CHAPTER XXXVIII
The Church and Reform
1517-65

I. ITALIAN PROTESTANT REFORMERS

IN climatically pagan Italy, constitutionally polytheistic, favoring a genial and artistic faith, populated with undying saints whose awesome or beloved effigies moved annually through the streets, and enriched by the gold that came to the Church from a dozen subject lands, one should not have expected to find men and women dedicated, sometimes at mortal risk, to the replacement of that picturesque and hallowed faith by a somber creed whose political support was the reluctance of northern nations to fatten Italy with the proceeds of their piety. Yet everywhere in Italy there were people who felt, even more keenly and intimately than the Germans, the Swiss, or the English, the abuses that were demoralizing the Church. And in Italy, more than anywhere else, the educated classes, though already enjoying some freedom of teaching and thought, were demanding the liberation of the intellect from even outward allegiance to the myths that so charmed and disciplined the populace.

Some of Luther’s writings appeared in the bookstalls of Milan in 1519, in Venice in 1520. In St. Mark’s itself a friar dared to preach the doctrines of Luther. Cardinal Caraffa reported to Pope Clement VII (1532) that religion was at a low ebb in Venice, that very few Venetians observed the fasts or went to confession, and that heretical literature was popular there. Clement himself (1530) described the Lutheran heresy as widely spread among both clergy and laity in Italy; and in 1535 the German reformers claimed 30,000 adherents in the homeland of the Church.¹

The highest lady in Ferrara was a fervent Protestant. Renée, daughter of Louis XII, had imbibed the new ideas partly from Marguerite of Navarre, partly from her own governess, Mme. Soubise. The Princess brought this lady with her when she married (1528) Ercole d’Este, who became (1534) the second duke of that name to rule Ferrara. Calvin visited her there (1536), and intensified her Protestant convictions. Clément Marot came to her, and, later, Hubert Languet, the Huguenot publicist. Ercole accepted them all in polite Renaissance fashion until one of them shouted Idolatría! during the Adoration of the Cross on Holy Saturday (1536); then he let the Inquisition question them. Calvin and Marot fled; the others appear to have saved themselves by affirming their orthodoxy. But after 1540 Renée gathered a new Protestant entourage, and ceased attendance at Catholic worship. Ercole soothed the Pope by exiling her to the ducal villa at Consandolo on the Po; but there too she surrounded herself with Protestants, and brought up her daughters in the Reformed faith. Ercole, fearing that Protestant daughters would be worthless pawns in the game of political marriages, removed them to a convent. Finally he allowed the Inquisition to indict Renée and twenty-four of her household. She was convicted of heresy, and was sentenced to life imprisonment (1554). She recanted, received the Eucharist, and was restored to religious and political grace;² but her real opinions were silently expressed by the melancholy solitude of her remaining years. After Ercole’s death (1559) she returned to France, where she made her home at Montargis a refuge for Huguenots.

Modena, also under Ercole, had a lively Protestant moment. Its Accademia of scientists and philosophers allowed great freedom in discussions, and some of its members, including Vesalius’s pupil and successor Gabriele Fallopio, were suspected of heresy. Paolo Ricci, an ex-friar, preached openly against the papacy; Lutheran ideas were debated in the shops, the squares, the churches. Ricci and others were arrested. Cardinal Sadoleto protected the Academicians, claiming that they were loyal to the Church, and that they should, as scholars, enjoy freedom of inquiry;³ Paul III contented himself with their signatures to a profession of faith, but Ercole disbanded the Academy (1546), and one unrepentant Lutheran was executed at Ferrara (1550). In 1568, as the Catholic reaction stiffened, thirteen men and one woman were burned for heresy at Modena.

At Lucca, Pietro Martire Vermigli, Prior of the Austin Canons, organized a learned academy, brought exceptional teachers to it, encouraged freedom of discussion, and told his large congregation that it might look upon the Eucharist as not a miraculous transformation but a pious remembrance of the Passion of Christ; this out-Luthered Luther. Summoned for questioning by the chapter of his order at Genoa, he fled from Italy, denounced the errors and abuses of Catholicism, and accepted a professorship of divinity at Oxford (1548). He took a disputed part in formulating the Book of Common Prayer (1552), left England when Catholicism returned to power, and died as professor of Hebrew at Zurich in 1562. Eighteen canons of his priory at Lucca followed him in abandoning their order and Italy.

Vermigli, Bishop Sorano of Bergamo, and many others had been turned to the new ideas by Juan de Valdés. He and his brother Alfonso, of high Castilian lineage, were perhaps the most talented twins in history. Alfonso, a devotee of Erasmus, became Latin secretary to Charles V, and wrote a Dialogo de Lactancio (1529) in which he defended the Sack of Rome, and contended that Luther would never have left the Church if, instead of condemning him, she had reformed the abuses that he had justly denounced. Juan contributed to the same volume a Dialogo de Mercurio y Carón, whose heresies were political: the rich should be made to earn their living; the poor have a right to share in the income of the rich; the wealth of a prince belongs to the people, and should not be wasted in imperialistic or religious wars.⁴ Clement VII naturally preferred Juan, and made him a papal chamberlain at thirty. Juan, however, moved to Naples, where he devoted himself to writing and teaching. He remained loyal to the Church, but favored the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith, and rated a devout mysticism above any external ritual of piety. Distinguished men and women gathered around him and accepted his lead: Vermigli, Ochino, Marcantonio Flaminio the poet, Pietro Carnesecchi, Vittoria Colonna, Costanza d’Avalos, Duchess of Amalfi, Isabella Manriquez, sister of the Spanish grand inquisitor, and Giulia Gonzaga, whose beauty we have already acknowledged. After Juan Valdés’s death (1541) his pupils scattered through Europe. Some, like Vittoria Colonna, stayed in the Church; some developed his teachings into open heresy. Three minor pupils were beheaded and burned at Naples in 1564; Carnesecchi was beheaded and burned at Rome in 1567. Giulia Gonzaga was saved by the death of the merciless Paul IV; she entered a convent (1566), and with her the Neapolitan party of reform came to an end.

Bernardino Ochino went through all the stages of religious development. Born near the birthplace of St. Catherine in Siena, he rivaled her piety. He joined the Franciscans, but finding their discipline too lax for his mood, he transferred to the severer order of the Capuchins. They marveled at his ascetic self-denial, his passionate mortification of his flesh; and when they made him their vicar-general they felt that they had chosen a saint. His sermons—in Siena, Florence, Venice, Naples, Rome—resounded through Italy; nothing like them in fervor or eloquence had been heard there since Savonarola a century before. Charles V went to hear him; Vittoria Colonna was deeply moved by him; Pietro Aretino, who had sampled almost every sin, was stirred to passing piety by hearing him. No church was large enough to hold his listeners. No one dreamed that this man would die a heretic.

