many places
Dominus ac Redemptor
became the warrant for an orgy of systematic and officially sanctioned looting. In Belgium the devastation was particularly severe. From the Jesuit houses, officials seized about thirty valuable paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel, and others and sent them to the imperial galleries in Vienna, where they remain to this day. They gutted the libraries. Of some five hundred thousand volumes, they classified 75 percent as theological rubbish and sold them for wastepaper. In Naples the avid search for Jesuit gold uncovered, instead, a debt of 200,000 ducats.
A month after the formal publication of
Dominus ac Redemptor,
papal officials and police entered Jesuit headquarters in Rome; arrested the superior general, Lorenzo Ricci, and his assistants (âthe Jesuit Sanhedrin,â as their enemies called them); and, aftersequestering them briefly in the Venerable English College, imprisoned them in Castel SantâAngelo. The jailers there refused Ricci permission to write, boarded up his windows, cut his food rations in half, and in winter denied him heat. No specific charges were ever able to be proved against him, and the 50 million scudi he was accused of hoarding turned out never to have existed. He died two years later, still a prisoner in Castel SantâAngelo and still protesting the innocence of the Society.
4
THE MODERN AND POSTMODERN ERA
T he suppression of the Society of Jesus was a tragedy for the Jesuits but also a tragedy for the church at large. Within the space of less than fifteen yearsâfrom the Portuguese suppression in 1759 until the papal in 1773âthe single greatest intellectual asset the church possessed was wiped out, as the Jesuitsâ libraries were dispersed and their network of more than seven hundred schools closed or passed into secular hands. The Jesuits were as a body the most broadly learned clergy in the church, no matter what may have been the limitations of their intellectual culture.
The Society of Jesus as a corporate force was no more. Compounding the calamity was the fact that the suppression occurred just as European culture was rapidly moving into unprecedentedly new forms, many of which were hostile to Christianity and particularly hostile to Catholicism. This was a moment when the church needed to husband and nurture its best resources, not a momentto see them dispersed and lost. As events turned out, the suppression of the Jesuits presaged the devastations soon visited upon other orders as a result of the social and political upheavals that in 1773 were just beyond the horizon.
If individual Jesuits were lucky enough to escape exile and prison, they were still scattered, dispossessed of their houses, and forced to fend for themselves. Although some fared reasonably well by entering the diocesan clergy or otherwise finding means to support themselves, many never recovered from the disorientation, the mental anguish, and the sense of loss the situation caused them.
THE ROAD TO RESTORATION
The suppressions and expulsions before 1773 in Portugal, France, Spain, and elsewhere were implemented consistently and often brutally by the governments that decreed them, but the same was not always true for the papal suppression. Unlike them, this one demanded formal promulgation by the bishop of every diocese in which a Jesuit community existed. More important, this suppression did not originate with the civil authorities, to whom, however, the papacy now entrusted the responsibility for carrying it out. These authorities often felt less committed to the undertaking and perhaps even unhappy with it. They sometimes treated the former Jesuits more gently. Since, however, by the terms of
Dominus ac Redemptor
these disgraced clerics could not accept novices, they were doomed to eventual extinction.
In the English colonies in North America, soon to be the United States, the civil authorities, who were all either Protestantsor Deists, had not the
Dominus ac Redemptor
became the warrant for an orgy of systematic and officially sanctioned looting. In Belgium the devastation was particularly severe. From the Jesuit houses, officials seized about thirty valuable paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel, and others and sent them to the imperial galleries in Vienna, where they remain to this day. They gutted the libraries. Of some five hundred thousand volumes, they classified 75 percent as theological rubbish and sold them for wastepaper. In Naples the avid search for Jesuit gold uncovered, instead, a debt of 200,000 ducats.
A month after the formal publication of
Dominus ac Redemptor,
papal officials and police entered Jesuit headquarters in Rome; arrested the superior general, Lorenzo Ricci, and his assistants (âthe Jesuit Sanhedrin,â as their enemies called them); and, aftersequestering them briefly in the Venerable English College, imprisoned them in Castel SantâAngelo. The jailers there refused Ricci permission to write, boarded up his windows, cut his food rations in half, and in winter denied him heat. No specific charges were ever able to be proved against him, and the 50 million scudi he was accused of hoarding turned out never to have existed. He died two years later, still a prisoner in Castel SantâAngelo and still protesting the innocence of the Society.
4
THE MODERN AND POSTMODERN ERA
T he suppression of the Society of Jesus was a tragedy for the Jesuits but also a tragedy for the church at large. Within the space of less than fifteen yearsâfrom the Portuguese suppression in 1759 until the papal in 1773âthe single greatest intellectual asset the church possessed was wiped out, as the Jesuitsâ libraries were dispersed and their network of more than seven hundred schools closed or passed into secular hands. The Jesuits were as a body the most broadly learned clergy in the church, no matter what may have been the limitations of their intellectual culture.
The Society of Jesus as a corporate force was no more. Compounding the calamity was the fact that the suppression occurred just as European culture was rapidly moving into unprecedentedly new forms, many of which were hostile to Christianity and particularly hostile to Catholicism. This was a moment when the church needed to husband and nurture its best resources, not a momentto see them dispersed and lost. As events turned out, the suppression of the Jesuits presaged the devastations soon visited upon other orders as a result of the social and political upheavals that in 1773 were just beyond the horizon.
If individual Jesuits were lucky enough to escape exile and prison, they were still scattered, dispossessed of their houses, and forced to fend for themselves. Although some fared reasonably well by entering the diocesan clergy or otherwise finding means to support themselves, many never recovered from the disorientation, the mental anguish, and the sense of loss the situation caused them.
THE ROAD TO RESTORATION
The suppressions and expulsions before 1773 in Portugal, France, Spain, and elsewhere were implemented consistently and often brutally by the governments that decreed them, but the same was not always true for the papal suppression. Unlike them, this one demanded formal promulgation by the bishop of every diocese in which a Jesuit community existed. More important, this suppression did not originate with the civil authorities, to whom, however, the papacy now entrusted the responsibility for carrying it out. These authorities often felt less committed to the undertaking and perhaps even unhappy with it. They sometimes treated the former Jesuits more gently. Since, however, by the terms of
Dominus ac Redemptor
these disgraced clerics could not accept novices, they were doomed to eventual extinction.
In the English colonies in North America, soon to be the United States, the civil authorities, who were all either Protestantsor Deists, had not the
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