Jesuits versus Jansenists
While they were successful, as statesmen, in parts of Europe (though they failed in preventing the triumph of toleration at the peace of Westphalia), a storm burst upon them, in France and the Netherlands, from the Jansenist controversy. The ancient hostility of the university of Paris, which had always been strongly averse to the admission of the Jesuits as teachers, rose up, in union with the rigid morality of the Jansenists, against the notorious semi-Pelagianism of Molina and his brother Jesuits.
The character of the Jesuits received a fatal wound from the pen of Pascal, whose famous Provincial Letters exposed the mischievous doctrines and practices of the Jesuits with admirable wit and argument, to which they opposed little but abuse and violence. These letters, which have been published in numerous editions since 1656, were read through all Europe, and their testimony quoted in the sentence of condemnation pronounced by Innocent IX, in 1679, against 65 offensive propositions, mostly of Jesuit casuists. But it availed them little that royal decrees and papal bulls, procured by the Jesuit confessors of Louis XIV (La Chaise and Le Tellier), were ievelled against Jansenism, and its ruin completed by the well-known constitution Unigenitus.
In the minds of reflecting and well-disposed persons, they still remained suspected of an attachment to the principles of their most eminent casuists, attacked by Pascal - principles which afforded the most startling solution of their crafty and ambiguous conduct. A lax morality, accommodated to the inclinations of a licentious age, which made interest and external circumstances the rule of conduct, and consecrated the worst means for a good end ; their probabilism - a system of principles and rules of life which tolerated every thing that could be defended as probably admissible ; their excuses for perjury and crimes of all kinds, sometimes by arbitrary perversion of language, sometimes by ambiguous expressions and perplexing interpretations, sometimes, too, by mental reservations, according to which a man had only to think differently from what he said and did, to be justified, in his own tight, from the greatest crimes - these, and other traits of a like nature, may be more fully and accurately learnt from the letters of Pascal, or the writings of the Jesuits, Sanchez, Bauny, Escobar, Suarez and Buscmbaum.
Their own defences against these charges only confirmed the suspicion excited against their system of morals, while they palliated and conceded a part where the whole was culpable. Other accusations were now brought against them, which they were still less able to repel. Their superficial mode of instruction, and the theatrical disorders of their schools, had been already condemned by Mariana, a learned Spanish Jesuit ; the gross selfishness of the order had been publicly exposed in Sciotti's Monarchia solipsorum ; the indifference with which they permitted their heathen converts to continue their old worship of idols, on condition of their mentally adoring, at the same time, Christ and the virgin Alary ; and their want of agreement with the other missionaries in China, had been warmly, but ineffectually, censured by several papal bulls.
Their conduct, too, was now and then discovered to harmonize too well with their indulgent code of ethics, aa they were not always prudent enough in the commission of their excesses ; and it was for this reason that the Iroquois, who had been converted hy them, expressly stipulated in a treaty of peace (1602) for the removal of these licentious brethren, who did every thing that Jesus did not do.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
