Chapter 12 LORENZO RICCI’S WAR

LORENZO RICCI’S strategy of dividing the British imperial system can be discerned in events occurring as early as 1752. In that year, Catholic interests in America were rather poorly managed by the Congregation for the Propaganda at Rome, depending upon a tangle of ambassadors (or nuncios) and intermediaries in Madrid, Paris, London, and Brussels. The Jesuit mission was to consolidate these often adversarial parts into a dynamic and independent whole governed directly from the mind of the black papacy.

In 1752, the Society of Jesus was brilliantly powerful, and had been so for nearly a century. “Most statesmen,” a fine Jesuit historian has written, “reckoned that the Society was a major force in politics, an international Great Power, acting primarily for its own intetests.”¹ Lorenzo Ricci had been Spiritual Father of this great power for nearly a year. Although that title assured him of unanimous election as Superior General upon the demise of General Luigi Centurioni, it presently endowed him with diplomatic oversight embracing the whole world. Ricci’s particular geographic interests included France and its possessions in New France – the whole Mississippi valley, from Canada and the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico; and England and its colonies in New England – all the lands to the south of French Canada and north of Spanish Florida stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts.

Both empires were to a certain extent Jesuit-driven. Great Britain was run by the Catholic-loathing system of Freemasonry, whose highest adepts obeyed the revered “unknown superior.” France was run by Louis XV, who obeyed the same superior through his Jesuit confessor, Père de Sacy. De Sacy’s good-natured ministry reduced the King’s dinner, on a strict fast day, from eight courses to five, and limited his wine consumption to three glasses per sitting.

Sun-tzu wrote;

I demand the art of making enemies move as one wishes. Those who possess that admirable art know how to arrange their men & the army they command in such a way that they make the enemy come toward them whenever they judge it appropriate. They know how to make generous gifts when appropriate, even to those they wish to conquer. They give to the enemy & the enemy receives; they abandon things to him & he comes to take them. They are ready for anything, they take advantage of any circumstance. They do not fully trust those whom they employ but choose others to be their overseers. They do not count on their own strength alone but use other means which they believe can be useful to them. They consider the men against whom they must fight to be stones or pieces of wood which they have been asked to roll down a slope. You, therefore, who are commanding an army must act in such a way that the enemy is in your hands like a round stone that you have caused to roll down a mountain a thousand paces high. Thus it will be recognized that you have power & authority, and that you are truly worthy of the position you occupy.

Lorenzo Ricci transformed British and French colonial personnel into round stones by creating a crisis between their conflicting imperial claims to dominion in North America. In 1752 his spiritual fatherhood directed French soldiers and their Indian allies to destroy the important British colonial trading center on the upper Great Miami river. Then followed the plundering, capture or killing – not murdering, but papally-absolved extirpating – of every English-speaking trader in the upper Ohio valley that the French and Indians could locate. Although these lands were legally British, dating from a grant to Virginia by King James I in 1609, the important Virginia families failed to empathize with the misfortunes of explorer-inhabitants in such remote and undeveloped wilderness. But when, toward the end of 1752, the Virginia government granted an additional 1,500,000 acres of Ohio valley land, empathies burst into bloom. Suddenly the Virginians had something to lose, and it was being lost to a band of Roman Catholics and their Indian converts.

In 1753, French engineers constructed a chain of forts connecting Lake Erie with the Ohio River. The governor of Virginia dispatched a small militia to confront these Catholic trespassers. Leading the militia was a recent initiate into the Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge, twenty-one-year-old Major George Washington. Washington warned the garrison at Fort LeBoeuf that it was illegally occupying Virginia real estate “so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain.” He read aloud the governor’s demand that they depart. The French ignored him and he returned home.

Despite the clear indication that the French intended not to concede to the governor’s demands, Virginia encouraged the Ohio Company to build a palisaded fort at the fork where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to create the Ohio River – where Pittsburgh now stands. The government pledged Virginian troops to support the venture.

