society of the Sacred Heart, allowing us to conclude that almost all of
them joined the Society of Jesus after passing through the Paccannarist institute.
Their names are: Jean-Baptist Caillat,16 Pierre Cuenet,17 Augustin Coulon,18
14 arsi, Paccan.,8, Catalogus C.

15 Jean Guerber, Le ralliement du clerg franais a la morale liguorienne. Labb Gousset et ses
prcureurs (17851832) (Universit Gregoriana Editrice: Roma, 1973).
16 Jean-Baptist Caillat *7. 5.1765 Trevoux, S.J. 1.7.1815 Lugd, 12.181853 Aix-en-Provence.
17 Pierre Cuenet *8.31.1767 Doubs, S.J. 10.19.1814 Gall, 4.18.1834 Paris.
18 Augustin Coulon *10.18.1765 Le Quesnay, S.J. 7.30.1814 Gall, 10.31.1831 Aix-en-Provence.
204 Castelli
Charles Gloriot,19 Fidle Grivel,20 Jean-Baptiste Gury,21 Nicolas Jenessaux,22

Anton Kohlmann,23 Joseph Kohlmann,24 Pierre Le Blanc,25 Pierre Roger,26
Giuseppe Sineo della Torre,27 Joseph Varin,28 and Jean-Luis Rozaven.29
19 Charles Gloriot *9.13.1768 Pontarlier, S.J. 9.11.1814 Paris, 2.18.1844 Avignon. A famous
preacher and controversialist, he became rector of the seminary in Soisson after 1814. dhcj
1743. His skills and missionary zeal are praised in the catalog of the Society of the Faith.
20 Fidle de Grivel *12.17.1769 Doubs, S.J. 8.16.1803 Poock, 6.26.1842 Washington. A Sulpician,
he joined the Society of Jesus in Russia after the Paccanarist interlude. Following the expul-
sion of 1825, he moved first to France and then to England and Ireland. As professor of the-
ology he was sent to the United States where he taught novices in Georgetown. dhcj 1821.
21 Jean-Baptiste Gury *9.20.1773 Besanon, S.J. 10.22.1814 Avignon, 4.18.1866 Mercoeur. One of
the most prominent authors of moral theology texts: his works espoused positions close to
the moral theology of Alfonso de Liguori and were adopted in many European seminars.
He was one of the of the restored Societys most important moralists. dhcj 18501851.
22 Nicolas Jenessaux *4.9.1769 Reims, S.J. 7.19.1814 Gall, 10.9.1842 Paris.
23 Anton Kohlmann *6.28.1771 Kayserberg, S.J. 6.28.1805 Daugavpils, 4.10.1836 Rome. dhcj 2211.
24 Joseph Kohlmann *3.17.1762 Kayserberg, S.J. 2.22. 1804 Stara Wie, 6.23.1838 Georgetown.
25 Pierre Le Blanc *10.16.1774 Caen, S.J. 7.31.1814 Belg, 1.12.1851 Drongen. After returning to
France with father Varin, he became Superior of the boarding-school of the Pres de la Foi
in Amiens and was then transferred to Montdidier. After several vicissitudes, he became
one the restorers of the Belgian province of the Society of Jesus and was rector of various
Jesuit boarding schools in Sion, Fribourg, and Chambery. dhcj 2312.
26 Pierre Roger *8.24.1763 Coutances, S.J. 6,19.1814 Paris, 1.15.1839 Lyon. Together with the
poet Andr Chenier, he was educated in the boarding school of Navarre under the super-
vision of Father Emery. After returning to France with Varin, he initially worked at the
Salpetriere hospital in Paris and was among the founders of the boarding school of
the Pres de la Foi at Belley. After joining the Society of Jesu, he contributed with Varin to
the creation of several female congregations of Ignatian inspiration, such as the Society
of the Sacred Heart of Mary Magdalene Sophia Barat that descended from the Paccanarists
female branch, the Beloved of Jesus. He is considered one of the most prominent figures
of the post-revolutionary religious revival. dhcj 34003401.
27 Giuseppe Sineo della Torre *10.21.1761 Turin, S.J. 8. 31.1810 Sion, 10.5.1842. A disciple of
Diesbach, he joined the Society of the Sacred Heart in Vienna. After entering the Society
of Jesus he was appointed superior of the Helvetic mission and superior of the boarding
school in Brig. In 1818, he became provincial of Italy, succeeding Luigi Fortis. dhcj 3581.
28 Joseph Varin de Solemont *2.7.1769 Besanon, S.J. 7.19.1814, 19.IV.1850 Paris. A Sulpician,
he left France and served in the army of the Prince of Cond. He entered the Society of the
Sacred Heart and became its superior after Tournelys death. After the union with the
Society of the Faith of Jesus, he was made missionary for France. Following the split
with Paccanari he became superior of the Pres de la Foi in France. Upon entering the
Society of Jesus he became superior of several houses and was very active in the promo-
tion of new congregations. dhcj 3896.
29 Jean-Luis de Leissgues de Rozaven *3.9.1772 Locronan, S.J. 4.28.IV.1804 Poock, 4.2.1851
Roma.
The Society of the Faith of Jesus became a point of aggregation for several
migr priests who had scattered across Europe and who subsequently passed
into the ranks of the restored Society of Jesus. Father Pierre Epinette,30 a
Frenchman sometimes erroneously listed among the Priests of the Sacred
Heart and one of the many clerics to repair to the Papal States, entered the
Society of the Faith of Jesus in 1798, at the same time as Antoine Depinoy31 and
Victor Mayer.32 Other emigrs were Charles Lionville33 and Antoine Petijean34
who fled to Austria; while Marc Antoine Fournier,35 Lodovico Bouvet,36 and
Jean Fessard37 retreated to London, another important destination of French
emigration, and entered the Paccanarist novitiate in Kensington.
Other future German-speaking Jesuits who entered the houses opened by
the Society of the Faith in Paderborn and Dillingen were Jaques Condrau,38
Johann Drach,39 Georg Staudinger,40 and Balthasar Rudoph.41 Franz Muth42
joined the Society in Vienna. Adam Britt,43 a former Jesuit who entered a house
in Dillingen, rejoined the Society of Jesus after the Paccanarist interlude. The
participation of ex-Jesuits in the Paccanarist foundation was virtually non-
existent. The original core of the Society of Faith had been a Roman
foundation and most of its members, at least initially, either came from the
Papal States or spoke Italian. The number of those who moved on to the
30 Pierre Epinette *9.24.1760S. Remy, S.J. 6.2.1805 Poock, 1.8.1832 Bohemia.

31 Antoine Depinoy *12.11.1763 Le Cateau, S.J. 2.12.1814, 2.7.1832 Reggio Emilia.
32 Victor Mayer *9.10.1773, S.J. 7.31.1810 Sion, 10,25.1840 Brig.
33 Charles Lionville *5.7.1779 Nancy, S.J. 6.24.1805 Polock, 11.30.1857 Bourges.
34 Antoine Petijean *10.16.1780 Namour, S.J. 9.10.1815, S.J. 9.10.1815 Germs,7.6.1846 Brig.
35 Marc Antoine Fournier *9.2.1760 Maine, S.J. 7.23.1805 Polosk,4.12.1821 Poland.
36 Ludovico Buvet *1.24.1765 Sabl, S.J. 10.4.1804 in Imp.Russ., 4.15.1815 Petersburg.
37 Jean Fessard *1.29.1749 Rouen, S.J. 6.24.1805 Gal, 1.21.1832 Jouzy.
38 Jaques Condrau *9.27.1779 Coira, S.J. 6.24.1805 Gal, 4.20.1837 Tarnopol.
39 Johann Baptist Drach *6.7.1780 Kirchdorf, S.J. 7.31.1810 Sion, 11.9.1846 Schwyz. He joined
the Society of faith with Godinot. In 1805, he went with Sineo to the boarding school in
Sion where he taught and was prefect of studies. After admission into the Society of Jesus
he became rector at Sion and Freiburg, vice-provincial for the Swiss province and later
first provincial of the Upper Germany province. dhcj 1144.
40 Georg Staudinger *4.23.1783 Griesbeckerzell, S.J. 7.31.1810 Sion, 3.15.1848 Graz. After join-
ing the Society of the Faith, he went to Rome to train. In 1805, he moved to Sion with Sineo
and several others. He later became responsible for the spiritual formation of most of the
members of the Upper Germany province. dhcj 3631.
41 Balthasar Rudolph *7.9.1782 Solothurn, S.J. 7.31.1810 Sion, 5.9.1860 Feldkirch.
42 Franz Muth *12.6.1782 Hainburg, S.J. 2.21.1815 Angl, 5.5.1841 Preston.
43 Adam Britt, *10.10.1743 Fulda, S.J. (I) 9.14.1764 Rheni S. (II) 3.21.1806 Polock, 7.12.1822
Conewago. Mendizbal gives a different date and place for his admission in the Society of
Jesus.
206 Castelli
restored Society was modest, amounting to only seven men: Girolamo

Bonacchi,44 Matteo Molinari,45 Pietro Rigletti,46 Giovanni Sbriscia,47 Serafino
Mannucci,48 Vincenzo Mignani,49 and Alessandro Testa.50
While these findings underscore the deep differences that existed between
the two institutes and the reasons that led the individual members to join
them, these clerics still shared a common experience, albeit a short-lived one.
If the early years of the nineteenth century saw the maximum expansion and
success of the Society of the Faith, they also contain the seeds of its decline, as
its very existence gradually became incompatible with the process of legiti-
mizing and re-establishing the Society of Jesus, notably after the brief Catholice
fidei. What further exacerbated the situation was the founders unwillingness
to merge his institute with the resurgent Society. It appears that Paccanari had
imposed as a necessary condition for this to happen that his brethren be admit-
ted as a religious body. This option was flatly rejected since admission into
the Society was only possible on an individual basis and Pope Pius VII had
made a clear pronouncement on the matter.51
Ultimately, though, the decline of the Society of the Faith became irrevers-
ible with the beginning of the canonical trial of Paccanari by the Holy Office,
which resulted in his conviction in 1808. The gradual hemorrhaging of the
Fathers of the Faith that occurred over the years, with individual defections
followed in some cases by the departure of entire groups of clerics, makes clear
that for many of them the decision to join the institute had been prompted by
the dissolution of the Ignatian order. Only a minority group, consisting mostly
of priests living in the Roman home of St. Sylvester, remained Paccanarist.
In 1803, Rozaven, appointed provincial of England by Paccanari,52 estab-
lished contacts with Superior General Gabriel Gruber to negotiate admission
into the Society for himself and his brethren as a body or individually.53 This
request was referred to the Jesuit Strickland who examined the fathers before
44 Gerolamo Bonacchi *11.17.1776 Roma, S.J. 11.13.1814 Roma, 3.19.1827 Terni.

45 Matteo Molinari *9.20.1778 Genova, S.J. 10.4.1804 Polock, 2.29.1861 Stara Wie.
46 Pietro Rigoletti *10.19.1761S. Giorgio Canavese, S.J. 11.12.1814 Turin, 5.5.1841 Chieri.
47 Giovanni Sbriscia *2.17.1746, S.J. 6.21.1815 Ital, 1.9.1824 Roma.
48 Serafino Mannucci *8.25.1765 Roma, S.J. 10.24.1814 Roma, 2.28.1834 Roma.
49 Vicenzo Mignani *1.17.1763 Ravenna, S.J. 11.21.1804 Napoli, 4.11.1841 Napoli.
50 Alessandro Testa *4.8.1760 Asti, S.J. 8.28.1814, 11.3.1834 Roma.
51 Fontana Castelli, La Compagnia, 196210.
52 He was a prominent member of the Society in Russia. dhcj 3385. Regarding Rozaven and
his activities in the Russian Empire see Sabina Pavone, Una strana alleanza. La Compagnia
di Ges in Russia (Bibliopolis: Naples, 2010).
53 Chadwick, Paccanarists, 166169; Inglot 1997, 214229.
their departure for the Russian empire where, following a second examination
in 1804, they were admitted into the Polostk novitiate.54
Not all of them went to White Russia for admission, however: Father Bournier
joined in foro interno, along with the Jesuits of the province of England, remain-
ing at the Jesuit college of Stonyhurst until his death. After 1801, the core of the
Society that remained isolated in the Russian empire functioned as a beacon
for dispersed Jesuits and new recruits, and became the engine of a reverse pro-
cess that led many Jesuits to leave the borders of the state which had protected
them. Among them were Anton Kohlmann, Epinette, and Grivel: they were
dispatched to the United States where they, Kohlmann in particular, played an
important role in the development of the Society of Jesus. After holding many
prestigious positions, Kohlmann was recalled to Rome where he taught theol-
ogy at the Gregorian University until his death in 1835.55
The story of the Society of the Faith in France presents very different char-
acteristics. Under the leadership of Father Varin, the Pres de la Foi had an
important role in French religious life during the Napoleonic age, founding
seven boarding schools and several residences, carrying out missions in the
countryside, providing assistance to the poor in hospitals and working to
reduce the numbers of schismatics, i.e. constitutional priests. The boarding
schools followed the Collegio Marianos curriculum of studies while the mis-
sions were modeled after the missionary paradigm established in the course of
the Paccanarist experience; many of them had attended the missions in the
Papal States with the specific aim of learning this new method.
In 1804, the Pres de la Foi formally separated from Paccanari and elected
Varin as their superior:56 unlike the group in London, the Pres de la Foi contin-
ued to operate in French territory, organized as a congregation in its own right
and assumed an ever more defined identity. They never lost touch with their
Sulpician roots, continuing to be guided by father Emery, a prominent figure
in French religious life. The uninterrupted bond with their old mentor under-
scores the independence of the Pres de la Foi from the Society of Jesus.57
Burnichon,58 in his reconstruction of the history of the Society of Jesus in
54 The group led by Rozaven consisted of approximately twenty individuals, but those who
are definitely known to have entered the Society of Jesus in Russia were: Bouvet, Condrau,
Fessard, Fourinier, Grivel, Lionville, Molinari, Anton Kolmann, Joseph Kohlmann, Epi
nette. Hist. Soc. 1020, IV (17731820), Catalogus personarum olim Provinciae Russicae.
55 Johanna Schmid, German Jesuits in Maryland (17401833), ahsi 81 (2012): 125158.
56 Mario Colpo, Una lettera del p. Varin a Paccanari, ahsi 57 (1988): 315329.
57 Andr Rayez, Clorivre et les Pres de la foi, ahsi 21(1952): 300.
58 [Bournichon 1914].
208 Castelli
France, devotes much space to the tireless work of these clerics: their work
continued even during the restoration, when they were active in the creation
of numerous congregations, especially female ones. The boarding schools,
established by the Pres de la Foi under adverse conditions and constant police
control, became the backbone of French Jesuit boarding schools such as the
College of Belley, of Amiens, and of Montruge. Many former Pres de la Foi also
entered the Society of Missions where they carried on their ministry.59
Of the Pres de la Foi, the group led by Father Varin that had overseen the
expansion of the institute in French territory, Luis Barat,60 Charles Bruson,61
Julien Druhilet,62 Robert Debrosse,63 Luis Leleu,64 Jean Nicolas Loriquet,65
Pierre Ronsin,66 Antoine Thomas,67 and Varin himself, became Jesuits. The
inclusion of the Pres de la Foi in the restored Society after 1814 was not entirely
without friction: these clerics, in spite of being admitted individually, were
members of a religious body in its own right. It had acquired its identity under
the influence of the circumstances in which it had functioned and was infused
by a strong communitarian bond of Paccanarist imprint.
Their presence was regarded by the real Jesuits with suspicion and, several
years after their arrival, the provincial Simpson, who had succeeded Cloriviere,
wrote that the problem with them was that they were in fact still Pres de la Foi.
Father General Brzozowski suggested correcting the shortcomings of Varin
59 Paolo Bianchini, Un mondo plurale. I gesuiti e la societ francese tra la fine del Settecento
e i primi anni dellOttocento, in Morte e resurrezione di un Ordine religioso. Le strategie
culturali ed eucative della Compagnia di Ges durante la Soppressione (17731814), ed. Paolo
Bianchini (Vita e Pensiero: Milano, 2006) 5381.
60 Luis Barat *3.30.1768 Joigny, S.J. 10.20.1814 Bordeaux, 6.21.1845 Paris. He taught in the
boarding-schools of Lyon and Belley and, after joining the Society of Jesus, was active as a
teacher, preacher and spiritual director. He authored several theological and devotional
works. dhcj 339.
61 Charles Bruson *7.2.1764 Cond sur Noireau, S.J. 7.31.1814 Belg, 1.31.1838 Gand.
62 Julien Druilhet *7.8.1768 Orlans, S.J. 9.26.1814 Paris, 10.30.1845 Touluse. As a Jesuit he
was Provincial of France from 1830. dhcj 1148.
63 Robert Debrosse *3.26.1768 Chatel-et-Chehery, S.J. 8.29.1814, 2.18.1848. As a Jesuit he had
held numerous positions in boarding-schools and seminaries. He was a prolific author of
spiritual texts. dhcj 1066.
64 Luis Leleu *12.17.1773 Chepy, S.J. 1.29.1818, 7.1.1849 Vannes.
65 Nicolas Loriquet *10.5.1767 pernay, S.J. 8.15.1814 Gall, 4-9.1845 Paris. A Sulpician, he
joined the Pres de la Foi after 1801. Very active in French seminaries during the Restoration,
he was summoned to Rome from 1830 to 1832 for the revision of the Ratio Studiorum. dhcj
2320.
66 Pierre Ronsin *1.18.1771 Soisson, S.J. 6.23.1814 Lugd, 114.1846 Touluse.
67 Antoine Thomas *9.24.1753 Setteville, S.J. 8.5.1814, 3.23.1833 Laval.
and his brethren through the practice of the novitiate and through Spiritual
Exercises designed to instill in them proper observance of the Institute.68 The
admission of an extraneous body had always been opposed by the Jesuits,
precisely in order to preserve the identity and the purity of the Society of
Jesus, which was ideally expected to make a comeback, just like the monar-
chies of Europe, and to seamlessly continue where the old Society had left off.
After the re-establishment of the Society of Jesus in the Kingdom of Naples
with the brief Per Alias in 1804, several Paccanarists traveled to Naples to seek
admission. In some cases they ended up leaving soon afterwards, unable to
adjust to the new setting, unlike Father Vincenzo Mignani who joined the
Society in November of the same year. After Paccanari was sentenced, a group
of priests remained in St. Sylvester on Quirinal Hill to carry out their apostolic
work in the hospital of the Holy Spirit in Saxia and in prisons around the city.
In 1814, Pope Pius VII allowed the remaining Fathers of the Faith to join the
Society of Jesus, on condition of approval by the Father General, after only one
year of novitiate.69 The last Paccanarists in Rome to become Jesuits were
Serafino Mannucci, Giovanni Sbriscia, Antoine Depinoy, Alessandro Testa,
Girolamo Bonacchi. They entered the novitiate at St. Andrew on Quirinal Hill
bringing with them, it is believed, the papers related to their past, which are
still preserved in the arsi and which provided much of the information for
this study.
Another aspect concerns the story of the Paccanarists in the boarding
school of Sion. In 1805, the Council of Valais deliberated whether to entrust the
boarding school, which had once belonged to the Jesuits, to the Fathers of the
Faith. Father Sineo Della Torre was appointed superior and was later joined by
Drach, Godinot, Mayer, Rudolph, and Staudinger. In 1806, this group also sepa-
rated from Paccanari with the approval of Pope Pius VII. They initially asked to
be admitted into the Society in Russia: Superior General Brzozowski was loath
to admit the entire community and believed that even the admission of indi-
viduals would be detrimental to that outpost of the Society. An interesting
solution was arrived upon in 1810, whereby the community was granted aggre-
gation in foro interno and these men became the nucleus which gave rise to the
Swiss province and later the German province.
One needs only to scroll through the acts of the twenty-first General
Congregation of 1829,70 which resulted in the election of Jan Roothaan, to
recognize the contribution given to the restoration of the Society of Jesus by
68 Burnichon 1914, 172.

69 Fontana Castelli, La Compagnia, 261.
70 Petrus Grootens, De Congregatione generali XXI, ahsi 33 (1964): 257268.
210 Castelli
clerics whose background included experiences in institutes of Ignatian inspi-

ration. In those acts, we find many of the names of former Fathers of the Faith
mentioned in this study, most of them in important roles: Rozaven as assistant
general for France, Godinot as provincial of France, and Drach as provincial of
Upper Germany. Among the electors were Richardot, Sineo, Druhilet, and
Petijean. Serafino Mannucci, one of the most representative Paccanarists, who
remained in St. Sylvester until 1814, had become procurator general of the
order, a role he held until his death in 1834.
However, a persistent and prejudicial attitude towards the ex-Paccanarists
still informed proceedings: although Rozaven had received the highest num-
ber of votes, his having been a disciple of Paccanari turned out to be an insur-
mountable obstacle to his election. Still, the fact that Roothaan was elected
only on the fourth ballot suggests that Rozaven enjoyed the support of many
supporters, possibly his former confreres. Ultimately, the decisive factor in the
election turned out to be the veto deployed against Rozaven, in the person of
Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, by Pope Pius VII, who considered past member-
ship in the Paccanarist Institute an indelible blemish for the future general of
the Society of Jesus.
In spite of not being elected, Rozaven went on to play an important role in
the Society where he became a close associate of Roothaan. He was also an
ardent polemicist, turning his criticisms on the doctrines of Flicit de
Lamennais (17821854) and Antonio Rosmini (17971855). The reactionary
nature of the Society of Jesus in the restoration has often been ascribed to its
having survived in the confines of an autocratic state and to its being com-
posed almost exclusively of old priests with ties to the ancient regime. All
these factors seemingly doomed the new Society to an inability to compre-
hend the new European reality born of the revolution, exposing its inability to
read the signs of the times.
One should also consider that these attitudes were amplified by the pres-
ence within the Society of individuals who, like Rozaven, had a militantly
counterrevolutionary background; who had, that is, taken an active role in the
events that had inflamed Europe. In particular, the presence of former mem-
bers of the Society of the Sacred Heart is sure to have conditioned, if not wors-
ened, the Societys own conservative leanings in this particular moment in
history.
There are, however, other aspects that call for further study, namely those
relative to the influence of the new Jesuits, for example those who came from
the Pres de la foi, on pastoral practices, educational activities in schools, and
spiritual training in the novitiates. Many of them held important positions in
Jesuit colleges and universities and were prolific authors of works of spiritual
and moral inspiration, such as Father Gury or Father Roger. A thorough analy-
sis of the careers, the work, and the intellectual output of these men could lead
to a more accurate assessment of this period of the history of the Society of
Jesus.
In the final analysis, if the restored Society managed to be more than a
mere anachronistic attempt to revive the past,71 it was also thanks to the con-
tribution of these men who, in complex and sometimes unorthodox ways, took
an active role in the preservation of the Ignatian spirit.
71 Martina 2003, 20.

chapter 12
Jesuit at Heart
Luigi Mozzi de Capitani (17461813) between Suppression
and Restoration
Emanuele Colombo
When the Brief Dominus ac Redemptor sanctioned the suppression of the

Society of Jesus on 21 July 1773, Luigi Mozzi de Capitani was a teacher at the
Collegio dei Nobili, the jewel in the crown of the Jesuit educational system in
Milan.
Mozzi was born in Bergamo in 1746, the son of Count Giambattista Mozzi
de Capitani and Concordia Zanchi.1 He studied at the seminary in Bergamo;
at the Jesuit college in Monza; and, against his fathers will, he entered the
Society of Jesus in the novitiate of Chieri, near Turin, in 1763. Later, he studied
rhetoric and philosophy in Milan (17661769) with excellent results.2 Some of
Mozzis decisions while in the novitiate were particularly influential on his
future life. On 15 October 1765, at the end of the biennio, he took a special
private vow of loyalty to the Society of Jesus, at a time when Jesuits were
being expelled from various European states. In the same period, he exhib-
ited a particularly fervent devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to his
personal protector Saint Luigi Gonzaga. Additionally, he took the blood
vow, which bound one to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception
of Mary to the point of shedding ones blood. Finally, during the same years,
he asked his superiors to send him to an overseas mission, with a preference
for China.3
After the suppression, ex-Jesuits wondered how to keep the spirit of the
Society alive: what did it mean to be a Jesuit even though the Society no longer
1 Giacinto Bassi, Vita del Padre Luigi Mozzi della Compagnia di Ges (Miglio: Novara, 1823);
Giuseppe Baraldi, Notizia biografica sul Padre Luigi Mozzi, in Memorie di religione, di
morale e di letteratura (Soliani: Modena, 1825), 7:111154; Francesco Altini, Vita del P. Luigi
Mozzi (S. Alessandro: Bergamo, 1884); Sommervogel 5:13711379; Mario Zanfredini, Mozzi de
Capitani Luigi, dhcj 3:2760; Paola Vismara, Mozzi de Capitani Luigi, in Dizionario
Biografico degli Italiani (dbi) 77 (Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana: Rome, 2012), 372374.
2 arsi, Mediol. 18.
3 Bassi, Vita, 1119. Mozzis request was not accepted as often happened to talented young
Jesuits, who were destined for teaching activity, and because of the delicate situation of the
Jesuit missions of the Society at that time. See Altini, Vita, 3738.

Jesuit At Heart 213
existed and how could one be, as a common expression of the time put it, a
Jesuit at heart? For forty years, together with other Jesuits, Mozzi helped to
ferry the Society of Jesus from the first part of its life (the so-called Old Society)
to the second. His books, his travels, his apostolate, and his missionary activity
were intertwined with complex European political events.4 His extraordinary
network of connections, witnessed by hundreds of letters scattered through-
out Europe, shows the cohesiveness of ex-Jesuits during these difficult years.
Retracing some stages of Mozzis life provides an opportunity to study a crucial
period in the history of the Society of Jesus through the eyes of a prominent
witness, highly renowned during the nineteenth century, but whose memory,
in subsequent years, almost completely faded away.
After the Suppression: Hopes and Prophecies (17731777)
In 1773 Mozzi left Milan and returned to Bergamo, his hometown, where he
refined his studies in theology. Here he was secretly ordained as a priest (1776)
and appointed pro-synodal examiner and canon of the cathedral. Later, in
1792, he was appointed archpriest of the cathedral.
Mozzis unpublished correspondence (17731797) with the ex-Jesuit Nicola
Visconti Venosta is crucial for the reconstruction of Mozzis life immediately
after the suppression.5 These letters reveal an active network of ex-Jesuits
who exchanged books and information and tried to keep the spirit of the
Society alive. Mozzi received letters from ex-Jesuits across Europe, copied
and distributed them to other ex-Jesuits, and asked his friend Visconti Venosta
to do the same.6 When the latter was in Rome, he put Mozzi in touch with
4 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore (Einaudi: Turin, 19691990).

5 After the suppression Nicola Visconti Venosta, a teacher at the Collegio dei Nobili, went back
to Grosio, his hometown; in 1775 he went to Rome, where he was in touch with other promi-
nent former Jesuits; finally, in 1779 he went back to Grosio and married. See Nicola Visconti
Venosta and Ugo Cavallari, Memorie spettanti alle famiglie dei Venosta di Valtellina e ai signori
di Mazia di Val Venosta (Bettini: Sondrio, 1958). More than 200 unpublished letters written by
Mozzi to Venosta are preserved at the Archivio Visconti Venosta, Grosio (Sondrio), b. 21. The
letters are not numbered but I provide the dates of the letters. A partial catalog of the letters
has been published in Daniele Galanga, La persistenza dello spirito gesuitico negli anni della
soppressione. Lettere di Luigi Mozzi a Nicola Visconti Venosta (M.A. Diss., Universit degli
Studi di Milano, 20052006).
6 Mozzi used to circulate Venostas letters to other ex-Jesuits in Bergamo. See Mozzi to Venosta,
24 March 1774.
214 Colombo
prominent ex-Jesuits such as Francesco Antonio Zaccaria and Mathurin

Germain Le Forestier.7
Immediately after the suppression ex-Jesuits had high hopes for an immi-
nent restoration of the Society, and many of them started to place bets on the
possible date of the event.8 Such hope was supported by prophecies and apoc-
alyptic visions. During the 1770s, symbolic and eschatological interpretations
of the suppression circulated throughout Catholic Italian circles. The same
prophecies were promoted and interpreted in contrasting ways by ex-Jesuits
and their supporters on the one hand, and by members of pro-Jansenist and
anti-curial groups on the other.9 For instance, prophecies of Clement XIVs
imminent death were interpreted on one side as divine punishment for the
suppression of the Society of Jesus, and on the other as the machinations of a
Jesuit cabal.10
In his correspondence, Mozzi showed interest in these prophecies: most of
them were from earlier eras and acquired a new meaning after the suppres-
sion. During the seventeenth century, for instance, the Spanish Dominican de
Posadas11 had predicted a short period in which Jesuits would live without
their habit. Similarly, a Portuguese woman foretold the expulsion of the Society
from Portugal and its suppression well in advance of the actual event: she added
that the resurrection of the Society would happen soon and would be as great
as the sufferings that its members suffered.12 Additionally, Mozzi reported vari-
ous popular interpretations of natural and atmospheric phenomena: the
7 Francesco Antonio Zaccaria (17141795) was a famous theologian, church historian, and
polemist. In the late 1760s he engaged a debate against Giustino Febronios anti-Roman
episcopalism. See Mario Zanfredini, Zaccaria Francesco Antonio, dhcj 4:40634064.
Mathurin Germain Le Forestier (16971780) was Provincial and Assistant of France. After
the Jesuit ban in France, he went to Rome. See Sommervogel 3:887888.
8 From Mozzis letters to Venosta we learn that the phenomenon was spread among
ex-Jesuits.
9 Marina Caffiero, La nuova era. Miti e profezie dellItalia in rivoluzione (Marietti: Genova,
1991); arsi, Hist. Soc. 182, De Suppressione et Restitutione Societietatis Iesu. Vaticinia et
Litterae.
10 Mario Rosa, Clemente XIV, dbi 8 (1966), 393408. On the flourishing of prophecies con-
nected with the suppression of the Society and their different interpretations see Caffiero,
La nuova era.
11 Francisco Martn Fernndez de Posadas (16441713) was beatified by Pius VII in 1818.
12 Mozzi to Venosta, 5 September 1774. The woman alluded to a naked arm with the moun-
tains in the middle, an expression that at first seemed to be meaningless. After the sup-
pression the image was clear: the arm with the mountains was part of Clement XIVs coat
of arms.
Jesuit At Heart 215
extraordinary drought of 1774, for example, was attributed to a divine punish-

ment for the suppression of the Society.13 The most famous prophecy concern-
ing the destiny of the Society of Jesus came from the prophetesses of
Valentano.14 The case is well known. In July 1774, Clement XIV ordered the
arrest of two women in Valentano, a little town in Lazio: the Dominican nuns
Maria Teresa del Cuore di Ges and the peasant Bernardina Renzi were both
accused of false sanctity and quietism. For a long time, the two women had
been receiving sacred visions and ecstatic manifestations shaped by those of
the great mystics of the past. Some of their visions foretold the imminent death
of Clement XIV, the divine punishment of the rulers who contributed to the
expulsions of Jesuits, and the upcoming restoration of the Society. While Maria
Teresa confessed to the falsity of her visions and declared that she had been
influenced by her superior and her ex-Jesuit confessor, Bernardina Renzi never
recanted and was imprisoned in Castel SantAngelo, where the superiors of the
Society of Jesus were also detained. Many ex-Jesuits started to believe in
Bernardinas prophecies, and considered her incarceration a further injustice
against the supporters of the Society. Mozzi, who was normally skeptical
towards events or activities that might be the result of superstition, at first had
a positive attitude toward Bernardinas prophecies.15
Clement XIV was also at the center of alleged prophecies and miracles.
According to Mozzi, in the last years of Clements life and immediately after his
death, the opponents of the Society concocted miracles attributed to the pope.
His sanctityadvertised in several apologetic lives of Ganganelliwas, accord-
ing to Mozzi, only stressed in order to attack the Society. In response, Mozzi
spread satirical poems about Clement XIV, sarcastically calling him the thau-
maturge, and mocking the multitude of friars, monks, and nuns who furi-
ously adore Ganganelli.16 The popes death in 1774 was celebrated by Mozzi as
a gift of the Divine Providence.17
During the conclave of 17741775 ex-Jesuits exchanged information, gossip,
and forecasts. The election of Pius VI on 5 February 1775 fueled their expecta-
tions of a prompt restoration of the Society. Rumors circulated about the
release of the Jesuit superiors but were immediately abandoned. The death in
13 Mozzi to Venosta, 20 August 1774; 28 August 1774.

14 Marina Caffiero, Le profetesse di Valentano, in Finzione e santit tra medioevo ed et
moderna, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Rosenberg & Sellier: Turin, 1991), 493517.
15 I trust the Valentana, but I dont trust the people around her. Mozzi to Venosta, 3 March
1777.
16 Mozzi to Venosta, 18 September 1774.
17 Mozzi to Venosta, 28 September 1774.
216 Colombo
prison of the general of the Society Lorenzo Ricci (November 24, 1775) showed
once again that the restoration was not as imminent as previously believed.
During 1777, hope for a resurrection of the Society was re-awakened by a
series of prophecies that indicated that the year was propitious: among them,
the dream of a Camaldolensian monk and a prophecy by Gioachino da Fiore
re-interpreted by the Bollandists.18 Once again, these expectations were dashed.
Mozzis attitude towards this wave of prophecies was ambivalent. On the
one hand, he strove to be prudent and was disinclined to accept them uncriti-
cally. On the other hand, he was well aware that prophecies helped to fuel hope
for the restoration of the Society: it was necessary to circulate them, and when
they proved groundless he asked Visconti Venosta to look for new ones.19 In
short, in the years immediately following the suppression, Mozzi and the large
ex-Jesuit network around him believed in an imminent restoration; therefore,
they worked hard to stimulate discussion about the Society of Jesus and
believed the circulation of prophecies to be instrumental in sustaining its
memory. However, in the late 1770s it became clear that the restoration was not
going to happen any time soon, and Mozzi began a new campaign to defend,
albeit indirectly, the Society of Jesus.
Defending the Church in Order to Defend the Society: Mozzi and

Jansenism (17771792)
During the late eighteenth century, Bergamo was one of the epicenters of
heated theological debate between Jansenists and ex-Jesuits. The city was con-
trolled by Venice, but was also under the influence of the diocese of Milan with
its strong pastoral traditions. Jansenists had their headquarters at the
Benedictine monastery of San Paolo dArgon, while ex-Jesuits had a significant
impact on the pastoral activity of many parishes in the city. The debates that
took place in Bergamo circulated around Europe and filled the pages of the
Nouvelles Ecclsiastiques.20
18 Mozzi to Venosta, 13 January 1777; 10 April 1777. See also Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di
Roma, Fondo Gesuitico (bncr fg), 135318, Relazione autentica venuta da Valentano da
pi sacerdoti del continuato prodigio del ss. Cuore di Ges nella festa di questo anno 1777.
19 You have not been writing to me about prophecies for a long time. It is important to cir-
culate them; I expect at least a dozen in your next letter. Mozzi to Venosta, 18 May 1778.
20 Paola Vismara, Riformare il mondo nella vera vita evangelica. M. Antonia Grumelli
(17411807) mistica e fondatrice del Collegio Apostolico, Nuova Rivista Storica 91 (2007):
751775, especially 751753.
Jesuit At Heart 217
When it became clear that the restoration of the Society was going to be a
slow process, Mozzi realized that the only way to defend the Society was to
support what he regarded as the sound doctrine of the church, by writing
against Jansenism, which he saw as the most dangerous enemy of both church
and society. This change of attitude can be seen in the writings of other influ-
ential ex-Jesuits, such as Francesco Antonio Zaccaria and Giovan Vincenzo
Bolgeni.21
Mozzis first book was a response to an anonymous work written by the pro-
Jansenist Benedictine Giovanni Gerolamo Calepio (17321800) and entitled On
the Return of the Jews and How it Will Happen.22 The return of the Jews to the
Catholic Church was a popular topic in Italy during the 1770s: as had happened
many times in the history of Christianity, in critical times the interpretation of
Scripture was used to interpret contemporary events. In his work, Calepio con-
demned the church of Rome, comparing it to Babylon, and foretold its immi-
nent destruction and the substitution of the Jews for the Gentile Christians.
Mozzi drafted an answer, and discussed it extensively in his correspondence
with Le Forestier, Bolgeni, and Zaccaria.23 After many delays, the book was
published in Lucca in 1777.24
In his book, Mozzi critiqued Calepios millenarianism and his views about
the return of the Jews. He also strongly opposed Calepios views on the church,
since he denied the infallibility, the indefectibility, and all the other essential
features of the Church, with an astonishing malice.25 Calepios answer, and
21 In the same period Zaccaria thought that it was not possible to restore the Society and it
was time to spread the sound doctrine. See Alberto Vecchi, Correnti religiose nel Sei-
Settecento veneto (Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale: Venice-Rome, 1962), 609.
See also the letters written by Zaccaria to Mozzi (17791781), and the letters written by
Bolgeni to Mozzi (17861799), Archivio Gesuiti Italia SettentrionaleGallarate (agis),
Persone, Mozzi-Paccanari. Giovan Vincenzo Bolgeni (17331811) was a theologian and
controversialist; he wrote against Jansenism and in support of the papacy. Pius VI
appointed him librarian of the Collegio Romano and Theologian of the Penitentiary. See
Mario Zanfredini, Bolgeni Giovanni Vincenzo, dhcj 1:476.
22 Giovanni Gerolamo Calepio, Del ritorno degli Ebrei e di ci che vi ha da porgere occasione
(Rizzardi: Brescia, 1772). See Pietro Stella, Calepio, Giovanni Gerolamo, dbi 16 (1973),
670672.
23 agis, Persone, Mozzi-Paccanari.
24 Luigi Mozzi, Lettere ad un amico sopra certa dissertazione publicata a Brescia sul ritorno
degli ebrei alla Chiesa (Bonsignore: Lucca, 1777). The ms. is preserved in arsi, Opp. nn.
156. It was difficult for Mozzi to find a publisher; he wrote to Venosta: Where should
I have published it? In Heaven? (Mozzi to Venosta, 27 February 1777).
25 Mozzi to Venosta, 25 April 1766.
218 Colombo
further debates fueled by Mozzis book,26 ushered in a new stage in Mozzis life.
He started to publish works against Jansenism that spread beyond Bergamo
and contributed to a broader European debate. In The False Disciple of
S. Thomas and S. Augustine (1779), Mozzi demonstrated that Jansenists were
innovators, not faithful to the church Fathers;27 in The True Idea of Jansenism
(1782) he denounced the spreading of the Jansenist sect that was dissolving
the Church and subverting the order of the State;28 he also wrote the History
of the New Church of Utrecht (1785),29 which he described as the new church of
Satan, and authored an accurate Historical and Chronological Compendium of
all the documents issued by the Church against Jansenism.30
Mozzis books provoked passionate debates among prominent exponents of
Italian Jansenism, such as the Benedictines Calepio and Giuseppe Maria Pujati,
and the Capuchin Viatore da Coccaglio: these works circulated far beyond
Italy, and some of them were translated into French and Spanish.31 Mozzi was
supported by several ex-Jesuits who reviewed and spread his books in ecclesi-
astical circles: their letters show that the defense of the sound doctrine of the
church was explicitly considered as an indirect way of defending the Society
of Jesus.32
26 Calepio wrote another book to refute Mozzis work; another famous Benedictine,
Giuseppe Maria Pujati, wrote three books to support Calepios thesis. See Vecchi, Correnti
religiose, 455456.
27 Luigi Mozzi, Il falso discepolo di santAgostino e di san Tommaso convinto derrore (Zatta:
Venice, 1779). The Benedictine Jansenist Pujati wrote against this book and strongly
attacked the Society of Jesus in his Difficolt proposte al signor canonico Luigi Mozzi sopra
le sue riflessioni critico-dogmatiche. Lettera terza (n.e. 1780). Mozzi used the same argu-
ment against Jansenists and rigorists in a letter on usury: Lettera sul mutuo e sullimpiego
del denaro del P. Luigi Mozzi d. C. d. G., Archivio della Pontificia Universit Gregoriana, 705,
385405.
28 Luigi Mozzi, Vera idea del giansenismo (Locatelli: Bergamo, 1781), II, 278 ff. The book was
dedicated to Cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga.
29 Luigi Mozzi, Storia compendiosa dello scisma della nuova Chiesa dUtrecht (Pomatelli:
Ferrara, 1785). The Milanese canon Luigi Bossi and the archbishop of Siena Tiberio
Borghese wrote against this book. Pius VI congratulated Mozzi with a brief.
30 Luigi Mozzi, Compendio storico-cronologico de pi importanti giudizi portati dalla Santa
Sede Apostolica-Romana sopra il Baianismo, Giansenismo, e Quesnellismo (Tomassini:
Foligno, 1792). Pius VI congratulated Mozzi with a brief.
31 The key role of Mozzi in the Italian anti-Jansenist movement is described in Pietro Stella,
Il Giansenismo in Italia, II: Il movimento giansenista e la produzione libraria (Storia e
Letteratura: Rome, 2006), 219; III: Crisi finale e transizioni (Storia e Letteratura: Rome,
2006), 323, 329.
32 See the letters by Zaccaria and Bolgeni to Mozzi, agis, Persone, Mozzi-Paccanari.
A similar idea was shared by Carlo Borgo, ex-Jesuit from Vicenza, who thought that the
Jesuit At Heart 219
During the 1780s ex-Jesuits considered books a precious tool to preserve and
to spread their identity: in particular Jesuits expelled from Spain, who at that
time lived in the Papal States and were involved in publishing activities, trans-
lating and distributing harshly anti-Jansenist literature. Mozzi had strong con-
nections with them,33 and was also in touch with the Christian Friendship
(Amicizia Cristiana), a secret group of selected lay people and priests, founded
in Turin by the ex-Jesuit Nikolaus von Diessbach and committed both to a seri-
ous spiritual life and to the circulation of Catholic books.34
The ex-Jesuits commitment to the spreading of sound doctrine found sup-
port in the policy of the Holy See. In the mid-1780s, Pius VI, who at first had been
cautious in his dealings with Italian Jansenism, began a program of anti-Jan-
senist and pro-papal propaganda that involved many ex-Jesuits.35 The Roman
Curia carefully examined the decrees of the Synod of Pistoia (1786) using, among
others, Mozzis books.36 In 1794, Pius VI, with the Bull Auctorem Fidei, con-
demned eighty-five theses of the synod, taking a firm position against Jansenism.
From the point of view of ex-Jesuits, this was a great step towards the recovery of
sound doctrine, but it did not lead to the restoration of the Society.
defense of the Society is connected with the defense of the Church, yet it is the same.
This recurring motif in Jesuit literature was attributed to Clement XIIIs brief of 9 June
1762 to the king of France. See Carlo Borgo, Memoria cattolica da presentarsi a Sua
Santit. Opera Postuma (Cosmopoli, 1780), 178.
33 See Mario Tosti, La fucina dellantigiansenismo italiano. I gesuiti iberici espulsi e la tipo-
grafia di Ottavio Sgariglia di Assisi, in La presenza in Italia dei gesuiti iberici espulsi, eds.
Ugo Baldini and Gian Paolo Brizzi (clueb: Bologna, 2010), 355365; Antonella Barzazi,
I gesuiti iberici in Italia tra libri e biblioteche, in La presenza in Italia, 337354.
34 The Amicizia Cristianalater called Amicizia Cattolica was founded by the ex-Jesuit
Nikolaus Joseph Albert von Diessbach (17321798) in Turin in 17791780. Later, a Milanese
group was formed. See Pietro Stella, Diessbach Nikolaus Joseph Albert, dbi 39 (1991),
791794. Mozzi was in contact with the Milanese group led by Count Francesco Pertusati,
and with the group in Turin. See Candido Bona, Le Amicizie, societ segrete e rinascita
religiosa (17701830) (Deputazione subalpina di storia patria: Turin, 1962); Roberto de
Mattei, La Biblioteca delle Amicizie. Repertorio critico della cultura cattolica nellepoca
della Rivoluzione, 17701830 (Bibliopolis: Naples, 2005). For Mozzis connection with the
Amicizia in Turin, see the unpublished documents at Biblioteca Reale di Torino,
Miscellanee, Varia 383.
35 Giuseppe Pignatelli, Aspetti della propaganda cattolica a Roma da Pio VI a Leone XII
(Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano: Rome, 1974); Niccol Guasti, Lesilio
italiano dei gesuiti spagnoli. Identit, controllo sociale e pratiche culturali, 17671798 (Storia
e Letteratura: Rome, 2006), 358359.
36 The works of many Spanish and Italian Jesuits were consulted during the examination of
the decrees of the Synod of Pistoia. Among the Italians there were Luigi Mozzi, Giovan
Vincenzo Bolgeni, and Francesco Antonio Zaccaria. See Stella, Il giansenismo, III, 451.
220 Colombo
Our Way of Proceeding Without the Society: Devotions,

Confraternities, and Education (17931797)
It soon became clear that the battle against Jansenism was not enough to
keep the spirit of the Society of Jesus alive: it was necessary to promote this
spirit in a more direct and active way. In the early 1790s, Mozzi turned to pas-
toral activity, combining the traditions of the Society of Jesus with the needs
and the circumstances of his time.37 In 1793, he created in Bergamo the Society
of St. Luigi Gonzaga, a group of young celibate men and priests dedicated to
charitable work, piety, and the apostolate;38 and soon another similar institu-
tion was born: the Society of the Sacred Heart. These societies were external
seminaries for the religious education of young men, regardless of whether
or not they would become priests. Mozzi also launched popular missions in
the diocese of Bergamo and supported the creation of confraternities, follow-
ing the model of the Jesuit Marian congregations: he founded more than
forty congregations, named after St. Luigi Gonzaga, the Immaculate
Conception, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.39 These typical Jesuit devotions
and in particular that of the Sacred Heartacquired great importance dur-
ing the suppression: opposed by Jansenists, they became the fortresses of a
Jesuit religious sensibility.40 Another problem Mozzi sought to confront was
education. In 1796, he established an extremely innovative institution, per-
haps the first of its kind in Europe, known as the Night School of Charity,
which offered free basic education to young workers during the evening and
enjoyed extraordinary success.41
37 Gaetano Bonicelli, Rivoluzione e restaurazione a Bergamo. Aspetti sociali e religiosi della

vita bergamasca alle soglie dellet contemporanea, 17751825, con documenti inediti
(Fondazione amministrazione provinciale: Bergamo, 1961).
38 Alessandro Baitelli, Luigi Mozzi, membro del Collegio Apostolico, in Il Collegio Apos
tolico. Una esperienza singolare nella diocesi di Bergamo, ed. Goffredo Zanchi (Glossa:
Milan, 2009), 75108; Bassi, Vita.
39 Following the model of the Jesuit congregations, they were all connected in a network.
See Baitelli, Il Collegio Apostolico.
40 Daniele Menozzi, Sacro cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana
della societ (Viella: Rome, 2002); Mozzi translated in Italian a book by Jean-Flix-Henri de
Fumel on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with some additional notes; he also wrote a long trea-
tise on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary that remained unpublished (Luigi Mozzi,
Meditazioni sui santissimi cuori di Ges e di Maria, ms., agis, Persone, Mozzi-Paccanari.)
41 Dellorigine, della costituzione e dello spirito della Scuola serale di Carit per i giovani artisti
della Citt Alta in Bergamo (Wilmant: Milan-Lodi, 1848). Suppressed by the French, the
School of Charity reopened in Bergamo in 1814.
Jesuit At Heart 221
These activities, which clearly had a Jesuit imprint, were supported by

members of the Collegio Apostolico, an institution founded a few years
before by the Clarissan mystic Maria Antonia Grumelli (17411807).42 The
Collegio was a secret group of diocesan priests who took a special vow of
obedience to the pope and to the local bishop and committed themselves
to intense pastoral activitysuch as spiritual exercises, popular missions,
and the religious instruction of young people.43 The Collegio, according to
the vision of Maria Antonia Grumelli, was intended to fill the gap left by
the suppression of the Society. For instance, Grumelli stressed that the
goal of the institution was the Glory of God and the salvation of souls and
of the entire Church, and the conversion of the unbelievers, the Turks, and
the heretics.44 Such language, including the strange reference to the
Turks, clearly derives from early Jesuit documents. Additionally, one of
the main goals of the Collegio was the propagation of devotion to the
Sacred Heart.
During these years, Mozzi did not abandon writing, but he now thought it
was no longer the time to fight against theological errors.45 He published sev-
eral short biographies of little known figures in order to provide examples of
Christian virtues in normal lives.46 These books became a further instrument
for the apostolate, in accordance with the Jesuit way of proceeding.
Our Indies (17971810)
In 1797 the French entered Bergamo and Mozzis successful activities did not
go unnoticed: he was arrested, then obliged to abandon the city. For two
years he stayed in the Parma area, where he dedicated himself to teaching
and to the apostolate. He returned to Bergamo (1799) with the Austro-Russian
42 Vismara, Riformare il mondo. Maria Antonia Grumelli had apocalyptic visions con-
nected with the suppression of the Society of Jesus; Mozzi was often suspicious of her
visions and prophecies.
43 The Collegio Apostolico was founded in 1773 by M. Antonia Grumelli. It was secret and
there was no community life. Mozzi joined the Collegio in 1795, and contributed in writ-
ing its rules. See Il Collegio Apostolico, bncr fg, 122615, Lettere sul Collegio Apostolico
di Luigi Mozzi.
44 Quoted in Vismara, Riformare il mondo, 768.
45 Altini, Vita, 181.
46 Angelo Roncalli, Il P. Luigi Mozzi biografo. Studio critico illustrativo, Vita Diocesana 6
(1914): 7580.
222 Colombo
army, but at the end of the year he again had to leave the city. Meanwhile,
Pius VII officially recognized the Society of Jesus in Russia, and a Jesuit novi-
tiate was opened in Colorno (Parma), under the direction of Jos Pignatelli.47
Mozzi took the simple vows in Colorno in 1801, and in 1803 he made his sol-
emn profession of the four vows in Fano.48 In 1804, he was called to Rome by
Pius VII, who held him in high esteem, as prefect of the Caravita Oratory, an
ancient and renowned Jesuit institution in Rome.49 He only remained there
for a few months: as soon as Pius VII extended the same rights of the Society
of Jesus in White Russia to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1804), Mozzi
joined Pignatelli at the Jesuit house in Naples. In 1806 the French army
entered Naples and the Jesuits were banned from the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies: together with Pignatelli, Mozzi moved to Rome, where he remained
until 1810.
These years of travels and flight constituted a new missionary period in
Mozzis life. He became one of the most prominent Italian missionaries
and tirelessly visited several dioceses, where bishops and cardinals vied
for his services.50 The number of places he visited was impressive: he was
first in Piacenza, Emilia, and the Parma area (17971799); then in the
Veneto region, in the Republic of Ragusa (todays Dubrovnik), and the
Marche region (18011803); later he was appointed by Pignatelli as urban
preacher in Naples and visited several nearby cities (18041806); finally
he went to Rome (18061810), where Pignatelli asked him to teach the
Jesuit missionary method to novices and visit cities and towns in the area.
The number of documents related to this workletters, reports, and
47 After the expulsion of Jesuits from Spain, Jos Pignatelli (17371811) went to Corsica,
Genoa, and Bologna. He wanted to go to White Russia, but his trip was delayed. In 1799, he
became the master of the novices of the novitiate of Colorno (Parma), in 1804 provincial
of the province of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and in 1806 provincial of Italy. He died
in Rome, at that time under French occupation, in 1811. Giuseppe March, Il resaturatore
della Compagnia di Ges: b. Giuseppe Pignatelli della Compagnia di Ges e il suo tempo (sei:
Turin, 1938).
48 See arsi, Ital. 1002, I, doc. 13, De P. Mozzi ad professionem admittendo, arsi, Russ. 1030,
ff. 239240.
49 The Caravita Oratory was founded in 1631 and was the center of Jesuit-sponsored lay con-
gregations. See Armando Guidetti, Le missioni popolari. I grandi gesuiti italiani (Rusconi:
Milan, 1988), 8690.
50 Altini, Vita, 259265; Guidetti, Le missioni popolari, 204205; Pietro Galletti, Brevi memorie
intorno alla Compagnia di Ges in Italia dallanno 1773 allanno 1814 (Deposito libri: Rome,
1938). Enthusiastic letters to Mozzi written by the bishops of Anagni, Terracina, Orvieto,
Amelia, and Sora are preserved in arsi, Ital. 1004; agis, Persone, Mozzi-Paccanari.
Jesuit At Heart 223
correspondence with bishops and priests of the places he visitedis

huge, still unexplored, and warrants more detailed study. It is worthwhile
here to consider some of Mozzis documents regarding missionsthe
Rules for the Missions and the Plan for the Missions,51 which are pre-
served in the Jesuit Roman archives. In those documents, Mozzi discusses
the details of the Jesuit style of popular missions: duration, methods of
preaching, processions, religious education, music, theatrical representa-
tions, and missionary rules of conduct. Mozzis explicit models are the
great missionaries of the Society: Paolo Segneri (16241694), Giovanni
Pietro Pinamonti (16321703), and Girolamo Trento (17131784), but also
Jesuits of the first generation such as Francis Xavier.52 Mozzi wanted to
emulate their methods, even in a profoundly different time and situation.
Being faithful to the tradition of the Society was a crucial and simple way
to keep the Society alive and preserve its identity, as is evident from
Pignatellis comments on Mozzis plan.
We will discuss in person your Method of Missions, because this is not a

topic to be discussed through letters. I want just to tell you that I dont like
any other method as much as yours, because it is the most similar to the
one of the Disciples and of our Founders and Fathers, who went to mis-
sions two by two and sometimes alone with a priest or a friar they found
on their ways or sent by God; our Fabre, Laynez, and Bobadilla went to
missions in this way.53
In 1806 Mozzi visited several towns in the diocese of Albano, at the behest of
the local bishop, Cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga.54 Later, in an enthusiastic let-
ter, Valenti Gonzaga wrote to Mozzi that while reading his reports, it seemed to
him that he was reading the edifying accounts from the missions in China and
in Japan and he acknowledged Mozzis special zeal, worthy of a true son of
St. Ignatius.55 It might be said that Mozzis youthful dream of going to China
and his fervent wish to revive the Jesuit missionary method were both fulfilled
in this unexpected way.
51 arsi, Opp. nn. 157, Regole per le Missioni; arsi, Ital. 1004, X, doc. 34, Piano per le
Missioni and Al padre provinciale, sopra alcuni punti relativi alla missione.
52 For biographies of these Jesuit missionaries see dhcj, ad voces.
53 Pignatelli to Mozzi, Rome, 29 October 1806. arsi, Archivio della Postulazione Generale,
San Giuseppe Pignatelli, 829, E, doc. 34.
54 Luigi Valenti Gonzaga (17251808) was created cardinal in pectore in April 1776 by Pius VI.
55 Card. Luigi Valenti Gonzaga to Mozzi, Rome, 7 February 1807. arsi, Ital. 1004, XI, doc. 3.
224 Colombo
The Society is Back, the Society is One. Mozzi, Pignatelli,

and Paccanari
From the beginning of the nineteenth century there was renewed hope for the
possible restoration of the Society. The novitiate in Colorno opened the possi-
bility of introducing young men to the Society of Jesus, and Mozzi recruited
five young novices from Bergamo, who constituted the core group of the novi-
tiate. In 1804, Mozzi followed Pignatelli to Naples when a new house of the
Society was opened in the city: in 1806, they both went to Rome, and Mozzi
supported Pignatelli in his role of provincial of all the Jesuits in Italy.56 While
the political situation was unstable, encouraging signs for the Society came
from the pope: now the priority for ex-Jesuits was to support the Society openly
and to remove all possible obstacles to its restoration.
Mozzi, the right arm of Pignatelli,57 was a key figure in this delicate phase of
the history of the Society: he enjoyed the esteem of Pius VII58 and of many
cardinals; through them he obtained many privileges for the Society.59 He was
also in touch with Duke Ferdinand of Bourbon-Parma,60 who supported the
Society of Jesus, and corresponded with the dukes sister, the Ursuline Luigia
Maria Antonia.61 The Society was slowly growing, and it was crucial to respond
to polemical attacks: in 1807, for instance, Mozzi wrote a note that responded
to allegations that the Society was working to restore its missions overseas
without subjecting itself to the Propaganda Fide.62
One of the main problems for the Society at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century was the Paccanari affair.63 In 1797 Niccol Paccanari, along
with some priests and lay people from the Caravita Oratory, founded the
56 With the exception of Sicily, which at that time was an autonomous province.
57 On Mozzis relationship with Pignatelli see Alessandro Baitelli, Per una biografia di padre
Luigi Mozzi (17461813). Il suo contributo alla restaurazione della Compagnia di Ges
(MA Diss., Universit Cattolica del S. Cuore, 20062007.)
58 The pope received him in Pesaro in 1800 and later appointed him prefect of the Caravita
Oratory. See the letters by Giuseppe Bartolomeo Menochio (Pontifical Sacristan and con-
fessor of Pius VII) to Mozzi: arsi, Ital. 1003, I, doc. 1218.
59 Mozzi obtained privileges for Jesuit confraternities and for a possible re-opening of the
Jesuit mission in China. arsi, Ital. 1003, I, doc. 6; arsi, Ital. 1004, III, doc. 38.
60 Mozzi had a rich correspondence with Ferdinand of Bourbons representative in Vienna,
Giuseppe Ferrari della Torre, arsi, Ital. 1002, III.
61 arsi, Ital. 1002, VI, doc. 35.
62 arsi, Ital. 1004, I, doc. 14.
63 Eva Fontana-Castelli, La Compagnia di Ges sotto altro nome: Niccol Paccanari e la
Compagnia della Fede di Ges (17971814) (ihsi: Rome, 2007).
Jesuit At Heart 225
Company of the Faith of Jesus, whose rules were similar to those of the
Society. The foundation was at first supported by prominent pro-Jesuit eccle-
siastics, who saw it as a possible answer to the suppression of the Society.64
However, from the beginning there was ambiguity in the relationship
between the Company of the Faith and the Society of Jesus. Paccanari was
clearly inspired by St. Ignatiuss spirituality, but he had never been part of
the Society of Jesus and his apostolic style was completely different. He
emphasized the role of his visions and ecstatic experiences, introduced a
female branch of the order, weakened the importance of education, and
emphasized the link between the Company and the pope well beyond the
Jesuit model. In short, Paccanari considered himself the founder of a new
religious order aimed to reform the Society of Jesus, as he wrote in one of his
memorials.65 At the same time, he was using a name similar to that of the
Society of Jesus, dressed like a Jesuit, and imitated many typical Jesuit activi-
ties, such as popular missions.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the clashes between ex-Jesuits
and the so-called Paccanarists became acute, and Mozzi became one of the
leading critics of the Company of Faith. In 1799, in a letter to Paccanari, he
described the Company as a schismatic branch of the Society of Jesus: How
could we acknowledge in the order you founded the restoration of the Society
of Jesus, since you dont depend onand dont have any relationship with
the Society of Jesus legitimately active in Russia?66
Mozzi underlined the differences in Paccanaris missionary method, in the
education of the novices, and in the relationship with women. Mozzi also con-
demned Paccanaris tendency to update the style and the spirit of the Society,
as if Paccanari wanted to improve the Society of Jesus by being more faithful to
Ignatius than the Jesuits themselves. In the Company of Faith, according to
Mozzi, there was a different spirit from the one of the Society of Jesus, and
more similar to that of other regular clerics.67
Paccanari was also opposed by former members of the Company of Faith,
who accused him of false sanctity and of soliciting women to carnal sins.
64 Paccanari was supported by Cardinal Giulio Della Somaglia and through him he received
a private audience in 1798 with Pius VI, who granted the Company privileges for seven
years. The Archduchess Marianna of Augsburg (sister of the Emperor Francis II) joined
the female branch of the Company, the Dilette di Ges.
65 Now I know that my order will be the reform of the Society of Jesus, and will be named
Company of Faith (Pro memoria del R.P. Niccol Paccanari, arsi, Paccan. 1004, I, doc. 1, p. 10).
66 Quoted in Bassi, Vita, 167.
67 arsi, Paccan. 1004, X, doc. 4. Fontana-Castelli, La Compagnia di Ges, 66.
226 Colombo
In 1801 the Holy Office launched an action against Paccanari, and Luigi Mozzi
was heard twice as a witness and wrote a detailed report. In this document and
in other letters,68 besides the issue of immoral conduct, Mozzi underlined
Paccanaris aversion to the Society of Jesus: His Company was meant to be
nothing else than a reform of the ancient Society; he saw its members as the
Gentiles, who should substitute the poor and undermined Jewish people.69 In
a time when the only true Society was trying to be officially restored, any
reform was extremely dangerous.
In 1808 Paccanari was condemned to ten years in prison:70 from Mozzis per-
spective, another obstacle to the restoration of the Society had been removed.
Fluctuating Memories
In 1810 Mozzi went back to Milan where he tried to organize a group of the
Societys novices. Among them was the future cardinal Angelo Mai, who had
sincere and great affection for Mozzi.71 Since the French considered him dan-
gerous, Mozzi was forbidden to preach publicly, and served only as a confessor
in popular missions. He became sick and spent the last months of his life in
Oreno, hosted by Count Gallarati Scotti, where he died on 24 June 1813.72 One
year later, Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus throughout the world.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the desire of the Society of
Jesus to preserve the memory of the old Jesuits who had allowed the Society
to survive during the suppression is well documented in the archives: among
them, Pignatelli and Mozzi stand out.73 Later, while the memory of Pignatelli
remained alive because of his beatification by Pius XI and his canonization by
68 Relazione del P. Mozzi, arsi, Paccan. 1004, XI, doc. 4; Lettera a un amico, arsi, Paccan.
1004, XI, doc. 5 (see also Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Gesuiti, 58, ff. 92-105r); Mozzi to
Giuseppe Ferrari della Torre, arsi, Ital. 1002, III.
69 Relazione del P. Mozzi, 34; Lettera a un amico, 14.
70 Paccanari was released one year later by the French, and disappeared under mysterious
circumstances. Fontana Castelli, La Compagnia di Ges, 255265.
71 Angelo Mai, Epistolario, ed. Gianni Gervasoni, I (Olschki: Florence, 1954), ad indicem;
Pietro Pirri, Angelo Mai nella Compagnia di Ges. Suo diario inedito del Collegio di
Orvieto, ahsi 23 (1954), 234282.
72 A report on Mozzis death and funeral is preserved at the archive of the Maryland Province
of the Society of Jesus, Georgetown University, box1, folder 5.
73 For Mozzi, see the three nineteenth-century ms. biographies preserved in arsi, Vitae 95,
ff. 270285.
Jesuit At Heart 227
Pius XII,74 the memory of Mozzi slowly disappeared. It was a non-Jesuit, the
young priest Angelo Roncalliat that time secretary of the bishop of Bergamo
Radini Tedeschiwho celebrated Mozzi as the apostle of Italy on the occa-
sion of the first centenary of his death.75
However, Jesuits were not completely silent: digging into the Jesuit archives,
it is possible to find traces of a fluctuating interest in Mozzi, though it never
developed in a systematic way. The memory of Mozzi was revived in 19331935,
when an acrimonious debate between Conventual Franciscans and Jesuits
arose. After the publication of the Italian translation of the volume on Clement
XIV of von Pastors History of the Popes, Conventual Franciscans claimed that
the negative assessment of Pope Ganganelliwho was a Conventual
Franciscan himselfdid not come from von Pastor, but from his Jesuit collab-
orators.76 Jesuits denied this analysis, and for almost two years both sides pub-
lished several polemical articles, and the Jesuit general wrote a letter to the
secretary of state Eugenio Pacelli, complaining about the Franciscans.77 The
suppression of the Society was still an open wound. A document in which
Jesuits planned their propagandist strategy suggested publishing the history of
the holy Jesuits of the time of the suppressionand among them Luigi
Mozziin order to show that at that time the enemies of the Society were the
same enemies of the Church.78 Twenty years later, the prominent Jesuit histo-
rian Pietro Tacchi Venturi (18671956) acknowledged the relevance of Mozzi
for his history of the Society. In a letter from 1955, he greatly deplored that,
together with the Saint Pignatelli, our superiors did not think about supporting
74 See Camillo Beccari, Il beato Giuseppe Pignatelli della Compagnia di Ges: (17371811)
(Macioce e Pisani: Isola del Liri, 1933); March, Il resaturatore; Celestino Testore, Il restau-
ratore della Compagnia di Ges in Italia: s. Giuseppe Pignatelli S.I., 17371781 (Curia
Generalizia della C.d.G.: Rome, 1954).
75 Angelo Roncalli, Il P. Luigi Mozzi d. C.d.G. Arciprete della Cattedrale di Bergamo. Nel
primo centenario della sua morte, La vita diocesana, 5 (1913), 243250; Angelo Roncalli, Il
P. Luigi Mozzi nel primo centenario della sua morte, Leco di Bergamo, 2324 Luglio 1913;
Roncalli, Il P. Luigi Mozzi biografo.
76 Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei papi dalla fine del Medioevo, vol. XVI: Storia dei papi nel peri-
odo dellassolutismo, dallelezione di Benedetto XIV sino alla morte di Pio VI (17401799),
parte II: Clemente XIV (17691774). Translated by Pio Cenci (Descle & Compagni Editori
Pontifici: Rome, 1933).
77 arsi, Hist. Soc. 1084, doc. 18. The letter was not sent. A reference to this debate, with an
extensive bibliography, can be found in Robert Danieluks article in this volume.
78 arsi, Hist. Soc. 1084, doc. 2. Giuseppe March, Per la difesa e la propaganda della
Compagnia; doc. 3, Sententia pp. Rosa et Leturia de hac propositione.
228 Colombo
the canonization of our brother Luigi Mozzi, who no less than Saint Jos
[Pignatelli] deserves the honor of the altars.79
The more access we have to archival documents and letters, the more Luigi
Mozzi de Capitani emerges as a key figure in the survival of the Society of Jesus
during the years following the suppression. For forty years Mozzi signed his
letters as an ex-Jesuit and he was always faithful to the education he received
and to the private vows he took during his novitiate. He promised to defend the
Society, and he did so both against Jansenism and against Paccanari. He vowed
to be faithful to the Immaculate Conception of Mary and promoted this and
other Jesuit devotions throughout his life; he asked to be sent to mission fields,
and became one of the most dedicated Italian missionaries; he was a promis-
ing intellectual and a teacher, never stopped using books to keep the spirit of
the Society alive, and started the innovative project of the Night School of
Charity. In order to allow the silent survival of the spirit of Society of Jesus,
Mozzi followed different priorities at different times, but always highlighted
key aspects of his Jesuit identity. The Society did not officially exist, but noth-
ing could prevent him from being a Jesuit at heart.
79 Tacchi Venturi to Dalle Nogare, Rome, 22 February 1955. agis, Persone, Mozzi-Paccanari.
chapter 13
The Romantic Historian under Charles X

Evaluating Jesuit Restoration in Charles Laumiers Rsum de
lHistoire des Jsuites
Frdric Conrod
With the fall of the Napoleonic empire and the restoration of the Bourbon
dynasty, France entered its most Romantic era, following in the footsteps of
England and the German-speaking lands. However, as a former Catholic nation
in the process of resuscitating a religion assaulted by the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, the revolution, and the separation of church and state, France
had to reconcile new Romantic inspirations with a rather complex religious
history. Fortunately, Romanticism was an artistic mode that embraced the
mystical and the mysterious: as a consequence, the periods historiography
could sustain a number of contradictions in its emplotment. In this context,
French historian Charles Lazare Laumier (17811866) published his Rsum de
lHistoire des Jsuites [A Summary of Jesuit History] (1826) in which he implicitly
proposed a critical examination of the rise and fall of the Society of Jesus from
the point of view of a double restoration: that of the Bourbon monarchy along-
side that of the Society of Jesus. His fascination with the Jesuits was of a com-
plex, and often perplexing nature.
In this chapter, I take a close look at the structure of this rather extensive
Rsum, and question the historicity and objectivity of the text, as well as the
ideological implications of Laumiers work. I pay particular attention to
Laumiers insistence on synchronizing the extinction and restoration of the
Jesuits as a natural phenomenon. His approach, mostly based on expertise in
institutional history, ultimately projected a natural restoration of the Society
of Jesus. This analysis attempts to determine whether Laumiers work in the
era of the Societys restoration helped the Jesuit cause, or contributed to the
formation of a Jesuit legend.
1826, when the Rsum was published, was a relatively quiet year in France,
but the calm would not last for long. The revolution of 1830 ended the Bourbon
attempt to restore absolutism, and gave way to a regime that tried to be more
inclusive of the experience of the revolutions. The Bourbon monarchy had
been restored in 1815 with the reign of Louis XVIII (18151824), followed by that
of Charles X (18241830), Louis younger brother, who pursued a conservative
agenda. Both Louis XVIII and Charles X were brothers of Louis XVI, the king
who was guillotined in 1793 as the citizen Louis Capet, and both were rather

230 Conrod
elderly when they took the throne. Consequently, it was more difficult for these
monarchs to project an image of youth onto a regime that was already being
called ancient, especially because they were supported by the Society of Jesus,
a Catholic order culturally associated with the ancien rgime. Moreover,
Charles Xs monarchy would never match the strength, virility, and modernity
of Napoleons. Scott Eastman writes that
Historians have pointed to the fact that the French were looking for a
great military victory abroad at the time, in order to reconnect with the
Napoleonic age as well as to compete with Britain. They were also con-
cerned to open up new markets to nascent industry. Perhaps most impor-
tantly, Charles X, the restored monarch of France, was looking to suppress
internal dissent and reestablish absolute monarchy.1
In the midst of this superficially calm period, when there was a need to provide
the people with a clear understanding of their recent history, the discipline of
historiography encountered a key moment of re-development and renewal:
one urgent task was an evaluation of the restoration of the monarchy. The
alternation of political regimes obliged historians to explain the past fifty years
of national instability and to trace them back to their roots in the Renaissance.
As a result, historians like Laumier opted to explain events within the frame-
work of a three-century cycle, directly connecting the Renaissance and the
Restoration. Historians, from Laumiers point of view, were charged with
recalling times of glory in the history the French monarchy, but they had to do
so in an indirect fashion in order to give the appearance of objective and scien-
tific evaluation.
Moreover, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the perception of the
Renaissance as an apogee in French culture was enhanced by Romantic inspi-
rations across the arts. Artists and historians of the restoration sought synchro-
nization with the sixteenth century. The Renaissance became an idealized time
period and many traveled to Italy in order to find Romantic inspiration in the
well-preserved buildings of Florence or Venice: for example, the poets Alfred
de Musset (18101857) and George Sand (18041876) while working on the play
Lorenzaccio. Perhaps this was due to the common insistence on individual
potentials, among which imagination was praised above all others and recog-
nized as the essence of the human spirit, beyond life and death and revered in
1 Scott Eastman, Constructing the Nation Within a Catholic Tradition: Modernity and National
Identities Across the Spanish Monarchy, 17931823 (Ph.D. diss., University of California at
Irvine, 2006), 11.
The Romantic Historian Under Charles X 231
an almost religious way.2 Renaissance Humanists and Restoration Romantics

might indeed have shared a belief in casuistry, a theological approach that can
be applied to artistic creativity, which explains their interest in Jesuit history:
that is, a history within a history that contained all the parameters of a
Romantic interpretation of time and space.
Laumier was a typical historian of 1826 France: he would have preferred to
be more liberal, but was somewhat constrained by political circumstances and
made conservative statements to avoid censorship. His historical work was
coded and lyrical, and, consequently, turned out to be more of a literary than a
scientific discourse. Author of the scandalous story about the life of Ignace, the
illegitimate son of a promiscuous priest, in the novel Lenfant du jsuite [The
Son of a Jesuit] (1822), Laumier had studied Jesuit history and was attracted by
what he considered to be its major contradictions. He seemed to admire the
order at the same time as feeling threatened by its restoration. He was there-
fore eager to use historical evaluation to predict the future of the Society. But
the Rsum also claimed to work simultaneously as both a warning and as a
resource for those who were yet to formulate a clear opinion on the Jesuit con-
troversies of the 1820s and 1830s. Laumier was not favorable to close links
between the Society of Jesus and the monarchy, but clearly acknowledged the
orders contribution to the development of critical thinking.
As he claimed in the introduction of Lenfant, it is my duty, as a good citizen,
to stand against their current pretensions (iv). As Vincent W. Beach explains,
Laumiers hesitation was common to all liberals under Charles X: From the
liberal viewpoint, it was the ultras who were the real revolutionaries. They had
sought to limit kingly authority in 1789 and before, and now, during the
Restoration, were trying to undermine the Gallican religious tradition and
place the Jesuits in control of the state.3 Although he acknowledged the Jesuit
contribution to the development of education in the previous century, espe-
cially in the training of Voltaire,4 he also sought to demonstrate that the Society
of Jesus had become an obsolete institution by 1826. His ambition was to offer
a balanced and objective account of Jesuit history.
2 As is suggested in the following internet article: Individualism in the Italian Renaissance

and the Romantic Era. StudyMode.com. StudyMode.com, 10 2011. Web. 10 2011. <http://www
.studymode.com/essays/Individualism-In-The-Italian-Renaissance-And-792822.html>.
Accessed January 2014.
3 Vincent W. Beach, Charles X of France: His Life and Times (Boulder, Colorado: Pruett
Publishing Co, 1971), 161.
4 Laumier wrote: If Voltaire had been their only graduate, that would still be enough for the
entire universe to be thankful to the Jesuits (iv).
232 Conrod
His fascination with the Society of Jesus originated in his interest in institu-
tional history, which he considered his specialty. Even though Pope Pius VII
had officially restored the Jesuits in August 1814, France was still in the process
of evaluating whether the Society of Jesus deserved to be recognized histori-
cally and, above all, whether it should be allowed to continue its previous
involvement with the monarchy. During the reign of Charles X, the Jesuits
struggled to regain this influence. As Geoffrey Cubbit recently wrote:
Between 1820 and 1827 and after 1829, as the ultra-royalist grip on Res
toration government was felt to tighten, denunciations of Jesuit conspir-
acy focused more and more on the idea of a governmental power
colonized and subverted from within. The ultra-royalist ministries of the
period were denigrated first as governments allied to the Jesuits and then
as governments in thrall to the Jesuits, or simply Jesuit governments.5
But as Laumiers Rsum demonstrated, the relationship of historians with the

Society of Jesus was rather complex. The Society was restored in 1815, put in
charge of some petits sminaires and congregations, and allowed to pursue
missions. This was a rather short-lived success since the liberals, notably the
Comte de Montlosier in 1823, attacked the order and its institutions (contain-
ing around 800 students) were closed between 1828 and 1829.
According to Stanley Mellon, Jesuit influence under Charles X was inoffen-
sive and has been exaggerated by historians: In the nineteenth century, there
are no Luthers, no Calvins, no new worlds to win to the true faith. Not only are
the Jesuits unnecessary to the Restoration, but they are a positive inconve-
nience to both the monarchy and the Church.6 This perception was, however,
unbalanced, since the monarchy and the church were in need of consolida-
tion, and the Society of Jesus was of clear benefit to both institutions.
Nonetheless, the Jesuits remained in the limbo of historical taboo, and debates
about an underground and symbiotic Jesuit consolidation of the Restoration
continued. Work such as Laumiers helped the legend triumph over history,
even though he sought to address and offer clarifications on a contemporary
debate. Frederick B. Artz points to a cultural fear about the Jesuit threat peak-
ing around 1827: In the public mind, now more aroused than at any time since
the Restoration began, it seemed that there was a secret conspiracy of the
5 Geoffrey Cubitt, Conspiracism, Secrecy and Security in Restoration France: Denouncing the
Jesuit Menace, Historical Social Research 38 (2013): 115.
6 Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study of Historians in the French Restoration
(Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1986), 140.
Jesuits and the Ultra-Royalists to undo the results of the French Revolution.7
The revolution of July 1830, which brought the reign of Charles X to an end, was
an expression of this contained fear of conspiracy, and represented another
serious blow to the Jesuits.8
Before the French Revolution, Charles X had been in favor of conserving the
religious orders, but his voice was only heard among the minority of his con-
temporaries. During his exile, he was the leader of the migrs, the French aris-
tocrats who had found refuge at other European courts, and he had returned to
the throne with the support of the Jesuits and the Ultramontanes. Many Jesuits
happened to share the same places of refuge as the exiled French aristocracy.
The future king was therefore deeply influenced by his interaction with the
Society of Jesus and was often called the Jesuit-King, as a caricature of him
shows (Figure13.1). But France was not quite ready for his extreme reactionary
agenda, and he needed to be careful about bringing the Society of Jesus, often
associated with absolutism and the reign of Louis XIV, back into the political
picture. Laumier was fascinated by Charles X, the Jesuit King, and in 1833 he
published the Meditations of Charles X, followed by the Recall of the Two Jesuits,
a work where history and religious conservatism merged to form a new genre,
again with the same concern for a balanced account.
Therefore, history needed to be updated and re-written in order to establish
the old king on the throne and to help the Jesuits regain their former influence.
Historians like Laumier had a complicated mission: they needed to identify
patterns through time and space, from the Renaissance (the idealized past) to
the uncertain Restoration (their present), in order to evaluate what should be
remembered about the Jesuits: was it their Humanist foundation or their thirst
for power that eventually led to their expulsion? This is the tension on which
the entire Rsum is based and the rhetorical question that maintains the read-
ers interest. However, between the publication of Lenfant du jsuite in 1822
and 1826, it seems that Laumiers position towards the Jesuits had grown even
more contradictory and obscure.
Nonetheless, there was a correspondence between the mission of the
historian and that of scientists during the sixteenth century. In his 1973
Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Hayden
White claims:
7 Frederick B. Artz, France under the Bourbon Restoration 18141830 (New York: Russell & Russell
Co, 1931), 164.
8 They had been active during the cholera epidemic in 1832 and were once again recognized for
their courageous involvement with the sick. At that point, their popularity was at its highest
point since the early eighteenth century.
234 Conrod
FIGURE 13.1 Original cover of 1826 edition of the Rsum

Historiography disputes on the level of interpretation are in reality dis-

putes over the true nature of the historians enterprise. History remains
in the state of the conceptual anarchy in which the natural sciences
existed during the sixteenth century, when there were as many different
conceptions of the scientific enterprise as there were metaphysical
positions. In the sixteenth century, the different conceptions of what sci-
ence ought to be ultimately reflected different conceptions of reality
and the different epistemologies generated by them.9
According to White, imagination played a crucial role in writing history in the

nineteenth century, and he separates the different ways to imagine that his-
torians adopted. He goes on to distinguish combinations of history-telling,
among which we find the four modes of emplotment that White identifies in
this work. Among these (Romantic, Tragic, Comic, and Satirical) one can place
Laumiers mode in the Rsum in the Romantic category. White argues that
various combinations of modes of emplotment, with different modes of argu-
ments (formist, mechanistic, organicist, and contextualist), and modes of ide-
ological implications (anarchist, radical, conservative, and liberal) are
theoretically possible. According to Whites system, the Rsum would there-
fore combine the Romantic mode of emplotment with a Contextualist mode
of argument in order to project a rather liberal ideology. But Laumiers ideo-
logical position is not always so easy to determine: it had conservative reso-
nances at times, since what was then considered liberal is nowadays often
perceived as conservative. The re-contextualization of Laumiers Rsum must
therefore be conducted with great care.
In addition, Laumier considered himself a natural historian, that is, a his-
torian who envisioned history in terms of natural evolution. Not in a Darwinist
sense of evolutionDarwins ideas would not be published until 1859, though
they are already somewhat present in Laumiers Zeitgeistbut still with a cer-
tain conception of what nature, and ultimately God, has revealed in the greater
plan of human action. As Jardin and Tudesq explain:
Intellectual life during the Restoration was often bold and passionate.
The eighteenth-century undertaking of drawing up the great catalogue of
the workings of the universe was continued amidst controversies of all
kinds. The thinkers of the Restoration era tended to place renewed
9 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 13.
236 Conrod
emphasis on the role of irrational forces and to substitute the idea of a

continuous creation for that of immutable and stable laws.10
The first chapter of the Rsum is dedicated to the sixteenth century as a time
when these irrational forces of nature came to a point of renewal and rebirth.
The French historian stayed close to the original meaning of the word
Renaissance and defined it as an act of natural renewal after a long cycle of
exhaustion in which energies are recycled for the betterment of the general
condition of humanity. Once this statement had been clearly made, he moved
on to how the Society of Jesus was part of this cosmological process.
Laumier declared: it was in the middle of this century, so fertile in great
events and in great men, that the institution of the Jesuits was born.11 The
meetings of the founding members, their convergence at the University of
Paris, the vows on Montmartre, their failed attempt to travel to Jerusalem, and
their establishment in Venice and then Rome, were all, for Laumier, the natural
consequence of a process of fertilization which, after a pregnancy corre-
sponding to Loyolas life, resulted in a birth. On Laumiers terms, the sixteenth
century witnessed the emergence of a power vacuum in Rome, a void the
Jesuits naturally filled. The Romantic image projected an idea of the sublime
onto the tone of his narration: The religious corporations, haven for tender
and contemplative souls, gained numerous subjects, and sometimes great
wealth, but none of them got to the power. It was waiting for the Jesuits.12
Laumier stressed throughout his first four chapters that the Jesuits were
called by nature to power and, unlike the other religious corporations of the
Catholic Church, did not have to justify this through a series of miracles. With
the Renaissance, according to Laumier, the need for miracles as supernatural
phenomena becomes obsolete and invalid, and the rise of the Society of Jesus
was the only miracle needed to demonstrate its validity. In other words, the
miracle of the Jesuits was purely political and legislative: the miracle lay in
Loyolas Constitutions, a text that Laumier repeatedly praised for its modernity
and its contribution to the improvement of European society in the sixteenth
century.
In the second chapter, Laumier took a closer look at the life of Ignatius in
order to tie the miracle to the life of the man. The whole chapter was a text that
oscillated between the pole of the coincidental and the pole of the intentional.
10 Andr Jardin and Andr-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 18151848. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), 91.
11 Charles Lazare Laumier, Rsum de lHistoire des Jsuites (Paris: Dupont et Roret, 1826), 8.
12 Laumier, Rsum, 11.
The historian sought to exemplify his general argument about the natural rise
to power of the Society by examining the coincidental nature of Loyolas life,
always insisting on the role of hasard.13 In many biographical accounts of
Loyolas life, including Cmaras and Ribadeneyras, it was common to empha-
size the coincidental nature of Loyolas life to soften the intentional aspect.
Laumier had obviously read these works in order to write his Rsum, and fol-
lowed the tradition of representing the founder of the Jesuits as a man who
incidentally followed his calling, which was an attractive idea for a Romantic
historian like Laumier. From the beginning of his work, Laumier suggested a
difference between Loyolas intentions and the consequences of the founda-
tion of the Society of Jesus. In other words, he stressed the shift between what
Ignatius of Loyola had in mind when he wrote the Spiritual Exercises and the
Constitutions and the kind of absolutist micro-monarchy that resulted:
What is not the work of randomness (hasard) are these admirable consti-
tutions that gave to the monarchy of Ignatius this native force that sus-
tained it against the most violent attacks, that expanded with honor in all
parts of the universe, and that, during two hundred years, protected it
from the weaknesses and passions of its own subjects as well as from the
attacks of its enemies. The foundation of the Jesuits is the work of man
whose ideas were not always healthy; their constitutions are the work of
a genius.14
Strikingly, in the conclusion of the Rsum, Laumier transformed this argu-

ment and claimed the following instead:
We have claimed here that Saint Ignatius did not have the intention of
founding, amongst Christian states, a powerful and independent monar-
chy; first, the limitations of his wit did not allow him to conceptualize
such vast plans, and second, the weakness of the means he had at his
disposal, the means to visualize such consequences, would not have
allowed him to hope for the success of such a project, even if he had been
intelligent enough to imagine it or to even formulate the idea of it.15
One cannot help but wonder what influenced the change of tone in
Laumiers account from the introduction to the conclusion. Almost forced to
13 Randomness, chance, luck, or fate do not do justice to this French word.

238 Conrod
align himself with the general consensus around King Charless historical
agenda, Laumier ended up destroying the image of Loyola he had originally
created. What do we find in the main corpus of the Rsum that could possibly
justify such a change on the part of the historian? Perhaps he desired to please
every single one of his readers, both conservatives and liberals? Perhaps the
Romantic mode of emplotment was permissive of contradictions and recon-
siderations. According to Mellon, [t]hroughout his work, Laumier strengthens
his position as an impartial historian by judiciously weighing the commonly
circulated charges (141). However, the complexity of this double restoration
forced him alternatively to adopt the arguments and the tones of all parties
involved in the debate around the Society of Jesus and its potential conspiracy.
The development of Laumiers Romantic emplotment continued with his
analysis of the missions in India, Canada, and Paraguay. Again, given the exotic
nature of the Jesuit enterprise and the association with the conquest of unciv-
ilized spaces, Laumier devoted a whole series of chapters to the development
of these structures around the world, once again keeping in mind the concept
of the natural drive to power. The same tension between the coincidental and
the intentional previously observed in the biographical chapter on Loyola was
applied to the figure of Francis Xavier, but this time Laumier stressed the rapid-
ity with which the Jesuits established missions at the four corners of the
world only twelve years after their founding in Rome.16 Laumier insinuated
here that the power vacuum was somehow accelerated by a universal need for
the Society of Jesus. Emphasizing the fact that no other religious order had
achieved one tenth of what the Jesuits accomplished in their missionary work,
Laumier stressed the Jesuits greater mission to remain a strong order in Rome,
at the heart of the Catholic world, and to connect this epicenter to the rest of
the globe through its missionary work. This bridging of the Holy See with the
world was justified, according to Laumier, by the Jesuit rule about not seeking
high positions within the Church, which implicitly guaranteed the lack of
ambition for a Jesuit pope. He also drew attention to the Jesuits gradual loss of
power: the majority of Laumiers work was dedicated to charting the momen-
tum of the Society, but always with a tone that suggested an upcoming decline,
or rather, the end of a natural cycle.
Laumier highlighted the first signs of this fall when he mentioned the diffi-
culties on the missions (as if nature reclaimed its territory), and over control of
French schools during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Although
Laumiers account tried to be as comprehensive as possible and to offer a
global summary of the Jesuits, his main concern was the relationship of the
16 Ibid., 159.
Society with the powers of France. The Sicle des Lumires in particular was not
favorable to the Society of Jesus: already weakened by a number of conflicts
with the university and the Jansenists, new struggles emerged with Madame
de Pompadour (Louis XVs mistress), and with philosophers like Voltaire,
Diderot, and Sade (all former students of the Jesuits). All these factors led to
the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and Spain in the 1760s. In the 1820s
these anti-Jesuit figures were brought back into the debate, and liberals recy-
cled the attacks made by these thinkers against the Society of Jesus and tried to
remind the general public of the reasons behind the expulsion. For Laumier,
1764 was the year that nature chose to begin the extinction of the Society of
Jesus, a body that it had once created to occupy a power vacuum. He wrote in
the concluding third part of the Rsum:
From this moment on, the history of the Jesuits is no more than a sad
painting of their decay.17 Its fall, like its rise, is a subject of numerous
observations and deep reflections for the man who contemplates histori-
cal eventsWe must examine the historical and moral phenomenon that
the Jesuits have offered us. The whole seed of their power and their fall
was the same.18 These men have separated themselves from the world
through eternal vows, their only country was the entire world, their only
society their company, their only master their general, their virtue obedi-
ence, their glory that of their order, men that ceased to be French,
German, Spaniards, but members of a corporation, and we shall see that
giant of power grow again.19
These few quotes are enough to show that Laumier once again thought in
botanical terms. He compared the Society of Jesus to a seed that was planted
during the Renaissance, that had taken several seasons to turn into an admi-
rable plant with an essential role in the ecosystem, and whose decay was only
a sign of potential renewal since the seed remained in the ground during the
winter, awaiting an upcoming spring. This understanding of the political
sphere through terms usually associated with nature and its cycles was not
specific to Laumier, but typical of the entire Romantic current. Perhaps
Laumier prefered to hide his true convictions behind these metaphors.
The French Revolution and the empire of Napoleon had been a long winter
for that Jesuit seed, now ready for another blossoming. Laumier retained his
17 Ibid., 459.
18 Ibid., 462.
19 Ibid., 487.
240 Conrod
admiration for the Society of Jesus: its structure, its constitutions, and its foun-
dation on the person of the general. He often called the whole structure a mon-
archy, and compared the general to an absolutist king. The Romantic tone of
his account constantly suggested the idea of synchronization of his time
period with that of the forthcoming blossoming. For a rather negative critic of
Jesuit history like Manfred Barthel, the connection is clear:
Certainly the Jesuits and the unenlightened monarchs of the Bourbon

Restoration had very little to fear from each other at this time because
they had so much in commonthey both devoted a great deal of their
energies to blotting out the memory of the last twenty-five years of
European history, and the Jesuits were especially active in promoting an
alliance between religion and reaction, a cause that was taken up by a
number of these monarchs and their secular apologists. The main prob-
lem with this was that neither the anointed kings and princes of Europe
nor the hierarchy of the Church was prepared to face the problems of
what really was, as much as they have liked to deny it, a new era.20
The idea of his present as a new dawn in French history was clearly present in
Laumiers Rsum. In other words, the historical phenomenon he observed in
the Renaissance, the birth and rise of the Society of Jesus, was the sublime ele-
ment of his reactionary agenda. Obviously differing from Nietzsches idea of
the eternal recurrence, Laumier seemed to predict that the forces of nature
were again preparing a rebirth, a re-naissance, in which the same power vac-
uum he mentioned at several points in the Rsumthe vacuum that was
once occupied by the Jesuitsneeded to be filled again with an institution
whose initial inspiration resembled that of the followers of Loyola, but should
not evolve into a thirst for power and gold.
A few years before the revolution of 1830, which would overturn Charless
absolutist agenda, Laumier depicted the ultra-monarchist regime through a
projection on to Jesuit history, not with active and openly militant suggestions,
but through a parallelism with the Renaissance and the successful political
structure of the Society of Jesus. He wanted his readers to question whether
absolutism was the most modern form of political structure that had ever
existed and was a result of the Renaissance, or whether it could be superseded
by another form of regime. The Restoration was therefore indirectly pictured
as another Renaissance in which both the absolutist system and the Society of
20 Manfred Barthel, The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus (New York: Quill
William Morrow, 1987), 239.
Jesus could potentially find a new springboard for another cycle in which they
could both perfect their alliance and avoid repeating the same mistakes that
caused their fall.
In parallel, Laumier claimed to be an expert on Spanish history and his
enthusiasm for the neighboring country could be read on almost every page of
his Histoire de la Rvolution dEspagne en 1820 (1820). The key to Laumiers con-
tradictory statements about the Jesuits in the Rsum can be partially found in
the Histoire. His hispanophilia was obvious every time Spain was mentioned,
and Laumier had a tendency to idealize Spain as the epitome of a Romantic
people who had united to give Europe a revolutionary model to follow. In the
Rsum, there are several places where Laumier underlined the origine espag-
nole of the Society of Jesus.21 For instance, he implied the Jesuits in France
were always perceived as essentially Spaniards in their practices, that is, under
the control of superstition, religious folklore, the fear of the Inquisition, the
baroque nature of their liturgies, etc. Laumier sought to correct this vision of
Spain which he considered inaccurate, and preferred to bring forward the new
era that had begun in the country of Loyola after the Revolution of 1820.
Even though Laumier wrote Lenfant du jsuite and the Rsum de lhistoire
des jsuites in order to make his readership objectively aware of the implica-
tions of a Jesuit restoration for French politics, he could not help a certain fas-
cination with the almost supernatural history of the Society of Jesus. For this
reason, one could claim that historical accounts like Laumiers were responsi-
ble for what is often referred to as the Jesuit legend. Manfred Barthels rather
controversial book The Jesuits: History and Legend of the Society of Jesus (1987)
proves through its title that there has always been a very thin line of associa-
tion between the historical and the legendary when it comes to studying the
life of the order, including its demise and resurrection. Of course, resurrection
is part of the Catholic understanding of mysteries and miracles. According to
the Catholic Encyclopedia, the restoration of the Bourbons,22 the reign of
Charles X in particular, and the attacks on his affiliation with the Society of
Jesus all contributed to a victory of the legendary over the historical. Laumiers
work claimed to be historical, but shared some of the responsibility for the
formation of the Jesuit legend. Through his contradictory statements Laumier
left the reader in a state of Romantic confusion.
21 Particularly on page 169.