But at Naples he met Valdés, and through him became acquainted with the works of Luther and Calvin. The doctrine of justification suited his spirit; he began to hint at it in his sermons. In 1542 he was cited before the papal nuncio at Venice, and was forbidden to preach. Shortly afterward Paul III invited him to Rome to discuss the religious views of some Capuchins. Ochino may have trusted the enlightened Pope, but he feared the long arm of the Inquisition, and Cardinal Contarini warned him of danger. Suddenly this saint and idol of Italy, meeting Peter Vermigli in Florence, decided, like him, to cross the Alps into Protestant terrain. A brother of Vittoria Colonna gave him a horse; at Ferrara Renée gave him clothing. He proceeded through the Grisons to Zurich, thence to Geneva. He applauded the puritan discipline that Calvin was establishing there, but, his German being better than his French, he moved on to Basel to Strasbourg to Augsburg, trying to earn a living by tongue or pen. In 1547 Charles V, having overwhelmed the Protestants at Mühlberg, entered Augsburg as master of Germany. He learned that the Capuchin whom he had heard in Naples was living there as a married man; he ordered the magistrates to arrest him; they connived at Ochino’s escape. He fled to Zurich and Basel, and then, when he seemed at the end of his food, he received a call from Archbishop Cranmer to come to England. There, as a pensioned prebendary at Canterbury, he labored for six years (1547-53); he wrote a book that strongly influenced Milton’s Paradise Lost; but when Mary Tudor came to the throne he hurried back to Switzerland.

He secured appointment as pastor of a congregation in Zurich, but his Unitarian views offended it, and he was dismissed when he published a dialogue in which a defender of polygamy seemed to have the better of the argument against a monogamist. Though it was December (1563), he was ordered to leave the city within three weeks. Basel refused to let him stay there; he was allowed a brief sojourn in Nuremberg; soon he set out with his family for Poland, then by comparison a haven for off-color thinkers. He preached at Cracow for a while, but was expelled when the king banished all non-Catholic foreigners (1564). On the way from Poland to Moravia three of his four children succumbed to pestilence. He survived them two months, dying at Schackau in December 1564. Almost his last words were: “I wish to be neither a Bullingerite nor a Calvinist nor a papist, but simply a Christian.”⁵ Nothing could have been more dangerous.

It was of course impossible that Italy should go Protestant. The common people there, though anticlerical, were religious even when they did not go to church. They loved the time-hallowed ceremonies, the helping or consoling saints, the seldom-questioned creed that lifted their lives from the poverty of their homes to the sublimity of the greatest drama ever conceived—the redemption of fallen man by the death of his God. The political domination of Italy by an intensely religious Spain conspired to keep both peninsulas Catholic. The wealth of the papacy was an Italian heirloom and vested interest; any Italian who proposed to end that tribute-receiving organization seemed to most Italians to be verging on lunacy. The upper classes quarreled with the papacy as a political power over Central Italy, but they cherished Catholicism as a vital aid to social order and peaceful government. They realized that the glory of Italian art had been bound up with the Church through the inspiration of her legends and the support of her gold. Catholicism itself had become an art; its sensuous elements had submerged the ascetic and the theological; stained glass, incense, music, architecture, sculpture, painting, even drama—these were all in the Church and of her, and in their marvelous ensemble they seemed inseparable from her. The artists and the scholars of Italy did not have to be converted from Catholicism, for they had converted Catholicism to scholarship and art. Hundreds, thousands of scholars and artists were supported by bishops, cardinals, and popes; many humanists, some polite skeptics, had risen to high position in the Church. Italy loved attainable beauty too much to despoil itself over unattainable truth. And had those fanatical Teutons, or that sour popelet in Geneva, 01 that ruthless ogre on the throne of England, found the truth? What depressing nonsense those Reformers were shouting—just when the intellectual classes in Italy had quite forgotten hell and damnation! One could understand a quiet and private rejection of Christian theology in favor of a vague and genial deism, but to replace the mystery of transubstantiation with the horror of predestination seemed a passage from a heartening symbolism to a suicidal absurdity. Just now, when the Church had spread her forgiving wings over the pagan proclivities of the Italian people, Calvin was calling upon the world to fetter itself in a puritanism that threatened to exile all gladness and spontaneity from life. And how could Italian joy and art continue if those barbarous Teutons and Englishmen should cease to send or bring their coins into Italy?

II. ITALIAN CATHOLIC REFORMERS

Consequently the Italian argument was all for reform within the Church. And indeed, loyal churchmen had for centuries admitted—proclaimed—the need for ecclesiastical reform. The outbreak and progress of the Reformation gave new urgency to the need and the demand. “A vast torrent of abuse in hundreds and thousands of pamphlets and caricatures poured down upon the clergy.” ⁶ The Sack of Rome touched the conscience and income of terrified cardinals and populace; a hundred priests pronounced the calamity a warning from God. Bishop Stafileo, preaching before the Rota (a judiciary branch of the Curia) in 1528, explained, almost in Protestant terms, why God had struck the capital of Christendom: “Because all flesh has become corrupt; we are citizens not of the holy city of Rome, but of Babylon, the city of corruption.”⁷ As Luther had said.

At an uncertain date shortly before 1517 Giovanni Pietro Caraffa and Count Gaetano da Thiene founded at Rome the Oratory of the Divine Love—Oratorio del Divino Amore—for prayer and self-reform. Half a hundred prominent men joined it, including Iacopo Sadoleto, Gainmatteo Giberti, Giuliano Dati. In 1524 Gaetano organized an order of clerks regular—i.e., secular priests subjecting themselves to monastic vows. After the Sack of Rome the Oratory was disbanded, and Caraffa and others entered the new order, which took the name of Theatines from Caraffa’s episcopal see of Theate or Chieti. Men of high distinction were admitted—Pietro Bembo, Marcantonio Flaminio, Luigi Priuli, Gasparo Contarini, Reginald Pole.... . All pledged themselves to poverty, care of the sick, and a strict moral life, “to make up,” said their first historian, “what is wanting in the clergy, who are corrupted by vice and ignorance to the ruin of the people.”⁸ The members spread through Italy, and their example shared with papal and conciliar reforms, with Capuchin and Jesuit example, in restoring the moral fiber of the Catholic clergy and the popes. Caraffa led the way by resigning all his benefices, and distributing his substantial wealth among the poor.

Giberti was in his person and career an image of the Catholic reform. At the court of Leo X he was a leading humanist; under Clement VII he was datary or chief secretary to the Curia. Shaken by the catastrophe of 1527, he retired to his bishopric at Verona, and lived like an ascetic monk while administering his diocese. He was alarmed by the decay of religion there—the churches dilapidated, preaching rare, priests ignorant of the Latin in which they said Mass, and the people rarely using the confessional. By example, precept, and firm discipline, he reformed his clergy; soon, says a Catholic historian, “the dungeons were full of concubinary priests.”⁹ Giberti reestablished (1531) the Confraternità della Carità that had been founded by Cardinal Giuliano de’ Medici in 1519; he built orphanages, and opened people’s banks to rescue borrowers from usurers. Similar reforms were carried out by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga (son of Isabella d’Este) at Mantua, by Marco Vida at Alba, by Fabio Vigili at Spoleto, and many other bishops who knew that the Church must reform or die.

Several of the heroes of the orthodox reform were later canonized by the Church they had helped to save. St. Philip Neri, a young Florentine noble, founded at Rome (c. 1540) a peculiar Trinità de’ Pellegrini: twelve laymen who, after attending Mass on Sundays, would make a pilgrimage to one of the basilicas, or to some rural green, and there give or hear pious talks, and sing religious music. Many of the members became priests, and took the name of Fathers of the Oratory; from their musical propensities the word oratorio added to its old meaning—place of prayer—the new meaning of choral song. St. Charles Borromeo, nephew to Pope Pius IV, resigned his high place as a cardinal in Rome to cleanse the religious life of Milan. As archbishop there he maintained discipline among the clergy, and showed the way by his own austerities and devotion. There was some resistance. The Umiliati, a religious order once proud of its humility, had degenerated into a comfortable, even a licentious, life; the Cardinal ordered them to obey their rule; one of them fired a shot at him as he prayed in chapel; the result was to raise to veneration the popular awe for a man who thought that reform was the best answer to the Reformation. Within his lifetime and his archdiocese, decency was made fashionable among clergy and laity alike. His influence was felt throughout Italy, and shared in transforming the cardinals from worldly aristocrats into devoted priests.