Construction began in the spring of 1754. Almost immediately, French and Indians descended upon the tiny crew of woodcutters and carpenters and overwhelmed them. By the time Washington, now a Lieutenant Colonel, could reach the scene, he was forced by Catholic fire-power to fall back to Fort Necessity. Here Washington surrendered on July 4. It was this clash between British and French armies that precipitated what was called by contemporary writers “The Maritime War,” or “Great War,” or “Great War for the Empire,” or “Seven Years’ War,” or “French and Indian Wars.” It could more appropriately be called “Lorenzo Ricci’s War.”

As these rounded stones began rolling, more succumbed to Ricci’s gentle touch. The colony most affected by the fighting was meek Pennsylvania, the colony originally settled by adherents of the renowned Quaker leader, William Penn. Penn had been dead a whole generation, and ownership of his colony had devolved upon a British corporation which included some of Penn’s descendants and was known austerely as “the Proprietors.” The Proprietors wanted wars in Pennsylvania to be fought by Pennsylvanians. The Quakers, who controlled the Assembly, abhorred the notion of Pensylvanians bearing arms. When the Assembly voted to raise a war chest, the Quakers stepped down and out of power. First, however, they appointed their most celebrated member, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, official printer of Pennsylvania’s paper currency, to sail to London and represent them against the Proprietors.

Dr. Franklin, who happened to be Grand Master of Pennsylvania Freemasonry, arrived in London to find that King George II, having made peace with France as recently as 1748, favored the Proprietors. The king’s attitude was “Let Americans fight Americans.” Franklin explained that Virginia’s undisciplined militiamen and the pacifists of Pennsylvania were no match for seasoned French regulars and savage Indian braves. France was jeopardizing British imperial interests. The king acquiesced to Franklin’s reasoning and ordered General Edward Braddock to take a small army to clear the forks of the Ohio of the French trespassers. He also sent Admiral Edward Boscawen’s fleet to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to prevent the arrival of more French reinforcements in Canada. All this was in perfect obedience to Lorenzo Ricci’s strategy of establishing a British military presence in America. The Crown ultimately would require the Americans to pay for this presence, which would expose the colonists to taxation from afar, which they could readily be fomented to resist. The resistance would be met with harassment, which would incite rebellion and, ultimately, division.

The philosophical similarities between Quakers and Loyolan gnosticism should not escape our notice. “Quaker,” the term, was first used by an English judge in 1650 to ridicule how the leader of that denomination, George Fox, admonished him to “tremble at the Word of the Lord!” Fox summoned all who sought spiritual truth and peace to come out of the churches and seek an intimate, “personal relationship with Christ.” Jesus of the Quakers spoke through inner illumination, a light available to all, having nothing to do with outward forms of ceremony, ritual, or creed. To the Quaker, every person was a walking church; every heart was God’s altar and shrine. There was no need, therefore, to attend “steeple houses,” or pay taxes to support a state church clergy, or doff a hat to king or commoner, or fight wars, or distinguish between sex or social class. Such doctrine, of course, was highly offensive to the Church of England, and so the Quakers were mercilessly persecuted as treasonous criminals.

They found a haven across the Atlantic in the colony conveniently granted by King Charles II to William Penn, one of the more outspoken English Quakers. Charles granted the land to settle a debt the Crown owed Penn’s deceased father, Admiral Sir William Penn. Knowledgeable contemporaries publicly charged the younger Penn with being “a Jesuit in disguise.” Actually, all Catholic clergy in England were to a certain extent “in disguise,” thanks to a law prohibiting Roman Catholics from wearing clerical garb. Promulgated with the intent of handicapping “Popery,” the law might as well have been written by Jesuits, as its effect reduced the Jesuit profile to nothing – the level preferred by covert militias. Eighteenth-century London was teeming with disguised Jesuit missioners trained at places like St. Omer’s in moral theology (casuistry, equivocation, mental reservation), as well as espionage, cloak-and-dagger diplomacy, guerrilla tactics, and the manipulation of public opinion.