22 See Jesuit Apologetic: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14103a.htm. Accessed January
2014.
Part 4
China and Beyond

chapter 14
Jesuit Survival and Restoration in China

R. Po-chia Hsia
On the 15th of November 1775, in the Western Church (Xitang), the Lady of
Sorrows, in the imperial capital of the Qing Empire, the Austrian Carmelite S.
Joseph a Santa Theresia (Joseph Max Pruggmayr, 17131791), acting on behalf of
the Jesuit Gottfried von Laimbeckhoven (17071787),1 administrator of the
vacant see of Beijing, read the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor noster to the
assembly of Jesuits.2 Dated 21 July 1773, this brief by Pope Clement XIV dis-
solved the Society of Jesus. This was but the last act, the proclamation of a slow
and painful death, of one of the most important religious orders of the Roman
Catholic Church. From the suppression in Portugal in 1758 by the marquis de
Pombal, the Company suffered successive blows in 1764 and 1767, seeing its
properties dispossessed, its institutions closed, and its members incarcerated
or dispersed in Bourbon France and Spain.
Half a world away, these successive European tremors struck the Jesuits
China mission with a time lapse. The Society was first swept away in Macao,
the low-lying Portuguese port on the south China coast: in 1762 twenty-four
Jesuits were arrested and shipped as prisoners to Portugal.3 Deep inside the
Chinese provinces, missionaries clandestinely caring for the Christian com-
munities and dependent on the Portuguese vice-province found their funds
cut off and were reduced to penury, as Laimbeckhoven testified.4 In the impe-
rial capital of the Qing Empire, the nerve center of the China mission, the
Jesuits, even though they were protected by a benevolent emperor and enjoyed
material security, were thrown into anxiety and conflict. Sharp confrontations
1 On Laimbeckhoven see Joseph Krahl, China Missions in Crisis. Bishop Laimbeckhoven and his
Times 17381787 (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964).
2 Text of the papal brief can be found in Bref de N.S.P. le Pape Clment XIV en date du XXI juillet
1773 portant suppression de lOrdre rgulier dit Socit de Jsus, n.d. For a succinct overview of
the suppression and restoration, see Jonathan Wright, The Suppression and Restoration, in
The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), 263277.
3 See my The End of the Jesuit Mission in China, in The Jesuit Suppression: Causes, Events, and
Consequences, ed. Jonathan Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in
2015).
4 Krahl, China Missions in Crisis, 132136.

246 Po-chia Hsia
within the Jesuit China missions broke out on the eve of the dissolution and
continued until 1782. At the heart of the conflict was property.
Dominus ac Redemptor noster specified that upon dissolution, the ex-Jesuit
missions could hold a precarious administration of their properties until
bishops or other ecclesiastical superiors made permanent arrangements. But
there was no bishop in Beijing after 1757. Upon his death, Policarpo de Sousa
(16971757), the last Jesuit bishop of Beijing, appointed his Austrian confrere,
Gottfried von Laimbeckhoven, bishop of Nanjing, as administrator of the dio-
cese. Unable to attend to his task personally, Laimbeckhoven appointed the
Carmelite S. Joseph a Santa Theresia to be his vicar in Beijing.5 This state of
affairs remained satisfactory until the papal brief of suppression reached
Macao in the summer of 1774. Eager to safeguard Portugals material interests,
the archbishop of Macao, Alexandre Pedrosa da Silva Guimares, a Franciscan,
claimed immediate jurisdiction over all Jesuit properties in China. He
demanded an inventory from Louis Joseph Le Febvre, the procurator of the
independent French mission, stationed in Guangzhou, who ignored his orders.
But in Beijing national interests overrode the intense antipathy toward the
Jesuits on the part of Guimares, a Pombal appointee. Eager to preserve their
property for the Portuguese nation, the Portuguese Jesuit Jos Espinha for-
warded a list of properties of the vice-province to Guimares and promised full
cooperation. The vice-bishop of Macao promptly appointed Espinha his vicar
and administrator of the diocese of Beijing. Two lines of ecclesiastical authori-
ties were thus established: two administrators and vicars, one responsible to
the bishop of Nanjing, subordinate to the metropolitan in Goa, but appointed
by the Congregation of the Propaganda Fide in Rome; the other to the bishop
of Macao, who obeyed orders only from Lisbon.6
At stake was property. The Society owned three churches, one college, and
numerous properties inside the walled city and without, in the form of shops,
dwellings, houses, and fields. Some of these properties represented gifts of the
Qing emperors, others were donations from Christians, and still others were
purchased with funds from Europe.7 The Portuguese vice-province and the
5 Ibid., 203.
6 See Krahl, China Missions in Crisis, 223261; Camille de Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot et les
derniers survivants de la mission franaise Pkin (17501795) (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1915),
165203; A. Thomas (pseudonym for Jean-Marie Planchet), Histoire de la Mission de Pkin
depuis les origins jusqu larrive des Lazaristes (Paris: Louis Michaud, 1925), 434435.
7 On the properties of the Portuguese vice-province see Antnio Graa de Abreu in Os bens
dos ltimos jesutas portugueses em Pequim, in A Companhia de Jesus e a Missionao no
Oriente (Lisbon: Fundao Oriente, 2000), 230231 and Joo Paulino de Azevedo e Castro,
Jesuit Survival And Restoration In China 247
independent French mission were both determined to preserve their own

properties for their respective national interests. Moreover, there was the ques-
tion of whether the properties would be held in common or divided, as the
fathers pondered their uncertain future in 1775.
Dissent first broke out in the ranks of the French Jesuits.8 The superior,
Franois Bourgeois, somewhat of an authoritarian, insisted on preserving the
Society and its communal property until he saw a copy of the signed papal
brief. A minority challenged him, demanding an immediate dissolution, open
accounting, and discussion about the future of their properties. To alleviate
legitimate anxieties over their future livelihood, Bourgeois agreed to give each
Jesuit in the French mission properties worth 1,000 taels of silver annual
income, after the news of the dissolution had reached Beijing in the autumn of
1774. Still, the dissenters were dissatisfied. Bourgeois could count on the major-
ity to support his decision not to divide the properties and to pass them on
intact, according to instructions from Rome and Paris. The three dissenters,
Jean Matthieu Ventavon, Joseph de Grammont, and Louis Poirot, all working at
the imperial court rather than engaged in active ministry, demanded the divi-
sion of the corporate properties. Moreover, they seemed to have a deep per-
sonal distrust of Bourgeois and were determined to overthrow his leadership
once news of the Societys suppression reached Beijing. In this, the dissidents
were at first supported by Joseph Amiot, the most senior French Jesuit, who
soon changed his position.
The occasion was the arrival in 1777 of two letters from the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, conceived by Bertin the former minister and signed by his suc-
cessor de Sartines.9 Invoking the name of Louis XVI, the letters declared the
Os Bens das Misses Portuguezas na China (Macao: Fundao Macau, 1995 facsimile of 1917
edition). The annual income from rental properties of the Nantang and Dongtang under the
vice-province came to ca. 18,000 taels in 1775. No inventories are extant for the properties of
the French Jesuit mission, but its annual income in 1780 was 6,000 taels of silver. Since there
was an earlier allotment of income to the French Jesuits on the eve of the dissolution, the total
property of the French Jesuits in Beijing would have been between thirty and forty per cent of
that of the Portuguese. To this must be added the 78,000 taels controlled by the procurator
of the French mission in Guangzhou, Louis-Joseph Le Febvre, who left China in 1775.
8 In addition to the work by Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, which used documents from the
archive of the French Jesuits and the French Foreign Ministry, Krahl, China Missions in Crisis,
is based mainly on the correspondence of the two parties with Rome in the archive of the
Propaganda Fidei. There is also a detailed description written by Franois Bourgeois, one of
the principal parties, De Societatis Jesu suppresione in Sinis ad PP. S.J. in Rossia, arsi, Jap-
Sin 185.
9 Quoted in full in Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 219223.
248 Po-chia Hsia
royal wish to establish a new French ecclesiastical mission on the basis of the
dissolved Jesuits and to appoint Bourgeois as its superior. There were also
plans in Paris to carve out Manchuria as French ecclesiastical territory, clearly
challenging the claims of the Portuguese padroado. Amiot was ecstatic that
French property would not fall into the hands of foreigners (i.e. the Italian,
German, and other missionaries of the Propaganda) and that French invest-
ment in the China mission would be safeguarded. In his reply to minister
Bertin on 19 November 1777, on behalf of Bourgeois and his supporters, Amiot
exclaimed:
Thanks to the protection which Your Greatness has honored usthe fate
of the French Mission of Beijing is finally determined. We are under the
protection of the king and we no longer fear anything on the part of for-
eigners. Long live the king! Long live the great ministers who have used
so much goodness to protect us against these interventions and
vexations.10
For Bourgeois, this new development strengthened his decision to resist the
demands of the dissenters, who sought new ways to attack. They found an
opening in the Beijing schism.
Let us recall the challenge to Laimbeckhoven by Guimares. To resolve this
conflict, Rome decided, first, that the bishop of Macao had no jurisdiction over
Beijing, thus giving the Jesuit bishop full backing; and secondly to appoint a
new bishop with the approval of Lisbon. With Pombals fall from power, the
queen regent quickly approved Romes nomination of Giovanni Damasceno
Salusti, an Augustinian missionary sent by the Propaganda, as the new bishop
of Beijing and also recalled Guimares from Macao.11 After receiving the news
from the cardinal prefect of the Propaganda, Salusti was eager to proceed with
consecration. But the papal bull, with its endorsement by the queen regent,
failed to arrive. Immediately, Salusti accused the Jesuits of intercepting the
bull. In a letter of inquiry to the governor and senate of Macao, he suggested as
much, describing the Jesuits as the most pernicious people he has ever met
10 Grce la protection dont votre Grandeur nous honore [] le sort de la Mission fran-
aise de Pkin est enfin fix. Nous sommes sous la sauvegarde du Roi, et nous navons plus
riens craindre de la part des trangers. Vive le Roi! Vivent les grands Ministres qui se sont
employs avec tant de bont pour nous mettre couvert de la tracasserie et des vexations
(Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 225).
11 Salusti arrived in China in 1761. Krahl, China Missions in Crisis 194; for the resolution of the
conflict between Laimbeckhoven and Guimres, see 246261, 273274.
and that they were like wolves to the sheep of their flock.12 Meanwhile, the
Franciscan Nathanael Burger, bishop of Shanxi, a fellow Propagandist mission-
ary, had traveled incognito to Beijing to consecrate Salusti.13 Despite grave con-
cerns that consecration without the papal bull was contrary to canon law,
Salusti proceeded. He was consecrated on 1 April 1780. Only twelve of the
twenty-six Catholic priests in Beijing attended this ceremony;14 fourteen
missionaries refused to acknowledge Salustis episcopal authority and the
schism, with Salusti excommunicating the venerable French Jesuit Jacques
dOllires and posting bills in Chinese denouncing his opponents, scandalized
the Chinese Christians.15
The polemic spread to Europe in letters of accusations and apologies writ-
ten by both sides. While Ventavon, the chief spokesman for Salusti, filed sev-
eral reports to the Propaganda in Rome, Espinha wrote to the archbishop of
Goa and the queen in Lisbon. The reply from Goa came first: the metropolitan
condemned Salustis consecration as uncanonical, injurious to Portuguese
12 According to Bourgeois, Salusti wrote to the Senado of Macao expressing his hostility
toward the Jesuits: Pelo zelo e bem da Cristianidade se temia que tivessem entregado aos
Jesuitas porque isso seris metter a ovelha na boca de lobo, por considerallos os homens
mais falsa, e impios de mundo. Cited in Krahl, China Missions in Crisis, 276. Bourgeois
reported the incident as follows: Scriptum erat a D. Stephano Borgia Sacra congregatio-
nis secretario ad D. Salusti, eius amicum, Bullas Pontificas mitti in Lusitaniam ut inde una
cum intimatione et instructionibus regiis irent in Sinas. Iam appulerant Macaum naves
Lusitana: nihil audiebatur de bullis, nihil de instructionibus regiis. D. Salusti, impatiens
morae, dedit litteras ad Senatum et ad Gubernatorem Macansem ut de utrisque inquir-
eret. In his litteris legitur: Ob zelum ac bonum Christianitatis timeri quod provisiones
Regiae traditae fuerint Jesuitis, id enim esset ovem mittere in os lupi; quod eos cogitem
magis falsos homines ac impios totius orbis. The Portuguese text follows. See ARSI, Jap-
Sin 185, fols. 78. The reason for the delay, as it turned out, was that the papal bull of
appointment was sent from Lisbon to Macao in a package addressed to Bishop Guimres
for forwarding to Beijing. When this shipment arrived in Macao, Guimres had already
left for Goa. The package was returned to Goa where it was opened, the mistake discov-
ered, and re-sent, hence the long delay. See Krahl, China Missions in Crisis, 279.
13 On the German Burger, see Georg Kilian Pflaum, Nathanael Burger und die Mission von
Shansi und Shensi 17651780 (Landshut: Bayerische Franziskanerprovinz, 1954).
14 This division over Salustis consecration involved only priests. For example, the former
coadjutor, the Italian painter Giuseppe Panzi, attached to the French mission, was not
involved.
15 For the names of the opposing parties, see Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 292294; for the
controversy, see 279321; for the signature of the missionaries witnessing Salustis conse-
cration, see document VIII, 495497; for Salustis justification of his actions to the
Propaganda, see document IX, 498513.
250 Po-chia Hsia
padroado, and declared all his pronouncements non-binding. The day after
Espinha delivered this letter to Salusti, on 24 September 1781, the bishop died
of apoplexy. Meanwhile, Lisbon also condemned Salustis consecration, while
the Propaganda expressed its support, both judgments made meaningless by
Salustis untimely death. In a spirit of compromise, Lisbon nominated and
Rome approved the Franciscan Alexandre de Gouvea (17511808) as the new
bishop of Beijing.16
Underneath this schism other tensions were at work. It is instructive to
examine the two camps and recognize the fissures that appeared after the dis-
solution of the Society. The Salusti party consisted of three out of four
Propagandists (including Salusti), the three French ex-Jesuit dissenters
(Ventavon, Grammont, and Poirot), two ex-Jesuits from the vice-province, the
Portuguese Felix da Rocha and the Italian Luigi de Cipolla, and four Chinese
ex-Jesuits from the French mission: twelve in all. The anti-Salusti party con-
sisted of one Propagandist, five Portuguese ex-Jesuits, three Chinese ex-Jesuits
from the vice-province, and five French ex-Jesuits. What is most significant
about this line-up was the solid bloc formed by a majority of European ex-
Jesuits against the authority of Salusti. The ex-Jesuits of the vice-province
showed the strongest solidarity and cohesion. All but two opposed Salusti. Of
the two, Felix da Rocha was already behaving less like a missionary than a
courtier, according to a report written by the visitor Florian Bahr in 1764 to the
general.17 As a mandarin of the Tribunal of Astronomy, da Rocha was defiant of
authority within the Society long before the dissolution; he was the only
Portuguese Jesuit who broke ranks with his fellow Portuguese Jesuits in the
quarrelsome years after 1773. The other was the much younger Cipolla, who
had arrived in Beijing in 1771. Still integrating into the Portuguese Jesuit com-
munity in Beijing, Cipolla faced the calamity of the suppression. He was the
only one in the vice-province who demanded his share of the corporate prop-
erty and lodged a lawsuit against his former superiors with the Chinese author-
ities in 1777, a story to which we will return.
The French ex-Jesuits were much more divided: the three dissenters, with
Ventavon as leader, supported Salusti in order to force Bourgeois to abdicate
his control over the account books. Bourgeois, in turn, was supported by Amiot,
dOllires, Jean Paul Collas, and Pierre Martial Cibot in Beijing, and by Mathurin
Lamathe and Pierre Ladmiral in the provinces. Three things can be said about
the dissenters. First, they belonged to the same demographic cohort aged
16 Krahl, China Missions in Crisis, 275288.

17 See my Noble Patronage and Jesuit Missions. Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690
1762) and Jesuit Missionaries in China and Vietnam (Rome: ihsi, 2006), doc. 148, 340341.
between thirty-nine and forty-two in 1775 (Ventavon, the leader, was the old-
est); by comparison, their opponents, Bourgeois and his supporters, averaged
just over fifty years. Second, none had served long in the China mission before
the suppression, averaging seven years (again, Ventavon had the longest tenure
at ten years); their opponents had spent double that time in the mission field,
just over fourteen years on average. Third, all three served in the imperial court:
Ventavon as clock-maker, Grammont as mathematician and musician, and
Poirot as painter. While it is true that they were not the only ex-Jesuits in the
French mission who served in the imperial courtAmiot and the coadjutor
Panzi were also attached to the courttheir opponents, as a rule, were not
courtiers and served in the ministry of the French Jesuit church, the Beitang, or
in the provinces.18
This analysis reveals that the suppression caused cracks in the cohesion
of the Society along lines of age, missionary cohort, length in the mission
field, work experience, and future life expectations. To this were added per-
sonal factors such as the animosity on the part of Ventavon and Grammont
toward Bourgeois; their resentment of his authoritarian style; and the collec-
tive anxiety about the future, their missionary identity, and their livelihood,
a feeling especially strong with the younger Poirot. The latter had left his
native Lorraine when the Society was suppressed in Bourbon France, land-
ing in Guangzhou in 1770 where there were only two Jesuits, of whom the
behavior of one, the procurator Le Febvre, Poirot found scandalous, and
arriving in Beijing barely three years before the troubles.19 The many letters
denouncing his fellow Jesuits and ex-Jesuits, first to Superior General Ricci
and then to the Propaganda, reflected perhaps an anxious and restless spirit.
It is interesting that the only dissenter in the Portuguese vice-province (Felix
da Rocha being more a mandarin than a missionary) in these quarrelsome
years after the suppression was Luigi Cipolla. Poirot and Cipolla had been
shipmates on the journey from Lorient to Guangzhou, arriving in 1770. Both
had entered the Society in Italy and were separated by one year in age. Like
Poirot, who resisted the authority of Bourgeois, superior of the French
Jesuits, Cipolla was also in conflict with his superiors in the Portuguese
vice-province.
In 1777, the Neiwufu , the Imperial Household Department, which was
in charge of all foreigners in Beijing, received complaints and counter-complaints
18 This analysis is based on the biographical data in Joseph Dehergne, Rpertoire des Jsuites
de Chine de 1552 1800 (Paris/Rome: Letouzey & An/ihsi, 1973).
19 See my The End of the Jesuit Mission in China.
252 Po-chia Hsia
from the Jesuits of the Portuguese vice-province.20 One party consisted of all four
senior resident Jesuits of the Nantang (the Southern Church); the three
Portuguese Jos Espinha, Jos Bernardo de Almeida, and Andr Rodrigues; and
the Bohemian Ignaz Sichelbarth. The other party was Luigi Cipolla. Only the
complaints from Cipolla have survived.21 Bearing in mind the partisan stance,
this is the summary of his story. In 1771, when Cipolla and Poirot arrived in Beijing,
they had wished to reside at the Xitang, the Western Church, assigned to the mis-
sionaries of the Propaganda. At that point, August von Hallerstein wrote and
asked Cipolla to join the vice-province at the Nantang, promising reimbursement
of his travel expenses. For three years, Cipolla seemed happy enough, but things
changed in 1774. News of the suppression reached Beijing in the summer.
Hallerstein died of a stroke and the community was in turmoil. According to
Cipolla, the three senior PortugueseEspinha, Almeida, and Rodriguesburned
the account books and exchanged the silver in the common account for gold. By
confronting them, Cipolla earned their enmity. Eventually, Cipolla was persuaded
to move out of the Nantang into a house in Haidien to avoid the hostile environ-
ment, but his entanglements with the senior Jesuits continued. These involved the
travel reimbursement promised him in 1771, which was paid in the form of rental
income from three shops owned by the Nantang. Cipolla accused his senior col-
leagues of cheating him by only paying him the income from two of the three
shops, and exploiting his inability to read the Chinese contracts. There were other
complaints about money invested by Cipolla himself in a shop and of past interest
owed and not paid. In addition, the three Portuguese Jesuits, in Cipollas account,
persuaded Sichelbarth to report their young Italian colleague to the imperial
authorities. In sum, Cipolla accused the Portuguese of fraud, deceit, and calumny.
It is impossible to verify Cipollas accusations. One fact is certain: the suppres-
sion of the Society coincided with an important change in the personnel of the
vice-province. In the years immediately prior to suppression, leadership in the
vice-province was in the hands of senior German-speaking JesuitsBahr,
Hallerstein, and Anton Gogeisl.22 By the end of 1774 all were dead, and the only
remaining Central European, Sichelbarth, would die in 1780. A new generation
20 On the general functions of the Neiwufu, see Preston M. Torbet, The Ching Imperial
Household Department. A Study of its Organization and Principal Functions, 16621796
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
21 Four petitions from Cipolla are extant; they are document numbers 153156 in The First
Historical Archives of China, Qing zhong qian qi xi yang Tian zhu jiao zai Hua huo dong
dang an shi liao, 4 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua
shu ju, 2003), 1:312323.
22 See my The End of the Jesuit Mission in China.
of Portuguese assumed power in the vice-province, an institution which they

had always considered the preserve of Portuguese interests. In October 1775, just
before the promulgation of Dominus ac Redemptor noster, the Portuguese Jesuits
of Nantang and Dongtang sent an inventory of their properties to Macao at the
request of Bishop Guimares: the 229 urban properties and rural farms were
worth 1.2 million taels of silver.23 It is clear that Espinha and the senior Portuguese
Jesuits wanted to keep control of the properties, whether to safeguard their own
financial future or in the interests of the Portuguese nation. In this regard, their
motives were no different from those of their senior French confreres.24
We do not know the outcome of the dispute between Cipolla and his col-
leagues, but the result of another lawsuit, instigated by Ventavon against
Bourgeois, is preserved in several reports to Paris.25 As mentioned, to safeguard
Frances interests, Louis XVI appointed Bourgeois superior of the French mis-
sionaries and the ex-Jesuits, and charged him with the administration of their
communal properties. The dissidents refused to accept this royal authority.
In December 1780 Ventavon went to Count Fu26 and accused Bourgeois of
23 The inventory of the properties of Nantang, dated 2 October 1775, was co-signed by Espinha,
superior, and Jos Bernardo, procurator; that of the Dongtang, dated 22 October 1775, was
co-signed by Andr Rodrigues, superior, and Incio Francisco, procurator. These docu-
ments in the Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Macao, caixa 10, doc. 19, are published
by Antnio Graa de Abreu in Os bens dos ltimos jesutas portugueses em Pequim, in A
Companhia de Jesus e a Missionao no Oriente (Lisbon: Fundao Oriente, 2000), 230231.
24 Cipollas accusation of financial fraud seems out of character for Espinha, the senior
Portuguese Jesuit. Amiot and Bourgeois thought highly of him, as did the Visitor Florian
Bahr, who had a high estimation of Espinha in his 1764 report to General Lorenzo Ricci:
Igitur P. Joseph Espinha Vice Provincialis prudentiam pollet: vocationis et honestatis
amans; haec magna in his partibus virtus, nam saepe pro aliis a nostro instituto requisitis
supplere solat. In munere suo solers est, et dirigi patitur. Quoted in my Noble Patronage
and Jesuit Missions, document 148, 340.
25 Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 327337. See also Bourgeoiss note to Count Fu, 9 December
1780 and his letter dated 21 June 1781 to Minister Bertin, including the notes of his defense
against the accusations of Ventavon to the Neiwufu, 17 December 1780, documents XI and
XII in Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 524533. Bourgeois reports in detail the occasion
leading to Ventavons accusation and the details of the interrogation by Count Fu in, De
Societatis Iesu suppression in Sinis (ARSI, Jap-Sin 185, fols. 1319).
26 This was Fulongan, Director of the Neiwufu, Imperial Household Service
Department, which had jurisdiction over all Westerners in the capital. A member of the
Embroidered Yellow Banner, the nobleman Fulongan rose from the rank of Imperial
Guard to Minister of the Board of War and member of the Grand Council. Among his
many posts, he was director of the Neiwufu between 1769 and 1784.
, 701005843. Source: (http://archive
.ihsinica.edu.tw/ttsweb/html_name/search.ph).
254 Po-chia Hsia
wielding arbitrary power; of denying financial supervision and co-decision,

contrary to previous understandings; and embezzlement. In support of his
position, Bourgeois produced the letter from Minister Bertin, Still refusing to
acknowledge royal authority, Ventavon argued that the document bore no sig-
nature of the king, merely that of the minister, who was in collusion with
Bourgeois. Even if the letter were genuine, Ventavon protested to the Manchu
nobleman, Louiss authority did not extend to China. For more than ten years,
the French government had sent no funds to their missionaries in China, effec-
tively abandoning them. Ventavon proclaimed that he, for one, would only
acknowledge the authority of the Qing emperor. In his verdict, Fulongan cited
his inability to read French and ignorance of the personal matters among the
missionaries; his judgment stipulated that all French ex-Jesuits should take
turns to administer their common finances on a yearly basis. Drawing lots
for their turn, Grammont came first and replaced Bourgeois. Of the annual
income, Grammont reserved 1,600 taels for common expenses, and 4,000
taels to be divided by the six European ex-Jesuits, but not before giving 500
taels extra to himself, Ventavon, and Poirot in compensation of the Cantonese
goods.27 In fact, this was not the first partition of the French corporate assets.
After the dissolution, Bourgeois had assigned to each European father proper-
ties yielding 1,000 taels annually in order to calm anxieties and to satisfy (in
vain) demands for total partition. In April 1785, after the French Lazarists had
arrived in Beijing to take over the properties of the French ex-Jesuits, most of
the sequestered properties were returned. In exchange for returning their
individual portions to the corporate assets, each ex-Jesuit was guaranteed an
annual pension. Even Ventavon agreed to the scheme; by then he seemed to
have reconciled with Bourgeois, and the anxiety over money, a symptom of the
crisis of the dissolution, was finally overcome. However, Poirot and Grammont
only returned a portion of their shares, guarding a part for their own use, much
to the frustration of Nicholas Raux, the Lazarist superior.28
A decade after the suppression of the Jesuit Mission in China, the crisis was
finally over. On 18 January 1784, Gouvea assumed his role as bishop of Beijing.
27 The original is in a letter written by Ventavon to the Prefect of the Propaganda, 20

September 1782: Ex redditibus qui ad sex mille uncias argenti circiter perveniunt detracta
summa 1600 taelium pro aeconomo, et alis alia 500 taelium in compensationem bonorum
cantoniensium quam nobis, scilicet mihi, D de Poirot et de Grammont retinuimus, tot
fecimus partes, quot missionarii Europaei in nostra ecclesia sumus, et unicuique suam
quoad 640 aut 650 uncias pervenire potest, annuentibus mandarinis qui factum approba-
runt, tribuimus. Cited in Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 338, note 1.
28 Rochemonteix, Joseph Amiot, 399402.
He lifted all bans and preached reconciliation; the tensions of the schism sud-
denly seemed released by his presence. The ex-Jesuits of the vice-province
were happy enough with a new Portuguese bishop, for by then, there were only
five Portuguese ex-Jesuits and their Chinese subalterns remaining in the two
churches of the former vice-province. For them, Portuguese padroado was pre-
served. Similarly, the arrival on 29 April 1785 of the three French Lazarists in
Beijing, with Raux as the new superior of all French missionaries, largely set-
tled the internal divisions among his countrymen. Moreover, many of the orig-
inal protagonists had died: Cibot, dOllires, and Sichelbarth in 1780; Salusti,
Collas, and da Rocha in 1781. Severe persecution broke out in 1784, when Qing
authorities intercepted letters carried by a courier between Shanxi and Macao,
discovering the names of all European missionaries hiding in the provinces. A
manhunt ensued, resulting in many arrests and martyrdoms, among both mis-
sionaries and converts.29 The downpour of this storm of persecution doused
whatever petty flames of resentment and anger might have remained in the
small circle of European missionaries in Beijing. Both Ventavon and Bourgeois
threw themselves into rescuing their fellow missionaries, an endeavor that
might well have contributed to their reconciliation. In friendship, Ventavon
died in 1787 and Bourgeois in 1792.
A generation was dying out. Ladmiral and Lamathe, ex-French Jesuits in Hubei
and Hunan, died in humble circumstances between 1784 and 1786 amongst their
flock, having been spared the ferocious in-fighting over property in Beijing. The
indefatigable Laimbeckhoven died in 1787 in Songjiang, Espinha in 1788, his
fellow Portuguese ex-Jesuits Joo de Seixas in 1785, Incio Francisco in 1792, and
Rodrigues in 1796. The venerable Amiot, the most senior French missionary, died
on 9 November 1793, but not before making a deep impression on the first British
ambassador to China, George Earl Macartney (17371806).
Macartney kept a journal of his embassy to China in the years 17931794,
when he strove in vain to establish permanent diplomatic relations with the
Qing Empire. He met most of the European missionaries in the capital, some,
such as Almeida being appointed as interpreters by the Emperor Qianlong,
others, such as Grammont, eagerly proffering their services, and the sick
and dying Amiot offering warm and wise words of encouragement, which
29 The classic work of Bernard Willeke, Imperial Government and Catholic Missions in China
during the years 178485 (St. Bonaventure, ny: Franciscan Institute, 1948), based on the
archive of the Propaganda and published Chinese documents, needs to be supplemented
with the more recent documentary collection from the Number One Historical Archive in
Beijing, Qing zhong qian qi xi yang Tian zhu jiao zai Hua huo dong dang an shi liao
(see note 21).
256 Po-chia Hsia
Macartney much appreciated. Aside from his aversion to Catholics, the Anglo-
Irish aristocrat expressed a slight condescension toward all things conti
nental,reserving his most negative comments for the Portuguese. On Almeida,
Macartney recorded that he was warned many times about this ex-Jesuit, who,
despite his appointment at the Tribunal of Astronomy, struck him as limited in
scientific knowledge: This [] is the person against whom I had been par
ticularly cautioned [] as a man of a malignant disposition, jealous of all
Europeans, except those of his own nation.30 As an ultimate putdown,
Macartney ascribed the failure of Almeida as an interpreter to the fact that
the missionary spoke neither English nor French, and the ambassador, with
pointed politeness, excused his ignorance of Portuguese. As for Bishop Gouvea,
Macartney described him as a man with courteous and dignified manners, but
said he was false and crafty and of little learning, although he was in the
Tribunal of Astronomy. I think, indeed, there is some reason [] to believe
that the Portuguese have formed a sort of system to disgust and keep out of
China all other nations. Between them and the rest of the missionaries there
appears to be great jealousy and enmityodium plusquam theologicum. In a
conversation with an Italian a few days ago, he told me that all the missionaries
except the Portuguese were our warm friends, but that the Portuguese were
friends of nobody but themselves.31
On the French, Macartney had a more variable opinion. He described their
superior, the Lazarist Raux as tall and corpulent, an affable man who loved to
talk.32 The Earl also met the two living French Jesuit dissidents, Poirot and
Grammont. The latter wrote two letters to Macartney offering his services and
warning him against Almeida who had been assigned as his interpreter.33
When the ambassador arrived in Beijing, Grammont paid a visit. This is
Macartneys analysis of the ex-Jesuit: He is certainly a very clever fellow and
seems to know this country well, but as he is said to be of a restless, intriguing
turn it is necessary to be a good deal on ones guard with him.34 He adds that
Grammont had gone to Guangzhou at an earlier time, hoping to return to
France, but was recalled to the capital by the emperor. The only missionary
Macartney did not meet was Amiot, owing to the latters illness. All the same,
30 An Embassy to China. Being the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the
Emperor Chien-lung 17931794, ed. J.L. Cranmer-Byng (Hamden, ct: Archon, 1963), 89,
9394.
31 An Embassy to China, 103.
32 Ibid., 92.
33 Ibid., 32, 80.
34 Ibid., 103104.
the French missionary sent the British earl a warm letter and his portrait, offer-
ing detailed and considered advice and genuine good wishes for the success of
the British embassy. Macartney had warm words to say about the old man,
stricken in spirit by the violence and disorder his country had fallen into after
1789 and who was at the end of his life.35
The small and dwindling community of Europeans in Beijing after the post-
suppression crisis was far from the fraternal and peaceful union depicted in
some older works of scholarship. The central tension still sprung from the
assertion of Portuguese padroado. This was clear enough from the instructions
for Bishop Gouvea, dated 7 April 1784, composed by the viceroy of Portuguese
India, Federico Guilherme de Souza, in the name of the monarch. The
Portuguese government expected the bishop of Beijing to act as a de facto
ambassador, to sustain in that Empire His Royal Patronage [] incontestable
rights that have proven themselves against the attacks and violence com
mitted against the royal patronage by the so-called missionaries of the
Propaganda.36 Moreover, Gouvea was instructed to lobby the imperial court in
order to maintain the privileged position of Macao, whose commerce had
been steadily losing importance to Guangzhou.37 Both would turn out to be
losing battles. In trade, the British easily surpassed Portuguese Macao, render-
ing it a subsidiary of their new entrept of Hong Kong after the Opium War
(18391842). In the missionary field, the Portuguese followed the French exam-
ple and sent Lazarists to continue the work of the ex-Jesuits; they furnished
two more bishops of Beijing after Gouvea before the dearth of personnel and
funds effectively ended the Portuguese padroado, giving rise to a new era of
French patronage in the century after the Opium War.
And what of the ex-Jesuits? Almeida, whom Macartney detested, died in
1805. He was the last Portuguese Jesuit from the once illustrious vice-province.
Among the French, Grammont probably died in 1812 and Poirot, the last mem-
ber of the old Jesuit China mission, the year after, both living into their 70s. Did
their longevity reflect the successful strategies of survival in the suppression
crisis? After all, Grammont and Poirot gained the most from the partial liqui-
dation of the French Jesuit properties. Another septuagenarian was Amiot,
35 Ibid., 151152, 245

36 Instruo para o Bispo de Pequim e outros documentos para a Histria de Macau (Macao:
Instituto Cultural de Macao, 1988), 4748.
37 Instruo para o Bispo de Pequim, 52, 5758. See also my A Tale of Two Ports: Macau and
Guangzhou in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, in Cidades porturias e Relaes Interculturais
(scs. XVXVIII), ed. Lus Filipe Barreto (Lisbon: Centro Cientfico e Cultural de Macau,
2012), 173191.
258 Po-chia Hsia
whose neutrality in the internal disputes, and whose determination to get

along with everyone, must have served him well in the stressful crisis. The tar-
get of the dissenters and the last superior of the French Jesuits, Bourgeois
proved to be a tough man, who bore well the pains of the turmoil, surviving
the crisis to write a long apology to his fellow Jesuits in Russia and a work
on Chinese culture.38 He lived to be sixty-nine. Others failed to manage
the extreme emotional stress of the suppression. The seventy-one-year-old
Hallerstein, as we have seen, died of a stroke upon hearing the news. Still oth-
ers succumbed to premature deaths on the eve of the suppression or expired in
the years of stressful conflicts in its aftermath: Hubert Cousin de Mericourt
died at the age of forty-five, Michel Benoist at fifty-nine after news of the sup-
pression reached China; Cibot at age fifty-three, dOllires at fifty-eight, and
Collas at fifty-six, all at the time of their conflict with Bishop Salusti (who also
died of a stroke prompted by the schism). Ventavon, leader of the dissenters,
also died prematurely at the age of fifty-four. This demographic fact among the
French Jesuits represented a strong contrast with the mortality of the Jesuits of
the Portuguese vice-province: none of the Europeans of the last missionary
cohort in the Nantang and Dongtang died in their fifties; on average they lived
to be almost sixty-nine-years-old.39 Unlike the French, the Portuguese main-
tained solidarity, zealously guarding their corporate property, and fighting off
the one challenge by the newcomer Cipolla. Most likely, the Portuguese Jesuits
felt a stronger sense of continuity, both with Macao and with their home coun-
try, at least until the Napoleonic invasion and the flight of the Portuguese court
to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. But by then, the last of them had died. The sense of
rupture seemed to have been stronger among some of the French Jesuits:
Ventavon acknowledged the authority of the Chinese emperor but not his
king; his fellow dissenters might have felt abandoned by France; and Amiot,
who championed French national interests throughout the crisis, no longer
recognized the country that was devastated by the whirlwind of revolution at
the time of his death.
Older scholarship, written by Jesuit historians, either condemned the
French dissidents outright or showed sympathy to those missionaries who
held onto their Jesuit identity. This is not the place to pass judgment. What
38 This is his manuscript De Societate Jesu suppresione in Sinis ad PP. S.J. in Rossia with
documents (see note 8). There is no study of the reactions of the Jesuits in Russia. On this
latter topic, see Sabina Pavone, Una strana Alleanza. La Compagnia di Ges in Russia del
1772 al 1820 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2008).
39 The six are: da Rocha (68), Sichelbarth (72), Espina (66), Francisco (67), Seixas (75), and
Almeida (67).
emerges is a complicated picture of how individuals in a corporation dealt

with the intense anxiety and anguish generated by the suppression of that
institution. On top of considerations for personal security, many emotional
factors fed the turmoil of the years 1775 to 1785: national loyalties, commitment
to their ministry, guilt, resentment, and perhaps even feelings of abandonment
and betrayal. Whatever their differences, the European fathers in Beijing led a
comfortable and secure life after the suppression. Some of them continued to
be productive in the cultural sphere. Amiot, who had made a name for himself
by translating Emperor Qianlongs Ode to Mukden (Shenyang) from Manchu
into French, continued his scholarship, publishing Mmoire de la musique
des Chinois tant anciens que moderns in 1779 and a two-volume Manchu-
Chinese-French dictionary in 1789. Even more productive was Louis Poirot,
who became equally expert in Manchu and Chinese. Unlike Amiot, however,
Poirots oeuvre did not make it into print. His Italian manuscript The Life of
Confucius by Louis Poirot is extant in the library of the Royal Society in
London.40 His life-long work, an almost complete translation of the Bible into
Chinese, the first undertaking of its kind, was never published and exists only
in a small fragment in the Xujiahui (Zikawei) Library in Shanghai.41
Their confreres in the provinces were less fortunate. During the great perse-
cution of 17841785, two ex-Jesuits were arrested together with other mission-
aries sent by the Propaganda: the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de la Roche
(17221785), whose ministry was in Hubei, died in chains en route to Beijing,
and the Chinese Jean Simonelli Ai (17141784), procurator for the ex-
Vice-Province in Guangzhou, died in prison in Beijing on 11 February 1785.42
These ex-Jesuit martyrs joined the ranks of their brethren who died earlier
under Pombals suppressionseven of the twenty-four Jesuits arrested in
Macao in 1762 died during the sea voyage or in the jails of Fort S. Julien, among
them the Chinese Jesuit Francisco da Cunha-Xu, ironically martyred in Portugal
and not in his own country. Among the survivors was Louis Marie du Gad
(17071786), a veteran in the China mission for twenty-five years when he was
arrested in Macao. Deported and imprisoned in Portugal, he was freed in 1766
thanks to the intervention of the French government. Undaunted, du Gad
immediately set out for China and returned to Guangzhou in September 1768.
40 Royal Society, GB 117, MS/167.

41 See Toshikazu S. Foley, Four-Character Set Phrases: A Study of their Use in the Catholic
and Eastern-Orthodox Versions of the Chinese New Testament, Hong Kong Journal of
Catholic Studies 2 (2011), special issue on Biblical Translation in Chinese Hong Kong:
Centre for Catholic Studies, cuhk, 2011), 7781.
42 Willeke, Imperial Government, 122123, 142.
260 Po-chia Hsia
There, provincial officials refused his request to serve in Beijing. Expelled

again, du Gad returned to Paris, where he participated enthusiastically during
the late 1770s in the governments plan for training a new generation of French
missionaries to China, before French ambitions to establish an independent
French vicariate yielded to the opposition of Rome. And finally, we have no
direct testimony from the Chinese, neither from the Chinese members of the
Society nor from the congregations. In the aftermath of the suppression,
Bourgeois remarked that his Chinese flock acted with great consideration for
the feelings of the fathers. It seemed that Chinese priests and brothers of the
Society continued their work as seculars after the suppression; we have no
documentation on whether the quarrels over corporate property had any
effect on them. tienne Yang and Louis Gao (Kao), the last two Chinese edu-
cated by the French Jesuits during the Bourbon suppression, returned to their
country in 1766 and worked for the Jesuits; in 1777, the government of Louis
XVI, while naming Bourgeois superior of the reconstituted French China mis-
sion, also appointed tienne Yang as procurator. Both Yang and Gao continued
their ministry after the suppression until their deaths in the 1790s.
By the time the Society was restored in 1814, all ex-Jesuits in China had died.
Nevertheless, the memory of their work was strong among Chinese Christians.
In 1832, the leaders of the Beijing Christian community wrote to General
Jan Roothaan, asking for missionaries from the new Society. The shortage of
priests, the lay leaders complained, seriously hampered religious life: the
dearth of Chinese clergy was compounded by the low esteem that the few
Lazarists enjoyed among the mandarins and commoners. The Chinese
Christians missed the splendor of the old mission, when Jesuits well educated
in science and technology and commanding Chinese and Manchu, won pres-
tige for the church and converts for Christianity. Other letters of petition to
Pope Gregory XVI followed in 1833 and 1835. A former prefect of the Propaganda
(18261831), Gregory was committed to reviving the China Mission. Between
1838 and 1841, he carried out a serious of ecclesiastical reforms in order to dis-
mantle the Portuguese padroado. Meanwhile, the Society had prepared its first
batch of new missionaries and three French Jesuits arrived in China in 1842 at
the end of the first Sino-Western conflict, the Opium War, which forced the
Qing Empire to open its doors to trade, diplomacy, and Christianity.43 In the
end, the restoration of the Jesuit China Mission did not work out exactly as
Chinese Christians had hoped. But that is another story.
43 The best work on this transitional period is Xiaojuan Huang, Christian Communities and
Alternative Devotions in China 17801860 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006),
113123.
chapter 15
Restoration or New Creation?

The Return of the Society of Jesus to China
Paul Rule
Introduction
Although the Society of Jesus is often said to have been restored in China
in 1842, it was a very different Society which returned and a markedly differ-
ent China to which it returned. Return is a much more appropriate descrip-
tion for what the Jesuits did in China from 1842 to 1949 than restoration
since their most famous mission, Beijing, was denied them; even their for-
mer churches in Jiangnan were restored after the Opium War to the
Catholic Church rather than the Society of Jesus. And, despite the original
intentions of the Holy See and Jesuit superiors, the scientific and intellectual
apostolate was only reinstated slowly and then centered on Shanghai rather
than the capital as it had been in the old mission. In fact, the new China
mission was more a new creation than a restoration, but one suited to an
emerging new China.
After the trauma of the suppression of the Jesuits, the French Revolution,
the Napoleonic wars, and the divided societies they left, the newly restored
Society had to move cautiously. The old Society suffered from and for its trium-
phalism, partisanship, and political maneuvering, but even had it wished to be
assertiveand the mid-nineteenth century Jesuit superior generals were ada-
mant and eloquent in their resistance to such tendenciestheir enemies were
even better organized and anti-Jesuit propaganda was both virulent and politi-
cally effective. Such propaganda also often drew on the enormous literature of
the Chinese Rites controversy of over a century before.
The year after the arrival of the first contingent of French Jesuits in Jiangnan,
a pasquinade published in Paris accused the Jesuits of promoting idolatry in
China,1 rejecting papal authority in the Chinese Rites controversy, and moral
1 Strictly speaking, Jiangnan is a geographical term for a large area south (nan) of the lower
reaches of the Chang Jiang (Long River usually known in the West as the Yangtze). It encom-
passes parts of several Chinese provinces (mainly Jiangsu and Anhui) and ecclesiastically
was the diocese of Nanjing soon to be subdivided. The main cities were Nanjing (the old
southern capital), Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Wuxi. To further complicate matters,

262 Rule
laxity.2 The five massive volumes of the priest-philosopher Vincenzo Giobertis

Il gesuita moderno, which appeared in 1846, used examples from the old China
mission to advance a case for a new suppression of the Jesuits.3
It is not surprising, then, that the new mission proceeded cautiously and
tended to reject rather than appropriate the traditions and practices of the old
China mission. The solution to the perennial problem of national rivalries
which had contributed to the collapse of the old mission was to create national
missions manned by members of one nationality, later even of one Jesuit prov-
ince. Rome accepted, or rather promoted, the notion of one religious order for
each mission; ameliorating the old rivalries, but at the expense of uniformity of
practice and a Chinese national consciousness. The vexed question of hierar-
chybishops or vicars apostolic against religious superiorswas superficially
resolved by appointing Jesuits as vicars apostolic/bishops (contrary to the Jesuit
Institute), but from early in the new mission tensions emerged between Jesuit
bishops and mission superiors. Who owned the property, controlled the dona-
tions from Europe, and assigned the men to their posts? Where a diocesan semi-
nary was run by the Jesuits, did the seminary belong to the bishop or the Society?
Should young trainee Jesuits, European and indigenous study together? Might
the seminarians be permitted to join the Society? These were new problems
with new solutions that radically changed the ethos of the mission.
Now not only were there other Catholic religious orders, but Protestant mis-
sionaries too, especially in the port-city of Shanghai. The remarks in the early
mission reports are generally derogatory of the Protestants. Bishop Besi
thought that the Protestant Bible translations and tracts could only advance
the cause of the true faith.4 Unlike some of the Protestants, however, and
the area is often called Wu after the ancient pre-unification state in the area; and Wu is the
name given to the dialect spoken there.
2 pitre aux Jsuites par J.-F. B*** (Paris: Chez tous les marchands de nouveauts, 1843). The
poem is accompanied by historical notes which must have undermined the authors case
rather than strengthened it even to someone who knew only the virulent anti-Rites propa-
ganda. The support of idolatry and rejection of papal infallibility re the Chinese Rites ques-
tion is attributed to a non-existent Jesuit superior of the China mission, Pre Pauquet; and
the unfortunate Joo Mouro, executed for his friendship with a rival to the throne of the
Yongzheng emperor is claimed to have caused the execution by strangulation of 300 mission-
aries for his debauching the wives of the mandarins. It is, however, an interesting example of
anything goes where Jesuits are concerned.
3 Il Gesuita Moderno, (Bonamici e Compagni: Losanna, 1846). See especially Tomo 2, Cap. 8.
China, he says, is not a special case but a logical consequence and strict application of the
sensual concept of the Jesuits which instead of preaching an austere philosophical Christianity
reduces it to sense experience and excessive devotion.
4 Lettre de Mgr Besy, Nankin, 15 Mai 1843, Annales de la Propagation de la Foi 16 (1844): 435.
Restoration Or New Creation? 263
despite overtures, the Catholic missionaries did not regard the Taiping rebels
whose operational centre was in the Jiangnan region as potential allies despite
their superficial Christianity.
Those missionaries who had closely studied the history of the old mission,
and judging by their letters and writings they were few, found that the sort of
collaboration and even friendships that earlier Jesuits from the time of Ricci
and Aleni had established with officials and scholars were no longer possible.5
They lamented that even the old Christian elite families were rife with apos-
tasy when faced with the choice of employment in the government service or
conforming to the church proscription of Confucian rituals. Most officials the
Chinese Christians dealt with regarded them not only as heterodox but as
allied with the foreigners who threatened Chinese sovereignty. In the crisis of
the Opium War the Christians and their pastors sought the protection of for-
eign gunboats and troops against local authorities. Officials knew that obstruct-
ing the implementation of the treaties, especially the provisions about
missionaries, would not cause problems in Beijing if it was done with subtlety
and by proxy through the local gentry. Then, in the Taiping Rebellion (1850
1866), officials were humiliated by the need to fall back on foreign forces for
the preservation of their cities, which made them even more resentful.6 The
old cozy relationship with local and central government officials and Manchu
dignitaries, including the emperor and his familynever universal and
severely shaken by the Roman decisions in the case of Chinese Riteswas

irretrievable.
The Return to Jiangnan
Eventually there were several Jesuit missions in China with some relationship to
a home province that provided personnel and resources. For a long time the
5 It is often wrongly assumed that the new Jesuits were fully conscious of the orders heritage
and history but the suppression led to a dispersal of Jesuit archives and libraries that was only
gradually overcome. The restored Society was too hard pressed for manpower to immediately
afford the luxury of official historiography. Even the foundation documentsthe Jesuit
Constitutions, the Spiritual Exercises, and the classics of Jesuit spiritualitywere often mis-
read due to the loss of a living tradition. It is worth noting, however, that the first three French
missionaries chose the Chinese surnames of Matteo Ricci, Giulio Aleni, and Ferdinand
Verbiest.
6 See the extraordinary exchange between the viceroy of Jiangnan and the Jesuit vicar apos-
tolic of Nanking in 1865 where the viceroy acknowledges the support of the missionaries
during the Taiping rebellion but adamantly refuses to honor the treaty obligations to restore
church property (Languillats letter of 12 July 1865 in Etudes 15 (1866): 104112.
264 Rule
main one was Jiangnan, and it was primarily a mission of the Jesuit province of
Paris. Initially it had some Italian Jesuits, especially during the episcopacy of the
Count Luigi de Besi from Verona (bishop of Nanjing, 18391848), but the old
internationalism was soon abandoned.7 The first three who arrived on the
China coast in the midst of the Opium War in late 1841 and moved inland the
next year were French: Claude Gotteland (18031856), Benjamin Brueyre
(18101880), and Franois Estve (18071848). Besi was a close friend of the Jesuit
superior general and had begged him for Jesuits to serve his huge diocese,
which had only a handful of Chinese priests trained in Macao or Naples and
two French Lazarists. He had, in fact, made the sending of Jesuits a condition
of accepting the post from his compatriot Pope Gregory XVI (r. 18311846).8
But the restored Society had had its eyes on China from long before 1841. In
1833, the third superior general of the renewed Society of Jesus (18291853), Jan
Philip Roothaan, wrote a letter to all Jesuits promoting foreign missions as cen-
tral to the ideals of the Jesuits.9 After reminding them that the Society had
originally been founded for missions outside Europe and that this was one of
their most urgent present tasks, he explicitly mentioned the China mission as
one of their old missions that he had been asked to reopen and committed
himself to doing so as soon as possible.
This request had come not from central China, but from Beijing. To the
annoyance of the Lazarists who had inherited the Beijing mission from the
defunct Jesuits, on 25 April 1832 the Chinese priests and leading Catholics of
the Beijing diocese sent a letter to Roothaan appealing to him to send Jesuits to
Beijing to renew their historical role of protecting the Chinese church by influ-
encing officials and the emperor through their science and Chinese scholar-
ship. For the Chinese, they wrote, and especially the Emperor and magistrates,
delight greatly in such matters.10 We have never forgotten, replied Roothaan
7 The history of the five Massa brothers, all missionaries in Jiangnan, is an interesting but
hardly typical case. See Luigi Sica, Une famille napolitaine, notice historique sur les cinq frres
Massa, de la Compagnie de Jsus, missionnaires en Chine, et leur famille (Paris: Retaux, 1892).
8 When he was appointed to Nanjing on 30 January 1840, Cardinal Fransoni, the cardinal
prefect of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, assured him che il Padre Generale dei
gesuiti mi promette dinviarle al pi presto 3 o 4 de sui Religiosi, onde ha in cio un grande
argomento di conforte. Quoted in Joseph de la Servire, Histoire de la mission du Kiang-
nan (Shanghai: Imprimerie de Tou-s-wei, 1914), 1:18n4.
9 De missionum exterarum desiderio excitando ac fovendo (3 December 1833); discussed in
C.J. Ligthart, The Return of the Jesuits: the Life of Jan Philip Roothaan, trans. Jan J. Slijkerman
(London: T. Shand, 1978), 129134.
10 A Latin translation made by Chinese College in Naples is in the Jesuit Roman Archives
(Gen. Sin. 2, 1, 4) and is given as an appendix in de la Servires Histoire, as Appendix I, 13.
on 18 May 1834, that most noble China mission [...] and with prayers and
sighs we beg God to protect the Christians of the Chinese Empire and offer our
assistance that such an important work may finally reach fruition if it can be
accomplished. However, he made no specific commitment, referring to the
urgent needs of a young organization, promising only to send his best men
[lectissimi quique aptissimi] when the time was ripe.11
Meanwhile, another letter was sent by the Beijing Christians at Pentecost
1833, this time to Pope Gregory XVI, and instigated on this occasion by the
Portuguese bishop of Beijing, Peres Pereira (bishop 18041838), and a Manchu
prince, Bel-min-zian-ho, son of the emperors brother and a former head of the
Astronomical Bureau.12 This letter was along the same lines, but longer. It
recounts the achievements in Beijing of the old Jesuit mission from the arrival
of Matteo Ricci as scientists, authors and artists; describes the churches built
with imperial approval and funds; and the inscriptions given to these churches
in the emperors own calligraphy. Such favors could be repeated if only Jesuits
were sent to Beijing.
Its peroration is fulsome, and one wonders how much is Chinese rhetoric
and who precisely composed the text:13
If you should do this you will have given new life to us and your piety and
humanity towards your petitioners will be celebrated forever not only by
us but by absolutely all the faithful notwithstanding the disparity of rank
and distance in space. And this can only be accomplished with ease if
you should send here on a divine mission Fathers of the Society of Jesus
who in human memory stand out before all others for their piety and
integrity of life, and for their teaching which may become more and more
acceptable to the people of China and Japan. We believe it is certain and
11 Quoted (from the Zikawei archives) in de la Servires Histoire, 1:34n1.

12 The letter, again in Latin translation, from Gen.Sin. 2.1.6, is given in full in de la Servire,
Histoire, vol. 1, Appendix II, 510. I have been unable to identify this prince, a question
that would repay serious investigation.
13 I have not seen the Chinese original, if there was one, and there is no indication of who
made the translation, but it is described by de la Servire as a translation from the Chinese
rather than one written by the bishop in Latin. Another letter along the same lines was
sent to Roothaan in August 1833 by Christians of Hunan, Hubei, Shanxi, Beijing and
Shaanxi (Latin translation in arsi: Gen. Sin. 2, 1, 7) who asserts that officials, courtiers and
the Emperor himself have requested that the General should send Fathers of the Society
who are skilled in the mechanical arts and the science of the stars and so on, and that if
he does so they will be well received (see text in de la Servire, Histoire, 35n2). But this
may simply be an echo of the previous letter and not based on first-hand knowledge.
266 Rule
demonstrable that if they should come here on an apostolic mission the

whole people including the important people will welcome them and in
a short time the Empire will accept the Christian faith. This is to us cer-
tain even most certain. For amongst the common people, the officials
and the Imperial court itself, the name of the Society of Jesus is held in
such honour that one Jesuit endowed with letters and sciences would be
held in higher esteem than all the Mandarins, as they are called, and all
the doctors of the Empire.14
The letter refers to the prince, our protector in these adverse times, as a close
friend of the bishop with whom he has frequent long discussions about reli-
gion and mathematics and holds out hopes of a renewal of the old influence at
court. Everything in the letter contradicts what is known about the situation of
Christianity in China generally and Beijing in particular at this time. In fact,
since there was no follow-up it may have been an attempt on the princes part
to regain his position in the Astronomical Bureau; he is said in the letter to
have lost his post but hoped to regain it. However, the letter served to sustain
hopes in Rome of an imminent recall of the Jesuits to the Bureau of Astronomy
by the imperial government, which was to greatly complicate the return of the
Jesuits to their old position as foreign experts. There were several attempts in
the 1840s and 1850s to send men to Beijing, but despite rumors that the impe-
rial government was about to request Jesuit astronomers no such request was
made; indeed, it was a period of heightened anti-foreign feeling in Beijing. The
closest the Jesuits came to Beijing was the assumption of responsibility in 1857
for a remote area of Zhili, the province surrounding the capital.15
One interesting result of this letter was that one of the first three Jesuits to
be sent to China was specifically chosen and designated for astronomical work
in case such an opening should present itself. Claude Gotteland, with training
in mathematics and science, was given a crash-course in astronomy in Paris by
M. Largetau of the Bureau of Longitudes who even composed for him a treatise
on practical astronomy, Astronomie pratique lusage des missions de Chine.16
He was never to use this expertise. Nevertheless, by the end of the century
Shanghai became the location for a famous Jesuit observatory, but one special-
izing in meteorology and seismology rather than astronomy.
14 De la Servire, Histoire, Appendix II, 10.

15 See Gabriel de Beaurepaire, Notice sur la mission du P-Tch-Ly Sud-est, confie aux soins
des PP.de la Compagnie de Jsus, (Lyon: J.-B. Plagaud, 1873).
16 De la Servire, Histoire, 1:42.
It was another letter from Chinese Christians to the pope which precipi-
tated the departure for China of the three French missionaries. This came in
October 1839 from Nanjing and was probably partly inspired by the new bishop
who was appalled at the state of his new diocese.17 The only remedy is to send
Jesuits, he wrote to the procurator of Propaganda Fide in Macao.18 The Chinese
petitioners, addressing Pope Gregory XVI, insisted they had urgent need of the
combination of learning and virtue for which the old Jesuits were famous, and
pointedly rejected the Portuguese as a source of priests. Not a single priest had
been trained for Nanjing for many years by the seminary of St. Joseph in Macao.
They needed their own seminary. And they went further and demanded Jesuit
bishops for both Nanjing and Beijing, an indication perhaps that Besi did not
have a direct role in its preparation.19
On 30 June 1840, the secretary of Propaganda Fide issued the three appointed
by Roothaan with their missionary credentials and ordered them to take the
oath prescribed for China missionaries by Pope Benedict XIV against the
Chinese Rites. The French queen Marie-Amlie obtained a free passage for
them on a French ship, and before they departed like their famous late seven-
teenth-century predecessors, the mathematicians of the king, were appointed
correspondents of the French Academy of Sciences. They left Brest on 28 April
1841 and arrived in Macao via Manila on 21 October. The Portuguese then
expelled them and they acted as chaplains to the Irish troops in Hong Kong
engaged in the Opium War until they eventually went by French ship to Pudong
across the river from Shanghai, arriving 12 July 1842.20 So, the Jesuits returned
to Jiangnan literally under the protection of a French gunboat.
17 In 1839 he was acting as administrator or vicar for Pires Pereira while the thorny question
of the Portuguese padroado over Nanjing and Beijing was negotiated between Rome and
Portugal.
18 Unicum remedium est mittere Jesuitas (Besi to Joset, October 1839: cited from Propaganda
Fide Archives in de la Servire, Histoire, 1:35n3).
19 De la Servire quotes extensively from this letter (3637) and notes that the Chinese text
was in the Zikawei archives and that, curiously in the light of its content, was translated
in Macao; he suggests this was done in the office of the Procurator of Propaganda Fide
rather than the Seminary without the knowledge of the government of Macao.
20 There seem to have been two reasons for their expulsion. One was their attachment to
Besi whose appointment was disputed by the Portuguese who had nominated two semi-
nary professors in Macao for the padroado sees of Beijing and Nanjing. The other was that
their host in Macao, the Procurator of Propaganda Fide, Joset, had been appointed by the
Holy See prefect apostolic of the new British base of Hong Kong, which the Portuguese
regarded as part of the diocese of Macao.
268 Rule
The Methods of the New Mission Compared with the Old
The history of the early years of this first mission in Nanjing, Shanghai, and
elsewhere has been well told by Colombel,21 Havret,22 and Brouillon,23 as well
as fully documented by de la Servire, but nobody to my knowledge has
attempted to systematically compare the new mission with the old.
It is frequently asserted that the old Jesuit mission maintained a top
down policy, by which is meant a concentration on evangelizing the educated
elite, the scholar official or gentry class, and a focus on Beijing and the
imperial court. This is a half-truth at best, although it is one that the restored
Jesuits in China seem to have accepted.24 The majority of Chinese Christians
from the late Ming to mid-Qing were neither officials, degree-holders, or
even from better-off families. While some Jesuits and most of the other mis-
sionaries boasted of living and working far from the Babylon of Beijing and
what they myopically saw as a leisurely privileged life led by the Peking
Fathers [Patres Pekinenses], life at court as members of the emperors house-
hold was hard, and in Beijing as elsewhere, most Christians were ordinary
21 Auguste Colombels massive Histoire de la mission du Kiang-nan (1900) was denied publi-
cation by his Jesuit superiors because of its defects, but a lithographic facsimile of the
manuscript circulated within the Society of Jesus. There is a copy in the Ricci Institute,
University of San Francisco and a Chinese translation (Taipei: Fujen University Press,
2009). The third part (vols. 4 & 5) deals with the new mission under the Qing.
22 Henri Havret S.J., La mission du Kiang-nan, son histoire, ses oeuvres (Paris: J. Mersch, 1900).
23 Nicolas Broullion, S.J. Mmoire sur ltat actuel de la mission du Kiang-Nan, 18421855
(Paris: Julien, Lanier & Cie, 1855). Broullion, the mission superior, wrote this on a return
visit to France and it is the earliest extensive account of the refounding of the Jiangnan
mission. Estve, Brueyre, Broullion and others also wrote several short propagandistic
pieces for the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi and similar church journals. And several
French visitors to Shanghai in the 1840s and 1850s have left impressions of the mission.
Particularly interesting is Charles Lavolle, Les Jsuites en Chine, Revue des Deux
Mondes, 2s. 1 (1856): 505536. An excellent summary is to be found in D.E. Mungello, The
return of the Jesuits to China in 1841 and the Chinese Christian backlash, Sino-Western
Cultural Relations Journal 27 (2005): 946.
24 Mgr.Languillat, the Jesuit vicar apostolic of S.E. Zhili wrote at the end of the Taiping
Rebellion that it was time to return to the old Jesuit policy of missionizing top-down from
important administrative centres rather than bottom-up in the countryside as in the pre-
vious twenty years. However, he ominously adds that this should be done under shelter of
the treaties which was most definitely not the earlier policy (Correspondance Chine,
tudes 3 (1965): 110112. It should also be noted that Languillats vicariate was mainly rural
as the Jesuits had been excluded from the capital and that in Shanghai his French col-
leagues had from very early been working in an urban environment.
people.25 What kept the Jesuits there was the protection they could offer to
Christians in the provinces by timely intervention and an opportunity to
convince high officials that Christianity was reasonable and that Western
priests were learned and useful to China. The Beijing Jesuits were a small
minority of the Jesuits in China, even at the height of their influence around
1700.26 In other words, a top down activity was necessary to ensure the very
survival of a bottom-up church, but was by no means the raison-dtre of the
mission. Most worked in the provinces and as itinerants, or as Broullion
called their successors, nomads.27
Hence, the exclusion of the new mission from the center of power was not as
drastic a change from the old accommodation method as has been alleged and
as some saw it at the time. And it could be argued that the same methods were
employed in a new context. Many of the French Jesuits in Shanghai saw educa-
tion rather than cultivating emperor and mandarins and a modern education
rather than a classical one as the key to influence in the emerging new China.
It is curious that education, in the sense of schools or colleges, was never
one of the activities of the old mission despite its centrality in Europe. There
were sporadic projects for establishing schools, but in practice even seminaries
to train future priests were avoided. Two serious attempts were made: by
Antoine Thomas at the beginning of the eighteenth century who attempted to
set up an educational college in the Eastern Church in Beijing;28 and a little
later by Giovanni Laureati further south,29 but both failed. The problems were
many: concentration on the all-important official examinations, early arranged
marriages in gentry families, and suspicion of sexual exploitation of young
boys, which was a common charge against Buddhist monasteries. But the main
25 See Paul Rule, Kangxi and the Jesuits: Missed Opportunity or Futile Hope, in Chine/
Europe/Amrique: rencontres et changes de Marco Polo nos jours, ed. Shenwen Li
(Qubec: Les Presses de lUniversit Laval, 2009).
26 The Kangxi Emperor became aware that talented Jesuits were being kept away from his
court and instituted at the end of the seventeenth-century a system of scrutiny in Canton
of newly arrived missionaries. They selected any with special skills or talents in sciences,
technology and the arts who were to be sent immediately to Beijing for service at the court.
27 Broullion, Mmoire, 64.
28 The question of a college for boys or young men is a recurrent theme in the correspon-
dance of Antoine Thomas S.J. (16441709). See his letters in the arsi, Jap. Sin. 148 and 149,
and elsewhere. Of special interest on this topic are Jap. Sin. 148: 109r112r, 155156, 187189.
He even got the Eastern Church (Dongtang) in Beijing, of which he was superior, erected
into a Jesuit college. But for the reasons mentioned no such institution developed.
29 See Laureati to the Jesuit superior general, Beijing 1 November 1719, in arsi: Jap.Sin. 178, 326
327. Interestingly, he suggests Shanghai as an appropriate place for such an experiment.
270 Rule
factor was, I argue, lack of the manpower and funds for such a venture at a time
when it might have succeeded (the 1690s and early 1700s) and then the changed
governmental attitude due to the Chinese Rites controversy. There was, of
course, a college in Macao but those on the China mission regarded it as too
European in curriculum and teaching staff, and no Chinese father would think
of sending his son to such an institution.
What is more surprising is that there is no evidence of formal or informal
Christian village schools. There is occasional reference to Christian schoolmas-
ters and perhaps Christian parents sent their sonsthere would be no ques-
tion of daughters whose education, if it existed, was entirely domesticto
such private schools.
But the situation in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in Shanghai was
different. The newly arrived Jesuits decided to focus on education for Christians
and non-Christians who wanted to be equipped for the traditional examina-
tions, but with the addition of some Western science and languages. In a fast
growing and modernizing city like Shanghai this was appreciated by some at
least of those Chinese families who lived in the in-between world of the treaty
ports, but their very success in combining the two traditions often prevented
their rise beyond the first rungs of the Chinese ladder of success.30 It was not
until over sixty years after the arrival of the Jesuits (1906) that the traditional
examinations were abolished and the new education came into general favor.
However, Broullion, the Jesuit superior, insisted that even the seminarians
should sit for the first Chinese degree if possible.31
The question of the feasibility of combining a Chinese classical education
with a Western-style one remained a question in Shanghai and elsewhere and
was the main cause of the defection from the Society of Jesus of the great
scholar and educationist Ma Xiangbo (18401939).32 Perhaps only someone as
talented as Ma could successfully combine the Chinese classics with physics
and mathematics; social science and political theory; and Chinese languages
with Latin, French, and English. Ma had been born in Jiangnan the year before
30 Paul Cohen neatly characterizes this emerging littoral culture as more commercial than
agricultural in its economic foundations, more modern than traditional in its administra-
tive and social arrangements, more Western (Christian) than Chinese Confucian in its
intellectual bearing. But he also notes that the hinterland, which included the capital
Beijing, long remained unchanged. China Unbound (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 39.
32 See Ruth Hayhoe and Lu Yongling, eds., Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China, 1840
1939 (Armonk, ny: M.E. Sharpe, 1996) and Mas collected works, Zhu Weizheng
ed., Ma Xiangbo Ji (Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 1966).
the arrival of the French Jesuits and was one of their first students in Zikawei
at a time when the curriculum for preparation for the imperial examinations
was still in place in St. Ignatius College. But the hostility of his French Jesuit
superiors to his insistence on the Chinese dimension to Jesuit education in
China was what drove him out of the Society and what led to later problems
with his Catholic university projects (lAurore and Fudan in Shanghai and
Furen in Beijing).
But that was towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the early days in
Shanghai and suburban Zikawei, the Jesuits insisted on Chinese education,
employed Chinese scholars as teachers, and made Chinese studies central
both in the nascent College of St. Ignatius and their seminary.33 Nevertheless,
the writings of the pioneers of the new mission were far from adulatory about
Chinese culture, unlike their Sinophile predecessors. Broullion, the second
superior of the mission, thought Chinese culture polie (superficially civilized),
but lacking in learning and good education.34
Chinese education was, he thought, a short-term expedient to evade the
charge of Europeanizing, which in time would be replaced by Christianity
and European civilization.35 He was aware of the apparent contradiction with
his Jesuit predecessors views, but explained it by saying that China had
changed.36 This was the same rationalization invoked when the prohibition of
Chinese Rites in 1939 was abandoned. The church does not change, it must be
China that has changed.
Another area of contrast between the old mission and the new was the
extent of clericalization of the Chinese church. During the years of perse-
cution, not only had the Catholic Church gone underground, but the
shortage of priests had led to the rise of community leaders, and especially
the virgins, celibate church women living with their families, leading
prayer services, teaching catechism, and often baptizing and comforting
33 When de la Servire made his tour of the French mission in 190810 (described in Croquis
de Chine, Paris 1912) in the course of writing his history of the Jiangnan mission, he
reported on the increasing political activity of the non-Christian teachers and students in
Shanghai and applauded the decision of the mission superior to replace almost all the
non-Christian teachers with Christians in order to depoliticize the schools. Then, to his
surprise, he found the Christian teachers and students joining in the agitation. Qui let
cru!, he exclaims (p. 24). This was, of course, immediately before the 1911 revolution.
35 Ibid., 118117.
36 Ibid., 178. Charles Lavoll when reviewing Broullion for the Revue des Deux Mondes while
praising the book claimed to find during his 1845 visit to Shanghai no grounds for such a
sweeping condemnation (Les Jsuites en Chine, 530531).
272 Rule
the dying.37 Catechists, too, had considerable autonomy and worked

peacefully alongside the Chinese priests. The prayer services often used
chants composed by the old Jesuits or, more recently, the Lazarists from
Macao. Both the lay leaders and the virgins were tolerated at first out of
necessity, but then systematically placed under clerical control.
The European priests consistently compared the virgins, to their detri-
ment, with European nuns. The Lazarist Pierre Lavaissire reported in 1840, the
year after he arrived in Nanjing: they wear silk, they live with their families,
they gossip, they move around, they talk to men, and they impose their opin-
ions on the Chinese priests.38 They have no center (milieu), being governed
neither by rule nor a husband.39 He wrote, My major preoccupation is the
extermination of the use of silk by the virgins and of the contacts they have
with their neighbours and relatives, so often a source of unfortunate scan-
dals.40 He also deprecated the catechists who, in the absence of priests, teach
a degraded Christianity.41
Besi reported to the cardinal prefect of Propaganda Fide soon after his
arrival in Jiangnan that during Mass the virgins chant the Gospel aloud (pre-
sumably in Chinese which the people could understand), drowning out the
poor priest who read it in a low voice (in Latin, which was unintelligible to the
congregation).42 He continued, They are not only cantors, Your Eminence, but
37 Broullion gives an interesting description of the Christian communities in rural Jiangnan

around 1850 with houses built to surround and conceal a Christian meeting place (or
gongsuo, place of worship) in the centre which could be quickly cleared of all objects
used for worship in case of a report to the authorities (Mmoire, 5758).
38 Lavaissire to Le Go, the Director of the Lazarist Paris seminary, Mmoires de la
Congregation de la Mission (Paris: Congrgation de la Mission, 1866), 726733.
39 Ibid., 729. The letter is also notable for its implicitly anti-Jesuit rhetoric. He is in Jiangnan,
he says, to cut the horns of the devil who reigns in this region, not to entice the inhabit-
ants with mathematics and cords of silk; our only weapon is the crucifix (thus endorsing
three of the old charges against the Jesuits).
40 Ibid., 728. The obsession of Lavaissire and others with wearing silk is curious and paral-
lels the frequent use of this as a charge against the old Jesuits. As they replied at the time,
silk in China is cheap, hardly a luxury fabric and required when paying formal visits. But
there seems to be an inveterate association on the part of many Europeans with effemi-
nacy and ostentation perhaps due to its almost exclusive use by women in the West, per-
haps also to ancient Roman sumptuary laws.
41 Ibid., 727.
42 The old custom of Chinese Christians chanting prayersperhaps an echo of Buddhist
practicewas a cause of dismay and complaint to many nineteenth-century missionaries.
See, for example, Bernard Laribe CM, Lettre de M. Laribe, missionnaire apostolique en
deaconesses and deaconesses more powerful than those of Christian antiq-

uity.43 This was an affront to a nineteenth-century Roman prelate and, it
would seem, to the French Jesuits too.
This led to a crisis during Besis administration. Late in 1845, Besi issued a
series of regulations to bring order to his diocese.44 His instructions primarily
involved playing down the leading role of the virgins in prayer services. They
were not to recite or chant the prayers alone, but the whole congregation
should recite them, men and women alternately. God had decreed that men
and women should be married except for men who become priests or religious
and women who withdraw from the world. These must be bound by a rule and
not usurp the role of the priest.45
Some, at least, of the old Christians were outraged at this breach of customs,
which they regarded as both Chinese and their inheritance from the seven-
teenth century. One, a catechist, published a pamphlet attacking Besis regula-
tions and their implementation by his vicar Gotteland which he entitled The
Opinion of the People is Clear.46 Gotteland, in turn, wrote a fierce reply.47
Later commentators like de la Servire are dismissive of the complaints but
the exchange is worth close attention, not least for the clash of ecclesiologies
involved.48
Chine, M. Etienne, procureur-gnral de la Congrgation de St-Lazare, Paris, Annales

de la Propagation de la Foi 54 (Sept. 1837): 5666.
43 Letter of 20 September 1842, cited in de la Servire, Histoire, 1:24.
44 Until recently, the only source for these regulations and their aftermath was a summary
account in de la Servire, Histoire, 1:9294. However the three Chinese pamphlets at the
core of the dispute have now been published in Chinese Christian Texts from the Zikawei
Library (Taipei: Fujen Catholic University, 1996), vol. 5, Nos. 26, 27, 28. They deserve much
more detailed analysis that is possible here and a good beginning has been made by
Mungello in The return of the Jesuits.
45 Ben Zhujiao Leisi Luo [Regulations of Bishop Luo [Besi]], in Chinese
Christian Texts from the Zikawei Library, 5:202738.
46 Zhaoran gonglun , in Chinese Christian Texts from the Zikawei Library,
5:203977.
47 In Chinese Christian Texts from the Zikawei Library, 5:2079119 (from a manuscript copy; it
may never have been published). The title given in the collection, Wubang lun
[False Accusations], is not in the text, but accurately represents its contents.
48 De la Servire implies without quite saying (he uses the evasive dit-on) that the catechist
whom he does not identify had been dismissed by the Jesuits and was acting out of malice
(Histoire, 1:9192). Unfortunately he is not identified by name in the pamphlet but the
postface is dated Pentecost 1846 and the place of compilation as Huangtang
(Zhaoran gonglun, 2077).
274 Rule
The catechist, as well as defending old practices, mounts a general attack on

the newly arrived missionaries. He begins:
The Western scholars do not understand how to employ the classics in

persuading people to enter the church and inducing people to get to
heaven if they should happen to meet learned non-Christians. If they
should want to engage in learned discussions and controversy they are
unable to respond when they encounter the thinking of those outside the
church. They say things like: These people are in great error, they are
mistaken, full of wild ideas. How can they be regarded as learned men let
alone discuss philosophical matters?49
To which Gotteland replied that such work would take time, and that the
urgent need of the church was the administration of the sacraments. However,
Gottelund does not express great enthusiasm for the old engagement with
Confucianism and Chinese elite culture. And he was not impressed by the cat-
echists citing the gospel against his bishop and pastor.50
The critic focuses, however, on changes in practices. He accuses Fr. Nan
(Gotteland) of allowing the remarriage of widows (at least that is how I inter-
pret a marginal addition: Mr. Nan performed a marriage ceremony for a
woman who had two husbands).51 The bishop and his vicar show no respect
for the Confucian sages52 and Confucianism.53 In the sixth chapter of com-
plaints, the author accuses the newcomers of prohibiting the ancient custom
approved by six popes of chanting the prayers together and in its place imposing
49 Zhaoran gonglun, 2041 (my translation). This first chapter is entitled simply Missionaries
[chuanjiao ].
50 The frequent quotation of phrases from the Gospels to strengthen his points is not only
apposite, but shows that the charge of the pre-modern Catholic Church ignoring the
Bible in China is a false one. Among many such citations, the author complains of using
church funds for building churches instead of feeding the poor as Jesus directed (Zhaoran
gonglun, 2044); invokes Jesuss saying that he is the tree and his followers the branches to
oppose clericalism (2042); and urges an outgoing pastoral approach by citing the example
of the Good Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one lost sheep (2071).
51 (Zhaoran gonglun, 2047). There are other possibilities; invoking the
so-called Pauline privilege to allow remarriage of a converted Catholic woman, or marrying
an abandoned concubine. Given the sensitivity of the topic, earlier Jesuit missionaries had
been slow to interfere in Chinese marriage arrangements except to prescribe monogamy.
52 Zhaoran gonglun, 204953 on.
53 Ibid., 205357 on.
alternate chanting by men and women. The remaining chapters deal with the
new regulations about the virgins and church leaders.54
In light of the surviving sources, it is impossible to determine how typical of
the sentiments of the old Christians of Jiangnan were the views of the author
of The Opinion of the People. And some of the new missionaries had a more
positive view of the virgins. Franois Estve, for example, described them as
angels and the flower of Christianity.
They are a very great help in instructing the ignorant, baptizing and look-
ing after abandoned children, exhorting the pagans in danger of death. If
one is deaf to their exhortations, one cannot at least refrain from praising
their zeal and respecting their virtue. Everything that the Sisters of St.
Vincent de Paul do in Europe, the Chinese virgins are capable of doing.55
The future lay with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and a highly centralized
and clericalized Chinese Catholic Church. However, lay leadership, covert
evangelization, and house churches returned in the mid-twentieth century
and enabled the survival of the Catholic Church in China through a new period
of persecution and expulsion of missionaries. The old traditions were not com-
pletely lost.
Conclusion
As a historian of the Chinese Rites Controversy I have searched in vain for any
reference to those old quarrels in the writings of the Jesuits returning to China.
That in itself is significant. Not only had they taken an oath to observe the pro-
hibitions imposed in 1704, 1715, and 1742 on permitting their Chinese flocks to
practice ancestor rituals and rituals in honor of Confucius and using certain
Chinese terms for the Christian God,56 they were forbidden to even write on
the subjecta prohibition generally observed by the Jesuits and ignored by
their adversaries. In time, as the manpower crisis eased and Jesuit scholarly
54 Ibid., 205759 on . Besi ironically had presented this as in accordance with Chinese
rules of propriety. His successor, Marasca, sensibly ruled that men and women could
chant together where there was no offense against local sensibilities (de la Serviere,
Histoire, 1:93).
55 Quoted from a letter of 1 June 1846 in de la Serviere, Histoire, 1:130.
56 Clement XIs Cum Deus optimus, 20 November 1704 (but published later) and Ex illa die, 11
July 1715; Benedict XIVs Ex quo singulari, 11 July 1842.
276 Rule
institutions were founded in China, the tactic used in the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury was resumed.57 Scholarly works, mostly translations of classics and
Confucian works, appeared in which both the language and the annotations
subtly supported the old Jesuit position.58
Time has proven that Gotteland was right in defending himself and his col-
leagues from the charge of neglect of classical Chinese scholarship. The exper-
tise acquired by some members of the old mission was gradual, cumulative,
and dependent on the aid of Christian scholars. Some of the old involvement
with these questions returned, but in a new environment: the Jesuits were now
associated with the modernizing elite, or a minority within them, rather than
the conservative scholars or the radical critics of Confucianism. One tactic was
to discuss Confucianism as philosophy rather than religion, thus conforming
to a contemporary European paradigm.59 Another was to regard it as a purely
historical phenomenon with no current implications.60 A third was to find par-
allels between Chinese (mainly Confucian) and Christian theological tradi-
tions, indeed to suggest direct influences.61
Since Matteo Ricci, many Jesuits had maintained a distinction between an
original pure Confucianism and a debased materialistic, even atheistic later
Confucianism. Some Jesuits writers on Confucianism abandoned the first,
while emphasizing the second, thus implicitly supporting the ban on Confucian
rituals.62 Others, particularly in the twentieth century, took a serious interest
in Daoism and Buddhism, and began to explore their spiritualities.63 And
57 Admittedly, many of the main Jesuit works of sinology were in fact published after the
suppression by ex-Jesuits, but they had been written much earlier. Such, for example, are
the sixteen volumes of the Mmoires concernant Ihistoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs,
les usages, etc., des chinois, par les missionnaires de Pekin, (Paris: Nyen, Treuttel & Wrtz,
17761814).
58 See the translations of Seraphin Couvreur S.J. especially of the ritual books.
59 This is especially the case in the voluminous works of Leon Wieger S.J.
60 The 65 volumes of the Shanghai based Varits Sinologiques series published before the
Second World War are mostly scientific and descriptive rather than evaluative.
61 As in the numerous works of Henri Bernard (-Matre) S.J., especially Sagesse chinoise et
philosophie chrtienne, (Tientsin: Cathasia, 1935).
62 See Stanislas Le Gall S.J., Le philosophe Tchou Hi, sa doctrine, son influence (Shanghai:
Imprimerie de la Mission catholique a lorphelinat de Tou-s-wi, 1894). Le Gall strongly
supports the thesis, now largely discredited, that Zhu Xis philosophy was atheistic and
materialistic. This was the basis of the argument of Bishop Charles Maigrot whose inter-
vention in 1693 precipitated the 1704 anti-Rites decision. However, its logical compatibil-
ity with the alleged idolatry of the same scholars is dubious.
63 A good example is Yves Raguin S.J., Ways of Contemplation East and West, 4 parts (Taipei:
Ricci Institute for Chinese Studies, 19932001).
finally, at the end of the twentieth century there began serious ventures in
what has been labeled Sinotheology.
In Taiwan, ancestor rituals have become naturalized and Christianized in
the Catholic Church. They have undergone what Ricci foresaw: the fusion of
Catholic beliefs such as survival after death, purgatory, and the communion of
saints with Chinese cultural expression.
Yet this belated acceptance of Chinese customs has not greatly increased
the attractiveness of Christianity to the Chinese in China or the Chinese dias-
pora. One remarkable feature of the explosive growth of Christianity in China
since the 1980s has been the comparative lack of success of the Catholic
Church despite the Protestant churches generally taking a harder line on pop-
ular religious practices including ancestor rituals. Why is this so? Is it, perhaps,
that the Catholic Church has never lost the appearance of foreigness it dis-
played in the nineteenth century? The role of the Vatican in the appointment
of bishops, the distrust of local and lay initiatives, and a theology and liturgy
that is centralized and imposed uniformly: all these tendencies within the
Catholic Church at the time of the return of the Jesuits to China in the 1840s
have continued to develop.
There has been a third return of the Jesuits to China in the last three decades,
but in a much lower key and less institutional form. Jesuit research institutes
and universities outside China have advanced studies of China, and individual
Jesuits have taught in Chinese universities. This is closer to the sixteenth cen-
tury beginnings of the Jesuit presence in China than the nineteenth century
and perhaps closer to the Jesuit ideal of all things to all men. Its outcome
remains uncertain.
chapter 16
Rising from the Ashes

The Gothic Revival and the Architecture of the New Society of Jesus
in China and Macao
Csar Guillen-Nuez
This essay considers the artistic and architectural developments out of which
the Gothic revival emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and argues that this
revival had special significance for the new Society of Jesus. It was at this time
the term Jesuit style was first coined in a defamatory sensea continuation of
the anti-Jesuitism of the previous century. The Jesuit style was understood to
be the antithesis of the nationalism and spirituality encapsulated by Gothic
architecture. In the midst of this remarkable cultural phenomenon, and in
response to the ambivalent reception of the restored order, some Jesuits and
their adherents set out to prove the falsity of these arguments.1 The Gothicism
of the age was a powerful literary and artistic currentan expression of spiri-
tual rebirth in the Westin which Roman Catholic architects and Jesuit writ-
ers were highly influential. By 1850 the neo-Gothic had entered its late phase
and was the accepted style for church architecture in Europe and remained so
up to the early twentieth century. Its impact was global and was adopted by the
Jesuits for their most prestigious new building in China, the church of Saint
Ignatius in Shanghai. The influence of the Gothic revival can also be seen in
the rebuilt neo-Baroque church of the Immaculate Conception in Beijing, the
first Christian church erected in the city by the Jesuits under the direction of
Matteo Ricci three hundred years earlier.
Anyone who researches the periods Jesuit architecture in China encoun-
ters limitations that, in important respects, are similar to those that hinder the
broader study of the history of the Chinese Roman Catholic missions.2 The
1 Joseph Braun, S.J., first systematically studied Jesuit churches of the period in Europe and
showed that, apart from Baroque, there were many in the Gothic style, especially in Germany.
Joseph Braun, Die Kirchenbauten der deutschen Jesuiten (Freiburg in Breisgau: Herder, 1908),
24, 9191. Joris Snaet and Krista de Jonge, The Architecture of the Jesuits in the Southern
Low Countries: A State of the Art, in La arquitectura jesuitica: Actas del Simposio Internacional,
Zaragoza, 9, 10, 11 de diciembre, 2010 (Zaragoza: Institucin Fernando el Catlico, 2012),
252259.
2 Li Jianhua (Fr. Augustine Li), Saving History: the urgent need for collecting historical data on the
Catholic Church in China, http://www.missionstudies.org/archive/4groups/daboh/balaton2008/
daboh08-li.pdf (accessed 10 January 2013).

Rising From The Ashes 279
latter suffers from the destruction or loss of archival material after various peri-
ods of anti-foreign and anti-Christian revolts, such as the Boxer Rebellion and
the Cultural Revolution. In the case of Roman Catholic architecture, there was
a similar loss of historical archives and an attempt to destroy many churches
during violent upheavals. Many of the buildings that survive are either new
constructions or structures that have been greatly restored, with an inevitable
loss of artistic quality. For this reason the following study does not attempt to
offer more than a tentative examination and exploration of the influence that
the Gothic revival exerted on the restored Society of Jesus and its main con-
struction in China. Hopefully it will inspire others to produce more detailed
publications or monographs on the buildings discussed.
The Difficult Question of the Jesuit Style in Nineteenth-Century

Europe
The existence of a Jesuit style has been debated at great length in recent
scholarship. Before proceeding to other topics, it is worth briefly discussing this
debate to obtain a number of insights regarding the style or styles adopted by
the Jesuits for their nineteenth- and early twentieth-century churches in China.
The Jesuit style as an artistic and architectural term only appeared in
the 1840s. Notwithstanding the heated arguments to which this apparently
innocuous-sounding term has given rise, it is only in comparatively recent times
that a small number of researchers have begun to wonder about its derivation.
Where, when, and why did the concept of a style peculiar to the architecture
and art of the Society of Jesus first originate and, more importantly, who coined
the phrase that claimed to describe it? These questions have now been satisfac-
torily answered.3 Although the exact date of the terms first appearance still
3 A fine exposition of the emergence of the term is in Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit
Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1516, 2832. See also, Gauvin
Alexander Bailey, Le style jsuite nexiste pas: Jesuit Corporate Culture and the Visual Arts,
in The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 15401773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1999), 3846; and Giovanni Sale, S.J., Architectural Simplicity and Jesuit Architecture, in The
Jesuits and the Arts 15401773, eds. John W. OMalley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey and
Giovanni Sale, S.J. (Philadelphia: St. Josephs University Press, 2005), 29. The exuberant archi-
tectural and decorative style that the nineteenth century associated with the Jesuits is further
discussed by Evonne Levy, Propaganda, 3235, passim. Illustrations of it are found in The
Jesuits and the Arts, e.g., figs.2.17, 4.16, 4.19, 4.48, 4.40, 4.52, 5.75, 5.78, 9.15, 9.13, 9.20, 9.30, 10.18.
See also Marcello Fagiolo, The Scene of Glory: The Triumph of the Baroque in the Theatrical
Work of the Jesuits, The Jesuits and the Arts, 231246.
280 Guillen-Nuez
eludes art historians, the term Jesuitenstil [Jesuit style], was already in use in
Germany by 184243.4 Coming after the anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment
and French Revolution, the anti-clerical ideology of the nineteenth century
continued its attack on the Society of Jesus even after its restoration. The deni-
gration of Jesuit architecture was achieved by associating Jesuit constructions
with a style that was considered a degeneration of Renaissance architecture.
Recent scholarship claims that the enigmatic beginnings of this controver-
sial term can be traced back to an anonymous entry in the 1845 publication
of Brockhauss Allgemeine deutche Real-Enzyklopdie.5 By the middle of the
last century the anonymous writer was identified as none other than Jacob
Burckhardt.6 Burckhardt, who in his youth had rejected his theological studies
in Calvinist Switzerland and turned to the history of art instead,7 started his
academic life as a medievalist. However, in later years he famously attempted
to identify the Italian Renaissance as a culture distinguishable from that of the
Middle Ages. Part of his project was to define periods in Western art at a time
when modern historical periodization was in a state of flux.
In his entry Burkhardt dismissed Jesuit architecture and decoration as hol-
low and theatrical; a debased form of mid-seventeenth century Italian architec-
ture. He argued that it reflected the broader institutional nature of the Society
of Jesus. There are several remarkable points here. The first is that Burckhardt
was trained as a medievalist. Therefore, he had acquired a bias in favor of Gothic
architecture that was widespread at the time in France, Germany, Britain, and
his own country. The second is that, without being aware of it, Burckhardt was
imputing the elaborate forms of the Baroque that he believed had corrupted
the purity of classical forms to the Jesuits. Ironically, the style he condemned
is the High Baroque style that has received so much praise from modern art
historians.8 In fact, the term Jesuit style that Burckhardt coined emerged about
4 Bailey traces its appearance to the 1843 publication of Brockhauss German encyclopedia.
Bailey, Le style jsuite, 40. Levy places it a year earlier (Levy, Propaganda, 16, 29). See also
Bailey, Le style jsuite, 74 note 13, on the apparently different editions of Brockhauss ency-
clopedia used by him and by Levy.
5 Levy, Propaganda, 2930, 251, ft 69.
6 Levy, Propaganda, 250, ft 67, gives details of the Swiss historian Werner Kaegi, who first iden-
tified its writer in his 19471982 biography of Burckhardt.
7 Irene Gordon, Introduction, in Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
trans. Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore, ed. Irene Gordon (New York: Mentor Book,
1960), viiiix.
8 Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 16001750: The High Baroque, 16251675, 6th
edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 2. Peter and Linda Murray, A Dictionary of
Art and Artists (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1959), 1617.
half a century before the Baroque style had been identified by architectural
historians.9 Burckhardts poor opinion of the architecture of the Jesuits is a
good example of the aesthetic preconceptions of the age.
For late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Catholic champions of the
restored Society of Jesus it was a matter of aesthetical survival to distance the
Jesuits from the style of the Baroque. A number of influential scholars and writ-
ers thought it necessary to prove the Jesuits had a well-established architectural
pedigree in building in a Gothic style. The leading scholar arguing the Jesuit
case was the German Jesuit Joseph A. Braun, but there had been an important
defender of the Jesuits as exponents of Gothic architecture in Belgium and
Northern France earlier in the twentieth century. As a frequent contributor to
the French Journal Bulletin Monumental, Louis Serbat (18751953) published
several pieces on Gothic architecture in the bulletin, and as early as 1902 he
wrote specifically on the seventeenth-century Gothic architecture of the Jesuits.
In this article, he argued that although the Jesuits did indeed use elaborate
baroque styles in certain regions to accommodate a local taste for excessive
ornamentation (namely, the Low Countries), they had already made sound use of
the Gothic style since the seventeenth century. Serbat admitted that the Jesuits
had been the inventors and propagators of Baroque architecture, but he argued
that regarding all the constructions of the Jesuits one should have, quelques
rserves sur la valeur de lexpression style jsuite, puisquelle peut sappliquer
indistinctement a tous ces difices (some reservations about the value of the
expression Jesuit style, since it can be applied indiscriminately to all these
buildings).10 That is to say, the term was meaningless if confined to their
Baroque buildings. In the estimation of these scholars the Gothic had been very
much a part of the Jesuit architectural vocabulary in the past and therefore
there was little reason to doubt the Jesuits relevance for the Gothic revival
movement.
The Gothic Revival
At the time of the Jesuits restoration, the gradual emergence of a neo-Gothic

style in both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastical constructions in Europe
and the Americas was perceived by contemporaries as a return to a more spiri-
tual, less rationally circumscribed art. Neo-Gothic architecture became the
counterpart to those eighteenth-century religious and civic buildings that had
9 Levy, Propaganda, 16.

