Chapter 9 SECURING CONFIDENCE

STRENGTHENED BY Trent’s unqualified endorsement, the Jesuits quickly became the Church’s most popular confessors. Ignatius directed that “a Jesuit should not allow anyone to leave the confessional entirely without comfort.” If a confessant’s opinion on any matter could be found in the least bit defensible, Ignatius said, “he should be permitted to adhere to it, even when the contrary opinion can be said to be more correct.”

People relished confessing to Jesuits. “Always go to the Jesuits for confession,” it was said in Germany, “for they put cushions under your knees and under your elbows, too.”

Merchants, aristocrats, courtiers, and crowned heads insisted that Jesuit confessional direction was the best in all Christendom. They considered the Jesuits to be the greatest converters of hardened sinners, the surest moral guides through life’s bewildering complexities. Indeed, for two centuries, all the French kings, from Henry III to Louis XV, would confess to Jesuits. All German emperors after the early seventeenth century would confess to Jesuits, too. Jesuits would take the confessions of all Dukes of Bavaria after 1579, most rulers of Poland and Portugal, the Spanish kings in the eighteenth century, and James II of England.

The sacrament of confession kept Jesuit information channels loaded with vital state secrets. It also furnished the Society an ideal vehicle for influencing political action. One of the most dramatic instances is found in the famous memoir of François de la Chaize, Jesuit confessor to the painfully diseased King of France from 1675 until 1709. “Many a time since,” wrote La Chaize, when I have had him [Louis XIV] at confession, I have shook hell about his ears, and made him sigh, fear, and tremble, before I would give him absolution.1 By this I saw that he had still an inclination to me, and was willing to be under my government; so I set the baseness of the action before him by telling the whole story, and how wicked it was, and that it could not be forgiven till he had done some good action to balance that, and expiate the crime. Whereupon he at last asked me what he must do. I told him that he must root out all heretics from his kingdom.

Louis obeyed his confessor by revoking the Edict of Nantes (October 1685), which immediately resulted in: the demolition of all the remaining Protestant temples throughout France, and the entire prohibition of even private worship under penalty of confiscation of body and property; the banishment of all Protestant pastors from France within fifteen days; the closing of all Protestant schools; the prohibition of parents to instruct their children in the Protestant faith; the injunction upon them, under a penalty of five hundred livres in each case, to have their children baptized by the parish priest, and brought up in the Roman Catholic religion; the confiscation of the property and goods of all Protestant refugees who failed to return to France within four months; the penalty of the galleys for life to all men, and of imprisonment for life to all women, detected in the act of attempting to escape from France.²

It was inevitable that the Council of Trent would establish the Jesuits as the schoolmasters of Europe. With money from royalty and commerce (and not so much as a pfennig from the Church), the Society built an extensive system of schools and colleges. No tuition was charged, but each prospective student was thoroughly examined to see if he had aptitudes the Society could use. With the founding of the first Jesuit school at Coimbra, Portugal, by the Emperor’s youngest sister Catherina (Iñigo’s romantic interest who had since married the King of Portugal), the principal Jesuit occupation became teaching. By 1556, three-fourths of the Society’s membership were dedicated in 46 Jesuit colleges to “learning against learning,” to indoctrinating minds with the learning of illuminated humanism as opposed to the learning of Scripture. This network would expand by 1749 to 669 colleges, 176 seminaries, 61 houses of study, and 24 universities partly or wholly under Jesuit direction.

Many Protestant families sent their sons to Jesuit schools, despite Martin Luther’s early warning in An Appeal to the Ruling Class (1520) that “unless they diligently train and impress Scripture upon young students, schools will prove to be widening gates of hell.” The Jesuit curriculum, or ratio studiorum (“method of study”), gave Scripture significant inattention. Part IV, Section 351 of Loyola’s Constitutions prescribes courses in “the humane letters of different languages, logic, natural and moral philosophy, metaphysics, scholastic and positive theology,” with “Sacred Scripture” bringing up the rear. How rigorously any one of these subjects was to be studied depended upon “circumstances of times, places, persons, and other such factors, according to what seems expedient in our Lord to him who holds the principal charge.” Section 366 puts Scripture at the mercy of these factors: “The scholastics should acquire a good foundation in Latin before they attend lectures on the arts, and in the arts before they pass on to scholastic theology; and in it before they study positive theology. Scripture may be studied either concomitantly or later on.” If Scripture should be studied at all, the commentary and critical interpretation of Protestant scholastics were to be ignored: “In the case of Christian authors, even though a work may be good it should not be lectured on when the author is bad, lest attachment to him be acquired.”

“The curriculum of the Jesuit colleges came to be adopted to a great extent as the basis of the curricula in the European colleges generally,” wrote Dr. James J. Walsh, Dean of Fordham University Medical School.3 Moreover, according to Dr. Walsh, The Founding Fathers of our American Republic, that is to say the groups of men who drew up and signed the Declaration of Independence, who were the leaders in the American Revolution, and who formulated the Constitution of the United States … were, the majority of them, educated in the colonial colleges or in corresponding colleges abroad … which followed … almost exactly the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum. The fact has been missed to a great extent in our histories of American education….

Embedded in the ratio studiorum were the elements of entertainment, of dramatic production – composition, rhetoric, and eloquence. These courses interlinked with the Spiritual Exercises to intensify the experientiality of Catholic doctrine over Scripture and Protestantism. They resulted in a genre of spectacular plays that won distinction as “Jesuit theatre.”