William Perm’s higher education began at Cardinal Wolsey’s endowment for the furtherance of papal supremacy, Christ Church College at Oxford. Before completing Oxford, Penn was sent by his father to the small University of Saumer, France. Penn left Saumer an accomplished propagandist less interested in achieving specific biblical objectives (“Much reading is an oppression of the mind,” he would later advise his children) than in establishing illuminated social justice through reason and natural understanding. His most influential work, the pamphlet “No Cross, No Crown,” published in 1669, agitated for Quaker separatism. Charles II readily accommodated Penn’s agitations by launching the Great Persecution of 1682, which created enormous migrations of diehard Protestants and Catholics alike to the American colonies. If Penn was not the Jesuit he was believed to be, he was at least a rather superior Jesuit product, another in a long train of Princes (designated “Proprietor” in Penn’s case, deferring to the Quakers’ dislike for titles of nobility) well-trained to populate, administer and defend their land-grants in obedience to the will of the Grantor. Penn’s example, and Franklin’s after him, inspired Franklin’s esteemed masonic brother Jean-François Arouet, better known as Voltaire, a founder of the Enlightenment, to memorialize Quakers as the noblest kind of born-again European.

Yet well-informed Englishmen saw neither Quaker nor regeneration in Penn’s curiously compromising friendship with James II, who succeeded Charles II in 1685. What possible league could a Quaker have with a King? Worse, a King converted to Roman Catholicism by Jesuits? Certainly no true Quaker could have written Penn’s Charter for the City of Philadelphia, which amounted to his gift of that estate to the Church of England. In the Charter’s Preamble, Penn stated: “I have, by virtue of the king’s letters patent, under the great seal of England, erected the said town into a borough, and do, by these presents, erect the said town and borough into a City.”2 The name “city,” in every case, signifies the location of a bishop’s see, the seat of his authority (from the Latin sedes), and the territory under his supervision.3 No place in England was called a City unless governed by a bishop – as in the See or City of Canterbury, See or City of York, See or City of London, of Bath and Wells, of Bristol, of Salisbury, etc. With the Philadelphia charter, Penn erected for the persecuting Church of England a nearly invisible mechanism for recycling the very victims of its persecutions. Indeed, Penn’s last will and testament, which became effective with his death in England in 1718 at the age of 74, turned all Pennsylvania into the same mechanism with these words: “The government of my province of Pennsylvania, and territories thereunto belonging, and All Powers relating thereto, I give and devise to the most honourable the Earl of Oxford, and Earl Mortimer, and their heirs, upon trust, to dispose thereof to the Queen [Anne], or to any other person, to the best advantage and profit they can.” With a stroke of Penn’s quill, the children of the Quakers who had followed him out of the Church of England were literally given back. To become free of this bondage, the Quakers were obliged to align themselves with the Church of Rome, at least the black papacy. This alliance was facilitated by Benjamin Franklin, whose political career was built on defending the Quaker interests against the Proprietary heirs, which were the Church of England. Against this common enemy, Franklin and the Quakers united, knowingly or unknowingly, with the designs of the Roman Church Militant.

WHILE these stones rolled unstoppably toward their objective, Jesuit General Luigi Centurioni died. Early in May of 1758 the General Congregation arrived at Rome to choose his successor. On the last day of the month the Congregation unanimously elected Lorenzo Ricci, the Society’s Spiritual Father and Secretary, as its eighteenth Black Pope.

Ricci, a professor of philosophy, theology, and the classics at the Roman College, was known for his patient, placid nature, his even temper. He inherited an organization in remarkably good shape. The Latin American missions were flourishing. A mission had just been established in Poland. Everywhere the schools and colleges were prospering. In the natural sciences, Jesuits were counted among the world’s leading authorities. Their presence in economic and secular government had never been more imposing. As the papal nuncio to Vienna stated in a letter to his superior at the Vatican, “the Jesuits have the upper hand over everything, even the most prominent ministers of State, and domineer over them if they do not carry out their will.”⁴

But the Society’s legendary power could hinder Catholic activity in the Protestant missions. To defeat Great Britain without a battle Lorenzo Ricci required the abilities and resources of an important Maryland family, the Carrolls. The three Carroll sons, Daniel, John and their first cousin Charles, all now in their twenties, had been trained in Jesuit warfare at St. Omer’s. John was teaching there. Charles was studying law at the Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand in Paris, about to undertake further studies at London’s Inner Temple. Daniel – of Daniel’s activities between 1753 and 1781, very little is known. What is well-known is that the Carroll lads were among the wealthiest Americans alive. The mother of Daniel and John, Eleanor Darnall, claimed direct descent from the Calverts, the owning family of original Maryland. She had come into possession of much of the land that Daniel would transfer to the District of Columbia. Charles Carroll stood to inherit America’s largest private estate; later, John Adams would label him America’s richest citizen.