10 LArchitecture Gothique des Jsuites au XIIe Sicle, Bulletin Monumental 66 (1902): 326.
282 Guillen-Nuez
emerged under the influence of the Enlightenment and that had adopted the
rational architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Two historical footnotes
provide insights to the main arguments here. The industrial revolution had
exploded in Britain, and the young German industrialist Friedrich Engels was
so shocked by the plight of the poor after living and working in Manchester
from 184244 that he penned Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England [The
Condition of the Working Class in England], published in Leipzig11 just about
the time the concept of the Jesuit style was emerging. The suffering of the
poor during the industrial revolution and the ensuing spiritual crisis provoked
another response. There was now a great need for Christian action, especially
in the form of charities and churches providing both material aid and spiritual
comfort. There were also thinkers who, unlike Engels and Karl Marx, were
moving towards socialist ideas without entirely abandoning the teachings of
Christianity, such as Thomas Carlyle (17951881), John Ruskin (18191900), and
others. Socialist-minded artists and architects looked to the past and found
answers in the Middle Ages and its cathedrals. Even today England has over
9,000 medieval church buildings.12 These developments in architecture did not
fail to escape the eye and pencil of the greatest Jesuit poet of the age, Gerard
Manley Hopkins.13
The galaxy of Gothic revival architects in Europe is impressive, and even
though John Ruskin denied the identification of modern Catholicism with
the Gothic movement,14 what is significant about these architects is how many
of them had a direct connection to Roman Catholicism. In Austria and
Germany, Vincenz Statz (18191898) and Friedrich von Schmidt (18251891)
were Catholics. In the Netherlands, Peter J.H. Cuypers (18271921) was a
Catholic, and Wilhelm Victor Alfred Tepe (18401920) worked for Catholics
patrons. The greatest exponent of the Gothic revival in Britain with his cathe-
drals and parish churches was Augustus Pugin (18121852), who converted to
Roman Catholicism. In France, the most influential champion of the Gothic
revival, Eugne Violet-le-Duc (18141879), did not have the same religious con-
victions, but his restoration work on medieval architecture such as Notre Dame
11 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_Class_in_England_in_1844
(accessed 14 June 2013).
12 The Cambridge Movement: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge, England:
Unknown, 1962), 2, http://www.questia.com/read/6296722.
13 Catherine Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 86110.
14 Kristine Ottesen Garrigan, Ruskin on Architecture: His Thoughts and Influence, (The
University of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 1973), 23.
in Paris brought him into the sphere of the Catholic revival.15 In much of their
output these architects, considered leading exponents of the genre in their
own lifetimes, designed civic and religious buildings that were inspired by
native Gothic styles and traditions, often as an expression of deep religious
conviction, but also of the nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century
in their countries of origin. For this reason the movement runs the gamut from
early to late Gothic, with variations in between.
Typical of the Gothic revival was the role played by the ecclesiologists of
the Cambridge Camden Society in England. The ecclesiologists claimed to
scientifically study and catalogue every feature of a Gothic church in an
attempt to recreate the spirituality of the Middle Ages. Although most were
staunch High Church of England members some greatly admired Augustus
Pugins ideas.16 Through his deep study of Gothic architecture, in buildings
such as St. Chads Cathedral, Birmingham (1841), Pugin developed into one of
the earliest exponents of the simplicity of forms and materials: the modern
ideal that form should follow function. As will be argued later, much of Pugins
vision of religious Gothic architecturewhich had such a profound influ-
ence on British architectsmay be seen in the Jesuits main neo-Gothic con-
struction in China.
Gothic Revival in the China Mission
At almost the same time as the concept of the Jesuit style was being debated
in Germany, and on the eve of the First Opium War (183942), two French
Jesuits assigned to re-establish the China mission, Claude Gotteland (18031856)
and Eugne-Franois Estve (18071848) arrived in Shanghai, later to be joined
by Benjamin Brueyre (18101880).17 Prior to their arrival, the fate of the Jesuits
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century churches in the Middle Kingdom is
15 Kenneth Scott Latourette, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age: A History of Christianity in

the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Harper: New York, 1958), 402404.
16 The Cambridge Movement, 10, 14, 28, 4851. Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival, An Essay in the
History of Taste (John Murray: London, 1995 reprint), 150174. Cambridge Camden Society,
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cambridge
_Camden_Society&oldid=563059977 (accessed 9 December 2013).
17 Joseph Sebes and John W. Witek, 1. Vuelta de los Jesuitas a China (1841), in dhcj 1:781
782. Peter W. Fay, The French Catholic Mission in China during the Opium War, Modern
Asian Studies 4/2 (March 1970): 127.
284 Guillen-Nuez
noteworthy because of their relentless destruction by a number of reactionary

Qing rulers in Beijing and elsewhere in China. Before that, the Jesuit missions
were reportedly flourishing. A 1703 summary report on the Chinese vice-province
written in Rome by the Bavarian missionary Gaspar Castner (16651709), for Pope
Clement XI during the heated days of the rites controversy is a good example of
claims made by the missionaries, although today it is difficult to assess the real
significance of this report because the Jesuits were attempting to advance their
cause. Castner states that the Jesuits were active in twelve provinces, minister-
ing to some 200,000 baptized Christians. They had 300 churches and chapels, as
well as five colleges and thirty-six residences. Among these there were proba-
bly buildings that followed traditional Chinese architectural forms, but more
than anything the report offers the historian of art tantalizing visions of
European structures in late Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo styles. Many of
the churches may have vanished, but in the rough calculations of specialists,
during the first three decades of the nineteenth century the number of Chinese
Catholics probably remained steady outside the capital, clandestinely minis-
tered to by a number of European missionaries and native priests.18
With the signing of the 184244 treatises between China and the Western
powers at the end of the First Opium War a dramatic reversal occurred in the
number of missionaries entering China and the new Christian churches and
chapels that emerged. There were already twenty-nine French Catholic mis-
sionaries by 1839 (half of them Lazarists), with the total number of missionaries
rising to seventy-five by 1843, largely under the protection of France.19 As regards
the Jesuits there were fifty-eight members of the order after the signing of the
new treaties, an increase that continued during the last decades of the century,
18 A good summary of the situation for Roman Catholics, the Jesuits, and the fate of their
earlier churches in Beijing, is Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and city life, 14001900
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 582584. On Castner see Witeks entry,
Castner (Kastner), Gaspar (Kasper), in dhcj 1:705706. On numbers of Catholics see The
Chinese Repository, Second Edition (Maruzen Co. Ltd.: Canton, 1 May 1832-April 1833), 443.
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: The
Macmillan Co., 1929), 182183. Peter W. Fay, The French Catholic Mission in China, 118.
Fay gives the names of European missionaries in China, ibid. See also Luke Clossey,
Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 42 .
19 Latourette, A History of Christian Missions, 306313. The treaties were signed between 1842
and 1844 at the end of the First Opium War, namely, that of the city of Nanjing with Great
Britain (1842), the Treaty of Whampoa with France (1844) and between China and the
United States signed on a small round stone table in the Kun Yam Temple in the village of
Mongha, just outside the Portuguese colonial city of Macao (1844).
with members of the Society of Jesus prominent in Shanghai where, again,

French Jesuits were dominant.20
There was an equally dramatic stylistic change in the Roman Catholic
structures that arose throughout the Qing Empire. One may look critically at
the Gothic churches of China as outgrowths of Social Darwinism that dic-
tated the conduct of the principal Western imperial powers of the day,
namely, Great Britain, France, Germany, and later Russia and the United
States. In this evolutionary concept of historya corruption of Charles
Darwins theoriesQing China was another of the dying nations of the
world that could only benefit from the imposition of Europes more evolved
civilization.21 While not downplaying the more dreadful results of nine-
teenth-century Western imperialism in China, which included proselytizing
to the heathen as a justification for colonization, it is impossible to separate
the style of these churches from the historical and social conditions out of
which the Gothic revival originally developed in Europe. Social conditions in
China were in certain respects very different from those of the West, but the
emergence of Neo-Gothic churches and educational and charitable institu-
tions by the Jesuits and other Catholic religious orders cannot be completely
divorced from the humanitarian and artistic ideals that gave birth to the
movement in Europe.
The arrival of the Gothic revival in China is a case of history repeating itself,
with European missionaries as natural bearers of Western artistic and architec-
tural styles to the rest of the world, as had previously happened in Spanish and
Portuguese settlements in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The concept of a European style as the correct style for the architec-
ture of Catholic churches in the China mission had originated in 1610 with the
Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci.22
20 The Cambridge History of China, vol. 10: Late Ching 18001911, Part 1, ed. John King Fairbank
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 228229, 554. Fay, The French Catholic
Mission, 118.
21 The term dying nations was coined by the British prime minister, the marquis of
Salisbury, at the end of the century. See Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China, Foreign
Devils in the Qing Empire, 18421914, (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 344345. Rosario de la
Torre del Ro, La prensa madrilea y el discurso de Lord Salisbury sobre las naciones
moribundas (Londres, Albert Hall, 4 mayo 1898), in Cuadernos de historia moderna y con-
tempornea 6 (1985): 163173.
22 At the time of Ricci the style for Roman Catholic churches was late-Mannerist. See Fonti
Ricciane 2:535, ft 4 and 536 and Csar Guillen Nuez, Matteo Ricci, the Nantang, and the
Introduction of Roman Catholic Church Architecture to Beijing, in Portrait of a Jesuit:
Matteo Ricci (Macao: Macau Ricci Institute, 2010), 101115.
286 Guillen-Nuez
Following Riccis lead, the three main public churches built by the Jesuits
during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties were the Nantang (South
Church), the Dongtang (East Church) and the Beitang (North Church),
all built in the styles popular at the time. These buildings, which had been
handed to the Lazarists, underwent reconstruction and suffered various adver-
sities, including the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, when the Beitang was besieged and
attacked, and the Nantang and Dongtang set alight.23 But in the nineteenth
century, as if from the ashes, all three churches had emerged in a number of
revival styles.
Donations
It is not on account of their European style as such that Western nineteenth-

century churches mark the start of a new phase for the Jesuits China mission.
As important as the introduction of Gothic revival architecture was for this
period in China, the way in which land was acquired for the construction of
neo-Gothic and other revival churches and religious buildings offers a more
penetrating insight.
The three main public churches built by the Jesuits in Beijing were erected
with the approval and often the support of Chinese emperors, as well as
wealthy high-ranking Chinese. The Nantang church was constructed near the
Xuanwumen, one of the gates of Beijings ancient city walls, outside the
Imperial City, but inside the Tartar City. Originally a small chapel built by
Matteo Ricci in 1610, it evolved into a large public church in 1650 under Adam
Schall von Bell. Ricci obtained the approval of the Ming Wanli emperor to
build his residence and chapel, and later enlargements, reconstructions, or
restorations received generous monetary and official support from the Qing
Shunzhi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors.
The Nantang had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary sometime in the seven-
teenth century, but it only gained its dedication to the Immaculate Conception
in 1776, which it retains today. It was considered the principal Jesuit church in
23 Diana Preston, The Boxer Rebellion: The Dramatic Story of Chinas War on Foreigners that
Shook the World in the Summer of 1900 (New York: Walker & Company, 2000), 43, 71, 75,
262274, 355356. Anthony E. Clark, Chinas Saints, Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing
(16441911) (Lehigh University Press: Bethlehem, 2011), 96110, 138139. William Devine,
The Four Churches of Peking (London/Tientsin: Burns, Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1930),
187201.
the whole of China and was declared a cathedral in 1690. After it was burned
down at the end of the eighteenth century, it remained in poor condition until
the treaty of 1860, when the Chinese government returned church property. The
previous church was then rebuilt, but was destroyed by the Boxers in 1900.24 It
was entirely rebuilt in the early twentieth century as a grand neo-Baroque build-
ing, with two strikingly large ornamental scrolls adorning its faade, and cannot
be classified as a neo-Gothic church. But it nonetheless displays the dimensions,
height and spaciousness characteristic of Gothic cathedrals, enlarged with six
bays per aisle and a deep choir. It can accommodate thousands of worshippers,
and it is arguable that the dominance of the Gothic revival influenced the
dimensions and plan of the nineteenth-century church and of the one that
exists today (Figs.16.1 and 16.2).25 Although its design has been very reasonably
attributed to the French Lazarist priest and architect Pierre-Marie-Alphonse
Favier (18371905), its large faade is still puzzling as it is evidently based on that
of the 1692 Jesuit Assumption Chapel at Cambrai, France, stripped of rusticated
columns and decoration, with an altered curly gable and two additional side
entrances (Fig.16.3).
The Dongtang was built with the permission of the Shunzhi emperor, who
had previously made a gift of a house to the Jesuits in 1653 with construction
funds provided by Justa Chao, a noble lady who had converted to Catholicism.26
During the following centuries it suffered reconstructions or restorations due
to a number of vicissitudes. The grey granite church that stands today, dating
to the first decade of the last century, is mainly a restored version of a church
built in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since it is faithful enough to
its original, it is possible to discuss it with its predecessor in mind. It displays
avariety of architectural features from various phases of Italian Renaissance
architecture, its front in particular. The latter is a two-storied, five-bay structure
articulated by clustered pilasters, with three large semicircular entrance
arches. Topped by three cupolas with polygonal drums and bases, it shows
typically Mannerist decoration such as consoles standing on the projecting
entablatures of the pilasters below. The middle cupola, larger than the other
two and standing on a square base, towers above the entrance bay. Today these
24 Guillen Nuez, Matteo Ricci, the Nantang, 104108. Paul Bornet, S.J., Les Ancienes
glises de Pkin, Notes dhistoire, in Le Bulletin Catholique de Pkin, no. 374 (Imprimerie
des Lazaristes: Pekin: November 1944): 527545.
25 I am greatly indebted to architect Francesco Maglioccola of the Parthenope University of
Naples, for providing me with the plans of the Nantang, as well as to Prof. Alan Sweeten
for sharing his researches on this church.
26 Guillen Nuez, Matteo Ricci, the Nantang, 103 and 116, ft 3 and 4.
288 Guillen-Nuez
Figure16.1 Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Nantang), 1904, Beijing.

2008 rendering of elevation of faade of 1904 church by Francesco
Maglioccola. Courtesy of Francesco Maglioccola.
features appear somewhat insipid, but that is evidently the result of its restora-
tion because the church appears impressive in a photograph by George Ernest
Morrison of the end of the nineteenth century.27 The clustered pilasters of the
two storeys are one of the most intriguing features of the faades design. It
27 Old China through G.E. Morrisons eyes, 2, compiled by Shen Jiawei, trans. Dou Kun et al.
(Fuzhou: Fujian Education Press, 2007), 41.
recalls similar pilasters in eighteenth-century drawings of the Nantang, today

in Lisbons Overseas Historical Archives (Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino or
ahu). In the Arquivo, these drawings are described as the church of So Jose,
that is, the Dongtang, but recent scholarship has argued against this.28 The
similarity of the clustered pilasters could nonetheless be an indication that the
now vanished design of the Dongtang resembled that of the Nantang, and that
the faade of the nineteenth-century church simply repeated certain of its fea-
tures as a form of continuity.
Perhaps the most remarkable transformation in modern times is that of the
North Church. It had originally been constructed within the Imperial Palace
grounds (an unheard of privilege) in 1703 with the symbolic name of Saint-
Sauveur [Saint Savior], on land donated by the Kangxi Emperor to the French
Jesuits for curing him from malaria with quininea traditional Quechuan
medicinal plant found by the Italian Jesuit Agustn Salombrini in Peru.29
Today known as Xishiku Catholic Church ), Saint-Sauveur was
rebuilt in 1887 on a new site as a large neo-Gothic church, thus providing a
dramatic example of the arrival of the Gothic revival in the Chinese capital
itself. When it was rebuilt, due to the suppression of the Society of Jesus, the
site had already passed to the Congregation of Priests of the Mission and,
appropriately, it was Alphonse Favier, celebrated for his stand against the
Boxers, who designed it and had it constructed as the French neo-Gothic temple
that stands today.
Faviers large neo-Gothic structure is typical of the times. In nineteenth-
century China, as had been true of India under the British Raj and earlier,
many of the finer examples of ecclesiastical architecture under Catholic and
Protestant missionaries were neo-Gothic structures. Apart from the distinct
Gothic style of the Protestant churches of Britain, dictated by liturgical and
aesthetic considerations, it has been argued that Catholic missionaries tended
to replicate the Gothic-revival style of their particular countries in China as an
expression of their distinct religious identities. These various trends resulted in
Protestant British, as well as Roman Catholic French, Portuguese, Italianate,
British, and Flemish neo-Gothic ecclesiastical buildings arising in the various
Western concessions or settlements into which treaty port cities were divided,
as well as in the two European colonies of Macao and Hong Kong. The French
28 ahu, Cart. Ms.-XICM 758. Guillen Nuez, Matteo Ricci, the Nantang, 109, 114.
29 Ibid., 103. The Italian Jesuit brother-nurse Agustn Salombrini,first observed the use of
quinine among the Incas; the Jesuits brought it from Lima to Europe and later adminis-
tered it to Kangxi in China. Short biography on Salombrini by Enrique Fernndez Garca,
S.J., in dhcj 4:3477.
290 Guillen-Nuez
Figure16.2 Ground plans of Nantang. Drawings by Francesco Maglioccola of ground plans

of 1904 church (left), and of 18th-century church (right).
Courtesy of Francesco Maglioccola.
sphere of influence was demonstrated in the neo-Gothic churches that arose

in Chinas four main urban centers, namely, Beijing, Guanghou, Shanghai,
and Tianjin, where a massive Gothic-revival cathedral had been built before
the 1870 massacre. The Flemish style was used by the missionary architect
Alphonse De Moerloose in Mongolia and northern China for Flemish and
Lazarist missions.30 Typically, De Moerloose produced wonderfully Flemish
neo-Gothic structures that unfortunately were not adapted to climatic
or other conditions in northern China. The tendency to build missionary
30 Thomas Coomans and Wei Lou, Exporting Flemish Gothic architecture to China: mean-
ing and context of the churches of Shebiya (Inner Mongolia) and Xuanhua (Hebei) built
by missionary-architect Alphonse De Moerloose in 19031906, Relicta. Heritage Research
in Flanders 9 (2012): 219262.
Figure16.3 Chapel of Assumption, 1692, Cambrai. Faade by Brother Jean Bgrand,

S.J. (16231694) architect.
(Photo courtesy of Vassil, November 2009)
colonies representative of particular Western nations is evidently the result

of the nationalism inherent in various Gothic-revival styles in Europe.31
Moreover, with few exceptions there was seldom an attempt to build
Christian church structures in a traditional but creative Chinese architec-
tural style.32
31 Coomans and Lou, Exporting Flemish Gothic architecture, 250. The Cambridge
Movement, 106.
32 Thomas Coomans, La creation dun style architectural Sino-Chrtien: Luvre dAdelbert
Gresnigt, moine-artiste bndictin en Chine (19271932), Revue Bndictine 123 (2013): 126168.
292 Guillen-Nuez
Figure16.5 Cathedral of St. Ignatius, Xujiahui District, Shanghai, 1910. Drawing of ground
plan, with cross section of nave, left isle, and low chapel. Measurements and
annotations in French by Thomas Coomans.
Courtesy of Thomas Coomans, 2011.
It should be reiterated that the Gothic style the Jesuits reproduced in China
was not one they were using for the first time. It had already appeared in the
early-seventeenth century in their churches and colleges in the Low Countries
and elsewhere, as in the 160104 Jesuit church at Tournai, Belgium.33 The sig-
nificance this has for the China mission is that they chose a Gothic-revival style
for their most important new construction, namely, Saint Ignatius Cathedral
in Shanghai.
Saint Ignatius Cathedral, Shanghai
The main Catholic exponents in China of the Gothic-revival style were French
missionaries, including French Jesuits, whose Saint Ignatius in Shanghai
33 Joris Snaet and Krista de Jonge, The Architecture of the Jesuits, 242, passim. Jeffrey
Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship, Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in
Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 124, passim.
is arguably the most outstanding. But before its construction there was an
important example of the style. In the 1860s Bishop Zphirin Guillemin began
the construction of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Guangzhou.34 Bishop
Guillemins belief that contemporary European church architecture was ideal
for Catholic churches in China mirrored that of Matteo Ricci. Bishop
Guillemins cathedral arose inside the city of Guangzhou on what had been the
palace grounds confiscated from Ye Mingchen (18071859), the imperial com-
missioner in charge of foreign affairs. Guillemin had claimed the grounds as
compensation for destroyed religious property. Commissioner Ye was already a
controversial figure in the history of nineteenth-century China. He became
infamous in Canton among the British because of his attack on the Hong Kong
registered lorcha the Arrow and his stiff-necked treatment of Britains Lord
Elgin (18111863), notorious for ordering the destruction of the Yuan Ming Yuan
in 1860, and Baron Jean-Baptiste Louis Gros (17931870), Frances distinguished
ambassador. There is now a tendency to rehabilitate Ye, as well as condemn
Bishop Guillemin as an imperialist who exploited the Anglo-French occupa-
tion of Beijing to build his cathedral.35 But previous scholars have argued that
Ye Mingchens bellicose actions were also responsible for the escalation of hos-
tilities with these two nations and led to the 1856 and 1857 bombardments and
fall of Guangzhou.36
Today a much admired and beloved monument, the Cathedral of the Sacred
Heart is one of the most impressive neo-Gothic structures in East Asia. It was
constructed out of granite, largely to the design of the French architect Antoine
Hermite. Excavation started on June 1863, and the cathedral was fully com-
pleted around 1900 with the addition of stained glass windows. Though the
original ground plan was somewhat smaller, today it consists of a large main
nave measuring 78.70 meters long and 35 meters wide.37 It is a commonplace
that its huge faade is based on that of Saint Clotilde, Pariss first neo-Gothic
church. However, the design of its faade only resembles Saint Clotilde up to
the bottom of the spires, which are rather different.
34 Jean-Paul Wiest, The Building of the Cathedral of Canton: Political, Cultural and
Religious Clashes, Religion and Culture, Past Approaches Present Globalisation Future
Challenges (Macao: Macau Ricci Institute, 2004), 231252.
35 Ibid., 250.
36 Tu Lien-Ch, Yeh Ming-chn, in Eminent Chinese of the Ching Period (16441912), vol. 2,
ed. Arthur W. Hummel (Washington: United States Government Printing Office: 1944),
904905.
37 Wiest, The Building of the Cathedral of Canton, 250.
294 Guillen-Nuez
Saint Clotilde is highly relevant to the Sacred Heart because it was started in
1846, according to the designs of Franz Christian Gau (17901853) and completed
in 1857, just about the time Guangzhou fell to Anglo-French forces. To Frenchmen
like Bishop Guillemin, Saint Clotilde symbolized not only the triumph of the
Gothic revival, but also of Roman Catholicism in France, and to see its counterpart
rising in full splendor in the Middle Kingdom became central to his mission. For
some art historians of the 1960s there was much to condemn in the Gothic revival.
In the same vein as Kenneth Clark criticized Gilbert Scotts gothic output in the
United Kingdom,38 the French art historian Marcel Brion thought poorly of Saint
Clotides architect for being a copyist of the Gothic rather than a real creator.39 It is
therefore arguable that Guangzhous Cathedral of the Sacred Heart is a copy of a
copy, without originality. But even then, these objections cannot detract from the
sense of the sublime sought by Gothic revival architects such as Gau and Hermite.
In contrast to Bishop Guillemins neo-Gothic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart,
the Church of St. Ignatius (Fig. 16.4) was erected after the return to China of
French Jesuits in the middle of the nineteenth century. Barring the plots of land
donated by Ming and Qing emperors to the Jesuits for their residences, churches,
and even burial grounds, there are few donations in the history of the China mis-
sion that can rival that of the Ming scholar Xu Guangqi (15621633), better known
among Christians today by his baptismal name, Paul Siu (). The Xujiahui
(), or Zikawei district of Shanghai is named after the Xu family, Christians
whose patronage of the Jesuits made the Shanghai mission prosper during the
late Ming dynasty. At that time the Jesuits church counted (according to the sev-
enteenth-century Belgian Jesuit Philippe Couplet) as one of the most magnificent
in China, thanks to the generosity of Diego Siu, son of Paul Siu, and his family.40
After the return of the Jesuits in the mid-nineteenth century, it was on these lands
that a new church and the Collge de Saint-Ignace for boys were built.
The present church was rebuilt in a majestic Gothic-revival style by the
Scottish architect William Macdonnell Mitchell Dowdall (b. 1842), who was
active in the 1880s in Shanghai as an independent and evidently, stylistically
versatile architect, since he worked for both Protestant and Catholic clients.41
38 Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival, 175191.

39 Marcel Brion, The Romantic Movement, Larousse Encyclopedia of Modern Art, ed. Ren
Huyghe (London: Paul Hamlyn Ltd, 1965), 42.
40 Philippe Couplet, Historia de una gran seora christiana de la China llamada Doa
Candida Hi (Madrid: Imprenta de Antonio Roman, 1691), 67.
41 I am most grateful to Dr. Thomas Coomans of the University of Leuven for generously
sharing with me the little-known name of the architect, the dates of construction of the
church, and details of its ground plan.
Figure16.4 Cathedral of St. Ignatius, Xujiahui District, Shanghai, 1910: View of main front.
Photo Pyzhou, May 2010.
296 Guillen-Nuez
One of his best-known constructions in the city was the 1886 Union Churchin
what was apparently Dissenting Gothicwhose single spire was torn down by
Red Guards and perhaps accidentally burnt down in 2007. Dowdells Cathedral
of St. Ignatius, built in 1910, became the heart of a large complex of charitable,
educational, and cultural institutions run by the French Jesuits, of which one
of the most distinguished is Aurora University, which rose at the opposite end
of the French Concession, away from Xujiahui. One of Aurora Universitys
founders was the renowned Jesuit scholar Ma Xiangbo (18401939). Fortunately,
unlike Union Church, the cathedral still stands after recent restorations, in
spite of violent attempts to destroy it during the Cultural Revolution, when it
was turned into a granary and its spires and unique stained-glass windows
were badly damaged.42
Unlike the severe stone materials of the Dongtang and the Church of the
Sacred Heart, the Cathedral of Saint Ignatius was built of red brick. William
Dowdalls superb design, which can house some 2,500 faithful, is closer to
Pugins more functional works. It is dominated by two tall majestic steeples,
composed of octagonal spires with corner pinnacles, all in grey slate, in stud-
ied juxtaposition to the red color of the body of the church. These tall spires
with openings in four of their facesstand on gabled towers, which in turn
rise on top of two lower stories. The first of these stories enclose the side
entrances to the aisles that frame the magnificent main entrance to the middle
bay. The massive square structures of the towers stand forward, away from the
middle bay. In true functional style the decoration is not excessive, so as not to
distract from the lines of the main structures. There is a studied use of arches
as decorative motifs, with three pointed arches with hood-molds in the second
bay and blind arches in the first bay. The middle bay forms a portico, behind
which the front of the main nave and a large rose window appear, with only
blind arcades as decoration. This rose window is today almost hidden by an
image of Christ with outstretched arms, the result of recent restoration, as are
the four images below. Its ground plan is cruciform with a large nave and side
aisles, and an ambulatory at the head with five radiating chapels (Fig.16.5). The
main nave of the interior is divided into seven bays with triforium galleries
above up to the crossing, large pointed arches, and an unadorned rib-vault ceil-
ing. It was the tracery of the windows and the now lost stained glass images
that provided the colorful effects of the interior.
42 Adam Minter, Keeping Faith, The Atlantic (July-August, 2007): unnumbered. http://
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/07/keeping-faith/305990/ (accessed 9 Decem
ber 2013).
With this magnificent building the Jesuits joined the centurys Gothicizing
trend. Built at the start of a new century, the Jesuits chose a Gothic-revival
stylefor their new church as a dramatic reaffirmation of the restoration of the
Society in China. The three public churches built by the Jesuits in Beijing differ
from St. Ignatius in that their original structures dated back four hundred years
to the early Society of Jesus. Also, they were popularly named after various
points of the compass, and in this sense were closer to local Chinese traditions.
But the Jesuits church in Shanghai was dedicated to the founder of the order,
Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Being a new foundation and dedicated to a saint, it
was more clearly rooted in the Roman Catholic, Counter-Reformation tradi-
tion, which had an impact on the early Society.
Return of Jesuits to Macao
The Jesuits return to the city that had been so closely connected to the Societys
golden age was dramatic.43 The fate of the College of St. Paul and Church, as
well as the Seminary and Church of Saint Joseph, is the perfect symbol of what
befell the Jesuits in Macao and the state of disarray in which the order found
itself during its restoration in the city. While impressive new churches and col-
leges emerged in various revival styles during the restoration phase of the
Society in the Chinese mainland, their many vicissitudes in the Portuguese
colony after their return made any building projects highly unrealistic. Instead,
they could only hope to restore the two main colleges which they had vacated
in the 1760s.
The Gothic revival in both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches also
took root in the city and in neighboring Hong Kong. As the two foremost
European colonies in southern China it is not surprising that the neo-Gothic
was used by colonial Portuguese and British architects as the modern style of
the times. Parallel with neo-Classical buildings Macao produced limited but
charming examples of the Gothic revival. There is church of the convent of
Santa Rosa de Lima,44 as well as the Roman Catholic Chapel of Saint Michael
43 Accio Casimiro, S.J., A primeira restaurao da Companhia de Jesus em Macau

(18621871), Boletim Eclesistico da Diocese de Macau 62 (Oct-Nov. 1964): 908921.
44 For an example of the neo-Classical see Lindsay and May Ride, An East India Company
Cemetery: Protestant Burials in Macao, abridged and ed. Bernard Mellor (Hong Kong:
Hong Kong University Press, 1996). Lindsay and May Ride, The Voices of Macao Stones,
foreword by John King Fairbank, abridged with additional material by Jason Wordie
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1999).
298 Guillen-Nuez
in the Cemetery of St. Michael. In the latter lay many of the bones of the
deceased formerly housed in the ossuary of the Ruins of St. Pauls.
For the newly arrived Jesuits the story of their two main foundations in
Macao had an ironic twist. Their famous College of Madre de Deus and its
church had been built in an early Baroque style from 16031641, while the 1750s
St. Josephs was more a creation of its own times, namely, the late Baroque.
Both, therefore, would have fit well into Jacob Burckhardts definition of the
Jesuit style. Ironically, what the Jesuits themselves saw was, Burckhardts
Jesuit style brought to a ruinous end. A few contemporary sources give a dra-
matic picture of the state of the College of Madre de Deus, popularly known as
the Colgio de So Paulo, or College of St. Paul. In the diary of Anna DAlmedia,
a Portuguese traveler who visited Macao a few years after the arrival of the
firstJesuits, we find one of the few sources that refer, even if only briefly, to
thecondition of the faade of the church. At the time of her visit she referred
to the terrible condition in which the images decorating it found themselves,
even twenty-eight years after the fire that had destroyed the entire college
complex.45 We can surmise that local authorities left the college ruins to
deteriorate.
Returning to the Gothic revival, whatever one may think of its appearance
and its astonishing development in the Middle Kingdom through the work of
the Jesuits and other religious orders, its appeal continues today when bygone
Western imperialist coercion is absent among the large Chinese Protestant
and Roman Catholic communities in Wenzhou and Shanxi provinces, where
spires and pointed arches are prominent.46 For the Society of Jesus the Gothic
revival in architecture had a double significance. It represented the symbolic
rebirth of a more spiritual architectural style that had been superseded by clas-
sicizing styles. This was also the age when the order itself returned from a pain-
ful exile. It is therefore little wonder that the Jesuits were willing to adopt the
Gothic revival and introduce it to China as an expression of their own rebirth.
45 Anna DAlmeida, A Ladys Visit to Manilla and Japan (Hurst and Balcket, Publishers:
London, 1863), 121122.
46 Nanlai Cao, Constructing Chinas Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary
Wenzhou, (California: Stanford University Press, 2011), 9091. Anthony E. Clark, A Visit to
Chinas Largest Catholic Village, in IngnatiusInsight.com (July 12, 2010).
chapter 17
The Phoenix Rises from its Ashes

The Restoration of the Jesuit Shanghai Mission1
Paul Mariani, S.J.
Introduction
Could the Society of Jesus be considered restored if its missions were not restored?
From its beginning, the Society of Jesus was committed to the propagation of the
faith. Jesuits fanned out across the world and China was one of their most prized
mission fields. Therefore, after the 1814 restoration, especially under Father
General Jan Roothaan (17851853), it was imperative that the Jesuits rapidly
increase their membership (which they did) and renew the Spiritual Exercises
and the Ratio Studiorum (which they did). It was also crucial that they renew the
missions. Had they not done so, they could not be considered the restored Society
of Jesus. For it was by no means certain the restored mission would once again
flourish. History is replete with examples of failed restorations.
This paper is a case study of the restoration of the Society of Jesus in the
region of China called the Jiangnan, of which Shanghai, especially after the
1840s, was becoming the premier city. I pick this region because of its profound
link with the pre-suppression Society. The Shanghai mission had been estab-
lished in 1608 by Matteo Riccis (15521610) famed convert Paul Xu Guangqi
(15621633). It was also the only area that Jesuits were permitted to work in
after their arrival. (The Vincentians did not invite the Jesuits back into Beijing.)
Further, the Shanghai region was one of the few places in China where
Christians had survived in large numbers. Indeed, in 1844 the Jesuits estimated
that there were some 16,000 Catholics in the Shanghai region alone.2 Some
60,000 to 70,000 remained in all of Jiangnan.3 By then the total Catholic popu-
lation of China was about 210,000, down from a high of about 300,000 in 1700.
1 I am indebted to the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books at Boston College and the Bancroft
Library at the University of California at Berkeley. I also wish to thank Robert Bonfils of the
French Jesuit Archives and Brian MacCuarta and Robert Danieluk of the Jesuit Archives in
Rome (arsi). I am also grateful to Paul Fitzgerald for help with some of the translations.
2 Joseph de la Servire, Histoire de la mission du Kiangnan: Jesuites de la province de France
(Paris) (18401898), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Catholic Mission Press, 1914), vol. 1, appendix, 12.
3 Numbers are approximate for these early years. For example, see the various references in ibid.,
92, 248, 356. See also Lettres de nouvelles mission de la Chine, 5 vols. (18411846), 1:120, 53, 78.

300 Paul Mariani
This paper examines the first decade of the re-establishment of the Jesuit
Shanghai mission. There are several reasons for doing so: it was during the gen-
eralate of Jan Roothaan (which lasted from 1829 to 1853), it occurred before the
Taiping Rebellion (18501864) seriously disrupted the mission, and yet it is a
long enough period of time to gain a good understanding of both the successes
and failures of the early mission.
This paper makes reference to both ecclesiastical politics and to institution
building, but it focuses mainly on the Jesuits relationship with the Christian
communities, the old Christians, that survived years of neglect and persecu-
tion. For it was these people who soon became the top priority of the Jesuit
mission effort. The Jesuit interaction with these communities leads to impor-
tant questions. For example, how did Jesuit initiative and determination come
to terms with the indigenous structures that the Shanghai Catholic commu-
nity had developed over hundreds of years? By some accounts Shanghai
Catholics benefited from the convergence of strong indigenous structures and
foreign money and personnel. By other accounts, there were serious struggles
between the Jesuits and these same local communities. Be that as it may, in
this interaction, after decades of difficulties, the China mission had to be
rebuilt from the ground up. And it was these old Christians who helped the
Jesuits resurrect the mission much like a phoenix from its ashes.
Factors Supporting the Mission
On 12 June 1842, two French Jesuits arrived on the coast of China not far from
current-day Shanghai. They were the first of the restoration Jesuits to return to
China. One of them was Claude Gotteland and the other was Franois Estve.
They were soon joined by Benjamin Bruyre. Within a few years, there were nearly
thirty foreign Jesuits assigned to the mission, the majority of them priests. Thus,
already in the first few years, the re-establishment of the mission seemedsuccess-
ful. This was no accident because there were some important pre-conditions that
aided this promising start. First, the Jesuits had the active encouragement of
Chinese Christians. These Christians had survived some harsh years and now
they yearned for the return of the Jesuits. In order to plead their case, Chinese
Christians from throughout the empire, including those from the Shanghai
region, had repeatedly written to Europe asking for the return of the Jesuits.4
4 For excellent background on these letters, see Huang Xiaojuan, Christian Communities
and Alternative Devotions in China, 17801860 (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2006),
The Phoenix Rises From Its Ashes 301
The tenacity and initiative of the local Christians shows the deep Catholic
roots that had sunk into Chinese soil, and that the Shanghai Catholic commu-
nity itself had a long and storied history. It traced its origins to Matteo Ricci
who, in 1603, had baptized Paul Xu Guangqi, later the grand secretary to the
emperor.5 Xu returned home to the Shanghai region in 1608 after his father died.
The Shanghai region would show its promise early []. In 1637, Shanghai
Catholics began building their first churchin a Chinese style, no lesswithin
the walls of the old Chinese city. Although the records are sparse, by 1663 the
Shanghai region boasted forty thousand Christians.6 It was this community
that was resilient enough to survive the Chinese Rites controversy, the suppres-
sion of the Jesuits, Emperor Yongzhengs 1724 proscription of Christianity, and
the Napoleonic Wars, which had damaged worldwide Catholicefforts.
A second pre-condition for success was that the Jesuits also had the active
encouragement of the church at all levels. In fact, the Jesuit restoration both
animated and coincided with the Catholic revival then spreading throughout
post-Napoleonic Europe.7 It was this Catholic revival which also gave rise to
new religious congregationsboth male and femalethroughout Europe,
some of which soon sent missionaries abroad.8
This animating spirit was felt at all levels. Chinese Catholics not only wrote
to Rome, but they also put pressure on the apostolic administrator of Jiangnan,
Ludovico de Besi. He, in turn, appealed to the Propaganda Fide (the Vatican
Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), and to Father General Roothaan,
with whom he was good friends. (Indeed, the Jesuit archives in Rome contain
an abundant correspondence between the men.) And Roothaan himself was
receptive. In fact, he had already launched a strong policy initiative on behalf
of the missions.9 The missions were part of Roothaans overall plan to rebuild
the Jesuits on a solid foundation. To this end, he wrote a series of long letters to
113121. Original copies of these Chinese letters are housed at the Jesuit Archives in France
and Rome.
5 For helpful background, see Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China,
15791724 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
6 Paul P. Mariani, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 78.
7 Ibid., 9.
8 See the articles in Roger Aubert, The Church between Revolution and Restoration, eds. Hubert
Jedin and John Patrick Dolan, trans. Peter Becker, History of the Church, vol. 7 (New York:
Crossroad, 1980).
9 Perhaps the best biography of Roothaan in English is Cornelius J. Lighthart, The Return of the
Jesuits, trans. Jan J. Slijkerman (London: T. Shand Publications, 1978).
302 Paul Mariani
the whole order on what he considered the key pillars of the Jesuit spirit.10 For
example, he wrote on the love of the Jesuit charisma (1830), on tribulations and
persecutions (1831), on the Spiritual Exercises (1834), on study (1847), on the
Sacred Heart of Jesus (1848), and on devotion to Mary (1851). In the midst of
these letters, in 1833, he wrote a decisive and momentous letter which took
up the thread of missionary zeal and wove it into the fabric of the new Society.11
For Roothaan, the restoration of the missions was a key element in the restora-
tion of the Jesuits.
Once the mission to China was established, Roothaan followed up with let-
ters meant specifically for China. In these letters he mentioned that he was
happy with this new mission. He also saw his fellow Jesuits as carrying on the
legacy of Francis Xavier. He exhorted them to continue in this life of sacrifice,
in order to follow the example of the victim Christ. These then are the exalted
models, the Lord himself and the great Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier.12 Thus,
a restored society would need to restore not only the Spiritual Exercises and the
Ratio Studiorum, but the missionary dynamism of Francis Xavier as well.
Third, the Jesuits had important financial resources at their disposal, as
there was now a flow of European money and resources into the mission.
Again, this was part of the worldwide Catholic renewal. Therefore, by 1842
some of these movements were already under way and were looking for ways
to dispose of their largesse. One of them was the Association for the Propagation
of the Faith (not to be confused with the Propaganda Fide), a French-based
organization that sent money to missionary lands. In addition, there was the
Holy Childhood Association, which sent money abroad to save infants, if not
from death, then at least from an uncertain fate without the saving waters of
baptism. Henrietta Harrison notes that this association was one of the few
organizations at the time with the financial and human infrastructure through
which charitable funds could be collected, transmitted, and dispersed across
the world.13 In addition, the Shanghai mission also received funds directly
from Rome through the Propaganda Fide, and the Jesuits also received money
from their own mission offices in France.
10 These letters to the whole Society can be found in Ludovicus de Jonge and Petrus Pirri,
eds., Opera Spiritualia: Ioannis Phil. Roothaan Societatis Jesu Praepositi Generalis XXI, vol.
I (Rome: Typis Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1936).
11 William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus, second revised ed. (St. Louis: Institute
of Jesuit Sources, 1986), 437.
12 Jonge and Pirri, Epistolae Ioannis Phil. Roothaan, 470.
13 Henrietta Harrison, A Penny for the Little Chinese: The French Holy Childhood
Association in China, 18431951, The American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 75.
Fourth, the restored Jesuits now had European protection through the so-
called unequal treaties. These treaties would, in time, hurt the missions cause
as they implicated the missionaries in imperialism and gunboat diplomacy. It
also fueled Chinese resentment. Yet, for the first decade and more, these trea-
ties had a positive side for the Jesuits, for they ultimately legalized Christianity,
afforded missionaries freedom of movement, and allowed the Church to build
institutions and own land. The most significant of these treaties in the first
decade of the mission were the Treaty of Nanjing (1842) with Britain and the
Treaty of Whampoa (1844) with France. In addition, the French negotiated fur-
ther religious concessions later in 1844, and an imperial edict was issued in
1846 that called for the return of land previously owned by the Church, unless
it was currently being used for temples or public buildings.14 The following
years would see even more lenient treaties, and soon France took on the role of
protector of the Catholic mission in China.
Finally, the Jesuits were careful in their preparations for the new China mis-
sion. Already by the late 1830s, there was a stream of petitions from Jesuit semi-
narians in Europe, who wanted to join the China mission. Some of them, such
as the Sicca brothers from Naples, eventually went to the mission. In addition,
Gottelands letters to Roothaan often included lists of important questions
concerning such things as the proper relations with the Propaganda Fide and
how to transport scientific material to the new mission.15
Obstacles to the Mission
There is no doubt that the Jesuits had some important preconditions for suc-
cess, but they were soon to encounter major obstacles as well. First, there was
the long hiatus between the departure of the last Jesuits and their return. The
fact was that the Jesuits had largely been absent from the Shanghai region
since the proscription of Christianity in 1724. Since the mission did not start
again until 1842 (nearly three decades after the 1814 restoration), the absence
of a viable Jesuit presence could have been as long as 120 years in some places,
fully seventy more years than much of the rest of the world. (Yet this statement
must be qualified because, even during the suppression, some former Jesuits
labored on. In fact, some Jiangnan Christians still had fond memories of the
last Jesuit bishop of the region, Gottfried von Laimbeckhoven [17011787]).
14 R.G. Tiedemann, ed. Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume Two: 1800 to the Present
(Leiden: Brill, 2010), 296297.
15 See the letters in arsi, Nuova Compagnia, Francia Missio Sinensis 1002, ff. 1417.
304 Paul Mariani
Second, the Jesuits had to deal with a strong anti-Christian tradition in

China.16 Catholics were suspect both because they were seen as heterodox,
and because they threatened the state. Thus, the educated class and the offi-
cials were often arrayed against Christianity from the beginning. Third, the
Jesuits also had to compete with the newly arrived Protestant missionaries in
the field, some of whom insisted on re-baptizing those who had been
Catholics.17
Fourth, there were major cultural barriers to surmount. The language alone
proved difficult. One missionary wrote that he was only half-understood. This
was mainly because pronunciations differed according to locality. While this
might not present difficulties to a native, it was the daily cross of this poor
European.18 The impenetrable language and host of dialects was only the
beginning of the cultural differences. Gotteland ends an 1844 letter to the Jesuit
seminarians at Vals pointing out the various opposition of usages between
Europe and China, as the place of honor is different, the way one writes is
different, and the supremacy of civil and military power is different.19 The
European missionary, it is clear, would have to re-learn most of his cultural
cues.
Fifth, Bishop de Besi himself soon became an obstacle to the Jesuit mission.
There were two main reasons for this development. First, serious disagree-
ments developed over who ultimately controlled the money that came from
Jesuit sources in France. Second, de Besi wanted to turn the Jesuits into his
own diocesan priests. They had not come to Jiangnan as Jesuits but as mis-
sionaries. A Jesuit is a Jesuit before being a missionary, the Jesuit provincial
countered.20 By 1847 de Besi had grown so frustrated with the power struggle
that he returned to Rome. While this much is true, there is a further back story
to de Besis fate that only came to light from a letter housed at the Jesuit
archives in Rome. While Joseph de la Servire was writing his Histoire de la
mission du Kiangnan, he ultimately decided against including the following
incriminating story that he had uncovered about de Besi. Servire admitted
that de Besi was an administrator, a diplomat, and an apostle, yet he was
16 Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of
Chinese Antiforeignism, 18601870, Harvard East Asian series, 11 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1963).
17 Lettres, 2: 326.
18 Servire, Histoire, 122.
19 Lettres, 1:183.
20 See Mariani, Church Militant, 11. See also Thomas A. Breslin, China, American Catholicism,
and the Missionary (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 11.
also guilty of committing grave faults against morals, especially with the vir-
gins, even those from the best Christian families, and the events risked
schism as the Chinese priests refused him obedience.21 In fact, in 1847 a French
Jesuit wrote his superiors that the local Christians were for the Jesuits, [and]
against the bishop.22
De Besi was ultimatly recalled to Rome. Yet for some inexplicable reason, he
served as a consultant to the Propaganda Fide, and from that position of power
de Besi continued to cause the Jesuit mission in Jiangnan a great deal of harm.23
It is in light of this new information that de Besis departureand some of the
subsequent obstacles faced by the Jesuitscan be more clearly understood.
Sixth, there was constant attrition, often brought on by exhaustion. These
Jesuits traveled far and wide over the region, often by foot or boat. Here is the
testimony of one missionary: Every day before Mass [] I would teach the
catechism to children. During Mass, I would preach to the Christians, and after
Mass I would hear confessions. During the day, I only had enough time to do
my spiritual exercises. Then, I needed to listen to the concerns of the Christians,
visit the sick, and search out those who did not have the confidence to come to
me on their own accord.24
At times it seemed that not just the daily grind was arrayed against them,
but nature as well. Already by 1848, Estve, one of the original three founders
of the mission, died. There was flooding in 1849 and a famine in 1850. This
lead to further disease which caused two Italian Jesuits to die of typhus in
that same year.25 Stalwarts saw this as part and parcel of the missionary voca-
tion, and Roothaan would later write that these latter two died like brave
men, with their weapons in hand. The Lord would approve their holocaust,
and pour out upon the mission ever more abundant graces because of their
sacrifices.26
There were also rebellions. In the early years of the mission, the Small Sword
Society claimed some lives, and the Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil
insurrections in history, caused some damage by the end of the first decade
and would later severely impact the mission.
21 This information is recounted in arsi, Nuova Compagnia, Francia Missio Sinensis 1002, ff.
1417.
22 Letter from Augutine Poissoneux to his superiors, afsj (French Archives of the Society of
Jesus), FCh. 216.
23 arsi, Nuova Compagnia, Francia Missio Sinensis 1002, ff. 1417.
25 Thomas F. Ryan, Jesuits in China, 2nd ed. (Taipei: Kuangchi Cultural Group, 2007), 99100.
306 Paul Mariani
The Old Christians
Thus far we have seen both the factors which helped the mission in its early
successes, as well as the obstacles that impeded it. Perhaps nowhere do we see
the confluence of these factors in bolder relief than in the Jesuits relationship
with the so-called old Christians.27
The Jesuits certainly returned to China with lofty ambitions. In fact, they
originally intended to return not only to Jiangnan, but to Beijing, and even as
far afield as Japan, something desired by Roothaan.28 They were to resume the
same scientific work that Ricci, Verbiest, and Schall von Bell had done. They
were to evangelize to non-Christian masses as well and build impressive insti-
tutions that would meet the needs of a rapidly burgeoning flock.
These were the goals the Jesuits set for themselves. Yet these high ambitions
soon met reality on the ground. Instead of setting their own priorities, the pri-
orities were set for them. The Jesuits were quickly overwhelmed with the
crushing pastoral needs of the old Christians. This became their top priority.
However, even the mission superior was aware that they were not as adept in
the Chinese language and culture as their predecessors. Yet the local Christians
demanded the new arrivals be just like the pre-suppression Jesuits. As a result,
the Jesuits were forced to respond: In order for us to have the time to study
your books, should we allow your sick to die without the sacraments?29
Therefore, the Jesuits had to respond creatively: Before considering the apos-
tolate to the non-Christians, the first work which was necessary was the reform
and instruction of the faithful. We had seen what miseries were introduced
during the long years of neglect.30 It is to the relationship between the Jesuits
and these old Christians that we now turn our attention.31
27 Focusing on the Jesuits relationship with the old Christians is in line with the new his-
toriography, which looks at the experience of the mass of Chinese Christians rather than
exclusively on foreign missionaries and elite converts. See Nicolas Standaert, New Trends
in the Historiography of Christianity in China, The Catholic Historical Review 83, no. 4
(1997): 573613. See also Huang, Christian Communities, 67, 235239.
28 Lighthart, The Return of the Jesuits, 139.
30 Ibid., 122.
31 Much of this information is taken from the first volume of Joseph de la Servires Histoire.
This work, in turn, is based on such sources as the letters contained in the Lettres de nou-
velles mission de la Chine, a five-volume work containing slightly redacted letters of the
first restoration Jesuits back to their superiors in France. Servire also consulted the
archives of the French Consulate and the archives of Xujiahui, as well as other sources.
Unfortunately, due to the political vagaries in China over the years, much of the corre-
spondence of the Xujiahui mission has been lost.
Some of the earliest letters from the missionaries concerned the state of the
mission.32 Many of the letters attest to two factors. On the one hand, the Jesuits
were edified to see that Christianity had not, once again, been wiped out of
China. Now they had the possibility of re-building and re-animating pre-
existing communities. They had a firm foundation on which to build and need
not start from scratch. On the other hand, there were serious difficulties in
ministering to a traumatized community that was still suffering from the mis-
eries which had been introduced during the long years of neglect. The local
Christians were often fearful, and they practiced their faith in secret. Some
would not even admit to being Christians.
These were traumatized communities. Yet, for the Jesuits, they were also
unreformed communities. The Jesuits soon saw their primary task as the
reform and instruction of the faithful.33 Servire notes their key tasks:
The proper formation of the catechists and the virgins, these indispens-
able helpers of the missionaries; the fight against the pretensions of the
administrators of some of the wealthiest Christian communities; the
reform of immoral habits that plagued many families; above all, the edu-
cation given to so many of the baptized who were ignorant of the funda-
mental truths of the faith; these then, along with attending to the dying,
were the works of the first missionaries.34
As the above shows, there were some important constituencies the Jesuits had
to work with, each of them representing indigenous groups that helped the
church survive the persecutions. First, there were the so-called administrators
(huizhang), non-ordained church personnel, often from the wealthiest
Catholic families, who administered the church properties and finances. They
built chapels in their own homes and bribed local officials in order to practice
their faith in peace. Second, in the absence of priests, catechists baptized and
passed the faith down to the next generation. Third, there were consecrated
virgins, single women dedicated to the service of the church.
The fourth important constituency was the largest: the baptized faithful. Yet
even with baptism, the gateway sacrament to the church, there were problems.
Many missionaries soon came to believe that some who claimed to be Christian
were not. For example, Gotteland and others found that many of those who
administered baptismboth men and womenemployed false or doubtful
32 For example see Estves long letter in Lettres, 1:5468.

34 Ibid., 122123.
308 Paul Mariani
formulas, and there soon turned out to be a considerable number of invalid

baptisms in the community.35
The Jesuits standardized the baptismal formula and brought local practice
into line with universal Church teaching. About this they were scrupulous. Yet
despite all precautions to rectify this situation with discretion, there was still
anxiety in the Christian community, and the situation proved to be an
ordeal for the Jesuits.36 In fact, time and again throughout the Lettres de nou-
velles mission de la Chine, baptism is mentioned: who received it, who admin-
istered it, and when and where it took place.
There were issues with the administration of other sacraments as well, most
notably marriage. The Jesuits soon found that Christian marriages differed little
from their non-Christian counterparts: Christians married almost like the hea-
thens [] they thought only about the civil ceremony, to be entertained, to satisfy
the flesh, having no idea about the sanctity of the sacrament. To remedy these
abuses, the missionaries had to recall the origin and the sanctity of marriage,
and the bishop had to establish clear guidelines on the marriage ceremony.37
There were other abuses as well, such as the issue of child brides. The Jesuits
knew that forbidding such practices and submitting to church authority would
require a great act of docility on the part of the Chinese. In fact, when the
missionaries did re-introduce the proper Catholic marriage ritual with the giv-
ing of the hand, expressing consent, and receiving the nuptial blessing, at first,
it almost elicited the laughter of the assembly. But all ended well for: Today
these holy rituals are practiced in an edifying way, and the further standard-
ization of Church practice proceeded apace.38
As might be expected, the Jesuits believed that religious practice should
revolve mainly around the proper reception of the sacraments. Chinese
Catholics, on the other hand, had learnedduring the long years with mini-
mal contact with prieststo rely on certain alternative devotions such as
following the Church calendar by keeping feast days and fast days, praying for
indulgences, reading and circulating Christian literature, memorizing parts of
the catechism, and chanting the rosary and other prayers.39 These became the
markers of indigenous Catholic practice.
Further, in these telling events, some might see the necessary standardiza-
tion of pastoral practice; others might see missionary meddling in local
35 Ibid., 128.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 See Huang, Christian Communities, 183239.
cultural practices. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. These
events certainly call to mind the age-old ecclesiastical tension of discerning
which cultural practices to baptize and which to reject as anti-gospel.
Another issue that confronted the missionaries time and again regarding
the Christian villagers was the almost complete ignorance of the truths of reli-
gion rather than ill will. One missionary wrote in 1847 that: The majority of
our Christians [] barely know what is strictly necessary to be admitted to the
participation of the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist; and among
those who know the letter of the catechism, there are few who understand the
meaning.40 Yet even trying to catechize the villagers led to some unexpected
problems. For the catechism was written in classical Chinese, and was beyond
the capacity of many Chinese Christians. However, if the missionaries wanted
to translate the catechism into the local dialects, they might be accused of try-
ing to debase religion by putting it in such coarse terms.41 Inculturation, it
would seem, soon ran into self-imposed limitations.
The Jesuits could not do their work alone. As mentioned above, they needed
help from such groups as the consecrated virgins who baptized infants and
those in danger of death and catechized the young. At times the Jesuits admira-
tion of the virgins ran quite high, for even if one were deaf to their exhorta-
tions, one would not be able to resist praising their zeal and respecting their
virtue.42 In fact, sometimes the Jesuits compared these virgins favorably with
the religious sisters in their home countries. Clearly, the virgins were a great
help. Yet some missionaries found them to be problematic, as they were accused
of vanity and of not keeping the necessary reserve when it came to men.43 For
some Jesuits, the virgins operated out of the normal ecclesiastical structures:
they were not governed by church law, had not received much official religious
formation, and often did not live in community.44
The virgins seemed to offend most when they threatened the project of the
European missionaries. In a self-revelatory letter of 1842 to the Propaganda
Fide, Bishop de Besi noted that the virgins sang the chants at mass, while the
priest took a subordinate role. His frustration at the irregularity is palpable:
These are not just cantors [] but deaconesses, deaconesses more powerful
than those of Christian antiquity.45 In time, the Jesuits invited French

41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 130.
43 Ibid., 24.
44 Mariani, Church Militant, 1112.
310 Paul Mariani
religious sisters to oversee the virgins and regularize their religious life. The
Jesuits needed their help, but the virgins had to be subject to church
oversight.
The Jesuits also had conflicts with the administrators. At times, these diffi-
culties threatened schism, which nearly took place in 184647 in Songjiang.46
There, some local Christians wrote a tract against de Besi and Gotteland.47 The
issues are complex because the Sonjiang Christians were one of the groups
that had invited the Jesuits back. In their eyes, these Jesuits were surely going
to be better than the Vincentians and other priests, and yet they were soon
accused of doing the bidding of Bishop de Besi. For their part, the Jesuits were
rather nave to think that they could avoid local ecclesiastical politics. They
also seemed unmoved by the Chinese Catholics streak of independence. Thus,
idealized images on both sides had to give way to day-to-day realities.
Yet, in the eyes of some missionaries, the clash was more black and white.
Estve called those that attacked him hardheads and troublemakers, while
their ringleader was a demon. Naturally, Estve himselfas the minister of
Godrepresented the way of obedience to the established authority of
God.48 The grievances of local Christians, whether legitimate or not, would
now be subsumed to the power of the missionaries.
The instruction of the faithful, the proper administration of the sacraments,
and the reconciliation of rebellious factions, were just part of the Jesuits work
with the old Christians. What was also worrisome was that many Christians
were Christians in name only. Vices abounded. Gambling, drunkenness, and
opium wreaked havoc in some Christian communities. In fact, in one village
some Christians had associated with a band of pagan pirates and one of them
became the leader.49
Even supposed supports to the local Christians such as European protection
and the new treaties turned out to be a mixed blessing. For too long these
Christian communities were traumatized and scorned by their non-Christian
neighbors. A missionary could go out only at night like a wild beast. Yet with
46 Ibid., 131. The polemic is treated in greater depth in D.E. Mungello, The Return of the
Jesuits to China in 1841 and the Chinese Christian Backlash, Sino-Western Cultural
Relations Journal XXVII (2005): 2840. A collection of these documents can be found in
volume five of Nicolas Standaert et al., eds., Xujiahui cangshulou Ming Qing Tianzhujiao
wenxian [Chinese Christian Texts from the Zikawei Library], 5 vols. (Taibei: Fu Jen Catholic
University Press, 1996).
47 See the tract and Gottelands response in Standaert et al., eds., Xujiahui cangshulou Ming
Qing Tianzhujiao wenxian [Chinese Christian Texts from the Zikawei Library], 20392119.
49 Ibid., 129.
the advent of European protection, there was a rapid reversal of fortunes. Now
the Chinese Christians became bold as they once were shy, and now priests
could move freely about the region.50 As a result, the local Christians became
confident, if not arrogant at times. For example, an official from Pudong
wanted to extort money from a Christian village. The Christians refused to
give the customary tribute and now attacked his detachment. They bound
them in the soldiers own chains and brought them to the tribunal. When the
rebel Christians were jailed instead, Bishop de Besi informed the English con-
sul who called for the release of the prisoners.51
Chinese Christians would no longer be intimidated by state power. Now it
was the mandarins turn to be cowed by European power. Further, at times, the
missionaries even pushed the limits of the treaties. Technically they were not
permitted outside of the treaty ports, yet if they were prudent, the local offi-
cials would ignore their presence some miles into the interior. Such privilege
only created further resentment among Chinese officials.
There is no doubt the Jesuits were delighted to build up the pre-suppression
Christian communities. Yet the goal of the missionaries was not only pastoral
care, but convert-making. However, they soon learned that the old Christians
were poor at evangelizing their compatriots. So while the missionaries tried to
model good neighborly relations with non-Christians, and wanted to invite
them to religious events, the local Christians, on the other hand, were happy to
remain separate from their non-Christian neighbors, from whom they had suf-
fered much. That their compatriots could become like them children of the
true God was therefore a fact that escaped many Chinese Catholics.52
Thus far, I have focused my efforts on the Christian communities and not on
institution-building. Yet the institutions the Jesuits did build or reclaim in that
first decade largely served the needs of their flock. One of their first institu-
tions, founded in 1843 at the behest of Bishop de Besi, was a seminary to train
the next generation of Chinese clergy. Within two years it had over twenty stu-
dents. After the imperial edict of 1846, the Jesuits tried to have three former
properties restored: the old church, the old residence, and the cemetery. They
were only able to get the cemetery back, but they received two additional
parcels of land in lieu of the other properties, which were being used. The
Jesuits used one of these parcels to begin constructing the Dongjiadu cathe-
dral in 1847.
50 Ibid., 132.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 133.
312 Paul Mariani
The Jesuits themselves also needed a more permanent residence. To this

end, by 1847 they bought some property in the village of Zikawei (Xujiahui),
where Xu Guangqi was buried. It was there they constructed a church and an
orphanage, and later the College of St. Ignatius and a minor seminary as well.
Therefore, within the first decade of their arrival, the Jesuits institutional foot-
print was not insignificant. In addition, Xujiahuiwith its deep Christian
roots and its excellent location between the central city and the nearby
Christian villageswas already becoming the heart of the mission, and a sta-
ble base of operations.53 The size of the growing Catholic population is also a
further testament to the efforts of both the missionaries and the tenacious
local communities. By 1853 there were some 74,000 Catholics in the Jiangnan
mission, yet the numerical increase was due less to adult baptisms than to
apostates returning to the faith.54
Analysis and Conclusion
The above description raises some important issues. First is the issue of repre-
sentation. The Jesuits often saw themselves as reformers and saviors. They
were the ones to rescue the Chinese Christian communities from years of
neglect. Further, while they were thankful to the catechists, the consecrated
virgins, and the administrators for keeping the communities alive, they also
were quick to point out their errors. In their own view, the Jesuits had saved the
mission. Without their intervention, these Christian communities might dis-
appear altogether.
The Jesuits patently tried to justify their own presence, but they also believed
their efforts were efficacious. It is not simply that they attempted to save and
reform the communities, but that they were successful in doing so. The narra-
tives they tell are often of neglected Christians being turned back into good
Christians. They are narratives of rapid success and progress. With these
arrangements, the improvement was rapid; the increasing number of confes-
sions and communions witnessed to the progress of instruction among the
Christian population.55 Therefore, the story is mainly one of the continued
reform and instruction of the faithful.56 Tensions are acknowledged, but are
53 Ibid., 114. See also Ann Nottingham Kelsall, Zi-ka-wei and the Modern Jesuit Mission to
the Chinese, 18421952 (M.A. thesis, University of Maryland, 1978), 79.
55 Ibid., 130.
56 Ibid., 122.
smoothed over, especially with the pre-existing indigenous structures: The

Fathers naturally paid the most attention to the training of their indigenous
auxiliaries, catechists and virgins.57
This is how these Jesuits presented themselves, but how are they repre-
sented in the current historiography? This scholarship often holds that the
restored Jesuits were highly conformist, rigid, and too associated with
European monarchies and the forces of reaction to be of much use.58 D.E.
Mungello states that they had a narrower perspective and were more con-
vinced of their cultural superiority than the pre-suppression Jesuits.59 He
further argues that [t]he pre-1800 China Jesuits had been overwhelmingly
supportive of adopting and accommodating position to the Chinese rites,
but their nineteenth-century confreres shared the uncompromising view-
point of most non-Jesuit missionaries.60 Patrick Taveirne gives an even more
sobering assessment. He notes the paradox of a nineteenth-century French
missionary (Jesuit or not) who as herald of Christian civilization combats
the obscurant oppression and superstitions of the heathen society, but who is,
on the other hand, not at ease with modern civilization, maintains nostalgic
reverie of medieval Christendom.61
So which is it? Did these Jesuits successfully take tenacious communities
and further strengthen and purify them, bringing them closer into the world-
wide Catholic orbit? Or were they too encumbered by their own historical bag-
gage to be of much help to Christian communities half way around the world
that had already developed successful indigenous structures? That is: were
they radical reformers? Or were they restorationists? Perhaps the truth lies
somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps it is the fate of the restoration Jesuits to live under a heavy historical
burden. For, despite their valiant efforts, they simply could not live up to the
reputation of their idealized past. They are condemned if they tried something
new and condemned if they did not. If they cut short their studies or delayed
their linguistic and scientific work in order to minister to the crushing pastoral
needs of the old Christians, then they are not seen as impressive as the Ricci
generation who introduced European science to Chinese emperors. If they
57 Ibid., 130.
58 A helpful review of the historiography can be found in D.E. Mungello, Historiographical
Review: Reinterpreting the History of Christianity in China, The Historical Journal 55/2
(2012).
59 Ibid., 534.
60 Mungello, The Return of the Jesuits to China in 1841 and the Chinese Christian Backlash, 16.
61 As quoted in Tiedemann, ed. Handbook, 281.
314 Paul Mariani
shirked pressing pastoral needs to engage in more refined work, then they
lacked the spirit of Francis Xavier who poured himself out like a libation.
If they followed church teaching and current pastoral practice in order to
help guide the Chinese church, then they are accused of not being sensitive to
indigenous developments. If they did not bring the Chinese Church into line
with current practice, then they are accused of keeping it in the dark. If they
took advantage of the protection afforded by the unequal treaties, then they
are linked with the imperialist powers. If they rejected such protection, they
are viewed as not being attentive to the local Christians need for security and
stability.
Regarding their own self-understanding as Jesuits, if they tried to recapture
the spirit of the early Jesuits by cleaving closely to the letter of the original
Jesuit documents, then they were too slavish in their interpretation. But if
theydeparted too much from the Exercises or the Constitutions, then they are
accused of introducing innovations and ignoring the history of the pre-
suppression Jesuits. Whether too slavish or too lavish, they are accused of not
being real Jesuits.
Suffice to say these biases might say more about our own historical predilec-
tions than about the myriad problems and possibilities that these new Jesuits
themselves had to face in restoring their China mission, long the prizeboth
pre- and post-suppressionof the Jesuit mission effort.
chapter 18
The Chinese Rites Controversys Long Shadow Over

the Restored Society of Jesus
Jeremy Clarke, S.J.
Christianity in China began its third historical period with the arrival of
European members of the Society of Jesus in the late sixteenth century. They
were present in China until the Societys suppression in 1773. This did not sig-
nal the collapse of the Catholic Church in China, but the Jesuits involvement
with Chinese Catholic communities came to an abrupt and almost complete
halt. Members of the Society only returned to China in late 1842, almost three
decades after the Jesuits restoration in 1814.
Three French Jesuit priests from the province of Paris resumed work with
Chinese Catholic communities in Jiangnan, the area south of the Yangtze River
(the Changjiang), which enters the East China Sea just north of Shanghai. The
long-standing Catholic communities of this region had continued to worship
in the absence of foreign missionaries, even while being persecuted by the
Chinese imperial government.1 The official presence of Jesuits in China ended
once more in 1955 when the order was no longer able to sustain official com-
munities as a result of the nationalization of the Christian churches and the
imprisonment and killing of Chinese religious and the expulsion of foreign
priests.2
The history of the Jesuits in China is intimately connected not only with the
emergence of the modern Chinese state, but also with the development of the
Chinese Catholic communities. As a result of the Jesuits status as cross-
cultural bridge builders, their ministry in China throughout these centuries
also resulted in contributions to the cultural and religious worlds of Europe
and China.3 For Jesuits of both the pre-suppression and post-restoration
1 There were still a number of Chinese ex-Jesuit priests and other order priests who continued
working after the suppression, sometimes at great personal risk. The last of the Chinese
Jesuits, Jean Yao, died in Suzhou in 1796. His story has yet to be widely told. The church was
founded at Shanghai in 1608.
2 For the impact of the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China on the Catholic Church
see Paul P. Mariani, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist
Shanghai (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
3 The Jesuit publications on China had an immense impact in Europe. For a selection of these
publications see the database http://ricci.bc.edu/.

316 Jeremy Clarke
Society, the China mission loomed large in the collective consciousness. In the
main this was because of the impressive work of early missionaries as sensitive
agents of cross-cultural exchange, even if this work eventually took on mythic
proportions that often excluded the contributions of Chinese Catholics and
other Chinese interlocutors.
In the new era, however, the Jesuits relationship with China was radically
different. During the earlier epoch, some Jesuits in the imperial court worked
selflessly for the emperors so their brothers elsewhere could work as itinerant
pastors among the newly established communities. A Jesuit court painter, Br.
Jean-Dennis Attiret described such work:
To be on a chain from one sun to the next; barely to have Sundays and
feast days on which to pray to God; to paint almost nothing in keeping
with ones own taste and genius; to have to put up with a thousand other
harassments which it would take too long to describe to you; all this
would quickly make me return to Europe if I did not believe my brush
useful for the good of Religion and a means of making the Emperor favor-
able to the Missionaries who preach it. This is the sole attraction that
keeps me here as well as all the other Europeans in the Emperors
service.4
When the Jesuits returned in the nineteenth century, however, they no longer
had to make the emperor favorable to their religion because English cannons
had already blown away any objections. In the words of David Mungello, they
came with the attitude of conquerors.5 It is the contention of this article that
not only had the long shadows of the Chinese Rites controversy caused this
dramatic change in missionary temperament and subsequent behavior, but
that the same shadows had also been cast on the restored Societys relation-
ships in Europe.
It is helpful first to consider the new historical context. The progress of
Western (initially European) interactions with China had advanced from posi-
tions of relative weakness in the sixteenth century to situations of dominance
4 Cited in Cecily and Michael Beurdeley, translated by Michael Bullock, Giuseppe Castiglione A
Jesuit Painter at the Court of the Chinese Emperors (Rutland, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971),
4748.
5 David E. Mungello, Drowning Girls in China: female infanticide since 1650 (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2008), 109. Mungello has written on the problems this attitude
caused in The Return of the Jesuits to China in 1841 and the Chinese Christian Backlash,
Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal 27 (2005): 946.
The Chinese Rites Controversys Long Shadow 317
by the middle of the nineteenth century. The ascendancy was built on the force
of arms and the invidious sale of narcotics. The shift in power relationships
between the hemispheres enabled Christian missionaries to work legally in
China once more, as the eighteenth-century imperial bans placed on their
presence were rescinded. Thus the re-vivified Society had two great advantages
upon its return to China: it was as an ecclesiological entity whose legality
had been renewed by the Roman pontiff, and it was the grateful recipient of
European military protection. Jesuits were no longer supplicants in China but
in the vanguard of further incursions.
Naturally enough, the drastic change in circumstances influenced how
Europeans approached China. Prior to Chinas forced opening, it was the rare
foreigner who retraced the route opened by Jesuit pioneers like Michele
Ruggieri (15431607) and Matteo Ricci (15521610) in seeking to understand the
culture to which they were exposed.6 As a consequence of this lack of sensitiv-
ity, barriers between China and Europe remained in place for a long time.
Almost exclusively it was only missionaries who had entered the kingdom
under the protection of Jesuits who were allowed to remain for any sustained
period. For most Europeans, Chinese doors remained closed.7
Trade imbalance between China and other nations may have comforted the
Chinese court and bolstered its imperial pride, but it had little appeal to the
European mercantile nations who wished to change the situation. Once the
British hit upon opium as an item of commerce, trade relations changed
entirely. The Chinese government valiantly tried to ban trade in the nefarious
drug, but with minimal success. In fact, its actions caused the British to go to
war in the late 1830s, ostensibly to protect their perceived trading rights. The
British argued that the efforts of Governor Lin Zexu (17851850), the Chinese
official leading the anti-opium charge, constituted an international affront to
the principles of free trade; to their minds, only a military solution could
6 Michele Ruggieri (15431607, in China 15821588) is the forgotten originator of Jesuit pres-
ence in China. A re-writing of his legacy is beginning to take place. See, for example, Yu Liu,
The true pioneer of the Jesuit China Mission: Michele Ruggieri, History of Religions, 50/4
(2011): 362383. By contrast, Matteo Ricci (15521610, in China from 1583 until his death) has
been universally acclaimed as the Jesuit pioneer. A more recent work is by Michela Fontana,
Matteo Ricci: A Jesuit in the Ming Court (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2011) and Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City Matteo Ricci 15521610
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7 This is not to say that missionaries were the only ones who approached the imperial court,
but they were the principal group that was allowed to maintain a permanent presence. See,
for instance, Tonio Andrade, An Accidental Embassy: How Two Minor Dutch Administrators
Inaugurated an Alliance with the Qing Dynasty of China, 16611662, Itinerario 35/1, 7796.
318 Jeremy Clarke
prevail.8 Although the ensuing fighting lasted almost two years, it was not an
even contest because the British had superior troops.
After some initial victories in the Pearl River delta, British naval forces also
made their way rapidly up the coast, entered the Huangpu River and captured
Shanghai, which forced an admission of defeat from the imperial troops. Under
the terms of the ensuing treaty of Whampoa (Huangpu), signed in 1842, five
ports were to be opened to trade and European merchants were entitled to
reside in them. More importantly, the European settlers would be subject to
the laws of their own nations and not those of the Chinese government (the
right of extra-territoriality). The five ports were Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen,
Ningbo, and Shanghai, thereby opening up and connecting large tracts of the
eastern seaboard. The largely undeveloped island of Hong Kong was also ceded
to the British as part of the settlement. Little more than a decade later, between
1856 and 1860, a second war was fought for much the same reasons, this time
by France and Great Britain on one side and China on the other. As with its
predecessor, this conflict also ended in ignominious defeat for the Qing impe-
rial forces, and additional treaties were imposed.
The two wars transformed relationships between China and the outside
world. An additional result was that the previously clandestine encroachment
of European traders and missionaries ever deeper into Chinese territory now
became an open advance, legally enshrined in the various treaties signed after
the two wars. Once the treaty system gave the green light to Europeans and
North Americans settling on Chinas shores, arrive they did: as merchants, mis-
sionaries, journalists, and joy seekers of both sexes. Members of the recently
re-constituted Society of Jesus were also among the crowd of foreigners stream-
ing into the newly opened ports. All these peoplewhether with benign or
more mercenary intentionsarrived in China in the wake of the trading ves-
sels making their way up the Chinese coastline. Missionaries hitched rides with
opium traders, and both groups were supported by foreign soldiers. It is easy to
see how their image of themselves as people with special privileges could have
been bolstered. It is also little wonder that Chinese mandarins and commoners
alike began to show opposition towards both traders and missionaries.
The Chinese Catholic communities, however, warmly welcomed the Jesuits
when they returned, at least initially. The communities were still affected by
the consequences of the internal disputes of the eighteenth century, including
the famous rites controversy. Among the effects were the fact that they had
been deprived of their much-loved Jesuits and that they were practitioners of
8 Lin Zexu has subsequently been elevated to the position of national hero for standing up to
Western imperialism.
a religion that was seen as foreign and which was often the target of persecu-
tion. Such campaigns of persecution had resulted in the confiscation of much
property over the years, and the loss of their churches and buildings was fur-
ther indication that the Chinese Catholics were still seen as potentially danger-
ous to the social order. Yet, as will be seen, not all the effects were negative, as
the Jiangnan Catholics had also been forced by such circumstances to build a
strong local church.
Thus, whereas the Jesuits may have come as conquerors, or at least certainly
in the boats of the victorious armies, the communities to which they returned
were living furtively. The Chinese Catholics tried to practice their faith in a
manner that did not draw undue attention. The French missionaries had no
desire to continue living in this way, and set about restoring a public face to the
Chinese church. The Jesuits did not realize, however, that the activities of the
Chinese Christians were still influenced by the long-standing consequences of
the rites controversy. Before one can explain the manner in which the rites
controversy affected the restored Society in China, however, it is important to
see how the imbroglio influenced the Society leading up to its suppression.9
The controversy was a decades-long argument about the best way to preach
the gospel to non-Europeans. At the core of the missiological debate was dis-
agreement about the extent to which aspects of Christian dogma needed to be,
or could be, translated into the languages and teachings of other cultures. At
the level of praxis, one other major point of disagreement was whether certain
Chinese rituals had religious underpinnings and therefore were permissible
for neophytes.
The Jesuits allowed cultural rituals like the paying of respect to ones ances-
tors, because they argued that these rites were not religious.10 In this, they fol-
lowed an approach initially worked out by Matteo Ricci and later agreed to at
a conference in Guangzhou in 1667. Other missionaries disagreed with the
Jesuits interpretation of these rites, the manner in which Jesuits had trans-
lated certain terms, and the perceived doctrinal laxity that seemed to ensue.
These dissenters denounced to Rome some of the approaches employed by
most of the Jesuits, beginning in 1643 with an influential series of questions
9 Works on the controversy are legion and authors are not done yet. See, among many oth-
ers, David E. Mungello, The Chinese Rites Controversy: Its History and meaning (Steyler:
Monumenta Serica, 1994).
10 The Canton Conference brought together Dominicans and Jesuits, and together they
worked out a level of pastoral compromise; it did not last long. See Nicolas Standaert, The
interweaving of rituals: funerals in the cultural exchange between China and Europe (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2011), 119.
320 Jeremy Clarke
about the rites posed by a Spanish Dominican, Juan Bautista Morales, and
thenfurther enflamed in 1676 by the publication in Madrid of a work by the
Dominican missionary, Domingo Navarrete, Tratados histricos, polticos, thi-
cos, y religiosos de la monarchia de China.
Church officials in the Vatican thus had to interpret practices in a world far
away about which they had little first-hand knowledge. They were forced to
rely on the increasingly polemical representations from supporters of both
sides. Consequently, the complexity of the advice they were receiving resulted
in Rome issuing a number of contradictory statements, whereby at one time
certain practices were banned, yet at other times the language of the state-
ments seemed to allow a degree of flexibility in the way a missionary in China
could interpret injunctions issued from Rome.
As a result of the ongoing confusion, Pope Benedict XIV pronounced Ex quo
singulari of 1742. Through this document he removed any possible misunder-
standings about injunctions placed on missionary practice in Chinawhich
effectively banned most of the cultural adaptations allowed by the Jesuit posi-
tion. Benedict XIV also imposed obedience to the decree on all the missionar-
ies in China, whether they were Jesuits or not.
It is hard to view the resolution of the controversy as a victory for the
Chinese Christian communities, at least in the short term; nor was it particu-
larly helpful to the universal church in the long term.11 The ban on the rites not
only affected the manner in which Christian proselytizing evolved, but also
tarnished the reputation of the church in China. It was seen as a source of dis-
cord and of teachings that caused disagreement among those who subscribed
to them. The 1742 bull was also far-reaching in that missionaries who went to
China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still had to take a vow that
they would not deviate from the positions espoused in Benedicts proclama-
tion. This requirement was only lifted in the 1930s by the Vatican decree, Plane
compertum.
While it was bad enough that the church was seeking to tear itself apart
from within, opponents of the missionaries had also initiated a number of
attacks on the Chinese Christian communities and their European clergy.
Although the Jesuits and their neophytes successfully convinced the emperor
Kangxi to recognize Christianity by issuing an edict of toleration in 1692, it was
a high point that did not match reality. The presence of numerous powerful
mandarins who opposed the new religion, as well as the obnoxious behavior of
the Christian missionaries and the Vatican representatives in the course of the
11 Yet it can be argued that the unique nature of the Chinese church came about through the
fact that the communities were now forced to grow and function on their own.
rites controversy, ultimately convinced Kangxis successors that Christianity

was dangerous.
The hostile officials saw Christianity as akin to banned groups like the White
Lotus Sect and judged it to be a group that needed to be eradicated. Therefore,
in 1724 and in 1732, the emperor Yongzheng (r. 17221735) issued edicts opposed
to Christianity, and his son the emperor Qianlong (r. 17351795) likewise initi-
ated anti-Christian programs from 1746 onwards. Arguments about cultural
immersion had thus stopped one highly effective form of evangelization in
China, and in the process the church had managed to prompt two emperors to
ban a Christian presence.
What led to this sorry state of affairs? In both instancesthe arguments
among themselves and the conflicts with certain scholar-officialsthe role of
individuals was important. First, there was mutual dislike between the mis-
sionary orders, based on their perception of the correctness of their missiologi-
cal approach, and the influence of animosities among European rivalries
seeped into the Chinese sphere. Also, some of the mandarins were simply jeal-
ous of the foreign missionaries and their Chinese co-religionists who held
imperial positions in bureaus like the Board of Mathematics or who worked in
the imperial palace.
Thus, a mixture of these components and, to a lesser extent, the fact that
some of the emperors were themselves devout Buddhists resulted in a series of
official bans on Christianity. The most important ramification of the prohibi-
tions was on the ability of European missionaries to enter China freely, and by
the latter decades of the 1700s most were banned from arriving all together.
A further major impact of the rites controversy was its effect on the Chinese
Christians themselves. The missionaries and their Chinese companions had
been successful in founding Christian communities throughout the country.
The imperial bans and then the suppression meant these communities were
now isolated from the international church. Consequently, they were largely
unable to renew the numbers of priests working among them. This did not
mean that the church did not try, and in addition to seeking to smuggle in
foreign priests from Macao or the Philippines, the aging ex-Jesuit Bishop
Laimbeckhoven (d. 1787) ordained a further four Chinese men for the esti-
mated 30,000 Christians living in Jiangnan. The combination of expulsion and
prohibition meant that the Christian community was now reliant solely upon
the Chinese ex-Jesuits in their midst, the small number of indigenous priests,
and any Lazarists that were able to visit from Beijing or Macao.
Naturally enough, the administration of the church in Jiangnan also became
increasingly difficult during this time of diminishment. After the death of
Laimbeckhoven, the then bishop of Beijing, Alexander Gouvea, was named
322 Jeremy Clarke
administrator of the diocese of Nanjing in 1790. The diocese incorporated

Shanghai, as well as the rest of Jiangnan. Gouvea remained in Beijing, however,
and thus the rites controversy had deprived the Jiangnan communities of
effective episcopal leadership. At least Gouvea appointed his replacement in
1804 to pre-empt confusion upon his own death, and made sure that the see
would not be empty. Gouvea died in Beijing in 1808.
The replacement bishop, Cajetan Pires-Pireira (a Lazarist), was also a mem-
ber of the Imperial Tribunal of Mathematics in Beijing. The position was
important and prevented him from attending to church business among the
communities in Jiangnan. Therefore, the earlier removal of the Jesuits and the
new bishops own special circumstances further reduced the churchs ability to
serve its people. Even though Pires-Pireira appointed two Portuguese Lazarist
assistants, Joo Castro Moura (in 1831) and Joseph Henriquez (18321836), they
too spent the bulk of their time in Macao, in part because of bad health as well
as because of the difficulties of living secretly as a missionary within China.
Therefore, unfortunately, they were but brief apparitions in the mission
[Jiangnan].12
The Vatican was well aware that all was not well in far off Jiangnan, and
sought to rectify the situation. The Congregation for the Propagation of the
Faith (which was in charge of appointments to mission lands) sought to wrest
control from the Portuguese crown and the Lazarists, although in a way which
would not bring about a damaging rift between the Vatican and the Portuguese
state. While the power of Portugal had decidedly diminished over the centu-
ries, it was still jealous of its patronage of the missions and protected it where
possible.13 Its long-standing jurisdiction of Macao at a time when other ave-
nues into China were difficult gave strength to an otherwise weak position. The
solution hit upon by Propaganda was to appoint a non-Portuguese priest as
coadjutor bishop for Nanjing, with the right of succession once Pires-Pereira
had gone to his reward.
To that end they conferred the right of succession upon a priest from Verona,
Louis, le Comte de Bsi. The move was seen as an affront to the privileges the
Portuguese had enjoyed for centuries, and they were not happy. Portuguese
displeasure was communicated to Bsi in no uncertain terms when he arrived
in Macao in 1834 and revealed to the Portuguese Lazarists the plans of
Propaganda and the Vatican. Not all of the Lazarists objections were solely
based on national grounds, however, andto be fairthey also considered
12 This paragraph and the one preceding draw on Servires summary in his introduction.
13 This privilege was the famous padroado, which emanated from the Treaty of Tordesillas
(1494).
the perilous state of the church in China as well. Although Pires-Pereira was
not serving the Christians of Jiangnan particularly closely, his position in
Beijing was very useful for the church in China as a whole. The Lazarists in
Macao duly informed Bsi that if he took himself to Beijing, his presence
in that city would jeopardize the carefully established position of Pires-Pereira
at the heart of a regime that had banned Christianity and had allowed for its
forceful closure. The reasonable conclusion was that if this occurred, the
church throughout the whole kingdom would suffer even more greatly than it
had previously.
Bsi reluctantly agreed to put aside his initial intentions and with the con-
sent of Monsignor Umpierre, the procurator of Propaganda in Macao, he was
smuggled secretly into Huguang, which was under the care of Propaganda.
There he spent three years living the life of a missionary, with the powers of
vicar general for that mission.14 Thus, while Propaganda had not achieved its
primary aim of having its nominee take over the hoped-for role of bishop of
Nanjing, at least they had their man in the country, biding his time.
At first glance, the almost total collapse of formal church leadership in
China after the resolution of the rites controversy seemed calamitous, and
especially to those Europeans who considered that the Chinese Catholics were
still too young in the faith to be able to govern their own affairs. Such concern
also explains the extent to which Propaganda got involved in the appointment
of Bsi to Jiangnan, even being willing to antagonize their Portuguese patrons.
Yet, again, there were still Chinese priests serving the well-established com-
munities and to good effect, although admittedly their numbers were small to
the point of almost being non-existent. Furthermore, while the bishops see in
Jiangnan may have been filled more in the breach than the observanceprior
to Bsis eventual appointmentthe leadership of the structured lay sodalities
continued to ensure that the Jiangnan communities gathered together for
prayer with or without a priest, strengthened each other in their knowledge of
doctrine and assisted the needy in their midst.
These lay groups, modeled on such European congregations as the Sodality
to Our Lady, had been established very early in the Jesuits stay in China. In 1610
Ricci created the first such confraternity in Beijing, quickly followed by Joo da
Rocha in Nanjing and Lazzaro Cattaneo in Shanghai, both in the same year.
Over the next decades similar groups were established throughout the Chinese
church by every order, although each with different guidelines according to the
particular local devotion. The groups became bulwarks of the Chinese church.
14 See Servire, 1417. Mungellos essay on the return of the Jesuits to Jiangnan is also essen-
tial reading for this period, and like the work of Servire, is relied on here.
324 Jeremy Clarke
Chinese consecrated women (known as the Virgins, or beatas) often presided

over these groups and led much of the communal prayer.
Thus, when European missionaries returned to Jiangnan, although they
may have had a sense that they were returning as proud representatives of the
impressive West, they found a church which had not only survived the near-
collapse of centralized administration but had also thrived locally in unex-
pected ways. While the Jiangnan Catholics welcomed the return of the Jesuits,
it was not as though they were a faith community slavishly looking for foreign
saviors. The difference in expectation of the role to be played by the missionar-
ies and the new bishop vis--vis the ongoing functioning of the communities
quickly caused friction between the Jesuits and their co-religionists. It is within
this friction that the ongoing shadows of the rites controversy are most
revealed.
After the restoration of the Society, these shadows affected the Jiangnan
communities in four main ways. First, the Jiangnan Catholics had worked out
a mode of living within the broader society that seemed too timid to the return-
ing missionaries, especially given that the Jesuits had sailed into Shanghai with
French diplomats and soldiers.15 Second, the returning missionaries sought to
regain properties and financial authority that had either been appropriated by
non-Catholic Chinese or by the local Catholic leadership, and this significantly
affected amicable relations both between the missionaries and their flock, and
between the missionaries and the broader public. Third, the return of the
Jesuits had negative consequences on the quotidian life of the Jiangnan
Catholics because the Jesuits and the new bishop sought to impose their will
on the leadership structure of the communities, especially in such things as
the extent to which lay leaders and the Virgins could perform liturgical func-
tions. This was because the Jesuits were so fearful of falling foul of the Vatican
in terms of doctrinal issues, haunted as they were by the specter of the sup-
pression, that they were exceedingly hesitant to engage in any of the cultural
adaptations that had so marked the functioning of the church in the earlier
era. Fourth, reports of the Jesuits work in Jiangnan were closely monitored by
Jesuits in Paris and Rome who did not wish to see relationships between the
Jesuits, Bishop Bsi, and the other missionaries deteriorate to the extent that
old animosities towards the Society in general could be revived.
The place of Catholics in broader society was a vexed issue. In Jiangnan, they
had managed to preserve their communities in the face of persecution, mainly
15 See Jean-Baptiste Piolet, Les Missions Catholiques Franaise au XIX Sicle (Paris: Librarie
Armand Colin, 1900), 175176. The second batch of Jesuits travelled in the same vessel as
the French ambassador, Lagrene, in 1843.
through prudent circumspection. Although they were delighted to now have

more priests, the Catholics did not wish to inflame public opinion against them.
To that end they preferred to pray discretely and thus transported the Jesuits
secretly from chrtient to chrtient. On their side, the missionaries noted the
manner in which the Chinese Christians remained fearful of allowing the mis-
sionaries presence in a community to be known widely, and they saw this as a
direct consequence of the persecutions and ongoing opposition to their reli-
gion. Several letters from the period give a sense of the conditions of the time.
One of the first Jesuits to return to Jiangnan, Franois Estve, wrote to his
mother in 1846 about his travel throughout the region. He sought to assure her
that he was more than comfortable on these small boats, although in fact he
did not mention that he was forced to use this mode of transport to stay hid-
den from likely antagonists.
My little boat is a small traveling house, where my chamber is a sleeping

room, a reading room, a dining room, a kitchen, a room for the servant,
and an office for work. In summer I am fresh, and in winter I do not feel
the cold, because the windows and doors can be closed very well, though
there is no special fitting device, and everything is made out of wood.16
The missionaries became increasingly dissatisfied with the secrecy that this
means of transport entailed. The Jesuits believed that the recent European
military victories had enabled the Chinese Christians to come out from the
shadows. After all, the continued presence of foreign troops likewise meant
that the Christians would be protected. The Jesuits also believed that one con-
sequence of the campaigns of intimidation had been the fact that the Christians
themselves were the ones who were perpetuating a sense of being besieged on
all sides, with every unknown watcher a potential enemy. Their opponents had
succeeded in having the Christians police themselves, and their continued
clandestine movement of the priests around the countryside only placed fur-
ther limits on the Jesuits apostolic activity and outreach.
Servire noted that the priests thought that the Chinese faithful are too
timid, as a consequence of the persecutions, and impose on the missionaries
precautions that are awkward and fastidious; they are not able to sail in a boat
without being hidden inside or without traveling by night; and once they arrive
at the chapel which is the destination of their voyage, they are kept sealed
away.17 Fr. Languillat noted in 1845 that the missionaries were like wild beasts,
16 Estve, 8 April 1846, Lettres nouvelles de missionaires, 1:328. Cited in Servire, 123.
17 Servire, 132. The letter of Languillat, 27 August 1845, is cited in Servire, 132, fn. 2.
326 Jeremy Clarke
only able to venture forth at night and hidden away during the day. The mis-
sionaries campaigned against the practice in a two-fold way, seeking to
embolden the Christians and alerting their own protectors about the chal-
lenges. Consequently, the establishment of French and British consulates in
Shanghai and the protection of the French troops meant that the missionaries
were able to travel freely throughout the countryside.
Second, regarding the question of the restitution of property; the negative
way in which the issue unfolded was not all the fault of the returning Jesuits,
although it certainly affected their work in Jiangnan. One of the consequences
of the suppression was that properties throughout the world, many of which
had been bequeathed or donated to them, were thereby left in a sort of legal
limbo. The kings of Portugal and France had decreed that the properties of the
Jesuits in China would be given over to the Lazarists. To their credit, in most
instances the Lazarists saw themselves as being only the stewards of these ben-
efices: where possible, they used the monies derived from these properties for
the intentions for which these had originally been given. Thus, incomes derived
from properties the Jesuits had originally held in Macao for the church of
Jiangnan were reserved by the bishop of Macao for the Chinese priests still
working in Jiangnan, and by implication for the Christian communities there.
Each year a Chinese Christianone Paul Touwould travel to Macao to col-
lect these monies, as well as carry letters from the remaining priests to the
bishop and vice-versa.
Not long after Bishop Bsi was installed, he sought to recover properties that
had belonged to the mission. He also decreed that the monies that used to be
paid to the Jiangnan Catholicsthe income that Paul Tou used to courier each
yearwere for his exclusive use. Bsis stance became increasingly problem-
atic. The local Chinese officials were reluctant to hand back certain properties,
and made that as difficult as possible, thereby arousing an antipathy towards
the local Christians that they had worked so hard to avoid.18 Bsis unilateral
decision about the income from Jiangnan properties also infuriated the bishop
of Macao, who simply stopped sending any more money. The Chinese priests,
who had been reliant on this income for many years and did not possess the
other resources that the newly arrived Bsi or the Jesuits could turn to, were
naturally resentful of their new bishops actions. To some of the local Chinese
priests the Jesuit return to Jiangnan at the expense of the Lazarists was thus a
very costly business.
18 See Servire, Jusqua la persecution de 1869, in Episcopat de Mgr Languillat (18641878),

125143, regarding the attempt to reclaim ancient church property in Nanjing and the
sustained attempts of the governor Li Hongzhang to oppose this.
The Jesuits were also most uncomfortable with the ways in which the con-
secrated women were leading the communities, especially during prayer. Their
unease was the third long-term shadow of the rites controversy. The returning
Jesuits were anxious that the situation might be interpreted as them allowing
activities that broke the vow (about the rites) that they had pronounced prior
to their departure from Europe. Although the Jesuits were conscious of the
significant role the women played and knew of the historical precedent set in
Jiangnan by such famous benefactors as Candida Xu, in the wake of the rites
controversy they were fearful of being seen to condone a laxness when it came
to church order and structure.19 In part their anxiety was due to the change
in missionary attitudes already mentioned whereby, although they were the
ones new to the situation and environment, they still believed they had a pre-
determined moral authority over their Chinese charges.
This is not to say that the Jesuits did not admire the zeal of the virgins, as is
clear in the following excerpt from a letter written by Franois Estve in 1846.20
The virgins complete all their activities in the manner of the angels, with-
out anyone getting in the way. We are able to call them the true flowers of
the chrtients, and this type of flower gives great honor to the garden of
the church []. They provide great assistance by educating the ignorant,
baptising and raising those infants who have been abandoned and
encouraging the pagans in danger of death. Even those who are deaf to
their exhortations cannot but praise their zeal and respect their virtue.
All that the Sisters of St Vincent de Paul do in Europe, the Chinese virgins
are capable of doing.21
Yet, while they admired their work, the Jesuits wanted the women to be
exactly like the European female congregations with whom they were famil-
iar, who exercised little real power. Their almost hysterical fear of allowing
anything unorthodox overcame their response to the particularities of their
new situation. Bishop Bsi articulated the most damning expression of this
viewpoint in a letter he wrote to the cardinal prefect of Propaganda in
September 1842.
19 See Philippe Couplets biography, Histoire dune dame Chrtienne de la Chine ou par
occasion les usages de ces peuples, ltablissement de la Religion, les manieres des mission-
naires, & les exercices de pit des nouveaux Chrtiens sont expliquez (Paris: Michallet,
1688).
20 As cited by Servire, Histoire, 130.
21 Estve, 1 June, 1846, Lettres des nouvelles des missions de la Chine, 1:348; cited in Servire,130.
328 Jeremy Clarke
The virgins chant the gospel in a loud voice in Chinese, on Sundays, while
the poor priest is on a low platform at the base of the altar []; they are
not only cantatrices, Eminence, but also deaconesses, and deaconesses
more powerful than those of the ancient Christian communities.22
Both Bsi and the Jesuits were with one accord when it came to the role of
the consecrated women in particular, and then to some of the lay leaders in
general, and rapidly sought to take control of the situation. Their heavy-
handedness in the pursuit of this goal, again a product of their post-restoration
anxieties, resulted in a campaign against their rule by the leaders of the
Jiangnan Catholics. Some of the Chinese Lazarists openly defied the new
Bishop and certain groups of the Jiangnan Virgins resisted Bsis attempts to
prevent them praying as theyd always done. Furthermore, the leaders of the
community sent to the Vatican a thirty-eight page open letter filled with their
complaints about the abuse of authority by Bsi and the Jesuits.23 The restored
Jesuits were clearly not as culturally savvy as their forebears had been.
The fourth long-term shadow was an increased attentiveness of the Jesuits
in Europe to the work of their brethren in China. Although not all of the issues
of the rites controversy can be blamed on the earlier generation of China
Jesuits, its effects had nevertheless swept like a fire over the operations of the
whole Society. The post-restoration Jesuit leadership in Rome (and Paris)
would not be caught unawares by any conflagrations from the East. To that
end, they urged the Jesuits in Shanghai to use caution in their dealings with
Bishop Bsi, even when it was clear that the new missionaries rights were
being infringed upon. The first superior of the Jesuits in Jiangnan, Claude
Gotteland, found his dealings with Bsi almost unworkable. His own Gallic
pride most likely did not help, but it is clear that the China Jesuits felt restrained
by the manner in which Jesuits in Rome were overly attentive to their situa-
tion, and seemed more supportive of the local bishop than them.
The estrangement between Bsi and the Jesuits involved a few main issues.
The most important one was that Bsi maintained that the Jesuits primary
obedience was to him and not to their religious superior, even though Gotteland
sought to disavow him of this. Gottelands representations did not sit well with
Bsis sense of the reverence due to a bishop and thus Gottelands defense
22 30 September 1842; cited in Servire, 24. Proclaiming the gospel in a Catholic church is
reserved to an ordained member of the community, that is, a deacon, a priest or a bishop.
Thus, a woman cannot proclaim the gospel because she is not ordained -see Number 59,
The General Instruction of the Roman Missal.
23 Mungello, Drowning Infants, 112.
seemed to have inflamed the situation further. In fact, upon being informed of
the increasingly fractious relationship, Gottelands French provincial, Fr.
Rubillon, urged him to appease Bsi: [] guard well, certainly, the observation
of our rule, but avoid too strict an interpretation of it, and when you believe
that you must refuse a certain request of the bishop, give the reason to him
clearly, but with care and with a due regard for his dignity.24
Both Gotteland and Bsi had written to officials in Rome listing various
grievances. For instance, Gotteland noted that in 1845 Bsi had prevented any
of his seminarians in Jiangnan from joining a religious order without his
express permission, and he made sure the Society was mentioned by name. He
also made Gotteland proclaim the ban during a sermon to the seminarians.
This was even though Bsi had appointed another Jesuit, Fr. Brueyre, to the
position of rector of the seminary in early 1843. Bsi also forbade the Jesuits to
work with those Chinese Catholic families who were considered particularly
pro-Jesuit.
Bsi also declared that French Jesuits were no longer to be sent to Jiangnan,
as he would refuse permission for any more of these missionaries to work in his
diocese. He also sought to remove the Jiangnan mission from the jurisdiction
of the Paris province. This final decision so alarmed the Jesuits in Europe and
the officials at Propaganda that a resolution was sought that included Bsi vis-
iting Rome. Bsi thought this would give him an opportunity to present his
case, although in fact it only served to remove him permanently from China.
Bsis return to Rome, however, also prompted a rigid clarification of the posi-
tion of missionaries in relation to a bishop; namely, that each missionary is,
and must remain, immediately subject to the vicar apostolic who directs and
negotiates all things of the mission.25
While Bsi clearly saw the problems as partly a result of French Jesuit pride,
the decision-makers in Rome saw the matter as an issue of governance and not
one of national chauvinism. Perhaps too they had learnt from the conse-
quences of the rites controversy, which had contributed to the suppression of
the Society and had added more hardships to the Chinese Catholic
communities. They had no desire to allow squabbles in China to turn into
calamities for the rest of the church. The Jesuits in Romewho later sent a
visitor to Jiangnan to explore the situation for themselvesalso realized that
the letters they had been receiving about their men in China were often biased.
Whereas before the suppression such accusations had inflamed other disputes
in Europe, the Jesuit leaders now sought to isolate the issue to China alone,
24 See Servire, 102.