Stimulated by such men, the popes began to give determined attention to ecclesiastical reform. Early in the pontificate of Paul III the renowned jurist Giovan Battista Caccia presented to him a treatise on the reformation of the Church. “I see,” said the preamble, “that our Holy Mother the Church .... has been so changed that she seems to have no tokens of her evangelical character; and no trace can be found in her of humility, temperance, continence, and Apostolic strength.”¹⁰ Paul showed his own mood by accepting the dedication of this work. On November 20, 1534, he appointed Cardinals Piccolomini, Sanseverino, and Cesi to draw up a program of moral renovation for the Church; and on January 15,1535, he ordered strict enforcement of Leo X’s reform bulls of 1513. Enmeshed in papal and Imperial politics, endangered by the advance of the Turks, and unwilling, in these crises, to disturb the structure or functioning of the Curia by radical changes, Paul deferred active reform; but the men whom he raised to the cardinalate were almost all known for integrity and devotion. In July 1536, he invited to a reform conference at Rome Contarini, Caraffa, Sadoleto, Cortese, Aleander, Pole, Tommaso Badia, and Bishop Federigo Fregose of Gubbio, all committed to reform, and bade them put into writing the abuses in the Church, and the means they would recommend to mitigate them. Sadoleto opened the conference by boldly stating that the popes themselves, by their sins, crimes, and financial greed, had been the prime source of ecclesiastical deterioration.¹¹ The conference met almost daily for three months. Its leading spirit, Gasparo Contarini, was the finest figure in the Counter Reformation. Born in Venice (1483) of aristocratic lineage, and educated in liberal Padua, he soon rose to high position in the Venetian government. He was sent as ambassador to Charles V in Germany, accompanied him to England and Spain, and then served the Senate as its representative at the papal court (1527-30). Retiring from politics, he devoted himself to study, and made his home a meeting place of the best statesmen, churchmen, philosophers, and humanists in Venice. Though a layman, he pondered ecclesiastical reform, and collaborated actively with Caraffa, Giberti, Cortese, and Pole. All Italy recognized him as a rare combination of intellect and character. In 1535, without any solicitation on his part, he was made a cardinal by Paul III, whom he had never met.¹²

In March 1537, the commission presented to the Pope its unanimous Consilium dilectorum cardinalrum de emendanda Ecclesia. This “Counsel of the Appointed Cardinals on Reforming the Church” exposed with astonishing freedom the abuses in the papal government, and boldly ascribed them chiefly to “reckless exaggeration of the papal authority by unscrupulous canonists.” Some popes, the report held, “had assumed the right to sell ecclesiastical offices, and this simony had spread venality and corruption so widely through the Church that now the great organization was on the verge of destruction through men’s lack of trust in its integrity. The report urged strict supervision of all Curial activities, a check on dispensations, an end to money payments for them, a higher standard in all appointments and in eligibility to the cardinalate and the priesthood, and a prohibition of plural or absentee holding of benefices. “Throughout the whole world,” the report added, “almost all the shepherds have deserted their flocks and entrusted them to hirelings.” Monastic orders must be regenerated, and nunneries should be subject to episcopal supervision, for their visitaton by monks had led to scandal and sacrilege. Indulgences should be proclaimed only once a year. The report concluded with a solemn exhortation to the Pope:

Paul took in good spirit this aureum consilium, this “golden counsel,” as many called it, and sent a copy to every cardinal. Luther translated it into German, and published it as a full justification of his break with Rome; however, he judged the authors of the document to be “liars .... desperate rascals reforming the Church with cajolery.” ¹⁴ On April 20, 1537, Paul appointed four cardinals—Contarini, Caraffa, Simonetta, and Ghinucci—to reform the Dataria, that department of the Curia which had become especially venal in granting those dispensations, graces, privileges, indults, and benefices which were reserved to the papal power. The undertaking required courage, for the Dataria yielded 50,000 ducats ($1,250,000?) yearly to the Pope—nearly half his income.¹⁵ At once a cry of anguish rose from the officials and their dependents; they complained of the high cost of living in Rome, and alleged that if they were made to keep to the letter of the law their families would soon be destitute. Paul proceeded cautiously; nevertheless, wrote Aleander to Morone (April 27, 1540), “the work of reform goes on busily.” On December 13 Paul summoned eighty archbishops and bishops residing in Rome, and ordered them to return to their sees. Again a thousand objections were raised. Morone warned the Pope that haste in executing this order might drive some of the bishops, returning to now predominantly Protestant areas, to join the Lutherans. This actually occurred in several cases. Soon Paul lost himself in Imperial politics, and left reform to his successors.

The movement for internal reform triumphed when its leader, Caraffa, became Paul IV (1555). Monks absent from their monasteries without official sanction and clear necessity were commanded to return at once. On the night of August 22,1558, the Pope ordered all the gates of Rome closed, and all vagrant monks arrested; similar procedures were followed throughout the Papal States, and some offenders were sent to the galleys. Monasteries were no longer to be assigned in commendam to support absentee officials with their revenues. Bishops and abbots not actually serving the Curia in a fixed office were required to return to their posts or forfeit their income. The holding of plural benefices was prohibited. All departments of the Curia were bidden to reduce their fees, and to eliminate any suspicion of simony in appointments to clerical positions. Having so diminished his own income, Paul made a further sacrifice by ending the payment of a fee for confirmation to archiepiscopal dignity. Severe papal edicts were issued against usurers, actors, and prostitutes; procurers were to be put to death. Daniele da Volterra was instructed to cover sartorially the more glaring anatomical features of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment; and it must be admitted that that gloomy shambles of flesh damned or saved had hardly found a fitting place over the altar of the popes. Rome now assumed an uncongenial air of external piety and morality. In Italy—less visibly beyond it—the Church had reformed her clergy and her morals, while leaving her doctrines proudly intact. The reform had been long delayed, but when it came it was sincere and magnificent.

III. ST. TERESA AND MONASTIC REFORM

A moral regeneration was simultaneously taking place in the monastic orders. We may imagine their reputation from a remark of the pious and orthodox Michelangelo, who, when he heard that Sebastian del Piombo was to paint the figure of a monk in the chapel of San Pietro in Montorio, advised against it, saying that as the monks had spoiled the world, which is so large, it would not be surprising if one should spoil the chapel, which was so small.¹⁶ Gregorio Cortese set himself patiently to reform the Benedictines at Padua; Girolamo Seripando the Austin Canons; Egidio Canisio the Augustinian Eremites; Paolo Giustiniani the Camaldolites.