Lorenzo Ricci could not win his War without the overt participation of the Carrolls. But New England was virulently Protestant. What Protestant leader would stoop to cooperate with devout Roman Catholics schooled in trickery by the all-powerful Jesuits? Would uniting with Jesuits not be laying America’s future at the feet of the Bishop of Rome? In this consensus Ricci was able to discern a valuable negative weapon. If the stones of envy and hatred were given a gentle nudge, their own weight and momentum could spectacularly blast the Society of Jesus to smithereens. With the Society out of the way, Roman Catholicism would hang in the wind, defenseless. To a Protestant’s perception, the Church would no longer be a forceful contender for political power. Suntzu advised a ruse known in the lingo of modern covert professionals as “blown cover as cover:”

There will be times when you will lower yourself, and others when you pretend to be afraid. Sometimes you will feign weakness so that your enemies, opening the door to presumption & pride, come to attack you unwisely…. Give out false information about the state [you] are in … [The enemy], believing [it] to be true, will act in consequence toward his Generals & all the Officers presently at his service….

Yes, sudden misfortune would bless the Society. Weakness and persecution would be transformed into magnificent new capital for building sympathetic relationships with other weak and persecuted people, such as the British colonists were destined soon to become. Without detailing his strategy (for Sun-tzu says “You will act in such a way that those who are inferior to you can never guess your intentions….”), Lorenzo Ricci affirmed to the General Congregation that stormclouds were gathering on the horizon. The Congregation summarily gave its understanding in obedience to the “hidden design” of their new Superior General – who occupied, after all, the place of Jesus. It issued a call for esprit to the brotherhood at large:

If, God permitting it because of his hidden designs which we could do nothing else but adore, we are to become the butt of adversity, the Lord will not abandon those who remain attached and united to him; and as long as the Society is able to go to him with an open soul and a sincere heart, no other source of strength will be necessary for it.⁵

The Prime Minister of Portugal, Sebastian the Marquis de Pombal, had been conducting what the New Catholic Encyclopedia calls “a long campaign of calumnies, false rumors, distorted manipulation of incidents, all intent on undermining the Jesuits’ reputation by ascribing to them nefarious doctrines, purposes, and practices.” Among Pombal’s allegations were that the Jesuits had incited revolts in Paraguay (a Portuguese colony), had traded illegally, had even conspired to murder the King. Pombal supported his claim with numerous anti-Jesuit tracts and inflammatory pastoral letters, which he submitted to Parliament. In the Society’s defense, a group of bishops showered Pope Clement XIII with letters commending the Jesuits for their invaluable work. Clement, known by Jesuit historians as “a Jesuited pope,”6 hastened to send copies of these endorsements to Lorenzo Ricci for publication under the title “Catholic Ecclesiastical Judgment for the Present Status of the Society of Jesus.” Publication of these endorsements would show the world that the Society enjoyed the solid support of the Roman hierarchy. Significantly, Ricci declined to publish them.

On January 19, 1759, the Marquis de Pombal procured a royal decree expelling the Jesuits from Portugal and its overseas colonies. More than a thousand Jesuit fathers were crammed into ships and dumped on the shores of the Papal States (then an area in central Italy only slightly more spacious than Switzerland). Two hundred-fifty fathers were cast into dungeons, many perishing from maltreatment. The Portuguese Crown seized all the Society’s houses, churches, and colleges, as well.