25 Cited ibid., 162.
330 Jeremy Clarke
rather than have this shadow fall on their newly restored relationships with
the Vatican and other influential groups. In fact the issue of misrepresentation
was so serious as to cause the Visitor to confess to the Jiangnan Jesuits when he
was with them (in the mid-1850s): You have been the victims of calumny in
the letters to Rome and Paris and you are worth much more than the reputa-
tion that you have.26 Thankfully, this time around their worth had been recog-
nized before the complex situation in China could again draw the international
church into the suppression of an order.
The Chinese Catholics continued their worship throughout all these machi-
nations, trying to exist within a state and a society that was more often than
not hostile to their presence. Now they had the added burden of yet again deal-
ing with foreigners who thought they knew best, regardless of whether the
church was in Rue de Bac or the streets of Shanghai. Sadly, for the Jiangnan
Catholics, the long shadows over their lives meant that the restoration of the
Society was not all good news.
26 Cited ibid., 304.

chapter 19
The Province of Madurai between the Old and New

Society of Jesus
Sabina Pavone
Introduction
This article is part of a series of studies on the relationship between the old and
new Society of Jesus, with a specific focus on the issue of discontinuity/conti-
nuity within the order. The issues are judged not only through the Jesuit histo-
riography of the Indian missions, but also in relation to the recent output of
one school of British social anthropological study that, in recent years, has
reflected in depth on the penetration of Christianity into the Indian caste sys-
tem. I am referring in particular to the work of Robert Frykenberg, Rowena
Robinson, and David Mosse.1 Mosse has recently published a volume in which
the Jesuit experience is evaluated in relation to the issue of the Indian caste
system.2 In this research, but also in volumes such as Jesuits in India: in
Historical Perspective,3 published by the Cultural Institute of Macao, the
impression given is that the gap between the old and new Society had a more
pronounced impact on the twentieth century, when the Jesuits commitment
in India, particularly on the issue of the civil rights of the dalits (formerly
known as pariahs or untouchables), became increasingly central. It is more
difficult to identify a discontinuity between the old and the new order in the
nineteenth century for a number of reasons: first, the nineteenth century has
been less studied by historians in general and by Jesuit historians in particular;
second, the Jesuit historians who, from the 1850s, began to reflect on the
missionary aspect of the Society were seeking to demonstrate the continuity
between the old and the new Society.
1 See Robert E. Frykenberg, ed., Christians and Muslims in India. Cross-Cultural Communication
since 1500 (Richmond: Routledge Curzon, 2003); Id., Christianity in India: From Beginning to
the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); R. Robinson, Christians in India (New
Delhi: 2003); Rowena Robinson-Sathianathan Clarke, Religious Conversion in India: Modes,
Motivations, and Meanings (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2007).
2 David Mosse, The Saint in the Banyan Tree. Christianity and Caste Society in India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012.
3 Teotonio R. de Souza, Jesuits in India: in Historical Perspective (Macao: Instituto Cultural de
Macau, 1992).

332 Pavone
This study has two parts. The first analyzes the years between suppression
and restoration using a source that is well known, but only in the version pub-
lished in the nineteenth century. The second considers the beginnings of the
new Jesuit mission in Madurai founded in the 1830s and, in particular, focuses
on how that experience was perceived by the new missions first superior,
Father Joseph Bertrand (18011884).4
Some Preliminary Observations
After the restoration of the order in 1814 more than twenty years elapsed before
the Jesuits settled again in India. As has been recently pointed out by Pierre-
Antoine Fabre, the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum placed particular
emphasis on the educational role of the Society and the resumption of the
missions was not immediate.5 In the first two decades after restoration, the
priority was to build up the Societys numbers, and it was decided to postpone
the reopening of the missions until better times. In addition, some elements
within the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith continued to
be wary of the Societys evangelical approach, which caused more delay.
The first fathers who settled in Calcutta in the new Bengal mission arrived
in 1834 and belonged to the English province; they did not, however, stay very
long because of disputes with the Irish apostolic vicar, Patrick J. Carew (c.
18001855).6 In 1846, eighteen missionaries left Calcutta and it was only at the
end of the 1850s that they were replaced by the Jesuits of the Belgian province.
The choice of the Madurai mission as a case study seems appropriate for a
number of reasons:
1. Madurai was the region where the old Society had worked with the great-
est continuity since the mission established by Roberto Nobili.
2. Madurai, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was the
area in which the Malabar Rites controversy had been resolved, although
4 Joseph Bertrand was born on 10 November 1801 and died at Notre-Dame de Liesse on 13
January 1884. He was the superior of Madurai twice: 18371842, 18431844.
5 Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Lhistoire de l ancienne Compagnie lpoque de la nouvelle
Compagnie: perspectives de recherches, in Jos Martnez Milln, Henar Pizarro Llorente,
Ester Jimenez Pablo, eds., Los jesuitas. Religin, politica y educacin (siglos XVIXVIII)
(Madrid: Comillas, 2012), 17951810.
6 On Patrick Carew, see Henri Josson, La mission du Bengale occidental ou larchidiocse de
Calcutta (Bruges: Imprimerie Sainte-Cathrine, 1921), 1:192246.
The Province of Madurai 333
it arose again during the nineteenth century, especially in relation to the

issue of the caste-divided Indian society.
3. The importance of the re-evangelization of India from Madurai was
clearly understood by the Roman Catholic hierarchy and especially by
Pope Gregory XVI (17651846) and the superior general of the Society, Jan
P. Roothaan (17851853). The opening of a novitiate in Madurai was an
important step for Jesuit evangelization,7 to the extent that [it] became
one of a growing number of springboards for such an enormous expan-
sion that, by the turn of the twenty-first century, no single country in the
world would have as many devout, dedicated, disciplined, well-educated
and -equipped Jesuits as India.8
4. The Madurai mission, with its beginnings in the French province of Lyon,
allows the missionary discourse to be linked to the context of the difficult
relations in colonial India between France and Britain in the late eigh-
teenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.
5. In the Madurai region, the prism of Jesuit missionary history can be used
to analyze the difficult relationship between a booming imperial Britain
and the Portuguese padroado, which was now in decline. On the other
hand it is hardly surprising that the Portuguese empire was dealt its coup
de grace by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith
through the establishment of the apostolic vicariates in India.9
6. Between the Madurai Jesuits and the Missions Etrangres de Paris
(mep)which had replaced the Society in Pondicherrythere arose a
controversy around the formation of native clergy in India.10 Indeed,
among the missionaries who worked in southern India we find figures
such as Jean-Felix Onsime Luquet (18101858), an mep priest (in 1845
coadjutor vicar apostolic of Madurai and the Coromandel Coast), and
Father Joseph Bertrand of the Society, who both wrote on this subject.
As has been noted by Pierre-Antoine Fabre, it was from the history of the mis-
sions that Jesuit historiography began again to reflect on the Societys past. It is
7 Jan J. Slijkerman, Roothaan and the First Novitiate in India of the Restored Jesuit Order,
Indian Church History Review 9/1 (June 1976): 2354.
8 Frykenberg, Christianity in India, 351.
9 Kenneth Ballhatchet, European Missions and Indian Society: The Archbishop of Goa, the
Vicar Apostolic of Malabar and the Padroado in the Early Nineteenth Century (Lisbon:
Institute de Investigaao Cientifica Tropical, 1985).
10 See Charles R. Boxer, The Problem of the Native Clergy in the Portuguese and Spanish
Empires from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, in Christianity and Missions,
14501800, ed. by J.S. Cummins (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 175195.
334 Pavone
also interesting because the first superior of the new mission, Bertrand, was
also the person who later undertook the writing of the history of the mission
and the publication of sources.
The Suppression of the Society and its Impact on the Madurai

Mission
To understand the history of the new nineteenth-century mission it is neces-

sary to discuss what happened in the intervening period, during the years after
September 1759, when the Portuguese viceroy Manuel de Saldanha y
Albuquerque (17121771) implemented Pombals decrees expelling the Jesuits.
Most of the Jesuits resident in Goa were arrested and imprisoned in Lisbon.11
By contrast, the Jesuits of Malabar and those who worked in Pondicherry
even after the French edict of 18 November 1764remained in India. It was in
1776 that Louis XVIin agreement with the Congregation for the Propagation
of the Faithentrusted the Sminaire des Missions Etrangres with the task
of replacing the Jesuits in the Carnate mission and some areas of Madurai and
Mysore. Relations between the mep and the Society had been difficult during
the eighteenth century, not least because of the meps negative attitude to
Malabar rituals.
The French governments management of this substitution was attentive to
the concerns of all the actors involved and has been adeptly reconstructed by
the Jesuit historian douard Hambye.12 This handover, with all the resulting
uncertainty, was discussed by Msgr. Davoust (17281789) in a mmoire sent to
Msgr. Pierre Brigot (17131791), the vicar apostolic of Pondicherry, and to Msgr.
Louis Mathon (17431778), procurator of the meps in the same city and some-
one known for his lack of sympathy toward former Jesuits. The meps believed
the restoration of the Society was likely (perhapsHambye hypothesized
influenced by their survival in Russia) and therefore the mmoire stressed that
11 Achilles Meersman, The Mysore Mission During the Period Subsequent to the
Suppression Decree of 1759, Indian Church History Review 9/2 (December 1975): 147157.
The article is based on the archives of the diocese of Madras-Mylapore. Before 1759 there
were seven fathers working with the Hindu castes and five with the pariahs.
12 douard R. Hambye, Le remplacement des Jsuites de la mission du Carnate, in Ecclesi
Memoria. Miscellanea in onore del R.P. Joseph Metzler O.M.I., a cura di Willi Henkel O.M.I.
(Freiburg: Herder, 1991): 243250. See also Id., History of Christanity in India (Bangalore:
The Church History Association of India, 1997), vol. III (Eighteenth century), chapter 35
(Christian presence at the end of the 18th century), 415419.
the administration would be temporary and would merely seek to keep the
Malabar mission alive. The mmoire stated:
The former Jesuits must be convinced that acceptance of the meps is

needed to keep their establishment with all its revenues. They will only
be their representatives [] but this remains secret because of Portugal.
Either way there will be no confusion about church property. The former
Jesuits should also be entreated to continue their work, even if they wish
to remain separate, within the country, but all the more so in Pondicherry.
On the issue of the Malabar rites, some will not want to comply with
papal decisions, others will want to. Proceed with caution and try to con-
vince the older former Jesuits to allow the younger ones to comply with
these decisions. We need to show a lot of care and courtesy to the former
Jesuits to soften the harshness of the royal decision.13
The reason why the mepsunfavorable until then to the Societys missionar-
ieswere so afraid of displeasing the former Jesuits in this case is not made clear
from a reading of the documents cited by Hambye. Of course, it is evident that
the French government needed to keep the missions in India alive as an instru-
ment of colonization.14 In any case, the eight missionaries who still lived in
Malabar signed a deed to formalize the union between the old and the new mis-
sion administered by the meps; the surviving fathers who lived in the region
therefore agreed to live in community with the new missionaries, while remain-
ing formally independent from the Missions Etrangres. A certain continuity was
therefore guaranteed in Madurai by the meps themselves. Later, in 183637, some
representatives of the French congregationsuch as Msgr. Jean-Antoine Dubois
(17661848) (author of a famous volume on Indian Manners and Customs)15 and
13 douard R. Hambye, Le remplacement des Jsuites de la mission du Carnate, in Ecclesi

Memoria. Miscellanea in onoredel R.P. Joseph Metzler O.M.I., ed. Willi Henkel O.M.I. (Roma-
Freiburg-Wien: Herder, 1991), 243250; see also Id., History of Christianity in India
(Bangalore: The Church History Association of India, 1997), 3:415419; Adrien Launay,
Histoire des Missions de lInde (Paris: Indes savantes, 2000 [Reprint ed. Paris: A. Dauniol,
1898]), 5/1:1147.
14 Similar to the Indian case is the situation of the French mission in China, which survived
the suppression of the Society of Jesus and also was offered to the meps, but was eventu-
ally entrusted to the Vincentian Fathers.
15 Jean-Antoine Dubois, Description of the character, manners, and customs of the People of
India; and of their institutions religious and civilTranslated from the french manuscript
(London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row, 1817). The first edition
in French is Moeurs, institutions et crmonies des peuples de lInde (Paris: St. Merlin 1825).
336 Pavone
Msgr. Jean-Louis Bonnard (18241852)sponsored the return of the Jesuits to

Madurai. This, however, did not prevent the old tensions resurfacing once the
fathers of the Society reaffirmed their permanent presence in the region.
One of the most important testimonies on the work of the former Jesuits in
the 1780s is Father Pietro Licchettas letter (17251783)16 to Father Giovan
Francesco Filippi di Vallecossa (kept at the arsi and published in incomplete
form by Joseph Bertrand in La Mission du Madur).17 The letter provides impor-
tant evidence, not only of the condition of the Indian mission in the late eigh-
teenth century, but alsomore importantlyof how a Jesuit missionary
perceived his role in an order that was disappearing. Bertrand censored the
text of the letter heavily as it did not fit the typical context of missionary pro-
paganda of the mid-nineteenth century. Citation of the original text of the
document is therefore important in order to understand its full implications.
Licchetta wrote that after the dissolution of the community of Goa, also due to
the exhaustion of Portuguese subsidies, we judged that to be more obedient to
the divine will we would stay, for the health of these poor Indians, and to form
a single body, with common consent and the explicit approval of the Father
General we succumbed to the authority of the provincial of Malabar.18 This
esprit de corps caused constant anxiety in which we were kept by the things of
our persecuted Mother the Society until the news of the fatal blow of extinc-
tion.19 Licchetta reconstructs the events of the day when the sad news arrived
16 Pietro Licchetta was born on 1 February 1725 (he himself reports the date of his birth in
the letter) and died on 31 May 1783. See arsi, Vit 94: Vita del P. Pietro Licchetta della
Portoghese Provincia di Goa (ff. 292303), which reproduces in full the letter to
Fr. Filippi, which is a large part of the Vita in question (292v301). In the same volume
there are also the lives of a number of missionaries in India, who were forced to return
to Portugal after Pombals expulsion and later imprisoned in Lisbon: Vita del Fr. Giuseppe
Piedimonte della provincia di Goa (ff. 175v/178v), Vita del P. Giovanni Alessandro della
Provincia di Malabar (ff. 179rv). On Lichetta see also Hambye, History of Christianity in
India, index.
17 Joseph Bertrand, La Mission du Madur (Paris: Librairie de Poussielgue-Rusand, 184754),
IV, 457463 (French transl.). Sommervogel also mentions the existence of a copy of this
letter in the college of Orvieto in 1858 (ref. to De Becker, III, 738).
18 Lettera di p. Licchetta, Daraburam 16 April 1780 (antiqua missio), in arsi, n.c. - Missio
Madurensis, vol. I, fasc. I, doc. 1. The letter, as attested in Vita del P. Pietro Licchetta, was
received by Father Filippi towards the end of 1781. Filippi replied recommending Licchetta
to the vicar apostolic and the vicar of the Discalced Carmelites of Veragoli in Malabar. The
letter is also quoted in David Ferroli, The Jesuits in Mysore (Kozhikode: Xavier Press, 1955),
193195. Ferroli also quoted another letter sent from Licchetta to Propaganda13 August
1780 (196201)similarly very critical.
19 Ibid.
from an intimate perspective: it was the feast day of St. John of Nepomucene,
protector of the Society, and the father was reading the book on the rules of
modesty and
I never wanted to read it again, nor see it, so as not to feel again the sor-
row, and bitterness, which I found more intense and penetrating than I
had ever experienced, or will ever experience, in my life, which of course
included the pain and sorrow of my own death. I thought I could not
survive such distress; neither eating nor sleeping, tired and overwhelmed
by extraordinary sadness, what little sleep I had was interrupted, and
awaking incontinent, the first thought that came upon me and pierced
my heart like a dagger was this: the Society does not exist and I am no lon-
ger a Jesuit. I was astonished and beside myself. [] Finally the sensitivity
abated, with the passage of time we grow accustomed to everything; but
my judgment remained equally firm, in fact it grew stronger day by day, as
I saw the harm that the absence of the Society was causing in these
Missions, which would also have been the case in other placesseeing
now that the Society absence in the World is little missed, it is little won-
der that I repeat, along with others: Oh, Society of Jesus. No one knows
you better than those who have lost you!20
In this important passage, Licchetta clearly shows how, for him, the articula-
tion of memory moves primarily through a psychological vocabulary that
relies on emotions.21 It is a theme that could perhaps be identified in much of
the Jesuit correspondence at that time and it brings into play the discourse
regarding how the Jesuits wrote their own history and what they meant when
they spoke of history. Licchetta continues:
I also want to know what they think and discuss in Europe about the
extinction of our Society. More than a year ago we received a good news
that some already believed it to be resurrected in Europe, and close to
resurrection also here, but later a bad news arrived, that it already seems
20 Ibid.
21 It would be interesting to connect the history of missions with the new branch of the his-
tory of emotions. For this branch of study see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling.
A Framework for the History of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2001);
Forum. History of Emotions, German History 28/1 (2010): 6780; The History of
Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,
History and Theory 49/2 (May 2010): 237265.
338 Pavone
to me that a real Sebastianism will be needed for the Society to return to the
world. I speak from the top down, for God is omnipotent.22
The letter agrees with those written by the Jesuits resident in Russia with its
references to providence, and the reference to Sebastianism mirrors an apoca-
lyptic dimension common to the Jesuits who had survived in Belarus, and
especially to those expelled from the Iberian empires.23 Another link with the
Russian experienceunknown to Licchetta at the timeis the hope that the
election of a superior and the foundation of a novitiate could be elements of a
possible continuity. I wish to know, wrote Licchetta to his confrere Filippi, in
which part of the world some fragment of the Society remains intact, not
extinct, which enjoys the power to elect its superior and accept novices sicut in
diebus antiquis.24
This attachment to the old Society does not, however, negate attachment to
the Indian mission, which was increasingly in crisis, not only because of a lack
of missionaries but also because of the difficulty of converting the Indians:
I have baptized a few hundred but have not converted anyone, and what I
have said can be said by more or less any missionary of any mission in this
peninsula. [] Spiritual reasons do not move them to become Christians
only temporal ones []25 therefore adult Baptisms nearly ceased after our
ruin, because we were no longer able to give generously.26
Anticipating the question of his interlocutor, Licchetta writes:
What on earth is this type of Christianity? Do you ask me? Do you, per-
haps, not know? As they are all Canarins from Salsette, Goa and Bandas
[Bandra?]. But what fruits have you produced from your labors? Father
Giulio Cesar Potenza answers for mehe is currently at the Madur mis-
sion. Fruit that, according to the Lives of the Fathers, that Monk was seek-
ing to harvest, by order of the Superiors, by sewing seed on stony ground.27
22 Ibid.
23 Sabina Pavone, Una strana alleanza. La Compagnia di Ges in Russia dal 1772 al 1820
(Naples: Bibliopolis: 2008 [but 2010]).
24 Lettera di p. Licchetta.
25 According to Father Licchetta they become Christians if someone wants a wife who is
Christian, in case of disease that encourages baptism with hope for aid in healing and for
the poor with hope for material aid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
It is clearly not one of the most edifying letters sent to Europe to propagate the
successes of the Society. On the contrary, the letter gives us a vivid idea of the
difficult conditions under which the missionaries were working in India. The
text also represents a point of reference for the debate that resumed at the start
of the nineteenth century on the Malabar rites and relations with the
Portuguese padroado. Indeed, Father Licchetta wrote later:
We who have struggled and continue to struggle so much; we who have

suffered and suffer from Christians themselves for observance of the
Decrees of Rome, are portrayed as such upholders of idolatry in India,
that it was one of the blows that led to the destruction of the Society. []
This is the twelfth year that we have been in this fire, and now that I am
writing, it burns more due to the intrusion of certain Canarins [native]
priests who promise these fools to give license to that which we have for-
bidden as contrary to the pontifical decrees and openly superstitious. It
seems that the fire will not be quenched, or rather, the mission will end
up in ruins, if we do not leave it, and I feel that we will soon leave it, and
thus the fire will end, because it is all-consuming and will destroy this
unfortunate Christianity. The cause of this evil seems to be Portugal,
which to keep its rightful patronage does not want to cede control of
these missions to the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the
Faith, which could be supported excellently by sending Teresians of St.
Pancras, whose experience makes them great servants and who are the
only ones that, in my opinion, after the extinction of the Society, might
properly administer this Church. But Portugal, I repeat, will not allow
this. Let them at least send Portuguese missionaries! Even in this, so as to
avoid spending, they seem to want to leave everything in the hands of the
Canarins.28
When the Jesuit fathers returned to India in 1838, they encountered fierce
opposition from the Canarins priests linked to the Portuguese padroadonow
in deep crisisespecially when they tried to regain control of the church of
Trichinopoly.29 Licchettas letter must therefore be read from two perspectives.
With regard to the history of the Society it reveals an attitude similar to that of
28 Ibid.
29 On this episode, see Estratto dalla lettera di p. J. Bertrand al p. Renault, written December
1837 and January 1838 (sent to Roothaan) and the Copie dune lettre du p. Bertrand au pre
Renault, Madur 25 March 1838, respectively in arsi, n.c. - Missio Madurensis, vol. I, fasc.
III, doc. 1 and 3.
340 Pavone
the European Jesuitsand in particular of the Jesuits in Russiawhich saw,

in the possibility of electing a superior and creating a novitiate, the necessary
conditions to ensure a minimum continuity for the Society. However, with
regard to the Indian mission, the letter expresses Lichettas very strong disen-
chantment as a missionary, encapsulated in the metaphor of sowing on stony
ground. What should be emphasized here is that the part of the letter dedi-
cated to the continuity of the Societys history in Joseph Bertrands edition was
not subject to significant censorship, but the part that concerns the missionary
failure was completely deleted from the French translation published by
Bertrand.30
I have chosen to focus on this example because it informs us about the use
of the missionary sources of the old Society in relation to the founding of the
new mission and, more generally, about the publication of these sources dur-
ing the nineteenth century. With regard to Licchettas letter, it should be
noted that it was used by historians only in Joseph Bertrands edition and
therefore in its incomplete version. Even some prominent scholars, such as
David Mosse, who are familiar with the archives of the Society of Jesus in
India, are unfamiliar with the Roman archives and cite Roman sources only
through the edition produced by the Jesuit historians. A critical reappraisal of
the Jesuit historiography of the nineteenth century is therefore an urgent
task.
It is no coincidence that Bertrand was the first superior of the new Madurai
mission and that, on his return to Europe, he took on the dual role of stressing
the continuity of the Jesuit mission and of defending the missionary strategy
in India especially regarding the advisabilitydelayed several times over the
yearsof building a native clergy.
The New Madurai Mission
The assignment of the new Madurai mission to the Society was sponsored by
the Sminaire des Missions Etrangres in Paris and in particular by Msgr.
Dubois.31 The context of this new experience was the crisis within the
Portuguese empire, regarded by the Roman Congregation for the Propagation
of the Faith as a real threat to the future of the mission. Cardinal Pedicini,
Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See, wrote in 1832 that there were very
30 In any case, the passage on the minimum requirements for the election of a superior and
the opening of a novitiate was cut off.
31 On the presence of the meps in Pondichrry, see Launay, Histoire des Missions de lInde.
severe disorders that are flooding the dioceses of Cranganor, Cochin, and
Mylapore and threaten to remove at least one hundred thousand Catholics
from the Church to reduce them again in Gentilism, or pass them to the profes-
sion [of faith] of any religious sect.32 The prefect of the Propaganda empha-
sized in the letter that it would be better to replace the Portuguese diocesesa
good number of them had been vacant for some timewith apostolic vicars,
but evidently Portugal was not of the same opinion.
A radical change took place with the election to the papacy of the
Camaldolese monk Gregory XVI: the new pope decided to appoint new vicars
apostolic for India. The first was Calcutta in 1834. The brief Latissimi terrarum
tractatus (18 April)despite opposition from the local clergyassigned vic-
ars powers to the Jesuit Robert Saint-Lger (17881856) without obtaining the
consent of the general of the Society,33 who repeatedly protested to the pope
about this development. Jan Roothaan was convincedas evidenced by the
wealth of correspondence held in the arsithat the Propaganda had no
desire to see the Jesuits return to India and the ruse of apostolic vicars such
as Saint-Lger was being used to dilute their Jesuit identity.34 In 1837, Rome
tried to appoint Joseph Bertrandready to leave for Pondicherryas a vicar
apostolic but he refused the post by agreement with the superior general, giv-
ing reasons that are highly relevant to our discussion because they refer pre-
cisely to Jesuit identity, which was more important than anything else for
Bertrand:
I am a Jesuit! A poor, poor Jesuit, it is true, a useless member. [] But due

to my love, gratitude, and devotion to my mother I intend never to sell her
or at least I do not wish to sell her to any of her children. [] Yes, all my
comfort, my happiness, and ambition is to live and die a Jesuit; and a
Jesuit not only in law and in name but a Jesuit in fact, i.e. an instrument
in the hands of, and immediately, freely and fully available to those who
32 acf, Lettere e Decreti e Biglietti di Monsignor Segretario, a. 1832, vol. 313, f. 122. Quoted in
Carlos Mercs de Melo, The Recruitment and Formation of the Native Clergy in India (16th
19th century). An Historical-Canonical Study (Lisbon: Agncia Geral do Ultra- mar, 1955), 51.
33 On Robert Saint-Leger, see Josson, La mission du Bengale occidental, 1:162185.
34 Copia della lettera di P. Jan Philip Roothaan SJ a P. Joseph Bertrand SJ, vicario apostolico del
Madurai (India), Rome, 1 April 1837, in arsi, n.c., P. Jan Philip Roothaan SJ, b. 13, fasc. 64,
1574, [old signature 1023, 222]. See also the letters written by Jan Philip Roothaan to
Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni, prefect of the Propaganda Fide, ivi, 1575 (5 April 1837)
and 1576 (10 Aprile 1837) and the one written by Jan Roothaan to Pope Gregory XVI, ivi,
1579 (25 January 1838).
342 Pavone
hold the place of God for me. Any other ambition is foreign to me, thanks
be to God.35
In 1834, the vicariate of Madras was established (with the brief Ex debito pasto-
ralis, 25 April) and the brief Commissum nobis (4 August 1835) abolished all the
rights of the padroado. With regard to Pondicherry, from 1836 the vicariate was
administered by people associated with the Missions Etrangres de Paris.36
From this moment on the correspondence can be followed between Superior
General Roothaan, the superior of the province of Lyonrequired to send the
missionaries to Maduraiand the Missions Etrangres. We have both Jesuit
and mep sources (partly published by Adrien Launay at the end of the nine-
teenth century, and it would be interesting to determine the degree of censor-
ship involved).
It was Gregory XVIs bull Ex munere pastoralis (10 January 1837) that offi-
cially re-established the Jesuit mission in Madurai. Another bull, the Multi pr-
clare (24 April 1838) removed jurisdiction from the three suffragan sees of Goa
and entrusted it to more local apostolic vicars. The clergy of Goa objected to
this act by starting what is known as the schism of Goa, but in the meantime
the territories had passed to British jurisdiction and Portugals hands were tied.
This was an important transfer because the parishes of Madurai over which
the Jesuits claimed jurisdiction now had the opportunity to switch back to the
Society under a principle of Indian law which stated that religious disputes
should be settled according to the rules of the faith itself (therefore by decision
of the pope). Also important was a law of the Madras High Court (founded by
the British administration), which had ruled that all peaceful occupations of
the churches should not be subject to dispute.37
The correspondence of the Lyon missionaries before their departure for
India clearly shows that the new Madurai mission was built in a context
that was radically different from that of the pre-suppression Society. The
Observations relatives au projet denvoyer au Madur quatre missionnaires de la
Socit de Jsus en 1836, attributed to Msgr. Dubois, insisted that the Jesuits had
35 Lettre du p. Bertrand au P. Gen. Roothaan, Lyon, 18 April 1837, in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis
1001, II, 13. The correspondence between Jan Roothaan and Propagation is held in arsi,
n.c., Roothaan, 1023.
36 Madurai in 1846 became an apostolic vicariate independent of Pondicherry with Msgr.
Alexis Canoz. On the new Jesuit mission see also Lon Besse, La mission du Madurai.
Historique de ses Pangous (Trichinopoly: 1914).
37 Hugald Grafe, The History of Christianity in Tamilnadu from 1800 to 1975 (Bangalore-
Erlangen: Church History Association of India- Verlag der Ev.-Mission, 1990).
a British superior so as to facilitate relations with the Indian government, but

it was also emphasized that the British in Madure by no means persecute the
Catholic missionaries and the status of Jesuit is not at all unfavorable. If the
missionary makes a favorable impression by his virtues, and above by his wis-
dom and prudence, they offer him all kinds of respect and honor, much more
than to their own ministers.38 To be well received it was necessary to learn the
English language and to be
straightforward and simple, perfectly formal but without any eccentric-

ity, silent on religion or at least extremely cautious in the matter, offer
oneself to their service, [], never to approach them for favors on behalf
of the Indians, requests for servants, no protection for anything at all, not
even for a criminal unless the latter was punished for insulting the mis-
sionary [] [and] shows oneself to be a good Englishman, i.e. happy for
the successes of that nation and always ready to applaud.39
The same document also clearly shows that the crisis in the Portuguese colonial
context, replaced by the East India Company, would have affected the develop-
ment of the mission and that one of its main aims was to counter the success of
Protestant pastors, whose presence in the territory was multiplying visibly:
The missionaries should expect the most furious war from the Portuguese
priests. If they could be persuaded to come to an arrangement this would
be an ineffable happiness; and to achieve that we must try all possible
routes []. It is absolutely necessary for the mission of Madurai to form a
separate ecclesiastical province; it must have a special apostolic vicar
invested with full powers; an apostolic prefect would not suffice. Another
area of exercise for the Catholic priest and often of the bitterest pain is
the Methodist preacher who, purse in hand, simply corrupts the unfortu-
nate Indians on whom gold has a very powerful effect, and who also steal
the flock of the true shepherd of the sheep gathered and tended with
infinite fatigue.40
While, therefore, the meps sought to persuade the Jesuits to send a British pro-
vincial to Madurai, another note sent by Msgr. Dubois to the Holy See insisted
38 Observations relatives au projet denvoyer au Madur quatre missionnaires de la Socit de

Jsus en 1836, in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis 1001, I, 4.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
344 Pavone
that the spiritual powers to be granted to the Reverend Jesuit Fathers []

should be highly explicit and leave no room for ambiguity.41 The matter of the
Portuguese clergy was discussed again:
One of the most embarrassing problems to which the new missionaries

are exposed have their origins in the obstinate opposition they face from
the Portuguese priests who have always seen themselves and still see them-
selves as the exclusive heirs of all the Indian missions despite the repeated
decisions of the Holy See contrary to their intentions. The British govern-
ment never involves itself in these disputes over jurisdiction, unless they
disturb the public peace.42
Indeed, it seemed necessary for the apostolic vicars of different nation-
alities come to an agreement that puts an end to these disputes that are a
constant source of scandal and division among the native Christians,
which make Catholicism an object of ridicule and contempt among
Protestants, Gentiles, and Muslims, and are one of the major causes of
the apostasy of many.43
There was obviously a lack of missionary personnel, which made it easier to

the local church to turn once again to the Jesuits. However, doubts about invit-
ing the Jesuits remained, which, in turn, gave rise to contradictions especially
on the issue of nationality. On the one hand, when Father Bertrand arrived in
Pondicherry he wrote to the Lyon provincial that we still prefer to see India
under British rule than under the current French government, as France is so
poorly represented in the colonies [] [and] does not have the moral qualities
that the English have.44 On the other handa few months laterBertrand
also contacted the superior general to summarize the decision of Msgr.
OConnor to postpone all non-British missionaries in Europe as well as the new
pressures from Dubois for a British superior:
He would wish to see a British provincial responsible for all the Jesuits in
India; I feel the benefit of this measure and would be the first to desire
41 Note crite de la main de M. Dubois [superior of the Foreign Missions Seminary] sur la mis-
sion du Madur (pour le St. Sige) [1836], in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis 1001, I, 5.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Estratto dalla lettera di p. J. Bertrand al p. Renault, scritte nel dicembre 1837, in arsi, n.c.,
Prov. Madurensis 1001, III, 1.
this for myself; but how to keep the peace and walk in the footsteps of our
ancestors who made themselves completely Indian, if the superior were
to bring English ideas here that were incompatible with the needs and
requirements of the places, if he involved himself too much in trade and
the views of the British, even of the clergy, fell under his influence? It is
necessary to be at peace with the government, it is a requirement and a
duty; and certainly no subjects would ever be more faithful to him than
we are determined to be; but in my view his protection is a real and
deadly slavery to religion. However it may be that the Society is forced to
adopt the idea of Msgr. Dubois, so what will the Society choose?45
Back in Europe Bertrand finally spoke in favor of acceptance by the Jesuits of

the dignity of the apostolic vicar. He understood this as the lesser evil in a colo-
nial context that was increasingly influenced by the British presence.46 At the
beginning, however, there was an attempt to resist pressure from Dubois. In
fact four French Jesuits were sent to Madurai, and it was stressed that the mis-
sion would be the oldest daughter of [the] new province of Lyon.47 The four
JesuitsJoseph Bertrand, Alexander Martin (17991841), Ludovicus Garnier
(18051843) et Ludovicus du Ranquet (18061843)48set off for Pondicherry,
where they arrived in October 1837.
45 Bertrand a Roothaan, [Pondichery], 13 march 1838, in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis 1001, III, 4.
46 See also Thomas Anchukandam, General Division of the Indian Missions into Vicariates
Apostolic: Luquets Role and Subsequent Controversies, Indian Church History Review
32/2 (December, 1998): 7794.
47 Le pre Renault au pre gnral Roothaan, Vals, 15 April 1836, in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis
1001, I, 2.
48 See Catalogus sociorum et officiorum Provinci Lugdunensis Societatis Iesu ineunte anno
MDCCCXL (Lugduni: DD. Archiepiscopi Typographi, 1840), 27: Missio Madurensis in India.
All of them are called in the Catalogus sacerdotes but there is the date of gradus only
for Garnier (15 August 1836) and Martin (2 February 1837). In the Catalogus sociorum et
officiorum(Lugduni: A. Perisse, 1841), we find the gradus for Bertrand (25 March 1840)
(45) and for du Ranquet (13 October 1839) (54), such as the date of Martins death (1842).
The date of Garniers death is in the Catalogus sociorum et officiorum(Lugduni: A.
Perisse, 1844), 55; that of du Ranquets death is in the Catalogus sociorum et officiorum
(Lugduni: A. Perisse, 1845), 55. Lon Besse, La mission du Madur. Historique de ses pan-
gous (Trichinopoly: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique, 1914), did not give full names
and biographical dates of these Jesuits except for Joseph Bertrand. On the death from
cholera of the Madurais missionaries see also the Lettera di P. Jan Roothaan SI a P.
Bonaventura Benetti SJ, preposito della Provincia Romana, Rome, 16 May 1843, in arsi,
n.c., P. Jan Philip Roothaan SJ, b. 12, fasc. 58, c. 1293 [old signature 1013, 308].
346 Pavone
It is not the intention here to reconstruct the start of the mission in detail,
but rather to dwell on the role of Bertrand in writing and rewriting the history
of the Indian mission in a perspective of continuity between the old and the
new Society. Msgr. Duboisin another letter sent to Roothaan in August
1836had already emphasized that continuity and had also prophesied great
new successes for the Jesuit order in Asia. He declared himself happy that the
mission had finally been
entrusted to your venerable Society. As the immediate successor of the

former Jesuits and having had the pleasure of exercising the holy minis-
try jointly with them, I was led to appreciate the immense good that they
had done in Madurai and Karnataka where their memory is still revered
and their restoration is desired and anticipated with great ardor []. The
degree of misfortune into which Catholicism has fallen in this country
can only be helped by your Society, aided by God, to preserve it from full
and speedy ruin and prevent these once so flourishing Madurai congre-
gations, formed by the zeal, sweat, and constant work of your worthy for-
mer colleagues, quickly becoming prey to some of heresy []. Here you
are once again setting off on a route that your predecessors travelled so
brightly and fruitfully. Asia is starting to open out its arms to you. The
ashes of your brothers who watered these vast fields with their sweat, and
several also with their blood, call you with loud cries.49
Arriving in Pondicherry with his three confreres, Bertrand immediately con-

ceived the idea of the continuity between the old and the new mission.50 The
letter written in October, on his arrival in Pondicherry, generally seems to her-
ald a work on the history of the mission. Referring to the old missionaries, he
wrote: Memories of them are still alive; some dozens of Malabaris, including
an old Brahmin, have already spoken fondly of their virtues and their kindness.
Next I could collect more interesting details that might be used to link the his-
tory of this mission to that of which it is the continuation or offshoot.51
49 Le p. Dubois au pre gnral Roothaan, Paris, 22 August 1836, in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis
1001, I, 6. See also Mons. Dubois au R.P. Roothaan, 27 October 1837.
50 Between 1838 and 1850, the mission grew substantially: from four to sixty fathers. At the
beginning, the name of the mission was Madurai mission, then was Indica mission
divided in 1842 in three parts: Trichinopoli, Madurensi et Maravensi, and Piscaria.
51 Le p. Bertrand au P. Gen. Roothaan, Pondicherry, 27 October 1837, in arsi, n.c., Prov.
Madurensis 1001, II, 13.
The following year Bertrand again returned to the theme of continuity: The
impression that our Fathers have left is still alive; many of their disciples, bap-
tized by their hands, are still there to transfer the old tradition to us to link the
nascent mission to that which has expired.52 One of the subtle issues was the
Malabar rites that once again threatened to undermine the outcome of the
Jesuit mission. Before leaving Lyon Bertrand had asked General Roothaan to
be so good as to go into the minutest details in the instructions sent to us in
order to draft our rule of conduct into something affecting the Malabar rites.53
Once in Pondicherry he updated the general, explaining that Monsignor
[Claude Bonnard, Bishop of Drusipare] asked me if we would be obliged to
take the oath to the bull Omnium sollicitudinum (the Capuchins would not
take it). Monsignor and all these gentlemen would love to rid themselves of
this weight, which they say is a source of concern and unnecessary scruples for
missionaries. What shall we do?54
In any case, while avoiding disagreeing with the meps and with Bishop
Bonnard, Bertrand judged that the decision to move away from the previous
Jesuit practice regarding Indian rituals had been one of the most important
causes of the crisis of conversions:
The regime of our ancient fathers (Roman saniassis) are not strictly
observed, the missionaries eat eggs and poultry in secret [emphasis in the
original], the Christians are not interested in it, but the gentiles would be
scandalized about it and [the missionaries] would still be considered by
them people with no caste, untouchables; these gentlemen themselves
admit that these prejudices are still inveterate in the south. Is this not
why so little or no fruit is harvested in the good castes? No more conver-
sions of Brahmins. Families converted by our ancient fathers are being
extinguished. What shall we do? How shall we express ourselves? I do not
know the country well enough to make a decision that calls for serious
reflection. [] I have a feeling that we are getting very close to our ancient
fathers, if we cannot imitate them in everything.55
Even on the issue of the untouchables Bertrand aimed to maintain the physical
division of the church in two parts, which was characteristic of the churches
52 Le p. Bertrand au P. Gen. Roothaan, Pondichery, 12 February 1838, in arsi, n.c., Prov.
Madurensis 1001, III, 2.
53 Le p. Bertrand au P. Gen. Roothaan, Lyon, 27 October 1837, in arsi, n.c., Prov. Madurensis
1001, II, 13.
54 Ibid. The parentheses are in the text of the letter.
55 Ibid.
348 Pavone
administered by the old Society: this form is very advantageous for giving
the caste distinction whatever ecclesiastical discipline permits (Monsignor
OConnor wanted to remove this practice in Madras and brought about a revolt
fifteent days ago and troubles from which it will be difficult to come away with
any advantage for our religion).56
On the problem of the rituals there were undoubtedly different positions: if
the Jesuits were particularly sensitive in this respect, the attitude assumedin
particular on the specific issue of the casteswas not unique.57 For example,
the Annales de la Propagation de la foi usually selected testimonies designed to
minimize the importance of the issue and, when talking about the ritual cus-
toms of the Indians, never used the term Malabar rites and only dealt explic-
itly with these issues rarely.58 Among the meps however, Msgr. Melchior de
Marion Bresillac (18131859) decided to leave his post simply because of dis-
agreement with the official position of the congregation, which was unfavor-
able to the maintenance of the Malabar rites after their conversion to
Catholicism.59
Joseph Bertrand returned to the issue of the Malabar rites on his return to
Europe where, as we have said, he decided to devote a significant part of his
work to the memory of the old Madurai mission, to defend these rituals, and to
argue for the creation of a native clergy. In the first volume of his collected
Lettres nouvelles de la mission du Madur,60 he wrote that to act against their
56 Ibid.
57 A few years later the Jesuit Clifford wrote from Trichinopoly to his friends in England that
whenever these national prejudices do not in any damage the interests of religion, we
have to respect them. To seek to uproot it would be futile (Annales de la Propagation de
la Foi, 16:248, quoted by Hlne Portier, Les missionnaires catholiques en Inde au XIXe sicle
(Paris: LHarmattan, 2009), 197. See also See Kenneth A. Ballhatchet, Caste, Class and
Catholicism in India 17891914 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998). See also Achilles
Meersman, o.f.m., Can We Speak of Indigenization of the Catholic Church in India dur-
ing the 19th Century? Padroado and Propaganda compared, Indian Church History Review
7/2 (December 1973): 7582.
58 The Annales de la Propagation de la foi were the review of the Oeuvre de la Propagation de
la foi, created by Pauline Jaricot 3 May 1822, and developed under the direction of the
monsignors of the Congrgation de Lyon.
59 Bresillac wrote about this matter to Msgr. Bonnard and Charbonneaux on 17 April 1855:
desiring much and more tolerance than we have had for Indian practices, it is absolutely
repugnant to my conscience to proceed in the way that I wanted, as long as the Holy See
does not declare that it is fully aware of everything that is practised and that this practice
is acceptable. This is the true cause of my resignation. Quoted in M. Bresillac, Je les
aimais: douze ans en Inde, 18421854 (Paris: Mdiaspaul, 1988), 12.
60 Joseph Bertrand, Lettres des nouvelles missions du Madur (Lyon: L. Perrin, 1839).
practices made them revolt and took them away from Christianity forever. So it
seemed natural and legitimate to be flexible on extraneous matters to safe-
guard what was essential, to allow that which was not forbidden by natural law
or divine law.61
All the works written by Bertrand on the Madurai mission aimed to identify
and exalt the former mission because of the sense of continuity it provided for
the new one promoted by the French Jesuits: A chain whose rings unite the
old and the new Society.62 The project has its own internal coherence
both apologetic and polemic at the same time: La mission du Madur daprs
des documents indits was originally conceived by Bertrand as a response to
the Lettres Mgr lvque de Langres, sur la congrgation des Missions-trangres
published by mep priest Luquet to justify the hostility of the old Jesuits to the
creation of a native clergy.63 Bertrand sees a sort of inconsistency between the
condemnation of the Malabar rites and the decision to establish an Indian
clergy. When the old missionaries had arrived in Madurai they presented
themselves as Roman Brahmins, Northern sanniasis:
They wrap themselves above all in an impenetrable mystery: through this

industry of their charity they manage to capture the attention of the
Indians []. Should they not also have been worried that the mere admis-
sion of native subjects, known to their countrymen, might destroy the
impression that they had produced and the position they had so labori-
ously acquired? Moreover, while condescending to the weakness of the
Indian, the missionaries had to safeguard the integrity of the faith.
Among the customs of India, some were innocent, and they allowed
them; others were more or less dangerous, but were not criminal and
they believed they should tolerate them; but where they found some with
which their conscience could not compromise, they then showed them-
selves firm and unyielding. Now, could they expect such firmness on the
party of the Indians, who had been born in the midst of prejudices that
had become second nature to them? Could they safely boast that these
61 Joseph Bertrand, Lettres des nouvelles missions, I: Recherches sur les Indes pour servir
dIntroduction aux Lettres des nouveaux missionnaires, 87. Also in arsi, Prov. Madurensis.
Varia Historica, 2001, a.b.c.d.e.f (introd.: a).
62 Ibid., 93.
63 Joseph Bertrand, La mission du Madur daprs des documents indits (Paris: Pussielgue-
Rusard, 184750) and Lettres Mgr lvque de Langres, sur la congrgation des Missions-
trangres (Paris: Gaume-Frres, 1842). See also arsi, n.c., Mad. 1001, fasc. X: Mmoire sur
la question du clerg indigne dans lInde par le P. Jos. Bertrand SJ (117); Remarques sur les
claircissements de Mr Lucquet (1749).
350 Pavone
Indians would join them in attacking national practices and ceremonies

that they still tolerated as not strictly criminal, but that they intended to
fight later as dangerous? They could hardly be responsible for their own
faithfulness: arriving from Europe with prejudices contrary to those of
India [] they saw their condescension accused of being guilty weakness
[]; in this state how could they entrust the deposit of their faith to
natives when this would simply bolster those prejudices?64
From a sharp polemical perspective the publication of the letters would then
be the best way to complete the story of the missions of previous centuries
and to respond to the attacks to which they were subjected by the blind hatred
of the enemies of religion, as the prejudices of people who were also well-
intentioned.65 In choosing to publish the letters both of the old and the new
nineteenth-century mission it is, however, clear that there was also a propa-
gandist dimension, linked to a crisis within European Catholicism. This propa-
ganda is therefore linked to an apologia, but to uncover the apologetic
dimension it is also necessary to study censorship, as the example of Licchettas
letter made clear.
Work on the new Society of Jesus therefore requires, among other things,
the exercising of caution in the use of published sources. It also invites us to
undertake a critical reconsideration of figures such as Joseph Bertrand, who
tell us a great deal about a complex issue in the history of the Society and its
missions.
64 Bertrand, La mission du Madur, 186.

65 Ibid., XI.
Part 5
The Americas

chapter 20
The Russian Society and the American Jesuits

Giovanni Grassis Crucial Role
Daniel Schlafly
On 28 January 1814, Archbishop John Carroll of Baltimore (17351815) wrote

to the father general of the Society of Jesus in Russia, Tadeusz Brzozowski
(17491820), describing Giovanni Grassi (17751849)1 as follows: Outstanding
prudence marks his administration. Moreover, he is well versed in those
branches of learning which fit him for the administration of a college [].
The reputation of the college, and the number of students, grew from the time
he took over the reins of office.2 Grassi had arrived in America only four
years earlier, and, in 1812, had been named superior of the Societys Maryland
mission and president of the struggling Georgetown College. What had
Grassi achieved since arriving in 1810 to earn Carrolls praise in 1814, and
what did he go on to accomplish before returning permanently to Europe in
1817? How did the Russian Society shape Grassis religious formation, stud-
ies, teaching, and what teaching and administrative experience did it pro-
vide, enabling him to be so successful in America? For former Jesuits of the
era, such as Gabriel Gruber or new vocations like Grassi and the future supe-
rior general, Jan Roothaan (17851853), the Russian Society meant not just
institutional continuity with the great Jesuit traditions of the past, but also
crucial formation, guidance, and inspiration before and after the general res-
toration in 1814.
Pope Clement XIV (r. 17691774) suppressed the Society of Jesus world-
wide with the brief Dominus ac Redemptor, issued 21 July 1773, but Catherine
II of Russia (r. 17621796), who had acquired 201 Jesuits with four houses and
two residences from Poland in the First Partition of Poland a year earlier,
refused to allow the brief of suppression to be promulgated in her domains.
Hence, the Society survived, then prospered, in the empire, first under
1 The best account of Grassis life is Gilbert J. Garraghan, John Anthony Grassi, S.J., 17751849,
The Catholic Historical Review 23/3 (Oct. 1937): 273292. See also The Memoirs of Father John
Anthony Grassi, S.J., ed. Arthur J. Arrieri, S.J., Historical Records and Studies 47 (1959): 196
232; Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, s.v. Grassi, Giovanni Antonio, and dhcj, s.v. Grassi,
Giovanni Antonio.
2 The John Carroll Papers, Thomas OBrien Hanley, S.J., ed. 3 vols. (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1976), 2: 252.

354 Schlafly
Catherines patronage, then under her successors, Paul I (r. 17961801), and
Alexander I (r. 18011825), until the general restoration in 1814 and beyond.
Alexander I later turned against the Jesuits, expelling them from St. Petersburg
and Moscow in 1815, and from the rest of the empire in 1820. Although Rome
initially attempted to have the suppression enforced in the empire, popes
Pius VI (r. 17751799) and Pius VII (r. 18001823) first tolerated the Jesuits
continued existence there, then acquiesced in the appointment of a provin-
cial in 1774, ordination of Jesuits to the priesthood in 1776, and the opening of
a novitiate in 1780. Pius VI later sanctioned the convening of a general con-
gregation in 1782, which elected the then provincial, Fr. Stanisaw Czerniewicz
(17281785), Vicar General, with the full authority of a Father General, thus
reconstituting the Society in full, but only in the Russian empire. Former
Jesuits and new candidates, many from abroad, now went to the Societys
headquarters in Poock, today in Belarus, to join, or rejoin the order. In 1783
and again in 1799, Pius VI gave formal approval, although only orally, to the
Society in the Russian empire, and in 1801, Pius VII confirmed its legal exis-
tence with the brief Catholicae Fidei; at this point the vicar-general became
father general, but only in the Russian empire. Even before 1801 and continu-
ing thereafter, former Jesuits living abroad were now able to rejoin, or aggre-
gate, with the Society in Russia as individuals or in groups, without having to
travel to the empire.3
Grassi was born 10 September 1775 in Schilpario, Bergamo. After studies with
the Somaschi he completed two years of theology at the Bergamo diocesan
seminary and was ordained a priest. He was one of the first to enter the Jesuit
quasi novitiate in Colorno, opened in 1799 by Jos Pignatelli (17371811) under
the patronage of Duke Ferdinand IV of Parma (17511802). In 1793, the duke had
persuaded Vicar-General Gabriel Lenkiewicz (17221798) of the Russian
Society in Poock to establish a Jesuit vice province in Parma, with the approval
of Pope Pius VI. At the dukes invitation, three Jesuits came to Parma from
Poock the following year, the first to work abroad as Jesuits since the suppres-
sion, and several former Jesuits later renewed their vows in the duchy.4 Grassi
spent two years at Colorno under Pignatellis direction, where he excelled in
the traditional Jesuit novitiate program of spiritual formation, studies, manual
labor, and works of mercy.5 In 1812, Father General Brzozowski described the
3 For a full account of these stages, see Inglot, 1997.

4 On the restoration of the Jesuits in Parma from 1793 to 1806, see ibid., 166179.
5 P. Jos M. March, S.J., El Restuarador de la Compaa de Jess: Beato Jos Pignatelli y su Tiempo
(Barcelona: Editorial Libreria Religiosa, 1944), 2:172.
The russian Society And The American Jesuits 355
good formation in Colorno of two Jesuits who have gone to Russia, one of
whom was Grassi.6
Because the novices at Colorno were allowed to make only simple vows of
devotion, Grassi and another novice went to the Jesuit college in Poock in 1801
to complete their spiritual formation and education.7 Grassi spent four years at
Poock, first as student, then as a teacher and an administrator. The college
offered the full Jesuit curriculum, from lower grammar through philosophy and
theology. Founded and endowed in 1579 by King Stefan Btory (15761586),
Poock in 1801 was not only the residence of the Jesuit vicar-general but also an
enormous complex with extensive lands, housing 110 Jesuits, many of whom
had come from other countries.8 That year it instructed 376 students in classes
from lower grammar to philosophy and theology, with separate boarding
schools for rich and poor nobles, a day school for local residents, and a semi-
nary. The other Jesuit schools in the empire were subordinate to it. The college
also had an extensive library, boasting some 20,000 volumes in 1806, a publish-
ing house, a linen factory, a museum, and scientific laboratories. The curricu-
lum, the sequence and content of the courses, the norms for the teachers, the
procedures for promotion, examinations and prizes, and the careful supervi-
sion of the students were faithful to the 1599 Jesuit plan of studies, the Ratio
studiorum. Hence, primary emphasis was placed on Latin in the lower grades,
but in the eighteenth century, Poock, like other Jesuit schools, had introduced
more contemporary subjects: Polish, Greek, French, and Russian, sacred and
secular history, mathematics, physics, and geography.9 Many of the textbooks
used were printed by the colleges own publishing house.10
6 Quoted in ibid., 503.

7 For Poock, see Jan Giycki, Materiay do dziejw Akademii Poockiej i Szk od niej
zalenych (Cracow: Druk W.L. Anczycki i Spki, 1905); Tamara Blinova, Iezuity v Belarusi:
Rol iezuitov v organizatsii obrazovaniia i prosveshcheniia (Grodno: Ministertsvo obrazova-
niia Respubliki Belarus, 2002); Sabina Pavone, Accademia di Polock, collegi gesuiti e
riforme statali in Russia allinizio del XIX secolo, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 61(1995):
163194; and William Alexander James, Paul I and the Jesuits in Russia, (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Washington, 1977).
8 From 1802 to 1815, the Jesuit superior, now father general, lived in St. Petersburg, returning
to Poock after the 1815 expulsion from the capital. Fr. Taduesz Brzozowski, father general
after 1805, died in Poock in 1820, shortly before the Jesuits were expelled from there and
almost everywhere else in the empire later that year.
9 See Stanislas Bednarski, Dclin et renaissance de lenseignement des jsuites en Pologne,
ahsi 2 (1933): 199233.
10 Giycki, Materiay, 68, 1925; Blinova, Iezuity, 329.
356 Schlafly
Contemporaries were very impressed by the education offered at Poock. In

1803, Wasyl Sewergin, a St. Petersburg academician who was official visitor of
the schools in Belarus, spent a week there and praised its facilities, its order,
and the knowledge its students demonstrated.11 The English Jesuit Charles
Plowden (17431821) wrote, based on reports from Belarus, that the students in
Poock were as well taught as the students were in our best Italian schools.12
Catherine II, who visited Poock in 1780; Paul I, who came as grand duke in 1781
and as tsar in 1797; and Alexander I who was received in 1802 while Grassi was
there, also commended Poocks facilities and the quality of the education it
provided. Later, in 1812, Alexander even raised Poock to the status of an inde-
pendent academy with control over all the Jesuit schools of the empire.13
Grassi completed his theological studies at Poock between 1802 and 1804, then
was named rector of its College of Nobles. He also taught higher mathematics.
Poock provided Grassi with an excellent model of Jesuit education and admin-
istration for his later service as president of Georgetown College and superior
of the Maryland mission in the United States. In Poock he experienced the
complete Jesuit curriculum, studied and taught with Jesuits from many coun-
tries, and saw firsthand how his Jesuit superiors advanced the interests of the
Society and the Catholic Church as a whole in negotiations with the authori-
ties of a non-Catholic realm.
In January 1805, Grassi, at one point destined to minister to Armenians in
Astrakhan, was assigned with two other Jesuits to join the one elderly priest
remaining in the Societys Chinese mission.14 Unable to obtain passage from
London, they instead sought to leave for China from Lisbon. They waited in
vain in Portugal until September 1807 for permission from the Propaganda
Fide to go to China, then returned to England. Grassi used his enforced stay in
Portugal to study astronomy in Lisbon and Combra and to give private math-
ematics lessons. He spent the next three years, from 1807 to 1810, at the Jesuit
college at Stonyhurst, Lancashire, founded in 1794 by teachers and students
fleeing from the advance of French revolutionary forces on their former col-
lege at Lige. In 1802 and 1803, Father General Gabriel Gruber reestablished the
11 Giycki, Materiay, 2225.

12 Quoted in James, Paul I and the Jesuits in Russia, 64.
13 For Poocks role in the Russian educational policy of the era, see James T. Flynn, The Role
of the Jesuits in the Politics of Russian Education, The Catholic Historical Review 56 (July
1970): 249265 and a chapter by Irena Kadulska in the present collection.
14 Grassi described his travels between 1805 and 1810 from Russia via London and Portugal to
Stonyhurst, England, and finally to America in his Memorie sulla spedizione di due padre
e dun Fratello Coadj. DallAlba Russia alla missione di Pekino nellanno 1805. Exartum
former English province and allowed some former English Jesuits to rejoin
theSociety and open a novitiate near Stonyhurst.15 At Stonyhurst, Grassi found
a Jesuit curriculum very similar to that of Poock, but not as complete, with
primary emphasis on Latin, faithfully transferred from Lige and earlier schools
for English Catholics on the continent at St. Omers and Bruges.16 In 1803
it enrolled 170 boys17 in eight grade levels culminating in rhetoric,18 and by
1809 had a library, a scientific laboratory, and a room for mathematical
apparatus.19
At Stonyhurst, Grassi perfected his English and taught Latin and Italian, and
early in 1810 went to London to study astronomy.20 He returned to Stonyhurst
later that year expecting to teach physics, but was assigned instead by Father
General Tadeusz Brzozowski to the Maryland mission.21 Grassis years at
Stonyhurst were valuable preparation for America, and he later wrote that he
was able to bring mathematical and scientific equipment from England with
him and that it was in Stonyhurst that he acquired a practical knowledge of the
methods used by the English Jesuits in educating youth.22 He also saw firsthand
manu auctoris, nempe P.is J.A. Grassicerto post 1810. arsi, Miss. Sinensis, 1001, III-3, ff.
147. See Marek Inglot, Dalla Colombia allo Zambesi: Le nouve missioni della Compagnia
di Ges nel tempo di Pio IX, in Pio IX: Atti del Convegno Pio IX et le Missioni, Roma, 6 feb-
braio 2004. (Rome: Editrice la postulazione, 2004), 338354 and Edward I. Devitt, Voyage
of the Very Rev. Fr. John Anthony Grassi from Russia to America. Jan. 1805Oct. 1810, The
Woodstock Letters 4 (1875): 115136.
15 Inglot 1997, 214229.
16 On Stonyhurst, see Thomas E. Muir, Stonyhurst College:15931993 (London: James & James,
(Publishers) Limited, 1992); Hubert Chadwick, S.J., St. Omers to Stonyhurst: A History of
Two Centuries (London: Burnes & Oates, 1962); and John Gerard, S.J. Stonyhurst College: Its
Life beyond the Seas, 15921794, and on English Soil, 17941894 (Belfast: Marcus Ward & Co.
Limited, 1894).
17 Gerard, Stonyhurst, 105.
18 Muir, Stonyhurst, 158.
19 Gerard, Stonyhurst, 130131.
20 From his arrival in America in 1810, Grassi wrote in correct and colloquial English. Later
he claimed that in the space of about six months, a missionary to the United States
should be able to learn enough English to hear confessions and provide public instruc-
tion Grassi, Notizie varie sullo stato presente della repubblica degli Stati Uniti dellAmerica
Settentrionle del P. Giovanni Grassi (Turin: Tipografica Chirio E Mina, 1822), 129. While
most other European Jesuits also learned at least adequate English, some never mastered
the language well enough to function effectively.
21 Grassi, Memoire della spedizione, 353354.
22 Grassi, Memoirs, 214.
358 Schlafly
in England the Protestant hostility to a Catholic minority, and especially the

Jesuits, that he would find in America, writing in 1813 that [our] [Jesuits] at
Stonyhurst suffer very much [] from the Protestants.23
Grassis first impressions of Baltimore, where he landed on 21 October 1810,
were not very promising, saying it was completely deserted where the map
indicated houses should be. After a cordial meeting with Bishop Carroll, he
reached Georgetown five days later. The American capital also was a sharp
contrast to what he had known in Europe: not even one-eighth of it built up
and [even] the Capitol [] appeared forlorn and deserted.24 Although Jesuits
had been in Maryland since 1634 and the colonys old Catholic families sent
their sons to short-lived Jesuit schools there and on the continent,25 Catholics
were a scattered and distrusted minority, and the Jesuits in particular were
often seen as the epitome of European Catholic rigidity and intolerance. As
John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson on 16 May 1816, [if] ever a congrega-
tion could merit eternal perdition on earth and in heaven, it is this company of
Loyola.26 The twenty-one Jesuits then in the English colonies had submitted
to the brief of suppression in 1773, but after petitioning Father General Gruber
in 1803 for permission to aggregate with the Russian Society, five former
American Jesuits did so in 1805.27 Former Jesuit property remained, however,
under the control of a Corporation of the Clergy, organized by Carroll in 1783
and 1784 to keep it from being dispersed.28
Grassi was destined for Georgetown College, founded in 1789 by Bishop
Carroll, a former Jesuit who had studied and taught at the Societys schools at
St. Omers, Lige, and Bruges and sought to replicate their traditional Jesuit cur-
riculum, with adaptations, in his new school.29 The first student arrived in
1792, and by 1798 Georgetowns prospectus put primary emphasis on the study
23 Grassi to Simon Brut de Rmur, 24 November 1813, Letters of John Grassi, S.J. to Simon
Brut de Rmur, Mid-America 15/4 (1933), 249.
25 See Hughes, 19071917.
26 Quoted in Robert Emmet Curran, A History of Georgetown University, vol. 1: From Academy
to University (Washington D.C., Georgetown Press, 2010), 61.
27 See Inglot 1997, 229233, and Hughes, 1910, 816820.
28 cp, 1, 7177; Hughes 1910, 617619.
29 For the early history of Georgetown, see Curran, From Academy to University, 183; John
M. Daley, S.J., Georgetown University: Origin and Early Years (Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press, 1957), 36203; and Daniel Schlafly, The Ratio Studiorum on
Alien Shores: Jesuit Colleges in St. Petersburg and Georgetown, Revista Portuguesa de
Filsofia, 55 no. 3 (1999): 253274.
of dead languages, that foundation of universal knowledge and also offered

English, French, mathematics, geography, the use of globes, and elocution.30
Three of the first four presidents were former Jesuits, but no Jesuits taught at
Georgetown until 1806, when two of the six men sent from Europe by Father
General Brzozowski joined the faculty. In that year, a novitiate was opened, but
enrollmentafter reaching a high point of 86 in 1796remained low: only 33
in 1806.31 Its financial situation was precarious, since tuition receipts did not
cover operating expenses, and the college depended for support on the inde-
pendent Corporation of the Clergy. Georgetown also faced serious competi-
tion from the Sulpician College of St. Marys in Baltimore, which by 1805 had
125 students and had been granted a charter by the state of Maryland.32 In
February 1807, Bishop Carroll even contemplated closing the college for which
he had worked so hard and so long, writing to its then president, Fr. Robert
Molyneux (17381808), that [as] things are now going on, we are exhausting
our funds, and sinking the reputation of the Society.33 No wonder one of the
newly arrived European Jesuits, Fr. Anton Kohlmann (17711836), wrote a few
months later: [heaven] grant that they send us abundant aid from Russia.34
Meanwhile, Georgetown had declined even further. By 1810, enrollment had
sunk to an all time low of 31,35 including seven Jesuit novices,36 with only ten
lay boarders,37 and a yearly deficit of $3,000. Grassi commented that in the
previous two years, the administration of the novitiate and the boarding
school went from bad to worse.38 After a year at Georgetown, Grassi wrote to
William Strickland (17311819) at Stonyhurst that it has been a dismal change
from dear [Stonyhurst] to this College, which with the exception of very few,
contains nothing but a crew of blackguard youths and boys. I cannot and never
will suffer it to be said that such a college belongs to the Society.39 Like many
other contemporary European visitors, he judged the intellectual level in the
30 College of George-Town (Potomack) in the State of Maryland, United States of America

(1798), Georgetown University Special Collections (gusc) Maryland Province Archives
(mpa), Box19, Folder 6.
31 Curran, From Academy to University, 359.
32 Ibid., 58.
33 Carroll to Robert Molyneux, 3 Feburary 1807, cp, 3, 8.
34 Kohlmann to William Strickland, 23 February 1807, The Woodstock Letters 12(1883), 88.
36 Catalogus Sociorum Missionis Americae Foederate Societatis Jesu, Ineunte Anno 1811,
The Woodstock Letters, 18(1889), 222.
37 Garraghan, Grassi, 279.
39 Grassi to Strickland, 8 October 1811, gusc, mpa, Box3, Folder 6.
360 Schlafly
United States low, writing after his return to Italy that in America there is a
certain superficial smattering of knowledge, perhaps more extensive and
widespread than elsewhere.40 In June 1811, Father General Brzozowskis assis-
tant, Father Eduardo Desperamus (17371812), had written to Georgetowns
previous president, Father Francis Neale (17561837), that his Paternity [the
general] is distressed by the disordered state of the George Town boarding
school and that a prompt and effective remedy was needed.41 Carroll
remained as pessimistic in 1811 as he had been in 1807, writing to Grassi in
October of that year that [for] the credit of the Society, we have too much
cause to blush at the degraded state of G. Town college, and I am glad to hear
that the [Jesuit] General knows of it.42
As soon as he arrived, Grassi began to provide prompt and effective rem-
edy for Georgetown, first as a teacher from 1810 to 1812, then as its president
and superior of the Maryland mission from 1812 to 1817. He made full use of
the authentic Jesuit tradition he had experienced at Colorno, Poock, and
Stonyhurst, as well as what he had learned from independent study in
Portugal and England. He saw how the Society could accommodate itself
successfully to the local secular authority in a non-Catholic nation, particu-
larly Orthodox Russia, but also in Protestant England. Grassi also witnessed
how the Jesuits had cultivated what today would be called good public rela-
tions, presenting themselves, their institutions, and their students to best
advantage in society.43 Also, Grassi had firsthand experience of how, after the
general suppression, first the Polish Jesuits of the former Mazovian and
Lithuanian provinces, then the Jesuits of the newly restored English prov-
ince, had successfully incorporated Jesuits and former Jesuits from other
countries like himself into their communities and apostolic work. But he
later found that assimilating the European Jesuits sent by the father general
in Russia with the Anglo-Americans of the newly restored Society in the
United States would not be so easy. Then there was the relationship with the
ecclesiastical hierarchy. Bishop Siestrzecewicz-Bohusz (17311826) in
Russia, the vicars apostolic in England, and Bishop Carroll in the United
States welcomed the Jesuits contributions to pastoral and educational work
40 Grassi, Notizie varie, 42.

41 Desperamus to Neale, 3 June 1811, gusc, mpa, Box93, Folder 2, 500: 12a.
42 Carroll to Grassi, 27 October 1811, cp, 3, 158.
43 The Ratio Studiorum encouraged public presentations, examinations, and award ceremo-
nies. For the impact of individual Jesuits, the Jesuit schools, and the Jesuit parish in early
nineteenth century St. Petersburg, see Marie-Joseph Rout de Journel, Un Collge des
jsuites a Saint-Ptersbourg, 18001816 (Paris: Perrin et Cie., 1922).
but, to varying degrees, balked at approving the full independence of the

Jesuit Institute while the general suppression was still in force.
Father General Brzozowski not only sent individual Jesuits from the Russian
Society brought to America, and also carefully supervised them and their work
from St. Petersburg and, after 1815, from Poock. In 1810, forexample, he wrote to
Fr. Anton Kohlmann, lamenting that novice master Fr.Francis Neales absence
from the Georgetown novitiate was a great evil that creates the most perni-
cious consequences.44 Two years later, the father general wrote to Grassi
objecting to the appointment of Fr. Pierre Epinette (17601832) as novice mas-
ter, because he did not know the usus Societatis [ways of the Society].45 Other
letters from the general or his assistant affirmed the legitimacy of the American
Jesuits aggregation with the Society in Russia, granted American superiors the
right to open a novitiate and to admit Jesuits there to professed status, approved
Grassis 1813 decision to close a Jesuit school in New York, and ordered the
Americans not to neglect schools in favor of mission work. The general was
particularly concerned that Georgetown still depended financially on the
Corporation of the Clergy, and not the Society proper. The letters also kept
Grassi and his companions fully informed about the status of the Society in the
Russian empire and about Jesuits who had aggregated with it in Parma, the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, England, the Aegean Islands, and the Netherlands.46
The generals also corresponded frequently with Bishop, later Archbishop
Carroll, and his successors over the years.
In the 18101811 academic year, Grassi taught Italian and Spanish as one of six
faculty members (three Jesuits and three laymen)47 and in 1813, in addition
to serving as rector (president), he taught Algebra, Mensuration, Arithmetic,
etc.48 Emulating Poocks and Stonyhursts sophisticated scientific laborato-
ries, he made use of new mathematical and optical equipment he had brought
from Stonyhurst and had wooden models built to explain the Copernican solar
system, the rotation of the earth, and mechanical and hydraulic principles, to
the admiration of visitors who came to see them on exhibit.49 He constructed
an earthquake meter, calculated an eclipse, calculated the altitude of the sun,
wrote dialogues on and made drawings to illustrate geometry and astronomy,
44 Brzozowski to Kohlmann, 16 October 1810, gusc, mpa, Letters of Generals, Box 93,
Folder 2, 500:9, a-3.
45 Brzozowski to Grassi, 20 February 1812. Ibid., 500: 13a.
46 See Letters of Generals, 615, passim.
47 Catalogus [] 1811, 221.
48 Faculty and subjects taught, 1813. gusc, mpa, Box104, Folder 6, 556b.
362 Schlafly
and imported books and more scientific instruments from Europe. Grassi also
visited the United States Patent Office, the Navy Yard, and a Lanterna Magica
exhibit in the capital several times.50 In 1816, he even launched a balloon from
the college grounds.51
Grassi also hired and supported talented faculty, dismissed some he considered
incompetent, reformed and expanded the curriculum, established effective disci-
pline, and put Georgetowns finances on a sound footing.52 He kept the college
functioning during the British sack of Washington in August 1814. Enrollment
steadily increased from 31 in 1810 to 119 in 1817, Grassis last year.53 In 1814,
Georgetown claimed to teach English, Latin, Greek, and all other branches of clas-
sical education, Sacred and Profane History, Geography, Use of Globes, Arithmetic,
Book keeping, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Mensuration, Navigation,
Surveying, Astronomy, Fluxions, and the other parts of Mathematics in general,
plus Natural and Experimental Philosophy, as well as Italian and Spanish.54
Despite Grassis efforts, Georgetowns curriculum still fell far short of Stonyhursts,
let alone Poocks, where all the levels prescribed by the Ratio studiorum were
offered. Classes listed in Georgetowns 1817 catalogue were Elementary, Preparatory
to Rudiments, Rudiments, Grammar, Poetry, Rhetoric, and Mathematics.55
Grassi was as adept at political negotiation as he was at teaching and admin-
istration, simultaneously maintaining good relations with representatives of
the autocratic Russian empire, just as Jesuits there had done since the suppres-
sion, and with officials and civic leaders in the democratic United States. He
was assisted by Russian diplomats in Sweden, Denmark, England, and Portugal
en route to the United States from 1805 to 1810,56 and once in America, fre-
quently visited with the Russian consul there, Andrei Dashkov (17751831).57
50 gusc, Catholic Historical mss., Box10, Folder 13:11, Grassi, Diario, 18101817, passim.
51 Grassi to Simon Brut, 29 September 1816, Letters, 258.
52 For a full description of Grassis tenure at Georgetown, see Curran, From Academy to
University, 7083; Daley, Georgetown University, 169193; and Garraghan, John Anthony
Grassi, 278286.
54 Georgetown College, District of Columbia, under the Direction of the Incorporated
Catholic Clergy of Maryland, (1814), gusc, mpa, Box19, Folder 6.
55 Catalogue of the officers and Students of Geo-Town College and a General prospectus of
all the Classes with the order of the Students in Each Class; from October 1816 to Sep. 1817,
gusc, mpa.
56 Grassi, Diario, passim.
57 Dashkov served in the United States from 1809 to 1817. See Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr, The First
Russian Diplomat in America: Andrei Dashkov on the New Republic, The Historian 60,
no. 1 (Fall 1997): 3957.
The Russian consul was also the usual intermediary for correspondence
between the American Jesuits and the Society in Russia. Grassi also reached
an understanding with Dashkov over the case of Aleksandr Divov, who had
secretly converted to Catholicism in Russia before coming to the United States
in 1813 as attach to the Russian legation. When Grassi defended the youths
right to abjure Orthodoxy, the consul accepted this, on the condition that
Divov resign his diplomatic position.58
Grassi quickly adapted to Americas religious freedom and democratic polit-
ical system. While he lamented the unlimited freedom which rules in the
United States, he was grateful that the truth can show itself freely, and tri-
umph in America, because it does not have to combat one of the principal
obstacles which block it elsewhere, which is that the civil authority in our days
seems completely to favor irreligion and error.59 Father General Brzozowski
was a loyal subject of autocratic Russia, but supported accommodation in the
United States, writing to Grassi in 1815 that we should obey the government in
civil affairs, adding that if some are federalists and some are democrats, what
is that to us? A Jesuit does not enter into that.60 Grassi applied for American
citizenship as soon as he landed and received his naturalization on 27
December 1815.61 He visited Congress and individual congressmen62 and took
advantage of the fact that there were in Congress, at that time, various mem-
bers who had sons at the school63 to apply for a federal charter for Georgetown,
which was issued on 1 March 1815 through the good offices of William Gaston
(17781834), Georgetowns first student and the only Catholic member of
Congress.64 Grassi also recognized the important role of American newspa-
pers, the most common source of learning and noted that in houses lacking
even a Bible or a catechism invariably newspapers can be seen.65
Like the superiors of the Society in the Russian empire, Grassi had to work
with the local ecclesiastical authority, here John Carroll, since 1790, bishop
of Baltimore and after 1811, archbishop. From his years in the Russian empire,
he knew how Stanisaw Siestrzenciewicz-Bohusz, the Latin rite ordinary
58 Grassi, Memoirs, 230233. Divov entered the Jesuit novitiate at Whitemarsh, Maryland
that year, but later left the Society, returned to Russia, and rejoined the Orthodox Church.
59 Grassi, Notizie varie, 35, 135.
60 Brzozowski to Grassi, 10 January 1815, Letters of Generals, Box93, Folder 1.
61 Garraghan, John Anthony Grassi, 283.
62 Grassi, Diario, passim.
65 Grassi, Notizie varie, 42. For example, he followed a religious controversy closely in the
pages of the National Intelligencer. Grassi to Brut, 15 April 1817, Letters to Brut, 263.
364 Schlafly
throughout the suppression era, often clashed with local Jesuits, acting on
their behalf only when forced to do so by the imperial government, and in
particular objecting to ordaining Jesuits as members of a religious order that
officially had been suppressed.66 Carroll supported the Society, particularly
Grassi, long advocated the worldwide restoration of the Society, and allowed
the Jesuits under his jurisdiction to make simple vows and form a kind of asso-
ciation. But he would not grant the Jesuits in his jurisdiction full canonical
status until a general restoration, even after the aggregation of 1805. In
December 1813, he wrote to Robert Plowden in England that the Jesuits in
America could make simple vows, but not vota religionis [vows of religion],
that they cannot constitute a body and, like Siestrzencewicz decades earlier
in the Russian Empire, admitted none to orders titulo religionis [as members
of a religious order].67 Since the Jesuits were not a corporate body, Grassi had
to negotiate the administration and finances of Georgetown with the
Corporation of the Clergy, which officially owned the college, and which, even
after the 1814 general restoration, refused to surrender control.68
When notice was received in America on 9 December 1814 that Pope PiusVII
had restored the Society of Jesus in universo orbe (worldwide) with the bull
Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, issued 7 August that year, Grassi immediately
gathered the whole community into the chapel to tell them the happy news
and to thank the Lord for so great a benefit by singing the Te Deum and the Veni
Creator.69 While Carroll rejoiced at the news of the general restoration, he still
cautioned Grassi to proceed slowly with a new organization of the members
of the Society, both since much caution is needed in view of the political
66 Inglot 1997, especially 6592; Andr Brumanis, Mgr Stanislas Siestrzencewicz-Bohusz: pre-
mier archevque-mtropolitain de Mohilev (17311826) (Louvain: Publications Universitaires
de Louvain, 1968), 85106.
67 Carroll to Plowden, 12 December 1813, cp, 3, 249250. He made the same case to Father
General Brzozowski a month later. Carroll to Brzozowski, 28 January 1814. Ibid., 253.
68 In was not until 1825 that the Corporation finally transferred former Jesuit assets to the
reestablished Society in America, thanks to the persistent efforts of a later superior of the
Maryland Mission, Fr. Franciszek Dzieroyski. Dzieroyski, previously in Poock, came
to the United States after the 1820 expulsion and like Grassi, drew on his experience in the
Russian Empire to make a major contribution to the Society in America. See Anthony
J. Kuzniewski, Francis Dzierozynski and the Jesuit Restoration in the United States,
The Catholic Historical Review (1992): 5173; and Franciszek Domaski, Patriarcha
amerykaskich jeszuitw. O. Franciszek Dzieroyski, Sacrum Poloniae Millennium
7 (1960): 459530. On the decades long conflict between the Maryland Mission and the
Corporation of the Clergy, see Hughes 1908 and 1910, passim.
institutions of this country and because of opposition from some Anglo-

American and non-Jesuit members of the Corporation of the Clergy.70 In 1813,
Carroll had complained to an American Jesuit, Enoch Fenwick (17781827),
about our foreign & precipitate Brethren, ignorant of our institutions,71 and
two years later, while exempting Grassi personally from such criticism, lamented
that he consults chiefly, if not exclusively foreigners [] not one of them pos-
sessing an expanded mind, discerning enough to estimate the difference
between the American character; and that of the countries, which they left.72
Carroll still admired Grassi, however, and summoned him and Fr. Kohlmann to
Baltimore just before he died on 3 December 1815, where he repeated his attach-
ment to the Society of Jesus and bequeathed 400 pounds to Georgetown for books
in his will.73 In March of that year, Carroll had outlined guidelines to Grassi for
assigning specific parishes permanently to the now restored Society,74 and Grassi
negotiated a formal concordat enumerating the parishes and setting conditions
with Carrolls successor as archbishop of Baltimore, Leonard Neale, on 3 April 1816.75
A year later, Neale had not been able to find a person more suitable for this
task,76 so he asked Grassi to go in person to Rome to ask the Propaganda Fide
to reverse an order to reinstate the dissident priests in Charleston whom Neale
had removed from the ministry: the so-called Charleston schism.77 Grassi
successfully negotiated a reversal of the original order, undoubtedly helped by
the fact that the prefect of the Propaganda Fide at the time was Cardinal
Lorenzo Litta (17561820), who as nuncio to Russia from 1797 to 1799 had sup-
ported the Society energetically.78 During this same visit, he negotiated a
70 Carroll to Grassi, 27 December 1814, cp, 3, 310311. A year earlier a diocesan priest and
member of the Corporation of the Clergy had written an American Jesuit that I object
[to] the Russians having anything to do with White Marsh [a valuable plantation in
Maryland and site of the Jesuit novitiate] in any shape whatever, adding that their sup-
posed plans to take over the corporation might perhaps do in the wilds of Syberia (sic),
but were unacceptable in America. Germain Barnaby Bitouzey to Carroll, 23 October 1813,
Hughes 1908, 368.
71 Carroll to Fenwick, 8 June 1813, cp, 3, 225.
72 Carroll to Charles Plowden, 25 June24 July 1815, ibid., 338.
74 Carroll to Grassi, 31 March 1815, cp, 3, 332.
75 Text in Hughes 1910, 952953.
76 Quoted in Grassi, Memoirs, 228.
77 Until 1908 the United States was considered mission territory, so the American church
was subject then to the Propaganda Fide.
78 On Litta as nuncio in Russia, see, Inglot 1997, 136149 and Marie Joseph Rout de Journel,
Nonciature de Litta, vol. 2 of Nonciatures de Russia daprs les documents authentiques (Rome:
366 Schlafly
temporary victory for the Jesuits in England for independence from the vicars
apostolic in a dispute analogous to that between the Society and Archbishop
Siestrzencewicz decades earlier in the Russian empire.79
Father General Brzozowski sent Grassi orders from Poock to return to
America,80 but he remained in Italy after 1818 when physicians told him that a
sea voyage might cost him his life.81 Until his death in 1849, Grassi held a num-
ber of important positions in Italy: rector of the College of Nobles in Turin,
confessor to King Charles Felix (17651831) and Queen Maria Christina (1779
1849) of Sardinia, provincial of the province of Turin, rector of the Collegio
Urbano of the Propaganda Fide in Rome, and finally, from 1842 to 1849, assis-
tant to the father general for Italy.82
Grassi continued to contribute to the America he never saw again, however,
particularly with his Notizie varie sullo stato presente della Repubblica degli
Stati Uniti, first published in Rome in 1818 and frequently reprinted thereafter;
he personally presented a copy to Pope Pius VII, who welcomed it very gra-
ciously, as did the most eminent cardinals and prelates.83 The Notizie gave a
comprehensive and perceptive survey of the United States, encompassing his-
tory, geography, agriculture, commerce, and religion, with particular attention
to the status of and prospects for the Catholic Church in America. Grassi also
wrote shorter pieces on America and on scientific subjects, and translated
works from English and French into Italian.84 He was consulted as an expert on
the Sixth Baltimore Council of 1846. The tie with the United States continued
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1952). For Grassis successful efforts on behalf of the
American hierarchy, see Garraghan, John Anthony Grassi, 285286.
79 On the dispute with the English vicars apostolic, see Muir, Stonyhurst College, 8587 and
Chadwick, From St. Omers to Stonyhurst, 401.
80 Although the Society had been restored worldwide in 1814, the Russian government
refused to allow Brzozowski to leave the empire to go to Rome. After expulsion from the
capital in 1815, he resided in Poock, where he died on 5 February 1820, shortly before the
Jesuits were expelled from Poock and almost everywhere else in the Russian domains
later that year. That same year, a general congregation meeting in Rome elected Fr. Luigi
Fortis as the new father general.
81 Grassi had other health problems. In 1812, for example, he contracted a persistent deliri-
ous fever, forcing him the following year to seek a cure at spring baths in Virginia. Grassi,
Memoirs, 221, 223.
82 For Grassis career in Italy, see Garraghan, John Anthony Grassi, 288292 and A.P.
Salvatore Casagrandi, Ioannes Antonius Grassi, in De Claris Sodalibus Porvinciae
Taurinensis Societatis Iesu (Turin: Iacobus Ameodus Eques, 1906), 1922.
84 See Sommervogel, III:16861687.
until his death; because he was an American citizen, he was not expelled with
other Jesuits from Rome during the 1848 revolution, and he died there on 12
December 1849 in the house of Cardinal Angelo Mai (17821854), Grassis fel-
low novice at Colorno from 1799 to 1801.
Grassi compiled a remarkable record as an educator, administrator, and
superior in his seven years in America. No wonder Fr. Peter Kenney (17791841),
sent by Father General Brzozowski as visitor to the Maryland mission in 1820,
found no one who could take his place and urged Brzozowski to send Grassi
back to America.85 His scientific achievements, knowledge of languages, and,
above all, his ability to adapt successfully to a new and challenging environ-
ment justified the praise he received from contemporaries and later commen-
tators. While Grassi was man of unusual talent and energy, it was the Russian
Society that made his life work possible. He was formed and guided by it as a
novice in Colorno from 1799 to 1801, as a teacher and administrator in Poock
from 1801 to 1805, in Portugal and Stonyhurst from 1805 to 1810, and throughout
his tenure in America from 1801 to 1817. It provided the model which, con-
stantly guided by the father general in St. Petersburg or Poock, he imple-
mented so successfully in the United States.
The American Jesuits of Grassis era were profoundly grateful to their breth-
ren in the Russian empire, as shown by a short play performed by Georgetown
students, undated, but undoubtedly from Grassis era, with dialogue in Latin
and stage directions in English. In the play, the Jesuit general is portrayed as
Jesus, brought before the pope, cast as Pilate. European monarchs take the role
of Jews calling for Jesuss crucifixion, while the generals of other religious
orders place a crown of thorns on the Jesuit general and divide his garments.
Catherine the Great speaks the lines of Pilates wife, Nihil tibi et justo illi mul-
tae [sic] sum hodie per visum [Have nothing to do with this just man. Because
of him, I have suffered many things today in a dream]. After the general is
scourged and handed over to be crucified, he proclaims [p]ost tres dies resur-
gam [After three days I will rise again].86 If the Society of Jesus had not sur-
vived the suppression in the Russian empire, Grassis career would have been
impossible. Nor would the Society as a whole have been able to rise again so
dramatically before and after the general restoration.