New monastic orders stressed reform. Antonio Maria Laccaria founded at Milan (1533) the Clerks Regular of St. Paul, a community of priests pledged to monastic poverty; they met originally in the church of St. Barnabas, whence they came to be called Barnabites. In 1535 St. Angela organized the Ursuline nuns for the education of girls and the care of the sick or the poor; and in 1540 St. John of God established in Granada the Brothers of Mercy for hospital ministrations. In 1523 Matteo de’ Bassi, in fervent emulation of St. Francis of Assisi, determined to observe to the letter the final rule that their founder had left to the Franciscans. Other friars joined him, and by 1525 their number encouraged Matteo to ask papal sanction of a new branch of the Franciscans dedicated to the strictest rule. The provincial of his order had him imprisoned for disobedience, but Matteo was soon freed, and in 1528 Clement VII confirmed the new order of Capuchins—so named because the friars wore the same kind of cappuccio or cowl that Francis had worn. They dressed in the coarsest cloth, lived on bread, vegetables, fruit, and water, kept rigorous fasts, dwelt in narrow cells in poor cottages, never journeyed except on foot, and went barefoot throughout the year. They distinguished themselves by their selfless care of the infected in the plague of 1528-29. Their devotion was a factor in keeping Vittoria Colonna and other incipient Protestants loyal to a Church that could still produce such ardent Christians.

The most interesting figure in this epoch of monastic reform was a frail and masterful abbess of Spain. Teresa de Cepeda was the daughter of a Castilian knight of Ávila, a man proud of his puritan rectitude and his loyalty to the Church; each night he read to his family from the lives of the saints.¹⁷ The mother, a chronic invalid, brightened her weary days with chivalric romances, and shared, from her sickbed, the adventures of Amadis of Gaul. Teresa’s childhood imagination vacillated between romantic love and saintly martyrdom. At ten she vowed to become a nun. But, four years later, she blossomed suddenly into a beautiful young woman, bounding with the joy of life, and forgetting the garb of the cloister in the colorful dresses that doubled her charms. Admirers came; she fell tremulously in love with one of them, and was invited to a tryst. At the crucial moment she took fright, and confessed the dire plot to her father. As the mother was now dead, Don Alonzo de Cepeda placed the impressionable girl with the Augustinian nuns at Ávila.

Teresa resented the solemn life and discipline of the convent. She refused to take the vows of a nun, but looked forward impatiently to her sixteenth birthday, when she would be permitted to leave. But as this goal approached she fell dangerously ill, and almost died. She recovered, but her youthful joyousness was gone. Apparently she had developed a form of hystero-epilepsy, perhaps from suppressed rebellion against constraints alien to her instincts. Attacks recurred, leaving her exhausted. Her father removed her from the convent, and sent her to live with her half-sister in the country.

On the way an uncle gave her a volume of St. Jerome. Those vivid letters described the terrors of hell, and the flirtations of the sexes as the crowded avenue to eternal damnation. Teresa read anxiously. After another severe attack she abandoned all thought of worldly happiness, and resolved to fulfill her childhood vow. She returned to Ávila, and entered the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation (1534).

For a while she was happy in the soothing routine of Masses, prayers, and cleansing confessions; and when she took the sacrament she felt the bread as veritably Christ on her tongue and in her blood. But she was disturbed by the lax discipline of the convent. The nuns had not cells but comfortable rooms; they ate well despite weekly fasts; they adorned their persons with necklaces, bracelets, and rings; they received visitors in the parlor, and enjoyed extended vacations outside the convent walls. Teresa felt that these conditions did not protect her sufficiently from the temptations and imaginations of the flesh. Perhaps because of these, and her growing discontent, her attacks became more frequent and painful. Again her father sent her to her sister, and again, en route, her uncle gave her a religious book, The Third Abecedarium of Francisco de Osuña. It was an A B C of mystical prayer, prayer without words; for, said the author, “only those who approach God in silence can be heard and will be given an answer.” ¹⁸ In her rural retreat Teresa practiced this silent, meditative prayer, which suited so well the trancelike state induced by her attacks.

An herb doctor tried to cure her, but his concoctions almost killed her. When she returned to the cloister at Ávila (1537) she was near death, and longed for it. The most violent of her seizures came now; she fell into a coma that was mistaken for death; for two days she lay cold and motionless, apparently without breath; the nuns dug a grave for her. She recovered, but remained so weak that she could digest no solid food, and could bear no touch. For eight months she lay in the convent infirmary in almost total paralysis. Her condition slowly improved to partial paralysis, but “the times when I was not harassed by severe pains were rare indeed.”¹⁹ She renounced medical treatments, and resolved to rely entirely on prayer. For three years she suffered and prayed. Then suddenly, one morning in 1540, the bedridden, seemingly incurable invalid awoke to find her limbs no longer paralyzed. She rose and walked. Day by day she joined more actively in the conventual regimen. Her recovery was acclaimed as a miracle, and she believed it so. Perhaps prayer had soothed a nervous system overwrought with conflicting desires, a sense of sin, and a fear of hell; and the quieted nerves, and the absence of doctors, gave her body unwonted peace.

The Incarnation Convent became famous as the scene of a miraculous cure. People came from surrounding towns to see the nun whom God had healed; they left money and gifts for the holy house; the mother superior encouraged these visits, and bade Teresa show herself when visitors came. Teresa was troubled to find that she took pleasure in these visits, this fame, and the presence of handsome men. A sense of sin returned to her. One day (1542), as she conversed in the parlor with a man who especially attracted her, she thought she saw Christ standing beside the visitor. She fell into a trance, and had to be carried to her cell in a cot.

Through the next sixteen years she continued to have such visions. They became to her more real than life. In 1558, while absorbed in prayer, she felt her soul moving out of her body and mounting to heaven, and there seeing and hearing Christ. These visions no longer exhausted, they refreshed her. She wrote:

On another occasion she thought an “exceedingly beautiful angel” thrust “a long dart of gold,” tipped with fire, “through my heart several times, so that it reached my very entrails.”

This and other passages in the writings of St. Teresa lend themselves readily to psychoanalytic interpretations, but no one can doubt the high sincerity of the saint. Like Ignatius, she was convinced that she saw God, and that the most recondite problems were made clear to her in these visions.

Teresa’s sister nuns interpreted her visions as delusions and morbid fits.²³ Her confessors inclined to the same view, and told her sternly, “The Devil has deceived your senses.” The townspeople thought her possessed by demons, called upon the Inquisition to examine her, and proposed that a priest should drive out her devils by exorcism. A friend advised her to send the Inquisition an account of her life and visions; now she wrote her classic Vida. The inquisitors scrutinized it, and pronounced it a holy document which would strengthen the faith of all who should read it.

Her position fortified by this verdict, Teresa, now fifty-seven, determined to reform the order of the Carmelite nuns. Instead of attempting to restore the old ascetic discipline in the cloister of the Incarnation, she decided to open a separate convent, to which she invited such nuns and novices as would accept a regimen of absolute poverty. The original Carmelites had worn coarse sackcloth, had gone always barefoot, had eaten frugally and fasted frequently. Teresa required of her Discalced (shoeless) Carmelites approximately the same austere rule, not as an end in itself, but as a symbol of humility and rejection of this tempting world. A thousand obstacles were raised; the townsmen of Ávila denounced the plan as threatening to end all communication between nuns and relatives. The provincial of the order refused permission for a new convent. Teresa appealed to Pope Pius V, and won his consent. She found four nuns to join her, and the new convent of St. Joseph was consecrated in 1562 on a narrow street in Ávila. The sisters wore sandals of rope, slept on straw, ate no meat, and remained strictly within their house.

The 180 nuns of the older establishment were not pleased by this simple exposure of their easy ways. The prioress, holding that Teresa was bound to her by the vow of obedience, commanded her to resume her former white robe, put on shoes, and return to the convent of the Incarnation. Teresa obeyed. She was adjudged guilty of arrogance, and was confined to her cell. The town council voted to close St. Joseph’s Convent, and sent four strong men to evict its now leaderless nuns. But the sandaled maidens said, “God wants us to stay, and so we shall stay”; and the hardened officers of the law dared not force them. Teresa frightened the Carmelite provincial by suggesting that in frustrating her plans he was offending the Holy Ghost; he ordered her freed. Four nuns left with her, and the five women walked through the snow to their new home. The four original members greeted Teresa happily as Madre. To nearly all Spain she now became Teresa de Jesú, the intimate of God.

