Richard W. Thompson - The Footprints of the Jesuits

At the time of Loyola's visit to Rome, Paul III was pope. When his approval of the new society was solicited, he deemed it indispensable, as a measure of precaution, that the question should be investigated with the greatest care; for until then no opportunity had been afforded him of knowing the ultimate purposes of Loyola, or the machinery he had constructed for executing them. Whether the pope suspected him of concealment or not, it is impossible now to tell; but that he had reason to do so is evident from the most favorable accounts given of the original official interview between them. Then it was that the pope was apprised, for the first time, that the constitution under which the society of Jesuits had been organized, required a solemn vow, by which all the members were pledged to "implicit and unquestioning obedience to their superior,"11 without the possibility of equivocation or mental reservation; that is, to Loyola himself as the first general, and to his successors from time to time thereafter. It required but little deliberation upon the part of the pope to realize that neither the Church nor the papacy could derive any advantage from this, but rather injury; for the reason that it would create a society under the protection of both, and, at the same time, absolutely independent of both. He therefore hesitated, evidently supposing that his approval under those circumstances would drag him into deep waters from which it would not be easy to escape, and referred the question to a committee of cardinals for thorough and scrutinizing investigation, so that his final action should be based upon full information.

Loyola was too sagacious not to have anticipated this difficulty; but he manifestly hoped to escape it in some way, either by evading or bridging it over, or he would not have asked the pope to approve the original constitution which contained it. He certainly did not desire or contemplate any change in his original constitution or plan; and therefore, when Paul III hesitated and appointed a committee of cardinals to scrutinize them, he must have felt a degree of perplexity to which his proud and ambitious military spirit had not been hitherto accustomed to submit unresistingly. He could not avoid seeing, however, that if the pope's final decision should be adverse to him, it would necessarily be the death of his society, upon which he had, with inordinate ambition, fixed his hopes. The occasion constituted the most serious crisis in his personal fortunes he had ever encountered. Success promised him a long list of triumphs; defeat, nothing but obscurity. He had no such intellectual resources as fitted him for rencounter with those who had, not having attended school until after he had reached the years of manhood, and not having then shown any special aptness for learning. Whatsoever capacity he possessed, tended in the direction of governing men, his faculty for which was developed during his service in the army; and he must therefore have experienced the consciousness that if he failed to obtain the sanction of the pope, his career would be seriously, if not entirely, checked. The future of the papacy depended upon the successful training of men to obedience; and Loyola, understanding this, could have had no difficulty in persuading the pope that a society like his, contrived especially to suspend the power of human reasoning and reduce its members to mere unthinking machines, would more assuredly produce that result than had been done by the very worst forms of absolute despotism which had, for so many centuries, held the Oriental world in subjugation.

But Loyola's embarrassment did not amount to discomfiture. He may never have held personal intercourse with Paul III before; but he understood the papacy, its wants and necessities, and had ample opportunity to study the character and penetrate the motives of the pope. For this he was specially fitted—few men have lived who excelled him in this respect—and, having constructed his society upon the theory that men were of no value unless persuaded to surrender up their personality to superiors, the occasion served him to address such arguments to the pope as would convince him that the obedience to authority he had introduced in his society was just what the existing exigencies of the papacy required to save it from overthrow. It may easily be seen now—although the pope may not have then employed penetration enough to discover it—that he did not intend to deal unequivocally and in entire frankness with the pope, so long as there remained a prospect of obtaining his end otherwise. He evidently had an accurate conception of what is meant by the terms confession and avoidance, in the sense of seeming to consent while not consenting. Thus, in order to remove the objection of the pope and secure his approval, he suggested another and new obligation to be inserted in the constitution of his society, providing that the members should also take a vow "of obedience to the Holy See and to the pope pro tempore , with the express obligation of going, without remuneration, to whatsoever part of the world it shall please the pope to send them."12 These words must be read critically in order that their meaning as intended by Loyola, and always since interpreted by the Jesuits, may not be misconceived. Their true import is, that whilst the members of the society were to pay obedience to the pope as well as to their general, it was qualified as to the former, and absolute as to the latter; that is, that as they were nominally to have two heads, the authority of both should, for all practical purposes, center in one. In point of fact, as amply demonstrated by subsequent experience, this new provision did not change the nature or limit the extent of the obligation of unquestioning obedience to the Jesuit general. Its most essential feature was that which required the members to go wheresoever ordered by the pope, without compensation; but with regard to this and all other duties, and the manner of discharging them, they were required to obey their general. They could receive no instructions except those which came from him, all of which they were required to obey as coming directly from God. This amendment created no special relations—or, indeed, any whatsoever—between the pope and the society; for he held no direct intercourse with it. And it only created such relations between the pope and the general as obliged the latter to send the members wheresoever the former desired, without remuneration. They remained the slaves of the general, and not the slaves of the pope. They obeyed the general, and not the pope, unless ordered to do so by the general, in which case they paid obedience only to the latter. But Paul III did not detect the well-concealed purposes of Loyola, and may not even have suspected them, in view of his anxiety to arrest the disintegration of the Church and the threatened decay of the papacy. Howsoever this may have been, the cunningly-contrived concession made to him by Loyola was satisfactory to him, notwithstanding the opposition of one of the committee of cardinals, and he issued his pontifical bull approving the society of Jesuits as a religious order. This pledge of fidelity to the pope, however, has been kept or evaded accordingly as the interests of the society have from time to time demanded. Its history shows prominent instances when the decisions of the popes have been denounced and resisted, and when the popes themselves have been treated with contempt and defiance. When the Jesuits have found shelter and protection under the authority of the popes, they have exalted them to absolute equality with God; when otherwise, they have disobeyed and traduced them.

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All the circumstances which attended the origin and establishment of the society of Jesuits combine to explain, with unmistakable clearness, the motives which must have influenced the mind and incited the action of Loyola in every step he took. They plainly show that his leading and controlling purpose was to organize a body of men, each one of whom should be brought into implicit and unquestioning obedience to the authority of their general, and hold themselves in readiness so long as the society existed, to do, without the least inquiry into results, whatsoever he should command to be done, so that they should have no wills or opinions of their own upon any subject over which he should assert jurisdiction. By making this the central and most fundamental principle of the constitution, he placed his society in direct antagonism to all intellectual progress and enlightenment—to everything that tended to dignify and elevate mankind. No one, therefore, ought to wonder that it has produced more disturbance in the world than any other organization that has ever existed; or, if it were out of the way, could ever exist again.