86 gusc, mpa, Box57, Folder 13, 202, M1.
chapter 21
John Carroll, the Catholic Church, and the Society

of Jesus in Early Republican America
Catherine ODonnell
From the first days of American independence, through his tenure as bishop of
Baltimore, until his death as archbishop of Baltimore in 1815, John Carroll
worked to build a viable American church in an age of political and religious
tumult. During his prelacy, the Catholic church in the United Statesinitially
tiny in numbers and hampered by civil disabilitiesbecame an increasingly
confident institution. During the same years, once mighty European Catholi
cism faced proscription and the pope became Napoleons captive. Thus, even
as Carroll sought to reassure Protestant countrymen of the limits of Romes
claims, he also labored to keep the American church in communion with Rome
when the idea of a transatlantic, let alone a universal, Catholic church, seemed
imperiled. The suppressed Jesuit order, as an ideal and as a problematic set of
individuals, was always central to Carrolls complex positioning of the church.
As he struggled to keep alive the hope of Jesuit restoration while advancing the
larger cause of American Catholicism, Carroll pondered what it meant to be
loyal to faith, nation, and brethren.
Carrolls efforts to serve both his former order and the American church
occurred within two distinct but linked contexts. The first was that of interna
tional efforts to prompt or prevent Jesuit restoration. Jesuits had always navi
gated a global arena of compromise and risk while pursuing the ends of the
Catholic church. As long as Jesuit restoration seemed to be synonymous
with those ends, negotiation with rulers of questionable morality and aggres
sive competition for church resources seemed justifiable. Over the course of
his tenure as bishop and archbishop, however, Carroll increasingly wondered
whether the effort to restore the Jesuits did not weaken rather than nurture the
fragile American church.
The second context of Carrolls work was the argumentative, diverse
Catholic community developing within the new nation. As prelate, Carroll was
a pastor as well as a diplomat. He received missives from men deeply involved
in international church politics, including the English ex-Jesuit Charles
Plowden and Archbishop John Troy of Dublin. But he also corresponded with
the Irish-American merchant James Barry, who offered earthy humor and
blunt commentaries on American clergy: There is no danger of Neale setting

John Carroll, the Catholic Church, and the Society of Jesus 369
the Potomac on fire, was Barrys mordant view of one former Jesuit.1 Carroll
received letters from frontier Catholics eager to criticize or recruit priests, from
women with unruly husbands, and from clergy seeking guidance on everything
from consanguinity to midnight mass. His life as a pastor was not a distraction
from his efforts to mold the institutional church nor from his struggles to usher
in a new era of the Jesuit order. On the contrary, Carrolls immersion in the
minutiae of American Catholicism deeply informed his vision of the proper
relationships within the former order, the international church, and the
national church.
In the thirteen American colonies, the only substantial Catholic population
had lived in Maryland. As in England, inter-married clanswhich in Maryland
included influential families such as the Carrolls and the Fenwicks, themselves
entwined with English families such as the Plowdens and Weldsknew both
wealth and restriction. Catholics early on lost control of Marylands colonial
government and faced civil and political disabilities. The intensity of persecu
tion rose and fell in response both to events in England and to politics within
the colonies, but Catholics endured extra taxation, bans on public worship,
and the threat, albeit always forestalled, of confiscation of their estates.2 Yet
Marylands Catholic families, like their English brethren, could achieve wealth
and status despite their civil disabilities. Elsewhere in the thirteen colonies,
anti-popery was less intense because Catholics were few and other enemies
usually more immediate. Nonetheless, the rhetorical, political, and emotional
power of anti-popery remained, and Indian alliances with Catholic France
sporadically reanimated it across the colonial period. Cultural anti-popery and
limits on Catholic political participation were common elements in otherwise
disparate colonies.3
That American Catholics had close ties to the Jesuit order only heightened
their Protestant countrymens mistrust. Non-Catholics feared and resented
Jesuits for their inflexible loyalty to Rome and for their reputation as silver-
tongued debaters; in Anglo-American print culture and popular imagination,
1 James Barry to John Carroll, 10 June 1807, 1-K5, Archdiocese of Baltimore Collection,
St. Marys, Baltimore, Maryland.
2 Ronald Hoffman and Sally Mason, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga,
15001782 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
3 Owen Stanwood, Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations in Early America, in
Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, eds. The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and
Intolerance in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 218240. The most exu
berant discussion of the cultural centrality of antipopery in the British colonies is in Brendan
McConville, The Kings Three Faces (unc Press, 2007).
370 ODonnell
Jesuits were somehow both too malleable and too obdurate. For American
Catholic colonists, however, Jesuits were pastors, teachers, and relatives. Jesuits
comprised the greatest number of priests in the colonies, and prominent
Catholic families sent sons to Jesuit institutions on the continent for educa
tion. John Carroll left Maryland at the age of twelve to study at St. Omer, in
Flanders. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in his late teens and continued his
studies at Lige.4 Carroll was ordained in 1761 and took his final vows a decade
later, seeming destined for a life as a teacher and tutor. The suppression of the
order and the outbreak of revolution destroyed his expected path and con
vinced him that the new United States could and must form the home for a
Catholicism freed from the destructive power he believed he had seen in both
Rome and England.
As the Revolutionary War ended, John Carroll contemplated the challenge
of how to create that Catholicism. Knowing nothing would be easy, he turned
to his fellow former Jesuits, and particularly to Charles Plowden, for advice
about how to protect the interests of both ex-Jesuits and the Catholic church as
a whole in the new nation. Plowden and Carroll agreed on the two central chal
lenges: the need to convince Rome to create an American bishoprather than
a vicar apostolicand the need to recruit and educate reliable clergy whom
that hoped-for bishop might lead. The achievement of these two goals would
defend the church from the corruptions of imperfect Roman direction and the
temptations of Protestant surroundings.
In these early days, Carroll and Plowden believed the cause of the ex-Jesuits
and the cause of the American church were indistinguishable. The kind of
bishop Carroll and Plowden hoped to see appointed (one with full powers
and one who was none other than Carroll himself) would simultaneously
protect the interests of the former Jesuits and build a viable American church.
Influential cardinals of the Propaganda Fide thought otherwise. Thus the
strange incident in which two young American boys studying at the English
College in Rome were roused from their beds and interrogated over whether
there was a secret Jesuit novitiate in their homeland. If there were, it was
implied, John Carroll and his effort to direct the church were not to be trusted.
The boys bewilderment must have spoken for itself, because the threat passed.
4 Ronald A. Binzley, Ganganellis disaffected children: the suppressed English Jesuit province
and the shaping of American Catholicism, 17621817, PhD diss. (University of Wisconsin,
2011); Hoffman and Mason, Princes of Ireland; Tricia T. Pyne, Ritual and Practice in the
Maryland Catholic Community, 16341776, American Catholic Historian (2008): 1746;
Guilday, Peter. The Life and Times of John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore (Westminster,
md, 1954).
But the event, conveyed to Carroll and Plowden by a fellow former Jesuit in
Rome, confirmed Carrolls and Plowdens view that the interests of the Jesuit
order and of the fledgling American church were jointly threatened by misun
derstanding and mistrust from Rome.5
The presence of the two American boys at the English College was a testa
ment to Carrolls belief that the American church needed native clergy, priests
who literally and figuratively spoke the nations language. It was impractical,
however, to send many boys to Rome for training. Some clergy, including
Plowden, suggested that Carroll send American boys to the Jesuit college at
Lige so that they might be properly trained to take up their place either as
parish priests or as faculty within an American seminary. Carroll, however, did
not want to give up control of American-born priests. Liges oath obligated
graduates to serve the institution.6 Thus Carroll contemplated establishing a
local academy, using proceeds from Jesuit properties as well as contributions
from Rome and the American laity. He hoped that this school of general edu
cation for youth would also be a nursery of future clergymen.7 Some ex-Jesu
its, including members of the influential Maryland Catholic Neale clan,
mistrusted Carrolls plans. They believed that Pius VI would soon reinstate the
Society and they wanted to reserve the orders property and energies for that
day. The ex-Jesuits skepticism over the founding of the seminary coincided
with doubts about offering Carrolls name for appointment to a see. They pre
ferred to come under the authority of a superior, not a bishop, just as they
wished to retain control of their property, rather than see it directed toward
training non-Jesuit clergy. Carroll sought to reassure the ex-Jesuits that should
the Society be restored, it would regain control of its property and gain control
of the new school. The doubters eventually acceded to Carrolls logic, but the
disagreement foreshadowed two decades of struggle between ex-Jesuits and
Carroll over the proper course of school and church.8
The effort to have Carroll appointed bishop succeeded in 1790. He was by
then hard at work creating an academy in the United States. Carroll decided
that it would educate boys and young men of all faiths, because he believed
5 John Thorpe to Carroll, 21 August 1790, aba.

6 Robert Emmett Curran, The Bicentennial History of Georgetown University, vol. 1 (Georgetown:
Georgetown University Press, 1993), 13.
7 Circular letter on a bishopric [] 24th November 1786, in Thomas Hughes, History of the
Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal, Documents, Part II, Volume I
(Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1910), 670.
8 mpa 2 N, Circular Letter 24 November 1786, quoted in Curran, 1415, Ronald Binzley,
Ganganellis Disaffected Children: The Suppressed English Jesuit Province and the Shaping
of American Catholicism, 17621817 (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2011), 170171.
372 ODonnell
Catholicism must peacefully coexist with other religions in the republic.

Carroll hoped that this school, which came to be known as Georgetown, would
also encompass a seminary to train young Catholic men to be priestsand
perhaps to think and act like Jesuits, even if they could not now be members of
the Society. Georgetown began its first building in 1788 and enrolled its first
student in 1790. In 1792, Marylands General Assembly created the civil corpo
ration the ex-Jesuits had sought for years; its trustees were to jointly manage
the ex-Jesuits property.9 College, corporation, and Bishop Carroll began their
uneasy lives together.
During Carrolls tenure as bishop (from 1790 to 1808, when he became arch
bishop), American Catholicism flourished in many ways. The number of
Catholics grew, albeit far more slowly than it would in later eras of Catholic
immigration, and so did the number of parishes. Catholics moved westward
across the Appalachians, coexisting confidently with Protestant neighbors. No
national establishment disadvantaged Catholics legally and, at the state level,
remaining civil disabilities continued to attenuate. Yet there were also causes
for concern. A recent estimate suggests that in the United States in 1790 there
were some 240,000 people of Catholic background who no longer practiced
their faith.10 Anti-popery, moreover, remained part of American culture. In
1788 New York, then home to a growing Catholic population, adopted a law
requiring office-holders to take an oath forswearing all foreign power, ecclesi
astical as well as civil.11 Even when Protestants and Catholics lived peaceably
together, Protestants deplored Catholics attachment to the pope, their accep
tance of clerical hierarchy, and their use of religious material culture. In
Carrolls view, lurking mistrust of Catholicism made the lack of well-trained,
well-disciplined priests more dangerous. Clergy who seemed to be avaricious,
drunken, or sexually active would scandalize Catholics and non-Catholics
alike. Georgetown College and its seminary were intended to form priests who
might not only serve the church, but save it.
As he built Georgetown, Carroll turned to his brethren in England for
advice, funds, and personnel. Only the first came in abundance. English
9 Spalding, 23, Curran, 16.

10 John Dichtl, Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic
(Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 11; Chris Beneke, The Catholic Spirit
Prevailing in Our Country: Americas Moderate Religious Revolution, in The First
Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, Chris Beneke and
Christopher S. Grenda, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011),
279285.
11 Jason K. Duncan, Citizens or Papist: The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 16851821
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 7085.
ex-Jesuits insisted that their own institutions were so reduced by suppression,

repeated dispossession, and civil disabilities, that money and professors could
not be spared for Georgetown.12 Carroll struggled to find instructors, con
stantly confronting the question of whether a talented priest should be
removed from a congregationperhaps to be replaced by a problematic one
or by no one at allin order to serve the college. The needs of the future and
those of the present warred.
Slowly, Georgetown College began to attract students. Four-fifths of the stu
dents were Catholic, but some local Protestant families also sent their sons.
The college attracted no anti-papist backlash. Nor, however, did it inspire
Catholic devotion. The laity proved unwilling to donate the sums Carroll had
hoped for, leaving the corporation struggling to pay for buildings and for the
faculty it did manage to acquire. Moreover, of 267 students who attended the
college between 1791 and 1805, only sixteen entered a seminary or novitiate.13
Carrolls correspondence reveals consistent unhappiness with the colleges
intellectual standards and even the condition of its buildings.14
In the end, the upheavals of the age brought Carroll a precious resource:
priests from the French order of St. Sulpice. Sulpicians fled France as their
superior corresponded with Carroll over a place for them in the United States.
Upon arrival, the priests quickly established the nations first seminary,
St. Marys, just west of Baltimore. The Anglophile former Jesuits at Georgetown
mistrusted these immigrants, but Carroll admired the Sulpicians learning,
energy, and resourcefulness. Although he believed Jesuit seminaries were the
ideal institutions for forming priests capable of meeting their sacred and
earthly obligations, the orders suppression had left only a small group of aging
clergy ill-suited to running an academy. Carroll saw in one of the Sulpicians,
William Dubourg, a man who might invigorate Georgetown and he appointed
Dubourg president of the college in 1796. The interests of the church trumped
concern over Jesuit control of property and college.
Dubourg succeeded in improving the colleges reputation and enrollment.
The corporationdespite comprising mainly ex-Jesuitsawarded the Sulpi
cians property to help fund their activities when revenue from France ceased
to arrive. But Dubourgs profligate spending, self-confidence, and Frenchness,
proved insupportable to the ex-Jesuits. The Select Body of Clergy, which
included Leonard, Charles, and Francis Neale of the powerful Maryland clan,
objected to the use of the corporations assets to meet the debts Dubourg
12 Christopher Hollis, A History of the Jesuits (Liverpool: Macmillan, 1968), 158160, Curran 17.
13 Curran, 35, 40.
14 Curran, 2434.
374 ODonnell
incurred, and even the supportive Carroll became concernedaboutGeorge

towns finances. The Select Body moved first to place the corporations trustees
in control of the choice of Georgetowns directors, then gained control of the
property of the college.15 In 1798, Dubourg resigned from the presidency,
replaced by Leonard Neale.
Dubourgs departure did not end the rivalry between the ex-Jesuits, particu
larly the Neales, and the Sulpicians. In 1799, the Sulpicians founded a college to
accompany their seminary, and the former Jesuits at Georgetown decried what
they felt to be an intrusion on their privileges. After brief hesitation, Carroll
decided the Sulpicians should pursue their goal. Georgetown had not suc
ceeded in creating a seminary; perhaps St. Marys might. The ex-Jesuits pro
tests caused Carroll growing concern over a divergence between ex-Jesuit
interests and the greater good of American Catholicism.16
Carrolls unease with American ex-Jesuits demands should not be misun
derstood as a lack of interest in the orders restoration. He remained hopeful
that a restoration might occur and was convinced that the Jesuit order as he
had known it was a true servant of the church. Yet he questioned whether the
aging men vying for control of property and college upheld that tradition. He
maintained an exacting view of what restoration must be: dissolved by a brief,
the Jesuit order could only be brought back into existence through a document
emanating officially from the Holy See.17 Thus Carroll was cautious as others
contemplated alliance with fragments of the order that had escaped suppres
sion.18 His skepticism arose not only from his strict attention to canon law, but
also from his developing view that Catholicism must avoid entwining itself
with political power. Carroll was warymore so than his English brethren
of relying on rulers such as Catherine the Great and indeed of dependence on
any state. For over two decades, ex-Jesuits had maneuvered between the civil
powers of England and America and the claims of the Holy See, avoiding the
efforts of Protestant-inflected states to impinge on the rights and obligations
of Catholics, and avoiding the efforts of Rome to intrude bureaucratically on
decisions best left to local clergyespecially if those clergy were ex-Jesuits.
15 Proceedings of the Corporation [] 1794, Doc. 172, History of the Society of Jesus, II, I, 769;
Spaulding, 38; Curran, 50, Christopher Kauffman, Tradition and Transformation in Catholic
Culture: The Priests of Saint Sulpice in the United States from 1791 to the Present (New York:
Macmillan, 1988), 45.
16 Binzley, Ch. 3.
17 Carroll to Robert Plowden, 12 December 1813, jcp III 248.
18 Hollis, 164174.
Rome had often seemed more dangerous than the governments of either
England or the United States. The specter of revolutionary France, however,
made reliance on civil power seem like a quick march to the destruction of
religion itself. Charles Plowden began reluctantly to share Carrolls concern
that alliance with the orders remnants necessitated compromising what the
order had been created to defend: the universality and spiritual sovereignty of
the Catholic church. If restoration required abasing religion before the state,
then ex-Jesuits might owe it to the church, and to their lost community, to
cease working toward it.
Not all shared this view. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, for
mer Jesuits in England and the United States followed the emergence of
small European groups claiming to be the bearers of Jesuit tradition. In
France, six clerics traveled to the chapel in which Ignatius Loyola had
founded the Society of Jesus, and took vows as members of the Society of
the Heart of Jesus.19 The beleaguered group traveled to Belgium and
Germany, even as another tiny association, the Company of the Faith of
Jesus, was founded in Italy by a young man named Nicholas Paccanari.
Paccanari declared that he exercised authority secretly vested in him by the
pope. Writing to the Fathers of the Sacred Heart, Paccanari announced that
he was taking over their house, in virtue, he explained, of an express wish
of the Pope to have the two communities united.20 Paccanari then sug
gested that he intended to unite the newly combined orders with the Jesuits
in Catherines Russia. Paccanaris oddness and failure truly to seek union
with the Russian Jesuits eventually alienated his followers. But for a time he
attracted admiration and allegiance from English and European ex-Jesuits
who were drawn to his charismatic faith and were desperate for reunion
with the community they had loved.
John Carroll was immune to Paccanaris appeal but some ex-Jesuits in
the United States met to discuss joining his order. They did not invite
Carroll to the meeting. The explanation one offered brought resentment
over Carrolls perceived abandonment of the Jesuit cause to the surface:
Your affection for us was much cooled [] your heart was now fixed on
the Sulpicians of Baltimore in preference to all others; insomuch that you
wished them to be legal successors to our estates.21 The incident seemed
19 Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 8889.
20 Quoted in Hollis, 174; Binzley, 254269.
21 Charles Sewall to Carroll, 15 December 1800, 7-O-5, aba, quoted in Spalding, 38.
376 ODonnell
to spur Carroll to more assertively seek control over the corporation.22

Perhaps because of the ex-Jesuits respect, grudging or otherwise, for
Carroll, or perhaps because they had so few alternatives, Carroll succeeded
in being elected to the board of the corporation in 1802. He served on it
until his death. Thus Carroll had official authority in both the churchs sec
ular hierarchy, as bishop, and in the state-created remnant of his order, as
a board member of the corporation. Yet he remained unable to realign the
interests of ex-Jesuits and the church.
Despite his brethrens fears, Carroll never abandoned hope for restoration.
Like his brethren, he sought news, rumors, and prophecies related to the
order. The Napoleonic wars disrupted communication from the pope even as
Pius VI and then Pius VII seemed sympathetic to the Society. The ex-Jesuits
were tormented by rumors of letters in transit, letters intercepted, and letters
willed but not written.23 In 1802, Carroll finally learned that Pius VII had a
year earlier authorized the Russian order to admit former members living
elsewhere. Carroll carefully sought entry for the American ex-Jesuits from the
Russian superior, Gabriel Gruber. In 1805, that permission at last arrived.
Carroll, fully committed to his role as a secular bishop, did not join. Neither
perhaps at Carrolls behestdid his coadjutor, Leonard Neale. Five other ex-
Jesuits, however, saw in the Russian order a partial realization of their
long-deferred dream and joined the order. Demonstrating the intricate chains
of command that would continue to characterize American Catholicism, it
was Carroll, as bishop, who appointed the American groups superior, Robert
Molyneux.
The tiny group of American ex-Jesuits were heartened by union with the
Russian Jesuits but were still threatened by small numbers, aging members,
and continued uncertainty over full restoration. Once again, Georgetown
became a focus of contention. Those who joined the new, Russian-based
Society wished, as did Carroll and the Sulpicians, to educate a priesthood.
Neither order nor church would survive without well-trained priests. But for
mation required a long investment in young scholars and the assignment of
scarce clergy to Georgetown. Disagreement over when newly ordained
priestsor the seasoned clergy who acted as Georgetowns instructors
should be removed from Georgetown and sent to serve struggling parishes,
arose frequently. Conflict over policy and priorities continued to be com
pounded by mistrust between orders and individuals.
22 Spalding, 39.
23 For example, see Charles Plowden to Carroll, 30 April, 1808 6Q7, aba, St. Marys.
The creation of a novitiate for the partially restored order provoked argu
ment and uncertainty. Several young American men applied for admission and
the Russian superior sent five European members to the United States. One of
the European arrivals, Anthon Kohlmann, was a former Paccanarist whose
education and piety immediately impressed Carroll. But Carroll worried about
the propriety of encouraging young men to join the novitiate, since the order
for which it prepared them might never fully exist. Under such circumstances,
he wrote to Robert Molyneux, it appears fair & obligatory to let those who
wish to enter into the Society, know its state & the nature of their security
in it.24 How, moreover, were the dwindling band of ex-Jesuits to train these
young men? Francis Neale, the master of novices, had never himself been a
Jesuit. A primer on formation that Charles Plowden reluctantly parted with in
order to bolster the fledgling American group remained lost in transit for
months. Carroll also worried that the novitiate did not offer the solitude neces
sary for true formation.
Not only did Georgetown seem to devour clerical resources rather than pro
duce them, it also continued to flag in comparison to the Sulpicians Mt. St.
Marys Seminary and College. The French migrs college now took in English-
speaking as well as French- and Spanish-speaking students and in 1805 received
permission from Maryland to grant degrees.25 Carroll believed St. Marys to be
far better run than Georgetown. As Carroll aged, he more often expressed the
deep dissatisfaction he felt when comparing the institutions. Too much praise
cannot be given by me to the priests of St. Sulpice here, he wrote in 1812, for
their zeal and sacrifices to the public cause [] I wish as favourable an account
could be given of the College of G[eorg]eTown, which has sunk to the lowest
degree of discredit.26 In addition to supporting and training seminarians, the
Sulpicians also embraced Carrolls vision of ecumenical education more
whole-heartedly than did Georgetowns priests. Neither Molyneux nor the
Neales nor any other members of the semi-restored order seemed capable of
spurring the ex-Jesuits to create a dynamic, rigorous institution that could edu
cate a priesthood while existing confidently within the diverse American reli
gious landscape.
The partially restored Jesuit order was both too slight and too demanding.
Its obvious vulnerabilities made those who loved it argue aggressively for its
privileges, but their pleas and demands only ensured further dispute with
Carroll. Carroll insisted that as bishop and archbishop he must have authority
24 Carroll to Molyneux, 27 March 1807, jcp III, 14.

25 Spalding, 40.
26 Carroll to C. Plowden, 27 January 1812, jcp III, 175.
378 ODonnell
over the assignment of priests from the order. His assurances that he hoped
always to use that authority in harmony with the wishes of the superior did not
reassure the ex-Jesuits.27
Practical questions, such as the assignment of priests, tended to bring to the
surface disagreements between Carroll and the Jesuits. But Carroll, along with
Charles Plowden, had also developed a view of the role of the Jesuit order in
the United States adapted more to suppression than to the hope of restoration.
Our unsettled precarious situation must continue, Plowden wrote in 1809,
concluding, We must then content ourselves for a time with practicing in
forno interno what we know to be holy & approved.28 For Carroll, this quiet
Jesuitism had a particular resonance. During the decades of suppression,
Carroll began to conceive of the orders position within American Catholicism
in the same way he conceived of Catholicism within republican America. In
the United States, Catholicisms essential doctrines and practices were to be
defended, but any claims on non-Catholics and any unessential Catholic prac
tices that courted mistrust were to be abandoned. Carroll adopted a similar
view on the Jesuits: it, too, was to be internalized, tucked within the Catholicism
that was itself tucked within American culture.
Whereas Carrolls vision of American Catholicism allowed him to preserve
the doctrines and internal hierarchies of Catholicism while modifying some of
its external practices, his vision of the Jesuits was of necessity more about
transformation than adaptation. Carroll lamented the destruction of the
Jesuits as a corporate body, but in its wake he urged fellow ex-Jesuits to adopt a
privatized, internalized Jesuit ethos, while accepting the loss of corporate and
public existence. Because the Jesuit order, like any order, only truly existed in
community, a private, individual Jesuit might be nonthreatening to the larger
Catholic church, but he was not in the end a Jesuit at all. Even when the order
achieved partial restoration, moreover, Carroll pressed its members to con
tinue to mold their Jesuit identity and claims in a way that avoided conflict
with the larger American Catholic church.
27 Carroll to Molyneux, 7 April 1807, jcp III, 14.

28 Plowden to Carroll, 21 August 1809, 6Q10, aba. In the present state of affairs, Plowden
wrote, would-be Jesuits cannot act with too much caution and reserve, and lamented
along with Carroll members of the restored orders too confident publicity [] given to
their profession of the Institute. Plowden to Carroll 30 April 1808, 6Q7 and 24 February
1809, 6Q9, aba. An excellent discussion of Plowden and Carrolls insistence that clergy
could not be Jesuits in externo foro emerges in Binzley, 323325.
In 1806 and 1807, problems in the New York City parish brought to the fore
lurking divisions over how the order and the American church fitted together.
The parish was the second largest in the United Statesall of Manhattan lay
within itand it was rising in visibility along with the city itself. St. Peters
pews contained wealthy merchants, several of Irish background, among its
trustees, as well as immigrants from St. Dominguesome wealthy and others
notand increasing numbers of Irish with few resources and limited English.
For years, its priests had been intermittently at odds with each other and the
church hierarchy; one even banned Carroll temporarily from the sanctuary.
The days of openly rebellious St. Peters priests had passed but from 1806 to
1808 the parish lurched once more into Carrolls alarmed view.
Led by confident trustees and an American-born priest named Michael
Hurley, Catholics in New York petitioned the state legislature to remove
remaining civil disabilities against Catholics. Just as that campaign promised
to bring the parish under scrutiny, rumored sexual scandals involving its priests
threatened to confirm Protestant Americans worst fears about the church.29
Carrolls urgent efforts to reform St. Peters revealed both his reliance on, and
his impatience with, members of the Russian Jesuit order. After months of
uncertainty, Carroll came to believe that two of St. Peters priests had indeed
been guilty of serious misconduct. He worried that news of their misdeeds
could threaten the credibility of the church in that city and throughout the
United States. Carroll wanted to bring a strong-minded, virtuous priest to New
York City to replace those tainted or simply exhausted by the scandal. In early
1807, Carroll wrote urgently to the orders superior, Robert Molyneux. Warning
that it was necessary to prevent the explosion of dreadful scandals in New
York, Carroll wrote that Molyneux must send a capable priest.30 Molyneux
resisted. By the summer of 1808, as the scandal again crested, Carroll turned to
Anthon Kohlmann, for an immediate answer, not forgetting that the crisis is
as important to Religion, as can almost happen.31 Kohlmann was remarkably
unmoved by Carrolls urgency. He, Neale, and Molyneux, he explained, did not
29 The challenges and ambitions of the New York parish, St. Peters, emerge in Carrolls cor
respondence. On efforts to petition the legislature to remove remaining civil disabilities
on Catholics, see Michael Hurley to Carroll, 6 January 1806, 4G8, aba. For reports of the
priests misconduct and the priests defenses of their reputations, see, for example,
Matthew OBrien to Carroll, 7 February 1806, 5T4 aba; Hurley to Carroll, 10 March 1806,
4G9, aba.
30 Carroll to Molyneux, 25 February 1807, jcp III, 10.
31 Carroll to Kohlmann, 15 August 1808, jcp III, 6768.
380 ODonnell
want to send a newly ordained member of the Society, because of their reluc
tance to expose them to so perilous a hazard as we judge that would be both
with respect to their spiritual advantage and future progress in learning and
virtue. Kohlmann also refused to go himself:
As for my going to New York in any quality whatever, it is thought that this
must defeat our present proposal of beginning the first course of philoso
phy never yet taught in this college and for which purpose I was destined
by the general of the society on my departure from Russia. This had been
proposed to the general as a necessary step to undertake the establish
ment of the society in this country.32
Carroll had no doubt that the immediate crisis in New York trumped the
long-term plans of the Russian Jesuits. He compelled Kohlmann to go to St.
Peters, and Kohlmann, willing to argue but not finally to disobey, com
plied. Once in New York City, Kohlmann found himself moved, as Carroll
had long been, by the daily needs of lay Catholics. He became convinced
that he was indeed needed there, and his respect for Carrolls judgment
grew. The church could not thrive if its most prominent parishes were in
disarray.
Carrolls correspondence during New Yorks long crisis reveals a crescendo
of the multifarious duties that had always characterized his prelacy. Affected
by its own internal scandals, the New York see was also dramatically affected
by international turmoil. Carroll could recommend no American priest to take
over the troubled parish, and so Rome appointed Luke Concanen, an Irish cler
gyman. But in the midst of the Napoleonic wars, Concanen could not gain pas
sage to the United States. Carroll sent urgent letters trying to learn Concanens
whereabouts, and to ascertain what course to take should Concanen, and the
pallium he was to bring with him, never arrive in the United States. He sought
information about British efforts to stop Napoleon. All the while, Carroll con
tinued to seek information about the internal workings of the troubled New
York parish. Far from distracting him from the day to day problems of St.
Peters, the accumulation of large scale uncertainties deepened Carrolls con
viction that well run parishes, whose laity had access to the sacraments and
respected their priests, were essential to the survival of the nations Catholic
church. Meanwhile, the voices of lay Americans continued to arrive daily in
letters, diminishing the power of Carrolls ex-Jesuit brethren to argue that the
restoration of the order was the foremost need of the national and
32 Kohlmann to Carroll, 18 August 1808, 4M1, aba.

international church. Even as Carrolls impatience with Molyneux and the

members of the Russian Jesuit order increased, however, he continued to hope
that the Jesuit order would be fully restored. Only a restoration would enable it
to return to its true nature as a community and to train young men through the
rigorous process of formation that Carroll still believed to be the best form of
priestly education.
Tensions between Carroll and the partially restored order mounted after
Molyneuxs death in 1808 and the appointment of Charles Neale to the posi
tion of superior. Becoming less diplomatic as he aged, Carroll in late 1811 sent
Nealebrother to Francis and Leonarda catalog of Neales failures to align
the order with the goals of the church. Carroll closed the long set of admoni
tions and chastisements with a startlingly personal rebuke: I know that my
delicacy and embarrassment between inclination and attachment on one side,
and duty confirmed by oath on the other has induced some and perhaps your
self to impute to me, disaffection to the Society, which I am confident, that I
love more than you do, because I knew it much better.33 Charles Neale had
found the end of Carrolls patience. The bishop complained to Neales Russian
superior, Gruber, about Neales insubordination. Gruber removed Neale and
replaced him with Charles Grassi.
Grassi initially proved willing to compromise with Carroll, and he also
proved a far better president of Georgetown Collegea post he also assumed
than Neale. Yet Carroll increasingly came into conflict with Grassi over the
same issue that had divided him from Neale and even from the less combative
Molyneux: the relationship between Jesuit interests and the interests of the
church as a whole. Once again, conflicts arose over the assignment of priests
and use of resources. Carroll also worried that Grassi failed to understand
Americans mistrust of foreign influence and their lurking mistrust of Jesuits
themselves. Your friend Mr. Grassi is doing his best, Carroll wrote to Plowden,
but it seems to me, that he consults chiefly, if not exclusively foreigners [] all
of them good religious men, but not one of them, possessing an expanded
mind, discerning enough to estimate the difference between the American
character, and those of which they left.34 Anti-Catholicism was not the only or
even the primary issue. Instead, Carroll worried that Grassis assertiveness
his rejection of Carrolls unobtrusive, undemanding form of the Jesuit order in
the United Stateswould turn non-Jesuit clergy against the order and against
Georgetown itself.
33 Carroll to C. Neale, jcp III, 160.

34 Carroll to C. Plowden, 24 June/ 25 July, 1815, jcp III, 338.
382 ODonnell
Let me beseech youCarroll wrote to Grassi in October of 1813to

recommend to the members of the Society to follow the instructions
of the Very Rev. Fr. General, and convince themselves that they have
not, and cannot yet have any corporate right in the ecclesiastical
property of this country. I see, methinks, a closed gathering, and
raised up by some anti Jesuitical Clergyman of different nations
amongst us, which threatens much trouble, if they can raise it: but
their enmity would give me little alarm, if it were not irritated more
and more, by the presumptuous language and premature pretensions
of some of your subjects.35
After decades of effort, Carroll still confronted new challenges at every turn.
St. Peters parish in New York City no longer teetered on the brink of scandal,
but the very success of its pastor prompted a new problem. Kohlmann had
brought order to the New York parish and successfully begun an academy for
Catholic and non-Catholic students. Carroll admired Kohlmann and appointed
him administrator when the New York see remained vacant. But Kohlmann
now believed his thriving literary institution should be staffed entirely by
members of his Russian Jesuit order. Kohlmanns insistence on this point led
Carroll to regard the school as a threat to, not an ornament of, the church.
Carroll wrote that Kohlmann was pursuing the regrettable practice of exclud
ing every teacher, who had not been trained in the same routine of servile
imitation and narrowness of studies, as themselves. Thus Kohlmann was
violating the principles of the Jesuits themselves: This was not the enlarged
system of St. Ignatius, Carroll wrote. It also harmed the reputation of the
church. Kohlmanns intransigence was destroying the future of the academy,
and thus angering wealthy trustees: it was, Carroll lamented, a cause of much
regret [] that such good friends as Messrs. Morris and Haney may have cause
of complaint and suffer loss.36
Elsewhere, problems were even more dramatic. Carroll believed that dis
putes among clergy in Philadelphia sent the bishop there, Bishop Egan, to an
early grave. Conflicts over the ex-Jesuit plantations, including unseemly squab
bles over the ownership and disposition of slaves, also plagued the church.
Communication with Rome, even after the 1814 release from captivity of Pope
Pius, was halting and untrustworthy. As was so often the case, problems inter
sected: the priests involved in the conflict with Philadelphias Bishop Egan
35 Carroll to John Grassi, 16 October 1813, jcp III, 235.

36 Carroll to John Grassi, 24 September 1813, jcp III, 231.
returned to Europe and publicly criticized the American ex-Jesuits ownership

of slaves; due in part to a loss of Carrolls letters complaining of the priests
conduct, Rome named one of the offending clergymen the new bishop of
Philadelphia. Amidst it all, Carroll, finally, was physically weakening. It is so
long since I wrote to you, he lamented to William Dubourg in early 1814, that
you will conclude, and indeed with a great degree of truth, that age renders me
every day more indolent, in mind and body.37
Then, after decades of disappointment, stunning news suddenly arrived:
The Jesuit order was restored. In December, 1814, Carroll received news of the
event in a letter from his old friend and confidante Charles Plowden. True to
form, Carroll responded with great emotion constrained by the need for
immediate, practical action: he sent what he called the miraculous bull of
general restoration on to John Grassi even before I could nearly finish the
reading of it.38 Carrolls correspondence reveals his gratitude for the bull. But
he viewed the events of 1814 less as a restorationa return of the order to its
state before suppressionthan as a rebirth. The Society was now a vulnerable
infant.
How many years must pass [Carroll wrote with unusual intensity to
Charles Plowden] before these houses will be repeopled by such men as
we have known, whom sanctity of manner, zeal for the divine glory, sci
ence, eloquence, and talents of every kind rendered worthy of being the
instruments of divine providence to illustrate his church, maintain its
faith, and instruct all ranks of human society in all the duties of their
respective stations.
Fear mixed with hope after the restoration, as it had done for so many years.
When I consider the length of preparation required to renew this race of
men, Carroll wrote, my apprehension is, that the friends of the Society will be
too precipitate, too hasty in expecting benefits from it, before its pupils will be
mature enough to produce them.39 Just two weeks after learning of the resto
ration, Carroll wrote earnestly to Grassi warning him of the propriety and
necessity of much caution, which arises from the political institutions of this
country, and the equally powerful danger of opposition, and
misrepresentation, proceeding [] from the body of the Clergy, most of whom
37 Carroll to William Dubourg, 7 February 1814, jcp III, 258.

38 Carroll to John Grassi, 10 December 1814, jcp III, 308.
39 Carroll to Charles Plowden 5 January 1815, jcp III, 317.
384 ODonnell
had no association with the Jesuit order. Carroll also cautioned Grassi against
the proposal of withdrawing those, who are employed in the care of souls, to
bring them back to the exercises of a community life.40 The interests of the
restored order were no more easily aligned with the church, than were those of
the partially restored order.
Such words led to familiar accusations that Carroll opposed the order,
even in its official restoration. Yet Carrolls unusual directness reveals
something quite different: he was still deeply attached to the Society he
had known, and did not want the restored order to grow in such a way as to
pervert the institutions true goals. Perhaps most eloquent was Carrolls
silence. For months, he apologized for not making a public pronounce
ment about the restoration. Carroll was not simply distracted by his many
duties. Profoundly moved by the rebirth of the Society and fully aware of
the challenges that rebirth posed, he struggled for words. How to signal the
momentousness of the occasion, without sparking fear and resentment
among those who feared the Jesuits would become powerful and self-seek
ing? How to publicly suggest a cautious path for the restored order, without
evoking hostility from those who believed that in the orders strength lay
that of the church?
The challenges never ceased. In late August, Carroll found himself writing to
Grassi urging him not to refuse to accept into Georgetown those who wished to
become secular priests rather than Jesuits. As in many other things, he wrote,
especially in the infancy of the reestablishment, and which are not absolutely
essential, it has been found necessary to dispense []. I cannot help persuad
ing myself, that you will cease from insisting on the establishment of a prac
tice, which must tend inevitably to deprive the churches of America from
having priests sufficient to answer public exigencies, with the great loss of
souls &c. Send an answer soon, he wrote, and a favourable one.41 The chal
lenges Carroll faced as both the leader of the institutional church and a pastor,
also rolled on. The cacophony of demands, pleas, and disagreements furthered,
as it had so long done, his vision of the true Jesuit order as servant of the needy,
fractious church. He, too, strove to be a servant who did not consume church
resources. I cannot recall with sufficient accuracy what I wrote or how fully,
he confessed to one correspondent in the months before his death. For I am in
my 80th year, and I have no secretary because I cannot withdraw any priest
who is able to care for souls.42
40 Carroll to John Grassi 27 December 1814, jcp III, 311.

41 Carroll to John Grassi, 25 August 1815, jcp III 256257.
42 Carroll to Lorenzo Litta, 17 July 1815, jcp III 346.
Carroll never stopped confronting the challenge of creating a purposeful

and flexible order true to the Jesuits goal of serving the church and capable of
working in the American context. When he began his final illness, in October
of 1815, Carroll was hopeful but uncertain about the Societys future. The chal
lenge of its true restoration would belong to others.
chapter 22
The Restoration in Canada

An Enduring Patrimony
John Meehan, S.J. and Jacques Monet, S.J.1
Canada is one of few countries in which the Jesuit order is part of the founding
national myth. The first recorded Jesuits on Canadian soil were Pierre Biard
and Ennemond Mass, who arrived in May 1611 at Port Royal, in present-day
Nova Scotia, to work among the Mikmaq people. Beginning in 1625, larger
numbers of Jesuits went to Quebec to accompany the first French settlers,
continuing in uninterrupted succession for some 140 years. Of the 331 Jesuits
who labored in New France, nearly all came from France, except for fifteen
Canadian-born members of the Society and one Italian, Francesco Giuseppe
Bressani.
A long and fruitful ministry in New France had begun. Within a century-
and-a-half, however, the presence of Jesuits in the colony would be threatened
by their gradual demise after the fall of New France in 1760, the death of their
members over the next forty years, and the resulting dispute over their assets.
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the experience of
the Society in Canada, as this chapter shows, was in many ways an anomaly to
its suppression and restoration elsewhere. Ironically, the British conquest
spared Jesuits in Canada from the suppression experienced by their brethren
in France. Forbidden by British authorities from recruiting or accepting new
members, they faced death by attrition, culminating in the passing in 1800 of
the last Jesuit, Jean-Joseph Casot. Moreover, the Jesuits return to Canada in
1842 occurred well after their restoration elsewhere and the bitter dispute over
their assets dragged on until the 1880s, reflecting the ethnic, religious, and
political fault lines of nineteenth-century Canada.
Establishment in New France
Motivated by a desire to bring the gospel to native peoples, the Jesuits accom-
panied, or often pioneered, the exploratory journeys that opened the North
1 The authors would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance in the
preparation of this manuscript: Prescy Alumaga, Bruce Henry, Edward ODonnell, Arthur
White, S.J. and Mahal Yu-Daquiado.

The Restoration In Canada 387
American continent to European discovery. The History of their labours,

wrote George Bancroft with only slight exaggeration, is connected with the
origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America. Not a cape
was turned nor a river entered but a Jesuit led the way.2 With its point up to
Hudson Bay, then roots down the Mississippi to New Orleans and petals pro-
tectively enveloping the Maritimes and the vast prairies, the Jesuits stamped a
giant fleur-de-lys on the map of North America. By the early 1700s they had
reached twenty-three First Nations including the Huron and Mohawk, among
whom labored eight of their number canonized in 1930 as the Canadian mar-
tyrs. Jesuits also played a role in the life of the first North American native saint,
Kateri Tekakwitha, canonized in 2012. A most enduring legacy was the reports
they sent annually to superiors in France between 1632 and 1673. Instant best-
sellers in their day, the Relations proved invaluable to generations of scholars,
providing extraordinary data on European contact with the Native peoples.3
The Jesuits acquired a significant patrimony in New France. As the Relations
attracted financial and other support, an appeal from Paul Le Jeune, the supe-
rior at Quebec, resulted in a fund established by the Marquis de Gamache of
48,000 livres through which the Collge des Jsuites was founded in 1635.
Located on Quebecs main square, the college occupied pride of place opposite
the parish church, its course of studies becoming the model for all of French
Canadas collges classiques. Evolving into what became Laval University in
1852, it enabled the latters claim to be the oldest institution of higher learning
in North America. Moreover, large grants from the French monarchy, as well as
legacies and donations from wealthy benefactors, turned the order into the
proprietor of some three-quarters of a million square acres. By the mid-eigh-
teenth century the Jesuits had become the colonys single largest landowner,
with nearly one-eighth of the land settled by the French.4 Their assets included
a church and the Collge at Quebec as well as a residence in Montreal. The
2 George Bancroft, History of the United States (George Routledge & Sons: London, 1851), 2:783.
3 For more on Jesuit missions among the aboriginal peoples of New France, see Carole
Blackburn, Harvest of Souls: the Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 16321650
(McGill-Queens University Press: Montreal and Kingston, 2004); Allan Greer, ed., Jesuit
Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth Century North America (Bedford/
St.Martins: Boston, 2000); and Jacques Monet, The Jesuits in New France, in The Cambridge
Companion to the Jesuits, ed., Thomas Worcester (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
2008), 186198. For an excellent study of Kateri that includes an assessment of her Jesuit con-
nections, see Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford
University Press: Oxford, 2005).
4 Roy C. Dalton, The Jesuits Estates Question, 17601888: A Study of the Background for the
Agitation of 1889 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1968), 60, 77.
388 John Meehan and Jacques Monet
considerable revenue from these holdings was used to subsidize tuition at the
college and support missions among native people. While their dominance
was challenged in certain places, notably by the Sulpicians who were seigneurs
at Montreal, their relative prestige rivaled that of their confreres in France.
European conflict soon imperiled such status, however. Hostility between
Britain and France led to the capture of the French fortress of Louisbourg in 1758
and the fall of Quebec after the battle of the Plains of Abraham in September 1759.
During the hostilities, Jesuits shared the experience of rationing, some fleeing the
colonial capital for refuge at the nearby Huron mission of Jeune Lorette (modern-
day Wendake, Quebec). British troops under the new military governor, Brigadier-
General James Murray, commandeered the Collge des Jsuites for use as a military
storehouse.5 The two priests and two brothers living there were allowed to leave,
joining their confreres at Jeune Lorette. With the surrender of the French garrison
at Montreal to General Jeffrey Amherst in 1760 and Frances inability to send rein-
forcements, Britains victory in North America was complete.
Life Under British Rule
The French defeat placed the Jesuits in a difficult situation. Uncertainty about
how the British authorities would treat the church prompted Jesuits to react
tentatively to the occupation. Under the French regime, there had never been
more than four dozen Jesuits in the colony at any given time but, over the first
eighteen months of British rule, their numbers fell to twenty-five.6 With the act
of capitulation of Montreal, British officials in the colony recognized the prop-
erty rights of religious orders but left the question of their continued existence
up to London. Initially suspicious of the Jesuits, Murray felt they and other
male congregations, such as the Rcollets, should be banned, their property
seized (with adequate pensions provided), but female communities retained
for the education of girls and the running of hospitals.7 Matters on the ground,
5 Hilda Neatby, Quebec: The Revolutionary Age, 17601791 (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto,
1966), 19. Interestingly, the college building was used by the military until 1871, when British
troops withdrew from Canada.
6 Of the forty-four Jesuits in the colony in early 1759, for instance, there were thirty-one priests,
ten brothers and three scholastics. Of these, there were none in Acadia, only one in Trois-
Rivires, two on the shores of the Great Lakes, two more in the Illinois territory, six teaching
in Quebec and two at the residence in Montreal.
7 G.-. Gigure, Augustin-Louis de Glapion in Dictionary of Canadian Biography (dcb), vol. IV:
1771 to 1800 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1979), 298; Neatby, Quebec, 116.
however, soon altered his views. Facing a growing political struggle with British
and American traders, Murray came to see the Catholic Church as an impor-
tant ally, a source of political legitimacy, and a force for social stability.8 By 1761,
he had restored part of the Collge des Jsuites to the Jesuits, who held classes
there until 1768. Although two-thirds of the school remained occupied by
British troops, two Jesuit brothers, Alexis Maquet and Jean-Joseph Casot,
headed the primary school, with Father Augustin-Louis de Glapion as the only
teacher at the secondary level. Glapion became local superior in 1763, guiding
the Jesuits through a difficult period until his death in 1790. Awaiting the result
of peace negotiations, he hoped the Jesuit ministry in education and among
native people would be allowed to continue.9
Political and diplomatic realities in Europe soon intervened. Unlike the situ-
ation in Canada, where there was no public opinion against the Jesuits, opposi-
tion to the order had grown in Europe. Across the continent, the Society was
criticized by court officials as too powerful and by church officials as too
accommodating morally and theologically. In October 1759, shortly after the
fall of Quebec, the order was expelled from Portugal and its colonies.
Negotiations for peace in North America coincided with the suppression in
France. Beginning in Paris in 1762, parlements across France banned the Society
and confiscated its property, prompting Louis XV to issue an edict in November
1764 dissolving the Jesuits throughout his empire. By this stage, Canada had
been ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, by which
France lost practically all of its North American colonies. Article four of the
treaty granted religious freedom in Quebec as far as the laws of Great Britain
permit: Catholics were not allowed to vote or hold public office, but they
could own property.10 While the Jesuits fate was not an issue during the nego-
tiations, London instructed Murray in August 1763 that they be forbidden from
accepting and recruiting new members but not be suppressed. Murrays con-
ciliatory stance led some Jesuits in Canada to realize they were better off than
their confreres in France. As Glapion confided in a letter of early 1764 to
Fr.Harding, an English Jesuit then working in Maryland:
We live very peacefully here. General Murray treats us with much hon-
esty and has helped us on several occasions. All the officers are courteous
toward us. The practice of religion is as free as it has ever been. I feel there
is much true piety in Quebec: confessions are frequent. When we are
8 Mason Wade, The French Canadians (Macmillan: Toronto, 1955), 57.

9 Joseph Cossette, Jean-Joseph Casot, in dcb 4:134135.
10 G.P. Browne, James Murray, in dcb, 4:573.
called to anoint the sick, we go there in full safety, day or night. We preach
regularly, on every Sunday and feast day, and we have catechism for the
children of the parish in our chapel.11
Relations between British and church officials further improved after 1766
when Sir Guy Carleton succeeded Murray as governor and Jean-Olivier Briand
became bishop of Quebec.12 Indeed, the churchand the Societyin Canada
might not have survived without Briand. A native of Brittany, he was a gener-
ous, cultivated, and intuitive man with very good practical judgment, though
friends and critics alike noted he could be as stubborn as a Breton dog.
Imbued with a great talent for making friendshe played whist with Murray
and Carleton and tutored the latters childrenhe was instrumental in saving
the Catholic hierarchy in Quebec, a precedent in the British Empire. At
Murrays urging, Briand went to Europe for delicate negotiations involving
King George III, the colonial office, the governor of Quebec, the Canadian vic-
ars-general, the papal nuncio in Paris, and the British and French ambassadors
in their respective countries. Backed also by Carleton, who was about to suc-
ceed Murray, he met with all the right officials in London before achieving
similar success with the papal nuncio in Paris, securing his own episcopal
nomination over a rival claimant, the superior of the Sulpicians at Montreal.13
As bishop, Briand oversaw the rebuilding of churches destroyed in the war
and conducted a census of his vast diocese, stretching from Detroit to Hudson
Bay to Halifax. He also ordained ninety priests, including Jesuit brothers such
as Casot and Maquet, and enabled the Society to continue its ministry among
native people and in education, though, for lack of Jesuits, the Collge was
gradually absorbed into the Sminaire de Qubec. Significantly, he fostered ami-
cable relations with British officials, based partly on personal ties and partly on
the churchs teaching on obedience to civil authority. Shortly after the fall of
New France in 1760, as vicar-general of Quebec he had ordered that prayers be
offered for the new king, answering his critics in almost jesuitical fashion:
11 The original of this letter is in the Canada Fonds with the Archives of the British Province
at Farm Street Church, London. This is our translation but the original French may be
found in Robert Toupin, Arpents de neige et robes noires: Brve relation sur le passage des
jsuites en Nouvelle-France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles (Bellarmin: Montreal, 1991), 99. There
is no evidence of any response to it.
12 For a thorough assessment of Carletons career, see G.P. Browne Sir Guy Carleton, Baron
Dorchester, in dcb, vol. V, 18011820 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1983), 141155.
13 For more on relations with the Sulpicians during this period, see Dominique Deslandres,
ed., Les Sulpiciens de Montral: Une histoire de pouvoir et de discrtion, 16572007 (Fides:
Montreal, 2008).
I think that it would be wrong not to name George in the Canon if it can
be done, just as it would be wrong to do it if it cannot be done. It should
not be refused without reason, any more than it should be admitted
against the rules. Therefore I concluded that if the church did not forbid
it, which they have not been able to prove to me, one should name him,
and not to do so would be a trick in which there would be more prejudice
than reason []. I could not admit that I should be given as a reason that
it is very difficult to pray for ones enemies. They are our rulers and we
owe to them what we used to owe to the French. Does the church forbid
subjects to pray for their Prince? Do the Catholics in the realm of Great
Britain not pray for their King? I cannot believe it.14
Clearly, Britain valued Briands support, especially as discontent brewed in the

thirteen colonies. Even before the Treaty of Paris, he had ordered that Te Deums
be sung after George IIIs accession and coronation, as well as for the signing of
the peace itself. He did the same after an American invasion was repelled in
1776, during which he threatened to excommunicate any Roman Catholic sup-
porting the rebels to the south. His goodwill toward the British authorities
proved a saving grace for the Society, unlike his similar appeals to Rome in
their favor, which fell on deaf ears. When the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor,
which suppressed the Jesuits universally, reached Quebec in the summer of
1773, he promptly met with his friend, Lieutenant-Governor Hector Theophilus
Cramah. Since Carleton was in England at the time, Briand secured Cramahs
agreement to forbid publication of the brief. All threeBriand, Carleton and
Cramahrealized how the suppression of the order, and the question of its
properties, could destabilize imperial policy on three sensitive issues: the
Quebec Act, intended to come into force in May 1775, guaranteeing rights of
property, law and religious freedom; the conniving behind the colonial secre-
tary to ensure a continuing Catholic hierarchy through the consecration of a
coadjutor bishop; and the threat of invasion by American rebels. Hastily con-
sulted about the brief of suppression, Carleton agreed with Briand and
Cramah to invoke the law prohibiting the publication of papal documents in
British territories. Unpromulgated, the brief would have no effect. The three
also agreed on the importance of secrecy. The few living Jesuits would be told,
the four in Quebec directly. They were all sworn to secrecy.15 As Briand
explained in a letter to friends in France: Our Jesuits still wear the Jesuit habit,
still have the reputation of Jesuits, carry out the function of Jesuits, and in
14 Cited in Neatby, Quebec, 27.

15 Andr Vachon, Jean-Olivier Briand, in dcb 4:101; Neatby, Quebec, 116.
Canada it is only the governor, I and my secretary, who know that they are no
longer Jesuits, they excepted.16
Thus the Society was never suppressed in Canada. Later, Briand reported to
Pius VI who, officially, neither approved nor disapproved but sent a blessing
and renewed all the indulgences and privileges which the Jesuit church in
Quebec traditionally received. Nevertheless, the Society in Canada continued
to die a slow death. Of the twelve Jesuits in Canada in 1773, nine were dead by
1785, leaving only Louis Glapion, Bernard Well and Jean-Joseph Casot. Just
prior to his death in 1790, Glapion transferred to the Canadian people all
property belonging to his order. In fact, Casot acted as owner and administra-
tor of the vast Jesuit estates. After Wells death in early 1791, Casot also drew up
a will, dated 14 November 1796, in which he bequeathed his goods. He left the
colleges science laboratory and precious relics (including Brbeufs skull) to
the hospital nuns of the Htel-Dieu, pedagogical books and instruments to the
Ursulines, and other belongings to the priests of the Sminaire de Qubec and
the new coadjutor bishop, Pierre Denault.17 By this stage, Casot had already
given part of the college archives to the Htel-Dieu and much of the college
library to the seminary. In early December 1799, only four months before his
death, he sought to leave the Jesuit estates to the crown, but Cramah feared
the move might be unpopular. Then, on 16 March 1800, Jean-Joseph Casot, the
last Jesuit in Canada, breathed his last. The Ursuline nun who recorded his
death noted with flourish:
In this month of March passed away at the age of 71 years and 6 months
Reverend Father J. Joseph Casot, the last of the sons of Ignatius in this
country, who has left as many orphans as there are poor and needy. []
He used all his income, which we know was large, to aid them, whilst
16 Briand to Mesdames de Pontbriand, quoted in Dalton, Jesuits Estates, 18. A corroboration

of this account can be found in a report to the Holy See in 1794 by the then Bishop Jean-
Franois Hubert: At the time of the extinction of the Order of the Jesuits in 1773, the
Bishop at that time, in order for them to keep their estates, of which they made an edify-
ing use, obtained permission from the Holy See and from the government, for them to
retain their old habit and remain under their Superior. The people perceived no change in
their manner of existence and continued to call them Jesuits. There remained about a
dozen of them. All have died, one after the other, while working for the salvation of souls.
There remains only one, and what characterizes well the humanity and the liberality of
the English government, is that this ex-Jesuit peacefully and tranquilly enjoys the revenue
of all the estates which belong to his Order in this country and gives immense alms from
it. Cited in Dalton, Jesuits Estates, 19.
17 The text of Casots will may be found in Toupin, Arpents de Neige, 104110.
denying himself the necessities of life. His death has been mourned by all
men of good will.18
The Jesuit estates now went in trust to the crown, which took formal posses-
sion of all properties and revenue accruing from them. Given the estates great
value, however, numerous claimants vied for them over the next eight decades
and, indeed, they had been contested even prior to Casots death. In November
1769, Sir Jeffery Amherst, who had received the surrender at Montreal, claimed
the estates on the basis of a promise by George III by right of conquest. Before
taking action, the colonial office wanted a clear description of what was
involved and Carleton too sought greater clarification. Uneasy about violating
property rights guaranteed in the Treaty of Paris, he was reluctant to grant so
much property to a single individual. Undeterred, Amherst reiterated his claim
several times, provoking opposition from both British officials and French-
Canadian leaders, most of whom agreed that revenues from the estates should
be devoted to education. Eventually, in 1803, six years after Amhersts death,
the British parliament granted an annuity of 3,000 in favor of his nephew and
heir, compensation enough for the estates his uncle had never received.19
At the other end of the social scale, Pierre-Joseph-Antoine Roubaud, a young
renegade Jesuit, also laid claim to the estates, arguing that Montreals surren-
der meant the suppression of the Society and a distribution of its properties.
Criticized by superiors as lacking in prudence and good judgment, Roubaud
had ingratiated himself to Murray and served as an informer and spy for
Amherst. After becoming an Anglican priest, then a translator for the British
embassy at The Hague, he sold state secrets to both sides in diplomatic talks,
all the while angling for Britains seizure of the estates. He failed. After a quar-
ter century betraying one master after another, he disappeared into the slums
of Paris sometime after 1789. In the end, his claim was never considered seri-
ously but for a decade his close links to many British officials created an atmo-
sphere of intrigue around the estates.20
With the estates passing in trust to the crown, there was general agreement
that they remain intact and that revenues be used for educational purposes.
This was seen as consistent with the Jesuits original aim. Differences became
more pronounced, however, on the question of who would control education.
18 Cited in Cossette, Jean-Joseph Casot in dcb 4:135.

19 Neatby, Quebec, 244; C.P. Stacey, Jeffery Amherst in dcb 4:2026; For more on Amhersts
claims, see Dalton, Jesuits Estates and Arthur Jones, S.J., Les biens des Jsuites en Canada:
question de droit canon (Collge Sainte-Marie: Montreal, 1888).
20 Auguste Vachon, Pierre-Joseph-Antoine Roubaud in dcb 4:685687.
In 1801, Lieutenant Governor Sir Robert Milnes hinted that funds from the
estates would be used to help launch the Royal Institution for the Advancement
of Learning, founded to establish free schools in the English tongue. The
move provoked strong opposition from both Bishop Pierre Denault, because of
lay control, and nationaliste politicians, because of the language used. Some
780 of estate funds went toward this end, but it was far from sufficient. The
Institution was saved in 1813 by James McGills legacy of forty-six acres of land
and 10,000, which soon became McGill College.21 Meanwhile, throughout the
teens and twenties of the century, the use of revenues from the estates played
into increasing antagonism between Montreal and Quebec, who battled for
influence, as well as that between the elected assembly and the governors.
Responsible government after the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada seemed to
promise greater accountability but the Union of the Canadas four years later
complicated matters, widening the question to include interests in both
Canada East and West (Quebec and Ontario respectively).22 A resolution of
the matter would require careful treading upon the emerging fault lines of
British North America. The estates question became a recurring theme: ever
present and never solved, and continuing through the confederation debates
of the 1860s about the jurisdiction of the province of Quebec.
The Return of the Jesuits
Meanwhile, and in this context, the Jesuits had been called back to Canada.
The consecration in March 1837 of the energetic, young Ignace Bourget as
coadjutor bishop of Montreal brought a new kind of leadership to the Canadian
church.23 Trained by his bishop, Jean-Jacques Lartigue, and widely read in such
leading ultramontane authors as Flicit de Lammenais and Louis Veuillot,
whom he would meet on his first trip to Paris in 1841, he was determined to
renew the quality and spirituality of his diocese and began with higher educa-
tion. He received from John Larkin, an English Sulpician teaching at Montreals
Grand Sminaire, the name of Pierre Chazelle, a well-known Jesuit preacher in
21 Dalton, Jesuits Estates, 8384.

22 Neatby, Quebec, 244245; Fernand Ouellet, Lower Canada, 17911840: Social Change and
Nationalism (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1980), 41; Dalton, Jesuits Estates, vii.
23 On Bishop Bourget and his place in French-Canadian history, see Lon Pouliot,
s.j., Monseigneur Ignace Bourget et son temps, 5 vols. (Fides: Montreal, 19551977); Philippe
Sylvain Ignace Bourget, in dcb, XI (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1984), 103115;
and Gilles Chauss, S.J., Monseigneur Lartigue et son temps (Fides: Montreal, 1980).
France who would certainly inspire Bourgets priests. At the time, Chazelle,
who had guided Larkin himself through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius,
was rector of St. Marys College, Bardstown, Kentucky.24 He enthusiastically
agreed to come to Montreal where his ten-day retreat in August 1839 for eighty-
three diocesan priests drew raves. The first Jesuit in Canada since Casots death,
Chazelle also visited the old Jesuit mission sites, rekindling fading but cher-
ished memories of heroic days of discovery and settlement. He arrived back in
Kentucky with dozens of emotional assurances of how welcome the Jesuits
return would be. Chazelle also carried an insistent plea for help from Bourget
to hasten the Jesuits return. The bishop knew how helpful the Jesuits would be
in his plans for the church of Montreal, especially for the opening of a college
there. Chazelle agreed.25
So it was that the two men found themselves in Rome in early summer 1841
for conversations with the superior-general of the Society, Jan Roothaan. For
his part, Bourget was armed with a moving document he had written, entitled
Appel aux Jsuites, that recalled both the 150 years of courage and perseverance
in work among the native peoples, and the still unfinished pioneering suc-
cesses in the education of youth. Roothaan was deeply stirred by references to
the heroic deaths of the 1640s. Was he also influenced by the prospect of recov-
ering the Jesuit estates? Bourget certainly was. As he confided to his friend,
Rmi Gaulin, bishop of Kingston: If ever these good Fathers set foot in this
country, the government will have to cough up their estates which it only holds
as a deposit until it pleases Divine Providence to give them back to Religion.26
Indeed, one wonders if the Jesuits might have been recalled had it not been
for their valuable estates. In any event, Roothaan promptly wrote to the provin-
cial of France, Clment Boulanger, asking him to send Jesuits to Canada as
soon as possible. Thus, eight Jesuits who had been destined for the mission in
Madagascar were instructed to go instead to Canada. Traveling by way of New
York, they arrived by rail at La Prairie, just across the St. Lawrence River from
Montreal, on 31 May 1842. Led by Chazelle and Flix Martin, who succeeded
each other as superiors, the group was comprised of four other priests,
Dominique du Ranquet, Joseph Hannipaux, Paul Luiset, and Rmi Tellier, and
24 John Larkin, in dcb, VIII (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1985), 489491; John
Larkin, 18011858, in Jesuits in English Canada, Dictionary of Jesuit Biography (djb), vol. I
(Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies: Toronto, 1991), 181182; Thomas G. Taaffe, A History
of St. Johns College (Catholic Publication Society: Fordham, N.Y., 1891).
25 Pierre Chazelle, 17891845, in djb 1:5558; Francis X. Curran, The Return of the Jesuits
(Loyola Press: Chicago, 1966).
26 Bourget to Bishop Gaulin, 25 April 1841, as quoted in Dalton, Jesuits Estates, 112.
three brothers, Emmanuel Brennens, Jean-Joseph Jennesseaux, and Pierre

Tupin. Two more Jesuits, Jean-Pierre Chon and Pierre Point, arrived in Toronto
the following year at the invitation of the new bishop there, Michael Power,
Bourgets former assistant.27
They wasted no time in picking up where their forebears had left off in the
1760s. Pierre Chazelle preached priests retreats. Flix Martin, a church architect
and scholar, designed a college, though it was six years before Collge Sainte-
Marie in Montreal was built, inaugurating its status as French Canadas lead-
ing Catholic college for some 120 years. Others ministered among the native
peoples. Dominique du Ranquet and Joseph Hannipaux set themselves to learn-
ing Ojibway, eventually reaching the unceded reserve at Wikwemikong on
Manitoulin Island in Northern Ontario, where Jesuits have been serving uninter-
ruptedly ever since. Paul Luiset and Rmi Tellier took up pastoral work on the
old Jesuit Mission at La Prairie, the common of which was part of the Jesuit
estates. A resolution of the estates question seemed increasingly desirable, not
least in order to help fund such important and far-reaching ministries.
For his part, Bishop Bourget was determined to obtain the estates and use
them for education. By this, he undoubtedly meant his dream of a university in
Montreal. Not so easy! Archbishops Signay and then Turgeon of Quebec brought
up the university they were working on (which later became Laval). At the same
time, Bishop Power of Toronto pleaded that much of the Jesuits early mission-
ary activity was in what had now become his diocese. Clergy elsewhere simi-
larly argued that compensation should go to those dioceses in which the actual
estates were located.28 The first LaFontaine-Baldwin government agreed with
the project of a college in Montreal but one that would be the governments
responsibility, not that of the Jesuits. On it went, as priests and politicians
agreed with or objected to proposals according to their interests. A solution was
finally reached in 1888, by which time an apostolic delegate had confirmed
Lavals monopoly on Catholic post-secondary education. Moreover, Canadian-
born Jesuits had become the majority in the mission, now administratively
independent of France and England, thus allaying any fear that compensation
for the estates might leave the country. Significantly, a new generation of
French-Canadian politicians led by a Jesuit alumnus, Honor Mercier, had
formed a new government in the province of Quebec. Given the conflicting
27 J.M.S. Careless, The Union of the Canadas: The Growth of Canadian Institutions, 18411857
(Oxford University Press: London, 1968), 177.
28 Dalton, Jesuits Estates, vii; Mason Wade, French Canadians, 294; Garth Stevenson, Parallel
Paths: The Development of Nationalism in Ireland and Quebec (McGill-Queens University
Press: Montreal & Kingston, 2006), 166.
claims and rivalries, Mercier referred the matter to Leo XIII, whom all agreed
was the person best placed to ensure a fair arbitration.
The pope was solomonic. Of the approximately half a million dollars or so
that the estates were currently said to be worth, the Society of Jesus was
awarded $160,000 and rights to the common at La Prairie; Laval University,
$140,000; the Assembly of Quebec Bishops, $100,000; and the Quebec Provincial
Protestant School Board, $60,000.29 Mercier was later made papal count and
invested as a knight of St. Gregory, still the highest honor ever given by the
Holy See to a layman in the New World.30
Continuity in Mission
The Jesuits experience in Canada was unique indeed. Part of the nations
founding myth, they faced formidable challenges in carrying out the mission
that had earned them renown. Throughout the turbulence of hostilities,
changes in political regime, and the near universal suppression of their order,
they remained faithful to their original mission: education and ministry among
native peoples. Passing from French to British authority, they avoided the fate
of their brethren elsewhere. Thanks to Bishop Briands support and the good-
will of British officials, they were able to continue their ministry for several
decades. Despite the ban on recruitment, they continued to live, dress and
serve as Jesuits. Even after the death of the last of their number, the nature of
their mission was recognized by everyone: the colonial (and later provincial)
government, Church leaders, and the people of Canada. In retrospect, what is
striking about the estates controversy was the general consensus that they be
kept intact and used exclusively for their original purpose.
Through the estates, in fact, the Society survived in Canada as a legal entity
and corporate institution. Arguably, this led to the decision not to suppress the
order in Canada in 1773 and later to recall the Jesuits in 1842, when they resumed
the ministry of their predecessors in education and among the native peoples.
The estates thus provided a crucial uninterrupted link with the past. The
Canadian case represented continuity, rather than discontinuity, with the old
29 Based on the papal brief of 15 January 1889. Dalton, Jesuits Estates, 164; Stevenson, Parallel
Paths, 166. For a thorough presentation and evaluation of the political reaction to the
papal arbitration by Protestant groups outside Quebec, see J.R. Miller, Equal Rights. The
Jesuits Estates Act Controversy (McGill-Queens University Press: Montreal and Kingston,
1979).
30 Dalton, Jesuits Estates, 164.
Society. While Jesuits, as individuals, had disappeared from Canada in 1800, the
Society, as a corporate body, continued to exist as a legal entity through the
integrity of the estates. Indeed, to nineteenth-century Jesuits inspired by the
Canadian martyrs, to Church officials seeking to bring the Jesuits back to
Canada, and to Quebec legislators eager to resolve the estates question, the
distinction between old and new Society did not exist. In the generation that
followed the return of the Jesuits, and despite serious objections, the Society
regained its patrimony. The Jesuits, now spreading across Canadain two
languagesremained faithful to their double calling.
chapter 23
Jesuit Tradition and the Rise of South American

Nationalism
Andrs I. Prieto
In the introduction to his 1789 Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia del
Gran Chaco, the former Jesuit Jos Jols explained that he had composed his
book in response to the patronizing and unflattering image that some authors
present of [America] by describing its climate as so noxious that not only men
degenerate, but also the animals, plants, and trees brought from Europe. Jolss
intent was not only to correct the distorted ideas about the nature of the
Americas that were circulating in Europe, but also to defend the insulted
honor of innumerable American nations and of the Europeans who are still
living there.1 Jols was responding to the claims of American inferiority in the
natural and moral realms advanced by enlightened philosophes such as
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, William Robertson, and especially
Cornelius de Pauw, whose Recherches Philosophiques sur les Amricains came
off the presses in 1769, the year in which 2,267 Jesuits who had been banished
from Spanish America arrived in Europe.2
Jolss attitude was characteristic of the exiled Jesuit writers, who published
numerous defenses of their patrias between 1776 and 1810. Jols accused De Pauw
of basing his work on unreliable informants who had never spent any significant
length of time in America; people who did not take the time to observe its nature
or learn the native languages.3 These objections to the armchair brand of natural
history practiced by European philosophers were common among the exiled
Jesuits.4 They felt aggrieved by what they considered calumnies against their
1 Jos Jols, Ensayo sobre la historia natural del Gran Chaco, trans. Mara Luisa Acua
(Universidad Nacional del Nordeste, Facultad de Humanidades, Instituto de Historia:
Resistencia, Chaco, 1972), 37.
2 Jonathan Wright, Gods Soldiers, 187.
3 Jols, Ensayo, 42.
4 Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies,
and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford University Press: Stanford,
ca, 2001), 208; Silvia Navia Mndez-Bonito, Las historias naturales de Francisco Javier
Clavijero, Juan Ignacio de Molina y Juan de Velasco, in El saber de los jesuitas, historias natu-
rales y el Nuevo Mundo, eds. Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma (Iberoamericana
Vervuert: Madrid and Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 241242.

400 Prieto
patrias disguised as science. The same year Jolss Saggio appeared, the Quiteo
Juan de Velasco published his Historia de Quito to give this poor present to the
Nation and the Patria offended by some rival pens intent on obscuring their glo-
ries.5 According to Antonello Gerbi, these feelings of attachment to their native
lands explained the fact that, whereas most Jesuit writers exiled from Spain were
prepared to accept De Pauws arguments, the Jesuits removed from America
were adamant in their condemnation of De Pauws ideas.6
Even though love and nostalgic pining for their patrias was a prominent
feature of the texts published by the former Spanish American Jesuits in the
late eighteenth century, I argue here that both their content and their passion-
ate defense of New World territories was ultimately the product of a long his-
toriographical tradition that reached back to the seventeenth century. As will
become clear, the banishment and suppression of the Jesuit order brought a
Jesuit historiographical tradition from the New World to Europe: a tradition
whose language and rhetoric helped define the claims to the territories and
spaces, both cultural and natural, as well as the language deployed by the
nationalistic movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. I illustrate
the importance of this tradition in the writings of Creole Jesuits by discussing
Juan Ignacio de Molinas Saggio sulla storia naturalle del Chili (1782) and Juan
de Velascos Historia del Reino de Quito (1789).
The Jesuits and Creole Proto-Nationalism
The Jesuits spirited defense of their patrias was the product of local traditions
that harked back to the early seventeenth century. With the notable exception
of Bernab Cobos Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1653), most seventeenth-century
Jesuit writers in South America shunned totalizing descriptions of the conti-
nent and restricted themselves to writing regional histories. By and large, their
books focused on the missionary enterprises of the Society of Jesus, emphasiz-
ing the hardships encountered by Jesuit missionaries in isolated areas of the
continent, while showcasing their role in the political and economic success of
the territories in which they worked.
The fact that Jesuit writers considered the history of their order and the his-
tory of conquest and colonization as part of the same narrative can be explained
by two factors. On a general level, the nature of Spanish rule encouraged a
5 Velasco, Historia del Reino de Quito, 1:56.

6 Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1973), 191192.
Jesuit Tradition And The Rise Of South American Nationalism 401
sense of independence among the different polities comprising the empire.

What we refer to as the Spanish Empire was a confederation of principalities
and kingdoms held together by the person of a single monarch.7 Castile,
Aragon, Naples, the Netherlands, and Portugal (between 1580 and 1640, when it
was under Spanish control), all had different laws and political traditions that
the king was bound to respect. Inevitably, tensions arose between the central-
izing impulses of the crown and the autonomous traditions of the different
kingdoms; tensions that sometimes became outright revolts, as in the case of
Aragon in 1590 or Catalonia in 1640. The tensions between the Castilian center
and the Spanish peripheries were also verified at a discursive level. At least
since the fifteenth century there had been two different historiographical tra-
ditions in Spain: one that was highly centralized, concentrating on the deeds of
the monarchs and their representatives, and another that sought to underscore
the nobility, antiquity, and political relevance of the local.8 These two tradi-
tions had an uneasy coexistence, with royal chroniclers constantly finding fault
in local historians who in turn attempted to counteract what they saw as an
unwarranted centralism in official historiography. On the Iberian peninsula,
the production of local and municipal histories reached a peak during the first
half of the seventeenth century, only to decline slightly over the next fifty years,
although still remaining relevant for local elites. By emphasizing the historical
importance of the local and the city within the empire, Spanish chorographic
tradition helped both to create and sustain the forces of localism.9
Although the Spanish American colonies were legally part of Castile, from
early on the settlers started referring to them in terms that mirrored the diverse
polities within the peninsula. Thus, Spanish and Creole settlers regularly
referred to the territories they inhabited as reynos (kingdoms). Jorge Caizares-
Esguerra has remarked that this was more than a rhetorical substitution: the
Creole elites who controlled much of the land and economic production in
the colonies enjoyed considerable autonomy until the eighteenth century.10
Almost from the beginning of the colonial period, the conquerors and their
7 Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination (Yale University Press:
New Haven and London, 1990), 3; Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (Yale University Press:
New Haven and London, 1997), 242.
8 Richard Kagan, Clio and the Crown: Writing History in Habsburg Spain, in Spain, Europe,
and the Atlantic World, eds. Richard Kagan and Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 1995), 7399.
9 Kagan, Clio and the Crown, 95.
10 Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation. Explorations of the History of
Science in the Iberian World (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2006), 12.
402 Prieto
descendants aspired to become a landed nobility through the perpetuity of

encomiendas (native labor grants). By the late-sixteenth century, however, it
was becoming increasingly evident to Creole elites that the crown was turning
its back on them by phasing out the encomienda system and by consistently
appointing European-born individuals to the highest colonial offices. At the
same time, Creoles were starting to swell the numbers of the clergy, both as
secular priests and as members of the religious orders. From these positions,
the discursive practices of clerical Creoles in the seventeenth century focused
on the regional, presenting colonies as kingdoms.11 These colonial texts under-
lined the mutually beneficial, reciprocal, or contractual relationship between
the crown and the colonies, as did peninsular regional historiography. By exalt-
ing the position of their respective patrias within the Spanish empire, Creole
writers were expressing and fostering early proto-nationalist sentiments.
The development of this historiographical tradition was simultaneous with
the fragmentation of the Jesuit Peruvian province into several different inde-
pendent and semi-autonomous units, which corresponded more or less to the
sub-divisions of the viceroyalty. Although the Jesuit Peruvian province origi-
nally held a territory spanning from Panama to Patagonia under its jurisdiction,
the difficulty of exerting effective control over the more remote areas of the con-
tinent soon brought on a series of administrative subdivisions. Paraguay became
an independent province in 1607; Chile started as a vice province in 1593 and
was elevated to provincial status in 1683. Quito became a vice province in 1605,
covering the territory of present day Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Within
this context, the Jesuits began selecting their new members more and more
from the local elites. The newly reconfigured provinces and vice provinces
meant that these home-grown Jesuits increasingly spent their careers in their
native patrias, either tending to the spiritual needs of the colonists, or evange-
lizing the native communities on the fringes of the empire, thus helping to
extend the Spanish area of influence within these territories. Both of these
developmentsthe high numbers of Jesuit priests working in their native lands
and the importance of their missionary activities both for the order and the
statehelp to explain why the Jesuit writers in the seventeenth century came
to prefer the praise of the local and regional rather than to compose general
histories that encompassed the whole hemisphere. Ideologically, politically, and
intellectually, these Creole Jesuits first and foremost belonged to their patrias.
As David Brading has shown, the texts produced by Creole clerics and aca-
demicswhether sermons, memoranda to the crown, poems, or historical
11 David Brading, The First America. The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal
State, 14921867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 298300.
narrativeswere informed by a rhetoric of Creole patriotism seeking to

underscore the aptitudes, capacities, and birthrights of the conquistadors
descendants.12 In this sense, the writings of the seventeenth-century Jesuits
can be seen as an expression of a fledging Creole identity. But alongside com-
mon themes of Creole defense of the patria and its inhabitants (which, in
many cases, shared a thematic affinity with peninsular chorographies), we also
find in Jesuit writers such as Alonso de Ovalle (16031651), Diego de Rosales
(16031677), or Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (15851652) some peculiarly Jesuit
aesthetic and scientific mental habits, such as a penchant for emblematic rep-
resentations of nature, or an interest in marvels and monsters and the moral
meaning they carried.13 They also exhibit a strong dependence on the informa-
tion-gathering practices put in place by Jesuit missionaries working among the
native peoples of each reyno.
Seventeenth-century Jesuit descriptions of South America can be read as a
rhetoric of praise, a narrative construction of the inherent superiority of the
local American climate, flora, and fauna vis--vis Europe. Ovalle, for instance,
presented Chile in 1646 to his European readership as a privileged land whose
fertility and advantageous climate rewarded with largesse the effort and work
invested in it. Even the crops that required special care from farmers in Europe
grew in the Chilean fields with almost no human intervention, and so abun-
dantly that cattle and horses were left to graze freely on them.14 Chiles climate
was neither too hot in the summer nor too cold in the winter, and it lacked
lighting, hail, or any kind of severe storms, making life comfortable during all
seasons. Not of less esteem is another good quality of this kingdom, and that
is that there are no vipers, snakes, scorpions, toads, nor any other poisonous
animals to be found, so a man in the countryside can sit down under a tree and
roll around in the grass with no fear of being bitten by a spider. Chile also
lacked jaguars, ounces, and other big cats abundant in other parts of America.15
Neither fleas nor lice could be found in Chile, a fact all the more surprising
12 Ibid., 293313.
13 William Ashworth, Jr., Catholicism and Early Modern Science, in God and Nature:
Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, eds. David Lindberg
and Ronald Numbers (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1986), 136166; Paula
Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture (University of
California Press: Berkeley, 1994), 33, 40, 81, 9294; Andrs I. Prieto, Maravillas, monstruos
y portentos: La naturaleza chilena en la Histrica relacin del Reyno de Chile (1646) de
Alonso de Ovalle, Taller de Letras 47 (2010): 927.
14 Alonso de Ovalle, Histrica relacin del reyno de Chile (Rome: Francisco Caballo, 1646), 5.
15 Ovalle, Histrica relacin, 2.
404 Prieto
given their abundance (as well as that of poisonous animals and thunder-
storms) in neighboring Cuyo, just across the Andes. All these nuisances were
kept out of Chile by the Andes mountains, which like a strong wall of this
kingdom of Chile, are its last line of defense.16
Chile appears in Ovalle as a generous land blessed by God, who distin-
guished it from all other kingdoms and provinces of America.17 This was a
common theme in Jesuit histories of the period. Perhaps nowhere is this atti-
tude more apparent than in their treatment of American flora, in particular
medicinal plants. Diego de Rosales, for instance, in his Historia General del
Reyno de Chile (1673), illustrated the richness of Chilean pharmacopoeia with
the story of an unnamed French physician who, travelling from Buenos Aires
to Lima, stopped briefly in Chile. Amazed by the number and quality of the
plants he found, he exclaimed that, if only the Chilean settlers knew how to
recognize them, they would not need to pay for European medicines, for they
could find the remedy for any illness in the outskirts of their city.18 Rosales, in
fact, described more than a hundred medicinal plants in his Historia. This
knowledge about local plants was compiled by Jesuit missionaries working
with native communities, from whom they learned traditional medicine and
adapted local plant use to Western clinical practices. The knowledge thus
obtained was circulated among the missionaries in handwritten herbals, the
likely source of Rosaless botanical information.
I have given here just a brief sketch of the historiographical practices devel-
oped by the Jesuits in seventeenth-century South America. However, some
general features can be discerned. There was a clear shift in Jesuit writings
towards the local and regional, a shift that was in tune with the rise of choro-
graphic historiography in Spain during this period. In the case of Jesuit histo-
ries of South American reynos, the promotion of the missionary success of the
order was coupled with the praise of the land and its inhabitants; the histori-
ography of the order thus dovetailed the Creole trend of a patriotic historiog-
raphy. Drawing upon the information gathered through their missionary,
educational, and political activities, the fundamental tropes and themes of the
rhetoric of praise of the patria developed by the seventeenth-century Jesuit
writers would be rehearsed by the exiled Jesuits who took part in the polemic
against the European philosophes such as De Pauw or Buffon. It is to their writ-
ings that we now turn.
16 Ibid., 3.
17 Ibid., 36.
18 Diego de Rosales, Historia general del Reino de Chile, Flandes Indiano, ed. Benjamn Vicua
Mackenna (Valparaiso: Imprenta de El Mercurio, 18771878), 1:231.
Juan de Velasco and the Creole Subjectivity
Perhaps no other history written by a Jesuit historian in the eighteenth century

better demonstrates the links to the Baroque tradition of Jesuit local natural
history than Juan de Velascos Historia del reino de Quito (1789).19 Originally, the
book was divided into three parts. The first was a natural history of the king-
dom, concentrating on plants and natural curiosities. The second part was
devoted to the history of Quito before the Spanish conquest. Here, Velasco
described autochthonous native civilizations, the Quitus and the Caran Scyri,
which predated the Incas.20 The third part dealt with the modern history of
thekingdom and the activities of the Society of Jesus. Velasco died in 1792 and
only saw the publication of the first part of his work, which came off the
presses in 1789.
Although Velasco noted at the outset that he would not attempt to debunk
the works of Buffon, De Pauw, and Robertson, since others before him had
already done so (particularly, ex-Jesuit writers, such as Clavigero, Nuix, and
Molina), the Historia de Quito does contain a denunciation of the falsehoods
about the Americas publicized by the European philosophes.21 In particular,
Velasco took issue with Buffons and De Pauws assertion that the continent
had a dearth of quadrupeds, and that those that could be found there were
smaller, weaker, and more timid than their Old World equivalents. According
to Velasco, such a conclusion could only be supported by either a lie or by the
use of a faulty philosophical system. The latter was the case with Buffons the-
ory. Buffon maintained that there were two hundred species of quadrupeds in
the world, of which only seventy were found in the Americas. Out of these
seventy species, thirty were common to the Old and the New World, leaving
America with a meager forty indigenous species.22 The reason for this small
number, according to Velasco, was not any deficiency in American nature, but
rather Buffons erroneous insistence that certain animals (such as the rabbit,
the tiger, or the lion) could only live in warm climates. Since, in order to popu-
late the New World after the flood, the only route available for them was
through the tundra of Siberia and Canada, this made their presence in the
19 I use the term Baroque both to refer to a time periodwhat cultural and literary histo-
rians have called el barroco de Indiasas well as to the peculiar characteristics present
in Catholic Counter-Reformation science (see Ashworth Jr., Catholic Science and
Findlen, Possessing Nature, 7893).
20 Velasco, Historia de Quito, 2:518.
21 Ibid., 1:12.
22 Ibid., 1:150.
406 Prieto
continent impossible. Regarding South America, with this argument he could

deny it any species without exception, leaving it thus unpopulated, scoffed
Velasco.23
Reductio ad absurdum was not the only technique Velasco used to show the
logical flaws in Buffons theory. He also pointed out the inconsistencies that
could be found in the French writers massive natural history. Thus Buffon,
forgetful of this argument of animal migration, and focusing only on the the-
ory of the perverse climate of America, claimed that it was due to the mild-
ness of its climate that lions lost their ferocity, cattle their horns, and, generally
speaking, all animals, whether native or introduced from Europe, were smaller
and tamer than their Old World counterparts. Forgetting later this rigorous
rule, he himself allows for several exceptions, and ponders how well are doing
[in America] several [European] species.24 Buffons conclusions, then, were
not just false; they reflected a deeper epistemological problem: the European
armchair philosophers gave primacy to their preconceptions rather than to the
facts or even to their own philosophical systems. Thus, when Buffon was deal-
ing with American animals, sometimes he determines as belonging to one
species several animals totally different from each other; some other times he
separates into different classes what are merely individuals of the same spe-
cies. Here he makes smaller an animal he himself has described as stocky, and
he never keeps any consistency in his assertions or in his system.25
Velascos criticism of Buffon is characteristic of what Caizares-Esguerra
has termed patriotic epistemology, that is to say, an epistemology that high-
lights the inability of foreigners to comprehend American realities, a task for
which the Creole clerical writer was assumed to be much better equipped.26 In
fact, as Eileen Willingham has remarked, Velasco presented an idealized ver-
sion of his patria as the space in which Quitos geographical and social ele-
ments coalesced around the figure of the knowledgeable Creole.27 His critique
of Buffon is predicated not only on his knowledge of European philosophical
systems and methodologies; it also highlights his own experience as a qualified
observer: I will speak about [the animal species of Quito] as I have seen them,
23 Ibid., 1:151.
24 Ibid., 1:152.
25 Ibid.
26 Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write, 8 and 206208.
27 Eileen Willingham, Locating Utopia: Promise and Patria in Juan de Velascos Historia del
reino de Quito, in El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo, eds. Luis
Millones Figueroa and Domingo Ledezma (Iberoamericana Vervuert: Madrid and
Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 253.
with the experience of so many years. And about those I have not seen, I will
speak according to reports from trustworthy persons.28 It was his forty years of
experience in Quito, his mastery of the Quechua language, and the fact that he
had personally examined its ancient monuments and made some observa-
tions regarding its geography and on some difficult or completely ignored
points of natural history that qualified him to write Quitos natural and civil
history.29 But Velascos first-hand experience alone was not enough. As in the
case of other Spanish American writers, he rooted his reliability and legitimacy
as a historian in his identity as a Creole:
If the historian must be impartial, so he does not emphasize the beautiful

colors in one part and the dark shadows in anothera vice to which, if
the citizen is inclined, moved by his innate love of Patria, is much more
prone the foreigner, due to the general animosity between nationsI am
neither European, for I was born in America, nor American, for I descend
from Europeans on every side. Thus, I can more easily refrain myself in
the just equanimity that Reason and Justice have always dictated me.30
Velascos subject position was thus a guarantee of his impartiality as a histo-

rian; a moral trait that was predicated on his social standing as a white Creole
untainted by native blood. But at the same time that this subject position
allowed him to critically engage the writings of European philosophers, it also
allowed him access to the natural historical traditions developed in Spanish
America.31 This can be seen in his preference for native names (usually, in
Quechua) over Spanish ones for plants and animals. Typically, Velasco would
give the name of a plant or animal in Quechua when available, and then
explain its Spanish meaning. This would be followed by a brief description of
the plant or animal and its habitat, and an analysis of how it was used either by
the natives or by white settlers. Occasionally, Velasco added a little anecdote
illustrating these uses. This emphasis on the usefulness of Quiteo nature is
one of the most salient features of the Historia del Reino de Quito. Confronted
with the daunting task of describing the flora of the different habitats of the
kingdom (which included both mountains and jungles), Velasco reduced them
to nine categories, based on the way they were consumed: medicinal, edible,
ornamental, used in the manufacturing of fabrics, dyes, or in construction, and

29 Ibid., 1:9.
30 Ibid., 1:10.
31 Ibid.
408 Prieto
so on. This has led some modern readers of Velasco to comment that his natu-
ral history classifies Quitos nature and resources according to taxonomies that
privilege the interaction of Quiteos with their environment. In this way, the
Historia [] sets up a criollo archive of Quitos known and knowable world.32
However, one could also postulate that this emphasis on utility comes from the
sources Velasco was using, namely, Jesuit herbals and reports. Both the internal
structure of his entries on natural history and the division of the subject mat-
ter according to its uses (rather than the then-current taxonomical systems
developed by European naturalists such as Linnaeus) were staples of seven-
teenth-century Jesuit published and unpublished writings on the nature of
South America. In fact, some of the anecdotes Velasco included were taken
directly from these sources. For instance, when discussing the antidotes against
vipers bites, Velasco comments on the bird machahuanga, which when it
feels bitten during the battles it has with serpents, flies promptly to eat that
herb, and feeling safe with the antidote, continues its fierce battle until it kills
them.33 This little anecdote is virtually identical to the one published in 1639
by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in his Conquista espiritual del Paraguay.
Here, the seventeenth-century missionary related the combats between ser-
pents and a bird the Guarani natives called macagu, which flew to eat a cer-
tain herb every time it felt the serpents bite, only to return, immune to its
poison, to kill it.34
Velasco had a penchant for more than the anecdotal, however; just like
Jesuit natural histories of the seventeenth century, Velascos Historia de Quito
included several cases of natural wonders and monsters, lending an antiquated
flavor to his text. Perhaps the best example is his detailed discussion of the
zoophytes. Although Velasco was aware that his contemporaries were skeptical
about the existence of species half-plant and half-animal, he described not
one, but four species of zoophyte: two involving a metamorphosis from animal
to plant, and two regarding plants becoming animals. Thus for example,
Velasco claimed that the liana called tamshi by the natives of Mainas was born
from an ant called isula. When the isula reached a certain age, it would burrow
into the forest floor, leaving only its abdomen above the ground, which would
start growing, becoming the liana. The [Jesuit] missionaries give sworn testi-
mony of this, based on their frequent visual experience. Velasco tried to
32 Willingham, Locating Utopia, 256257.

34 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compaa de
Jess en las provincias del Paraguay, Paran, Uruguay y Tape (Imprenta del Reino: Madrid,
1639), 3v4r.
legitimize the other species of zoophyte through his own experience or through
the testimony of other Jesuit priests.35 Other marvels, such as the cuichun-
chulli, a plant capable of completely curing leprosy in a matter of days, were
also legitimized in this way.36
The inclusion of marvels such as the zoophytes makes Velascos Historia
del reino de Quito stand out among the natural histories published by his
former confreres during their Italian exile. Velascos fascination with the
wondrous has puzzled many readers, even in the eighteenth century, and
might be responsible for the relative obscurity of his work. Modern scholars
have attempted different explanations for the inclusion of these stories.
For Caizares-Esguerra, for example, Velasco sought to dazzle European read-
ers by taking them to task for their exaggerated skepticism.37 Navia Mndez-
Bonito has speculated that Velasco, attempting to create as exhaustive an
archive of knowledge about Quito as possible, included native traditions and
folklore, which she considers the most likely source for the fantastic elements
in his natural history.38 Neither explanation is entirely satisfactory, however.
Velasco was not trying to test the limits of European skepticism and, although
these stories might have originated in native traditions, whenever Velasco
described a natural wonder, the information comes either from his own first-
hand experience or from the reports of other Jesuit missionaries. This last fact
is telling. Velasco, who had so meticulously challenged Buffons system, expos-
ing his logical inconsistencies and his lack of factual support, seems to have
been eager to accept any piece of information if it bore the stamp of approval
of another member of the order. Thus, for example, when introducing the sub-
ject of the zoophytes, he acknowledged that most naturalists denied the exis-
tence of beings that were half-plant, half-animal. Yet, he claimed, they existed.
They were unknown to European naturalists because such scientists had either
not read the relevant books or did not believe what they had read.39 The books
to which Velasco was referring (and which he quoted in support of his own
observations of zoophytes) are Le maraviglie di Dio, published in 1693 by the
Italian Jesuit Carlo Gregorio Rosignoli, and El Maraon y Amazonas, a history
of the conquest, settlement, and evangelization of present-day Colombian
and Ecuadorian Amazonia published in 1684 by the Quiteo Jesuit Manuel
Rodrguez. Zoophytes, like other natural wonders, did not fit into the scientific

36 Ibid., 1:74.
37 Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write, 251.
38 Navia Mndez-Bonito, Las historias naturales, 246.
410 Prieto
climate of eighteenth-century literature; they belonged to the Baroque tradi-

tion of seventeenth-century Jesuit science.
Velasco was certainly conversant with the nomenclature, theories, and lan-
guage of natural history as practiced in eighteenth-century Europe, as evi-
denced by his methodical refutation of Buffon and De Pauw. Yet, Velascos
Historia fits more comfortably in the historiographical tradition developed by
the Jesuits in the seventeenth century. He not only eschewed contemporary
taxonomical systems in favor of idiosyncratic categories, such as edible fruits,
edible roots, trees for timber, monsters, or some plants that seem to be mar-
velous.40 He also concluded his history of Quito with a long section devoted to
the works and travails of the Jesuit missionaries in the kingdom, chronicling
their success in bringing a frontier area (Ecuadorian Amazonia) under the
aegis of the Spanish empire.41 As in the case of the seventeenth-century Jesuit
writers, for Velasco the history of the kingdom of Quito was inseparable from
the history of the Society of Jesus in the realm.
Juan Ignacio de Molina and the Saggio sulla storia naturalle del Chili
Contemporary readers of Velasco, while lauding his historical acumen, criti-

cized his penchant for the fantastic and the marvelous. The examiners of the
Royal Academy of History in Spain (charged with judging whether the work
was fit for publication) criticized Velasco for his idiosyncratic and inconsistent
use of taxonomical categories. They suggested that Velasco look to the Chilean
ex-Jesuit Juan Ignacio de Molinas use of the Linnean classificatory system as a
model for cataloguing the nature of Quito.42
Unlike Velascos Historia, Molinas Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chili (1782)
catered to the intellectual trends of its time.43 Molina delivered discussions of
the geology, botany, zoology, linguistics, and fossils of Chile clad in the chemi-
cal and mineralogical terminology of the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, while following the Linnean system in his classification of Chilean plants
and animals. But in spite of Molinas familiarity with the latest scientific devel-
opments, evidenced by his frequent quotations from Louis Feuill, Linnaeus,
Tournefort, and Brisson, the Saggio remained firmly anchored in the Jesuit
40 Ibid., 1:87, 110, 130, 135 and 237.

41 Willingham, Locating Utopia, 264265.
42 Ibid., 259.
43 Juan Ignacio de Molina, Compendio de la historia geogrfica, natural y civil del Reyno de
Chile, trans. Domingo Joseph de Arquellada Mendoza (Antonio de Sancha: Madrid, 1788), iii.
tradition of the seventeenth century. Among the sources Molina mentions for
the Saggio were the histories written by Ovalle, Friar Gregorio de Len, the
one written by Santiago Tesillo, the history composed by Melchor del Aguila,
all seventeenth-century Creole historians.44 In his defense of Chile against the
accusations of degeneracy raised by De Pauw, Molina took up not only the
tropes of the rhetoric of praised developed by Ovalle, but also its language. At
the outset of the Saggio, Molina informed his readers that the Kingdom of
Chile has been especially and carefully endowed by Nature, [who], sustained
and favored by the delicacies of its climate, has prodigally given [to Chile] its
best gifts, while exempting [the land] from all the incommodities that usually
accompany them in other places.45 Chile was, in fact, the garden of Spanish
America, comparable only to Italy; the only place in the New World where one
could find in abundance everything a European required to enjoy a comfort-
able life.46 The Kingdom of Chile is one of the best countries in all America,
because the beauty of its skies and the constant benignity of its climate, that
seems to agree on purpose with the fertility and richness of the soil, make it
such a pleasant mansion, that it has nothing to envy to any of the happiest
regions of the globe.47 As Ovalle had done almost a century and a half earlier,
Molina emphasized the mild winters and summers, the absence of violent
thunderstorms, and the protection given to Chile by the Andes mountains,
keeping damaging winds on the eastern side, over Cuyo and Tucuman.48
Perhaps nowhere was the influence of seventeenth-century Jesuit mission-
aries and writers more clear than in Molinas discussion of Chilean medicinal
plants. When introducing the subject, Molina directly paraphrased Ovalles
encomium of native pharmacopoeia and his complaints about the natives
reluctance to share their knowledge of medicinal plants:
Plants, especially of the herbaceous kind, form the bulk of the pharmacy
of those Chileans that still persist in the errors of paganism, and their
physicians, called Machi and Ampive, are expert herbalists that possess
by tradition the secrets of a large number of medicinal simples, useful for
all kinds of diseases, with which they perform every day marvelous heal-
ings, and although they hide [from the Spaniards] what they know in this
subject, whether due to hatred of the conquering nation or because they
44 Molina, Compendio, viii.

