Abolition of the Jesuit order

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First page of the papal deed of repeal Dominus ac Redemptor of July 21, 1773 in Latin and French

The Jesuit order was abolished in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV under pressure from the kings of France, Spain and Portugal. Various conspiracy theories played a major role in the attacks on the Jesuit order . The process of the Age of Enlightenment , unique in modern church history, robbed the papacy of an important support. The fight against the Jesuits were reconnaissance significantly involved. The repeal was reversed in 1814 by Pope Pius VII .

Prohibition in Portugal

Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello , the later Marquês de Pombal

In Portugal , the leading minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello (since 1769 Marquês de Pombal ) was a supporter of enlightened absolutism . The Jesuits were a thorn in his side because they resisted attempts to subordinate the Portuguese Church to the absolute power of its king, Joseph I. The specific cause of the hostility to the order were the Jesuit Indian reductions in South America. When seven of these settlements were to be evacuated in 1750 because their territory was to fall to the Spanish Crown in the event of an exchange of territory, the Indians living there violently resisted their resettlement ( war of the seven reductions ). Although the order had called the Indians to obedience, Carvalho e Mello made him responsible for the five years of guerrilla warfare. This sufficed together with the accusation that the Jesuits would form a “ state within the state ” in the colonies in order to have the remaining reductions in Brazil dissolved. The public sermon by the Italian Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida that the devastating earthquake of 1755 that destroyed Lisbon was the punishment for the government's godless and anti-church policies further poisoned relations.

An assassination attempt on the king in September 1758 brought the barrel to overflow. Without being able to present sufficient evidence, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Mello portrayed the Jesuits as masterminds of the attack and had Malagrida and nine other priests arrested. In Joseph I's decrees of January 19, 1759, the property of the order was confiscated and the Jesuits forbade them to leave their homes and to have any intercourse with secular people; a law of September 3, 1759 regulated the "immediate and complete expulsion" of the members of the Society of Jesus, and in October all Jesuits were expelled from Portugal.

Jesuits from the Portuguese colonies were interned there, transported to Portugal from 1761 and imprisoned for 16 years until the king's death without a personal trial, such as the German doctor and Africa missionary Moritz Thomann .

Prohibition in France

Contemporary German leaflet against the repeal of the Jesuit order

In France , the order came under pressure from the emerging Jansenists . This direction of piety, partly pursued by the Church, soon after its foundation came into opposition to the Jesuit order. For example, they spread the rumor that the Order had commissioned Robert François Damiens in 1751 to carry out an assassination attempt on King Louis XV. to perpetrate.

On the other hand, the internationally active Order of the Crown was in the way: In the course of Gallicanism , which was introduced with the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438 and was continued in the Gallican Articles of 1682, the kingship endeavored to limit pontifical power. As late as 1730, the Jesuits seemed to have triumphed over Jansenism.

The reason for the dissolution was the missionary activity of the order overseas - similar to Portugal. Antoine de LaValette , superior general of the Jesuit missions in Latin America, was targeted for illegal trade in Martinique . When he went bankrupt in 1755, leaving debts worth 2.4 million livres , the French Jesuits rejected joint liability for the order. This led to a trial before the Jansenist-dominated Parlement (court) of Paris, in which in 1764 the Constitutiones of the order, which had been secret until then , were uncovered.

The fact that the French fathers owed absolute obedience to the Pope, i.e. more loyalty than the French crown, sparked considerable indignation. The Paris Parliament then banned the Jesuits from any connection with their superiors and confiscated their property. In November 1764 King Louis XV followed. with an edict in which the remaining Jesuits were required to take an oath of allegiance to the crown, which only six of them were willing to take. This ended the Order's activities in France.

Ban in Spain

In Spain , the Jesuit state of Paraguay also offered one of the external reasons for banning the order. In order to repair the so-called " reductions " and to defend themselves against the slavers from São Paulo , the notorious Bandeirantes , the Jesuits had allowed their Indians to arm themselves, which further nourished the prejudice that they were striving for their own political power would have.

When it came to the so-called “ Madrid hat revolt ” in 1766 - the government had aroused the anger of the citizens with the ban on wearing sombreros and a simultaneous tax increase - the Jesuits were again blamed as alleged masterminds against the evidence . On February 27, 1767, the order was in Spain by a decree of King Charles III. banned, its members arrested and evacuated. At the same time the reductions in Paraguay were dissolved and all Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish colonies.

Repeal of the order

A territorial conflict between the Bourbon -ruled Duchy of Parma and the Papal States finally offered the other Bourbon thrones of France and Spain and Portugal a lever to exert increased pressure on the Papal Curia to have the hated religious entirely cancel. After tough negotiations, Clemens XIV submitted and on July 21, 1773, with the Breve Dominus ac Redemptor , revoked the order. The following year, three smaller territories that had been occupied by the Bourbon powers were returned to the Papal States in order to put pressure on the Curia. A congregation set up by Clement XIV in August 1773 under the direction of Cardinal Andrea Corsini implemented measures against Jesuit theologians, including many arrests.

consequences

After the end of their order, the Jesuits gathered in various cooperatives for devotion to the Sacred Heart , some of which even adopted the Jesuit rule , for example in the "Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus" founded in 1794 or the Paccanarists founded three years later . With the dissolution of the order, the conspiracy theories against him by no means ended: it was suspected that he would continue his work in secret, and when Clemens XIV died in September 1774, the enlightener Jean Baptiste d'Alembert suspected in a letter to King Frederick II. von Prussia, the Pope must have succumbed to a poison attack by the vengeful Jesuits.

In Russia and Prussia, where the non-Catholic governments did not recognize papal authority, some of the Jesuits found refuge, largely because the rulers of enlightened absolutism , Tsarina Catherine the Great and Frederick II, did not want to give up the advantages of the Jesuit school system and because both rulers needed pastors for the Catholic population of Poland, which had been divided between Russia and Prussia .

A few years after the ban, however, the absolutist idea of ​​the state, for which the international order was a disruptive factor, was so massively shaken by the French Revolution from 1789 that the ancien régime was no longer to recover from it. Consequently, Pope Pius VII used the return of the papacy to international law in 1814 to restore the Jesuits, who had partially survived the repeal, with the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum . Although the Order may never quite have weathered the shock of the 1773 repeal, it provided numerous leading theologians in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a pope for the first time in the 21st century .

Jesuit bans also followed. For example, the order was banned in Germany - as part of a series of measures in the Kulturkampf - from 1872 to 1917 ( Jesuit Law ). The Swiss Federal Constitution of 1874 (Article 51) banned the order in Switzerland. This confessional exception article was not repealed until 1973.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich Schäfer: History of Portugal , Volume 5, Pages 288-291. Gotha 1854 , queried on January 18, 2012
  2. ↑ Moritz Thomann : An Exjesuit . An autobiography. Ed .: JB Kempf. Reissue. Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 1867 ( full text in the Google book search).
  3. ^ Peter Claus Hartmann: The Jesuits . 2nd edition, Munich: Beck 2008, p. 90.
  4. ^ Giuseppe Pignatelli:  Corsini, Andrea. In: Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 29:  Cordier-Corvo. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1983.
  5. ^ Marek Inglot: The Jesuits of the Low Countries and the Society of Jesus in Russia . In: Leo Kenis, Marc Lindeijer (ed.): The Survival of the Jesuits in the Low Countries, 1773-1850 (= KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, Vol. 25). Leuven University Press, Leuven 2019, ISBN 978-94-6270-221-9 , pp. 147-167.
  6. ↑ Swiss Federal Chancellery: referendum of May 20, 1973