STONES were then nudged in France. The Superior of a Jesuit mission in the Caribbean, Père LaValette, had obtained commercial credit to finance his mission in Martinique. When it happened that he could no longer pay his debt, a trading firm in Marseilles alleged damages against him of more than two million francs. LaValette asked Lorenzo Ricci for help. Ricci turned him down. The firm sued the Society in a French court and won. Ricci then appealed the case to the Parlement in Paris, which was more of a supreme court than a legislative body. His lawyers argued that the Society could not be held liable for personal debts of its members due to a prohibition laid down by St. Ignatius himself in the Constitutions against any member’s doing business as a principal or partner. Although this claim was easily dismissible as a flimsy legal fiction, the court demanded evidence to support it. This required Lorenzo Ricci to produce the Constitutions, which had never before been publicly revealed. When the volumes were brought to court and examined, the government attorneys had a field day. A lawyer from Brittany named LaChatolais charged that the Constitutions was a handbook of “every known form of heresy, idolatry, and superstition, [which] provides tutelage in suicide, legicide, blasphemy, and every kind of impurity, usury, sorcery, murder, cruelty, hatred, vendetta, insurrection, and treason.”⁷

As the LaValette case unfolded, during 1759 and 1760 Benjamin Franklin’s beloved Voltaire slammed the Jesuits in two satirical plays mounted on the Parisian stage. Educated in the humanities and theatrical arts by Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le- Grand, Voltaire served the Society and the Catholic Church with distinction by becoming their chief critic and debunker, much in the way Will Rogers served Franklin Roosevelt’s administration by lampooning New Deal politicians, or in the way Keystone Cops tickled an America being transformed into a police state. Audiences at Candide howled at Jesuit buffoons strutting about self- importantly drilling their Paraguayan Indian troops. In The Account of the Sickness, Confession, Death and Apparition of the Jesuit Berthier, the editor of a Jesuit literary review who dies of sheer boredom challenges the notion that the Society is even worthy of existence. With his predecessor Blaise Pascal (whose Provincial Letters had alerted earlier generations to the egomania of high Jesuitry), Voltaire provided a spirit of ridicule which gave Jesuit- bashing the feel of good sport.

Lorenzo Ricci’s handling of the LaValette case resulted in a resolution, passed by Parlement on August 6, 1762, condemning the Jesuits as “endangering the Christian faith, disturbing the peace of the Church, and in general building up far less than they destroy.” The resolution continued:

The Society of Jesus by its very nature is inadmissible in any properly ordered State as contrary to natural law, attacking all temporal and spiritual authority, and tending to introduce into Church and State, under the specious veil of a religious Institute, not an Order truly aspiring towards evangelical perfection, but rather a political organization whose essence consists in a continual activity, by all sorts of ways, direct and indirect, secret and public, to gain absolute independence and then the usurpation of all authority…. They outrage the laws of nature and as enemies of the laws of France should be irrevocably expelled.

Louis XV being an absolute monarch, parliamentary resolutions were worthless without his signature. Louis being obedient to his Jesuits, it was highly unlikely that he would ever sign a resolution condemning the Jesuits. Yet sign it he did. And why he did has remained a point of debate. Some say his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, craved vengeance against court Jesuits for implacably denying her a mass. Others say the king needed Parlement’s favor to bail him out of debt. I submit that Louis signed because Lorenzo Ricci wanted him to.

When the resolution became law, Ricci released the French Jesuits from their vows. The Society as an institution ceased to exist on French soil. Louis consented to allow the Jesuits to remain in France, but as “regular clergy.” Others went into exile. (Père LaValette, whose financial problems had brought on the debacle, was exiled by Ricci to live the rest of his life as a private citizen in England. When the war that had begun in the Ohio valley reached Martinique, the English occupied that tiny island and took over the Jesuit plantations, selling them, slaves and all, for more than enough money to have paid off LaValette’s debts.)

In the midst of their decomposing glory, the Jesuits received from Clement XIII an awesome gift designed to make welcome the most humiliating of circumstances. This was the mass and office of the Sacred Heart, with its icon of a realistically bloody heart plucked from Christ’s ribcage and ignited by an eternal flame. Based on visions resulting from the Spiritual Exercises made by Ste. Margaret-Marie Alacoque (1647-90) as promoted by her Jesuit spiritual director, Claude de la Colombière, Sacred Heart is a gnostic Jesuit production centering on the Saviour’s perfect humanity. “By devotion to my Heart,” Jesus supposedly revealed to Alacoque, “tepid souls shall grow fervent, and fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.” Sacred Heart summons true believers to pay a debt of “reparation” for the world’s sins. The debt is payable only by prayers, penances, masses, and (significantly for this epoch in the Society’s history) social action. John Carroll, so indispensable for the outworking of the American Revolution, was profoundly devoted to Sacred Heart.