45 Ibid., iii.
46 Ibid., iv.
47 Ibid., 15.
48 Ibid., 16, 17 and 24.
412 Prieto
want to be needed, they had nonetheless over the years, moved by friend-
ship, revealed the medicinal virtues of many trees and over 200 healing
herbs.49
Although Molina claimed to have identified over 3,000 new species of plants
during his excursions in Chile, his description closely follows that of Ovalle
and, particularly, of Rosales.50 He described approximately the same number
of plants as Rosales, and focused on some of the same ones that had caught the
attention of his predecessors, such as the cachanlahuen, the quinchamali, the
patagua, and the salt-producing plants of Lampa. To be sure, Molinas descrip-
tions are more detailed, less prone to support his claims of medicinal proper-
ties through the use of anecdotal information, and, in some cases, discuss the
uses of a plant not recommended by Rosales. But his description of Chilean
plants betrays its missionary origin in both the number and kinds of plants
discussed and in the almost exclusive focus on their healing properties.
According to Molina, a stroke of luck led him to regain his notebooks from
Chilethus allowing him to complete his natural historywhen his friend
Ignacio de Huidobro brought them to him in Bologna.51 Modern readers have
for the most part taken Molinas claims to have personally inspected every-
thing he talks about in his book at face value, therefore assuming that the notes
Huidobro returned to him contained the results of his naturalistic excursions.
But it is also probable that Molina had taken extensive notes from manuscripts
housed in the College of San Miguel in Santiago. We know for certain that
Molina was acquainted with Rosaless manuscript, for he mentioned it in a
bibliography of Jesuit writers. We also know that, during his years as a philoso-
phy student in San Miguel, Molina worked as an assistant to the librarian,
where he must have had ample opportunity to examine the archives of the
Jesuit Chilean province.52 This idea is supported by the fact that Molina
described in detail the flora, fauna, geography, peoples and climate of areas of
Chile in which he never set foot (such as Arauco and Chiloe), but which had
witnessed an active Jesuit missionary presence since the seventeenth century.
49 Ibid., 155. Compare to Ovalle: Hay muchas yerbas muy medicinales, y de grandes vir-
tudes, conocidas solamente de los indios que llaman machis, que son sus mdicos, los
cuales las ocultan particularmente de los espaoles, a quienes por grande amistad comu-
nican la virtud de una u otra, reservando para s la ciencia de las dems, Histrica rel-
acin, 56.
50 Molina, Compendio, 129.
51 Ibid., ix.
52 Jimnez, El Abate Molina, 83.
In spite of his use of the latest theories and nomenclatures of natural phi-
losophy, Molinas descriptions of Chilean nature was just as indebted to the
historiographical tradition developed by the South American Jesuits in the sev-
enteenth century as was Velascos Historia del Reino de Quito. In this sense, the
works of Creole exiles such as Molina and Velasco were the culmination of
two hundred years of Jesuit scholarship on American nature and its peoples.
Although cast in the scientific idiom of the European Enlightenment, and, at
least on the surface, rejecting old epistemological modes, the texts written by
these exiles depended on the seventeenth-century regional histories, and not
merely as primary sources. By freely borrowing information, themes, and
tropes that had been developed by their Jesuit predecessors, these writers were
inscribing themselves in the Creole tradition of local historiography. It was
from this tradition of local knowledge that the Creole intellectuals attempted
to set the record straight and defend the honor of their patrias in the wake of
De Pauws attacks on the Americas.
Conclusion: Colonial and Post-Colonial Ideologies
The works of Velasco and Molina were the European offspring of two hundred
years of Jesuit intellectual activity in the colonies. This tradition combined the
rhetoric of praise of the reyno characteristic of Creole historiography and the
knowledge gathered by the members of the order working in the missions. But,
at the same time, these texts represent a bridge between the colonial tradition
from which they sprang and the nationalistic ideologies that were emerging in
the last decades of the eighteenth century. It is in their defenses of their patrias
from the slanders and accusations leveled by writers like De Pauw against the
Americas that we can see the transition from the local histories written by sev-
enteenth-century Creole Jesuits in the reynos of Quito or Chile to the emergent
discourse that helped create a shared historical sentiment that began to crys-
tallize in the love of patria around the turn of the eighteenth century. In a
word, they help us see the transition from reynos to patrias.
But the texts written by the former Jesuits exiled in Europe must not be read
as harbingers of the goals and objectives of the nation-building programs car-
ried out in the newly founded liberal republics of Spanish America.53 I have
used the term patria to refer to the American territories the exiled Jesuits set
out to defend from European philosophers. This helps us to avoid endowing
the discussion with the false sense of a national context for these publications:
53 For a useful summary of this projects, see Caizares-Esguerra, How to Write, 205.
414 Prieto
reading back into the works of the exiled Jesuits our modern concept of the
nation-state. To be sure, works such as Juan de Velascos Historia have been
appropriated by modern nationalistic ideologies (enjoying critical editions
within larger projects aimed at defining the cultural heritage of the nation,
such as the Biblioteca Ecuatoriana), but the fact is that the concept of indepen-
dent American nations was not yet a fully developed notion when most of
these authors were at work. Even if some of them had begun toying with the
idea of South American independenceespecially in the wake of the American
Revolutionthe very notion of what constituted a nation or a national iden-
tity was unclear even in eighteenth-century Europe.54 As Charles Withers has
pointed out recently, even though eighteenth-century Europe did define itself
intellectually in relation to the Americas, national self-awareness was not a
constant or a consistent thing. Neither Europe nor its constituent nations were
ever securely fixed labels. They were worked at and worked out through []
the gradual accrual of meaning to the idea of the nation through language,
culture, historical sentiment, and claims to territory and space.55 In the case of
the exiled Jesuits, their texts were part and parcel of a process that would crys-
tallize later in the nineteenth century in nationalistic ideologies, but such
concepts were not yet fully developed when these texts were written.
Exiled Jesuits found themselves in peculiar conditions after 1773forbidden
to contact their friends and relatives back in America, and lacking the institu-
tional support of the order. This, coupled with the new intellectual climate in
Europe, led to the casting of an inherited Baroque historiographical tradition in
the critical idiom of enlightened natural philosophy, as illustrated by Molinas
Saggio. It was precisely in this reformulation of the tropes and themes of the
rhetoric of praise that we can begin to discern the rhetorical transition not just
from reynos to patrias, but to the new concept of nation-states.
54 Walter Hanisch, Juan Ignacio Molina. Sabio de su tiempo (Universidad Catlica Andrs
Bello: Caracas, 1974), 4446.
55 Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment. Thinking Geographically about the Age of
Reason (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2007), 28.
chapter 24
The First Return of the Jesuits to Paraguay

Ignacio Telesca
Introduction
The Jesuits definitively returned to Paraguay only in 1927. This was 160 years
after their expulsion from Spanish imperial territories (1767) and 113 years after
the formal restoration of the Society of Jesus. It seems strange that it took so
long for them to return to a territory so emblematic of the Jesuit presence in
the Americas. The explanation for this should not only be sought in the motives
of the Jesuits but also in the new social and political realities that transformed
Paraguay after its independence from the Spanish empire in 1811.
There was an earlier attempt to return, but it lasted barely three years, from
1843 to 1846. In this article, we consider that experiment in order to understand
the reasons for its failure. In this brief relation of the context and immediate
events surrounding the attempted re-insertion of the Jesuits into Paraguay, we
find that the best hopes and most sincere intentions could not overcome the
suspicions and sensitivities born of the delicate politics of post-colonial sover-
eignty. For just as the Society of Jesus had represented an instrument of colo-
nial expansion in early modern Spanish America, so, during the nineteenth
century, the Jesuits were much closer to Rome than they were to Madrid,
Buenos Aires, or Asuncin.
Colonial Origins and Late-Colonial and Postcolonial Ruptures
The Jesuit province of Paraguay was created in 1607 within the borders of the
province of Paraguay that corresponded to the viceroyalty of Peru.1 The Jesuits
colegio was immediately founded in Asuncin, and in 1609 the mission of San
Ignacio to the Guaran was established. 150 years later, on the eve of the San
Ignacio feast day, 30 July 1767, the expulsion of the Jesuits from their colegio in
Asuncin began. Fearful of an indigenous revolt, and needing time to find new
governing officials for the province, the Jesuits postponed removing the
1 The territory was divided in two in 1617, with the province of Paraguay and the province of
Ro de la Plata. But the name of the Jesuit province did not change.

416 Telesca
missionaries from the indigenous mission pueblos until 1768. All Jesuit clergy
and officials abandoned Paraguay after these developments except for Father
Segismundo Aperger who died in the pueblo of Apstoles in 1772.2 The expul-
sion of the Society of Jesus from the province of Paraguay initiated significant
territorial and demographic change. The lands of the missions were redistrib-
uted to members of the Asuncin elite, and half of the indigenous population
of the Paraguayan missions left their pueblos to intermix with the surround-
ing poor peasantry of the province.3 The property of the colegio that was
not sold off was used to found the seminary of San Carlos in Asuncin two
decades later.
From the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territory until their restora-
tion in 1814, many parts of the Americas underwent profound changes tied to
the collapse of the Spanish colonial empire. In Paraguay, which was then a
province pertaining to the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, the process of indepen-
dence began in 1811 and took a very different path to that of its provincial neigh-
bors. Anticolonial agitators in Buenos Aires, in their push to separate from
Spain, nonetheless sought to maintain dominion over subordinate provinces
and thus the territorial integrity of the viceroyalty. Not all provinces accepted
this premise and pushed for their own autonomy. Such was the case of Paraguay,
which witnessed something of a bloodless coup. Independence from Spain as
well as from Buenos Aires resulted in decades of isolation for Paraguay. This
was largely because Buenos Aires cut off free navigation of the Plata river sys-
tem, the only route to the exterior and the Atlantic for Paraguayan commerce.
Until Buenos Aires formally recognized the independence of Paraguay in 1852,
it was impossible for the country to sustain significant development, economic
or otherwise. After a five-member ruling junta (18111813) and a consular gov-
ernment (181314), a dictatorship was established in Paraguay under Jos
Gaspar Rodrguez Francia (known as Dr. Francia) who remained in power until
his death in 1840.4
The majority of the secular clergy and the religious orders supported inde-
pendence, and one of the leading spokesmen for the governing junta was
2 He was born on 26 October 1678 in Innsbruck. He arrived in Paraguay in 1717, already ordained
as a priest. He lived from 1754 in the Indian pueblo of Apstoles. See Hugo Storni, Catlogo de
los jesuitas de la Provincia del Paraguay (Cuenca del Plata) 15851768 (Institutum Hisoricum
S.I.: Rome, 1980).
3 Ignacio Telesca, Tras los expulsos. Cambios demogrficos y territoriales en el Paraguay despus
de la expulsin de los jesuitas (ceaduc: Asuncin, 2009).
4 On this period, see Richard Alan White, Paraguays Autonomous Revolution, 18101840
(University of New Mexico Press: New Mexico, 1978); John Hoyt Williams, The Rise and Fall of
the Paraguayan Republic, 18001870 (University of Texas Press: Austin, 1979).
The First Return Of The Jesuits To Paraguay 417
Father Francisco Javier Bogarn.5 In fact, in the general congress called to elect
the junta, clergy constituted ten percent of the representatives (among them,
Fray Bernardino Encisco, prior of the Dominicans; Fray Fernando Caballero,
visitor general of the Franciscans; and Fray Manuel Tadeo de la O., head of the
Mercedarians). Moreover, in 1812 the new government assumed the rights of
patronage over the church, previously claimed by the Spanish crown in all its
colonial territories. In the same year, the seminary was reopened after being
closed during the events of 18101811. But the institutional church in Paraguay
had never been a very influential institution. During almost three hundred
years of Spanish rule, the Paraguayan prelacy was occupied for only 92 years,
while for 170 years it was vacant.6 The lack of a bishop made for a constant
scarcity of priests in the countryside. Accordingly, the Spanish Franciscan
Pedro Garca Pans assumed leadership of the diocese in 1809, and in 1811 he
ordained fifty-two new priests.
The relationship of Francias government with the church was the same as
with the rest of the society. It revolved around imposing a system of govern-
ment that would not put the independence of the republic at risk. The Robertson
brothers, Scottish merchants and Protestants, who had arrived in Paraguay dur-
ing the early years of Francias government, described the new leaders attitude
toward the provincial church: There was another class in the republic that
Francia hated and contemned [sic] as heartily as he did the old Spaniards, and
that was the clergysecular and regularbut more especially the latter. He
hated the friars for the influence which they exercised over the people and for
the open profligacy of their lives.7 Francia himself (born in 1766) had studied
theology at the University of Crdoba, where he received his doctorate, but did
not become ordained as a priest. Upon returning to Paraguay after his studies,
he taught for a couple of years in the local seminary before taking up work as a
lawyer. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, he occupied various
positions within the cabildo of Asuncin, reaching the post of alcalde in 1808.
Upon assuming control of the government as supreme dictator in 1814, Francia
took measures to protect the incipient and fragile independence of Paraguay
from foreign influences. The church would not be spared the impact of such
measures. In 1815, Francia decreed that religious communities
5 Jerry W. Cooney, The Destruction of the Religious Orders in Paraguay, 18101824, The
Americas 36/2 (1979): 177198. See also John Hoyt Williams, Dictatorship and the Church.
Doctor Francia in Paraguay, Journal of Church and State 15 (1973): 419436.
6 Albeto Nogus, La Iglesia en la poca del Doctor Francia (edicin del autor: Asuncin, 1960), 5.
7 John Parish Robertson & William Parish Robertson, Francias Reign of Terror, Being the
Continuation of Letters on Paraguay (John Murray: London, 1839), 27.
418 Telesca
are exempt from all interference or exercise of jurisdiction by Prelates or

authorities of other nations. I prohibit and, if necessary, suppress and
annul all use of authority or supremacy over the convents of regulars of
this Republic, their communities, individual persons, and goods of what-
ever brotherhoods or annexed confraternities or functionaries of such by
those mentioned authorities, judges, or prelates resident in other prov-
inces or governments. Therefore, the expressed religious communities
are free and separated from all obedience and entirely independent of
the Provinces, Cabildos, and Visitadores Generales of other states, prov-
inces, or governments. [] As a consequence, they govern themselves
from now forward with independence, observing their respective rules or
institutes under the direction or authority of the Illustrious Bishop of this
diocese, in spiritual as well as temporal and economic matters.8
Francia was not the first to take such action against the church. The provinces
of the Ro de la Plata had decreed something similar in 1813. This measure
nonetheless profoundly affected the work of Bishop Pans. By 181617 he fell
into such a deep depression that he stopped officiating at confirmations in the
capital and halted the ordination of new clerics.
Francia continued to restrict the power of the religious orders, and on 20
September 1824, he ordered that all monasteries be dissolved and that the
clergy within them be secularized.9 The reasons given by Francia for this latest
measure were that regular priests no longer can claim to be necessary nor
useful. All their lands and properties were confiscated, including slaves. If,
however, convents and monasteries in the countryside were hardly ornate
institutions, we cannot forget that they also functioned as schools where the
rural elite sent their children to be educated. Soon the elite of Asuncin were
also left without their center of learning: On 23 March 1823, Francia ordered
the closure of the Colegio Seminario. In the 1830s, papal representatives sta-
tioned in Rio de Janeiro attempted to establish relations with the Francia gov-
ernment but without positive results. Finally, Bishop Pans died in 1838 without
having ordained any new priests in the previous twenty years. Francia had
seized control over the Paraguayan church and, from a viable institution, it had
8 Francia 1:558. I follow here the citation from the recently published volumes of the Coleccin
Doroteo Bareiro, which contain the documents concerning Dr. Francia found in the Archivo
Nacional de Asuncin. There are three volumes with 2475 documents and additional appen-
dixes. The citation indicates the volume and document number. Translation from Cooney,
The Destruction.
9 Francia 2:1308.
become nearly extinct. Still, the common religiosity of the people remained
very much alive.10 But this subordination of the church was not due, as the
Robertson brothers insisted, to Francias hatred of the clergy. Rather it followed
more from the impulse to control all institutions under his regime. And Francia
never put ecclesiastical institutions to more instrumental political work as
would his eventual successor in power, Carlos Antonio Lpez.
After Dr. Francia: Institutional Revivals and Religious

Re-acquaintances
After the death of Francia on 20 September 1840, various short-lived govern-

ments held power before giving away to the establishment of a new consular
government by another congress in 1841. Mariano Roque Alonso and Carlos
Antonio Lpez were elected to rule for a period of three years. During this
time, along with reorganizing the administrative structure of the state, rela-
tions with foreign countries were also renewed. Toward this end, in 1842 an
extraordinary congress formally ratified, via an official document, the inde-
pendence of Paraguay. The first country to recognize this independence was
Bolivia in June 1843, and other countries soon followed. However, and most
importantly for the interests of Paraguay, the Argentine confederation contin-
ued to recognize the territory as a province of its own, not as an independent
republic. Despite this, commercial exchange between Asuncin and Buenos
Aires began again, if on a smaller scale than in late colonial times.
In March 1844, another congress met and approved a Law that Establishes
the Political Administration of the Republic of Paraguay. It established a for-
mal division of powers in the state, however fictitious, and Carlos Antonio
Lpez was elected president for a term of ten years. The legislature, for its part,
would meet every five years to formally approve the actions of the president
and perhaps re-elect him to office. In this environment of political reorganiza-
tion, a formal reorganization of the provincial diocese was also underway.
After the death of Bishop Pans on 14 October 1838, the provincial church was
without an effective head and it lacked an ecclesiastical cabildo, which had
been suppressed by Francia in 1828. Upon the death of Francia, the remaining
priests of the country gathered on 5 January 1841 in an Extraordinary Congress
of Clerics of the Republic and elected Father Jos Vicente Oru as vicar general
10 Viajeros pontificios al Ro de la Plata y Chile (18231825): la primera misin pontificia a

Hispano-Amrica relatada por sus protagonistas, translation, introduction, and notes,
Avelino Ignacio Gmez Ferreyra (Gobierno de la Provincia de Crdoba: Crdoba, 1970).
420 Telesca
of the diocese of Paraguay.11 The supreme government approved the nomina-

tion on 13 January.12
In a letter sent to Pope Gregory XVI on 15 February 1842, the ruling consul-
ates described the critical situation of the Paraguayan church. Eighty-two par-
ishes comprised the diocese, but there were only fifty-six priests, most of
whom were old and sickly.13 In the same letter, along with requesting that the
actions of the extraordinary synod be approved, the consulates also presented
two priests as candidates for diocesan bishop and auxiliary bishop. For the first
post, they nominated Secular Reverend Citizen Basilio Lpez of sixty one
years, and for the auxiliary post, Reverend Citizen Marco Antonio Maz of
fifty nine years. The wording of the letter revealed the dependence of the pro-
vincial church on the state, in its concept of citizen. Moreover, it noted the
secular status of Basilio Lpez, the brother of Carlos Antonio: he had been a
Franciscan before being secularized when Francia suppressed the religious
orders in the country.
In the same letter, the ruling consuls assured the pope that they had also
overseen the education of young men who want to pursue an ecclesiastical
career. But this was not through the reopening of the local seminary (which
would not occur until 1859). Rather it was through the opening of the Academia
Literaria in November 1841.14 The opening of the Academia, in place of a semi-
nary, allowed the consulates to lay down central principles that fostered an
intrinsic bond between religion and the state. Among the reasons given for the
opening of the Academia, the ruling consuls mentioned:
Second: That the grand scarcity of national clergy urgently demands the
teaching and education of those who want to dedicate themselves to
such a delicate and necessary profession []. Third: That along with the
lack of civil capacities to elevate the republic to the rank to which its
position and destiny calls is another powerful reason to reestablish the
elements of enlightenment that have been entirely extinguished.
11 For matters of church-state relations during the time of Carlos Antonio Lpez, see: Carlos
Heyn, Iglesia y Estado en el Paraguay durante el gobierno de Carlos Antonio Lpez, 1841
1862. Estudio jurdico-cannico (ceaduc: Asuncin, 1987); Jerry W. Cooney, The
Reconstruction of the Paraguayan Church, 18411850, in The Church and Society in Latin
America, ed. Jeffrey Cole (Tulane University: New Orleans, 1984), 239258; Juan Francisco
Prez Acosta, Carlos Antonio Lpez: obrero mximo, labor administrativa y constructiva
(Editorial Guarania: Asuncin, 1948).
12 Archivo Nacional de Asuncin (ana), Seccin Histrica (sh), vol. 245.15.
13 The letter is found in Heyn, Iglesia y Estado, 252255.
14 ANA-SH-245.22.
Initially, courses in Latin were established under the charge of Reverend

Citizen Marco Antonio Maz, and courses in Spanish and Fine Letters under
the charge of Reverend Citizen Jos Joaqun Palacios. Along with their
courses, the first would give to his students weekly seminars over the basics of
Christian religion, and the second weekly seminars over the rights and duties
of the social man. On 2 February 1842, Father Maz gave the inaugural seminar
of the Academia, calling it the day in which the foundations of Paraguayan
happiness had been laid [] the first, essential step for the prosperity of the
Nation.15 And he ended his address with a Viva la Repblica! Vivan nuestros
Cnsules!
If, for Francia, the church was an institution that should be submitted to his
authority, for the new consular government, and later the presidency of Carlos
Antonio Lpez, the church was to be a pillar upon which the Paraguayan
nation would be built. Michael Huner in his doctoral thesis clearly reveals
how clergy and institutional practices of the church actually articulated early
expressions of nationhood.16 And it was onto these new social-ecclesiastical
grounds that the first Jesuits to enter independent Paraguay since the expul-
sion of 176768 treaded.
Spanish Jesuits returned to the Ro de la Plata, after the suppression of the
Society in Spain, in July 1835. They were without homes and nearly without
bread. Young novices had spread to other European countries while priests
and lay brothers had dispersed throughout Spanish dioceses.17 In this context,
the authorities in Uruguay and Buenos Aires had contacted Spanish Jesuits
and asked them to send members of the order. This request had the authoriza-
tion of the clergy and the governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas.
The superior provincial of Spain, as well as the superior general of the order,
resolved to send six Jesuits with Father Mariano Berdugo named head of the
future mission. A mission to the Ro de la Plata was not in the original plans of
the Spanish Jesuits, however, and Berdugo had wanted to be sent to the
15 ANA-SH-254.13.
16 Michael Kenneth Huner, Sacred Cause, Divine Republic: A History of Nationhood,
Religion, and War in Nineteenth-century Paraguay, 18501870 (PhD diss., University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011), iii.
17 For the history of the Society of Jesus in the Ro de la Plata see: Rafael Prez, La Compaa
de Jess restaurada en la Repblica Argentina y Chile, el Uruguay y el Brasil (Imprenta de
Henrich: Barcelona, 1901); Pablo Hernndez, Resea histrica de la Misin de Chile-
Paraguay de la Compaa de Jess. Desde su origen en 1836 hasta el centenario de la restau-
racin de la Compaa en 1914 (Editorial Ibrica: Barcelona, 1914); Manuel Revuelta
Gonzlez, Las misiones de los jesuitas espaoles en Amrica y Filipinas durante el siglo
XIX Miscelneas Comillas 46 (1988): 339390.
422 Telesca
Philippines. But the suppression in Spain and the request from Buenos Aires
prompted the change. In August 1836, the first group of Jesuits since the expul-
sion to eventually reach what once was part of the old Jesuit province of
Paraguay disembarked at the port of Buenos Aires.
The bishop of Buenos Aires, Mariano Medrano, writing to the superior of
the Jesuits, assured him of the great reception the recently arrived priests
would receive from the government, the local church, and all of society. He
also discussed the future pastoral missions planned for the group: The civil
government already has a place for them to stay, and plans are in the works
that will demonstrate their commitment and will support the efforts their
brothers previously made. Soon they will open up schools and others will take
up evangelizing among the Indians.18 The bishop also asked for more Jesuits to
be sent, and they would not be long in coming. It was the work among indige-
nous peoples that was most widely desired. In fact, Rosas announced to the
Buenos Aires legislature in 1839 that the Jesuits were close to opening a new
mission among the Pampa peoplea project that never came to fruition. Still,
the policy of the new independent governments of the Ro de la Plata was the
same as that of its Spanish predecessors, if not worse, with respect to indige-
nous peoples: suppress them and take their ancestral lands.
While Francia was still alive, the recently arrived Jesuits had no intention of
attempting to enter Paraguay, knowing the actions of his government toward
religious orders. Indeed, the Robertson brothers recalled that Francia repre-
sented the Jesuits as unos pillos ladinos, that is: refined rogues.19 Once
Francia died in September 1840, Father Berdugo, now vice provincial, decided
to send a group of Jesuits to Paraguay with the hope of beginning evangelical
work there. For the job he designated Father Bernando Pars, who was then
serving as the director of the colegio of Buenos Aires, and Father Anastasio
Calvo. First, they went to Montevideo in July 1841 to rest and begin studying
Guaran. However, it was impossible for them to get permission from Rosas to
travel to Paraguay from Buenos Aires, as the porteo governor considered the
territory just another rebellious province.
Upon crossing the northern Uruguayan border into Brazil, the two priests
first visited some of the ex-Jesuit missions. However, fighting in the War of
Farrapos in southern Brazil forced them to cross the Uruguay River and enter,
at the end of 1841, the Argentine province of Corrientes, which bordered
Paraguay and was then in rebellion against Rosas. The local population and
18 Carta del Obispo de Buenos Aires al Padre General de la Compaa de Jess, Buenos Aires,
16 de agosto de 1836, in Prez, La Compaa de Jess, 835833.
19 J.P. and W.P. Robertson, Letters on Paraguay, (John Murray: London, 1838), 2:40.
provincial governor received the two Jesuits with much affection. They were
given a house in which to reside, and, upon finding out about their arrival,
Toba indigenous peoples from the nearby Chaco lands approached the priests
about establishing a mission. Pars, in a letter to Berdugo, described all these
new challenges, but hesitated to make any new commitments because he
knew that his final destination was Paraguay and he was uncertain about the
ultimate plans of his superior. Pars nonetheless assumed that Corrientes was
an ideal base from which to assist the Chaco to the west, the ex-Jesuit missions
to the east, and Paraguay to the north.20 Fathers Pars and Calvo passed the
first months of 1842 realizing mission work in various pueblos of the province
of Corrientes. The mission with the Toba could not get off the ground due to
the lack of interested subjects, and the deteriorating situation in Buenos Aires
prevented additional Jesuits from being sent.
Meanwhile, the two priests prepared to go to Paraguay and gathered all the
news they could about the country in Corrientes. In fact, they were well
informed. In a letter Pars wrote to Father Coris, who was in Rio de Janeiro, he
suggested they would be well received in Asuncin. But we would have to
accept the destination the government [demands], perhaps some parish dis-
tant from the capital, or even have to go back, or perhaps accept some position
in the school that was established under the nominal direction of a Paraguayan
cleric, who only has the title of director, since it is a porteo who runs every-
thing. He continued: the only thing that I know about the spiritual state of
Paraguay is that there are many vacant parishes, lack of clergy of who are few
and sick. There is no Bishop and no Cabildo.21
Finally, on 14 July, they left Corrientes and arrived three days later in Pilar,
the southern-most river port in Paraguay. From there, Pars wrote the consular
government requesting permission to go up to Asuncin. However this permis-
sion was denied on the grounds, as Pars explained, that it was not convenient
that I pass up to the capital, thanking my good intentions and they would be
sure to call on me when necessary. As a sign of its good will though, the gov-
ernment gave the Jesuits a bulk of yerba mate (about 736 kilograms) and even
paid for the transport of the tea to Corrientes.22 According to Pars, the reason
for the ruling consulates denial was trepidation about upsetting Rosas or get-
ting involved in the internal affairs of neighboring provinces. The truth was the
Paraguayan consulates had just assumed their duties and needed time to con-
template their relations with foreign powers.
20 See Pars a Berdugo in Prez, La Compaa de Jess, 233234.

21 See ibid., 249250.
22 Pars a Berdugo, Corrientes, 5 de agosto de 1842, in Prez, La Compaa de Jess, 251.
424 Telesca
Despite this frustrated attempt, Padre Pars felt, following his own salutary
words (I expect that we will see each other again soon), that the day of his
formal entrance into Paraguay was close. He thus decided to remain in the city
of Corrientes, conducting missions in the surrounding pueblos. By 1843, thirty-
eight Jesuits remained in Argentina. According to that years catalog there
were twenty-seven priests, only one student, and ten novice assistants. Pars
and Calvo were listed under the heading III. In Paran.23
The Return to Paraguay
On 5 May 1843, the two priests were once again in the port of Pilar soliciting
permission from the consular government to travel to Asuncin. The following
day, Francisco Pereyra, the leading civil authority in Pilar, informed the ruling
consulates of the arrival of Father Bernardo Pars of the Company of Jesus who
presented me the accompanying letter, which I send along to Your Excellency.24
On 22 May, Pereyra wrote the consulates again informing them that both priests
had left for the capital with their respective passports and that he had let the
priests know that in the Capital they would receive their titles and assignments
as these may correspond to the appeals of their petition.25 In this petition,
Pars indicated his intention to lead missions to convert the unsettled indige-
nous peoples of the frontiers while promising that the priests recognized the
independence of Paraguay and respected its constituted government.
They finally arrived in Asuncin on 7 June and the following day presented
themselves before the leading consul, Carlos Antonio Lpez. For the moment,
Lpez assigned each priest to parishes in the capital. Calvo went to San Roque;
Pars went to the church of Encarnacin. The proposed work among indige-
nous peoples would have to wait. Both priests collaborated in their respective
parishes and lived from the charity of parishioners. But important political
developments were underway that would effect the recently arrived Jesuits.
By the beginning of 1843, the vicar general Jos Vicente Orue had died, and
the government had independently named as his replacement Father Jos
23 arsi, Catalogi 1944, 69. The name of the mission was Missio Paraquarensis and its
superior continued to be Padre Mariano Berdugo from August 1836. The mission had resi-
dences in: I. In Republica Argentina: Residentia Cordubensis et Seminarium; Residentia
S. Joann in Cujo. II. In Civitat Monsvideana. III. In Paran. IV. In Brasilia: In Provincia
Magni Fluvii Rio Grandes; In Insula Sta. Catharinae. V. In Republica Chilensi.
24 ANA-SH-395.1, fol. 89r.
25 Ibid., fol. 94r.
Moreno. In fact, it was Moreno who had given the Jesuits their license to serve
as priests in the territory. Moreover, in the early months of 1844, the congress
that ratified the law that Establishes the Political Administration of the
Republic of Paraguay, with its formal division of powers, met and elected
Carlos Antonio Lpez to the presidency for a ten-year term. Again, the con-
gress, with the nominal authority to make, interpret, and repeal laws met
only once every five years. Lpez, with his effective assumption of control of
the state, had attributed to his office the formal authority to:
Article 16. Exercise general patronage over churches, benefices, and

ecclesiastical persons following customary law; [and] name bishops and
members of the Ecclesiastical Senate.
Article 17. Celebrate agreements with the Holy See; concede or deny
his approval of decrees of Church councils or other ecclesiastical bodies;
grant or deny the execution of papal bulls, without which requirement
no one can enforce.26
The assumption of the old Patronato Real of the Spanish crown was common
among the new Spanish American republics. It had been the practice in
Paraguay since the days of Francia. For its part, for example, the consular gov-
ernment in November 1843 had granted the execution of the 1842 papal bull
that conceded the nomination of the vicar general named by the government,
but had rejected the accompanying clause that sought to empower the posi-
tion with faculties in whole or in part to the Brothers of the Mission, to which
the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide would had sent. In response, the
consular government had declared: it is prohibited in the territory of the
Republic any foreign [religious] missions exempt from the supreme authority
of the Republic, nor is it allowed the formation of any congregation or monas-
tic body under any ecclesiastical authority other than that of the Republic,
with which condition the papal decree will be put into effect.27 The consular
government, and later that of President Lpez, refused to relinquish control
over ecclesiastical bodies forged by Francia.
Although the recently arrived Jesuits did not explicitly say so at first, these
developments would clearly affect the intentions of Pars to reestablish the
Society of Jesus in Paraguayan lands. Perhaps it was even the reason why, after
an incident with Father Palacios, professor in the Academia Literaria, Pars
26 Reportorio Nacional, n 8, 1844. Ley que establece la Administracin Poltica de la

Repblica del Paraguay y dems que en ella se contiene.
27 In Heyn, Iglesia y Estado, 102. Also see ANA-Seccin Rio Branco-298.
426 Telesca
decided to ask Carlos Antonio Lpez for a passport to leave Paraguay. Palacios
had publically insulted Pars, who complained to the vicar general to little
effect. The insults continued, and in December 1843 Pars went to Lpez to
request his papers to leave without indicating his reasons. However, upon
learning of the reasons himself, Lpez sided with Pars and the Jesuits and
ended up expelling Palacios from the countryfor Palacios was a porteo and
had created too many problems with other priests.28 Incidentally, in 1844 a
smallpox epidemic also swept through a significant part of the population of
Asuncin and lasted until the end of April. Both Pars and Calvo worked day
and night tending to the sick, which earned the gratitude of residents and the
authorities.
This good will culminated in the middle of 1844 when the son of President
Lpez arrived from Buenos Aires. Francisco Solano Lpez was a young man of
sixteen years who had accompanied the diplomatic mission to Buenos Aires
seeking recognition of the independence of Paraguay from the government of
Rosas. Despite the unsuccessful mission, it is likely that the group had heard
something about the work of the Jesuits there, recently expelled from the
Argentine capital. Recall that Pars had served as the rector of the Jesuit school
before leaving Buenos Aires. Upon arriving in Asuncin, Francisco Solano
Lpez asked his father to allow him to take classes with the Jesuits in Paraguay.
Carlos Antonio Lpez passed the request to Pars, and he accepted the pro-
posal to open an informal school that would give classes in mathematics and
French. One of their first students was Francisco Solano Lpez. This new
charge allowed the two Jesuits to live together in the same residence.
There are no official documents confirming this new position for the priests,
however we can approximate the thinking of Lpez here through a state spon-
sored publication of the time. In 1848, there appeared in Rio de Janeiro the
title: O Paraguai, seu passado, presente e futuro por um estrangeiro que residiu
seis anos naquele pais. Obra publicada sob os auspcios da legao do Paraguai
na Corte do Brasil [The Paraguay, its past, present and future by a foreigner who
lived for six years in that country. Work published under the auspices of the
Legation of Paraguay in the Court of Brazil]. Although the true author of the
short volume is in doubt, historians believe it was Juan Andrs Gelly, diplo-
matic representative of the Lpez government in Brazil. The work was intended
to introduce Paraguay to foreign powers and was soon translated into French
28 See ANA-SH-254.17: Denuncia presentada por el padre Castelvi contra Palacios en 1842.
Also see Ricardo Scavone Yegros, ed., Polmicas en torno al gobierno de Carlos Antonio
Lpez en la prensa de Buenos Aires, 18571858 (Tiempo de Historia: Asuncin, 2010).
and Spanish by the Paraguayan state press. Gelly dedicated a paragraph to the
work of the Jesuits that seemed to echo Lpezs approach to the matter:
Two individuals of the religious society dedicated to public learning have

arrived in ParaguayI refer here to the Jesuits. Although my principles are
different than those they profess, and despite all that has been said about
them, I still consider them some of the most useful and less-costly educa-
tors that the youth of a country could have. It falls to the vigilance and
prudence of governments to prevent this from descending into abuse. But
one of them does have the charge of directing a school of mathematics.29
The school began with twelve students, and this number soon grew. The Jesuits
sent two students to Crdoba to begin their training as novices in the order.30
Perhaps just as important as the school were the hopes of opening a mission
among the unconverted indigenous population on the frontiers. Toward the
end of 1844 a group of Gauycuru peoples from the Chaco came before President
Lpez in Asuncin with the aim of engaging in trade and gaining permission to
open a settlement along the Pilcomayo River. Upon hearing about this meet-
ing, Pars requested authorization from the president to establish a mission
among this community of the Guaycur. The policy of the consular govern-
ment and that of president Lpez with respect to indigenous peoples was ori-
ented toward their absorption and integration within the Paraguayan body
politic. Indeed, Lpez once expressed to Pars: as for the Indians, settle them
or kill them.31 By 1842, the administration of the old Jesuit mission towns were
being handed over to civil-military officials, and by 1848 all Indian pueblos in
the territory were legally suppressed and their inhabitants declared regular
citizens of the state.32 Still, Lpez did not want to lose the services of the two
Jesuits in Asuncin, as both clergy and educators, and he authorized Pars to
29 El Paraguay. Lo que fue, lo que es y lo que sera (Imprenta de la Repblica del Paraguay:
Asuncin, 1849), 2324. Sobre la autora de esta obra ver Liliana Brezzo, La historia y los
historiadores, in Historia del Paraguay, ed. Ignacio Telesca (Taurus: Asuncin, 2011),
1940.
30 arsi, Argentino-Chilensis, 1001, letter of Pars dated in Montevideo 18 December 1846
where he indicates that dos jvenes paraguayos solicitan ser admitidos en la Compaa.
El uno me escribe que ha obtenido permiso para salir de aquel pas y que est prximo a
ponerse en camino.
31 Prez, La Compaa de Jess, 361.
32 See Thomas Whigham Paraguays Pueblos de Indios: Echoes of a Missionary Past, in The
New Latin American Mission History, eds. by Erick D. Langer and Robert H. Jackson
(University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1995), 157188.
428 Telesca
bring more Jesuits to Paraguay to collaborate in the project of the Chaco mis-
sion. In fact, he suggested that they come via Brazil along with the diplomatic
officer Gelly who was called back to Paraguay.33 On 5 October, Pars wrote to
Father Jose Vila in Santa Catarina asking him to send more priests.
The chosen priest for the task was Father Miguel Vicente Lpez who on 2
January 1845 left Santa Catarina for Paraguay. In an extensive letter written
from Asuncin on 26 April to a certain Father Vanni, the Jesuit Lpez narrated
all the surprises and discoveries of his journey.34 He had traveled across south-
ern Brazil, entered Corrientes, and then from the south, through Itapa,
Paraguay. He passed through the ex-Jesuit mission settlements along the way
and recorded his impressions. He was the first Jesuit to walk again through the
ruins of the work of his forebears. The missions in Brazil and Corrientes were
completely abandoned. However, that was not case with those of Paraguay,
which still functioned as colonial-style Indian pueblos. He encountered his
biggest surprise in the pueblo of Santa Mara de Fe. A storm forced him to
spend a night in the pueblo where he observed children praying the rosary
twice a day, and on Sundays the entire community gathered to pray it. They
also sang el Bendito and songs to the Virgin Mary accompanied by twelve
instruments made by hand. When Father Lpez celebrated mass, everyone
knew their role and their place, even after having been left without a priest for
such a long time. They all knew the answers to the liturgy, and the choir and
altar assistants had all mastered their responsibilities. Father Lpez concluded
his description of the experience claiming, I will never erase from my memory
the sight of that early morning on 1 March 1845, and I will never stop praising
the Lord for this blessing.
Upon arriving in Asuncin in March, he found his brothers working con-
spicuously in the capital. Father Pars had his classes in mathematics, French,
and moral theology. Father Calvo was accompanying the auxiliary bishop
Maz on his pastoral visits to the interior of the country. Both priests, at the
end of 1844, had celebrated the month of devotion to Mary in the church of
Encarnacin with much sacramental pomp. And after this experience, they
had founded the Escuela de Cristo in the style of the religious exercise of the
Buena Muerte. Perhaps for this reason, Lpez could close his letter to Father
Vanni reveling that I am in Paraguay in the middle of a good-natured people
33 For a biography of Gelly, see Antonio Ramos, Juan Andrs Gelly (Ediciones de Argentina:
Buenos Aires, 1972).
34 The letter is found in arsi, Argentino-Chilensis, 1001, XI, doc. 14, Vicente Lpez a Vanni,
Asuncin, 26 abril 1845. There is a transcription of it in Prez, La Compaa de Jess,
383394.
who adore us, provide for us in abundance, who need many of our ministers
and who make good use of them.35
This rather euphoric picture soon began to disappear. According to the later
testimony of Father Pars in a letter written to a colleague from Montevideo in
June 1846, the Jesuits encountered their principal difficulties with the new
bishop of the diocese, Basilio Lpez, brother of the president.36 The papal bull
naming Basilio as bishop was issued in July 1844 but did not reach Paraguay
until March 1845 and was authorized by the government the following month.37
Due to the ongoing difficulties with the Argentine Confederation, Basilio and
his entourage traveled to Cuyab, in Brazil, to be consecrated in August 1845. It
was during this trip, according to Pars, that Basilio Lpez complained about
the Jesuits:
His complaints were none other than that in Paraguay we were more
respected than even the bishops; that we only sought the praises of the
people in our work; that we looked down upon the priests who could not
do the work we were doing; that it was strange to not want stipends for
our ministry.38
For their part, the new bishop and his lieutenant were subordinated to the
political authority of the country. In fact, all pastoral letters first had to receive
approval from the government, and President Lpez even issued a decree in
November 1845 prohibiting any and all ringing of bells when the Bishop enters
and leaves a church [] and no one should bow in the streets or any other
place when the Bishop passes by. The reason given for this decree was to care
that no functionary of the church appears dominant in temples or in the
streets over the Supreme National Government.39 Clearly the potential for
intra-institutional and personal rivalries with relatively more independent
agents of the church, like the foreign Jesuits, ran high.
The first run-in with the bishop occurred at the end of November 1845 when
Father Pars requested, on behalf of the presidents wife, permission to con-
tinue taking confession into the night after a series of prayer services dedicated
to the Virgin Mary. The bishop denied the request. But the president and his
35 Ibid., 394.
36 Transcription of the letter found in Luis Parola, Historia contempornea de la Compaa
de Jess en el Paraguay 19271969 (Ediciones Loyola: Asuncin, 1973), 602608.
37 ANA-SH-272.39.
38 Parola, Historia contempornea, 603.
39 ANA-SH-272.18.
430 Telesca
wife insisted on the nocturnal confession, obliging the bishop to back down.
However, another conflict, which would be the last, occurred in early December.
Two new Jesuits, Father Emanuel Martos and Brother Andrs Pedraja, had just
arrived after a three-month journey from Porto Alegre, Brazil. They wanted to
celebrate the feast day of Saint Francis Xavier with mass and communion, hav-
ing arrived in Asuncin at seven in the morning. While they rested, Father
Lpez went to the bishop to request permission for Father Martos to first say
mass and then report to the government. The bishop again denied the request,
and an argument began between the prelate and the Jesuit. The Jesuit priests
words offended the bishop, and he denounced them to the president. And
upon giving a deposition in a preliminary legal proceeding in the matter, Lpez
indicated that he was sent before the bishop by his superior. These words
provoked outrage, and soon Father Pars was called into the legal proceedings
to explain what sort of authority he exercised in Paraguay.
Father Lpez spent three days in jail after which he had to request formal
pardon from the bishop. For his part, President Lpez allowed Martos and
Pedraja to stay, but insisted that the brother can be accepted as well as long as it
is understood that in Paraguay religious communities are not permitted. Father
Pars tried to negotiate with the president regarding the status of all Jesuits in
Paraguay. As Pars recounted, the president wanted us to stay, to charge us with
educating and give us a house and subsistence but that we could not recognize
any superior outside of the republic and within it only receive that of the author-
ity of the government. And with that, I resolved to leave the country. They
requested their respective passports to leave Paraguay, which were granted.
Fathers Lpez, Martos, and Brother Pedraja were the first to leave. Next, on 23
February 1846 Fathers Pars and Calvo departed, not without shedding tears.40
Around this time, although he did not yet know it, Father Bernardo Pars had
already been named the superior of the Paraguay mission in March 1845. The
mission had some 44 subjects (29 priests, 5 students, and 10 brothers).41
Conclusion
The nature of the Jesuits exit from Paraguay warrants our attention. Why did
Pars decide to leave once it became clear that it would be impossible to sus-
tain a religious community with ties to foreign entities and superiors? He knew
that before entering Paraguay.

41 arsi, Catalogi 1947, 1618.
For the Jesuits, it has more to do with a perceived future than the experi-
enced present. In the same letter written from Montevideo to a colleague dis-
cussing their departure, Pars emphasized that in things political the system
of Dr. Francia remained [] and now that the yerba fields and timber have
been declared state property, you could say the president is the only merchant
[] or should I say the only authority, because in Paraguay there is not a
national will nor law besides the will of the President. He used similar terms
to describe ecclesiastical affairs in the country: religion is a slave [of the gov-
ernment], and if in other parts they had wanted to make it a sad instrument of
the politics of rulers, in Paraguay its their monkey.42
Pars seemed to have perceived a future not all that different from what was
being experienced with the government of Rosas in Buenos Aires and, wanting
to guarantee a possible return, preferred to leave Paraguay on relatively good
terms rather than be expelled. In fact, he ended his letter on a hopeful note,
confident that once the independence of Paraguay was recognized by the
Argentine confederation and passions had calmed we would be the first to be
called, because not only the common people but also the churchmen and
enlightened persons were satisfied and wanted us to get established there;
and, more, even the President had said that only the Jesuits could regenerate
Paraguay.43 And, in fact, Father Pars did return to Paraguay in August 1864 to
meet with Francisco Solano Lpez, his ex-student and, since 1862, the presi-
dent. The reason for the visit is unknown, but we can speculate that it was to
explore a possible return for the Jesuits, as a religious order, to Paraguay.
However, by the end of that year, the War of the Triple Alliance had begun and
would last another five years, delaying thus further the return of the Society.
But to fully understand why the Jesuits left Paraguay at the beginning of
1846, it is also crucial to appreciate the interests of the government of Carlos
Antonio Lpez. The postcolonial Paraguayan state under Lpez not only
wanted to control ecclesiastical bodies in the country, but also needed them as
fundamental pillars for the construction of nationhood and obedience to the
new government. The provincial church, in this regard, functioned as just
another ministry of the state. As Juan Andrs Gelly pointed out, though, the
Jesuits, as a foreign religious order, were also seen as the most serious and most
economical educators for a state about to embark on a project of political and
material modernization. Clearly this was the thinking of President Lpez. He
had a utilitarian agenda. Indeed, when he tried to convince Pars to stay to
continue to educate young Paraguayans, he still offered the Jesuits housing,

43 Ibid., 607.
432 Telesca
food, and support, while nonetheless denying them the right to function as a
religious order. The restoration of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay and the mak-
ing of a new system of government in the country simply turned out to be two
incompatible projects. One party had to submit to the other, and neither was
disposed to do so, least of all the Paraguayan government.
chapter 25
Jesuit Restoration in Mexico

Perla Chinchilla Pawling
Mexican Historiography on the Jesuits
The literature on the restoration of the Society of Jesus is still very limited,
particularly in the case of Mexico. There are some references to the Jesuits in
nineteenth-century general histories of Mexico, two of which are mentioned
below, but no historical accounts of the local restoration process appeared
until the early twentieth century, and most of these were written by members
of the order who took a distinctively apologetical approach. This can clearly be
seen in the Historia de la Iglesia en Mxico [History of the Church in Mexico]
written by Father Mariano Cuevas:
The order had been so good to our country in previous centuries, and the
memories it created were so pleasant, that despite all of the venom
directed against it by the European and Mexican press, the country
always retained a traditional affection for them and expressed a desire to
have them back.1
This kind of approach can also be seen in the Historia de la Compaa de Jess
en la Repblica Mexicana durante el siglo XIX [History of the Society of Jesus in
Mexico during the nineteenth century], written by Father Gerard Decorme and
published in 1921. Decorme (18741965) wrote his study as a member of a
Mexican province that had achieved some stability during the last decades of
the nineteenth century. Decorme relied on the work of Jos Mariano Dvila
but sought to distance himself from the latters interpretation of the Jesuits
return to New Spain.2 This can be perceived in the books epigraph,3 where
1 Mariano Cuevas S.J., Historia de la Iglesia en Mxico (Editorial Revista Catlica: Texas, 1928),
5:277.
2 Jos Mariano Dvila y Arrillaga, Continuacin de la Historia de la Compaa de Jess en Nueva
Espaa (Imprenta del Colegio Pio de Artes y Oficios: Puebla, 1889), vol. 2.
3 Guillermo Zermeo Padilla, Retorno, Extincin e Independencia: imgenes jesuticas y
antijesuitismo en Mxico, 18141830s, in Antijesuitismo y filojesuitismo. Dos identidades ante
la restauracin, eds. Susana Monreal, Sabina Pavone, and Guillermo Zermeo (Universidad
Iberoamericana: forthcoming), 12.

434 CHINCHILLA PAWLING
Decorme associates the Jesuits with the cause of the insurgents during the
fight for Mexican independence. Dvila makes no reference to this and simply
links the second suppression of the Society in 1820 to the resentment the peo-
ple of New Spain harbored against the Spanish monarchy; a feeling that,
according to him, favored the independence movement led by Iturbide.4 On
the other hand, Decorme enriched his archival research by studying new and
extensive documents, though he did not refrain from attacking the opponents
of the campaign.
Guillermo Zermeo comments that Decormes work suffered some darken-
ing due to a new diaspora and the dispersion of the Jesuits caused by the 1910
revolution, the consequences of which would not be noticeable until the reli-
gious and political military conflict of 19261929. This new historical thresh-
oldarticulated around the conflict between church and state that started in
1821was surpassed by a new generation of postcristero Jesuit historians, rep-
resentatives of a new Society stabilized and resurrected after 1930.5 In this
regard, the work of Father Jos Gutirrez Casillas stands out, and it still carries
the imprint of Decorme.6
In the second half of the twentieth century, the histories written by Jesuits
about the restoration of the order exhibited a rather commemorative tone. A
notable example is the work of Gutirrez Casillas. In the prologue of his book
Jesuitas en Mxico durante el siglo XIX [Jesuits in Mexico during the Nineteenth
Century] he states the following:
September of the current year [1972] will mark the 400th anniversary of
the coming of these men to Mexico. The celebration will be a quiet one;
it will consist of the renovation of the primitive supernatural spirit.
However, it might be convenient that some historical works on the sub-
ject remain as monuments.7
Finally, both Gerard Decorme and Jos Gutirrez Casillas analyzed the politi-
cal aspects of the return of the Jesuits, and commented only marginally on
what happened within the schools and missions. What proliferated at the time
were pamphlets and articles either in favor of or opposed to the return of the
Society of Jesus. To give one laudatory example, here is an account originally
published in Madrid in 1845 and reprinted in Mexico in 1873:
4 Arrillaga, Continuacin, 239240.

5 Zermeo, Retorno, extincin e independencia, 3.
6 Jos Gutirrez Casillas S.J., Jesuitas en Mxico durante el siglo XIX (Porra: Mxico, 1981).
7 Gutirrez, Jesuitas, 11.
Jesuit Restoration In Mexico 435
The Society of Jesus, hurt and maligned in France, was violently attacked
in the name of freedom in the Helvetic Republic and undermined by per-
nicious intrigues in Germany and Italy; it was sought in America by some,
prohibited and banished by others. It should draw the attention of think-
ing men to the cause of such large setbacks and to seek with cold and
impartial critique the final verdict of this religious and humanitarian pro-
cess. For us, the attacks on the Society of Jesus are not indifferent thrusts
directed to a given group; the constant efforts of persecution, even after
their misfortune, clearly demonstrate that a great thing has to be
overthrown.8
The Restoration of the Society of Jesus during the Nineteenth

Century: Advances and Setbacks
From their arrival in New Spain in 1572, the missionary, educational, and eco-
nomic work of the Jesuits was important and, according to several documents,
their expulsion provoked consternation among various groups. After the defeat
of Napoleon, the European absolutist monarchs, who had maintained a hostile
attitude towards the Jesuits until the revolution, changed their stance. They
had experienced how the bourgeoisie, filled with liberal ideas, could threaten
the status quo, just as had happened in France. Because of this, the Jesuits
came to be seen as a possible ideological counterweight to revolutionary ideas,
and as an institution capable of preserving Catholic values and the hierarchi-
cal organization of the old regime. As the Mexican Jesuit historian Gutirrez
Casillas wrote:
The monarchy restored the Society of Jesus, which remained dependent

on the monarchy in the eyes of many. In the civilized world, Cardinal
Consalvis phrase was regarded as a stereotype: Sovereigns shall see that
the Jesuits will secure their thrones by restoring religion.9
During the nineteenth century, Spanish America echoed the European situa-
tion and was home to a constant political battle between liberal and monarchi-
cal Creoles to dominate the government of the emerging independent countries.
In this context arose the authorities intermittent support or repudiation of the
8 Francisco G. De la Huerta, Dictamen sobre el restablecimiento de los jesuitas (Imprenta de la

voz de Mxico: Mxico, 1873), ivv.
reinstatement of the Society of Jesus in their respective territories, which

remained at the mercy of the groups that dominated the politics at any given
time. In Mexico in particular, which had nine governments between 1814 and
1867, the situation was so fluctuating and explosive that the Jesuits faced enor-
mous difficulties when it came to settling permanently in the country.
For the supporters of the Jesuits, the 1767 expulsion had left an educational
gap in New Spain. The reality was that, once the expulsion occurred, Jesuit
schools became part of the governmental system and teaching was left to
secular instructors. Despite this, budgets did not suffer greatly because the
schools continued to live off their properties and rents, although these were
now administered by the Junta de Temporalidades or by local councils.10
Nevertheless, school practices underwent major changes. For example, school
officials started using the same space for teaching classes and housing board-
ers, two activities that were not usually conducted in the same buildings and
which were separate in the schools of the old regime.11 There were also struc-
tural changes. Even though in high school the Ratio studiorum continued to be
in use,12 starting from 1832 it was adapted to the circumstances of the time.
Despite this, the subjects taught were essentially the same: Latin grammar,
rhetoric, philosophy, arts, theology, and in some cases (such as the Colegio de
San Ildefonso) jurisprudence.13
The Jesuits advocates also complained about a complete abandonment of
missionary activity in the north of the country. Different groups within colo-
nial society used these arguments many times during the suppression period
to demand the return of the Society of Jesus, but they had little impact until
1843. The first official document to openly address the issue of education in
Mexico was issued by the city council of Guadalajara:
The Government, in its October 26th, 1808 manifesto, invited the sages to,
among other things, suggest projects to improve public education and it
10 The Juntas de Temporalidades (Transition Board) was created by the Real Cdula de
Madrid (Royal Document of Madrid), on 27 March 1769, to administer the goods and
properties of the recently extinguished Society of Jesus.
11 Rosalina Ros Ziga, Ausencia y presencia de colegios jesuitas en la educacin superior
en Mxico: San Ildefonso y San Gregorio (18001856), in De los colegios a las universi-
dades: los jesuitas en el mbito de la educacin superior, eds. Paolo bianchini, Perla
Chinchilla, and Antonella Romano (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de Mxico,
Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla, Universidad del Pacfico, Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana: Mxico, 2013), 291.
12 Ros, Ausencia y presencia, 309.
is not unlikely that they submitted them. As a way to do so and to restore

the previous customs, they believed in the reinstitution of the Institute of
the Society of Jesus in all royal domains. The institution embraced these
important objectives and it is obvious that they executed them in the
most proper and plausible way so that the sages could defend them. If
political or other defects of such gravity as the ones attributed to the
extinction of the order were found, the government should have to think
of a remedy to restore it.14
After the legal restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814 there were diverse
campaigns for its reintroduction both in Spain and New Spain, which was then
immersed in internal civil struggles that would lead to Mexican independence
in 1821. Even before the restoration, Jos Mara Morelos y Pavn, insurgent
leader and priest, had pronounced himself several times in favor of the return
of the Jesuits. For instance, he told Carlos Mara de Bustamante, Mexican poli-
tician and historian: I love Jesuits from my heart and even though I did not
study with them I understand that it is necessary to reinstate them.15 He for-
mally expressed this intention in 1813, during the Congress of Chilpancingo,
through the following decree: We declare the reestablishment of the Society
of Jesus to provide American youth with the Christian instruction that most of
them lack and to provide zealous missionaries for the Californias and other
border provinces.16
Despite several requests and the existence of a territory with a pro-indepen-
dence tendency, the Spanish monarch Ferdinand VII could not yet grant per-
mission for the return of the Jesuits. In May 1815, the king overruled the
so-called Pragmatic Sanction enacted by his grandfather Charles III that had
decreed the expulsion of the Jesuits from his domains. This move allowed the
reestablishment of the order in Spain, as well as the return of expropriated
goods that had not yet been sold. The same authorization was extended in
September of the same year to include the kings domains in the Americas and
the Philippines. The news reached Mexico City in February 1816. Even though
Viceroy Flix Mara Calleja did not promulgate the law immediately, word
14 Gerardo Decorme. Historia de la Compaa de Jess en la Repblica Mexicana durante el

siglo XIX, (J.M. Yguiniz: Guadalajara, 1921) 7374. See also Archivo Histrico Nacional de
Espaa (ahn), Jesuitas, Amrica, 116.
15 Decorme, Historia, 76. See also Francisco Javier Alegre, Historia de la Compaa de Jess en
Nueva Espaa, Mxico, Prlogo, 3:4.
16 Ibid.
spread very quickly and, as Gutirrez Casillas put it, youngsters and older peo-
ple tried to join the Society of Jesus immediately.17
As Guillermo Zermeo points out, it is paradoxical that the return of the
Jesuits to Spanish territoriesEuropean and overseasoccurred under the
orders of the same Bourbon dynasty that had decreed its suppression in 1767:
the dynastic house that once regarded them as an obstacle to their administra-
tive reforms, now needed them to fight against anarchy and bourgeois liber-
alism, and the separatist forces within their fading empire. Thus, the restoration
of the Society in Mexico is the story of one paradox after another: the result of
contradictions experienced in the metropolis.18
After more than four decades in exile, few Jesuits had survived in the old
Mexican province, and most of those who had were now elderly. Decorme esti-
mates that from these survivors, fifteen resided in Rome, a few others in several
places on the Italian peninsula, one or two in Spain, and four in the United
States.19 In New Spain, there were three Jesuits who had returned before the
universal restoration: Jos Mara Castaiza, Pedro Cantn, and Antonio
Barroso. After the expulsion they had lived in Bologna with other members of
the Mexican province, and with the suppression of the Society they became
secular clergy. Facing the threat of the Napoleonic invasion of Italy, Charles IV
allowed them to settle in Cdiz, but they were captured by the English during
their journey and were imprisoned for eight months until they were finally set
free in the port of Barcelona. When Napoleon invaded Spain, Father
Castaizawho, as the son of Marquis Juan de Castaiza, had a vast fortune
with which he maintained his confreresobtained passports for himself and
his companions, allowing them to return to New Spain in August 1809.20
After the universal reestablishment of the Society, the Mexican Jesuit Juan
Arrieta, who was working in the general curia of the Jesuits in Rome, thought
about the orders restoration in Mexico and wrote to Father Castaiza and
Father Cantnthe only Jesuits who were already in the country: Father vicar
general [] has commanded me to write you to grant you the authority to wel-
come those who want to be Jesuits, as priests, scholars or coadjutors you find
suitable for serving God in the order.21
17 Gutirrez Casillas, 35.

19 Decorme, Historia, 79.
21 Gutirrez, Jesuitas, 36. See also Davila Arriaga. Historia de la Compaa de Jess, II, 164 and
ahn, Jesuitas, 116.
On 25 February 1816, Castaiza, Cantn, and Barroso respectfully informed

both the archbishop of Mexico and Viceroy Calleja of their intention to use
Ferdinand VIIs decree to restore the Society of Jesus in New Spain. The viceroy
required from Father Castaizawhose family was openly in opposition to
the insurgentsthe instructions sent from Rome for the admission of nov-
ices. The viceroy only allowed the Jesuits to open one novitiate on the condi-
tion that every applicant had to meet with the archbishops approval.
That is how the former Jesuits started to return to New Spain, answering the
call of both the pope and the king of Spain, who encouraged them to act as an
obstacle to the liberal advances and, in some cases, to the Jacobin ones.22
They were expected to fight a new battle, similar to the one fought against
Luther and his followers, only this time against the philosophy of the
Enlightenment: the philosophes, the Encyclopedia, and liberalism. In both
European and Mexican publications, Jesuits argued that, because of their
expulsion, the French Revolution had not been stopped, thus their restoration
was perceived as part of the attempt to restore the old regime, as can be seen
in the following excerpt:
The revolution, that had started in Europe in the eighteenth century and
had joined with impiety, endured and was extending more or less under-
cover, which caused the Society of Jesus, which had been its victim, to
necessarily encounter great obstacles in its reestablishment. Therefore,
once it was suppressed, the Society faced the same hostilities as in previ-
ous times, and would have to face new storms that continued because the
Society of Jesus would have to fight in every age and under any
conditions.23
The situation in New Spain was nonetheless ambiguous. On one side the insur-
gents clearly understood what the return of the Bourbons meant: the persecu-
tion of the Cdiz constitution of 1812, of the ideas of independence, and the
restoration of the Inquisition and the suppression of the free press. But, just as
in the case of Morelos, not everybody identified the order with the royalist fac-
tion at the beginning of the independence movement, and so, during the first
restoration, members from opposite sides were united in support of the Society,
although there were always critics of the restoration.

23 Antonio Zarandona, Historia de la extincin y restablecimiento de la Compaa de Jess
brevemente anotada y aumentada por el P. Ricardo Sappa S.J., (Luys Aguado: Madrid,
1890), 2:301303.
19 May 1816 marks the official date of the reestablishment. According to

documents from the period, it was a day of celebration in Mexico City. It is said
that many people wanted to see the Jesuits, so they gathered where the official
ceremony was held. Gutirrez Casillas described it in the following terms:
On May 19 joy was felt very early in the day throughout the whole capital
because the restoration was going to be enacted. All of the houses on the
route of the parade were decorated with curtains, as in the most solemn
festivities, and the streets were filled with a considerable number of peo-
ple who wished to see the Jesuits, especially in the street of San Ildefonso
where the act of restoration was going to be held. Shortly before eleven
oclock in the morning, amid applause and a general tolling from all
churches of the city, the illustrious archbishop arrived at the school, driv-
ing Father Castaiza and Father Cantn in his own carriage.24
Father Barroso could not participate in the parade because of his old age, but
he was waiting in the school, where the royal decree for the restoration of the
Society was read and where the viceroy handed over the keys to the building.25
From that moment until 1821, Jesuits were in charge of the Colegio de San
Ildefonso. It can be seen from such documents that the main meaning given to
the return of the Jesuits concerned the role they had played in Mexican educa-
tion, since people perceived that their expulsion had damaged education dra-
matically, bringing youngsters closer to seditious liberal thinking.
The main problem Jesuits faced during the reestablishment of the Society in
Mexico and in other parts of the world was the return of their properties and
the displacement of those who occupied their schools. Another issue was the
shortage of members, which was key to the reconstruction of the order. Thus,
to start the process, in May 1816 Father Jos Mara Castaiza was appointed
provincial. It was also crucial to train novices because there were only three of
them at the outset. Hence the priority was to establish a novitiate. It is interest-
ing to notice that even before the restoration was formalized, men from all
ages showed interest in joining the order. The new novitiate opened its doors
on 2 June 1816 in a small space adapted at the Colegio de San Ildefonso. Some
novices were received and Father Cantn remained in charge of them. Among
those who were accepted into the novitiate were Isidro Ignacio de Icaza,
Francisco Mendizbal, Jos Mariano Gama, Ignacio Mara de la Plaza, Jos
Loreto Barrasa, Juan Lyon, Rafael Olaguibel, Joaqun Moreno, Victoriano

25 Ibid.
Snchez, Diego Sanvictores, Lorenzo Lizrraga, Jos Pea, and Jos Basilio
Arrillaga.26
Finally, it was vital to prepare the college for receiving the new generation of
novices so there was an immediate effort to expand the facilities. All the build-
ings located in the block opposite San Ildefonso had previously belonged to
the Jesuits and the government agreed to give them back. The buildings of the
old Colegio de San Pedro and San Pablo, the Colegio de San Gregorio, and the
church of Loreto are still there today.
The church of Loreto had been sustained throughout the suppression by
private donations from the count of Basoco, who voluntarily handed the build-
ing over to the Jesuits on 26 August. That same day the government returned to
the order the Colegio de San Gregorio, which had been dedicated to Indian
education since its inceptionthere were thirty-six indigenous students
studying with the Jesuits. In San Gregorio, students were taught singing, read-
ing, and writing, while at the Colegio de San Ildefonso they studied Latin gram-
mar and philosophy. Latin grammar was also taught in San Gregorio from 1811,
but without the approval of the municipal board, therefore it was eliminated
from the syllabus in the year the Jesuits returned. However, the students of San
Gregorio who wished to continue with their Latin grammar were able to do so
at San Ildefonso. Father Cantn was also in charge of San Gregorio and ensured
that the school continued to collect rents and receive the profits from the pro-
ductive hacienda of San Jos Acolman in Texcoco. Under these circumstances,
the activities of the Jesuits in this college were able to continue uninterrupted
until 1821.27
Father Castaiza had greater difficulties in recovering the Colegio Mximo
de San Pedro and San Pablo, because the government used half of the building
as military quarters and the other half was occupied by the Monte de Piedad.
The part held by the army, even though in dire condition, was returned to the
order on 11 November 1816, and the soldiers were assigned to another location.
From the remainder of their other former properties only the hacienda of San
Jos de Acolman was returned to the Jesuits. The hacienda, along with rents
and some private donations, was the only source of income for the order from
1816 to 1821.
Father Castaiza died in November 1816. During the six months in which he
administered the province he managed to open three schools and two
churches. Before his death, he appointed Father Pedro Cantn as his successor
in the province, who, in order to dedicate himself to the orders administration,

27 Ibid., 297.
placed the novitiate in the charge of the Spaniard Ignacio Lerdo de Tejada,
who had just arrived in Mexico. At that time the main problem for the Jesuits
was maintaining a growing number of members. However, the economical
shortcomings were the hardest to overcome. This is apparent from the pro-
ceedings of two faculty meetings at the Colegio de San Ildefonso, held in 1819
and 1820.28
According to Decorme, the Jesuits received invitations to settle in many cit-
ies outside Mexico City, but most of the time they did not have the economic
means or enough personnel to do so. For example, the bishop of Durango
approached Father Catn and Viceroy Juan Ruiz de Apodaca on numerous
occasions to convince them to open a school in his city. His main argument
was based on the lack of educational institutions in the northern part of the
country. According to him, in the provinces of New Vizcaya, Sonora, Sinaloa,
and New Mexico only seven schools taught reading and writing or gave basic
catechetical instruction. Additionally, he argued that there were very few cler-
gymen in the area. Finally, five Jesuit priests managed to settle in Durango and
engage in teaching, as well as visiting prisons and hospitals.
The only city where the reestablishment of the order was fully achieved,
thanks, among other reasons, to the persistence of its council, was Puebla.
With the bishops approval the Jesuits returned to this city, where their old
church, a seminar, a school and other buildings were returned to them, in addi-
tion to some old haciendas that had not been sold. Since the order did not have
enough staff to manage them directly, most properties were rented out, which
allowed them to pay for the maintenance of the school and their pastoral
deeds. It is important to highlight that the Jesuits enjoyed strong support
among the population.
A New Suppression
Despite these achievements, the orders problems soon increased. Although it

was only growing slowly in the province of Mexico, the Spanish branch of the
order had to face the hostility of the liberal party. The situation in Spain became
unsustainable when the Madrid city council made a complaint to the congress,
arguing that the canons of San Isidro claimed possession of the building where
the Jesuit Colegio Imperial had just been reopened. On 15 August 1820, through
the gazette of the government of Madrid, the Mexican Jesuits learned that the
Congress of the Courts had decreed a second suppression of the Jesuits, which
28 Ibid., 296.
was made official on 17 August 1820.29 Despite protests in defense of the Jesuits,
the restoration act of Ferdinand VII was nullified, on the grounds that the
Jesuits had not respected the kingdoms laws.
The authorities arrived at the Colegio de San Ildefonso on 13 December to
inform the Jesuits about the new suppression of the order.30 Soon, the Jesuits
of Durango and Puebla were taken to Mexico City. This time, however, the
Jesuits were not expelled from the country, but were simply banned from orga-
nizing themselves as members of the Society of Jesus; however, their proper-
ties were once more confiscated. Both priests and novices were forced to leave
their buildings and to look for somewhere else to live. The priests sought
accommodation within parishes, professors in other schools, while students
continued their education anywhere they could:
The order had thirty-seven members at the time. After what happened,
there were only two novices: Luis Traslosheros and Jos Guadalupe Rivas;
two students ordained as priests: Jos Ildefonso Pea and Luis Gutirrez
del Corral; and thirteen who became priests later: Pedro Cantn, Ignacio
Plaza, Ignacio Lerdo de Tejada, Jos Amaya, Francisco Mendizbal,
Basilio Arrillaga, Juan Mara Coronado, Lorenzo Lizrraga, Ignacio Lyon
and Cipriano Montfar, among others. Only a few of them directly par-
ticipated in secondary or higher education, either as professors in the
Seminario Conciliar, schools, and the Universidad Nacional, or as writers,
whose books were read in some of the courses taught at institutions
offering these levels of education.31
A particularly interesting example of the flexible integration of former Jesuits

into nineteenth-century society is Basilio Manuel Arrillaga, who devoted him-
self to politics and teaching. Shortly after the suppression, Arrillaga became
part of the printing board of Mexico Citys council which sponsored the dis-
semination of printed material that favored the independence movement.32
He was later elected court deputy, and after the triumph of Iturbide, he was
appointed private tutor to Iturbides children. He also served at the synod of
the archdiocese of Mexico and the diocese of Puebla, and was chancellor of
the Colegio Carolino of Puebla and of the Universidad Nacional.33 More

30 Gutirrez, Jesuitas, 60. See also Decorme I:193.
32 dhcj, 1:244.
33 Ibid.
importantly, in 1845 he was appointed superior of the dispersed province and

finally made provincial in 1851, even though the Society had not been formally
reinstated.
Months after the second suppression of the Jesuits, Mexicos independence
was finalized in September 1821. This aggravated the situation of the clergy in
general, but mostly that of the regular clergy, whose members, including of
course the Jesuits, had to learn to live outside community and find new liveli-
hoods in this tumultuous climate. From that moment on, a controversy broke
out between political parties over the need for the presence of the Jesuits. As
expected, the conservative faction called for their return, while those with
more liberal tendencies felt otherwise and sought to separate the church from
politics and education. In that nationalistic climate, it is interesting to note
how the Jesuits were deemed to be legitimate within the emerging field of pub-
lic opinion. The order provoked differing responses, including requests for his-
tory books that granted them a central place in the history of independent
Mexico. The requests were rejected at this stage since they lacked the support
of the liberal group in power, and because the poor state of the economy was
not conducive to the idea of the order returning to its former possessions.
The Nationalist Construction of the Jesuit Image
Two of the most important Mexican historians during the nineteenth century,
Lucas Alamnpaladin of conservative historiographyand Carlos Mara
Bustamante, who had ambiguous ideological positions, developed, in 1836 and
1852 respectively, an image of the Jesuits as forefathers of Mexican indepen-
dence, and once the order was restored, as supporters of the 1814 constitution.
Facing suspicion that the Jesuits were part of the Profesa Conspiracy
carried out by monarchists against the insurgents and the constitution of
CdizAlamn defended the Jesuits in the following terms:
In the excitement of the times, the situation was discussed in every con-
versation, but there was no intention [from the Jesuits] to plan or carry
out a revolution, only to celebrate some gatherings held in Dr. D. Matas
Monteagudos lodging located in San Felipe Neris chapel in Mexico City,
which was formerly the professed house of the Jesuits thus commonly
referred to as La Profesa. The Society of Jesus did not participate in the
gatherings as a religious body because they occupied themselves exclu-
sively in the exercise of their ministry. However, some of the most respect-
able people from the city assisted and saw with horror the ideas expressed
in the courts on religious matters, especially the ones stated in Cdiz, and
wanted at all costs to resist their propagation and execution in the
country.34
Bustamante defended the Jesuits as victims of damaging circumstances out-

side the order:
Once reestablished to the throne, Ferdinand VII believed (I dont know if

wisely), that he would consolidate his control by reestablishing the
Society of Jesus in his domains; and because of this decision the order
reappeared in Mexico with great splendor on May 19th, 1815. However, in
1820 the courts in Madrid decreed the suppression of the Society on
September 6th, and Viceroy Count of Venadito promulgated the decree
on January 26th, 1821. The governmental troops entered the colleges of S.
Pedro and of S. Pablo and S. Ildefonso to expel the Jesuits []. These
blows, given with such injustice and lack of political sense, accelerated
the consummation of independence.35
Independence meant the Jesuits had to learn new ways of living. Thus, as we
have seen, various apologetic texts were published, such as a set of volumes
titled Defensa de la Compaa de Jess [Defense of the Society of Jesus], pub-
lished in 1841 and financed by the printer Juan Surez Navarro. Although they
did not have a major impact, such books rekindled interest in the order in a
certain sector of the Mexican population.
The Second Restoration (1853) and the Third Suppression (1856)
In the 1840s, Mexico went through one of the worst political crisis of the cen-
tury and as a result it lost half of its northern territory. In that climate of
uncertainty it is not surprising that the president in office, General Antonio
Lpez de Santa Anna, promulgated a decree to restore the Jesuit missions in
the north of the country on 21 June 1843. The decree limited the establishment
of the order to the provinces of California, New Mexico, Sonora, Sinaloa,
34 Lucas Alamn, Historia de Mjico, desde los primeros movimientos en el ao 1808 hasta la
poca presente, (Imprenta de J.M. Lara: Mxico, 1852), 5:5051.
35 Carlos Mara de Bustamante, Suplemento a la historia de los tres siglos de Mxico durante
el gobierno espaol escrita por el padre Andrs Cavo (Imprenta de la testamentaria de D.
Alejandro Valds: Mxico, 1836), 3:4.
Durango, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Texas, and established a clear objective:

to civilize the barbarian tribes and to contribute to the safety of the terri-
tory where the wandering tribes resided.36 As a governmental decree, the
request for the reestablishment of the Jesuit missions was a clear political
strategy aimed at strengthening the public authority of the depopulated bor-
der states. In this regard, Alejandro Cancino explains how Santa Anna used
the requests from residents: Several authorities from those provinces, and
many citizens who distinguished themselves as supporters of liberal princi-
ples, have recommended this action as capable of contributing to the safety
of the territory.37
This author suggests that the mind behind the creation and promulgation
of the decree had not actually been Santa Anna, but the historian and politi-
cian Carlos Mara de Bustamante.38 To support his argument he quotes a frag-
ment of a letter from 1843 sent by Bustamante to Superior General Jan Roothan.
In the letter, Bustamante announced with happiness and pleasure that after
two years during which his request was denied four times he finally obtained
the decree, and it at last came into force.39
Even though the decree was never implemented, President Santa Anna
allowed eventually the reestablishment of the Jesuits in 1853. Until then, only
four priests survived from the province dissolved in 1820: Basilio Arrillaga,
Ignacio Lyon, Ignacio Lerdo, and Luis Gutirrez del Corral.40 Despite their
advanced age, they were able to restore the order in Mexico with reinforce-
ments of priests who arrived from Europe and South America. At this time,
education in the country was in a process of transformation. The aim was that
the new educational projectwhich included recently established higher lev-
els of educationshould be fully managed and controlled by the state. In the
Colegio de San Gregorio, for example, higher level classes were immediately
36 Alejandro P. Cancino, Los rastros de las misiones jesuitas en el noroeste de Mxico, in

Las misiones antes y despus de la restauracin de la Compaa de Jess. Continuidades y
cambios, eds. Emanuele Colombo, Leonor Correa, and Guillermo Wilde (Mexico City:
Universidad Iberoamericana: fortcoming), 18.
37 Cancino, Los rastros de las misiones, 18. See aslo Dubln, Lozano, Legislacin mexicana,
4:465466 (Decree 2584).
38 Cancino, Los rastros de las misiones, 20.
39 Cancino, Los rastros de las misiones, 21. See also Letter of Carlos Mara de Bustamante to
Superior General Jan Roothan, Mxico, 24 June 1843 in arsi, Mexicana 1001 (18161853)
fascculo III, d. 25. The first letter from Bustamante to Roothan is dated 18 November 1841:
arsi, Mexicana 1001 (18161853), fasc. III, d. 4.
40 Cuevas, Historia, 277.
established.41 In order to do this, Father Francisco Sauri from Guatemala was

recruited, for he was regarded as the appropriate person to implement every
modern secondary education improvement in Mexico.42
Despite the social needs that were used as arguments in favor of the reestab-
lishment of the order, the restored Jesuits did not last long. The reformist ideas
of total separation of church and state were taking root in Mexico, and the
liberals supported reformist ideas by trying to diminish the power of the clergy.
Jesuits became the target of the liberals, both for being a religious institution
and because the Colegio de San Gregorio collected rents from lands that were
considered property of the state.
Early in 1854, under the banner of the Ayutla Revolutionled by Juan
lvareza civil war broke out in the south of the country. The following year,
on 9 August 1855, the Plan of Ayutla triumphed and Santa Anna was forced to
leave the country. An apparent calm reigned in Mexico City until 13 August
when a mutiny of common people erupted, supposedly promoted by the lib-
eral party.43 In this climate of violenceDecorme commentsJesuits were
accused of harboring pro-Santa Anna officials, particularly in the Colegio de
San Gregorio.44 Under the public gaze of the press, Jesuits began to feel pressure
from the liberal party to leave some of their properties, even before the third
suppression took place. When the liberal party returned to power, a new decree
suppressing the Society of Jesus was promulgated in Puebla on 7 June 1856.
In May of the same year a clause to annul Santa Annas decree for the rees-
tablishment of the Society was presented to the constitutional congress. The
matter came to a vote on 6 June with sixty-eight votes in favor of the suppres-
sion and fifteen against.45 Again, the Jesuits were displaced and their proper-
ties confiscated.
Settlement of the Society of Jesus in Mexico
After the Reform War, with the French occupation of 1863, the conservative
party came to power and religious communities began to be tolerated once
41 They called modern secondary or modern preparatory the two courses they started
teaching at San Gregorio, which, as Ros mentions, offered Latin grammar, English and
French, as well as rounded a more integral education of the students with drawing, gym-
nastics and music. See Ros, Ausencia y presencia, 312.
42 Ros, Ausencia y presencia, 306. See also Decorme, Historia de la Compaa, 2:6263.
44 Ibid.
more. The regency that preceded the Mexican empire of Maximilian of

Habsburg had returned the Colegio de San Ildefonso to the order, and the
Jesuits who were scattered all over the country began to return there. The
school opened its doors again in 1864. However, with the defeat of Maximilian
and the withdrawal of the French troops in 1867, President Benito Jurez
ordered the imprisonment of all those who had participated in the govern-
ment of the deposed emperor, including Father Arrillaga.
The triumph of Jurez involved the introduction of the Laws of Reform
and the Jesuits were again stripped of their possessions. However, the order
was not dissolved; instead it was completely separated from politics. In spite of
the fact that the old novitiate in Tepotzotln was a nationalized property, the
Jesuits were allowed to reopen it in 1870 since it was under the control of the
Vatican.46
In the 1870s, a period of security began for the Society of Jesus in Mexico.
During the Porfiriato, the order was allowed to slowly return to some of its old
schools and to take charge of some churches, such as Santa Brgida, to which
the superior provincial moved from Tepotzotln, where he had resided since
the rule of Jurez. During that decade the Jesuits also founded residences in
Puebla, Guadalajara, Zamora (which became a novitiate in 1882), Guanajuato,
San Andrs Chalchicomula, Jalapa, Morelia, Orizaba, Oaxaca, and Parras.47
The residences were usually funded with the support of families who appreci-
ated the old Jesuit colleges. However, most of them only had one priest, so they
could not remain open for long. Apart from offering spiritual ministries, these
residences were used to promote Marian congregations. Their main work was
developed through their schools. Because of the governmental requirements
and in accordance with the standards of the time, science and language classes
were taught in addition to the traditional subjects of the Jesuit educational
system, such as philosophy, religion, and grammar.
In the 1880s and the 1890s, the order was sufficiently consolidated to restart
its missionary activity in rural areas of the country, albeit in a limited way.
Itinerant missions were conducted in the diocese of Oaxaca, and later around
Sonora and Coahuila. In general, the main focus of the missions was preaching
and hearing confessions. Marriages were blessed and mutual and public for-
giveness to enemies was promoted.48 The government always monitored
Jesuit activity and in a way it continued its existence because of governmental
46 Ibid., 191.
47 Ibid., 221.
48 Ibid., 246.
approval; by 1900, the Mexican province had 245 members.49 However, the
Society of Jesus could not continue to develop steadily due to the outbreak of
the Mexican revolution in 1910.
From 1914 to 1920, the Society of Jesus experimented a period of confusion
and instability. In the heat of the war, the troops under the command of gener-
als Villa and Carranza plundered the properties of the church and sometimes
arrested priests, including the Jesuits. The military closed the schools, the novi-
tiate, and the Filosofado of the Society. Most Jesuits (260 of the total of 330 in
1914) had to flee the country.
The provincial of the Society during this period, Marcelo Renaud, was forced
to live first in Salvador, Cuba and then in Texas. In February 1920, Father Camilo
Crivelli was appointed provincial and a new period of stability began. Unitl
then there was no Jesuit school operating in the country, but starting in 1920
schools began to open, recovering their properties.50
Epilogue: A Research Agenda
It is important to reflect on future research agendas for writing the history of

the Society of Jesus and its restoration in Mexico. In this regard I would like to
make two observations. First, it is possible to write a general history of the res-
toration of the Society of Jesus based on the construction of its own identity.
Historical research of this kind would have to be based on the documents pro-
duced by the order itself.
The other possibility is to write various historical works which integrate the
topics and problematics of contemporary historiography, in terms of national
or regional history or based on particular subjects such as specific practices or
ministries (preaching, giving the Spiritual Exercises, missions, education,
Marian congregations, etc.). The field is almost untouched, and works on any
of these topics would be very desirable.
49 Ibid., 267.
Part 6
Africa

chapter 26
Early Departure, Late Return

An Overview of the Jesuits in Africa during the Suppression and after
the Restoration
Festo Mkenda, S.J.
Jesuits quickly reached Africa after the Society was founded in 1540. On their
way to Asia, Francis Xavier (15061552) and his two companions spent over six
months in Mozambique between 1541 and 1542. Fr. Joo Nunes Barreto (1517
1562), who would later become patriarch of Ethiopia, was already working
amongst slaves in Morocco in 1548, at the same time as another promising mis-
sion was beginning in the Congo-Angola region. By 1561, Fr. Gonalo da Silveira
(15261561) had, at the cost of his life, tried to evangelize the reluctant kingdom
of the Monomotapa in southern Africa. Ethiopia had even received a bishop,
who, with four other Jesuits, held on to an impossible mission in the fabled
Land of Prester John. As far as the Jesuits global mission was concerned,
therefore, Africa would seem to have started on a par with the rest of the world,
if not actually favored by the sons of St. Ignatius.
This Jesuit enthusiasm for Africa lasted until the suppression, although their
actual presence on the continent was always intermittent. Their mission was
often viewed as one of evangelizing and civilizing,1 and thus fitted well into
the more comprehensive imperial program of the expansionist nations of
Europe in those years. Africa was part of the global domain that was Portugals
by papal decree, and that tiny imperial nation sanctioned and guaranteed all
Catholic missions on the worlds third largest continent. A general missionary
view at the time, which the Jesuits espoused, was that Africans could be turned
into Christians only after they had been made subject to Portugal.2 Conse
quently, the success or failure of Jesuit efforts in Africa depended heavily on
Portuguese political, economic, and military strength. Unfortunately for the
Jesuits, Portugals global fortunes declined considerably in the seventeenth
century. This might partly explain the Jesuits dismal performance in Africa in
those early days. During the first half of the eighteenth century, Portuguese
influence was largely limited to the eastern and western parts of southern
1 Francisco Rodrigues, Histria da Companhia de Jesus na Assistcia de Portugal (Livraria

Apostolado da Imprensa: Porto, 1950).
2 W.F. Rea, Agony on the Zambezi: The First Christian Mission to Southern Africa and Its
Failure, 15801759, Zambezia 1/2 (1970): 48.

454 Festo Mkenda
Africa, with todays Mozambique and Angola as focal points. These were the pre-
suppression Jesuit strongholds on the continent. This link between a political
empire that was in crisis and a religious mission that should have withstood
political tremors had serious ramifications for the Jesuits. Since the Society was
first suppressed in Portugal and its dominions in 1759some fourteen years
before its universal suppression by a papal brief of 1773Jesuits had to leave
Africa much earlier than they were exiled from many other parts of the world.
Historically, the early Jesuit missions in Africa have been under-researched
even, and especially, by the Jesuits themselves. Having been planned and
directed mainly from India, these African missions have always been treated as
a sub-section of the dominant narrative of the Jesuits in south Asia. With the
exception of Ethiopia, which has received some consolidated attention that,
once in a while, amounts to whole chapters, the African missions have often
been dispatched in a sentence or two in nearly all the recent tomes on the his-
tory of the Society of Jesus.3 This state of affairs makes any work on the suppres-
sion of the Jesuits in Africa ground-breaking. Based on disjointed information
gathered from various secondary sources, however, this paper is more of a
pointer towards ground that still needs to be broken than a comprehensive nar-
rative. In the following pages, I piece together elements that provide an overview
of the state of the Society in Mozambique and Angola on the eve of the suppres-
sion, together with an analysis of the impact of that religious clampdown on the
missions in these parts of Africa. To treat the ending of the early Jesuit missions
in southern Africa will be, in a way to repeat an old questionfirst raised by
David Livingstone and, to date, yet to receive a compelling answeras to why
Christianity so completely vanished in the lands the Jesuits evangelized in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The concluding overview of
the trickling return of Jesuits to Africa after the restoration of the Society in 1814
reveals how some of the places to which the Jesuits returned constituted com-
pletely new mission fields which required primary evangelization.
Jesuits in Mozambique before the Suppression
From 1560 onwards, the Jesuits became a significant missionary force in

Mozambique. However, the mission that was suppressed in 1759 was their
3 With reference to the early missions in Africa, there are a few sentences in Thomas
J. Campbells The Jesuits: 15341921 (Milford House: Boston, 1971) and a few paragraphs in
William V. Bangerts A History of the Society of Jesus (The Institute of Jesuit Sources: St. Louis,
1972), while James Brodricks The Progress of the Jesuits (155679) (Loyola University Press:
Chicago, 1986) has a chapter dedicated to Prester Johns Business.
Early Departure, Late Return 455
second venture in the region, not the first one that had seen the martyrdom of
Silveira. The only link between the two missions is probably the fact that the
Silveira incident was one of several factors that prompted the Portuguese seri-
ously to consider conquering the southern African interior,4 and the second
Jesuit mission rode on the back of an expedition that was designed for that
purpose.5 Commissioned from Goa, the mission was opened in 1610. The Jesuit
presence remained vibrant in the Mozambique region throughout the seven-
teenth century. In 1667, for example, they managed six out of sixteen mission
stations that were located in the main centers of Sena, Tete, and Sofala. The
stations included schools in Tete and Sena and on the island of Mozambique.6
There was also a hospital on the island, which was entrusted to the Jesuits by
the king of Portugal from 1647. It would be managed by them until 1681 when it
was taken over by the Brothers of St. John of God. A Jesuit college was built on
the same island in 1640 and a seminary was launched at Sena in 1697.
Established mainly to serve Portuguese children and African princes, the semi-
nary is said to have been the first attempt at multi-racial education in the
African interior.7 Furthermore, the Jesuits owned houses and mission stations
in Cabaceira, Quelimane, Luabo, Caia, Chemba, Tambara, and Marangue,
which they regularly visited. Located much further into the interior, Tete had
particular strategic importance. The college at Tete, which opened in 1611,
served a vast area that included the Makaranga community and other peoples
under Monomotapas suzerainty. From Tete, the Jesuits also sent missionaries
beyond the borders of todays Mozambique and successfully opened stations
in present-day Zimbabwe.8
In order to sustain their missions, the Jesuits participated fully in the local
economy of Mozambique. As William Rea notes in his comprehensive study of
4 Edgar Prestage and A.P. Newton, The Portuguese in South Africa, in The Cambridge History
of the British Empire: (Volume VIII) South Africa, Rhodesia and the Protectorates, eds. A.P.
Newton, E.A. Benians, and Eric A. Walker (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1936), 94,
9798.
5 George McCall Theal, A History of Africa South of the Zambesi: From the Settlement of the
Portuguese at Sofala in September 1505 to the Conquest of the Cape Colony by the British in
September 1795, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (George Allen & Unwin: London, 1916), 1:403.
6 Theal, Africa South of the Zambesi, vol. i, 433; idem, Records of South-Eastern Africa: Collected
in Various Libraries and Archive Departments in Europe, 9 volumes. (William Clowes and Sons:
London, 18981903), 3:488.
7 W.F. Rea, Missionary Endeavour in Southern Rhodesia (unknown publication details,
c.1962), 6.
8 J. Vaz de Carvalho, Mozambique in dhcj; Jos Augusto Alves de Souza, Os Jesutas em
Moambique, 15411991: No Cinquentenrio do Qearto Periodo da Nossa Misso (Libraria
Apostolado da Imprensa: Braga, 1991), 6465.
456 Festo Mkenda
the missions economics,9 the Jesuits did not rely greatly on the dwindling sti-
pends from the Portuguese crown, but earned an income from commerce and
from agriculture in their prazosenormous estates that were worked by slaves
to produce corn and stock, or that were leased to tenants who paid rent.
Aprazo belonging to the Jesuits at Tete is said to have been one of the largest
of the crown lands.10 With seventeen such prazos across the region, the Jesuits
were among the most prominent landholders and owned an equally large
number of slaves who worked the lands.11 While these activities made the
Jesuits independent from crown stipends, they rendered their mission com-
pletely dependent on the manner in which the Portuguese economy was orga-
nized in Mozambique.
In addition to their commitments to the mission and its economic suste-
nance, the Jesuits also occupied an influential position in the Portuguese
administration of Mozambique. Their familiarity with the country and its peo-
ple made them knowledgeable about political and commercial matters. For
this reason, the government sought their advice and entrusted important busi-
ness to them. At one point the Jesuits were contracted to repair an entire for-
tress because they were more likely to see the work carried out properly than
the civil or military officials. Even financiers who lent money to the Portuguese
in Mozambique did so through Jesuits, whom they considered to be more reli-
able than their colonial compatriots in the colony. The Jesuits had thus earned
recognition as the most refined and most highly educated men of the day, for
which reason they were naturally regarded as the most competent to give
advice in all matters.12 Even as late as 1720, the Portuguese viceroy in India
would still entrust to the Jesuits in Mozambique the task of verifying details of
the customs due to the crown treasury in Lisbon.13
The government in Portugal also relied on Jesuit reports from its possessions
in eastern Africa, not least because it received little information of value from
its own officers on the ground. In the seventeenth century, Portugals officials
and subjects in Mozambique became so independent from the mother coun-
try that they hardly bothered to advance collected tributes or commercial prof-
its to Lisbon. Against this backdrop, Jesuit opinion acquired significant political
value. When the viceroy realized that his own dispatches provoked no reaction
9 William Francis Rea, The Economics of the Zambezi Missions: 15801759 (ihsi: Rome, 1976).
10 M.D.D. Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambesi (Longman: London, 1973), 89.
11 Rea, Agony on the Zambezi, 50.
12 Theal, History of S. Africa, 1:441442.
13 See George McCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa: Collected in Various Libraries and
Archive Departments in Europe 9 vols. (William Clowes and Sons: London, 18981903), 5:84.
at home, he sent a Jesuit, Fr. Andr Furtado, to impress on the government that
Portugal must forget about her possessions in eastern Africa unless it was will-
ing to enforce its authority by military force.14 A widely cited 1667 report by Fr.
Manuel Barreto, then superior of the Jesuit college at Sena, advised the
Portuguese authorities on all manner of topics, including reasons for making
his mission territory an archbishopric or a patriarchate, the necessity of con-
quering Madagascar before the French, and when best to launch a military
attack to subdue Africans in the interior of Zambezi.15 Moreover, if Monomotapa
were to rise again in rebellion, opined the Jesuit, that would provide an excuse
for annexing his country and subdividing the land among the Portuguese, who
would be obliged to pay quit rent and tithe at the same time.16 Writing in 1916,
George McCall Theal concluded that these Jesuit reports from Mozambique
were the clearest, best written, and far the most interesting documents now in
existence upon the country, and added: Compared with the ordinary state
papers, they are as polished marble to unhewn stone.17 Indeed Theals vast
collection shows just how indispensable Jesuit records are for the history of
southern Africa from the sixteenth century onwards.18
Jesuits in Angola before the Suppression
The Jesuit presence on the western side of Portugals southern Africa was
equally ubiquitous. After their earlier initiatives in the broader Congo region,
the Jesuits finally focused their attention on an area that roughly corresponds
to todays Angola. In 1560 four of their members joined a Portuguese recon-
naissance team to the country. This crucial mission was headed by Paulo Dias
de Novais (c.15101589), a grandson of the famous Bartholomew Dias (c.1451
1500). The first team encountered many challenges, which included imprison-
ment by the Ngolathe local king from whose title we get the name
Angolaand thus achieved almost nothing.19 Missionary work was only pos-
sible from 1575 after the Portuguese had subdued Angola by force. Exploiting
14 Theal, History of S. Africa, 1:435436; idem, Records of South-Eastern Africa, 8:501.