Her rule was loving, cheerful, and firm. The house was closed to the world; no visitors were allowed; the windows were covered with cloth; the tiled floor served as beds, tables, and chairs. A revolving disk was built into the wall; whatever food was placed by the people on its outer half was gratefully accepted, but the nuns were not permitted to beg. They eked out their sustenance by spinning and needlework; the products were placed outside the convent gate; any buyer might take what he liked and leave whatever he liked in return. Despite these austerities new members came, and one of them was the most beautiful and courted woman in Ávila. The general of the Carmelites, visiting the little cloister, was so deeply impressed that he asked Teresa to found similar houses elsewhere in Spain. In 1567, taking a few nuns with her, she traveled in a rude cart over seventy miles of rough roads to establish a Discalced Carmelite nunnery at Medina del Campo. The only house offered her was an abandoned and dilapidated building with crumbling walls and leaking roof; but when the townspeople saw the nuns trying to live in it, carpenters and roofers came, unasked and unpaid, to make repairs and simple furniture.

The prior of the Carmelite monastery at Medina, wishing to reform his relaxed monks, came to Teresa and asked for her rules of discipline. The prior was tall, but was accompanied by a youth so short and frail that Teresa, with the humor that brightened her austerities, exclaimed, as they left: “Blessed be the Lord, for I have a friar and a half for the foundation of my new monastery.” ²⁴ The diminutive friar, Juan de Yepis y Alvarez, was destined to be San Juan de la Cruz, St. John of the Cross, the soul and glory of the Discalced Carmelite monks.

Teresa’s difficulties were not ended. The provincial of the Carmelites, perhaps to test her rule and courage, appointed her prioress of the Incarnation Convent. The nuns there hated her, and feared that now, in revenge, she would subject them to every humiliation. But she behaved with such modesty and kindness that one by one they were won over, and gradually the new and stricter regimen replaced the old laxity. From this victory Teresa advanced to found a new cloister in Seville.

The friars of the mitigated rule resolved to stop the extension of the reform. Some of them smuggled an agent, as a discalced nun, into the Seville convent. Soon this woman proclaimed to Spain that Teresa flogged her nuns and heard confessions as if she were a priest. The Inquisition was again called upon to investigate her. She was summoned before the fearful tribunal; it heard her testimony, and gave its verdict: “You are acquitted of all charges.... . Go and continue your work.”²⁵ But a papal nuncio was won over to her enemies. He denounced Teresa as “a disobedient, contumacious woman who promulgates pernicious doctrines under the pretense of devotion, who left her cloister against the orders of her superiors, who is ambitious, and teaches theology as though she were a doctor of the Church, in contempt of St. Paul, who forbade women to teach.” He commanded her to retire to confinement in a nunnery at Toledo (1575).

Hardly knowing where to turn in this new vicissitude, Teresa wrote to the King. Philip II had read and loved her Life. He sent a special courier to invite her to an audience; he heard her, and was convinced of her saintliness. The nuncio, royally reproved, withdrew his order of restraint on Teresa, and announced that he had been misinformed.

Amid her travels and tribulations she wrote famous manuals of mystical devotion: El camino de la perfección (The Way of Perfection, 1567), and El Castillo interior (The Interior Castle, 1577). In the latter she revealed the return of her physical ailments. “It seems as though many swollen rivers were rushing, within my brain, over a precipice; and then again, drowned by the noise of the water, are voices of birds singing and whistling. I weary my brain and increase my headaches.” ²⁶ Heart attacks recurred, and her stomach found it hard to retain food. Even so she passed painfully from one to another of the many nunneries she had founded, examining, improving, inspiring. At Malaga she was seized with a paralytic fit; she recovered, went on to Toledo, and had another seizure; she recovered, went on to Segovia, Valladolid, Palencia, Burgos, Alva. There a hemorrhage of the lungs forced her to stop. She accepted death cheerfully, confident that she was leaving a world of pain and evil for the everlasting companionship of Christ.

After a shameful competition, and successive kidnapings of her corpse by Alva and Ávila, she was buried in the town of her birth. Pious worshipers claimed that her body never decayed, and many miracles were reported at her tomb. In 1593 the order of Discalced Carmelites received papal sanction. Famous Spaniards like Cervantes and Lope de Vega joined in an appeal to the Pope to at least beatify her. It was done (1614), and eight years later Teresa was pronounced, along with the Apostle James, one of the two patron saints of Spain.

Meanwhile a greater than Teresa had come out of Spain to reform the Church and move the world.

IV. IGNATIUS LOYOLA

Don Iñigo de Oñez y Loyola was born in the castle of Loyola in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa in 1491. He was one of eight sons and five daughters begotten by Don Beltran de Oñez y Loyola, a member of the higher Spanish nobility. Brought up to be a soldier, Iñigo received little schooling, and showed no interest in religion. His reading was confined to Amadis of Gaul and like romances of chivalry. At seven he was sent to serve as a page to Don Juan Velásquez de Cuellar, through whom he had some access to the royal court. At fourteen he fell in love with Ferdinand the Catholic’s new queen, Germaine de Foix; and when, in due course, he was knighted, he chose her as his “Queen of Hearts,” wore her colors, and dreamed of winning a lace handkerchief from her hand as prize in a tournament.²⁷ This did not prevent him from engaging in the casual amours and brawls that were half a soldier’s life. In the simple and honest autobiography that he dictated in 1553-56, he made no effort to conceal these natural escapades.

His carefree youth came to an end when he was assigned to active military service at Pamplona, capital of Navarre. Four years he spent there, dreaming of glory and waking to routine. A chance came to distinguish himself: the French attacked Pamplona, Iñigo heartened the defense with his bravery; the enemy captured the citadel nevertheless, and Iñigo’s right leg was fractured by a cannon ball (May 20, 1521). The victors treated him kindly, set his bones, and sent him on a stretcher to his ancestral castle. But the bones had been wrongly set; they had to be rebroken and reset. The second operation proved more incompetent than the first, for a stump of bone stuck out from the leg; a third operation set the bones straight, but the leg was now too short; and for weeks Iñigo bore the torture of an orthopedic stretcher that kept him helpless and weak and in constant pain.

During the weary months of convalescence he asked for books, preferably for some exciting tale of knighthood and imperiled princesses. But the castle library was composed of two books only: Ludolfus’s Life of Christ, and Flos sanctorum, recounting the lives of the saints. At first the soldier was bored by these volumes; then the figures of Christ and Mary grew upon him, and the legends of the saints proved as wonderful as the epics of courtly love and war; these cavaliers of Christ were every bit as heroic as the caballeros of Castile. Gradually the thought formed in his mind that the noblest war of all was that of Christianity against Islam. In him, as in Dominic, the intensity of Spanish faith made religion no quiet devotion as in Thomas à Kempis, but a passion of conflict, a holy war. He resolved to go to Jerusalem and free the sacred places from infidel control. One night he had a vision of the Virgin and her Child; thereafter (he later told Father Gonzalez) no temptation to concupiscence ever assailed him.²⁸ He rose from his bed, knelt, and vowed to be a soldier of Christ and Mary till his death.