Louis xv was the effective head of the “Family Compact,” an agreement between reigning Bourbon monarchs to present a united front before the rest of the world “on important measures.” Once he had dissolved the Jesuits in France, he advised other Bourbons to do likewise, although he could not name anything to be gained politically, economically, or financially by the Society’s dissolution. The issue “still remains puzzling and problematic” (Professor Martin says8) unless considered (I submit) in light of Sun-tzuan ruse.

At any rate, the Bourbon Charles III of Spain followed Louis’ advisory. Charles convened a special commission to prepare a master plan for ousting the Jesuits. No one could produce any hard evidence against the Society. But there were plenty of rumors. A mob that had risen up to protest a law Charles had passed forbidding the wearing of wide sombreros was said to have been fomented by Jesuits. A rumor swept across Spain that the Jesuits were nursing a plot to assassinate Charles. The Jesuits supposedly had proof that the king was technically a bastard and should be deposed. None of these rumors were ever substantiated. Moreover, General Ricci ordered the Jesuits to do nothing to dispel them. The result was that forty-six of the sixty Spanish bishops decided that Spain should follow the Marquis de Pombal and oust the Society.

And so the commission drafted an expulsion order, which Charles signed on February 27, 1767. The order was executed by ambush, reminiscent of Philip IV’s move against the Knights Templar in 1312. Charles sent out sealed envelopes marked “Not to be opened before sunrise of April 2 on pain of death” to all provincial viceroys and military commanders. When sunrise came and the recipients opened their envelopes, they discovered two letters inside. The first ordered them to place troops around the Jesuit residences and colleges during the night of April 2, to arrest all Jesuits, and to arrange for them to be placed aboard waiting ships at certain docks. “If a single Jesuit,” concluded the king, “even though sick or dying, is still to be found in the area under your command after the embarcation, prepare yourself to face summary execution.”

The second letter was a copy of King Charles’ original order of expulsion, which began “Being swayed by just and legitimate reasons which shall remain sealed within my royal breast forever,” and went on to say that “all members of the Society of Jesus are to leave my kingdoms [Castille, Aragon, Navarre, and the other formerly independent kingdoms that made up Spain] and all their goods are declared forfeit … by virtue of the highest power, which the Lord God Almighty has confided into my hands.” The king made sure to discourage any investigation into causes: “It is not for subjects to question the wisdom or to seek to interpret the decisions of their sovereign.”

Only days before April 2, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See presented a document from Charles to Pope Clement XIII that explained,

Your Holiness knows as well as anyone else that a sovereign’s first duty is to ensure the peace of his dominions and the tranquillity of his subjects. In the fulfillment of this sovereign task, I have found it necessary to expel all the Jesuits residing in my kingdoms and to commit them directly to Your Holiness’ wise stewardship in the States of the Church…. I beg Your Holiness to consider that my decision is unalterable and has been made as the result of mature reflection and all due consideration for the consequences….

Clement, the likelihood of whose submission to the will of Lorenzo Ricci should not be underestimated, responded in a melodramatic vein, as though playing for an audience: “Of all the shocks I have had to endure in the nine unhappy years of my pontificate, this one, of which Your Majesty has informed me, is the worst.” The pope had little more to say, except that the king may have placed himself in danger of eternal damnation.