15 Full report in Portuguese original and English translation printed in Theal, Records of
South-Eastern Africa, 3:436495.
16 Prestage and Newton, The Portuguese in S. Africa, 100102.
18 Most of the works of George McCall Theal can be accessed in digital form at at https://
archive.org/details/geschiedenisvan00theagoog.
19 Prestage and Newton, The Portuguese in S. Africa, 96; See Hugh Thomas, The Slave
Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 14401870 (Picador: London, 1997), 131.
458 Festo Mkenda
the protection afforded by this conquest, the Jesuits established themselves in

the mission and operated from two main centers: Mbanza, later renamed So
Salvador after a Jesuit church that was dedicated to the Savior, and Luanda,
reported to have had up to 8,000 Christians in 1593.20
Like their companions in Mozambique, Jesuits in Angola remained close to
the Portuguese administration. They also carried out works beyond the field of
evangelization. For example, they established an association at Luanda for
assisting shipwrecked sailors who were frequently cast on the coast,21 and they
were active in commerce as well.22 They collected rent from tenants who used
their lands or occupied their well-constructed stone houses.23
Unlike in Mozambique, however, Jesuits in Angola were more focused on
ministering to Africans. By the seventeenth century their mission had seen sig-
nificant progress in the interior. They paid great attention to packaging their
message in a manner that was suitable for the indigenous African populations.
Fr. Mateus Cardoso (15841625) translated the Cartilla de la Sagrada Doctrina
[Ideas of Christian Doctrine] into Kikongo in 1624, to the excitement of many
a local chieftain. Another catechism by Fr. Antnio do Couto (d. 1666) was pub-
lished in Kimbundu in 1642.24 Moreover, the Jesuits established a network of
Christian villages in the interior of Angola. Ordinarily tended by Angolan and
Portuguese catechists, the villages were regularly visited by the Jesuits. One
Fr.Pedro Tavares (15911676) is said to have continually travelled to supervise
courses for as many as 20,000 catechumens in 1624.25 Moreover, the Jesuits
established sodalities to suit nearly every devotional disposition in Angola: the
Corpo de Deus for the more learned citizens, the Onze Mil Viagens for students,
and the Senhora do Rosrio for mature Africans and slaves, to name but a few.
With their missionary numbers stabilized at about eleven priests and five
brothers through most of the century, the Jesuits sustained many of these
ministries well into the eighteenth century.26
20 J. Vaz de Carvalho, Angola in dhcj 1:171.

21 B.N., The Jesuits: Their Foundation and History. 2 vols. (Burns & Oates: London, 1879), 2:147.
22 See David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa: Including a
Sketch of Sixteen Years Residence in the Interior of Africa (Ward, Lock & Co. Limited:
London, 1857), 29.
23 Vaz de Carvalho, Angola, 172.
24 Ibid., 174.
25 John Baur, 200 Years of Christianity in Africa: An African Church History, 2nd edition
(Paulines Publications Africa: Nairobi, 2009), 7374; Manuel Nunes Gabriel, Os Jesutas:
Na Primeira Evangelizao de Angola (Biblioteca Evangelizao e Culturas: Cucujes,
1993), 4750.
26 Vaz de Carvalho, Angola, 173; Gabriel, Os Jesutas, 6970.
Besides catechizing and offering pastoral care, the Jesuits in Angola assumed
the task of civilizing the people, which took the form of education. A Jesuit col-
lege was built in So Salvador in 1623 and ran until 1669. Established decades
before the seminary in Tete, Mozambique, and catering to a mixed population,
this college was probably the earliest institution where African and Portuguese
children were allowed to learn together. Another college in Luanda became even
more famous. Named Colgio de Jesus, it opened its doors to students in 1622 and
served thousands of children until the morning after the suppression. Students
from the college assisted in giving catechetical instructions in the Kimbundu lan-
guage, which they understood well.27 Attached to the Colgio de Jesus was a tech-
nical school that served the same mixed population. In 1655, the school was in
excellent condition, with one of its two cloisters said to be as big as the University
of vora. Seven Jesuits and five lay missionaries still served at this college in 1754.28
The crowning glory of Jesuit achievement in Angola during these years was
arguably their main church in Luanda. Together with the Colgio de Jesus, the
Igreja de Jesus was erected on a piece of land that Dias de Novais gave to the Jesuits
as a token of gratitude for their services. Its construction began in 1612 and contin-
ued for twenty-four years, culminating in a magnificent edificewith well-
adorned chapels, altarpieces, paintings, and columnswhich was then described
as the best and largest concrete structure in the southern hemisphere. To show its
centrality in the imagination of the Jesuits in Angola, even before its completion
the church housed large celebrations on the occasion of the canonizations of
Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier in 1622. Moreover, its Baroque style and its
very name, A Igreja de Jesus [the Church of Jesus], seem to have been designed to
mirror the Jesuits mother church of Il Ges in Rome.29 Although this church,
together with the school, was briefly taken over and used by the Dutch during
their occupation of south-west Africa (16411648), it was regained by the Jesuits,
who looked after it until the eve of their suppression and expulsion from Angola.30
The Suppression and its Impact on Mozambique and Angola
When discussing the suppression of the Society of Jesus and its impact on the
missions in Africa, it is important to understand the state of these missions
27 Ibid., 47.
28 Vaz de Carvalho, Angola, 173; Rodrigues, Histria da Companhia de Jesu, 226.
29 Maria Amlia, Angola Field Trip: Seven Historic Churches Tour, February 2009, on http://
angolafieldgroup.com/historic-tours/, accessed 13 January 2014.
30 Gabriel, Os Jesutas, 72.
460 Festo Mkenda
in the middle of the eighteenth century. From the foregoing overview of

Mozambique and Angola, it can be confidently stated that, by the beginning of
the eighteenth century, the Jesuits had established themselves fairly well in
these southern parts of Africa. Nevertheless, theirs was a struggling mission,
and an established presence did not imply successful evangelization. A 1751
assessment by the provincial superior in Goa reveals how poor the harvest had
been after more than a century of labor in Mozambique. Fr. Joo de Castro
(d.1761) wrote:
I do not count among the missions of my province that of the rivers of

Sena, where all that is effected in Gods service is the baptizing of a few
children in years of famine and disease, when there is pestilence in those
lands. As to the adults, although they show no difficulty in receiving holy
baptism, they have very great difficulty in leading Catholic lives and
observing the precepts of our holy creed, to which they never conform, as
the experience of many years has shown, the good doctrine taught them
only resulting in greater condemnation of their souls and excessive grief
of those who labour to lead them to heaven.31
Neither could the Jesuits show much economic fruit from their decades of
material labor. Overreliance on their imperial backer remained their Achilles
heel, and made them vulnerable to every Portuguese stress. In the early 1700s,
Portugals economy was in decline and, as a result, so were its military power
and imperial opportunities. King Joo V, who reigned from 1706 to 1750, was
later described as a monarch of no importance.32 It was during his reign that
Portugal lost practically all her eastern African possessions north of the
Zambezi with the exception of the Mozambique region.33 The Jesuits watched
their own economic support structures collapse within the same period.
King Jos I succeeded the ineffectual Joo V and immediately identified
strength in the man he named as prime ministerSebastio Jos de Carvalho e
Mello, better known as the marquis de Pombal, or simply Pombal (16991782).
31 Joo de Castro, Account of the Missions of the Company of Jesus in the Province of Goa,
with the Number of Missionaries, Catechists, and Christians Resident in Them, printed
in Portuguese original and English translation in Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa,
5:210211.
32 Theal, History of S. Africa, 1:450; also see Cone de Carnota, The Marquis of Pombal, 2nd
edition (Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dye: London, 1871), 1017.
33 Justus Strandes, The Portuguese Period in East Africa (East Africa Literature Bureau:
Nairobi, 1961), 255.
Pombals overall economic policy was to rebuild the mother country, which
entailed favoring large Lisbon companies.34 For him, the remaining Portuguese
possessions in Africa were of so little value that he did nothing to raise them
from the abyss in which he had found them. Local chieftains in Mozambique
took advantage of the situation to challenge Portuguese authority and claim
more freedom for themselves. In a 1753 engagement, the Portuguese lost half of
the military force they had been able to muster, together with several prazos
and the desire to fight on.35 To make matters worse, the exportation of slaves
from the eastern African region was beginning to be regarded as more profit-
able than their use in local production, a change that had a devastating impact
on the prazo economy upon which the Jesuits depended.36 These develop-
ments shook the foundations of the missions in the region and left the Jesuits
weakened even before their actual suppression. In their final years, the Jesuits
retreated from most of their stations and concentrated themselves at their
headquarters at Sena and at their magnificent college on the island of
Mozambique.
In spite of the impression David Livingstone gave of riches of the fraternity,
which were immense,37 there is ample evidence of the Mozambique missions
financial crisis during its final years. At the time of the expulsion, all Jesuit
houses were in debt, with the exception of Sena which had a balance of 3,000
guilders (about 250 pounds).38 Rea arrives at the conclusion that, Even had
they not been driven out by Pombal, and even had their expulsion not been
followed fourteen years later by the general suppression of the Order, it is
doubtful whether under the circumstances their prazos and their missions
could have survived.39
Besides being exposed to similar political and economic challenges in con-
nection with their reliance on Portugal, the sister missions in Angola felt the
aftershocks of imperial disputes from as far away as Latin America. Seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Luanda was essentially a slave port that served Brazil.
To the infuriation of Lisbon officialdom, a handful of Jesuits in Brazil had the
temerity to embarrass even their own companions by questioning the morality
34 Sanderson Beck, Congo, Angola, and Mozambique 17001950, on http://www.san.beck

.org/16-13-Congo,Angola,Mozambique.html, accessed 8 January 2014; also see Carnota,
Marquis of Pombal, 3940.
35 Theal, History of S. Africa, 1:450, 453; see Sousa, Os Jesutas em Moambique, 66.
36 Rea, Records of the Zambezi, 171.
37 Livingstone, Missionary Travels, 551.
38 Rea, Agony on the Zambezi, 51.
39 Rea, Records of the Zambezi Mission, 171.
462 Festo Mkenda
of enslaving Africans.40 In Angola itself, the daring few (for several Jesuits
made no bones about keeping slaves themselves) were called meddlers and
trouble-makers.41 Their opposition to the shameful trade was included on the
list of supposed Jesuit misdemeanors, marginally adding to a concocted argu-
ment for their total expulsion from the Portuguese Empire.42
The African missions were casualties, first of a malignant memorandum
that was addressed to Pope Clement XIII on 20 April 1759,43 then of a subse-
quent Portuguese decree of expulsion in the same year. Given the lack of
sources, George Theal found it reasonable to assume that at least some Jesuits
in Mozambique may have escaped into the interior of the region, thus obeying
the command of God rather than that of human beings.44 Today it is known
that most Jesuits were literally pulled out of their houses and for some time
were incarcerated at Quelimane.45 Their properties were confiscated by the
state,46 and they were afterwards shipped, first to Goa, where they were impris-
oned alongside their companions in India, and later to Portugal. A number of
them died at sea while the rest arrived to continue their incarceration in
Lisbon.
The Jesuits in Luanda suffered a similar fate. Officials in Angola responded
swiftly to the order of expulsion, and the Jesuits at the Colgio de Jesus were
surrounded and held under strict confinement until they could be repatriated.
In July 1760, most of them were shipped to Lisbon, from where they were later
exiled to Italy among their companions from Portugal and its dominions.47
Five other Jesuits, probably brought from elsewhere, still languished in an
Angolan prison in 1768.48
Even though the missions were already small and underperforming, the
expulsion had a devastating impact on the prospects for Christianity in south-
ern Africa. Initially, the Dominicans took over some of the Jesuit stations in
Mozambique. However, the Dominicans never fully replaced their harassed
religious cousins. To make matters worse, they too were expelled from south-
eastern Africa in 1775. Just eight secular priests replaced the Dominicans,
40 See Thomas, The Slave Trade, 137, 147148, 364, 449.

41 See Dauril Alden, The Making of An Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire,
and Beyond, 15401750 (Stanford University Press: California, 1996), 513ff.
42 Beck, Congo, Angola and Mozambique.
43 Carnota, Marquis of Pombal, 126128.
45 Sousa, Os Jesutas em Moambique, 66.
47 Vaz de Carvalho, Angola, 174; Rodrigues, Histria da Companhia de Jesus, 4/1:238.
48 Rodrigues, Histria da Companhia de Jesus, 4/1:244.
dealing a serious blow to the little flock that still existed in the region.49 On the
other side, King Jos I offered Luandas Igreja de Jesus to the local bishop to be
used as a cathedral. The great edifice was left gradually to deteriorate. Only in
1953 did it receive renovation, which made it suitable for a military chaplaincy
and, later, a cathedral once more.50
The blow to the Jesuits educational ministry, which was their missions
most important element, was fatal. The expulsion destroyed a sprouting cul-
ture of learning. The Jesuits had kept three schools running in the Mozambique
region even when the whole mission was struggling. The college on the island
of Mozambique was, in fact, a large institutional structure and still counted
among the very few buildings of importance in 1911.51 After the expulsion, this
building was converted into a residence for the Portuguese governor.52 In
Luanda, the Jesuit college was immediately divided into two parts, one to shel-
ter the bishop of Angola, the other to house a modest seminary. The little
teaching that still took place was by law conducted in Portuguese and Latin, to
the great detriment of the local languages which the Jesuits had promoted.
Anew governor came to office in Angola in 1772 and ordered all religious mate-
rial that existed in African languages be destroyed.53 In the last decades of the
eighteenth century, the Colgio de Jesus was little more than a ruin. Describing
the loss, James Duffy observes how, for 250 years, the Jesuits had given the col-
ony whatever dim enlightenment it possessed and, on occasions, were the
conscience of Angola and the only buffer between the African and his oppres-
sor.54 With the suppression, all that was gone.
For almost a century the Jesuits were reduced to a memory in Africa.
Nevertheless, it was one that impressed many who visited the region in the
nineteenth century. The Protestant missionary David Livingstone, for example,
ordinarily scathing in his attacks on matters Catholic, had a lot to say about the
positive footprints left behind by the expelled Jesuits. He identified more than
twelve abandoned churches in the Congo-Angola region, which he believed
had belonged to the Capuchins and the Jesuits. Declaring the latter to have
been wiser in their generation than we, he greatly admired their missionary
methods in Africa, especially the employment of each member in a field in
which he was most likely to excel, which served to guarantee economic

50 Amlia, Angola Field Trip.
51 See Mozambique in The Catholic Encyclopaedia (1911 edition).
53 Beck, Congo, Angola and Mozambique; Amlia, Angola Field Trip.
54 James Duffy, Portugal in Africa (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1962), 66.
464 Festo Mkenda
sustainability for their missions. He who was great in barter was sent in search
of ivory and gold-dust, said Livingstone, so that while in the course of per-
forming the religious acts of his mission to distant tribes, he found the means
of aiding effectually the brethren whom he had left at the central settlement.55
The observations of the great missionary also point to the dividends of Jesuit
(and Capuchin) labor in African education. When he visited Ambacaan
important place in former times, but now a mere paltry villagehe discov-
ered that the Jesuits were still fondly remembered as os padres Jesuitas. To his
happy surprise, the Ambacans could read and write: ever since the expulsion
of the teachers by the Marguis of Pombal, he noted, the natives have contin-
ued to teach each other.56 He even attributed to the Jesuits and other mis-
sionaries the introduction to Angola of coffee and species of trees that were
useful for timber.57
Besides the impressive Jesuit footprints they unearth, Livingstones observa-
tions help us to see where the missions underperformed. As already men-
tioned, Livingstone brooded over the complete disappearance of Christianity
from these lands after so many years of missionary labor: Since the early mis-
sionaries were not wanting in either wisdom or enterprise, it would be inter-
esting to know the exact cause of their failing to perpetuate their faith, he
mused.58 And, indeed, if the Ambacans could pass on the skill of reading and
writing from one generation to another long after their teachers had been sent
away, could they not have done the same with the faith of their evangelizers?
For answers, Livingstone judged that, being Catholics, the Jesuits and the other
missionaries in the region had kept the Bible to themselves, leaving their con-
verts with nothing that could become a light to their feet when the good men
themselves were gone.59 He also thought that the early missionaries were too
much enmeshed in the systems that sanctioned the slave trade for their faith
to be taken seriously.60
Few have found Livingstones answers to his own salient question satisfac-
tory, and this is not without reason. It is somewhat puzzling that, in Angola,
where the slave trade (as opposed to the use of slave labor in local prazos) was

56 Ibid., 330.
57 Ibid., 347.
58 David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its
Tributaries; and of the Discovery of the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 18581864 (John Murray:
London, 1865), 204.
60 Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition, 204.
rife throughout the period under consideration, the Jesuits were better known
and more appreciated than in Mozambique. While he judged the memory of
os padres Jesuitas to be positive, Livingstone clearly stated that the Jesuits in
Tete do not seem to have possessed the sympathies of the people as their
brethren in Angola did and that [n]one of the natives here can read and
write, even though the Jesuits had also translated a few prayers into local lan-
guages, copies of which he could not find.61 Seeking to go beyond Livingstones
answers, William Rea lays the blame on the dwindling economy of the Zambezi
missions and further exploits what became a somewhat standard explanation:
the innate fickleness of the Africans and, especially, their inability or reluc-
tance to give up polygamy.62 To this list were often added other factors like
opposition from the Muslims, unfriendly weather, and irregular contact with
Europe.63 Today, few would consider this list a comprehensive and satisfactory
answer to the difficult question: not all Africans were polygamous, since nature
has never provided so many women in any human population sample;64
Africans never became Muslims en masse after the departure of the missionar-
ies, but reverted to their traditional religions; and Christianity never disap-
peared from Ethiopia because of irregular or even complete absence of contact
with Europe.
A Late Return to Africa
After forty-one years of suppression, the Society of Jesus was restored by a

papal bull in August 1814. Almost two decades passed before the restored
Society looked once more to Africa. When it finally did so, its post-restoration
missions to Africa had little or no connection to the previous Portuguese enter-
prises. For example, only in 1881 was Mozambique incorporated into the
greater Zambezi Mission, which had started in 1875 as an international effort
via South Africa and extended to present-day Zimbabwe and Zambia. Worse
still, it was only in 1967 that Jesuits returned to Angola.
Rather than go back to old patterns, many new missions broke completely
new ground. The earliest post-restoration missions to Africa were those from
France to Madagascar, which started as early as 1832, but gained ground only
after 1861. In 1840, another French mission was sent to Algeria. An orphanage

62 See Rea, Economics of Zambezi Missions, and idem, Agony on the Zambezi, passim.
63 See Mozambique in The Catholic Encyclopaedia (1911 edition).
64 David G. Maillu, Our Kind of Polygamy (Heinemann Kenya: Nairobi, 1988), 2.
466 Festo Mkenda
was opened there that served as many as 250 children in 1848. Four other
Jesuits took part in a precarious mission of the Holy See to the Sudan, where
they first arrived in 1848. For a brief moment, a Polish Jesuit, Fr. Maksymilian
Ryo (18021848), became the missions pro-vicar apostolic. On another front,
Queen Isabella of Spain invited the Jesuits to move to her newly acquired
Island of Fernando Po in 1859. A mission was opened there and for twelve years
the Jesuits became great reconcilers between the few but notoriously fractious
islanders. Following instructions from Pope Leo XIII in 1879, a Jesuit school was
opened in Cairo. Named Collge de la Sainte Famille, the school expanded sig-
nificantly over the years and has survived to the present day. As the restoration
century was coming to a close, seven Belgian Jesuits established a mission at
Kwango in the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo. Opened in 1893,
this new mission to Congo laid the foundation for what is now the Central
Africa Province of the Society of Jesus. These post-restoration missions to
Africa were more international and more spread-out than their predecessors.65
Unlike in the early years of the Societys foundation, however, there was no
Jesuit rush to Africa after 1814. The nineteenth-century missions came in a
trickle, and some of them were quite short-lived.
Today, over 1600 Jesuits are present in thirty-six Africa countries, but the
roots of most of their new missions reach only to the second half of the twen-
tieth century. Compared to the pre-suppression missions that had lasted for
over a century, the current missions are relatively young. They also stand out as
clearly new, with little or nothing to do with previous Jesuit efforts to evange-
lize Africa. This disjunction seems to emphasize my initial claim that the
pre-suppression story of the Jesuits in Africa is under-researched and largely
untold. This is a conclusion that opens up more questions than can be answered
within the scope of this paper: Could the new Jesuit missions and, indeed, all
current Christian efforts in sub-Saharan Africa benefit from a more compre-
hensive attempt at understanding the curious disappearance of the faith from
lands that had been so painstakingly evangelized before the nineteenth cen-
tury, and in such a short period of time? Might the answer to this question
reside in the methods the Jesuitsas well as the Dominicans and the
Capuchinsused rather than in mission economics and African dispositions?
Might a positive response to requests from Mozambique for a prelate with
powers to ordain have helped to establish a local hierarchy that could have
kept the church alive after the missionaries had left? These questions seem to
make a good case for a systematic study of the old Jesuit missions in Africa.
65 jecam, Jesuit Response to the Challenge of Mission in Africa and Madagascar Today,
English Edition (Jesuit Missions: Washington, D.C., 1976), passim.
chapter 27
Hoping Against All Hope

The Survival of the Jesuits in Southern Africa (18751900)
Aquinata N. Agonga
The establishment of the Jesuits in southern Africa was by no means easy.

From the beginning, the Jesuits encountered conditions that would render any
mission difficult: the number of missionaries was limited, the climate harsh,
and the local population hostile. Thus, what is today a successful and well-
established Jesuit mission would be non-existent but for the tenacity of the
first Jesuit missionaries in southern Africa. It took the missionaries a combina-
tion of dogged determination, youthful optimism, and a spirit of unquestion-
ing obedience to overcome these challenges. The survival and success of the
mission in the face of many obstacles have constituted a subject of great his-
torical interest, and is replete with lessons that can inspire contemporary mis-
sionary enterprises. This paper seeks to establish an account of the success of
the first Jesuit mission in southern Africa: how the missionaries survived the
hostile environment to establish their mission, with skeletal personnel, mini-
mum resources, and limited knowledge of the land and the people. The paper
especially seeks to highlight the extreme hardships that the missionaries faced,
including an attempt at poisoning by local chiefs who plotted to have the
Jesuits killed so they could inherit their possessions.
The Historical Background
Founded in 1540, the Society of Jesus was, from the start, keen to send mission-
aries to foreign lands which had not yet been reached by the Gospel message.
The Societys Constitutions encourage missionary work, and include
a special vow to obey any order that the present Roman Pontiff or his suc-
cessors might issue with regard to the spiritual progress of the people or
the spread of the faith, and to go wherever they may choose to send us,
without any sort of evasion and as quickly as we can, whether it be among
the Turks or others who do not share our convictions, even as far as India,
or to any heretics and schismatics, or even the faithful themselves.1
1 The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Annotated and complemented by General Congregation
34, trans. P. Divarkar (India: Gujarat Sahitya Prakash Anand, 1996), Formula of the Institute, no. 3.

468 Agonga
As early as 1541 Jesuit missionaries were already being sent to Africa. The Jesuits
were, in fact, the first Catholic missionaries to arrive in southern Africa and to
penetrate inland into what is today known as Zimbabwe. Father Gonalo da
Silveira (15261561), a Portuguese Jesuit missionary, launched the first Christian
mission in the region, among the Shona of Zimbabwe at the court of the
Monomotapa dynasty.2 Father Silveira lived in the court of the Monomotapa
dynasty until he was murdered in 1561, a victim of court intrigues. By the time
of his death, he had established several churches, but by 1667 they had all dis-
appeared. The commitment, zeal, and determination that characterized this
first missionary venture came to nothing as all their work and legacy were lost
over the ensuing generations. Indeed, as Marshall W. Murphree observes, by
the seventeenth century there was not even a trace of Christianity in South
Africa.3
In 1773, the Society of Jesus faced the greatest challenge in its history when
it was formally suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. The suppression, as Jonathan
Wright points out, was largely a result of volatile political circumstances in
Europe at the time.4 Before the suppression, the Jesuits had been active and
vibrant in many parts of Europe and beyond. They had a tradition of establish-
ing schools and mission houses wherever they went. In Africa too, they set up
missions and other apostolates, like schools and hospitals. The first Jesuit mis-
sions in southern Africa were established near the Portuguese forts at Sena and
Tete, at the mouth of the Zambesi.
In 1624 the Jesuits founded a college in the Mozambican region. The college
had six priests and about two hundred students who had become Christians.
At Sena, nine fathers served the king and his subjects, and further inland at
Chemba they set up a base from where missions could be directed. The land on
which the residence was built was donated by the king.5 With the suppression
much of what the Jesuits had established was either destroyed or taken over by
other missionaries.6
Following the restoration of the Society in 1814, the Propaganda Fide asked
the Jesuits to reconsider the evangelizing mission in southern Africa. However,
2 The Kingdom of Monomotapa, also known as the Mutapa Empire, was a Shona kingdom that
existed from around 14301760 and stretched between the Zambesi and Limpopo rivers of
southern Africa in what is today Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
3 Marshall W. Murphree, Christianity and the Shona (London: Athlone Press, 1969), 6.
4 Jonathan Wright, The Suppression and Restoration, in The Cambridge Companion to the
Jesuits, ed. T. Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 272.
5 Anonymous, The History of the Zambesi Mission, The Zambesi Mission Record: A Missionary
Publication for Home Readers 1 (1898): 137.
6 Wright, The Suppression and Restoration, 263.
Hoping Against All Hope 469
the Society was prevented from taking up the assignment immediately after
the restoration. For one thing, the Society lacked personnel. At the restoration
the membership of the Society had dwindled and it was scattered across
Europe. Wright notes that the urgent task of the Society at the restoration was
to consolidate its membership and to re-establish community life and com-
munities for the companions.7
A few cardinals had been entrusted with the task of helping the Society
return to normalcy at the restoration. In assigning Jesuits responsibilities, the
cardinals had to pay due attention to the Societys tradition of appointing
Jesuits to tasks for which they were most suited and competent. Fortunately,
the first superior general of the Society after the restoration, Father Jan
Roothaan(17851853) had a passion for missionary work. He immediately set
about reviving the spirit of missionary work that had prevailed at the time of
the founding fathers, pointing out that the fields were white with harvest.8
His vision for, and interest in, missionary work resulted in Jesuit missionaries
being sent to Africa within a few years. Roothaan especially encouraged supe-
riors provincial to support Jesuits willing to go on missions abroad.9 In spite of
all these attempts at rekindling the missionary spirit, it was not until 1875 that
the first group of Jesuits returned to South Africa.
In 1875, Bishop James Ricards (18281893), the apostolic vicar of the eastern
district of the Cape of Good Hope, welcomed to South Africa eight Jesuits from
the English provincefive ordained priests and three lay brothers. The bishop
intended to entrust to this group the college of St. Aidans, located in
Grahamstown. The bishop handed over the college to the Jesuits as soon as
they arrived in South Africa. He had set up the college to educate boys for the
liberal professions, and the college would serve as a base and port-of-call for
missionaries headed inland through the southern Africa route. It was clear
from the beginning that the ultimate mission station for the missionaries was
the interior of the continent. The bishop envisaged the expansion of the mis-
sion inland, to include parts of southern and south-central Africa in what
would later become Rhodesia. This mission came to be known as the Zambesi
mission.10
7 Ibid.
8 William V. Bangert, A History of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit
Sources, 1972), 437.
9 Ibid.
10 Viator, A Visit to Chishawasha, The Zambesi Mission Record: A Missionary Publication for
Home Readers 1 (1898): 24.
470 Agonga
The Emergence of the Zambesi Mission and its Importance
The Zambezi mission was a response to the call, embedded in the Jesuit
Constitutions, to spread the good news to the world and especially to areas
where no missionary had been. The Society of Jesuss attempt to re-establish
their mission in southern Africa was not without challenges. Jesuits found
many Protestant missions already established along the southern African
coast. The Moravian church had set up several missions and had good finan-
cial backing from mother churches, the Presbyterians had churches and
schools, and the Anglicans had penetrated into the interior as far as what
would later be Rhodesia. The Anglicans had set up bishoprics with missionar-
ies in Kaffraria, Zululand, Mashonaland, Lebombo, and as far as Mombasa on
the present-day East African coast. There were also the Wesleyan missionar-
ies in Rhodesia; a French Protestant Missionary SocietyLAssociation de
Parisin Basutoland; and the London Missionary Society in Khamaland and
Matabeleland.11 Thus, the Jesuits had to travel long distances inland to find
untouched territories. This endeavor saw the birth of the Zambesi mission.
Its mandated territory covered present-day Zimbabwe, most of Zambia, and
a part of Mozambique. As well as being the foundational Catholic mission
from where the Jesuits would launch the evangelization of sub-Saharan
Africa, the Zambesi mission was also international in complexion, with mis-
sionaries coming from Italy, Belgium, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and
Austria.12
The missionaries recognized that they were latecomers and so took great
precautions to avoid conflict with the established Protestant churchesthe
Wesleyan, the Anglican, and the Dutch Reformed churches, among others. The
Jesuits opted to go further inland where they would have an opportunity to lay
a Christian foundation based exclusively on the Catholic faith and teachings,
with no Protestant influence.13
The first Jesuit missionary expedition into the interior of the African conti-
nent took place four years after they landed at St. Aidans. The missionaries
headed north from Grahamstown, crossing the British colony of Bechuanaland
11 Richard Sykes, Protestant Missionary Activities in South and Central Africa, The Zambesi
Mission Record: A Missionary Publication for Home Readers 1 (1898), 13.
12 Anonymous, Notes from the Different Stations, The Zambesi Mission Record: A Missionary
13 Chas Bick, The Missions of Kaffraria, The Zambesi Mission Record: A Missionary
into Chief Lobengulas territory where they arrived in September 1879.14 This
missionary expedition left a limited Jesuit presence in South Africa itself.
However, St. Aidans retained its significance as a port-of-call and base for mis-
sionaries coming into Africa and as a training college for boys.15 Moreover, the
establishment of new missions in the north did not limit Jesuit presence to
that region alone. The Society also established several important houses and
stations in the wider vicariate of the Eastern Cape under the leadership of the
superior of the mission, Father Henri Depelchin (18221900). The Jesuits set up
stations in Dunbrody, Keilands, and Kaffraria. Further inland, in Bulawayo
(Rhodesia), they built a Jesuit community where the superior of the mission
also resided, a school for the white population, and a town hospital. At
Empandeni, Fathers Peter Prestage (18421907), Andrew Hartmann (1851
1928), and Charles Bick (18611939) set up a mission on a farm donated by chief
Lobengula. In Mashonaland, they established a church for the white popula-
tion of Victoria, and a mission for the natives in Chishawasha.16
Some of the challenges the Society faced on this mission were internal, but
most stemmed from the circumstances of the mission itself and from the Jesuit
way of proceeding. At the time of the suppression, the Society had been draw-
ing up blueprints for the missions that it planned to undertake. These plans
were interrupted by the suppression. After the restoration, the Society faced the
difficult task of picking up the thread of history. Slowly, Jesuits moved back into
classrooms, the pulpit, the confessional, writers desks, and most importantly,
into the missions across the seas, which had been its priority before 1773.17
Pope Pius VII, at the time of the restoration, understood that the Jesuits had
the necessary qualities for missionary work. Referring to the Jesuits, he declared
that he would be guilty of a capital crime if he neglected to employ the skilled
rowers for the storm-tossed bark of Peter.18
The first Jesuit missionaries to arrive in Africa after the restoration were
confronted with many challenges. The companions were drawn from different
nationalities and had different educational backgrounds and training, although
they shared a passion for missionary work. These differences played out in the
14 Chief Lobengula (18451894) was the second and last chief of the Ndebele people usually
pronounced Matabele in English in present-day western Zimbabwe. See Anonymous,
Notes from the Different Stations, 51.
15 Ibid., 78.
16 Anonymous, Staff and Stations of the Zambesi Mission, The Zambesi Mission Record:
AMissionary Publication for Home Readers 1 (1898): 8.
17 Bangert, History, 433.
18 Ibid., 429.
472 Agonga
mission, and it took a while before adequate communication could be estab-

lished between them. The companions also had little knowledge of the people
they were seeking to evangelize and limited knowledge of the region, its cul-
ture, and its climate.
Once inland, Father Depelchin, the superior of the mission, divided the
group to ensure adequate coverage of the region that had been assigned to them
by Rome. This put a strain on the team, as it meant that small groups of people
were given responsibility over vast areas of land. The groups felt stretched to
their limits. The superior has been blamed for failing to appreciate the vastness
of the area to which he had sent the missionaries. Father Franois Berghegge
(18491916), observing their troubles with chief Lewanika,19 wrote home warn-
ing: Remember Father Depelchin does not always tell things the way they are,
but like he wants them to be. Father Emil Holub (18471902) felt that Father
Depelchin was wasting resources by stretching limited personnel.20
The missionaries employed incentives to win the confidence of the chiefs
and to attract young African boys to their schools where they could be taught
about the new religion. Even though the Africans trickled in slowly, the strat-
egy of recruiting boys to the school worked fairly well. Some children were
drawn to the school after a visit to the dispensaries for treatment. Through
their sickness, they discovered the missionary schools.21 The number of native
children coming to Jesuit schools had risen considerably. It is estimated that
between 1879 and 1897 there might have been about 511 children in the
schools.22
The missionaries also became fully involved in the daily activities of local
communities. They provided various kinds of assistance to local chiefs, offer-
ing services as builders, blacksmiths, metal workers, carpenters, wagon repair-
ers, farmers, interpreters, doctors, and teachers. They repaired guns and
painted wagons for the chiefs and served as their interpreters, especially with
the colonial authorities who were also moving inland. A notably gifted mem-
ber of the group, Father Anthony Terrde (18441880), had started mastering
local languages while still at St. Aidans in Grahamstown, with the help of
Father Augustus Law (18341879). There were already books in the Zulu
19 Chief Lewanika (18421916) was the king of Barotseland in present day Zambia.
20 Ray S. Roberts, Introduction, in Journeys Beyond Gubuluwayo, to the Gaza, Tonga and
Lozi. Letters of the Jesuits Zambezi Mission, 18801883, ed. R.S. Roberts, trans. Vronique
Wakerley (Harare: Weaver Press, 2009), xxivxxv.
21 Anonymous, Current Catholic Events in Rhodesia, The Zambesi Mission Record: A
Missionary Publication for Home Readers 1 (1898): 7.
22 Anonymous, Current Catholic Events in Rhodesia, 7.
language when the missionaries arrived that had been translated by some of
the missionaries who had come before the Jesuits. These books were useful for
the missionaries working in Lobengulas Matabeleland. Father Terrde also
composed a Bechuana catechism. He had learnt the language from a Bechuana,
and from a Mrs. Open who was at Grahamstown.23 Father Hartmann, mean-
while, had a firm command of the Mashona language, which he had started
learning at St. Aidans. By 1893, he had published a grammar which was used as
a text book for teaching boys in the Jesuits schools.24
Africans, the chiefs included, generally mistrusted the missionaries. Their
previous encounter with white foreigners had not been pleasant. White colo-
nialists and Boer trekkers had preceded the missionaries inland and had
caused devastation among the locals. The people had lost their land, lives, and
property in these encounters. The Africans were therefore cautious and even
resentful in their relationship with the missionaries.
Further inland the missionaries encountered chiefs who welcomed them
only for the gifts they brought. At chief Lewanikas kraal, for instance, they
were detained for some time while the chief demanded ammunition, clothing,
and medicines.25 They were welcomed even though the chief remained non-
committal about their request to settle in his territory. The chief hatched a plot
to reap as much as he could from the missionaries without allowing them to
evangelize in his chiefdom. He was interested in the skills and gifts the mis-
sionaries had to offer because he thought the gifts were valuable and would
elevate him above the other chiefs.26
Meanwhile all these efforts were not yielding much in the area of evangeli-
zation. Ten years after the establishment of the mission, there were so few con-
verts that it dawned on the missionaries that the natives were only interested
in the schools, and not in their religion. The heart of the native remained
impenetrable to the Gospel:27 they stuck to their traditional religions and
beliefs. In the midst of hopelessness and almost on the verge of despair, Father
Hartmann wrote to encourage the missionaries:
23 Murphy refers to a letter written by Father Law to Father Alfred Weld in which Father
Law says, Father Terde, with the help of good Mrs Open has already composed a
Bechuana catechism. Edward P. Murphy, Portraits, in A History of the Jesuits in Zambia:
A Mission Becomes a Province, ed. Edward P. Murphy (Nairobi: Paulines Publications
Africa, 2003), 89.
24 Anonymous, Current Catholic Events in Rhodesia, 7.
25 Murphy, Documents, 369.
26 Edward P. Murphy, First Zambezi Mission, in A History of the Jesuits in Zambia: A Mission
Becomes a Province, ed. Edward P. Murphy (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2003), 71.
27 Bick, The Missions of Kaffraria, 28.
474 Agonga
The true test of a missionary consists in being able to stand firm and
immovable amid the trials of apparent failure, to toil on without ever see-
ing the fruit of his labors, never to yield to despair where everything
seems hopeless, being content with digging the foundations, disappear-
ing more and more the longer one works, finding all ones honor and
reward in his unselfish toil. They will have the good fortune to be stimu-
lated to new exertions by the progress which they will see their converts
make; but sweet memory of working for Gods glory without reward
remains reserved for those who are first in the field.28
These remarks of Father Hartmann capture the spirit and objective of the mis-
sion. The missionaries were charged with establishing a strong foundation and
creating an environment conducive to future missionary work. They were here
to sow the seeds of the Gospel, others could harvest later. It is this understand-
ingof their mission as sowers of the seedthat drove the Jesuits on, even
when there was little tangible fruit for their labor.29
Critics have observed that the mission would have yielded more immediate
results had the missionaries employed better ways of evangelization. They
argue that the approach of the missionaries obstructed the success of the mis-
sion. The missionaries, for instance, made it a condition that to become a
Christian one had to leave ones family and relatives and live in the mission
under the watchful eye of the Jesuits. Many potential converts were discour-
aged and opted to stay away.30 For the natives, therefore, becoming a Christian
meant abandoning their traditions. Yet this presented them with a dilemma. If
they abandoned their culture for Christianity, they would be ostracized and
cursed by their families and would risk the wrath of their ancestors.31 The
approach of the missionaries betrayed a sense of religious superiority on the
part of the missionaries, in regard to what they perceived as inferior African
religion.
The Jesuits, arriving in southern Africa with limited local knowledge, were
surprised by the vastness of the region. Even the superior of the mission, Father
Depelchin, did not know how extensive the area was, when he assigned the mis-
sionaries. The small groups of missionaries would have to stretch themselves
28 Viator, A Visit to Chishawasha, 26.

29 Ibid.
30 Nicholas M. Creary, Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of
the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 18791980 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 31.
31 Anthony Boos, The Springtime of the Mashonaland Mission, in The Zambesi Mission
Record: A Missionary Publication for Home Readers 1[4] (1899), 122123.
exceedingly thinly to cover the region assigned to them. The missionaries also
had to contend with a hostile tropical climate and diseases. Most of these men
were in a mission field for the first time and had no experience of Africa. Worse
yet, they were moving into lands to which no other missionaries had been, and
therefore they had no point of reference.32 These challenges weighed heavily on
the mission, and slowed its progress.
The missionaries also had little knowledge of African beliefs, cultures, and
traditions. Africa was a world of mystical powers, controlled by supernatural
forces that Europe, with its rational approach to the world, could neither grasp
nor accept. Africa was a land of spiritual powers, with whom the people
enjoyed close and constant inter-communion, and which profoundly affected
their motives and actions.33 While Africans might not have had a definite,
rational or theological understanding of their deities, they had established
ways of communicating with them. They, for instance, could determine, by
observing such natural phenomena as storms and droughts, that a deity was
angry or hungry.
The different tribes encountered by the missionaries had names with which
they associated their deities. The Zulu referred to their deity as Inkosi and
sometimes as Unkulunkulu who they believed was up there. The Tonga had a
deity called Tilo who was believed to reside in the mountains. And the Sotho
called their Supreme Being, Modimo.34 The missionaries were thus confronted
with a rich diversity of well-established African beliefs and traditions. They
faced the challenge of having to reconcile these beliefs with the Christian mes-
sage. They substituted a Hottentot word, Fixo, for all the local names of the
deities, claiming that it captured the concept of God, who was the same
Christian God about whom they preached.35 They also developed a new set of
terms or new meanings for existing concepts in an attempt to help the local
people understand their Christian God. At the mission station in Keilands, for
instance, they discovered that the Supreme Being was referred to as gamata.
The locals believed that gamata was ever present, but only consulted him in
times of need, such as when there was a flood or famine, or in times of calam-
ity. In such times, they invoked the help of the deity through a witchdoctor. The
missionaries adopted this concept of the deity when they sought to explain to
32 Roberts, Introduction, xiii.

33 Alexander Hetherwick, The Gospel and the African: The Croall Lectures for 19301931 on the
Impact of the Gospel on a Central Africa People (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark 38 George Street,
1932), 43.
34 Hetherwick, The Gospel and The African, 67.
476 Agonga
the people the meaning of the universality of God. Suffice to say, however, that
Africans did not always readily associate the new names with their deities.
Most local people stuck to their gods, and only reluctantly accepted the
Christian God, and this, only when absolutely necessary.36
The missionaries had intended, in their program of evangelization, to teach
the faith to young boys first, believing that they would understand the faith
more quickly and would convert easily. At the courts of the chiefs however, they
learned that there was no direct access to the boys. They had to convince the
elders about their mission before they were allowed to gather the children. In
some places, these preliminary deliberations proceeded slowly, and were car-
ried out over a pot of beer. The elders had to assess the message the missionar-
ies intended to convey to the people, to establish whether it would be beneficial
to the community, and to ascertain that the ancestors would not be offended. It
was only when an agreement had been reached with the elders that the mis-
sionaries were allowed to gather young men and boys for training.37
Apart from having to confront a set of difficult beliefs, traditions and lan-
guages, the missionaries also had to contend with a section of society that was
simply unwilling to convert to Christianity, or to substitute the Christian faith
for the cultures, customs, and laws that had governed their lives for a long time.
They also encountered a stubborn and insecure tribal leadership that was
unwilling to let their subjects acquire new knowledge for fear that they might
use the knowledge to stage a revolution. For instance, in their first missionary
excursion to the chiefdom of Lewanika in 1881, Fathers Depelchin and
Berghegge and Brother Louis de Vylder (18411883) were welcomed and invited
to settle among the Barotse, only to find out on their return, two years later,
that the king and his council of elders had changed their mind and were unwill-
ing to admit them to their lands.38
The missionaries woes were further compounded by a culture of insincerity
among the locals. This baffled them. Fuller has observed that it was difficult for
the missionaries to establish the sincerity of those who claimed to be con-
verted, and to determine whether those who recited prayers or attended Mass
were genuine.39
36 Werner Max Eiselen, Christianity and the Religious Life of the Bantu, in Western
Civilization and the Natives of South Africa: Studies in Culture Contact, ed. I. Schapera
(London: George Routledge and Sons, 1934), 71.
39 Latimer J. Fuller, South African Native Missions: Some Considerations (Leeds: Richard
Jackson Commercial Street, 1907), 19.
Most Africans only joined the missionary schools, or accepted the Christian
religion, in order to learn the ways of the white man. They also intended to use
missionary education to gain employment from the Europeans in order to
raise money to pay taxes. The establishment of colonial government inland
had led to the introduction of such taxes, especially for the adult males in the
region. For this reason, attending school became a necessity and many families
had no choice but to send their children to the missionary schools.40
The chiefs who interacted with the missionaries were often only interested
in acquiring guns to defend themselves, and in securing interpreters to help
protect their land from being taken by foreigners. They were little interested in
conversion to Christianity. The chiefs adopted a strategy of keeping the Jesuits
waiting. They would listen, or be perceived to listen patiently to the missionar-
ies, showing enthusiasm, and would invite them back over and over again. The
missionaries would misjudge this enthusiasm. They did not understand that
for the local people, welcoming a visitor and lending him an eager ear did not
necessarily mean agreement with his message. For the African, the messenger
was never dishonored. Since the missionaries claimed to have been sent by
God, they were considered to be messengers, and were treated as such. Even if
their enthusiasm for the message of the missionaries never yielded converts, it
never waned.41
Another serious challenge for the missionaries was the fact that the Africans
confused them with the colonizers. Often the missionaries were treated with
disdain and hostility and the failure of the missionaries to dissociate them-
selves from the colonizers, and of the Africans to differentiate between them,
affected the progress of the mission. Where the missionaries were closely iden-
tified with the colonial authorities, locals hesitated to receive the Gospel. The
missionaries involvement in the Matebele Wars of 1893 and 1896, in which
they took the government side, did not help their evangelical cause. The
Catholic missionaries had regrettably joined forces with the patrols that had
come to end the rebellion, hoping that crushing the rebellion would bring the
peace they needed for evangelization. In the words of Father Marc Barthlemy
(18571913),
the father had the happiness to exercise on the battlefield and on the
march his ministry of forgiveness and consolation, recognized as baptme
40 Isaac Schapera, PresentDay Life In The Native Reserves, in Western Civilization and the
Natives of South Africa, 43.
478 Agonga
de feu and it was this that gave him a claim to take his position in the
other expeditions and at the post of danger.42
Hence, they accompanied the troops, heard their confessions, gave out rosaries
and scapulars, and where possible said Mass for the soldiers before they set out
for the battlefield. The Jesuit missionaries were in charge of both Catholic and
Protestant troops who were only too pleased to have a minister of God with
them throughout the fighting.43
The result of the war was devastating for the Africans. With the defeat, they
lost their land and many of them were displaced. The experience of war cre-
ated deep resentment among the Africans, which made it difficult for them to
trust and willingly accept the European missionaries and their religion.44
Itwas only after they were forcefully subjected to colonial rule that the Africans
relented and accepted the new religion and Christian baptism.45
The missionaries also had to contend with tropical diseases and deaths.
Many succumbed to illnesses for which they had no medicine. In February
1880, Father Charles Fuchs died of fever at Tati. In September of the same year,
they lost Father Terrde to poisoning and, in November, Father Augustus Law
to malaria. The following year (May 1881) Father Charles Wehl also succumbed
to malaria. In March 1882, the superior of the mission at Tati, Father Anton de
Wit fell off his horse and broke his neck, and a year later (March 1883) Brother
de Vylder drowned in the Zambezi as he was being ferried to Lealui.46 The mis-
sionaries also lost their oxen, which they used to pull their carriages across the
missions, to diseases.
These tragedies caused devastation in the Zambezi mission, depleting its
resources and weakening the resolve of the surviving missionaries. The situa-
tion so deteriorated that the missionaries were recalled to South Africa to re-
evaluate the mission. As everyone prepared to leave for South Africa, Father
Prestage, in a profound act of selflessness and courage, made a request to be
left behind at Empandeni to keep the fires burning.47
42 Marc Barthelemy, During the Matabele Wars, in The Zambesi Mission Record: A
Missionary Publication for Home Readers 1 (1898): 19.
43 Barthelemy, During the Matabele Wars, 21.
45 Francis Richartz, The End of Kakubi and the Other Condemned Murderers, in The
Zambesi Mission Record: A Missionary Publication for Home Readers 1 (1898): 55.
46 Murphy, First Zambesi Mission, 8283.
47 Edward P. Murphy, Early Years at Chikuni, in A History of the Jesuits in Zambia: A Mission
Becomes a Province, ed. Edward P. Murphy (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2003),
147.
After the missionaries had left for South Africa, the local people agreed to
stay at the mission station at Empandeni, without any incentives from the
missionaries. The Africans had been observing the Jesuits keenly, and were
now able to distinguish between them and the Protestant missionaries they
had encountered earlier. They remarked: Your religion is more difficult to
practice; therefore it ought to be truer. While the others exhibit egoism, yours
is the spirit of sacrifice.48 They recognized the act of Father Prestage as one
of sacrifice and courage which to them meant that his was the true religion.
This encouraged the Africans to start allowing their children to go to the
mission.
The Jesuits first missionary expedition into the interior of the African con-
tinent and their encounter with Africa, was a venture of mixed fortunes. From
the time they departed from Grahamstown in 1879 they encountered chal-
lenges that ranged from being denied permission to settle in Shoshong by
chief Khama,49 to losing several members of their contingent from as early as
1880. They faced betrayal from such unexpected quarters as the fellow
European, George Westbeech,50 who openly boasted that he had succeeded in
dissuading chief Lewanika from granting the missionaries leave to settle in
Lealui. Westbeech wanted the kingdom reserved for fellow British and
Protestant countrymen and not Belgian or Dutch Catholics.51 At other places,
such as the territory of chief Lobengula, they were welcomed and permitted to
set up stations, but forbidden to carry out evangelization among the chiefs
subjects.
Chief Lobengulas permission to enter his territory was all the missionaries
needed, as it provided a gateway to the Tonga, Ngoni and Ila peoples. This first
journey, even though hampered by the deaths of some companions and restric-
tions over entering certain territories, was nevertheless successful. The mis-
sionaries were able to meet various chiefs, including Lewanika of the Barotse
and Moemba of the Tonga.
These missionaries laid the foundation for the Catholic faith in southern
Africa. Chief Lobengulas forbidding them from preaching to his subjects did
not deter them from attempting to settle in the territory. Even the harsh

49 Chief Khama (18351923) of Bechuanaland allied himself with the British colonizers and
rejected the Catholic missionaries. He had been converted to Christianity in 1860 under
the Anglican faith.
50 George Westbeech (18441888) was a British trade who welcomed the first Jesuits to
Pandamatenga (Zimbabwe) in 1880.
51 Murphy, First Zambesi Mission, 83.
480 Agonga
treatment at the hands of the treacherous chief Moemba did not discourage
them from pursuing their cause.52
The hard battle waged by these pioneer missionaries and their determina-
tion and courage in the face of daunting challenges, comprise a heroic tale
from which contemporary missionary enterprises, and indeed the African
church, can draw inspiration. The challenges molded the missionaries atti-
tudes and shaped their motivations. They acknowledged that preaching the
Gospel in Africa required great patience.
When the missionaries set out from the base at St. Aidans, they intended to
set up a port-of-call or halfway house in Shoshong. In fact, Father Terrde had
already been learning Setchana for this purpose. It was therefore a great disap-
pointment when the missionaries were denied leave, by chief Khama, to set up
the house at Shoshong. They shrugged off the disappointment and moved on
to the smaller town of Tati, from where they separated into three groups; one
was led by Father Law to the Ngoni, another was sent to the Lozi under the
leadership of Father Berghegge, and the third was led by Father Terrde to the
Tonga.
The missionaries had no intention of returning to St. Aidans at Graham
stown, despite the many difficulties they encountered. They proceeded inland,
and wherever they were welcomed they set up their missions.53 In chief
Lobengulass territory, as already observed, they were granted permission to
settle, but restricted from preaching. The missionaries chose to stay and
worked there for ten years until Lobengula decided that they should teach his
people how to work with the soil. The missionaries took every opportunity
afforded them to win over the natives.
Sometimes the missionaries yielded to the demands of powerful chiefs, but
this was only in order to gain a foothold in areas where they had been posi-
tively received. It was only in this way that they were able to win their first
converts. The Zambesi mission, a foundation laid, and a seed planted, through
the patient labor of this valiant group of missionaries, stands to this day.
Conclusion
Considering the magnitude of the challenges, one is amazed that the mission
never failed. The missionaries were sometimes discouraged and disillusioned,
but they never gave up. Surely a power, something greater, must have urged
52 Ibid., 82.
them on. The Society of Jesus responded courageously and generously to the
request of the Holy See to send missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa. This was an
especially remarkable call coming, as it did, at a time when the Society was still
finding its feet after the restoration. The Society had barely established com-
munities when it embarked on the mission to Africa. The vastness of the area
of the mission, poor knowledge of the people, limited knowledge of the topog-
raphy of the region, and inadequate personnel, are some of the factors that
mitigated against the rapid growth of the mission.
This was the Jesuits first mission into sub-Saharan Africa after the restora-
tion. The Society found the right team for the mission. It would be their resil-
ience and perseverance, even in the face of death, that would lead to the birth
of the Zambesi mission.
chapter 28
The Jesuits in Fernando Po (18581872)

An Incomplete Mission
Jean Luc Enyegue, S.J.
Introduction
In 1915, the Spanish Jesuit Lesmes Fras published La Provincia de Castilla de

la Compaa de Jess: Desde 1863 hasta 1914.1 The year 1863 corresponds to the
division of what had been the province of Spain since the restoration of the
Society of Jesus on 7 August 1814. It included all of the Spanish possessions in
the Gulf of Guinea, South America, the Philippines, and the kingdom of
Portugal and all its missions in Asia.2 The year 1914 was the centenary of the
bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, which had been signed by Pope Pius VII
on the restoration of the Society of Jesus. Referring to his work, Fr. Fras
observed that it was not so much a historical volume as a thanksgiving for all
the blessings the Society had received from God,3 and for the good done by the
Society for the salvation of souls.4
On 8 September 1907, a year after his election as the superior general of the
Society of Jesus, Father Franz Xavier Wernz (18421914) wrote a circular to pro-
vincials urging them to make thorough preparations to mark the anniversary
of the restoration. The main goal was to invoke memories of the departed
companions in order to inspire new generations. As part of the preparations
for the anniversary, the general also directed different communities and prov-
inces to publish books providing detailed accounts of the Societythe resto-
ration, the Societys development, and major accomplishments during the
centenary. He wanted each province and mission to publish a compendium of
the history of the modern society, outlining important components of Jesuit
life during that period, namely, the spiritual and religious formation of mem-
bers from the novitiate until the third probation; literary and scientific educa-
tion, with respect to juniorate, philosophical and theological studies, and
1 Lesmes Fras, La Provincia de Castilla de la Compaa de Jess. Desde 1863 hasta 1914 (Bilbao-
Deusto: El Mensajero, 1915). This book follows another published by the same author under
the title La Provincia de Espaa de la Compaa de Jess, 18151863 (Madrid: Real Casa, 1914).
2 Fras, La Provincia de Castilla, 6.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid. 5.

The Jesuits In Fernando Po (18581872) 483
other special studies; spiritual ministries (in and outside of Spain); literary
production (the intellectual apostolate); and biographies of renowned Jesuits,
founders of missions, and benefactors who had earned the Societys
gratitude.5
Today, one hundred years after these pioneering publications and two hun-
dred years after the restoration of the Society, another superior general of the
Society, Father Adolfo Nicols, has invited all members of the Society to par-
ticipate in similar reflections. On 15 November 2011, the bicentenary of the
death of Saint Jos Pignatelli (17371811), one of the most distinguished Jesuits
during the suppression, Father Nicols wrote:
Mentioning that date leads me to look forward to the year 2014 as a privi-
leged occasion to study and know more fully the historical period of the
suppression and restoration of the Society. At the same time we have to
take advantage of such a commemoration as an opportunity for the
Societys spiritual renewal for greater and better service to the Church,
with renewed vigor and zeal. History can put us to the test and teach us. It
can help us learn how to deal with the paradoxical context in which we
live. In the face of the present apostolic challenges, we now want to
deepen our understanding of the call to serve faith, promote justice and
dialogue with culture and other religions (gc 35, D. 3, 12). At the same
time, we experience ourselves as limited and poor, but also painfully
purified from our own mistakes and thus more disposed to accept and
put into action the Word that comes from above. Without this Word we
will only pursue our own selfish interests.6
As Father Nicols continues his predecessors theme of thanksgiving, he also

invites the Society to engage in a critical examination of this period. He urges
the Society to learn from the mistakes of the period in order to purify and
deepen its contemporary mission. In this study, I examine the mission
of Fernando Po (18581872) in light of this call from the superior general.
The study traces the geographical and historical context of Fernando Po; the
history of the Jesuit mission, its preparation, and execution; and the
5 Lesmes Fras, Historia de la Compaa de Jess en su asistencia moderna de Espaa (Madrid:

Razn y Fe, 1923), 56. Also referring to this period from the same author: La provincia de
Espaa de la Compaa de Jess, 18151863: resea histrica ilustrada (Madrid: Sucesores de
Rivadeneyra, 1914).
6 Fr. Adolfo Nicols, On the Bicentenary of the Death of Saint Joseph Pignatelli, Rome: 15 Nov.
2011.
484 Jean Luc Enyegue
termination of the mission and the lessons for the Society and for mission
today. My conclusion is that, beyond the merits of their work and their sacri-
fices in Fernando Po, Jesuit missionaries could have produced better results
had they been more independent, and freer from patriotic concerns and
from prejudices regarding Africa that were dominant in Europe at that
period.
Sources
The primary sources of this work are drawn from the archives of the Castilian
province of the Society of Jesus for the period from 1857 to 1892; the publica-
tions of Lesmes Fras on the mission; and the publications of those directly
involved in the missionfor instance, the pioneers Miguel Martnez y Sanz7
and Jos Irsarri.8 These sources are mainly found in the archives of the Society
in Spain; annual letters or house histories of different communities; correspon-
dence between local superiors and the provincial or the general; correspon-
dence between the provincials and the general; and official documents and
manuscripts in public Spanish archives.9 I also draw on recent publications
such as those of the Jesuit historian Manuel Gonzlez Revuelta10 and by non-
Jesuits such as the Claretian missionaries,11 successors of the Society in
Fernando Po, and by the historian Joaqun Navarro.12 I have also consulted the
doctoral thesis of Jacint Creus.13 These sources provide details about the moti-
vations behind the mission as well as its origins and development. This work
also relies on secondary sources for the period, both on the particular subject
of the mission in Fernando Po and the context that surrounds it, including the
7 Miguel Martnez y Sanz, Breves apuntes de la Misin de Fernando Poo en el Golfo de Guinea
(Madrid: Imprenta de Iigo Reneses, 1859).
8 In the Archives of the Province of Castile in Alcal de Henares, and whose most detailed
report was published under the title Misin de Fernando Poo, 1859 (Barcelona: Ceiba, 1998).
9 La Provincia de Espaa, 7.
10 Manuel Gonzlez Revuelta, La Compaa de Jess en la Espaa contempornea
(Santander/Bilbao: Sal Terrae, 1991).
11 Misioneros Claretianos, Cien aos de evangelizacin en Guinea Ecuatorial, 18831983
(Barcelona: Editorial Claret, 1983).
12 Joaqun Navarro, Apuntes sobre el estado de la Costa Occidental de frica y principalmente
de las posesiones espaolas en el Golfo de Guinea (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1859).
13 Jacint Creus, Action missionnaire en Guine Equatoriale 18581910. Perplexits et navets
laube de la colonisation (PhD diss., Universit Paris VII Denis Diderot, 1998).
geographical location, and the internal, colonial, and international politics of

Spain during this period.14
Situating Fernando Po
Conquered by the Portuguese explorer Ferno do Poo in 1472,15 the island of

Fernando Po is now part of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, which remained
under Portuguese control until 1778, after the Ildefonso Treaty was signed, by
which Portugal ceded the sovereignty of the island to Spain. With its 28,051 sq.
km, Equatorial Guinea extends over three main geographic areas: a continen-
tal region (Mbini) previously known as Ro Muni which was the subject of a
major conflict between Spain and France in the nineteenth century; the Pagalu
region, formerly made up of two islands historically known by the names
Annobn and Corisco; and the region of Bioko, which covers the former
island of Fernando Po. The latter, together with Annobn and Corisco, formed
the territory of the so-called Fernando Po Mission and its dependencies16
in which the Society of Jesus carried out its missionary activities from 1858
to1872.17
Fernando Po is a high island on the equator that consists of a single large hill
and a thick rainforest. Its temperatures range between 26.2 and 24C through-
out the year. The nights are generally cool, even cold, due to sea breezes.18
Adry season from November to March precedes a period of torrential rains
between April and October, which situates the island in one of the worlds wet-
test regions with an average of 2,000 mm per year in Santa Isabel and 14,000
mm per year in Ureka.19 The island is also known for its rich diversity of flora
14 Dolores Garcas Cants, Fernando Poo: Una aventura colonial espaola en la frica
Occidental: 17781900 (Barcelona: Ceibas, 2006); Adolfo Guillemar de Aragn. Observaciones
al llamado Opsculo sobre la Colonizacin de Fernando Poo (Madrid: Fundicin y Librera
de Don Eusebio Aguado, 1852); ngel Bahamonde, Espaa en democracia. El Sexenio,
18681874 (Madrid: Temas de hoy, 1996); Manuel Tuon de Lara, Estudios sobre el siglo XIX
espaol (Madrid: Castilla ed., 1972).
15 See Nicolas Ossama, LEglise du Cameroun. Schma historique: 18902000 (Yaound: ucac,
2011), 6.
16 Miquel Vilar i Gell, La Misin Jesutica de Fernando Poo y sus dependencias, 1858
1872, in Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, Javier Burrieza, Doris Moreno (eds.), Jesuitas e
Imperios de Ultramar. Siglos XVIXX (Madrid: Slex, 2012), 319342.
17 A. Santos, Guinea Ecuatorial, in dhcj 2:1845.
18 Irsarri, Misin, 4041.
19 Ibid. See also ibid., 4244.
and its agricultural potential. There are red and white cedar, mahogany, palm
trees, coconut, ebony, guava, and many other species that scientists have never
seen before. The island also grows pineapples, plantain, sugar cane, potatoes,
and yams.20
This island in the Gulf of Guinea was an object of great commercial and
strategic interest to several European powers from the fifteenth century on.
This interest grew during the nineteenth century when the region was influ-
enced by British, Spanish, and French interests,21 and, indirectly, by the inter-
ests of Cuba and the United States because of their role in the periods
transatlantic slave trade. Since Spain was eager to keep providing its American
colonies with slaves, its interests were threatened by the commercial reposi-
tioning of Great Britain in the Gulf of Guinea under the guise of abolitionism.
Additionally, all the powers in the Gulf of Guinea sought a foothold on the
continent, especially when the industrial transformations in Europe and the
Americas increased the demand for raw materials and cheap labor. It seems
that the most significant motives of the Spanish crown were commercial, as
Dolores Garca Cants notes that Spain had no real substitute for its policy
of asientos or monopoly in the colonial sphere.22 Therefore, the island of
Fernando Po and its dependencies, located in the center of the Bight of Biafra,
were important strategic positions for the Spanish,23 providing not only slaves
for its American colonies, but also important reserves of food and water, and
shelter for sailors on the Atlantic coast.24
These two factors became real handicaps for successive Spanish missions
on the island, however.25 For example, the immorality of the settlers, especially
20 Ibid., 4445.
21 The influence of Senegal on this region had been gradually increasing since the late sev-
enteenth century (see Ibrahima Baba Kak; Elikia MBokolo, Histoire Gnrale de lAfrique,
8 vols. (Paris: abc, 1977), 7:2628, 31. This would result in the dispute with Spain on the
island of Corisco or Muni Crisis in the early twentieth century (see Zarco de Mariano,
Actuacin de los misioneros espaoles en la cuestin Muny (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios
Africanos, 1950).
22 Dolores Garca Cants, Fernando Poo: Una aventura colonial espaola en el frica
Occidental 17781900 (Universidad de Valencia: Servei, 2004), 31.
23 Cantus thinks that the Spanish government had been fooled by Portugal in the territory
assigned to him. For Spaniards, the dependencies of Fernando Po extended to the whole
surrounding area of the Bight of Biafra, covering Gabon, Camerones, Domingo, and Cabo
Formoso. This obviously was not the case (see Cantus, 37).
24 Mariano De Castro and De La Calle, M Luisa, Origen de la colonizacin espaola de
Guinea Ecuatorial, 17771860 (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1992), 19.
25 Ibid., 6.
regarding the slave trade, and ideological differences between the missions
originators and the newcomers about slavery, affected the attitude of indige-
nous peoples towards Europeans in general. In many archives and reports from
missionaries, Fernandians manifested great hostility to Spanish missionaries,
linking them to the threat of slavery practiced by Spanish settlers. Another
obstacle seems to have been the structural disorganization of the first missions
and the transitional context of their arrival.26 From the political perspective,
for example, the Spanish replaced the British, and from the religious perspec-
tive, Catholics replaced Baptist Protestants.
Finally, Fernando Po represented the ultimate manifestation of interconti-
nental migrations in the Gulf. Its inhabitants had originated in many parts of
the world, including Europe, the Caribbean, and the British colonies in Africa.
Each of these groups had its own motivations. Specifically, some have argued
that the Christian humanitarian and civilizing mission in the colonies was part
of an attempt by the colonial government to calm growing protests, especially
in religious and academic circles, at home.27 In other words, policies tended to
submit the evangelizing mission to the patriotic mission,28 which too often
placed the interests of the nation and its businesses above the salvation of
souls. Some missionaries embraced this patriotic mission without discern-
ment, whereas others became disillusioned. However, the very success of the
mission was dependent on how well these two forces were balanced. How this
tension was maintained among the Jesuits, the court, and the liberal govern-
ments of Spain during the Guinean adventure is a subject that can only be
determined by studying the foundation of the mission, its subsequent devel-
opment, and its achievements.
First Missionary Attempts in Fernando Po
The island of Fernando Po and its dependencies were not isolated from the
missionary activity that had marked the entire Gulf of Guinea since the
26 The anarchism of the first missions, however, does not seem to be an isolated case, if we
accept the findings of Baka Kak and Elikia MBokolo (Histoire Gnrale de lAfrique, 7:28).
27 Recall here that the Sierra Leone Company was founded by a missionary, Granville Sharp
and that its members had to give up slavery and enter the English religion and civiliza-
tion in Africa. The purpose of the Company was to demonstrate that a fair-trade and that
the slaves would be more productive-with Africa was possible. (Kak; MBokolo, hga,
7:3435).
28 At Fernando Po, this asymmetry is proven by the dispute over the school beginning in
1869, a crisis discussed below.
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, during the Spanish domination

of Portugal (15801640), the Discalced Carmelites and Capuchins launched an
evangelizing adventure in Annobn from 1645 to 1654.29 When the Jesuits
arrived in Annobn in 1863, the memories of these first Portuguese expeditions
were still alive, and the Jesuits referred to it as a Catholic island. The success
of Annobns experience does not seem to have extended to the island of
Fernando Po, however, where Bubi people were less malleable.30 It was not
until 1840, when the Baptist missionaries set foot on the island, that the mis-
sionaries began to achieve success. Among these Baptists were Thomas
Sturgeon and Joseph Merrick. Another expedition followed in 1843 comprised
of Alfred Saker and John Clarke.31 The expedition passed through Jamaica to
join some fifty blacks and mestizos who wanted to return to Africa. In 1844, the
Baptist mission had purchased the West Africa Company, and had built houses,
a church and a school for about seventy children.32 On 23 February 1843,
Captain Juan Jos Lerena y Barry took possession of the island on behalf of the
Spanish crown.33 There followed a second wave of Catholic missionaries on
the island, which paved the way for the arrival of the Jesuits.34
In 1842, Pope Gregory XVI created the Apostolic Vicariate of Two Guineas
and entrusted one to the French missionaries of the Holy Spirit and the other
to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.35 Fernando Po and Annobn remained,
however, under the control of Portugal, belonging to Sao Tom and Prncipe
until 1846, when Fernando Po attained independent jurisdiction. The first
Spaniard to set foot on the island, Jernimo Mariano Usera y Alarcn, arrived
in 1845 as chaplain of the expedition to Guinea.36 But until 1856, there was
limited Catholic missionary activity on the island.37 Indeed, it was not until
May 1856 that a ship was sent to Fernando Po by the pope and Queen Isabel II
29 Cants, Fernando Poo. Una aventura colonial, 4344.

30 Ibid., 44.
31 Alfred Saker and Joseph Merrick were the first Christians to evangelize the Victoria area,
which is in the south west of Cameroon today.
32 Cantus, Fernando Po, 244.
33 Ibid., 269ss.
34 See Cien aos de la evangelizacin de Guinea, 1213.
35 Ibid., 13.
36 Ibid. But long before this expedition, the Spanish government had already decided to
make Fernando Po a strategic priority by founding a mission at the same time as an auton-
omous administration. The beginning of the mission of the Society of Jesus on this island
coincides, therefore, with the beginning of Spanish colonization, after the Spanish-British
treaty of 1827.
37 Ibid., 14.
with the aim of evangelizing this region. The mission was led by a secular
priest, Miguel Martnez y Sanz, head of a large expedition that included some
thirteen religious men, fourteen nuns, three lay carpenters, one seamstress,
one mason, four farmers, and one shoemaker.38 This mission eventually disin-
tegrated through a lack of group cohesion and the discrepancy between the
aims of the mission and the fruit harvested.39 On 17 June 1856, a royal decree
officially founded this mission and entrusted it to the College of Overseas
Missionaries of Loyola. 22 May 1858, marked the beginning of the Jesuit mis-
sion in Santa Isabel, known until 1843 as Clarence City, which was then domi-
nated by the British.
The New Society and the Throne
With the election of Pius VII to the chair of Saint Peter, the restoration of the
Society experienced rapid development, with a clear missionary motivation.
On 28 July 1800, Pius VII wrote Charles IV to ask explicitly for the restoration of
the Society. He noted that it was the fastest remedy for the evils that surround
us on every side, namely, political unrest, irreligion, and immorality. The pope
intended to use the universality of his office to reverse this trend throughout
Christendom, and mentioned the Formula of the Institute of the Society of Jesus
in its mission to educate in all directions, that is, wherever the need arose. The
restoration was so urgent that the suppression had left the world deprived of
the most effective instrument capable of preventing such large and painful
disasters. Therefore, the pope argued, it was imperative to restore the Society
around the world, echoing a plea of bishops and cardinals of all Christendom.
The bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum by Pope Pius VII of 7 August 1814,
formally restoring the Society of Jesus, was immediately followed by the resto-
ration of the Society in the Spanish Empire in 1815. But this first attempt at
restoration was only ephemeral. The Jesuits would be expelled from Spain
again in 1820 (after the triumph of the liberals) and again in 1823.40 On
7 January 1824, the superior general of the Society, Luigi Fortis (17481829),
wrote to King Ferdinand VII to thank him for the regained freedom.41 In the
38 Jos Irisarri, Misin de Fernando Poo, 1859, edited by Jacint Creus & M. Antonia Brunat
(Torell: Documentos de la Colonizacin, 1998), 5.
39 Fras, Castilla, 95.
40 Manuel Revuelta, Amrica Hispnica, in dhcj, 1, 147.
41 A vuestra Magestad reconoce en estos sus Reynos por su glorioso Restaurador, por su
amantsimo Protector y por Padre atentsimo a procurar sus verdaderos bienes; bienes
letter, he, on the behalf of the Society, thanked the kingRestorer, Protector,
and Caring Fatherfor his kindness. In return for the restoration, the gen-
eral pledged the dedication of all the members of the Society, sacrificed under
the protection of the Catholic Monarchs in four parts of the world. Finally, he
outlined three apostolic priorities for the restored Society: promoting the
interests of the monarchy, the well-being of countless peoples, and the spread-
ing of the gospel. To fulfill its mission, the Society required a strong formation
for its members. But in the meantime, it would remain prostrated at the feet
of the August Throne of His Majesty and his Majestys desire for the utility of
people under the Spanish Crown.42 The king answered the father general as
follows:
I have no doubt that the prayers of the Society of Jesus have helped tilt
the favor of God the King of Kings on me; and the Society of Jesus must
be convinced of my affection for its Institute, whose absence has deprived
the Christian youth of sound and political education, the Catholic people
of the pure doctrine by which it was fed through the ministry of the
Society, and the infidels, zealous propagators of the light of the Gospel.43
This fragile calm afforded the Society an environment within which it could
pursue missionary work under the crown. This was the case after its readmis-
sion to work in Spain in 1852, after the concordat of 1851 and the 1835 expulsion.
However, while the Society was muzzled in Spain, it was encouraged to accel-
erate the restoration overseas, particularly in Spanish America, the Caribbean,
the Philippines, and Fernando Po. As Manuel Revuelta reports:
The readmission of the Society in Spain (1852) was based precisely on

missions overseas. The missions depending on the province of Spain
were supported by two different systems. Those established in the inde-
pendent nations of America were organized on the initiative of the
Society, with the support or tolerance of the respective governments, and
que, bendicindolos Dios, pueden formarla y conducir a grado de emular con el tiempo
las sealadas empresas de los antiguos jesuitas, sacrificados baxo la proteccin de los
Reyes Catlicos en las Quatro partes del mundo a promover las ventajas de la Monarqua,
el bien de innumerables pueblos y la propagacin del Evangelio con la agregacin de
nuevos mundos al cuerpo mstico de Jesu Cristo, la Santa Iglesia Catlica (see Lesmes,
Historia de la Compaa, Appendix, 733).
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 734.
without interference from the Spanish government. Instead, the missions

of the Caribbean, the Philippines and Fernando Po were developed with
the legal approval of the Spanish government, under the control and pro-
tection of the Ministry of Overseas Territories in Madrid.44
In Spanish America, the Society financed its free services through the system
of haciendas, maintained by the labor of colonial societies: Indians and black
slaves from Africa.45 The mission of Fernando Po, on the other hand, depended
mainly on the Spanish treasury, and was thus subject to its constraints.
The Mission Project of Fr. Antonio Zarandona (1857)46
Father Jos Irisarri was appointed superior of the mission and apostolic prefect
in 1857. Born on 6 February 1811 in Fakes, this Spanish Navarrese joined the
Society of Jesus on 21 July 1838 at Loyola. He was ordained on 15 August 1849 in
Madrid. With the advance of liberal troops, he migrated with other Jesuits to
Belgium (1839). He studied theology in France before being sent to the Missouri
province (United States of America), where he taught philosophy and moral
theology until 1846. He returned to Belgium from 1846 to 1848 and then moved
back to Spain. In Spain, he founded a community in Bilbao and undertook
popular missions in Cantabria, Castille, Aragon, and Catalonia, before being
appointed superior of the mission in Fernando Po in 1857. He died on 7 March
1868, in Malabo (Fernando Po).
On 4 May 1857, Antonio Zarandona, procurator of the Jesuit missions of
theprovince of Spain,47 drew up plans for a mission to the Spanish islands of
the Gulf of Guinea which he presented to the Overseas Ministry. A copy of the
project is available in the archives of the province of Castile in Alcal de
Henares.48 The project outlines the legal and territorial scope of the mission,
its purpose, and the roles played by the Society of Jesus and the government of
Queen Isabel II. According to this document, Fernando Po is undoubtedly a
44 dhcj, 1:147. The translation from Spanish is mine.

45 dhcj, 2:1254.
46 Antonio Zarandona appears in many archives as az.
47 The function of the procurator for missions is a kind of ambassador of the Society to the
court, charged mainly with issues related to the mission (see Ignacio Echarte, Procurador,
in dhcj, 4:3244).
48 Proyecto de una misin a las islas espaolas del Golfo de Guinea. Presentado en la direccin
de Ultramar por A-Z, el 4 de mayo de 1857 (Arch. C 458, n 8570009).
Spanish property.49 The property was extended to include the island of Corisco
on 27 February 1843, when Bubi leaders swore allegiance to the queen of
Spain.50 The document notes with some regret that the occupation of these
territories had previously never been effective. It also observes that the advent
of the British and Protestant missionaries and the introduction of the
Protestant sects had created great aversion towards the Spanish population.
The report makes no mention of the arrival of the Protestants on the island.
However, it would be anachronistic to suggest they would have introduced
their sect after 1778 in a territory that was owned, but still not occupied, by
Spain.
The missionary project in the Gulf of Guinea seemed, at first, like an attempt
to remedy this situation. The mission aimed both at ending the Spanish non-
occupancy of the island and containing the increasing influence of the
Protestants. The document explicitly states that the mission would take care to
ensure these possessions were useful to the country, and would develop the
beneficial work of the Catholic religion. The report directs that the two objec-
tives should be pursued as soon as the missionaries are settled on the island,
and further directs the missionaries to give an account of the state and cir-
cumstances of the country.
The report lays down specific responsibilities for the Jesuits and the govern-
ment. The Society of Jesus would take care of the mission as the government
wants,51 even though the text fails to indicate with certainty what wants
meant. The Society would send six or seven members to Santa Isabel (the capi-
tal of Fernando Po). The contingent would include three ordained priests (two
speaking English),52 along with three or four brothers to help in primary
schools and vocational training. Upon arrival on the island, the missionaries
would open a special school for children, from where they would, hispanicize
and catholicize the country, without neglecting the adults.
49 The document refers to conflicting interpretations that followed the Treaty of 24 March
1778 in which Portugal ceded this area of influence to Spain, and seems not to include
Annobn. This subsequently weighed on effective occupation of this island and many
others in the Gulf of Guinea by Spain.
50 It is important to place the meaning of these allegiances in context, and explore how they
could affect evangelism as a whole.
51 Como lo desea el gobierno can mean either the governments desire that the Society
takes charge of the mission, or, that the Society carries out the mission as desired by the
government.
52 Criterion suggested by the superior of the mission who had stayed in Missouri in the
United States.
The government, on the other hand, would provide letters of recommenda-

tion for the missionaries, and furnish maintenance and indispensable
expenses for the mission while explicitly committing to set the framework for
these expenses so that they do not weigh heavily on the public treasury.
In1857, the royal government avoided associating the mission with a military
expedition because, it argued, the natives were naturally docile and already
won over to the cause of Spain. A Spanish ship would sail there only in order to
strengthen the bonds of the islands with the mainland.
In sum, the missionary project of 4 May 1857, is a well-written and concise docu-
ment. It seems to be a compromise between different interpretations of the
Spanish presence overseas, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea. According to
Cntass interpretation, for instance, there was a group that campaigned for greater
involvement of the state, and another that argued for a minimal role. One wonders
to what extent the church was involved in these debates. Was Rome involved at all
in those talks? The documents available do not provide a satisfactory answer.
On 26 September 1857, Queen Isabel II ordered the mission to leave for
the islands whenever the government would determine. She also instructed the
government to provide the Society of Jesus with 75,000 reales, far beyond the
6,000 pesos requested by the Jesuits in their original budget for the mission.53
The Mission as Seen by a Spanish Officer
An anonymous letter, whose author, judging by the content, must have been a
naval officer in charge of an expedition to Fernando Po,54 acknowledges the
receipt of the royal decree on the organization of the mission of Fernando Po,
and reports a commissioning of a naval mission to the island.55 The author
requests that he be personally given full authority over the administration of
the island, to ensure the effective implementation of the ministerial instruc-
tions as to the establishment of the mission, and its conduct in accordance with
the political ambitions of the Government of Her Majesty in the islands of
Fernando Po, Annobn and Corisco.56 The letter outlines a religious, economic,
53 Real Orden del 26 de Setiembre de 1857, archivos de la Provincia de Castilla, Chapter 58, n
8570010.
54 Carta al Seor Ministro de Marina, Madrid 30 de marzo de 1858. Archives of the Castile
Province in Alcal de Henares, Chapter 58, n 8580002.
55 This is the first time a document seems to use Fernando Po to describe the mission in the
Spanish territories of the Gulf of Guinea.
56 Hasta ahora, Espaa no tiene otras relaciones con sus provincias del Golfo de Guinea,
que las puramente indispensables para poder afirmar la posesin que en ellas y sobre ellas
and social plan to take advantage of the beautiful location of the islands and of
its inhabitants.
From a religious point of view, it states that it is a most sacred duty to spread
the Catholic faith among the people of Fernando Po, pulling out from the
darkness of idolatry and the yoke of barbarism. When this main objective is
reached, all channels will be free for the high and noble enterprise of civiliza-
tion.57 The mission would, therefore, be both political and religious, in a vir-
gin territory, of rustic and simple people, easy to indoctrinate with the taste
of good and truth. Religion would captivate minds, win hearts, improve and
help to regulate customs, instill the value of hard work, and teach the basics of
the art of human culture. In short, it would sow the seed whose ultimate glory
would be a modern Christianized world. Finally, the author promised to give
the mission the support and freedom it needed to carry out this noble goal.
Furthermore, because the objective of the mission entailed the Catholicization
of the Spanish territories of the Gulf of Guinea, it could not tolerate the public
manifestation of any other religion on the island.
The mission also had an economic aspect. The missionaries were directed to
take care to give the lead, in agreement with the head of the mission, on ways
that could be used to take advantage of the property of the island by establish-
ing factories which, in addition to contributing to the progress of Spain, would
also effectively support the life and work of the missionaries.58 The governor
would, in turn, reserve the treatment of questions relating to other foreign
powers, to the sole discretion of the central royal government in order to avoid
international conflicts. In the same light, the mission would report to the
government about matters regarding the state, and the social and moral con-
ditions of people of color from ultramarine colonies and settlements of
Europeans, and natives of Africa, who had previously been slaves.
This is probably the most important document available for understanding
the mission of Fernando Po. It also served as a roadmap for the missionaries. In
a later section, I examine a report by Father Irsarri,59 the superior of the mis-
sion, in the light of this roadmap in order to establish whether the Jesuit mis-
sionaries also shared this vision or whether there was anything else that
distinguished the evangelizing mission from the colonizing mission.
compete a nuestra patria; y nuestra dominacin hasta el da de hoy solo ha producido el

efecto de delegar en la autoridad que las vige y el de corresponder con ella acerca de pun-
tos significantes alguna que otra vez al cabo del ao. The English translation is mine.
57 From 1862.
58 My translation.
59 See Irsarri, Misin de Fernando Po, 1859.
Second Stage of the Jesuit Mission: after Arrival in Guinea
The Irsarri report of 1862 allows us to appreciate the extent to which the 1857
roadmap was implemented, four years after the start of the mission. It also
allows us to evaluate the challenges missionaries faced. To begin, what did they
actually do in Fernando Po?
The construction of a beautiful and large church seems to have been the
main concern of missionaries on their arrival on the island. However, that
building would not be sufficient to divert Fernandians from the Baptists because
parents resisted even sending their children to the Catholic school. Three new
missions were subsequently created, resulting in a radical change in the mis-
sionary approach. In fact, the Jesuits went from a Bubi-centered mission to new
deployments at Banap (1861),60 Corisco (1864), and Western Basup (1865).
This change in tactics coincided with a change in the colonial enterprise as
well: The conversion of the Bubi to Catholicism and to Spanish culture would
have to be accompanied by a system of colonial production serving Spanish
companies, along with the limitation or progressive extinction of Anglo-
Protestant presence, including that of Krumanes from British colonies.61
This process of Hispano-catholicization was supported by the creation of a
primary education center and a boarding school in the capital, bringing
together the best students of the colony to create new frameworks for the colo-
nial administration.62 That school taught primarily the catechism, the Castilian
language, reading, writing, arithmetic, sacred and profane history, agriculture,
and anything that could make young useful members of society.63 Most of the
students came from Annobn, Corisco, and Saint John. There were also some
children of Spanish settlers. Classes were held in the morning and evening.
Lessons were free, as were books, pens, paper, chalk, and clothing for the more
successful. Between 1859 and 1860, there were eleven students at the school.64
The major work of the missionaries comprised the administration of sacra-
ments and the celebration of the liturgy. These included visits to and provision
of the sacrament for the sick (apparently for the settlers)65 and the baptism of
60 The first authentically Jesuit mission.

61 Irsarri, Misin, 11.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 29.
64 Ibid., 27.
65 Regarding the care of the sick, it should be noted that the Jesuit mission coincided with the
general use of quinine in Europe. Several Spanish settlers of Fernando Po survived thanks
to quinine. See Philip D. Curtin, Death by migration: Europes Encounter with the Tropical
World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1989). Quoted by Irsarri, 57.
children and adults coming mainly from Accra and Ro Camarones (current
Cameroon), other indigenous, and descendants of settlers. From 1859 to 1860,
nineteen children and two adults were baptized.66 Fifty Blacks and approxi-
mately 100 settlers participated in the Easter liturgy of 1860. Some of the faith-
ful also regularly participated in the divine office and in the Eucharistic
celebrations on Sundays and festive days.67 Finally, missionaries organized
tours of the Bubi at the Basil Peak (3,012 m).68 We can recognize in these
excursions the resumption of a widespread pilgrimage culture in Spanish
Catholicism similar to the Camino de Santiago, which inspired the Spanish
reconquest against the Moors.
On 27 June 1859, the overseas director general wrote a note to the procurator
of the Jesuit missions in Spain, Fr. Zarandona, confirming that a group of
Jesuits had embarked with the colonizing expedition sent to Fernando Po.69
Among the Jesuits who were part of this expedition was Pedro de Dalmases
who became the first missionary to die in Fernando Po. In a letter dated 24 May
1860, the governor regretted the death of Father Dalmases and praised him for
his exemplary virtue, self-sacrifice in the performance of duties imposed upon
him by his sacred ministry. The governor also stressed how Dalmases had
won the sympathy of the whole colony, and [how his] loss produced in its
inhabitants a deep pain.70
In 1863, the Spanish council of ministers authorized the Jesuits to extend the
mission of Fernando Po to Annobn, Corisco, and the Cabo San Juan Islands.71
Acknowledging the receipt of this letter, Zarandona gives us a clear idea of the
number of missionaries still on the site: eight priests and seven lay brothers.
And to cover all the tasks listed, the mission needed twelve priests and twelve
lay brothers. He also promised the Society would arrange to send the nine
remaining missionaries to complete the list.72 In addition, the Jesuit procura-
tor required the government to establish in each of these places a community
66 Ibid., 31.
67 Ibid., 35.
68 Ibid., 32.
69 Del Director de Ultramar, 27 de junio de 1859. Archives of the Castile Province in Alcala de
Henares, Chapter 58, n 8590002.
70 Translation adapted by me. The original quote is: sus ejemplares virtudes, su abnegacin
en el cumplimiento de los deberes que le impona su sagrado ministerio le haban con-
quistado las simpatas de toda la colonia, habiendo producido en ella un profundo dolor
su prdida (Chapter 58, n 8600003).
71 Nota al Consejo de Ministros, Chapter 58, n 9, du 4 mai 1863.
72 az. al Marques de Miraflores, Ministro para Ultramar, 18 de mayo de 1863. Chapter 58,
n 8630007.
for missionaries and a chapel or a church (building), except for Annobn

where such a space already existed. Finally, he outlined the entire missionary
strategy for Fernando Po around its capital Santa Isabel, where four ordained
priests and four lay brothers would reside. Thus, the resident missionaries
could supplement other missions where priests were unavailable due to ill-
ness, and could organize tours to the interior of the island to prepare the
ground. He also directed that hospital and school services be guaranteed at
Santa Isabel.
Towards the End of the Mission
The first crisis of the mission came in 1864 when there was a conflict with the
Spanish government about the school. Another occurred with the revolution
of 1868 when the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain was extended to the
island. This second crisis provided justification for the final abandonment of
the mission. The two crises created an opportunity for debate on the desirabil-
ity of founding a mission in Annobn in 1866.
On 8 November 1864, Zarandona, responding to the desire of the overseas
minister, Manuel S. Lozano, to establish a civil primary school in Fernando Po,
made it clear to the minister that this school was not necessary and could be a
handicap for the mission.73 The idea of a civil primary school had resulted, as
noted earlier, from the reluctance of the natives to send children to the mission
school, probably at the instigation of the Protestants. For the procurator, this
fear no longer had substance as children now attended the mission school
without hesitation. By 30 July 1864, there were about nineteen boarders and
twenty extern students, most of them Protestants. On 29 August the superior
of the mission even considered an increase in enrolments. In addition, in
Fernando Po, Corisco, and Banapa, pupils learned about the Catholic religion
and Spanish language. In the case where a civil school was established, the
government was forced to hire Protestant instructors, or otherwise bring
73 az. a Manuel Lozano, Ministro de Ultramar, el 08 de noviembre de 1864. Chapter 58,

n 5640004. This is probably the most important archive I have consulted on relations
with Protestants: La cuestin de la escuela civil se suscit con motivo de que las familias
de Santa Isabel, capital de la Isla, reusaban mandar sus hijos a la escuela de los misione-
ros, temiendo que stos los indujeran a abrazar la religin catlica abjurando la secta
metodista, que en aquella capital es la dominante; y a consecuencia de este retrainmiento
de los naturales, la autoridad de la Isla propuso al gobierno la creacin de la referida
escuela, por no dejar sin medio de educacin a unos nios que si bien han nacido en el
seno del error, son sbditos de Espaa.
Catholic instructors from Spain. Since the motto of the mission was: Same
custom, same language and a symbol of faith, he asked how this goal could be
achieved with an Anglo-Protestant school in a small population in which the
English and Protestantism dominated.74 Hence the need to strengthen the
capacity of the existing mission school to make it more efficient and to trans-
form the school in Santa Isabel into a normal school in which future instruc-
tors could be trained.75
In 1866, tension over the Annobn mission quickly arose. The Spanish
authorities had dismissed Annobn as a part of the continent so remote that
there was no need to establish a mission there. However, Zarandona, invoking
the Aranjuez royal order of 4 May 1863 released by the marquis of Miraflores
(minister of state in charge of overseas territories), argued that while it
was true, as the government suggested, that the island had less commercial
attraction, the islands 4,000 inhabitants were all Catholics who had not come
under Protestant influence and therefore presented an opportunity for the
building of a Catholic state. The island also had the advantage of not adding
anything to the budget of the mission. This latter detail proved to be an impor-
tant factor when the Jesuits convinced the department to start the mission on
22 October 1866.
But the coup de grce of the Jesuit presence in Fernando Po coincided with
the end of the Bourbon monarchy during the revolution of 1868. Having been
expelled, and with their activities suspended on the island by the decree of 12
November 1868, Jesuits no longer agreed to return despite the strong insistence
of the new Spanish authorities. They limited their presence in Fernando Po to
the interim administration of the parish of Santa Isabel where, on 11 September
1869, the Society appointed Pablo Esteban as pastor.76
This escalation of tensions between the Society and the government reveals
a new situation, a new balance of power between the parties. Since the found-
ing of the mission in 1858, the Society had been better organized in Spain, had
seen a significant increase in membership, was directing several successful
74 Ibid.
75 Carta de Gabriel Enriquez, por el Subsecretario del Ministerio de Ultramar, 10 de Agosto
1864.
76 Considerando que los padres Jesuitas administran la parroquia de Santa Isabel de esa Isla
pueden prestar sus servicios con mayor utilidad para la Iglesia y el Estado en estas provin-
cias de Ultramar, su Majestad el Rey (g.D.g) ha tenido a bien autorizar al cura y coadjutor
de la referida parroquia para que puedan retirarse de ella tan pronto como lleguen a esa
los sacerdotes que hayan de reemplazarles hasta cuya fecha debern continuar desempe-
ando su sagrado ministerio (Ministro de Ultramar al Gobernador de Fernando Poo, el 01
de enero de 1871. Arch. N 8710003).
missions around the world, and enjoyed greater autonomy from the govern-
ment. For the Spanish government, on the contrary, the illusion of the revolu-
tion of 1868 did not last long, and the government was undermined from
within by recurrent political crises, a weakening economy, and diminished
international influence. Thus, I argue that the end of the mission, although
triggered by the liberal governments decision of 12 November 1868, was ulti-
mately the result of a deliberate decision of the Society of Jesus. It decided to
end a compromising, painful and ineffective apostolic relationship with a soul-
less government.
The government, on the other hand, was against ending the mission. Even
after the collapse of the mission in 1872, it still urged the Society to continue
administering the parish of Santa Isabel. A letter from Zarandona on 23 March
1875, three years after the departure of the Society from Fernando Po, reveals
tense negotiations between the two parties. In this letter, Zarandona rejects
the call of the king to return to the parish of Santa Isabel, citing a list of frustra-
tions that can be regarded as the final account by the Jesuits of their mission to
Fernando Po: since the mission was entrusted to them in 1858, Zarandona
wrote, the Jesuits had founded a school for children, administered a parish,
visited the island and its residents, both Fernando Po, and Annobn and
Corisco. Several Jesuits succumbed to the climate (including twenty young
men) and the missions result did not correspond to such high sacrifices.
Moreover, government subsidies were removed and colleges overseas were
closed. Therefore, the superiors were not in favor of sending a missionary to
administer a parish in a context where the missionary was no longer subject to
the rule he professed. More importantly, the missions of the Jesuits had grown
in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other places where there was a
greater need for missionaries.
Responding to another letter from the government on 18 March 1878,
Zarandona explained the Jesuits objection to managing a parish as requested
by the Spanish authorities. He observed that the Jesuit Constitutions forbade
Jesuits from administering parishes and that the Jesuits had only accepted
responsibility for the parishes in 1858 under the title of mission. The king
persisted, invoking the good of the Catholic Church, the spiritual needs of the
island and the danger of the Protestant influence, and employing the term
mission.77 On 7 April he reiterated that the Jesuits had complied,78 but
received a prohibition from Zarandona on 16 April 1879, reiterating the same
objections.
77 Correspondencia del 1 de abril de 1878. Chapter 58, n 8780006.