He had read that the Holy Grail had once been hidden in a castle at Montserrat in the province of Barcelona. There, said the most famous of all romances, Amadis had kept a full night’s vigil before an image of the Virgin to prepare himself for knighthood. As soon as Iñigo could travel he mounted a mule, and set out for the distant shrine. For a while he still thought of himself as a soldier accoutered for physical combat. But the saints he had read about had had no weapons, no armor, only the poorest clothes and the firmest faith. Arrived in Montserrat, he cleansed his soul with three days of confession and penance; he gave his costly raiment to a beggar, and donned a pilgrim’s robe of coarse cloth. All the night of March 24-25, 1522, he spent alone in the chapel of a Benedictine monastery, kneeling or standing before the altar of the Mother of God. He pledged himself to perpetual chastity and poverty. The next morning he received the Eucharist, gave his mule to the monks, and set out on limping foot for Jerusalem.

The nearest port was Barcelona. On the way he stopped at the hamlet of Manresa. An old woman directed him to a cave for shelter. For some days he made this his home; and there, eager to surpass the saints in asceticism, he practiced austerities that brought him close to death. Repenting the proud care that he had once taken of his appearance, he ceased to cleanse, cut, or comb his hair—which soon fell out; he would not trim his nails or bathe his body or wash his hands or face or feet;²⁹ he lived on such food as he could beg, but never meat; he fasted for days at a time; he scourged himself thrice daily, and each day spent hours in prayer. A pious woman, fearful that his austerities would kill him, had him taken to her home, where she nursed him back to health. But when he was removed to a cell in a Dominican monastery at Manresa he resumed his self-flagellation. His remembrance of past sins terrified him; he waged war against his body as the agent of his sins; he was resolved to beat all thought of sin out of his flesh. At times the struggle seemed hopeless, and he thought of suicide. Then visions came and strengthened him; at communion he believed that he saw not a wafer of bread but the living Christ; at another time Christ and His Mother appeared to him; once he saw the Trinity, and understood by a flash of insight, beyond words or reason, the mystery of three persons in one God; and “at another time,” he tells us, “God permitted him to understand how He had created the world.”³⁰ These visions healed the spiritual conflict that had produced them; he put behind him all worry about his youthful follies; he relaxed his asceticism; and having conquered his body he could now cleanse it without vanity. From the experience of this struggle, almost a year long, he designed the Spiritual Exercises by which the heathen flesh could be subdued to the Christian will. Now he might present himself before the sacred shrines at Jerusalem.

He set sail from Barcelona in February 15 2 3. En route he stayed two weeks in Rome, escaping before its pagan spirit could bend him from sanctity. On July 14 he took ship from Venice for Jaffa. He suffered a host of calamities before reaching Palestine, but his continuing visions sustained him. Jerusalem itself was a tribulation: the Turks who controlled it allowed Christian visitors, but no proselytizing; and when Iñigo proposed to convert the Moslems nevertheless, the Franciscan provincial who had been charged by the Pope to keep the peace bade the saint return to Europe. In March 1524, he was back in Barcelona.

Perhaps he felt now that though he was master of his body he was subject to his imaginations. He determined to chasten his mind with education. Though now thirty-three, he joined schoolboys in studying Latin. But the itch to teach is stronger than the will to learn. Soon Ignatius, as he was scholastically called, began to preach to a circle of pious but charming women. Their lovers denounced him as a spoil-sport, and beat him brutally. He moved to Alcalá (1526), and took up philosophy and theology. Here too he taught a little private group, chiefly of poor women, some of them prostitutes hungering for redemption. He tried to exorcise their sinful propensities by spiritual exercises, but some of his pupils fell into fits or trances, and the Inquisition summoned him. He was imprisoned for two months,³¹ but he finally convinced the inquisitors of his orthodoxy, and was released; however, he was forbidden to teach. He passed on to Salamanca (1527), and went through a similar sequence of teaching, trial before the Inquisition, imprisonment, acquittal, and prohibition of further teaching. Disappointed with Spain, he set out for Paris, always on foot and in pilgrim garb, but now driving before him a donkey loaded with books.

At Paris he lived in the poorhouse, and begged in the streets for his food and tuition. He entered the Collège de Montaigu, where his sallow, haggard face, starved body, unkempt beard, and aged clothing made him a cynosure of unsympathetic eyes; but he pursued his purposes with such absorbed intensity that some students began to reverence him as a saint. Under his lead they engaged in spiritual exercises of prayer, penance, and contemplation. In 1529 he transferred to the Collège Ste.-Barbe, and there too he gathered disciples. His two roommates came by different routes to believe in his sanctity. Pierre Favre—Peter Faber—as a shepherd in the Savoyard Alps, had suffered deeply from fears superstitious or real, and under their influence he had vowed perpetual chastity. Now, aged twenty, he concealed under his disciplined manners a soul struggling feverishly against temptations of the flesh. Ignatius, though making no pretensions to intellect, had the power of sensing the interior life of others through the intensity of his own. He surmised the problem of his younger friend, and assured him that the impulses of the body could be controlled by a trained will. How train the will? By spiritual exercises, answered Ignatius. Together they practiced them.

The other roommate, Francis Xavier, came from Pamplona, where Loyola had soldiered. He had a long line of distinguished ancestors; he was handsome, rich, proud, a gay blade who knew the taverns of Paris and their girls.³² He laughed at the two ascetics, and boasted of his successes with women. Yet he was clever in his studies; he already had the master’s degree, and was aiming at a doctorate. One day he saw a man whose face was pocked with syphilis; it gave him pause. Once, when he was expounding his ambition to shine in the world, Ignatius quietly quoted the Gospel to him: “What is a man profited if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Xavier resented the query, but he could not forget it. He began to join Loyola and Faber in their spiritual exercises; perhaps his pride stirred him to equal the other two in power to bear deprivation, cold, and pain. They scourged themselves, fasted, slept in thin shirts on the floor of an unheated room; they stood barefoot and almost naked in the snow, to harden and yet subdue their bodies.

The spiritual exercises that had first taken shape at Manresa now reached a more definite form. Ignatius modeled them on the Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual (1500) of Don Garcia de Cisneros, Benedictine abbot at Montserrat; ³³ but he poured into that mold a fervor of feeling and imagination that made his little book a moving force in modern history. Loyola took as his starting point the infallibility of the Bible and the Church; individual judgment in religion, he held, was the vain and chaos-breeding pretense of proud, weak minds. “We ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.”³⁴ To avoid damnation we must train ourselves to be unquestioning servants of God, and of God’s vicar on earth, the Church.

As the first spiritual exercise we should recall our many sins, and consider how much punishment they deserve. Lucifer was condemned to hell for one sin; and is not our every sin a like rebellion against God? Let us keep a daily count of our sins by marks on lines that represent the days, and let us strive each day to reduce the marks. Kneeling in our darkened room or cell, let us picture hell to ourselves as vividly as we can; we must conjure up all the horrors of that undying fire; we must vision the torments of the damned, hear their shrieks of pain and their cries of despair; we must smell the stinking fumes of burning sulfur and flesh; we must try to feel those tongues of flame scorching our own bodies; and then we must ask ourselves, How can we escape that everlasting agony? Only through the redeeming sacrifice which God Himself, as Christ, offered on the cross.* Let us then contemplate the life of Christ, and in every detail; we must make ourselves present in imagination at those profoundest events in the history of the world. We must in fancy kneel before the holy figures in that divine epic, and kiss the hem of their garments. After two weeks of such meditations we must accompany Christ through every step in His Passion, every station of the cross; we must pray with Him in Gethsemane, feel ourselves scourged with Him, spat upon, nailed to the cross; we must suffer every moment of His agony, must die with Him, lie with Him in the tomb. And in the fourth week we must picture ourselves rising triumphantly from the grave, rising at last with Him into heaven. Strengthened by that blessed vision, we shall be ready to join as dedicated soldiers in the battle to defeat Satan and win men to Christ; and in that holy war we shall gladly bear every hardship and joyfully spend our lives.