The order was executed during the night of April second and third. Some six thousand Jesuits were rounded up throughout Spain. They were crammed into the lower decks of twenty-two watships. In May 1767 the gruesome fleet appeared off Civitavecchia, the port of the Papal States, and – amazingly, was fired upon by shore artillery! The ships were denied permission to land their human cargo by order of the pope himself, pursuant to a conference with Lorenzo Ricci! Historians are at a loss to explain why Clement, so devoted to the Jesuits, would impose such cruelty upon his beloveds in their hour of need. The most plausible answer, I would suggest, is that his understanding was obedient to the inscrutable command of his General, whose exceedingly private objective, after all, was to disqualify the Society of Jesus and the Roman Catholic Church as viable enemies of Protestantism, at least in the North American colonies. No longer enemies, they could develop personal alliances. The suffering priests, the guns of Civitavecchia, were all explained in Amiot’s Sun-tzu:

Your army, accustomed to not knowing your plans, will he equally unaware of the peril which threatens it. A good General takes advantage of everything. But he can only do that because he has operated in the greatest secrecy, because he knows how to remain cool-headed & because he governs with uprightness. At the same time, however, his men are constantly misled by what they see & hear. He manages for his troops never to know what they must do nor what orders they must receive…. If his own people are unaware of his plans, how can the enemy discover them?

Over the next few months, thousands more Jesuits were expelled from the remaining Bourbon states of Naples, Parma, Malta, and Spanish America. Jesuits in French America (Quebec) and New England were left undisturbed, as were those in Austria. In October 1768 the Austrian Empress Maria-Theresa, a Habsburg, wrote her Jesuit confessor, Father Koffler: “My dear fathet, there is no cause for concern; as long as I am alive you have nothing to fear.” But Maria-Theresa hoped to marry her two daughters to Bourbon princes, Caroline to the son of the Spanish king, Marie-Antoinette to the son of Louis XV. Bourbon ambassadors advised her that unless she expelled the Jesuits, she would have to look elsewhere for sons-in-law. The Empress reneged on her promise to Father Koffler, expelled the Jesuits, and the girls got their men. (Marie-Antoinette’s marriage would end with the execution of her husband, Louis XVI, in January 1793. Nine months later, she would die the same way, decapitated by the guillotine. This device bears the name of the French Revolutionist who in 1792 first suggested its use in administering the death penalty, Dr. Josef Guillotin. Dr. Guillotin was a disestablished Jesuit.)

In January 1769 the ambassadors from France, Spain, and Portugal visited Clement XIII to demand “the complete and utter suppression of the Society of Jesus.” Clement called for a special consistory of the College of Cardinals to deliberate the question. But when the cardinals convened February 3, it was not to discuss Bourbon ultimatums, but to choose Clement’s successor. For the 76-year-old pope had died the night before “of an apoplectic attack,” said the official record, a heart attack attributed to the pressures applied by the Bourbon diplomats.

For nearly three months, one question charged the turbulent conclave: Should the next pope be for or against the Jesuits? The cardinals’ choice of Lorenzo Ganganelli was a triumph for Lorenzo Ricci. Although Ganganelli was a Franciscan, he had colleagued with Jesuits as a special consultant to the Inquisition. His celebrated book Diatriba theologica (1743) had been dedicated to Ignatius Loyola. Moreover, Ganganelli literally owed his papacy to Lorenzo Ricci, as it was Ricci who had sponsored his nomination for cardinal in 1759.9 Almost immediately after receiving the red hat Ganganelli had shown evidence of cooperating with General Ricci’s strategy of gradually disestablishing the Society of Jesus. Oxford Book of Popes indicates a sudden and unexplainable habit change: “Hitherto regarded as a friend of the Jesuits, Cardinal Ganganelli now distanced himself from them.” And now, a decade later, calling himself Clement XIV, Ganganelli presented what the Catholic Encyclopedia calls “in appearance a hostile attitude” toward the Jesuits, an apparent hostility, a theatrical hostility that masked an involved loyalty toward the Society. Clement XIV would do whatever was necessary to help the Society win victory without doing battle, even if it meant obliterating the Society.