78 Correspondencia del 7 de abril de 1879. Chapter 58, n 8790006.
The last archival piece that I have consulted suggests that, until 1892, rumors
continued to cast a negative shadow over the hasty departure of the Jesuits.
Lessons from an Incomplete Mission
In evaluating the mission of Fernando Po, we can ask that question asked by
Fr. Franz Xavier Wernz more than a century ago: what has God done for/
through the Society in Fernando Po? And, to this we may add another, borrow-
ing from the counsels of Fr. Adolfo Nicols: what can we learn from the failures
of the mission?
The response to the first question is not an easy one. But, if we consider the
thoughts expressed by the protagonists in this mission, the response is, no
doubt, an astounding failure, an overwhelming cross. It was the cross of an
unknown and hostile world for the Spanish missionaries, which evidently
crushed them in many respects and claimed more than half of their lives.79
They faced sickness and hard conditions. They also confronted resistance from
local people who were hostile to the new colonial and pro-slavery order in gen-
eral, and the Catholic mission in particular, because the Fernandians were
infected by the Protestants who, along with their evangelizing mission, also
represented and defended British interests and abolitionist ideology in the
Gulf of Guinea. Fernando Po, in the end, was a mission where the sacrifices of
the lives of missionaries hardly yielded the number of converts generally
expected. For that reason, historybeginning with the accounts of the mis-
sionaries themselvesremembers it as a failed mission.
Yet, as this study has sought to show, the Society of Jesus also did admirable
work in Fernando Po. It brought the message of salvation to many souls through
the celebration of the sacraments,80 service to the suffering, and instruction of
the illiterate. Moreover, in the fragile context of the restoration, Jesuits would
look at this mission as a moment of fidelity to the spirit of their order, as elabo-
rated in the founding Formula of the Institute. This Formula invites candidates
who wish to enter this apostolic body to be willing and available to reach even
Turks if necessary in order to save a few desperate souls, if such is the will of
his Divine Majesty. This seems to be, from the Jesuits perspective, what hap-
pened in Fernando Po. From Jesuits literature on the mission, Fernando Po
79 Besides all those who returned to Spain and died there, it can be noted that out of nine-
teen fathers assigned to the mission, twelve had died; of seventeen lay brothers, eight had
died (A. Santos, Guinea Ecuatorial, in dhcj 2:18451846, at 1846).
80 They baptized 350 children and 150 adults (see Santos, Guinea Ecuatorial, 2:1846).
highlights, beyond the cost, a certain audacity of the superiors of the Society
who launched foreign missions, amidst the hostile conditions of reconstruc-
tion and continuing persecution of the Society in Spain, while they would have
understandingly limited their attention to local emergencies.
This mission, in the assessment of this study was far from a failure: it was
simply incomplete. Their work was pursued by the Claretian Fathers who har-
vested what Jesuitsand the Franciscans, Miguel Sanzs expedition, and the
Protestants before themlaboriously sowed. Today, Equatorial Guinea has a
vibrant and prosperous church because of the combination of all those factors.
Fr. Crisanto Abesso Ebang has just been ordained as the first Jesuit priest com-
ing from this country (in 2012). It is, therefore, a mission to be continued.
Many questions remain, however. There are still regrets about missed oppor-
tunities that would have resulted in a different outcome for the mission.
142 years after the mission of Fernando Po, questions remain about the motiva-
tion for the founding of the mission, the attitude of its participants, the igno-
rance and the fears that accompanied them, where they found their security,
and how these affected the mission.
Harsh climate and malaria were not the preserve of the Guinean mission;
nor was the existence of Protestant competition. These were realities facing all
Catholic missions in the Gulf of Guinea, where, further north, there was also a
strong Muslim presence. There are some factors which could have helped to
improve the nature of this mission and its outcome. First, because politics
affected the planning and strategy of the mission, it would have been better
served if the missionaries had been more independent from the expectations
of the Spanish crown and the idea of patriotic mission. Second, at the cul-
tural level, the outcome of the mission would have been different if the mis-
sionaries had been more favorably inclined towards things that were new and
strange to them, beginning with the indigenous peoples and cultures. Their
description of the locals and their cultures are anything but respectful. The
missionaries also regarded the other Christian groups in Fernando Po in the
same negative light. The Jesuits, in their accounts of the mission, frequently
dismiss the Protestants as heretics, when in fact the Protestant missions on the
island were more successful. Fourth, a question remains: did the missionaries
really get their priorities for the mission right? Why, for example, did they
devote so much energy, money, and time to building an imposing church
before making sure there would be enough faithful to fill it? Above all and
finally, any assessment of this mission cannot avoid a more fundamental ques-
tion: did the restored Society at that stage have a coherent vision of its mis-
sions outside Europe, corresponding to the changes and new challenges in the
new world of the late nineteenth century? Did it have the means to sustain this
enterprise? Did the shadow of the suppression of the Society in 1773 and the
suspicion it engendered still affect the relations between the missionaries of
Fernando Po and the different regimes in Madrid?
In my opinion, the post-restoration Society lacked a coherent vision of its
missions ad gentes. However, many of the missions it had elsewhere suc-
ceeded, especially in the Americas and Asia. Therefore, it can be argued that
the success or failure of a Society under reconstruction after the restoration
was dependent, first, on the internal organization of missions. Those who were
self-managing succeeded more than those directly subject to the crown.
Second, they also depended on members of the Society themselves, their cre-
ativity and their ability to restore themselves, and to rebuild the Society. This
restoration of the members was possible only as far as the men in mission were
able to let themselves be transformed and shaped by local realities so as to
enrich the whole order with their new discoveries. Unfortunately, not only
were missionaries in Fernando Po subjected to Spanish politics and its crises,
they were also immersed in the dominant prejudices and stereotypes about
Africa, Africans, and Protestants. Had they been free from these, they would
have been more creative in their apostolic mission in Fernando Po.
Index
Abajo, Antonio Astorgano44 Amiot, Joseph24748, 25051, 25559

Academia Literaria420, 425 Mmoire de la musique259
Academic Statute (Brzozowski)88 Amitis Chrtiennes (Diesbach)199
Acadmie Anglaise (Bruges)165 Ampive (African herbalists)411
Academy of Fine Arts (Munich)142 Amsterdam91, 202
Accra496 Anagni195
Acquaviva, Claudio25 ancien rgime7, 183, 210, 230
Directory of the Spiritual Exercises25 Andes499, 511
Acton, John190 Andrs, Juan183, 18687, 19192, 194,
Aden143 Angiolini, Francesco94
Adoration of the Shepherds (Rubens)134 Angiolini, Gaetano18891, 193
Aegean Islands82, 361 Angiolini, Giuseppe88
Aeneid (Virgil)93 Anglicanism56, 393, 470
Africa5, 9, 30, 84, 45381, 484, 48788, Angola45354, 45765
491, 494, 502 Annales de la Propagation de la foi348
Aguila, Melchor del411 Annobn, Island485, 488, 493, 495499
Ai (Jean Simonelli)259 Annunciation (Rubens)133
Aigner, Piotr102, 115, 123 anti-popery369, 372
Alba Iulia152 Anton, Raymund (prince-bishop)13637
Albano223 Antonelli, Leonardo (cardinal)171
Albertrandi, Jan64, 111 Antonio, Jos 187
Albrecht V, duke of Bavaria140 Antwerp91, 133
Alcal de Henares491 Aperger, Segismundo416
Alcamo193 Apodaca, Juan Ruiz de442
Aleni, Giulio263 Appalachians372
Alexander I (tsar)3, 7375, 80, 84, 87, Appel aux Jsuites (Bourget)395
354, 356 Apulia192
Alfieri, Vittorio183 Aragon178, 401, 493
Algeria5, 465 Architectura universalis (Furtenbach)143
Allgemeine deutche Real-Enzyklopdie architecture18, 45, 54, 73, 88, 1001, 104,
(Brockhaus)280 107, 109, 112, 11516, 11823, 125, 27883,
Almeida, Jos Bernardo de252, 25557 28587, 289, 293, 398,
Alost133 Architektura obejmujca
Alps123, 183, 203 (Sierakowski)100, 11214, 116, 11819,
lvares, Manuel56, 93 121, 123
lvarez, Juan447 Argentina6, 424
Amaya, Jos 443 Argentine Confederation419, 429, 431
Ambaca (village in Zambesi)464 Arquivo Histrico Ultramarino289
Amelia (Laitian city)195 Arrieta, Juan438
America. See United States Arrillaga, Basilio Manuel443, 446, 448
American independence368 Arrillaga, Jos Basilio441
American Revolution2, 4, 414 Arrupe, Pedro2425
Amherst, Jeffrey388, 393 arsi38, 4244, 47, 209, 337, 341
Amicizia Cristiana219 Artz, Frederick B. 232
Amiens, college of209 Asia5, 293, 346, 45354, 482, 502
504 Index
Aspaas, Pippin155 Barthel, Manfred24041

Assumption of the Virgin (Bock)134 The Jesuits241
Assumption of the Virgin (Rubens)133 Barthlemy, Marc477
Astrain, Antonio43 Basel138
Astrakhan75, 87, 356 Basil Peak496
Astronomie pratique... (Largetau)266 Basilians61, 195
astronomy54, 58, 64, 97, 148, 15051, 154, Basup (Equatorial Guinea)495
15661, 250, 256, 264, 35657, 36162 Basutoland (Lesotho)470
Asuncin41518, 42324, 42628, 430 Bthory, Stephen (king)56, 83, 125
atheism57 Batllori, Miguel40, 44
Attiret, Jean-Dennis316 Batthyny, Ignatius152
Au Bon March23 Batthyny, Mrtonfi152
Auctorem fidei (Pius VI)219 Bavaria12931, 134, 137, 14042, 284
Augsburg132, 134, 143 Bechuana (people and language)473
aurea libertas56 Bechuanaland (Southern Africa)471
aurora borealis151 Begheyn, Paul44
Aurora University296 Bgrand, Jean291
Australia30 Beijing24552, 25457, 25961, 263,
Austria5, 7, 13, 30, 58, 68, 99, 12930, 26571, 278, 284, 286, 290, 293, 296, 299,
13739, 149, 182, 190, 205, 24546, 282, 470 306, 32123
Austrian empire4, 5, 67, 133, 153, 15556, Beitang (North Church)251, 286
15960 Belarus (White Russia)2, 8384, 87, 91,
Autobiography (Loyola)24 93, 9596, 186, 190, 196, 338, 354, 356
Avignon2829 Belgium3, 5, 68, 8283, 133, 136, 139, 281,
Aylmer, Charles175 292, 375, 470, 491
Ayutla Revolution447 Belles lettres93
Belley, college of208
Badowski, Augustyn66 Bel-min-zian-ho265
Bahr, Florian250, 252 Benedict XIV (pope)177, 267, 320
Baines, Peter176 Ex quo singulari320
Baltimore199, 353, 35859, 363, 26566, Benedictines13, 61, 104, 129, 21618
368, 373, 375, 414, 459 Bengal332
Bamberg137 Benimeli, Jos Antonio Ferrer44
Banap495, 497 Benisawski Jan72, 76
Bancroft, George387 Bentez, Josep40, 44
Bandas (Bandra)338 Benoist, Michel258
Bansk Bystrica149 Benvenuti (papal agent)78
Baptists487, 488, 495 Berdugo, Mariano42123
Barat, Luis208 Bergamo186, 21213, 216, 218, 22021, 224,
Bari, college in191 227, 354
Baroque15, 104, 14851, 155, 16061, 241, Berghegge, Franois472, 476, 480
278, 280281, 284, 287, 297, 405, 410, 414 Berlin91, 119
Vilnan54 Berrecci, Bartolomeo119
Barotse476, 479 Berrigan, Daniel25
Barrasa, Jos Loreto440 Bertin, Henri Lonard Jean Baptiste
Barreto, Joo Nunes453 24748, 254
Barreto, Manuel457 Bertrand, Joseph232, 33334, 336,
Barroso, Antonio43840 34041, 34450
Barry, James36869 La Mission du Madur336, 349
Index 505
Lettres nouvelles du missions Boskovich, Roger153, 15556

Madure348 Boston8, 45, 47
Bsi, Louis, Comte de (Besi, Luigi de) Bouhours, Dominique29, 30
262, 264, 267, 27273, 301, 3045, 30911, Life of St. Ignatius, Founder of the Society of
32224, 32629 Jesus29
Biafra, Bight of486 Life of St. Francis Xavier29
Biaa Ru. See Belarus/White Russia Boulanger, Clment395
Biard, Pierre386 Bourbon (house of)12, 1315, 31, 78, 129,
Biblioteca Ecuatoriana (Velasco)414 17980, 182, 185, 187, 190, 224, 229, 24041,
Bibliotheca Collegii (Mnster)137 245, 251, 260, 43839, 498
Bibliotheca Gymnasii (Mnster)137 Bourdaloue, Louis18, 29
Bibliothque Nationale (Paris)146 Bourgeois, Franois24748, 25051,
Bibliothque Royale (Brussels)140 25355, 258, 260
Bick, Charles471 Bourget, Ignace39496
Biedermeier160 Appel aux Jsuites395
Bieliski, Franciszek65 Bournier, Stephan207
Binet, Etienne2830 Bouvet, Lodovico205
What Is the Best Government?28 Boxer Rebellion279, 286
Idea del buon governo per i superiori Brading, David A.402
religiosi28 Brahe, Tycho148
Bioko, region of485 Brahian model148
Birmingham283 Brahmin346
Bismarck, Otto von5 Brakensiek, Stephan142
Black Cardinal200 Brancadoro, Cesare (cardinal)173
Black Sea75 Braschi,Giovanni Angelo (Paul VII)72
Bobadilla, Nicols223 Brazil153, 422, 426, 42830, 461
Bobola, Andrzej, Saint94 Brennens, Emmanuel396
Bock, Paul Bresillac, Melchior de Marion348
Assumption of the Virgin134 Bressani, Francesco Giuseppe386
Boer473 Bretonneau, Paul29
Boero, Giuseppe36 Briand, Jean-Olivier39092, 397
Bogarn, Francisco Javier417 Brigot, Pierre334
Bogusawski, Wojciech94 Brion, Marcel294
Bohemia68, 83 Brisson, Mathurin Jacques410
Bohomolec, Franciszek58, 6465, 94 Britain3, 5, 13, 82, 230, 280, 282, 285, 289,
Diabe w swojej postaci65 293, 303, 318, 333, 38889, 391, 393, 470, 486
Bolgeni, Giovan Vincenzo217 British Raj5, 289
Bolvar, Simn6 Britt, Adam205
Bollandists27, 216 Brittany389
Bologna91, 185, 190, 412, 438 Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold280
Bonacchi, Girolamo206, 209 Allgemeine deutche
Bonaparte, Joseph3, 193 Real-Enzyklopdie280
Bonnard, Claude347 Broglie, Charles de199
Bonnard, Jean-Louis336 Broullion, Nicolas26870
Borgo, Carlo185 Brueghel, Jan133
Memoria Cattolica185 Brueyre, Benjamin264, 283, 329
Borja, Stefano, Cardinal174 Bruges133, 16364, 167, 35758
Borowski, Franciszek95 Brulliot, Franz142
Borromini, Francesco122 Bruna, Franciscus Xavier15354
506 Index
Bruson, Charles208 Cameroon496

Brussels133, 140 Camino de Santiago496
Bruyre, Benjamin300 Canada1, 9, 13, 238, 38687, 38990, 392,
Brzozowski, Tadeusz31, 76, 8182, 8789, 394398, 405
174, 193, 195, 20809, 35354, 357, 35961, Canarins339
363, 36667 Cancino, Alejandro446
Academic Statute of Poock88 Canisius, Peter137
Bubi (people)488, 492, 49596 Caizares-Esguerra, Jorge401, 406, 509
Buda153, 15758 Cantabria491
University of153, 157 Canton (China)254, 293,
Buddhism276 Cantn, Pedro43841, 443
Buena Muerte428 Cants, Dolores Garca486
Buenos Aires404, 41516, 419, 42123, Cape of Good Hope469
426, 431 Capella Regia131
Buffon, comte de (Georges-Louis Capet, Louis. See Louis XVI (king)
Leclerc)399, 40406, 40910 Capitoline Hill108
Bulawayo. See Rhodesia Capuchins13, 200, 347, 463, 466, 488
Bulletin Monumental281 Caravita Oratory222, 224
Burckhardt, Jacob28081, 298 Cardoso, Mateus458
Bureau of Astronomy. See Tribunal of Cartilla de la Sagrada Doctrina458
Astronomy Carew, Patrick J.332
Bureau of Longitudes266 Caribbean487, 49091
Burger, Nathaniel249 Carleton, Guy, 1st baron of
Burghausen132 Dorchester39091, 393
Bustamante, Carlos Mara de437, Carlyle, Thomas282
44446 Carmelites200, 488
Bystrzycki, Jowin64 Carroll, John (bishop)8, 353, 35861,
36365
Caballero, Fernando417 American Catholicism and368
Cabo San Juan, Islands496 70, 372, 378, 380
cachanlahuen412 education of368
Cdiz438, 44445 Georgetown and37274
Constitution of 1812439 Grassi, Charles and38182
Caillat, Jean-Baptist203 Jesuit restoration and364, 368,
Cairo464 37476, 378, 381, 383
Calcutta332, 341 Kohlmann, Anthony and377,
Calepio, Giovanni Gerolamo21718 37980, 382
On the Return of the Jews217 Neale, Charles and381
Calicut143 New York diocese crisis
Calleja, Flix Mara437, 439 and37980
Callot, Jacques143 ordination of370
La Misere de la Guerre143 Paccanari and375
Calvin, John91, 143 Plowden, Charles and368, 37071
Calvinism56, 280 Sulpicians and373
Calvo, Anastacio42224, 426, 428, 430 Cartesianism55
Camaldolensian216 Cartilla de la Sagrada Doctrina
Cmara, Gonalves Luis da237 (Cardoso)458
Cambrai287, 291 Casa Professa191, 193
Cambridge Camden Society283 Casillas, Jos Gutirrez43435, 438, 440
Index 507
Jesuitas en Mxico durante el siglo Centre Svres28

XIX434 Chaco423, 42728
Casimir, the Great (king)109, 123 Chalchicomula (Mexico)448
Casot, Jean-Joseph1, 386, 38990, Challoner, Richard (bishop)16768
39293, 395 Changjiang. See Yangtze, River
Caspian Sea74 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de13
Castaiza, Marquis (Juan de Charles Felix (king)366
Castaniza)438 Charles III (king)163, 178, 184, 43
Castaiza, Jos Mara43941 Charles IV (king)2, 77, 80, 175, 185, 187,
Castel SantAngelo215 438, 488
Castile17879, 401, 491 Charles X (king)4, 14, 22933, 241
Castner, Gaspar284 Charpentier, Marc-Antoine18
Castro, Joo de462 Chazelle, Pierre39496
Catalonia401, 491 Chemba (Mozambique)455, 468
Catherine II (tsarina)13, 5859, 67, Chieri, novitiate of212
6970, 7273, 75, 83, 184, 35354, 356, 367, Chihuahua (Mexico)446
37475 Chile180, 40204, 41013
Catholic Relief Act170 Chilpancingo, Congress of437
Catholicae fidei (Pius VII)3, 7273, 78, 80, China1, 5, 9, 13, 26, 156, 188, 212, 223,
187, 191, 354 24546, 248, 251, 25471, 27579, 28387,
Catholici praesules165 28994, 296300, 30204, 30607, 31323,
Catholicism5, 54, 56, 66, 282, 287, 294, 326, 32830, 356
344, 346, 348, 350, 363 Chinese Rites controversy261, 270, 275,
in China287 284, 301, 316, 31819, 32124, 328, 32829
in England344 Chishawasha (Zambesi region)471
in France294 Chon, Jean Pierre396
in Germany under Bismarck5 Cibot, Pierre Martial250, 255, 258
in India346, 348 Cicero93
in Poland54, 56, 66 Cipolla, Luigi de25053, 258
in Russia363 Cistercians13, 61
in United States36872, 374, 376, Cistercians of the Strict Observance13
378 Civita Castellana195
in West Africa49596 Clarence City489
Catholics14, 155 Claretian Fathers501
in Africa464, 479, 487, 498 Clark, Kenneth294
in Canada389, 391 Clarke, John488
in China256, 264, 282, 284, Clavigero, Francisco Javier181
299301, 304, 308, 310, 312, 316, 319, Clement XIII (pope)194
32326, 328, 330 Clement XIV (pope)13, 3536, 40, 46, 59,
in England170, 172, 357 67, 6972, 76, 7879, 12930, 173, 21415,
in India341 227, 245, 353, 468
in Poland-Lithuania53, 56 Dominus ac Redemptor34
in Russian Empire2, 69, 7475, 78, Clorivire, Pierre-Joseph de31, 207
98 Cluj149, 15455
in United States35758, 369, 372, Coahuila (Mexico)446, 448
374, 37880 Cobo, Bernab
Vatican I and II and32 Historia del Nuevo Mundo400
Cattaneo, Lazzaro323 Coccaglio, Viatore da218
Caucasus3, 75 Colgio de Jesus (Luanda)459
508 Index
Colegio de San Ildefonso436 Constantinople143

Colgio de So Paulo298 Constitutions (Jesuit)2324, 45, 67, 76,
Colegio Imperial (Mexico)442 171, 189, 199, 23637, 240, 314, 467, 470
Colegio Seminario (Paraguay)418 Conventuals13
Collas, Jean Paul250, 255, 258 Convitto dei Nobili di Santa
Collge de la Sainte Famille (Cairo)466 Caterina184, 187
Collge de Saint-Ignace (Shanghai)294 Coomans, Thomas292
Collge des Jsuites (Quebec)294 Copernican cosmology148
College of Nobles (Turin)356 Copernicus, Nicolaus107
Collge Sainte-Marie (Montreal)396 Coralli, Filippo40
Collegio Apostolico221 Cordara, Giulio Cesare34
Collegio dei Nobili (Milan)212 Crdoba, University of417
Collegio Mariano (Rome)20203 Corisco, Island485, 49293, 49597, 499
Collegio Massimo (Naples)191, 193 Corneille, Pierre95
Collegium Nobilium (Ostrg)101 Coronado, Juan Mara443
Collegium Nobilium (Warsaw)55, 59 Coronelli, Vincenzo Maria138, 145
Collegium Nobilium (St. Petersburg)74 Corporation of the Clergy35859, 361,
Collegium Romanum (Rome)171 36465
Collegium Willibaldinum (Eichsttt)161 corps of cadets91
Collingridge, Peter (bishop)176 Corpus Christi94
Cologne91, 130, 132, 13637, 140, 14346 Corral, Luis Gutirrez del443, 446
Colombel, Auguste268 Corrientes42224, 428
Colombia6, 402, 409 Corsini, Cardinal Andrea164, 167
Colombire, Claude La31 Corsiniana Library47
Colorno2, 18687, 190, 222, 224, 35455, Coulon, Augustin203
360, 367 Counter-Reformation106, 297
Commission for National Education Couplet, Philippe294
(Poland-Lithuania)5964, 66, Courland, duchy of53
10001, 111 Courtrai (Belgium)133
Commissum nobis (Gregory XIV)342 Couto, Antnio do458
Commonwealth of Poland- Cracow4, 54, 61, 63, 102, 104, 10609,
Lithuania23, 44, 5152, 5657, 59, 110111, 11215, 118, 12426
66, 68, 84, 99, 121, 123 Academy of61
Company of Faith. See Society of the Faith, University of63 105
Company of the Faith of Jesus. See Cramah, Hector Theophilus de39192
Paccanarists Crbilion, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de94
Concanen, Luke380 Creoles182, 400
Condrau, Jaques205 proto-nationalism of40007, 411, 413,
Confucianism274 276 435
Congo453, 457, 463, 466 Crtineau-Joly, Jacques36
Congregation for the Propagation of the Creus, Jacint484
Faith301, 322, 33234, 33940 Croatia153, 154
See also Propaganda Fide Crown of St. Stephen. See Hungary
Congress of Vienna4, 7, 13 Crucifixion of St. Peter (Rubens)146
Conquista espiritual del Paraguay (Ruiz de Cuba449, 486
Montoya)408 Cubbit, Geoffrey232
Consalvi, Ercole (cardinal)7879, 173, Cuenet, Pierre203
174, 176, 435 cuichunchulli409
Consejo Extraordinario17980 Cultural Institute of Macao331
Index 509
Cultural Revolution279, 296 dsenclavement42, 47

Cuore, Maria Teresa del201 Desperamus, Eduardo361
Curci, Carlo36 Destouches, Philippe Nricault94
Cuyo404, 411 Diabe w swojej postaci (Bohomolec)65
Cuypers, Peter J.H.282 Dialogues (Tasso)93
Cytowicz, Jzef90 Dias de Novais, Paulo457
Czartoryski, Adam Kazimierz6263, 64, Dias, Bartholomew457
118 Daz, Porfirio6
Czerniewicz, Stanisaw6971, 172, 354 Dictionnaire de spiritualit 27
Diderot, Denis239
da Rocha, Felix25051, 255, 323 Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England
dalits331 (Engels)282
Dalmases, Pedro de496 Diesbach, Johann Jacob
Dalmatia68, 83 Amitis Chrtiennes199
DAlmedia, Anna298 Diessbach, Nikolaus von219
Danilou, Jean27 Dilette di Ges202
Daoism276 Dillingen129, 205
Darwin, Charles235 Directory of the Spiritual Exercises
Darwinism235 (Acquaviva)25
Dashkov, Andrei363 Divov, Aleksandr363
Daugava/Dvina, River8385 Dugosz, Jan91
Daugave, River84 Do witego Ignacego93
Daugavpils85 Dominicans51, 56, 417, 462, 466
Dvila, Jos Mariano43334 Dominus ac Redemptor (Clement
Davoust, Msgr.334 XIV)34, 59, 67, 129, 155, 164, 16667,
de Crayer, Gaspard133 178, 212, 245
de la O., Manuel Tadeo417 Dongjiadu (cathedral)311
de la Servire, Joseph268, 273, 304 Dongtang (East Church)253, 258,
Histoire de la mission de Kiangnan304 286, 296
De la Suppression la Restauration43 Doric104
De Moerloose, Alphonse290 Douai, parlement of163
de Pauw, Cornelius399400, 40405, Dowdall, William Macdonnell
41011, 413 Mitchell29495
de Sartines, Antoine R.J.G.G.247 Drach, Johann205
de Vylder, Louis476, 478 Dreifaltigkeitskirche132
de Wit, Anton478 Drewniany Dziadek96
Debrosse, Robert208 Druhilet, Julien208
Decorme, Gerard43334, 438, 442, 447 du Gad, Louis Marie25960
Historia de la Compaa433 du Mesnil, Pierre Louis157, 260
Defensa de la Compaa de Jess445 Dublin368
Dekadentempel. See Dreifaltigkeitskirch Dubois, Jean-Antoine335, 340, 34244
Della Somaglia, Giulio (cardinal)201 Observations relatives342
Delplace, Louis39 Dubourg, William37374
Demonstratio idioma (Sajnovics)151 Dubrovnik222
Denault, Pierre (bishop)392, 394 Dudon, Paul39
Denmark362 Duhr, Bernhard39
Dpartement des Estampes146 Dunbrody471
Depelchin, Henri47172, 474 Durango44243, 446
Depinoy, Antoine205, 209 Dsseldorf131, 134
510 Index
Dvina. See Daugava River 439, 446, 453, 465, 46869, 475, 484,
Dyneburg66, 69 48687, 501
Dyneburg, college of70 Ex debito pastoralis (Gregory XIV)342
Ex munere pastoralis (Gregory XIV)342
Ebang, Crisanto Abesso501 Ex quo singulari (Benedict XIV)320
cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences ex-Jesuits12, 25, 35, 6063, 65, 72, 77, 80,
Sociales43 101, 111112, 121, 133, 13638, 144, 151, 1534,
cole Franaise de Rome43 159, 162, 165, 167173, 18186, 18992, 205,
Ecuador6, 402, 40910 212219, 22425, 246, 25051, 25357,
Egan, bishop of Philadelphia382 25960, 273, 277, 289, 310, 316, 321, 325, 331,
Egell, Augustin141 368, 37078, 380, 38283, 405, 410
Eger (Hungary)152 Exposcit debitum (Julius II)24
Eichsttt Hochstift (Germany)137
El Maraon y Amazonas (Rodrguez)409 Fabre, Pierre-Antoine43, 195, 223
Elgin, 8th earl of (James Bruce)293 fanatisme jesuitique63
Empandeni471, 478 False Disciple, The (Mozzi)218
Encisco, Bernardino417 Fano (town in Marche, Italy)222
encomiendas402 Farrapos, war of422
Engels, Friedrich282 Faszczw85
Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in Fathers of the Faith. See Paccanarists
England282 Fathers of the Sacred Heart375
England1, 37, 67, 83, 123, 16267, Favier, Pierre-Marie-Alphonse287, 289
172, 17377, 207, 229, 28283, 35658, Feldkirch139
36061, 362, 364, 366, 36970, 372, Flicit de Lamennais, doctrines of210
37475, 391, 396 Fenwick, Enoch365
English college (Bruges and Rome)164 Ferdinand IV of Naples (king)3, 81, 190
Enlightenment67, 6465, 75, 112, 115, Ferdinand VII of Spain (king)4, 175, 196,
157, 159, 18283, 229, 280, 282, 413, 420, 439, 437, 439, 443, 445, 489
463 Ferdinand, duke of Parma2, 3, 18486,
Epinette, Pierre205, 207, 361 224, 354
Equatorial Guinea, Republic of485, 501 Fernando Po6, 466, 48388, 490502
Ernestine Hall141 Ferrara91, 190
Escuela de Cristo428 Fessard, Jean205
Espinha, Jos246, 24950, 25253, 255 Feuill, Louis410
Esteban, Pablo488 Findlen, Paula26
Esterhzy, Carolus, bishop of Eger153 The Man Who Knew Everything26
Estve, Eugne-Franois264, 275, 283, Fiore, Gioachino da216
300, 305, 310, 325, 327 Fiorentino, Francesco122
Ethiopia45354, 465 Fixo (African deity)475
Euripides95 Flanders164
The Phoenician Women95 Flemish school (painting)133
Europe1, 45, 13, 15, 30, 33, 38, 5152, 56, Flemish style (architecture)291
65, 6869, 77, 80, 8485, 89, 145, 15254, Florence230
15657, 15960, 188, 198, 205, 20910, 213, Floridablanca184
216, 220, 233, 24041, 246, 249, 262, 264, Foggini, Pier Francesco164
269, 275, 27879, 28182, 285, 292, 30001, Fondo Gesuiti47
30304, 31517, 32729, 337, 33940, Fontainebleau3
34445, 348, 350, 353, 35859, 362, 383, Formula of the Institute24, 489, 500
38990, 399400, 403, 406, 410, 41314, Fortis, Luigi489
Index 511
Fournier, Marc Antoine205 Gdask (Danzig)95

France26, 1315, 28, 3032, 43, 57, 67, Gelly, Juan Andrs42628, 431
85, 123, 129, 143, 162, 20203, 20708, 210, Genoa91
22933, 239, 241, 245, 251, 253, 256, 258, Geometry and the Polish Architect
28082, 28485, 287, 29394, 30204, 318, (Solski)118
326, 333, 344, 369, 373, 375, 38691, 39596, George III (king)170, 39091, 393
435, 465, 485, 491 Georges-Adam, prince of
Francia, Jos Gaspar Rodrguez41622, Starhemberg133
425, 431 Georgetown College (University)1, 3,
Franciscans13, 227, 417, 501 353, 356, 35864, 367, 37274, 37678, 381,
Conventual227 384
Francisco, Incio255 Gerbi, Antonello400
Franois, Ren (Etienne Binet)28 Germany5, 32, 44, 63, 68, 83, 13034, 137,
Frankfurt91 139, 143, 146, 210, 280, 28283, 285, 375, 435,
Frederick II (emperor)59 470
Freemasonry75 German Confederation5
Freiburg im Breisgau132, 138 empire of5, 146
Freiburg, University of138 Second Reich5
French Revolution4, 7, 14, 31, 65, 183, 198, unification of5
233, 239, 261, 280, 356, 439 Geronimo, Francesco de192
Fras, Lesmes43, 482, 484 Gesuitomania (Colombo)33
La Provincia de Castilla de la Compaa de Ges Vecchio (Naples)81, 19192, 196
Jess482 Ghent140, 16263
Frings, Heinrich145 Giambattista, Count212
Friz, Andreas95 Giard, Luce47
Fu, Count (Fulongan )253, 254 Gibson, William (bishop)176
Fuchs, Charles478 Gioberti, Vincenzo262
Fulda137 Il gesuita moderno262
Fulongan. See Fu, Count Giovanucci, Giovanni164
Furtado, Andr457 Giove195
Furtenbach, Joseph (the elder)143 Glapion, Augustin-Louis de389, 392
Architectura universalis143 Glaubitz, Johann Christoph119
Fuzhou318 Gloriot, Charles204
Glover, Thomas165
Gaillard, Franois-Marie38 Gniezno54, 60, 64
Galicia59, 68, 84 Goa143, 246, 249, 334, 336, 338, 342, 455,
Gallicans13 460, 462
Gama, Jos Mariano440 Gogeisl Anton252
Gamache, marquis de387 Gonzaga, Luigi (Saint)87, 94, 212, 220, 223
gamata475 Gothic (neo-)18, 107, 125, 27883, 28587,
Ganganelli, Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio 289298
(Pope Clement XIV)215 Gotteland, Claude264, 266, 273, 274, 276,
Gao, Louis260 283, 300, 30304, 307, 310, 32829
Garampi, Giuseppe51, 59 Gottsched, Johann Christoph93
Gatti, Isidoro Liberale35, 40 Gouvea, Alexandre de250, 254, 25657,
Gau, Franz Christian294 32122
Gaulin, Rmi, bishop of Kingston395 Grahamstown46970, 47273, 47980
Gawroski, Andrzej (bishop)61, 111 Grammont, Joseph de247, 25051,
Gazeta Warszawska35, 64 25457
512 Index
Grand Sminaire (Montreal)384 Hartman, Ferdinandus154

Granelli, Giovanni95 Hartmann, Andrew471, 47374
Grassi, Charles381 Havret, Henri268
Grassi, Giovanni1, 186, 35367, 381, Heidelberg138
38384 Heilig-Kreuz, church of132
contributions to Georgetown35963 Hell, Maximilian14956, 15859
at Stonyhurst College35657, 367 Helvetic Republic435
Notizie varie sullo stato...366 Henri IV (king)18
Greece5, 282 Henriquez, Joseph322
Gregorian University4, 40, 207 Henry, Lord Arundell of Wardour162
Gregory XVI (pope)260, 26465, 267, Herbarium (Syreski). See Zielnik
333, 34142, 420, 488 Hermitage73
Commisum nobis342 Hermite, Antoine29394
Ex debito pastoralis342 Hervs y Panduro, Lorenzo183
Ex munere pastoralis342 Hevelius, Jan91
Multi prclare342 Selenographi91
Latissimi terrarum tractatus339 Machinae coelestis91
Grivel, Fidle204 Heyder, Jacob145
Groote, Eberhard von146 Stampe e disegni145
Gros, Jean-Baptiste Louis293 Histoire de la mission du Kiangnan (de la
Gruber, Gabriel3, 73, 77, 81, 94, 96, Servire)304
17374, 188, 191, 206, 353, 356, 358, 376, 381 Histoire de la Rvolution (Laumier)241
Grumelli, Maria Antonia221 Historia Albae Russiae Soc. Iesu96
Grzebie, Ludwik44 Historia de la Compaa (Decorme)433
Studia i materiay do dziejw jezuitw Historia del Nuevo Mundo (Cobo)400
polskich44 Historia del Reino de Quito (Velasco)400,
Guadalajara436, 448 405, 4089, 413
Guangzhou246, 251, 256, 257, 259, Historia General del Reyno de Chile
29394, 31819 (Rosales)406
Guaran408, 415, 422 Historia narodu polskiego
Guatemala6, 447 (Naruszewicz)64
Guaycur427 Historia Societatis Iesu34, 37
Guillemin Zphirin (bishop)29394 Historisches Museum147
Guimares, Alexandre Pedrosa da History of the Popes (von Pastor)227
Silva246, 248, 253 Hodder, novitiate of3
Guinea, Gulf of482, 48588, 49195, Hof- und Staatsbibliothek170
500501 Hofbibliothek141
Gury, Jean-Baptiste198, 202, 204, 211 Hofgartengalerie134
Gust, Francisco191 Hofkirche131
Gymnasium Tricoronatum144 Holland143
Hoowczyc, Szczepan (bishop)61
Habsburgs133, 149, 15458, 448 Holub, Emil472
haciendas442, 491 Holy Childhood Association398
Hagenbrunn (Austria)200 Holy See40, 5859, 67, 78, 174, 179, 219,
Halifax (Canada)390 238, 261, 340, 34344, 374, 397, 425, 466,
Hallerstein, August von252, 258 481
Hambye, douard Ren33435 Hong Kong257, 267, 289, 293, 297, 318
Hannipaux, Joseph395 Horace93
Harding (Jesuit in Maryland)389 Hornyold, John Joseph167
Index 513
Howard, John165, 170, 172 Irkutsk (Siberia)75, 87

Huangpu, River318 Isabella II (queen)466, 488, 491, 493
Hubei255, 259 isula408
Hudson Bay387, 391 Italy3, 78, 32, 3637, 40, 68, 8081, 83,
Huerta, Francisco Gutirrez de la195 122, 143, 179, 182, 18687, 18889, 191, 196,
Huguang (China)323 204, 21718, 224, 227, 230, 251, 360, 366, 411,
huizhang307 435, 438, 462, 470
Hunan255 Itapa428
Huner, Michael421 Iturbide, Agustn Cosme Damin434,
Hungary83, 14849, 151, 15457, 15960 443
Hurley, Michael379
Huron387, 388 Jacobin/Jacobinism3, 64, 439
jger91
Icaza, Isidro Ignacio de440 Jagiellonian University105
Idea del buon governo (Binet)28 Jalapa (Mexico)448
Idgoras, Jos Ignacio Tellechea44 Janda, Jan123
Igreja de Jesus (Luanda)575 Jansenism21620, 228
Il Ges104, 111, 459 Jansenists13, 35, 216, 218220, 239
Il gesuita moderno (Gioberti)262 Japan5, 223, 398, 306
Il Redentore (Palladio)104 Jardin, Andr 235
Ila (people)479 Jaszlinszky, Andreas155
Ildefonso Treaty485 Institutiones physicae155
Iliski, August87 Jenessaux, Nicolas204
Iukszta (Ilkste, Latvia)5354, 61 Jenison, John164
Illuminism4 Jennesseaux, Jean-Joseph396
Immaculate Conception Jesuit Historical Institute34, 4041, 43
church of (Beijing)278 Jesuit Roman Archives. See arsi
church of (Freiburg im Jesuitas en Mxico (Casillas)434
Breisgau)132 Jesuitenstil280
college of (Derby District)166 Jsuites: Une multibiographie
devotion to212, 220, 228, 286 (Lacouture)26
Imperial Gallery (Vienna)133 Jesuitica45
Imperial Library (Vienna)140 Jesuits
Imperial Public Library (Russia)90 in Africa and the Portuguese
Imperial Tribunal of Mathematics empire340, 462, 481
(Beijing)322 Africa, problems in47478, 481
India5, 238, 257, 289, 33136, 33846, Africa, return to488
34950, 369, 454, 456, 462, 467 Africa, suppression in454, 459, 483
Indochina5 American Catholic church
Industrial Revolution4, 282 and378
Industrialization5 American mistrust of378, 381
Ingolstadt91, 132, 137 ancien rgime and7, 183
Initia Astronomica (Mrtonfi, A.)152 in Angola457462
Inkosi (African god)475 architects in Poland-Lithuania5354,
Innsbruck13738 99
Institute of Jesuit Sources27, 45 architecture in Poland and99125
Institutiones physicae (Jaszlinszky)155 artistic and cultural properties
Ireland30, 174 lost132147
Irsarri, Jos484, 491 astronomy and14861
514 Index
Jesuits (cont.) conservativism of7, 298

in Australia30 Conventual Franciscans debate
Baroque and15, 54, 104, 14851, 155, 161, with227
241, 278, 28081, 297, 405, 410, 414, 459 cosmography and148, 150, 160
Basque and44 devotions and societies founded187,
Corporation of the Clergy 192, 220, 228
and35859, 361, 36465 education in Africa and455
Bourbon restoration in France education in Latin America and404,
and240 420, 42223, 42627, 436, 44043
in Canada386 England, restoration in172, 176
Canada, establishment in386 England and Wales, suppression in165
Canada, return to39495, 498 England, survival in163
Canadian estates of39297 English Colleges of16566
canonical approval in Russia English possessions outside England
of7677, 79 of16465
Carroll, John and35860, 36465, English province of163, 165, 167, 169,
371, 37476, 378, 381 177, 332, 357, 360, 469
Catholicae fidei and3, 7273, 78, English residences of16566
80, 187, 191 estates controversy in Canada397
China mission and fate of257, 260 ex-Pres de la Foi, tensions
China, differences of other missions with2078, 210
of403 Fernando Po under Spain49294
in China, donations to294 Fernando Po, departure from499
in China, education and271 France and Switzerland, opposition
in China, expulsion in 1950s of315 in15
in China, identity of258 France, argument for restoration in295
China, legacy of the old mission to302 France, expulsion from57
in China, misrepresentation of330 France, in pre-suppression3031
in China, opposing forces of restoration French Jesuit writers27
of261 French second empire and5
China, overwhelmed in306 fundamentalism of24
China, properties in246 general congregations of23, 37,
China, requests for missionaries 4041, 46, 72, 188, 209, 354
to26465 Georgetown University and1, 3,
China, return to26061, 283, 300, 353, 356, 35864, 367, 37274,
303, 316 37677, 381, 384
in China, schism in mission of314 German art and123, 147
China, suppression in, and24546, German empire, suppression in5
254, 260 German properties lost131144
in China, suspicion of269 golden age of2324, 27, 297
in China, top down policy myth gothic revival and278, 281, 283, 286,
of268 292, 298
Chinas unequal treaties and303 historiography after the restora-
Chinese Catholic secrecy and32526 tion35, 37, 3940
Chinese Rites controversy and261, identity during the suppression8, 193,
263, 267, 27071, 275 228, 258, 340, 378
Cologne, treasures in130, 132, 136 in India under British Raj34244
Commission for National Education India, correspondence in337
and59, 61, 63 India, restoration in332, 334, 346
Index 515
Indian caste system and331, 333, in Mozambique before the

34748 suppression45457
in Italy from Spanish assistancy178, in Mozambique, departures effects576
180, 18386, 19092 Mozambique, expulsion from462
Jansenists against216 Mozambique local economy
Jiangnan, mission to261, 263 and45556
Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, Mozambique, mission to45355
return to190 in Munich13132, 134
in Latin America, expulsions of12 Naples Kingdom of, restoration
in Latin America, proto-nationalism in184, 19092, 194
of181, 40004 Naples, Kingdom of, expulsion
Laumier and23141 from19394
liberals and23132, 23839, 447, 489 nationalism and5, 32
library holdings lost by137140 nationalism in Latin-America
in Luanda after the and5, 181
suppression46960 in New France as pioneers38687
in Luanda, church of460 New France, properties in38788,
from Macao, repeated expulsions of376 39294
to Macao, return of267 observatories of53, 149, 156
in Macau, suppression of24546, Paccanari and18687, 189
248, 253 Paccanarists and197298, 20003
Madurai mission of33234 papal confirmation in Russia of172
Madurai, mission after Papal states, denied of hospitality
restoration34041 to179
Malabar rite controversy and332, 335, Paraguay under Francias rule417418
339, 34749 Paraguay, departure from431
Maryland mission of353, 35657, 360 Paraguay, return to42426
in Maryland, education by358 Paris Commune of1871 and5
in Maryland, properties and estates in Parma educational activities of187
of358, 371, 369, 37375 in Parma readmission of2, 178
Mexican independence and434 in Parma suppression of129
Mexican province of181, 433, 438, 449 patrias defense of Latin
Mexico (newly independent) and436 America399400
Mexico after Napoleons defeat and435 Pedro Arrupe and24
Mexico after the reform war and44748 pensions of60, 6566, 133, 139, 179,
in Mexico versus Enlightenment439 19091, 194, 254, 388
in Mexico, haciendas returned to442 Pres de la Fois members who
in Mexico, properties returned to440 joined20809
in Mexico, residences of (during Philadelphia, plantations of380
Porfiriato)448 Pius VII and restoration in Russia
in Mexico, restoration of43349 of68, 7273, 7679
in Mexico, third suppression of445, Pius VII and universal restoration
447 of8082
in Mexico, universal restoration in Poland-Lithuania before
of438 suppression5154
missionaries relation to a bishop329 in Poland-Lithuania during parti-
monarchical help in restoration of14, tions59, 6669
161, 233, 435, 445, 48990 in Poland-Lithuania novices of55
monarchy vs liberals and438 in Poland-Lithuania destitution of66
516 Index
Jesuits (cont.) in Spain of Ferdinand VII4, 175, 196,

in Poland-Lithuania contributions 437, 439
of66 from Spanish assistancy in Parma184
in Poland-Lithuania patriotism of65 from Spanish assistancys identity179,
Poland-Lithuania, survival in 181
partitioned74 from Spanish assistancys contribution to
Polish commissions on education Italy18687
and99100, 11011 from Spanish assistancy in papal
Poock Academy, theater at86, 89, states182, 195
9493 in St. Petersburg3, 38, 7273, 7576,
Poock Academy, trades and professions 78, 80, 82, 87, 354, 356, 361, 367
at92 style104, 222, 27883, 398
Poock, departure from98 Sulpicians and199, 201, 37377,
Portuguese administration in 388, 390
Mozambique and456, 458 Switzerland, expulsion from5
Portuguese padroado and248, 250, Two Sicilies, Kingdom of, restoration
255, 257, 260, 333, 339, 342 in79
prazo economy in Africa and461 Two Sicilies, Kingdom of, return
print culture and28 to8081
prophecies of restoration of179, 200, in United States (before indepen-
21516 dence) during suppression358
Quebec after British occupation and386 in United States, mistrust of369,
rebirth of82, 84, 236, 278, 298, 384 37173
ressourcement and2728, 33 in White Russia during
Romanticism and231, 23538 suppression69
in Russia, growth and expansion from White Russia, missions of74
of5254, 7375, 83, 87 in White Russia, reorganization
Russia, re-establishment in79 of7071
Russia, survival in46, 75 in White Russia, scholarly activities
Russian empire, expulsion from67, 75 of72
Russian empire, missionaries in95 in White Russia, stability and continuity
sequestered churches of18, 13133 of85
Shanghai mission of294, 299300, 302 in White Russia, survival of2, 68
Shanghai, problems of307, 309 White Russia, universal restoration
Sicilian province of192 in80, 82
Sicily, return to184, 191, 193 White Russia, continuity in66
slavery in Africa and46162 Zambesi mission and46970,
Society of the Faith and197202, 478480
20506 Jesuits, History and Legend, The
South Africa activities of in478 (Barthel)241
South Africa return of to465, 469 Jesuits in Poland (Zaski )38
South American local history Jiangnan261, 263, 267, 270, 272, 275, 299,
and40002, 413 301, 30306, 312, 315, 319, 32130
South American natural history Joo V (king)153, 460
and40610, 412 Johannes der Taufer church
South American traditional medicine (Koblenz)132
and404 Jols, Jos398400
in Spain and Fernando Po, expulsion Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia
of490, 497 del Gran Chaco399
Index 517
Joseph II (emperor)65, 73, 130, 133, 152, Kupferstichkabinett142

155, 157, 159 Kwango (Congo)466
Journal de Trvoux156
Journal Historique et Littraire35 Ladmiral, Pierre250
Jouvancy, Joseph de94 LAssociation de Paris470
Julius III (pope)24 Lenfant du jsuite (Laumier)231, 233, 141
Exposcit debitum24 LObservateur en Pologne (Vautrin)120
Junta de Temporalidades436 La Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso)93
Jupiter (planet)150, 152 La Mission du Madur (Bertrand)336,
jurisdictionalism79 349
La Prairie (Canada)39597
Kaffraria47071 La Provincia de Castilla (Fras)482
Kalendarz Poocki87 La XX Congrgation Gnrale
Kamsetzer, Jan Chrystian119 (Gaillard)38
Kangxi (emperor)289, 32021 Lacouture, Jean26
Kareu, Franciszek7778, 172 Jsuites: Une multibiographie26
Karpiski, Franciszek93 LaFontaine-Baldwin, government of396
Pieni nabone93 Laimbeckhoven, Gottfried von24546,
Keilands471, 475 248, 255, 303, 321
Kensington203, 205 Lamalle, Edmond40
Kentucky395 Lamathe, Mathurin250, 255
Kri, Franciscus Borgia156 Lammenais, Flicit de394
Khama, (chief)479 Lampa412
Khamaland470 Lanterna Magica362
Kiev94 Largetau, M. 266
Kikongo458 Astronomie pratique266
Kimbundu45859 Larkin, John39495
Kircher, Athanasius26, 144, 148, 150 Lartigue, Jean-Jacques394
Klemens, Antonius136 Last Judgment (Rubens)134
Kochanowski, Jan91 Last Man Who Knew Everything
Wybr przedniejszych rymw93 (Kircher)26
Kochanowski, Piotr93 Latian195
Kohlmann, Anton198, 204, 207, 359, 361, Latin America4, 6, 14, 30, 461
365, 37779, 382 Latin rite, 5355, 363
Kohlmann, Joseph204 Latissimi terrarum (Gregory XIV)341
Konarski, Stanisaw58, 111 Laumier, Charles Lazare5, 22933,
Konstanz (Germany)139 23541
konwikty55 Histoire de la Rvolution dEspagne241
Korycki, Karol69 Lenfant du jsuite231
Kociuszko, Tadeusz199, 107 Meditations of Charles X233
Koice (Slovakia)155 Rsum de lHistoire des Jsuites229
Krakovian Academy126 Launay, Adrien342
Krakw. See Cracow Lavaissire, Pierre272
Krasicki, Ignacy93 Laval, University475, 489, 490
Krumanes (people)495 Law, Augustus472, 478
Kubicki, Jakub119 Lazarists58, 25455, 257, 264, 270, 272,
Kulturkampf5 284, 286, 32123, 326, 328
Kunsthistorisches Museum133 Lazio215
Kunstkammer138 Le Blanc, Pierre204
518 Index
Le Febvre, Louis Joseph246, 251 Lobengula (chief)471, 473, 47980

Le Forestier, Mathurin Germain214 Locci, Agostino119
Le Jay, Gabriel9495 Lpez, Basilio421, 429
Le Jeune, Paul387 Lpez, Carlos Antonio41921, 42326, 431
Le Mans, cathedral of18 Lpez, Enrique Gimnez44
Le maraviglie di Dio (Risignoli)409 Lpez, Francisco Solano426, 431
Lealui, River478, 479 Lpez, Miguel Vicente428
Lebombo470 Lorenzaccio (Musset and Sand)230
Ledchowski, Wodzimierz3839 Lorette, Jeune398
Leipzig91, 282 Loriquet, Jean Nicolas208
Leitha, River15355 Lorraine57, 251
Leleu, Luis208 Louis IX (king)15
Lenkiewicz, Gabriel18485, 354 Louis XIII (king)15
Leo XIII (pope)397, 466 Louis XIV (king)223
Len, Gregorio de411 Louis XVI (king)2, 14, 229, 247, 253, 260,
Lerdo, Ignacio44243, 446 334
Lerena y Barry, Juan Jos 488 Louis XVIII (king)14, 229
Leniewski, Micha90 Louisbourg, fort of388
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim94 Louvre146
Leszczyski, Stanisaw (king)56, 111 Low Countries133, 281, 292
Lettres Mgr lvque de Langres Loyola, Ignatius of13, 25, 29, 35, 37, 89,
(Luquet)349 98, 129, 23638, 24042, 297, 358, 375, 459,
Lettres de nouvelles mission de la 487, 489
Chine308 Arrupe, Pedro and24
Lettres nouvelles (Bertrand)348 Autobiography24
Leuven45, 140, 199 death of23
Lewanika (chief)47273, 476, 479 Spiritual Exercises2425, 45, 161, 187,
Liana (zoophyte)408 19193, 199, 202, 209, 221, 237, 299, 302,
Licchetta, Pietro33640, 350 305, 395, 449
Lige35, 162, 16465, 167, 16972, 35658, Lozano, Manuel S.497
37071 Lozi (people)480
Life of Confucius, The (Poirot)259 ozowice (Belarus)85
Life of Jan Roothaan (Lighthart)24 Luanda (Angola)45859, 46163
Lighthart, C. J.24 Lubac, Henri de13, 27
Life of Jan Roothaan24 ubieski, Feliks64
Liguori, Alfonso de 203 Lubeka92
Lin, Zexu317 Ludea, Antonio187
Linnaeus, Carl408, 410 Luengo, Manuel35, 189, 196
Linnean system410 Luigia Maria Antonia, princess of
Lionville, Charles205 Parma224
Lisbon246, 24850, 289, 334, 356, 456, Luiset, Paul395
46162 Luquet, Jean-Felix Onsime333, 349
Lithuania, Grand Duchy53, 57 Lettres Mgr lvque de Langres349
Litta, Lorenzo (cardinal)76, 81, 176, 363 uskina, Stefan6365
Livingstone, David454, 461, 463 Lustig, Antoni88
Livonia65, 69 Luther, Martin91, 439
Lizrraga, Lorenzo441, 443 Lutherans53, 139, 232
Ljubljana73 Lutheranism56
Llampillas, Francisco183 Lww (Lviv)10102
Index 519
Lyce Charlemagne18 Marino (Laitian city)195

Lyons27, 29, 333, 342, 34445, 347 Marotti, Giuseppe76
Lyon, Ignacio443, 446 Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse
Lyon, Juan440 Franois de Sade)239
Martin, Alexander345
Ma Xiangbo270, 296 Martin, Flix39596
macagu408 Martn, Luis3738, 41
Macao24549, 253, 255, 25759, 264, 267, Martina, Giacomo40
270, 272, 278, 289, 297298, 32123, 326, 331 Martnez y Sanz, Miguel484, 489
Macartney, George Earl25557 Mrtonfi, Antonius15152
machahuanga408 Initia Astronomica speculae152
Machi411 Mrtonfi, Josephus (Mrtonffy),
Machinae coelestis (Hevelius)91 bishop152
Madagascar395, 457, 465 Marx, Karl282
Madame de Pompadour239 Mary Altarpiece (Schwarz)134
Madarassy, Joannes15253 Maryland35859, 36971, 372, 377, 389
Madonna and Child (van Dyck)133 Catholics and Catholicism in369
Madras342, 348 education in377
Madre de Deus, college of297 Neale family of371, 373
Madrid41, 163, 178, 180, 183, 320, 415, 434, Maryland mission1, 353, 35657, 360, 367
442, 445, 491, 502 Masdeu, Baltasar187
Madurai9, 33137, 33943, 34546, Masdeu, Francisco183
34849 Mashona473
Magyars149 Mashonaland47071
Mai, Angelo186, 226, 367 Massalski, Ignacy (bishop)5961
Mainas408 Mass, Ennemond386
Mainz91, 137 Masserati, Antonio185
Maistre, Joseph Marie, comte de32, 87 Matabeleland470, 473
Maz, Marco Antonio42021, 428 Matebele Wars477
Malabar97, 33437, 339, 34647, 34849 Mathon, Louis334
Malabar rites controversy332 Mattei, Michele di Pietro Alessandro81
Malta, Knights of131 Max III Joseph (elector)137, 140
Manchu254, 25960, 265 Max IV Joseph (elector-king)131
Manchuria248 Maximilian (emperor)6
Manhattan379 Maximilian I (elector)14243
Manila267 Maximilian of Habsburg (Mexico)488
Manitoulin, Island396 Mayer, Victor205
Mannerist285 Mazovia53, 66, 7071, 360
Mannucci, Serafino206, 20910 Mbanza (Angola)458
Marais (Paris)15 McCoog, Thomas M. 25
Maratti, Carlo145 The Mercurian Project25
Maria Anna, Archduchess202 McGill, James394
Maria Carolina (queen)190 Meditations of Charles X (Laumier)233
Maria Christina (queen)366 Medrano, Mariano422
Mari Himmelfahrt church Melanchton, Philip91
(Cologne)132, 136, 14344 Mellon, Stanley232, 238
Maria Theresa (empress)129, 133, 138 Mmoire de lAgriculture (Rieule)119
Maria Theresia (empress) See Maria Theresa Mmoire de la Musique (Amiot)259
Marie-Amlie (queen)267 Memoria Cattolica (Borgo)185
520 Index
Menchaca, Roque192 Molinari, Matteo206

Mndez-Bonito, Navia409 Molyneux, Robert359
Mendizbal, Francisco440, 443 Mombasa470
mep (Missionaires Etrangres de Mongolia290
Paris)33335, 34243, 34749 Monomotapa
Mercedarians417 dynasty of468
Mercier, Honor39697 kingdom of453, 455, 457
Mercurian Project, The (McCoog)25 Monteagudo, D. Matas444
Mericourt, Hubert Cousin de258 Montevideo (Uruguay)422, 429, 431
Merrick, Joseph488 Montlosier, Comte de232
Mesmer, Franz Anton150 Montreal38788, 390, 39396
Metahistory (White)233 Montruge, college of208
Metastasio (Pietro Antonio Trapassi)95 Montfar, Cipriano443
Metternich, Prince, Klemens von4 Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu
Mexico6, 15, 143, 43334, 43649 27, 41
Mexico City130, 437, 440, 44244, 447 Monumenta Missionum40
Mikmaq (people)386 Monza, Jesuit college of212
Michelangelo106 Morad, Maria Guadalupe40
Middle East84 moral theology428, 491
Middle Kingdom. See China Morales, Juan Bautista320
Miesicznik Poocki8687 Moravian470
Mignani, Vincenzo206, 209 More, Thomas164, 16870
Mihanowicz, Jan95 Morelia (Mexico)448
Milan91, 212, 216, 226 Morelos y Pavn, Jos Mara437
Milizia, Francesco115 Morelowski, Jzef95
Principi di architettura civile115 Moreno, Joaqun425
Miller, Michael135 Morrison, George Ernest288
Treasury Book of St. Michaels135 Moscow3, 38, 91, 354
Milner, John (bishop)175 Moura Joo Castro322
Milnes, Robert394 Mozambique45363, 46566 470
Ming268, 286, 29394 Mozdok (Russia)75, 87
Minsk91 Mozzi de Capitani, Giambattista212
Miracles of St. Ignatius, The (Rubens)133 Mozzi de Capitani, Luigi1, 186, 212228
Miracles of Francis Xavier, The History of the New Church of
(Rubens)133 Utrecht218
Miraflores, Marquis of498 The False Disciple218
Missions Etrangres de Paris. See mep Jos Pignatelli and22224, 22627
Mississippi, River387 Mcisaw (Belarus)75, 85
Modziejowski, Andrzej (bishop)5960 Multi prclare (Gregory XVI)342
Modimo (Adrican deity)475 Mungello, David313, 316
Moemba (chief)47980 Munich91, 13032, 134, 136, 14044
Mogilev (Mohilev)69, 75, 85, 91, 94 Mnster137
Mohawk387 Muriel, Domingo181
Mohylew. See Mogilev Murphree, Marshall W.468
Molire (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)94 Murray, James38890, 393
Molina, Juan Ignacio de400, 405, 41113 Murry, Daniel (bishop)175
Saggio sulla storia naturale del Musei Naturalium (Cologne)172
Chili400 Museum Mathematicum (Cologne)145
Molina, Luis de187 Muslims344, 465
Index 521
Municki, Nikodem new Jesuits210

Historia Albae Russiae Soc. Iesu96 New Mexico442
Muzeum fizyczne95 New Orleans387
Pogarda nauk95 New Spain178, 43339
Zabawki teatralne95 New Vizcaya442
Musset, Alfred de230 New York361, 372, 37980, 382, 395
Lorenzaccio (with George Sand)230 Carroll, John and372, 37980, 382
Muth, Franz205 Catholic crisis in37980
Muzeum fizyczne (Municki)95 Kohlmann, Anton as administrator
Myli o pismach polskich (Czartoryski)118 in382
Mysore (India)334 Newcomb, Simon152
Mystic Engagement of the Blessed Hermann Newtonian physics150
Joseph (van Dyck)133 Newtonianism57
Myszkowski, Mikoaj66 Ngola (ruler)457
Ngoni (people)47980
Namur (Belgium)133 Nicols, Adolfo25, 483, 500
Nancy (France)91 Night School of Charity220, 228
Nanjing246, 264, 26768, 272, 303, Ningbo (China)318
32223 Nixon, Thomas169
Nanjing, Treaty of303 Norway151
Nantang (South Church)25253, Notizie varie sullo stato (Grassi)366
258 Notre Dame (Paris)36, 282
Naples and Sicily, Kingdom of81, 175, 191 Nouvelles Ecclsiastiques35, 216
Naples, Kingdom of3, 190, 193, 209 Nova Scotia386
Napoleon (emperor)3, 5, 7, 1314, 31, 81, Novais, Paulo Dias de457, 459
111, 131, 146, 159, 175, 18687, 191, 19496, Nuremberg9091, 129
198, 22930, 239, 380, 435, 438
Napoleon III (emperor)18 O sztuce u dawnych (Potocki, S.)118
Napoleonic Wars34, 73, 8688, 159, 200, Oaxaca (Mexico)448
207, 258, 261, 301, 376, 380, 438 Observations relatives (Dubois)342
Naruszewicz, Adam63 Ode to Mukden (Qianlong)259
Historia narodu polskiego64 Odessa (Ukraine)3, 75, 87
National Assembly (France)14 Oedipus the King (Sophocles)95
National Printing House (Warsaw)65 Ojibway (people)396
nationalism5, 32, 278, 283, 292, 399 Olaguibel, Rafael440
Naturkunde-Museum146 Omnium sollicitudinum
Nauka czytania pisma polskiego93 (Benedict XIV)347
Navarrete, Domingo320 On the Return of the Jews (Calepio)217
Navarro, Joaqun484 Ontario (Canada)394, 396
Navarro, Juan Surez445 Opinion of the People is Clear, The273,
Nax, Ferdynand115, 123 275
Neale, Charles381 Opium Wars257, 284, 26061, 26364,
Neale, Francis36061, 373, 377, 381 267
Neale, Leonard365, 374, 376, 381 Oreno (Italy)226
Neiwufu 251 Orestes (Euripides)95
Netherlands3, 45, 68, 82, 162, 281, 361, 470 Orizaba (Mexico)448
Neuburg an der Donau (Court Orlans, house of14
Church)131 Orsbeck, Johann Hugo von
New France. See Canada (elector-archbishop)139
522 Index
Orsza, college of (Belarus)70, 74, 85 Paris1, 5, 13, 15, 1923, 2829, 43, 57,
Orte (Latian city)195 9091, 95, 131, 143, 14647, 16263, 236,
Orthodox Christianity2, 5556, 66, 68, 24748, 253, 26061, 264, 266, 283, 293, 315,
7475, 91, 104, 123, 360, 363 324, 32830, 333, 340, 342, 38991, 39394,
Orue, Jos Vicente419 470
Orvieto3, 195 Paris, Treaty of389
Ostrg (Ukraine)101, 104 Parma23, 129, 178, 18488, 19092, 196,
Osuna, Juan de183 22122, 224, 354, 361
Ottoman Empire5, 157 Parma and Piacenza, Duchy of184
Ovalle, Alonso de40304, 41112 Parras (Mexico)448
Overseas Missionaries of Loyola, college patagua (plant)412
of489 patrias399400, 402, 41314
xlein, Johann Leonhard130 Patronatskirche131
Paul I (tsar)3, 24, 46, 7273, 7678, 104,
Pacca, Bartolomeo (cardinal)80, 210 298, 354356
Paccanari, Niccol 18687, 189, 197201, Paul III (pope)24, 46, 7879
20607, 210, 22426, 228, 375 Regimini militantis Ecclesiae24
founding Company of Faith375 Paul VI (pope)76
inspiration from St. Ignatius225 Pearl, River delta318
sentencing and imprisonment209 Pedicini, Carlo Maria (cardinal)340
Paccanarists (Society of the Faith/Fathers of Peking Fathers268
the Faith)197, 20103, 205, 20810, Pea, Jos441
377 Pea, Jos Ildefonso443
Pacelli, Eugenio227 Pentecost (Rubens)134
Padberg, John25 Per alias (Pius VII)3, 81, 174, 191, 209
Paderborn (Germany)137, 202, 205 Pereira, Peres (bishop)265
padroado248, 250, 255, 257, 260, 333, 339, Pres de la Foi20708, 210
342 Prez, Ignatius190
Padua91 Perry, Philip Mark163
Palacios, Jos Joaqun421, 425 Peru6, 178, 289, 402, 415
Palermo (Sicily)81, 193 Peters, Johannes Bartholomus de145
Palestrina (Italy)195 Peterskirche146
Palladian102 Petijean, Antoine205
Palladio, Andrea104 Petre, Francis167
Il Redentore104 Phaedrus93
San Giorgio Maggiore104 Philadelphia8, 29, 38283
Pallazi, Agostino95 Philippines35, 178, 321, 422, 437, 482,
Pamitnik Historyczno-Polityczny65 49091, 499
Pamitnikowi pro memoria (Wyrwicz)65 Phoenician Women, The (Euripedes)95
Pampa (people)422 Piacenza. See Duchy of Parma and Piacenza
Pancaldi, Luigi188 Piarists52, 58, 61, 91, 93, 98, 111, 155
Panizzoni, Luigi8082, 184, 188, 195 Pieni nabone (Karpiski)93
pantadeknyon97 Pignatelli Jos3, 38, 81, 18596, 22224,
Papal States32, 17879, 182, 195, 205, 207, 22628, 354, 465, 483
219 beatification and canonization of226
Paraguay6, 35, 178, 181, 190, 192, 238, 402, death of195
408, 41532 Pilar, port of423
Pars, Bernand42231 Pilcomayo, River427
Pans, Pedro Garca41719, 423 Pinakothek134
Index 523
Pinamonti, Giovanni Pietro223 Polling (Bavaria)129

Piramowicz, Grzegorz62, 111 Poock23, 6974, 80, 8399, 185, 35456,
Rhetoric and Poetry for the National 36062, 36667
Schools62 Poock, academy of8399
Pires-Pereira, Cajetan32223 collection of classical texts of94
Pius VI (pope)2, 63, 7172, 76, 79, 87, 165, contributions of83, 93
169, 18586, 201, 215, 220, 354, 371, 376 faculties, languages, and courses
Auctorem fidei219 offered89
Catholici praesules165 Jesuit expulsion from Russia and93
death of186 libraries of86, 8889
Pius VII (pope)3, 13, 1415, 31, 46, 68, printing press of87, 90
7273, 7682, 131, 17375, 177, 187, 19092, theater in90, 95
19495, 207, 20910, 222, 224, 226, 232, 354, Polonophone nobilit55
364, 366, 376, 392, 471, 482, 489 Pooski, Maurycy90
Catholicae fidei7273, 78, 80, 187, 191, Polotsk. See Poock
354 Pombal, 1st marquis de (Sebastio Jos de
imprisonment and exile13, 175 Carvalho e Melo)24546, 248, 259,
Per alias, 3, 81, 174, 191, 209 334, 46061, 464
Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum3, 34, Pondicherry33335, 34142, 34447
68, 8081, 175, 177, 195, 203, 332, 364, Poniatowski, Micha (bishop)60
426, 468, 482, 489 Poniatowski, Stanisaw August
Pius IX (pope)6 (king)5758, 63, 10011, 117, 120,
Pius XI (pope)39, 226 123, 126
Place des Vosges18 Zabawy przyjemne i poyteczne63
Place Royale18 Poo, Ferno do485
Placidi, Francesco110 Pore, Charles9495
Plains of Abraham, Battle of388 Porfiriato448
Plane compertum320 Port Royal386
Plata, River416, 418, 42122 Portugal5, 14, 68, 83, 129, 153, 214, 24546,
Plaza, Ignacio443 259, 322, 326, 335, 339, 34142, 356, 360,
Plaza, Ignacio Mara de la440 362, 367, 389, 401, 45357, 46063, 482,
Pliny the Younger93 485, 488
Pock60 Porzia, Enea de182
Plowden, Charles175, 356, 368, 37071, postcristero434
375, 37778, 381, 383 post-Tridentine Catholicism54, 56
Plowden, Robert364 Poszakowski Jan56
Poczobut, Marcin58, 61, 63, 66, 91 Potenza, Giulio Cesar338
Pogarda nauk (Municki)95 Potocki, Stanisaw Kostka102, 112, 11516,
Point, Pierre396 11819, 123
Poirot, Louis247, 25052, 254, 25657, O sztuce u dawnych118
259 Potocki, Ignacy6263, 112, 116, 123
The Life of Confucius259 Uwagi o architekturze116
Polan2, 38, 51, 54, 5657, 60, 64, 6870, Potomac River369
85, 101, 115117, 11920, 353 Power, Michael, bishop of Toronto396
Polesian marshes54 Powinnoci nauczyciela (Piramowicz)62
Polish Jesuit Centre (Cracow)44 Pozna54, 59
Polish Revolution63 Praga (Warsaw)65
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. See Pragmatic Sanction, The (Charles III)179,
Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania 437
524 Index
Prague54, 91 Regimini militantis Ecclesiae (Paul III)24

Pray, Georgius151 Regnard, Jean-Franois94
prazo456, 461, 464 Renaissance45, 102, 23031, 233, 236,
Prestage, Peter471, 478 23940, 280, 284, 287
Prester John453 Renzi , Bernardina215
Principi di architettura civile (Milizia)115 republicanism7
probabilism7 Requeno, Vicente183, 191
Profesa Conspiracy444 ressourcement2728, 33
Propaganda Fide167, 171, 174, 176, 224, Rsum de lHistoire des Jsuites
246, 267, 272, 30103, 305, 309, 356, 36566, (Laumier)229, 241
370, 425, 468 Revuelta, Manuel Gonzlez43, 484, 490
Protestants262, 344, 358, 372, 417, 487, Rezzi, Luigi Maria188
492, 497, 50002 Rezzonico, Giovan Battista (cardinal)71
See also Lutherans; Lutheranism; Calvinist Rhine, River130
Protestant Reformation28 Rhodes143
Prussia5, 7, 13, 53, 5859, 68, 99, 132, 146 Rhodesia46971
Pudong (China)267, 311 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de237
Puebla (Mexico)44243, 44748 Ricards, James469
Pugin, Augustus28283, 296 Ricci, Lorenzo35, 71, 89, 179, 216
Pujati, Giuseppe Maria218 Ricci, Lorenzo Biography of
(Termanini)40
Qianlong (emperor)255, 259, 286, 321 Ricci, Matteo26, 265, 276, 278, 28586,
Ode to Mukden259 293, 299, 301, 317, 319
Qing24546, 25455, 260, 268, 28486, Riccioli, Giovanni Batista148
294, 318 Richelieu, Cardinal (Armand Jean du
Quebec38694, 39697 Plessis)15
Quechua289, 407 Riegger, Johann Anton von138
Quel est le meilleur governement Riego, Rafael4
(Binet)28 Rieule, tienne120
Quelimane455 Mmoire de lagriculture120
quinchamali412 Riga87, 91
Quito178, 400, 402, 40510, 413 Rio Camarones. See Cameroon
Rio de Janeiro258, 418, 423, 426
Racine, Jean94 Ro de la Plata418, 42122
Ragusa, Republic of222 Rivas, Jos Guadalupe443
Ranquet, Dominique du39596 Robertson, William399
Ranquet, Ludovicus du345 Roche, Jean-Baptiste de la259
Rasna85 Rococo54, 284
Ratio studiorum25, 55, 85, 94, 156, 184, Rodrigues, Andr252
192, 299, 302, 355, 362, 436 Rodrguez, Manuel409
Ratusz (town hall)107 Roger, Pierre204
Ravignan, Gustave-Xavier de36 Romano, Antonella43
Razumowski, Aleksy87 Romanticism229
Rea, William455, 465 Rome236, 238, 24550, 260, 262, 266,
Recall of the Two Jesuits (Laumier)233 282, 284, 30102, 30405, 31920, 324,
Reeve, Joseph16970 32830, 339, 341, 36571, 37475, 380,
Reform War (Mexico)447 38283, 391, 395, 415, 43839, 459, 472, 493
refrattari Jesuits184, 196 Roncalli, Angelo227
Regensburg130, 132 Ronsin, Pierre208
Index 525
Roothaan, Jan8, 24, 303, 305, 353, 451 S. Julien, Fort259

election of20910 Sacred Heart of Jesus
foreign missions and264, 306 Bourbon restoration and31
mission to Canada and395 cathedral of29394, 296
mission to China and267, 29900, devotion to187, 212, 302
30102 Saggio sulla storia naturale (Molina)400
mission to Madurai and333, 34142, Saggio sulla storia naturale (Jols)399
34647 Saint Clotilde church (Paris)29394
Rosa, Joseph de133 Saint Ignatius Cathedral
Rosales, Diego de403 (Shanghai)29293
Historia General del Reyno de Chile404 Saint Paul-Saint Louis church (Paris)16
Rosas, Juan Manuel de42122 Saint Stephen church (Poock)85
Rosignoli, Carlo Gregorio409 Saint-Ignace church (Paris)18
Le maraviglie di Dio409 Saint-Lger, Robert341
Rottenburg132, 139 Saint-Louis church (Paris)18
Royal Institution for the Advancement of Sajnovics, Joannes Nepomucene15152,
Learning394 15859
Royal Society (London)259 Demonstratio idioma151
Rozaven, Luis198, 204, 206, 210 Saker, Alfred488
Rubens, Peter Paul133, 144, 146 Sala Poselska123
Adoration of the Shepherds134 Saldanha y Albuquerque, Manuel de334
Annunciation133 Salombrini, Agustn289
Assumption of the Virgin133 Salusti, Giovanni Damasceno24850,
Crucifixion of St. Peter146 255, 258
Last Judgment134 Salviati Palace202
Pentecost134 Smi (Lapp)151
The Miracles of St. Ignatius158 San Giorgio Maggiore (Palladio)104
Rubillon (Jesuit French provincial)329 San Miguel, college of (Santiago)412
Rudoph, Balthasar205 San Pietro, college of (Piacenza)186
rue de Svres18 Snchez, Victoriano442
Ruggieri, Michele317 Sand, George230
Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio403, 408 Lorenzaccio (with Alfred de
Conquista espiritual del Paraguay408 Musset)230
Ruskin, John282 sanniasis349
Rusnati, Aloysius91 Santa Anna, Antonio Lpez de445
Russia14, 7, 13, 3839, 46, 5860, 6667, Santa Fe (Mexico)178
7377, 7982, 84, 98, 99, 169, 17275, 187, Santa Isabel (Fernando Po)485, 489
192, 209, 222, 225, 258, 285, 334, 338, 340, Santa Theresia, S. Joseph a (Joseph Max
353, 35961, 365, 375, 380 Pruggmayr)24546
Russian Bible Society74 Santa Rosa de Lima (convent)297
Russian empire31, 53, 63, 6568, 7075, Santiago, Chile412, 496
7780, 8384, 184, 196298, 207, 35455, Sanvictores, Diego442
36164, 367 So Salvador458
Russification88 Saratov (Russia)3, 75, 87
Ruthenia54 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz94
Ruthenian rite55 Sauri, Francisco447
Ryo, Maksymilian466 Sava, River72
Rzeczpospolita. See Commonwealth of Savoy32
Polish-Lithuania Saxia209
526 Index
Sbriscia, Giovanni207, 209 Sigismund chapel102, 119

Schatz, Klaus44 Sigismund I (king)126
Schilpario (Bergamo)354 Sigismund III (king56
Schmidt, Friedrich von282 Signay, Joseph, archbishop of
Schwarz, Christoph134 Quebec396
Mary Altarpiece, Virgin and Child134 Silling, Theodor136
Scordial, Bernardino80 Silveira, Gonalo da453, 455
Scotland174 Simbirsk (Russia)91
Scott, Gilbert294 Sinaloa (Mexico)442, 445
Scotti, Gallarati, Count294 Sinotheology277
Sebastianism338 Sion, boarding school of209
Seghers, Daniel133 Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul275
Segneri, Paolo223 Siu Paul ()294, 299, 301, 312
Segreteria dei Memoriali71 Siu, Diego294
Seine15, 18 Skarga, Piotr91, 93, 98
Seixas, Joo de255 Slavery (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade)
sejm5859, 63 115 in Africa453, 45658, 46162, 464,
Selenographia (Hevelius)91 48687, 491, 494, 500
Sminaire de Qubec390, 392 in Paraguay418
Seminaire des Missions Etrangres. See in United States38283
Missions Etrangres de Paris (mep) lizie, Otto98
Seminario Conciliar (Mexico)443 Small Sword Society305
seminarium generale158 Smissek, Johann140
Sena455, 457, 46061, 468 Smith, Sydney F. 39
Sending Out of the Apostles, The Smuglewicz, Franciszek54
(Smuglewicz)54 The Sending Out of the Apostles54
Serbat, Louis281 niadecki, Jan63
Serrano, Josef187 Sobieski, Jan III (king)119
Servire, Jacques de la268, 273, 304, 307, Society of Jesus. See Jesuits
325 Society of the Faith of Jesus ( Fathers of the
Setchana (African language)480 Faith). See Paccanarists
Severoli, Antonio Gabriele175 Society of Missions208
Seville163 Society of the Sacred Heart197201, 203,
Sezze195 210, 220
Shanghai259, 26162, 26671, 278, 283, Society of St. Luigi Gonzaga220
285, 290, 29294, 297, 29903, 315, 318, Sofala (now Mozambique)455
32224, 326, 328, 330 Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum (Pius
Shanxi249, 255, 298 VII)3, 34, 68, 8081, 175, 177, 195, 203,
Shona (people)468 332, 364, 426, 468, 482, 489
Shoshong (now Botswana)47980 Solski, Stanisaw118
Shunzhi (emperor)28687 Geometry and the Polish Architect118
Siberia3, 74, 405 Somaschi354
Sichelbarth, Ignaz252, 255 Sommervogel, Carlos28
Sieberg. See Zyberk Songjiang (China)255
Sicle des Lumires239 Sonora (Mexico)442, 445, 448
Sierakowski, Sebastian2, 99125 Sophocle95
Architektura obejmujca100, 112, 116, Oedipus the King95
118, 119, 121, 12325 Sora (Lazio, Italy)191
Siestrzecewicz-Bohusz, Stanisaw Sotho (people)475
Jan6970, 75, 77, 360, 36364, 366 Sources Chrtiennes27
Index 527
Sousa, Policarpo de246 Stoss, Veit122

Souza, Federico Guilherme de257 Strasbourg90 138
Spain, 25, 1415, 35, 4344, 80, 129, 16263, Strickland, Joseph37
168, 173, 175, 17879, 18788, 219, 222, 239, Strickland, William17075, 206, 359
242, 245, 40002, 404, 410, 416, 42122, Studia i materiay (Grzebie)44
43739, 442, 466, 48287, 48994, Sturgeon, Thomas488
496498, 501 Sudan466
Spanish assistancy178, 180, 183, 186, Suetonius93
19092 Sukiennice (Cracow)107
Spas (Belarus)9596 Sulpicians199, 201, 37377, 388, 390
Spiritual Exercises (Loyola)2425, 45, 161, Suppression, survivance (Gaillard)38
187, 19293, 199, 202, 209, 221, 237, 299, 302, Sweden362
305, 395, 449 wity Alojzy (ukiewski)96
St. Adalbert church (Dobro)109 witkowski, Piotr65
St. Carolus Borromeo (Antwerp)134 Switzerland3, 5, 15, 68, 83, 142, 280
St. Catherine (St. Petersburg)74 Syllabus of Errors7
St. Chads Cathedral283 Synod of Pistoia219
St. Domingue379 Syreski, Szymon91
St. John Lateran (Rome)131 Zielnik91
St. Josephs (Burghaufsen)132 Szentivnyi, Martinus148
St. Josephs (Rottenburg)132 Szentmartny, Ignatius153, 154
St. Lawrence, River395 Szerdahelyi, Gabriel148
St. Louis (Missouri)27 Dissertatio148
St. Louis University8 szlachta5559, 6263
St. Mary, college of (Kentucky)395 Szlamowo (Lithuania)70
St. Marys, college of (Baltimore)359,
37374, 377 Tacchi Venturi, Pietro227
St. Michaels church (Munich)131 Taiping rebellion5 263, 300, 305
St. Omer, college of162 Taiwan277
St. Paul (Macao)297298 Talbot, Thomas169
St. Pauls (Regensburg)132 tamshi408
St. Peters (New York)379 Tartar City286
St. Peters (Rome)202 Tasso, Torquato93
St. Petersburg3, 38, 7273, 7576, 78, 80, La Gerusalemme liberata93
82, 87, 354, 356, 361, 367 Tati (Africa)480
St. Salvator (Augsburg)132 Taucher, Franciscus15758
St. Sulpice, Order of. See Sulpicians Tauerbach, Sebastian150
St. Sylvester (Paccanarist mother Tavares, Pedro de458
house)202 Tedeschi, Radini288
St. Sylvester, novitiate of202 Tejada, Ignacio Lerdo de44243
Stampe e disegni (Heyder)145 Tekakwitha, Kateri (Catherine), Saint387
Stapelhaus146 Tellier, Rmi395
Statz, Vincenz282 Templars129
Staudinger, Georg205 Tepe, Wilhelm Victor Alfred282
Stepling, Joseph149 Tepotzotln (Mexico)448
Styca (Poland)64 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer)91
Stonor, Christopher167 Termanini, Tommaso35
Stonor, John167 Biography of Lorenzo Ricci35
Stonyhurst, college of3, 176, 207, Terrde, Anthony47273, 478, 480
35662, 367 Tesillo, Santiago411
528 Index
Testa, Alessandro206, 209 ukaz69, 74

Tete45556, 459, 465, 468 Ukraine54, 101
Texas446 ultramontanist ecclesiology32
Theal, George McCall457, 462 Umpierre (procurator of Propaganda
Theatines58 Fide)323
Theiner, Vincenzo36 umweltseelsorge199
History of Clement XIV36 Uniates. See Ruthenian Rite
Theodor, Carl, elector of Bavaria131 United Kingdom82, 177, 294
Thirteen Colonies369, 391 United States1, 3, 5, 8, 23, 45, 80, 82, 188,
Thomas, Antoine208, 269 207, 285, 356, 360, 36264, 36668, 37075,
Thompson, Richard176 37781, 438, 486, 491
Thorpe, John16264, 16768 anti-popery in369, 372
Tianjin290 Catholicism in36869, 372, 374,
Tiber, River84 376, 378
Tilo (African deity)475 mistrust of Catholicism in372
Tivoli (Italy)195 Universidad Nacional (Mexico)443
Tomsk (Russia)75, 87 Universittsbibliothek142
Tonga (people)475, 47980 Universittskirche (Freiburg)132
Toronto396 University of Paris13, 236
Torre, Giuseppe Sineo della202, 204, 209 Unkulunkulu (African deity)475
Tournai (Belgium)140, 292 Uranus153
Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de410 Uruguay6, 421
Tournely, Franois Leonor de199 Uruguay, River422
Towarzystwo do Ksig Usera y Alarcn, Jernimo Mariano488
Elementarnych61 Uwagi o architekturze (Potocki)116
trans-Atlantic slave trade. See slavery Uwiadomienia87
Transcarpathia156 Uwad (Izvalta, Latvia)75, 90
Transylvania149, 152, 156
Trappists13, 200 Valais, council of209
Traslosheros Luis443 Valence76
Tratados histricos (Navarrete)320 Valentano215
Treasury Book of St. Michaels, Valenti Gonzaga, Luigi (cardinal)223
(Miller)135 Valladolid (Spain)163
Trento, Girolamo223 Vallecossa, Giovan Francesco Filippi
Tribunal of Astronomy (Beijing)250 di336
Trier131, 13738 Vals (France)304
Triple Alliance, War of431 van Dyck, Anthony
Trnava (Slovakia)149, 155, 15758 Madonna and Child133
Troy, John368 Vard (Norway)150
Tbingen (Germany)13839 Varin, Joseph198, 201, 20304, 207208
Tucuman (Argentina)411 Vatican City7, 41, 47, 177, 277, 301, 320,
Tudesq, Andr-Jean235 322, 324, 328, 330, 354, 448
Tupin, Pierre396 Vatican I7, 32
Turgeon, Pierre, Archbishop of Vatican II24, 27, 32
Quebec396 Vautrin, Hubert121
Turin212, 219, 366 LObservateur en Pologne121
Two Sicilies, Kingdom of4, 7981, 174, Velasco, Juan de400, 405, 40710, 41314
19496, 222, 361 Historia de Quito400, 405, 40809
Index 529
Velbruck, Franois-Charles de, Warmia53

Prince-bishop165 Warsaw35, 55, 5859, 61, 64, 65, 104,
Venadito, Viceroy Count445 112, 117
Veneto222 Warsaw Monitor117
Venezuela402 Warsaw Society for the Friends of
Venice104, 138, 143, 216, 230, 236 Science64
Venosta, Visconti213, 216 Watten162
Ventavon, Jean Matthieu247, 24951, Wawel (Poland)99
25355, 258 castle107, 123
Venus (planet)150 cathedral10203, 107, 109, 119
Vergil91 Hill126
Verona264, 322 Wzowski, Bartolomiej119
Versailles5 Wehl, Charles478
Veuillot, Louis394 Weiss, Franciscus Xavier179, 189
Vienna54, 59, 73, 91, 96, 133, 137, 140, 152, Well, Bernard392
15657, 175, 200, 205 Wendake (Quebec)388
Congress of4, 7, 13 Wenzhou (China)298
Jesuit observatory in150 Wernz, Franz Xavier482, 500
siege of148 Wesleyan (Protestant church)470
university of155 Westbeech, George479
Vilnius (Wilno)3, 52, 5859, 61, 70, 84, Western Church (the Lady of
107, 115, 119 Sorrows)245
academy of52, 54, 57, 125 Whampoa (Huangpu), Treaty
university of3, 6164 of303, 318
Vincentians299 White Russia2, 67, 6973, 75, 80, 8283,
Violet-le-Duc, Eugne282 207, 222
Virgil93 White, Hayden233
Aeneid93 Metahistory: the Historical
Virgin and Child (Schwarz)134 Imagination233
virgins (Chinese female catechists) Wiadomoci Warszawskie64
27173, 275, 305, 307, 30910, 31213, 324, Wikwemikong (Canada)396
32728 Wilanw (Warsaw)119
Vitebsk (Belarus)85, 90, 94 Wilhelm V, duke of Bavaria132
Viterbo188 Wilhelm, Wolfgang, duke of Jlich and
Vitruvian canon. See Vitruvian principles Berg134
Vitruvian principles104, 115, 119 Willingham, Eileen406
Volga, River3, 75 Wilno. See Vilnius
Volhynia87, 101 Witebsk, college of7071, 74
Voltaire (Franois-Marie Arouet)231, 239 Wolffianism57
von Littrow, Carl Ludwig150 Wujek, Jakub91
von Pastor, Ludwig39, 227 Wrth, Franz13839
History of the Popes227 Wurttemberg91
von Pfalz-Neuburg, Franz Ludwig Wybicki Jzef61
(elector)138 Wybr przedniejszych
(Kochanowski)93
Wallraf, Ferdinand Franz146 Wymowa i poezja dla szk
Wallraf-Richartz Museum (Cologne)146 (Piramowicz)62
Walmesley, Charles (bishop)16768 Wyrwicz, Karol59, 65
530 Index
Xavier, Francis2324, 29, 133, 223, 238, Zaski, Stanisaw

302, 314, 430, 453, 459 Jesuits in Poland38
Xiamen (China)318 Zambesi (Zambezi)457, 460, 465,
Xishiku church ()289 46870, 47881
Xitang. See Western Church (Our Lady of Zambia30, 465, 470
Sorrows) Zamora (Mexico)448
Xu Guangqi. See Siu, Paul () Zanchi, Concordia212
Xu family (Siu)294 Zarandona, Antonio492, 496499
Xu, Candida327 Zawadzki, Stanisaw119, 123
Xu, Francisco da Cunha259 ebrowski, Tomasz54
Xuanwumen (Beijing)286 Zermeo, Guillermo434, 438
Xujiahiu (Xujiahui) 259, 292, Zhili (China)266
294, 296, 312 Zielnik (Syreski)91
Zikawei. See Xujiahiu
Yang, tienne260 Zimbabwe30, 455, 465, 468, 470
Yangtze, River315 Zoty otarzyk92
Ye, Mingchen293 od, Wincenty90, 92
yerba mate423 zoophyte40809
Yongzheng (emperor)286, 301, 321 ukiewski, Karol95
Yuan Ming Yuan293 wity Alojzy albo Ludwik
Gonzaga95
Zabawki teatralne (Municki)95 Zulu (people)472, 475
Zabawy przyjemne i poyteczne Zululand470
(Poniatowski)6364 Ziga Manuel, 193
Zaccaria, Francesco Antonio214, 217 Zurich138
Zach, Franz Xaver158 Zyberk (Sieberg), family53

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Jesuit Survival and Restoration

Studies in the History of Christian

Robert J. Bast (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Paul C.H. Lim (Nashville, Tennessee)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/shct

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

1 A Restored Society or a New Society of Jesus?13

2 Some Remarks on Jesuit Historiography 1773181434

3 Before and After Suppression

4 The Society of Jesus in the Russian Empire (17721820) and the

5 The Poock Academy (18121820)

6 Sebastian Sierakowski, S.J. and the Language of Architecture

7 The Jesuit Artistic Diaspora in Germany after 1773129

8 Enduring the Deluge

9 Est et Non Est

10 The Exiled Spanish Jesuits and the Restoration of the Society of

11 The Society of Jesus Under Another Name

13 The Romantic Historian under Charles X

14 Jesuit Survival and Restoration in China245

15 Restoration or New Creation?

16 Rising from the Ashes

17 The Phoenix Rises from its Ashes

18 The Chinese Rites Controversys Long Shadow over the Restored

19 The Province of Madurai Between the Old and New Society

20 The Russian Society and the American Jesuits

22 The Restoration in Canada

23 Jesuit Tradition and the Rise of South American Nationalism399

24 The First Return of the Jesuits to Paraguay415

25 Jesuit Restoration in Mexico433

26 Early Departure, Late Return

27 Hoping Against All Hope

28 The Jesuits in Fernando Po (18581872)

1.1 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Exterior, Dome. June 201216

6.11 Frontispiece. Architektura obeymuica wszelki gatunek murowania i budowania,

ahsi Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu

quadraginta tres cum earum domiciliis, quantum fieri

III: poque de progrs (16041623) [Fouqueray 1922]

Krss 19101938 Ludwig Krss [Kroess], Geschichte der bmischen Provinz

IV: (16661683) [Lukcs 1990b]

VIII/1: 17511760 [Pastells/Mateos 1949a]

Europam gestas, et alia quaedam supplevit Petrus

II: Lepoca di Giacomo Lanez. Lazione, 15561565 [Scaduto

II Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (arsi)

Aquit. Provincia Aquitaniae

Austr. Provincia Austriae

Sard. Provincia Sardiniae

III Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (mhsi [selected frequenly

Epp. ign. VIII mhsi 36

Mon. paed. VII mhsi 141

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004283879_002

home many ex-Jesuits managed to make a significant, if conflicted, contribu-

This was a moment of long-awaited celebration, but many challenges con-

tolerable, though the era witnessed an explosion of anti-Jesuit polemic, and

These disparate but interlocking political trends had a profound impact on

As always, of course, what happened on the ground, in the revived schools

A Restored Society or a New Society of Jesus?

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015|doi 10.1163/9789004283879_003

Rome and within a few months he issued a decree restoring, or re-establishing

Figure1.1 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Exterior, Dome. June 2012

Figure1.2 Church of Saint-PaulSaint-Louis, Paris. Interior. June 2012

Bourdaloue, and by music commissioned from prominent composers includ-

II Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (arsi)

III Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (mhsi [selected frequenly