the form of life contained in the Apostolic Letters of the Society of
Jesus and in its Constitutions.”
Immediately after the vows the Jesuit adds the following simple vows: (1) that he will never act nor consent that the provisions in the constitutions concerning poverty should be changed; (2) that he will not directly nor indirectly procure election or promotion for himself to any prelacy or dignity in the Society; (3) that he will not accept or consent to his election to any dignity or prelacy outside the Society unless forced thereunto by obedience; (4) that if he knows of others doing these things he will denounce them to the superiors; (5) that if elected to a bishopric he will never refuse to hear such advice as the general may deign to send him and will follow it if he judges it is better than his own opinion. The professed is now eligible to certain offices in the Society, and he may remain as a professed father of the three vows for the rest of his life. The highest class, who constitute the real core of the Society, whence all its chief officers are taken, are the professed of the four vows. This grade can seldom be reached until the candidate is in his forty-fifth year, which involves a probation of thirty-one years in the case of those who have entered on the novitiate at the earliest legal age. The number of these select members is small in comparison with the whole Society; the exact proportion varies from time to time, the present tendency being to increase the number. The vows of this grade are the same as the last formula, with the addition of the following important clause:—
“Moreover I promise the special obedience to the Sovereign Pontiff concerning missions, as is contained in the same Apostolic Letter and Constitutions.”
These various members of the Society are distributed in its novitiate houses, its colleges, its professed houses and its mission residences. The question has been hotly debated whether, in addition to these six grades, there be not a seventh answering in some degree to the tertiaries of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, but secretly affiliated to the Society and acting as its emissaries in various lay positions. This class was styled in France “Jesuits of the short robe,” and there is some evidence in support of its actual existence under Louis XV. The Jesuits themselves deny the existence of any such body, and are able to adduce the negative disproof that no provision for it is to be found in their constitutions. On the other hand there are clauses therein which make the creation of such a class perfectly feasible if thought expedient. An admitted instance is the case of Francisco Borgia, who in 1548, while still duke of Gandia, was received into the Society. What has given colour to the idea is that certain persons have made vows of obedience to individual Jesuits; as Thomas Worthington, rector of the Douai seminary, to Father Robert Parsons; Ann Vaux to Fr. Henry Garnet, who told her that he was not indeed allowed to receive her vows, but that she might make them if she wished and then receive his direction. The archaeologist George Oliver of Exeter was, according to Foley’s Records of the English Province, the last of the secular priests of England who vowed obedience to the Society before its suppression.
The general lives permanently at Rome and holds in his hands the right to appoint, not only to the office of provincial over each of the head districts into which the Society is mapped, but to the offices of each house in particular. There is no standard of electoral right in the Society except in the election of the general himself. By a minute and frequent system of official and private reports he is informed of the doings and progress of every member of the Society and of everything that concerns it throughout the world. Every Jesuit has not only the right but the duty in certain cases of communicating, directly and privately, with his general. While the general thus controls everything, he himself is not exempt from supervision on the part of the Society. A consultative council is imposed upon him by the general congregation, consisting of the assistants of the various nations, a socius, or adviser, to warn him of mistakes, and a confessor. These he cannot remove nor select; and he is bound, in certain circumstances, to listen to their advice, although he is not obliged to follow it. Once elected the general may not refuse the office, nor abdicate, nor accept any dignity or office outside of the Society; on the other hand, for certain definite reasons, he may be suspended or even deposed by the authority of the Society, which can thus preserve itself from destruction. No such instance has occurred, although steps were once taken in this direction in the case of a general who had set himself against the current feeling.
It is said that the general of the Jesuits is independent of the pope; and his popular name, “the black pope,” has gone to confirm this idea. But it is based on an entirely wrong conception of the two offices. The suppression of the Society by Clement XIV. in 1773 was an object-lesson in the supremacy of the pope. The Society became very numerous and, from time to time, received extraordinary privileges from popes, who were warranted by the necessities of the times in granting them. A great number of influential friends, also, gathered round the fathers who, naturally, sought in every way to retain what had been granted. Popes who thought it well to bring about certain changes, or to withdraw privileges that were found to have passed their intentions or to interfere unduly with the rights of other bodies, often met with loyal resistances against their proposed measures. Resistance up to a certain point is lawful and is not disobedience, for every society has the right of self-preservation. In cases where the popes insisted, in spite of the representations of the Jesuits, their commands were obeyed. Many of the popes were distinctly unfavourable to the Society, while others were as friendly, and often what one pope did against them the next pope withdrew. Whatever was done in times when strong divergence of opinion existed, and whatever may have been the actions of individuals who, even in so highly organized a body as the Society of Jesus, cannot always be successfully controlled by their superiors, yet the ultimate result on the part of the Society has always been obedience to the pope, who authorized, protected and privileged them, and on whom they ultimately depend for their very existence.
Thus constituted, with a skilful union of strictness and freedom, of complex organization with a minimum of friction in working, the Society was admirably devised for its purpose of introducing a new power into the Church and the world. Its immediate services to the Church were great. The Society did much, single-handed, to roll back the tide of Protestant advance when half of Europe, which had not already shaken off its allegiance to the papacy, was threatening to do so. The honours of the reaction belong to the Jesuits, and the reactionary spirit has become their tradition. They had the wisdom to see and to admit, in their correspondence with their superiors, that the real cause of the Reformation was the ignorance, neglect and vicious lives of so many priests. They recognized, as most earnest men did, that the difficulty was in the higher places, and that these could best be touched by indirect methods. At a time when primary or even secondary education had in most places become a mere effete and pedantic adherence to obsolete methods, they were bold enough to innovate, both in system and material. Putting fresh spirit and devotion into the work, they not merely taught and catechized in a new, fresh and attractive manner, besides establishing free schools of good quality, but provided new school books for their pupils which were an enormous advance on those they found in use; so that for nearly three centuries the Jesuits were accounted the best schoolmasters in Europe, as they were, till their forcible suppression in 1901, confessedly the best in France. The Jesuit teachers conciliated the goodwill of their pupils by mingled firmness and gentleness. Although the method of the Ratio Studiorum has ceased to be acceptable, yet it played in its time as serious a part in the intellectual development of Europe as did the method of Frederick the Great in modern warfare. Bacon succinctly gives his opinion of the Jesuit teaching in these words: “As for the pedagogical part, the shortest rule would be, Consult the schools of the Jesuits; for nothing better has been put in practice” (De Augmentis, vi. 4). In instruction they were excellent; but in education, or formation of character, deficient. Again, when most of the continental clergy had sunk, more or less, into the moral and intellectual slough which is pictured for us in the writings of Erasmus and the Epistolae obscurorum virorum (see Hutten, Ulrich von), the Jesuits won back respect for the clerical calling by their personal culture
