The End of Four Centuries

Fortnight ago fell a notable anniversary in church history. Ignatius Loyola, a Basque soldier turned saint, who founded the Society of Jesus in 1534, got it formally recognized by Pope Paul III on Sept. 27, 1540. The Jesuits have been a zealous, well-disciplined unit of the church militant ever since. "Today," began the leading editorial of last fortnight's New World, official weekly of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, "the whole Christian world celebrates the 400th anniversary of the Jesuits, the Panzer units in the Army of Christ."

Perhaps the most effective accomplishment of the Jesuits in all their four centuries was their part in the Roman Catholic Church's 16th-Century Counter-Reformation against Protestantism. In 1550, Protestantism seemed on the verge of a sweeping triumph in Poland, Hungary, Austria, Belgium, Bavaria and the Rhineland. By 1600, thanks largely to the Jesuits, these regions again were Catholic.

Today the Society is still a great preaching, teaching and missionary order, effective enough to breed enemies both inside and outside the Catholic Church. The Jesuits have been suppressed, at one time or another, in nearly every nation in which they have labored. Under political pressure from Spain, Portugal and France, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order in 1773. Pius VII revived it in 1814. Under Franco and Petain the Jesuits have been freed from decrees aimed against them by Republican Spain and France. Last January they were given permission to enter Greece for the first time since the 17th Century. Only country which now formally bars them is Switzerland.

Founder Loyola, the Society's first Superior General, developed such methods of discipline as encouraging Jesuits to inform on one another out of high motives, to travel always in pairs, to drink beer with beer drinkers. Of women he said: "Conduct religious conversations only with aristocratic women, and never with the door shut." More than any other Catholic fathers, the Jesuits are at home in the drawing rooms of the rich and great. But the order forbids its members to accept ecclesiastical honors, keeps them quietly and efficiently on the move, their minds sharp, their spirits obedient, their black-cassocked persons unattached to any one locality. Its Superior General (at present Polish Wlodimir Ledochowski) is elected for life, is often called the "Black Pope" because he wears a black habit and possesses powers which, in a limited way, resemble the Holy Father's.

Nowhere was the Jesuit quadricentennial celebrated more widely last week than in the U. S., for here labor 5,440 members of the Society--more than in any other nation, even Catholic Italy. Most intellectual of the Catholic orders (it normally takes 15 years of work, prayer and scholarly study to become a fully professed Jesuit), it is best known in the U. S. for the 14 universities it runs. At the anniversary convocation of the biggest, New York's Fordham,* the Very Rev. Robert Ignatius Gannon, S.J., succinctly summarized his order's first four centuries: 'A checkered career, a career which for bright light and black shadow has not seen equaled in the history of the church."

*The others: Georgetown; St. Louis; Marquette; Creighton; Loyola, New Orleans; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara; Loyola, Los Angeles; Loyola, Chicago; Xavier; John Carroll; University of Detroit; Gonzaga.

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