The Bourbons needed appeasing. Hastily, Clement promised Charles III of Spain forthcoming documents necessary to “proclaim to all the world the wisdom of Your Majesty’s decision to expel the Jesuits as unruly and rebellious subjects.” He assured Louis XV of France also of a “plan for the complete suppression of this society.” On Maundy Thursday 1770, Clement omitted the annual reading of In coena Domini (“On the Lord’s supper”). The omission was an astonishing statement. This celebrated bull, first proclaimed in 1568 by Pope Pius V, arrogantly reminded kings that they were but vassals of the papacy. Suddenly discontinuing this assertion flattered the royal self-importance, inviting crowned heads to stay on the anti-Jesuit, anti-Church track so necessary for the fulfillment of Lorenzo Ricci’s secret designs in England and America. It surely evidences Clement’s involvement in the strategy of feigned weakness in order to conceal what Sun-tzu called “an order that nothing can interrupt.” The non-reading of In coena Domini rang the deathknell of the strong-armed white papacy as manifest by Ricci’s political theorist, “Justinius Febronius,” in his 1763 masterpiece On the State of the Church & the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pontiff – about which more presently.

For more than eighty years, the papacy had supported Rome- based members of the Stuart monarchs exiled from England for being Roman Catholics. Not only did Clement XIV diminish this tradition to almost nothing, in 1772 he began extending a highly visible and most cordial hospitality to the Protestant King George III and his family. This tableau was enormously disturbing to American Protestants, who at that time were having extreme difficulties with George. The prospect of England reuniting with Rome gave them all the more reason to strive for what Lorenzo Ricci wanted, their independence.

Finally, on July 21, 1773, Clement XIV delivered on his promise by signing the brief Dominus ac Redemptor noster (“God and our Redeemer”). The brief “dissolved, suppressed, disbanded, and abolished” the Society of Jesus “for all eternity” so as “to establish a real and enduring peace within the Church.” All the Jesuits’ “offices, authorities, and functions” were declared “null and void, and all their houses, colleges, hospices, and any other places occupied by them to be hereby disestablished, no matter in what province, state, or kingdom they might be found.”

Clement appointed five cardinals, an archbishop, a bishop, two theologians, and other ecclesiastical dignitaries to supervise the Disestablishment. None of the confiscated Jesuit records, correspondence, and accounts showed any incriminating evidence.

Although Lorenzo Ricci lived a short walk from the pope’s palace at St. Peter’s, notice of the Disestablishment was not served upon him until mid-August. Guards took the General into custody at his offices in Number 45 Piazza del Gesu. They removed him to the English College a few blocks away. He remained there five weeks. Things were then happening in England and America that make Ricci’s presence in the English College extraordinarily significant. We shall consider those happenings in a forthcoming chapter

Toward the end of September, Lorenzo Ricci was taken from the English College to Castel Sant’Angelo, a medieval fortress whose dungeons suggest a prison. His detention was probably less demeaning than we might imagine, as Sant’Angelo contained quite elegant rooms. Popes often used them as a convenient resort from administrative stresses. In fact, a secret underground tunnel connected Sant’Angelo to the papal palace at the Vatican. It would be consistent with Lorenzo Ricci’s position and strategy for him to stay in personal, secret contact with Clement XIV by means of this tunnel.

On September 22, 1774, the first anniversary of Ricci’s detention at Sant’Angelo, Clement died. He was sixty-nine. He had suffered the last year of his life in severe depression, it was said, with morbid paranoia over assassination. His corpse decomposed rapidly, feeding rumors of death by poison, rumors which his famous last words tended to confirm: “Mercy! Mercy! Compulsus feci!” (“I was compelled to do it!”) For many years afterward, historians would wonder just whom Ganganelli was addressing: God? A vengeful Jesuit assassin? Ricci? What was the “it” he was compelled to do? Disestablish the Jesuits? Commit suicide? The definitive answer may never be known, because the pope’s personal papers and effects decomposed as rapidly as his flesh. What is quite known, though, is that the death of Clement XIV, in the words of Oxford Book of Popes, “brought the prestige of the papacy to its lowest level in centuries.” Which is precisely what Lorenzo Ricci needed for his American Revolution to happen.

WE now proceed to examine the structured darkness of the men who led the attack against the Society of Jesus. It was the same darkness from whence came not only the Englishmen who turned their kingdom into a hated tyranny, but also the Americans who advocated rebellion against that tyranny. The darkness is called Freemasonry, and it is the subject of our next chapter.

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