The Jesuits
The Reformation did not go unanswered. When the gospel of free justification began to run through Germany and Switzerland, through France and the Low Countries and at last through England and Scotland, Rome gathered herself and replied. She replied with a council at Trent, which defined her doctrine and anathematized the Reformers. She replied with tribunals and an Index of forbidden books. But her most effective answer was neither a decree nor a court. It was a company of men.
The Society of Jesus was approved on September 27, 1540, five years before the first session at Trent opened. Within a generation its members were confessors to kings, theologians to popes, schoolmasters to half of Catholic Europe, and missionaries in Goa, Nagasaki, and the forests of New France. Where Protestantism had advanced, the Jesuits were very often the instrument by which it was pressed back. Poland, Bohemia, southern Germany, and much of Hungary were recovered for Rome largely through their schools and their preaching. No other order of the sixteenth century left so deep a mark.
A page that treats them honestly must grant at once what they possessed. The early Jesuits were disciplined where many clergy were idle, learned where many were ignorant, and brave to the point of martyrdom where many were comfortable. They corrected real abuses that the Reformers had rightly denounced. The question this page presses is not whether they were earnest. It is what their earnestness was bent toward, and whether the obedience at the center of their calling was obedience to Christ speaking in His Word or obedience to a visible hierarchy claiming to speak for Him.
The Wounded Soldier
Iñigo López de Loyola was born about 1491, the thirteenth child of a Basque nobleman, and he began life as a courtier with a courtier’s expectation of soldiering when called upon. In 1521, the year Luther stood before the emperor at Worms, a French cannonball shattered Ignatius’s leg at Pamplona. The long convalescence that followed left him with nothing to read but devotional books, among them the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, and out of that reading came a conversion.1
It is worth pausing over the coincidence of dates. In the same season in which one man was being driven to Scripture and finding there a righteousness not his own, another was being driven to the lives of the saints and finding there a pattern of heroic achievement. Both men were in deadly earnest. Both gave the rest of their lives to what they had found. The two discoveries, however, were not the same discovery, and the sixteenth century was shaped by the distance between them.
Ignatius withdrew to the Benedictine house at Montserrat and then to Manresa, where he began to compose the Spiritual Exercises. He then went back to school: Latin at Barcelona, scholastic theology at Alcalá and Salamanca, and finally the University of Paris, where he studied from 1528 to 1534.2 It was at Paris that the Society was conceived. On August 15, 1534, in a chapel at Montmartre, Ignatius and six companions bound themselves by vow. Among the six were Francis Xavier, who would die within sight of China; Diego Laínez, who would succeed Ignatius as Superior General and dominate the final sessions of Trent; and Alfonso Salmerón, who with Laínez would sit at Trent as the pope’s own theologian.
Their first intention was not to fight Protestantism at all. They meant to sail for Jerusalem and preach to the Turks. War in the eastern Mediterranean closed that door, and the vow they had taken provided for the contingency: if Jerusalem proved impossible, they would place themselves at the disposal of the pope, to be sent wherever he judged best. The door that closed in the East opened in Rome.3
A Company Vowed to the Pope
Paul III approved the new order by the bull Regimini militantis Ecclesiae — in English, To the Government of the Church Militant. The title is not incidental. The founding document of the Society, the Formula of the Institute, opens by describing the man who enters it as one who desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross, in a company that serves the Lord and His Church under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth. The military figure runs through everything the early Society produced.4
Three features set the Society apart from the older orders. First, it was composed entirely of priests, not of monks; its men were not cloistered but deployed. Second, to the three customary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience it added a fourth, a special vow of obedience to the pope concerning missions — circa missiones — by which a Jesuit held himself bound to go wherever the pope should send him, without argument and without delay.5 Third, its government was monarchical: a Superior General elected for life, with authority over a disciplined chain of provincials and rectors. Ignatius was elected the first General in 1541 and held the office until his death in 1556.
It is the fourth vow that matters most for our purpose. Every religious order in Christendom had vowed obedience. What was new was that a body of trained, mobile, highly educated priests now stood in direct and personal subjection to the bishop of Rome, at the very hour when the authority of that office was the central question of the age. The Reformation had asked whether the pope could bind the conscience. The Society of Jesus was an institutional answer in the affirmative, and a formidable one.
The order’s stated purposes were pastoral and catechetical: to preach the gospel as Rome understood it, to instruct the faithful, to hear confessions, and to give spiritual direction. Preaching stood first among the ministries listed in the Formula, and the Jesuits took it seriously, preaching by invitation in churches and in the open air in deliberate imitation of the apostles, in order to reach those who would not come to church.6 In 1550 a further purpose was added in so many words: the defense of the faith.7 By then it was perfectly clear against whom the faith was to be defended.