This call to lifelong devotion found nine students at Paris ready to accept it. Earnest young men feeling for the first time the unintelligibility of the world, and longing for some anchor of belief and hope in a sea of doubts and fears, may have been moved, by the very extent of the demands made upon them, to put their fate, their lives and salvation, in Loyola’s plan. He proposed that in due time they should go together to Palestine, and live there a life as nearly as possible like Christ’s. On August 15, 1534, Loyola, Faber, Xavier, Diego Laynez, Alonso Salmerón, Nicolas Bobadilla, Simon Rodriguez, Claude Le Jay, Jean Codure, and Paschase Broet, in a little chapel in Montmartre, took the vows of chastity and poverty, and pledged themselves, after two years of further study, to go and live in the Holy Land. They had as yet no apparent notion of combating Protestantism; Islam seemed to them the greater challenge. They had no interest in theological disputes; their aim was sanctity; their movement was rooted in Spanish mysticism rather than in the intellectual conflicts of the time. The best argument would be a holy life.

In the winter of 1536-37 they walked through France, over the Alps, and across Italy to Venice, where they hoped to find passage to Jaffa. But Venice was at war with the Turks; the trip was impossible. During the delay Ignatius met Caraffa, and for a time joined the Theatines. His experience with these devoted priests had some influence in changing his plan from life in Palestine to service of the Church in Europe. He and his disciples agreed that if, after a year of waiting, Palestine should still be closed to them, they would offer themselves to the Pope for any service that he might assign to them. Faber secured permission for all of them to be ordained priests.

By this time Loyola was forty-six. He was bald, and still limped slightly from his wound. His five feet and two inches would have left him quite unimpressive had it not been for an aristocratic refinement of features, the sharp nose and chin, the somber, deep-set, piercing black eyes, the grave, intent countenance; he was already the absorbed and almost humorless saint. He was no persecutor; though he approved of the Inquisition,³⁵ he was rather its victim than its agent. He was stern but kind; he willingly served the sick in hospitals and plague. His dream was to win converts not by the pyre or the sword but by catching character in malleable youth and forming it immovably to faith. Founder of the most successful educational order in history, he laid little emphasis on learning or intellect. He was not a theologian, took no part in the arguments and refinements of the Scholastics; he preferred direct perception to rational understanding. He did not have to argue about the existence of God, of Mary and the saints; he was convinced that he had seen them; he felt them closer to him than any object or person in his surroundings; in his own way he was a God-intoxicated man. Yet his mystical experiences did not make him impractical. He could combine pliancy of means with inflexibility of ends. He would not justify any means for an end that he held good, but he could bide his time, moderate his hopes and demands, adjust his methods to characters and conditions, use diplomacy where needed, judge men shrewdly, choose fit aides and agents, and manage men as if he were—as he actually thought himself—a general leading a martial company. He called his little band by a military term, Compañía de Jesú; they were soldiers enlisted for life in the war against unbelief and the dissolution of the Church. For their part, as a matter of course and necessity, they accepted the military discipline of co-ordinated action under absolute command.

In the fall of 1537 Loyola, Faber, and Laynez set out from Venice to Rome to ask papal approval of their plans. They walked all the way, begged their food, and lived mostly on bread and water. But they sang psalms happily as they went along, as if they knew that out of their small number would grow a powerful and brilliant organization.

V. THE JESUITS

Arrived in Rome they did not at once ask audience with the Pope, for Paul III was immersed in critical diplomacy. They took service in the Spanish hospital, tended the sick, taught the young. Early in 1538 Paul received them, and was impressed by their desire to go to Palestine and live there as exemplary monks; he and some cardinals contributed 210 crowns ($5,-250?) to pay the passage of the band When the devotees had to abandon the idea as impracticable, they returned the money to the donors.³⁶ Those members who had remained in the north were summoned to Rome, and the company now numbered eleven. Paul appointed Faber and Laynez to professorships in the Sapienza (the University of Rome), while Ignatius and the rest devoted themselves to works of charity and education. Loyola made a special mission of converting prostitutes; with funds collected from his supporters he founded the House of Martha to receive such women; and his fervent preaching against sexual transgressions made him many enemies in Rome.

As new candidates were received into the company, it became desirable to define its principles and rule. The vow of obedience was added to those of chastity and poverty; the “general” chosen by them was to be obeyed only next to the Pope. A fourth vow was taken: to “serve the Roman Pontiff as God’s vicar on earth,” and “to execute immediately and without hesitation or excuse all that the reigning Pope or his successors may enjoin upon them for the benefit of souls or for the propagation of the faith” anywhere in the world. In 1539 Loyola asked Cardinal Contarini to submit these articles of organization to Paul III, and to request the papal confirmation of the company as a new order. The Pope was favorable; some cardinals dissented, thinking the group to be unmanageable extremists; but Paul overcame their objections, and by the bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae (“For the rule of the Church Militant”) he formally established what the bull called Societas Jesú:, the “Society of Jesus” (September 27,1540). The members were properly called “Clerks Regular of the Society of Jesus”; the name “Jesuit” did not appear till 1544, and then chiefly as a satirical term used by Calvin and other critics;³⁷ it was never used by Ignatius himself. After his death the success of the new order deprived the term of its early sting, and in the sixteenth century it was a badge of honor.

On April 17, 1541, Ignatius was elected general. For several days thereafter he washed dishes and discharged the humblest offices.³⁸ During his remaining years (he was now fifty) he made Rome his home, and the city became the permanent headquarters of the society. Between 1547 and 1552, after much thought and experiment, he drew up the Constitutions which, with minor changes, are the Jesuit rule today. The ultimate authority in the order was to lie in the fully “professed” members. These would choose two delegates from each province, and these delegates—together with the provincial heads, the general, and his aides—were to compose the “General Congregation.” This would, when occasion required, elect a new general, and then it would delegate its authority to him as long as he should commit no grave offense. He was given an “admonitor” and four assistants, who were to watch his every act, warn him of any serious fault, and, if need appeared, convene the General Congregation to depose him.

Candidates for admission were required to pass through two years of novitiate, in which they would be trained in the purpose and discipline of the society, go through the spiritual exercises, perform menial duties, and submit to the superiors in absolute “holy obedience.” They must put aside their own individual wills, and allow themselves to be ordered like soldiers and moved about “like corpses”;³⁹ they must learn to feel that in obeying their superiors they are obeying God. They must agree to report the faults of their associates to their superiors, and to harbor no resentment against being reported themselves.⁴⁰ This discipline was rigorous but discriminating and flexible; rarely did it break the will or destroy initiative. Apparently the willingness to obey is the first step in learning to command, for this training produced a great number of able and enterprising men.