The Spiritual Exercises and the Rules for Thinking with the Church
The Spiritual Exercises, published in 1548, is the book by which the Society formed its own men and, in time, a great many of the laity. It is a manual for a directed retreat of roughly thirty days, carrying the retreatant through self-examination, meditation on sin and hell, contemplation of the life and passion of Christ, and finally a discernment of God’s will for his own calling. Much in it is devout, and a Protestant reader will find whole passages he can only admire for their seriousness about sin and their concentration upon the person of Christ.
Two things, nevertheless, must be said. The first is structural. The Exercises perpetuate the older model of the contemplative life, in which a Christian deepens his faith chiefly by meditation and prayer conducted in retreat from ordinary occupations, rather than the Reformation conviction that the ordinary duties of work and family are themselves the arena of Christian obedience.8 The Reformers did not abolish meditation; they refused to make it a higher grade of Christianity.
The second is more serious, and it stands in the closing pages of the book. Ignatius appended a set of rules headed To have the true sentiment which we ought to have in the Church Militant. They are short, and they are plain. The first sets the key:
All judgment laid aside, we ought to have our mind ready and prompt to obey, in all, the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, which is our holy Mother the Church Hierarchical.9 Ignatius of LoyolaSpiritual Exercises, First Rule
What follows is a catalog of the very practices the Reformation had called into question, each to be praised. The sixth rule commends the veneration of relics, prayer to the saints, stations and pilgrimages, indulgences, pardons, and candles lighted in churches.10 The fourth rule praises religious orders, virginity, and continence, and marriage not so much as any of these. The eighth praises images, and the veneration of them according to what they represent. The ninth draws the thread together:
Finally, to praise all precepts of the Church, keeping the mind prompt to find reasons in their defence and in no manner against them.11 Ignatius of LoyolaSpiritual Exercises, Ninth Rule
Here is the hinge of the whole matter. The reader is not forbidden to think; he is instructed beforehand what his thinking must arrive at. The mind is to be kept prompt to find reasons in defense of the Church’s precepts and in no manner against them. That is the precise reverse of what Luther had said at Worms, that he could not and would not recant unless convinced by Scripture and plain reason, because to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. It is also the reverse of the Berean commendation, that they received the word with all readiness of mind and searched the Scriptures daily to see whether those things were so.
The thirteenth rule is the one most often quoted against the Society, and it is quoted so often that it deserves to be given whole and in its own words rather than in the summary forms that circulate:
To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls.12 Ignatius of LoyolaSpiritual Exercises, Thirteenth Rule
Honesty requires two observations about this famous sentence. Ignatius is not teaching that truth is whatever authority says it is, in the manner of a modern cynic; his stated ground is that the Spirit who governs the Church is the Spirit of Christ her Bridegroom, so that a contradiction between what the Church defines and what the individual perceives must be resolved against the individual. The rule is an act of faith in the Church’s Spirit-given infallibility, not a counsel of dishonesty. Nor was it written for the general public; it belongs to a manual for those under direction.
But those observations, fairly made, do not blunt the point. The argument turns on a premise that the Reformation denied. If the hierarchical Church is so governed by the Spirit that her definitions cannot err, then the rule follows and the surrender of private judgment is reasonable. If she is not, the rule is a surrender of the conscience to men. Everything depends on the prior question of authority, which is the question treated at length on the page on tradition. The thirteenth rule is simply that question reduced to a single sentence, and answered.
The Jesuits at Trent
The Society was four years younger than the council it came to shape. When Trent opened in 1545, Paul III sent Diego Laínez and Alfonso Salmerón — two of the original seven from Montmartre, and both still young men — not as representatives of any prince or province but as his own theologians. They had no vote. They had something better: the floor, and the pope’s ear. In the debates on justification in the sixth session, and again in the long struggles of the third period over the residence and authority of bishops, Laínez argued at length and to great effect for the fullest construction of papal supremacy. By the time the council closed in 1563 he was Superior General of the Society.
Trent’s own words show how thoroughly the hierarchical principle had carried. Treating the sacrament of orders, the council condemned the notion that all Christians indiscriminately are priests of the new covenant:
But if any one affirm that all Christians indiscriminately are priests of the New Testament, or that are all mutually endowed with an equal spiritual power, he seems to do nothing but confound the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which is as an army set in array.13 The Council of TrentSession XXIII, chapter 4
An army set in array. That is the figure under which Trent conceived the Church, and it is the figure under which Ignatius had conceived his Society. The two fit together because they rest on the same conviction: that grace descends through an ordered hierarchy, and that the Christian’s part is to receive it where the hierarchy dispenses it. Over against this the Reformation set the priesthood of all believers, not as a leveling of office, but as the plain consequence of a finished atonement and an open way to the throne of grace.