Those who survived this trying novitiate would take “simple”—revocable—vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and would enter the ‘’second class.” Some of these would remain in that status as lay brothers; some, as “formed scholastics,” aspiring to the priesthood, would study mathematics, the classics, philosophy, and theology, and would teach in schools and colleges. Those who passed further tests would enter the third class—“formed coadjutors”; and some of these might rise into the fourth class—the “professed”—all priests, and specially pledged to undertake any task or mission assigned them by the Pope. The “professed” were usually a small minority—sometimes hardly more than a tenth—of the entire society.⁴¹ All four classes were to live in common like monks, but in view of their many administrative and pedagogical duties they were exempted from the monastic obligation to recite the canonical hours. No ascetic practices were required, though they might on occasion be advised. There was to be moderation in eating and drinking, but no stringent fasting; body as well as mind was to be kept fit for all tasks. A member might retain title to such property as he owned when entering the order, but all income from it was to go to the society, which hoped to be the ultimate heir. Every Jesuit possession and action must be dedicated ad majorem Dei gloriam—to the greater glory of God.

Seldom has an institution borne so definitely the stamp of one personality. Loyola lived long enough to revise the Constitutions into a successfully functioning rule. From his small, bare room he guided with severe authority and great skill the movements of his little army in every quarter of Europe, and many other parts of the globe. The task of governing the society, and of establishing and administering two colleges and several charitable foundations in Rome, proved too much for his temper as he aged; and though kind to the weak he became cruelly harsh to his closest subordinates.⁴² He was severest on himself. He made many a meal from a handful of nuts, a piece of bread, and a cup of water. Often he left but four hours of the day for sleep, and even restricted to a daily half-hour the period that he allowed himself for celestial visions and illumination.⁴³ When he died (1556) many Romans felt that a sharp wind had ceased to blow, and perhaps some of his followers mingled relief with grief. Men could not realize, so soon, that this indomitable Spaniard would prove to be one of the most influential men in modern history.

At his death the society had approximately a thousand members, of whom some thirty-five were “professed.” ⁴⁴ After disputes that showed considerable will to power in Jesuits supposedly broken in will, Diego Laynez was chosen general (1558); the fact that he had Jewish ancestors four generations back made him unacceptable to some Spanish grandees who had some influence in the order.⁴⁵ Pope Paul IV, fearful that the office of Jesuit general, because of its life tenure, might grow to rival the papacy, ordered the Constitutions revised to limit the general’s term to three years; but Pius IV revoked the order, and the general became (as later generations would call him from his black cassock) the “Black Pope.” After Francis Borgia, Duke of Gandia, joined the order and dowered it with his wealth, the society grew rapidly in size and power. When he became its third general (1565) it had 3,500 members, living in 130 houses in eighteen provinces or countries.

Europe was but a small sector of its activities. It sent missionaries to India, China, Japan, and the New World. In North America they were venturesome and undiscourageable explorers, suffering every tribulation as a gift of God. In South America they did more than any other group to develop education and scientific agriculture. In 1541 St. Francis Xavier left Lisbon on a Portuguese vessel, and after a year of travel and travail reached Goa. There he walked up and down the streets ringing a hand bell to gather an audience; this accomplished, he expounded the Christian creed with such sincerity and eloquence, and illustrated the Christian ethic with such cheerful sharing of his poorest listeners’ life, that he made thousands of converts among Hindus and Moslems, and even convinced some hardship-hardened expatriated Portuguese Christians. His cures were probably caused by his contagious confidence or his incidental knowledge of medicine; miracles were later ascribed to him, but he himself claimed none. The papal bull that canonized him (1622) credited him with the “gift of tongues”—the ability to speak any language at need; but in truth the heroic saint was a poor linguist, who spent hours memorizing sermons in Tamil, Malay, or Japanese. Sometimes his faith was too strong for his humanity. He urged John III of Portugal to establish the Inquisition in Goa,⁴⁶ and recommended that no Hindu should be ordained unless he had several generations of Christian ancestors; he could not bear the thought of a Portuguese confessing to a native.⁴⁷ He finally left Goa as too polyglot for his purposes. “I want to be where there are no Moslems or Jews. Give me out-and-out pagans!”⁴⁸—these, he felt, were more open to conversion, as being less ingrained in another faith. In 1549 he set out for Japan, studying Japanese on the way. Landing at Kagoshima, he and his associates preached in the streets, and were courteously heard by the people. Two years later he returned to Goa; he settled some disorder that had arisen among the Christians there, and then sailed off to convert China (1552). After much suffering he stopped on the island of Chang-Tschouen, below the mouth of the Canton River. The Chinese emperor had made it a capital crime for a European to enter China; yet Xavier would have dared it, had he been able to find passage. While he waited he fell sick. He died on December 2,1552, crying, “In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me not be confounded forever.”⁴⁹ He was forty-six years old.

The same devotion which the Jesuits showed in foreign missions was displayed in their work in Europe. They kept to their posts, and tended the sick, in times of plague.⁵⁰ They preached to all classes, and accommodated their language to every situation. Their superior education and good manners made them the favorite confessors of women and nobles, finally of kings. They mingled actively in the affairs of the world, but with prudence and tact; Ignatius advised them that more prudence and less piety were better than more piety and less prudence.⁵¹ Usually they were men of high moral quality; the faults charged against them in a later period hardly appeared in this age.⁵² Though they corporately approved of the Inquisition,⁵³ they stood aside from it, preferring to work through education. Their limited number compelled them to leave to others the instruction of children; they concentrated on secondary education; and finding the universities preempted by other orders, or the secular or Protestant clergy, they organized their own colleges, and sought to train selected youths who would be centers of influence in the next generation. They became the greatest educators of their time.

At important points in Europe they established studia inferiora—corresponding to the German Gymnasien and the French lycées—and studia superiora—colleges. Sometimes, as at Coimbra and Louvain, they were able to take over existing universities. They shocked their competitors by giving instruction gratis. The curriculum probably owed something to the schools set up in Holland and Germany by the Brethren of the Common Life, something to the Gymnasium of Sturm at Strasbourg, something to the humanist academies of Germany and Italy. It was based on the classics and was given in Latin; the use of the vernacular was forbidden to the students except on holidays.⁵⁴ In the higher grades the Scholastic philosophy was restored. The education of character—of morals and manners—was given fresh emphasis, and was bound up anew with religious belief. The traditional faith was inculcated daily, and a regimen of prayer, meditation, confession, communion, Mass, and theology so imbued the students with orthodoxy that few of them, in the sixteenth century, ever strayed from that beaten path. Humanism was turned back from paganism to Christianity. The system had serious defects: it relied too much on memory, and discouraged originality. Like the other curricula of the time it was deficient in the sciences, and expurgated history to control the present. And yet so independent a thinker as Francis Bacon would soon say of the Jesuit schools, “Such as they are, would that they were ours.”⁵⁵ In the next two centuries their graduates would excel in almost every walk of life except scientific research.

By the time of Loyola’s death there were a hundred Jesuit colleges. Through education, diplomacy, and devotion, through fervor directed by discipline, through co-ordination of purposes and skillful variation of means, the Jesuits turned back the Protestant tide, and recaptured much of Germany, most of Hungary and Bohemia, all of Christian Poland, for the Church. Rarely has so small a group achieved so much so rapidly. Year by year its prestige and influence grew, until, within twenty years of its formal establishment, it was recognized as the most brilliant product of the Catholic Reform. When at last the Church dared to call that general council to which all Europe had so long looked for the quieting of its theological strife and the healing of its religious wounds, it was to a handful of Jesuits—to their learning, loyalty, discretion, resourcefulness, and eloquence—that the popes entrusted the defense of their own challenged authority, and the undiminished preservation of the ancient faith.