There is one further detail in the Tridentine decrees that is easy to overlook and worth noticing. When the council came in its final session to reform the religious orders, tightening the law on novices, probation, and the renunciation of property, it paused to exempt the Jesuits by name:
By these things, however, the holy synod does not intend to make any innovation, or to prohibit, but that the religious order of clerks of the Society of Jesus be able to serve God and His Church, according to their pious institute, approved by the holy Apostolic See.14 The Council of TrentSession XXV, chapter 16
A council summoned to reform the orders declined to reform this one. The Society had arrived at Trent as an untested novelty of five years’ standing; it left with a conciliar guarantee that its institute would not be touched. Few bodies in the history of the Church have risen so far so fast.
Schools, Catechisms, and Recovered Ground
The Jesuits did not set out to be schoolmasters. In the earliest years their energy went into spiritual formation by way of the Exercises. The first college for lay students opened at Messina in Sicily in 1548, almost as an experiment, and the experiment succeeded so completely that it reshaped the order.15 In 1599 their accumulated practice was codified in the Ratio Studiorum, a plan of studies that governed Jesuit teaching for centuries. By 1615, members of the Society were teaching in some four hundred and fifty institutions across Europe and in fifty-five seminaries.16
The growth of the order itself is nearly without parallel. There were ten Jesuits in 1540. At Ignatius’s death in 1556 there were a thousand. By 1600 there were five thousand.17
This mattered because the Reformation had been, among other things, an educational movement. Luther had called on the magistrates of Germany to found schools; Calvin built an academy at Geneva; Knox proposed a school in every parish. Protestant advance ran along the lines of literacy and the vernacular Bible. The Jesuit colleges met that advance on its own ground and frequently beat it, offering a humanist curriculum of high quality, free of charge, to the sons of Catholic and sometimes of Protestant families alike. Where a Jesuit college was planted in a contested city, the next generation of its gentry tended to be Catholic.
Alongside the schools came the catechisms and the controversialists. Peter Canisius, so effective in the German lands that he was called a second apostle to Germany, produced a series of catechisms from 1555 that did for Catholic Germany something of what Luther’s Small Catechism had done for Protestant Germany. Robert Bellarmine, the greatest of the Jesuit controversialists, published between 1586 and 1593 his Disputations on the Controversies of the Christian Faith, a work so thorough that Reformed divines spent the next century answering it. Francisco Suárez gave Catholic scholasticism a new and durable form, and Luis de Molina advanced an account of grace and free will which drew Jesuits and Dominicans into a bitter internal quarrel and which Reformed polemicists would later confront alongside Arminianism.18
It should be said plainly that much of this work was reform in the proper sense. Preaching improved. Clergy were better trained. Catechesis reached people who had been left in ignorance. The Reformers had charged Rome with starving her people, and in these respects Rome answered the charge. What she did not do was revise the doctrine of justification, or the sacrifice of the Mass, or the authority of tradition. The Counter-Reformation fed the sheep more carefully while leaving the pasture unchanged.
Xavier and the Wider World
Ignatius founded the Society in 1540 with a clear missionary intent, and no other body of the age came near its reach.19 Francis Xavier, one of the original companions, sailed for Goa in 1541 and spent the rest of his life in India, the Moluccas, and Japan, dying in 1552 on an island off the coast of China with the mainland still before him. Jesuits followed into Brazil, Paraguay, Japan, China, Ethiopia, and the woodlands of New France. They established their own presses; the Jesuit press at Nagasaki printed martyrologies of its own converts.20 Of the forty-four Jesuits later canonized, twenty-nine were martyrs, and the great majority of those died in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.21
Their missionary method was as controversial inside the Roman communion as outside it. The policy of accommodation — adapting liturgy, dress, vocabulary, and sometimes theology to Chinese, Japanese, and Indian custom in order to win a hearing — produced the long and damaging Rites controversies.22 Protestants have often cited that flexibility as evidence of Jesuit duplicity. The charge is too easy. The questions the Jesuit missionaries faced about culture and conscience are questions that Protestant missions have faced in their turn and have not always answered better.
A soberer judgment is simply this: that their courage and endurance were real, that many of them laid down their lives, and that the gospel they carried so far at such cost was the gospel of Trent. A man may die for a message that cannot save, and his death does not make the message true. That is not a comfortable thing to say about brave men, and it should not be said lightly or with any satisfaction. But it is the thing that must be said.
The English Mission
Nowhere did Jesuit and Protestant meet more sharply than in England, and nowhere is the history more tangled, because in England the Society’s work and the queen’s treason laws were locked together.
When Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and purported to release her subjects from their allegiance, every English Catholic priest became, in the eyes of the government, a potential agent of a foreign power that had declared the sovereign deposed.23 Seminaries on the continent trained priests and sent them back: William Allen’s English college at Douai, later at Rheims, founded in 1568, and the English College at Rome, which Gregory XIII established and entrusted to the Jesuits in the later 1570s.24 In 1580 the Jesuit mission proper began, led by Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion. Between 1581 and 1585 Parliament answered with a series of treason statutes directed at Catholic priests and at the laity who sheltered them.25
What followed was a persecution with martyrs on both sides of the century, and the Protestant reader should feel the discomfort of that. Campion was racked and hanged. Margaret Clitherow, a York butcher’s wife who catechized her neighbors and hid priests, was pressed to death in 1586.26 English Catholic writers built from such deaths a martyr theology drawn from the New Testament, the Imitation of Christ, the lives of the saints, and Loyola’s Exercises.27 Across the Channel, John Foxe was building another out of Hooper and Ridley and Latimer and Cranmer.
Two things must be held together here. The Reformed conviction that Rome preached another gospel is not altered by the courage of those who died for her. And the sins of Protestant governments against Roman Catholic subjects are not excused by the justice of the Protestant cause. Our own forebears in the faith were sometimes persecutors as well as persecuted, and a site devoted to the Reformation does its readers no service by pretending otherwise. The gospel is vindicated by Scripture, never by the scaffold.
How the Reformation Judged the Society
The Reformers wrote comparatively little about the Jesuits directly, for the simple reason that the Society rose late. Luther died in 1546, six years after the bull of approval, and never had to reckon with it. Calvin lived until 1564 and did, though his references are passing. In the Institutes he groups the Jesuits with the Anabaptists — an odd pairing to modern ears, but Calvin’s point was about a common error concerning repentance, which both parties, he judged, treated as the business of a few days rather than of a lifetime:
that giddy spirit which brings forth such fruits that it limits to a paltry few days a repentance that for the Christian man ought to extend throughout his life.28 John CalvinInstitutes III.iii.2
The deeper Protestant answer to the Society was never a matter of personalities. It was the answer the confessions gave to the claim of the hierarchical Church, and it was given with a directness that later generations have found startling. The Westminster divines wrote in 1646:
There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ: nor can the Pope of Rome in any sense be head thereof; but is that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ, and all that is called God.29 The Westminster Confession of FaithChapter 25.6
Whatever a reader makes of that identification, the logic is worth seeing. If the pope is not the head of the Church, then a vow of unconditional obedience to him is not a high act of devotion but a misdirected one, and the whole architecture of the Society rests on a foundation that will not bear it. The quarrel was never with discipline, or learning, or zeal for missions. Protestants wanted all three and said so. The quarrel was with the object to which that discipline was pledged.
Behind it stood the settled Reformation principle of authority, stated in the English Articles with characteristic restraint: that Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, so that whatever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.30 Set that article beside the ninth rule of the Exercises, and the sixteenth century comes into focus. One sentence sends the conscience to the written Word and binds it there. The other sends the conscience to the Church and binds it there. Everything else — indulgences, purgatory, transubstantiation, the Mass — follows from which of those two sentences a man believes.
What Scripture Says
The Society of Jesus took a military name and a military shape, and it is striking how readily Scripture grants the figure while redefining the war. Paul does not deny that the Christian is a soldier. He denies that the weapons are of this world.
For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:3–5
Every thought is to be brought into captivity — but to the obedience of Christ, not to the obedience of a hierarchy that speaks in His name. And the sword by which that captivity is accomplished is named in the one place where Paul describes the Christian’s armor at length: it is the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. There is no other offensive weapon in the list. A church that supplies her soldiers with anything else has disarmed them.
The apostle knew, too, how an apparent authority was to be weighed when it brought another message:
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. Galatians 1:8
It is a remarkable sentence. Paul submits his own apostolic office, and the office of an angel, to the gospel already delivered. The gospel is the standard; the messenger is measured by it. That is exactly the reverse of the thirteenth rule, where the definition of the hierarchy becomes the standard by which even what a man plainly sees must be measured. Two methods of settling truth could hardly stand further apart, and the second cannot be made safe by the sincerity of those who adopt it.
The Reformation’s confidence was not in its own discipline. It had less discipline than the Society and knew it. Its confidence was in the sufficiency of what God had already given:
And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works. 2 Timothy 3:15–17
Throughly furnished unto all good works. If that is true, then the Christian needs no second source and no final arbiter beyond the Word, and the conscience that rests there rests on God. The foundation is laid, and no man can lay another. The company that marched under the banner of the cross was in earnest, and much of what it built still stands. But the only banner under which a sinner is finally safe is the one raised at Calvary, where Christ offered one sacrifice for sins forever and sat down. He needs no army set in array to dispense what He has already finished.