The first Jesuit theatre was performed in Vienna in 1555, nearly forty years before the emergence of Shakespeare. It was instantly popular and quickly spread to other parts of Europe. Between 1597 and 1773 more than five hundred Jesuit theatricals were staged in the lower Rhine regions alone. Jacob Bidermann’s play Cenodoxus (“Newfangled Beliefs”), a point-by-point rebuttal of Luther’s teachings, proved the power of entertainment to achieve political reform. “Such a wholesome impression was made,” wrote Father Bidermann recalling the 1609 opening of Cenodoxus in Munich, “that a full fourteen persons of the highest rank of the Bavarian court retired into solitude during the days that followed, to perform the Spiritual Exercises and to reform their manner of living. Truly a hundred sermons would not have done so much good.”⁴

An exemplary Jesuit drama, performed in 1625 at the College of St. Omer in honor of Belgian royalty, allegorized the glorious end to civil war in Belgium brought by the advent of Princess Isabella and her husband, Albert. The play, as reviewed by a contemporary official, represented a country, long heavily oppressed under the Iron Age, supplicating the help of Jupiter, who, after having summoned a council of the gods, sent down Saturn, lately married to Astraea. These visitors were received with much pomp by twelve zodiacs or princes sent by Mercury. They then dispatched four most potent heroes, Hercules, Jason, Theseus and Perseus from the Elysian Fields, with commands to conquer Iron Age, War, Error, and Discord. The heroes expelled those terrible monsters from the country and substituted in their stead Golden Age, Peace, Truth, and Concord. The Princess with the whole assembly were highly delighted.⁵

The faculty of Munich College praised the way Jesuit theatre captivated Protestants, especially the parents of school-aged youngsters: “There is no better means of making friends out of the heretics and the enemies of the Church, and filling up the enrollment of the school than good high-spirited playacting.” Moliere’s Jesuit theatricals in Paris were so popular that even the dress rehearsals were sold out. Mozart, at the age of eleven, was commissioned to write music for a play at the Jesuit college in Salzburg, where his father was musical director to the Archbishop. Even from the West Indies a Jesuit missionary reported that “nothing has made a more forceful impression on the Indians than our play.”

In England, Jesuit theatre was not known as such because of Queen Elizabeth’s statute making it a capital crime to be, or even to assist, a Jesuit within her orbit. But if the purpose of Jesuit theatre was to capture that share of man’s spiritual attention which might otherwise have been directed toward the Bible, then England certainly produced the greatest Jesuit playwright of them all. Shakespeare occupies us with the human process in a way that subtly marginalizes the Bible – exactly pursuant to the Jesuit mission.

Shakespearian characters do preach, and they preach a religion, but it is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the gnostic illumination of Medici learning that Shakespeare preaches, the stuff of Jesuit schools. Not surprisingly, the secret tradition of Templarism claims Shakespeare, at least the writer of his plays, to have been a Rosicrucian steeped in Medici learning:

The philosophic ideals promulgated throughout Shakespearian plays distinctly demonstrate their author to have been thoroughly familiar with certain doctrines and tenets peculiar to Rosicrucianism; in fact, the profundity of the Shakespearian productions stamps their creator as one of the illuminati of the ages….

Who but a Platonist, a Qabbalist, or a Pythagorean could have written The Tempest, Macbeth, Hamlet, or The Tragedy of Cymbeline? Who but one deeply versed in Paracelsian lore could have conceived A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Yet, as Garry Wills in his book Witches & Jesuits points out, Macbeth is an elaborate condemnation of the Jesuits as satanists, murderers, witches. Macbeth is one of many of its period’s “powder plays,” a genre in which certain buzz words, well understood by contemporaries, memorialize the guilt and execution of eight Jesuits for having schemed the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605. The Plot aimed to blow up the entire government of Great Britain, including the royal family, in a single catastrophic explosion under the Houses of Parliament.

How could a play defaming Jesuits be of service to the Jesuit agenda? As we shall see, warfare in defense of the papacy requires extravagant measures. In fact, both the Gunpowder Plot, which failed, and the celebration of its detection, which lives on in Macbeth, served Rome abundantly. King James I, who declared himself the Plot’s divinely-illuminated discoverer, blamed the Plot on “Jesuits and papists.” But at the same time, James exonerated “less fanatical Catholics.”⁶ According to Wills, “the Plot gave [James] his best opportunity to separate loyal and moderate Catholics from the mad extremists of the Plot.” In short, the Plot secured England for “loyal and moderate” Roman Catholicism. In the reasoning of a Superior General, particularly the General of the Gunpowder Plot and Shakespearian theatre, Claudio Acquaviva, the sacrifice of eight Jesuits was a small tactical price to pay for moving the King of England to express confidence in the pope’s British subjects, estimated at half the population of the realm.

CERTAINLY the most elaborate single Jesuit theatrical event was produced by Gregory XV, the first Jesuit pupil to be elected Pope. This was the canonization of Ignatius de Loyola, the climax of Gregory’s brief pontificate (he reigned only three years). Canonization is authorized nowhere in the Bible. Rather, it is a process adapted from the pagan tradition of “apotheosis,” whereby the priestly college declared a particularly effective mortal to be a god.

In Roman Catholicism, the Sacred Congregation of Rites conducts a lengthy inquisition into the works of a deceased candidate. The inquisition can take dozens, even hundreds of years. The candidate’s works are defended before a tribunal of three judges against a “devil’s advocate.” A final judgment is declared by the Pope, who orders the Church to believe that the candidate’s soul is in Heaven, and to venerate the person with the title of “Saint.”

(The Bible teaches that anyone who hears and does the commandments of Jesus is a saint. Without any hierarchical red tape, he or she avoids judgment and goes to heaven immediately upon physical death.)

Loyola’s canonization was celebrated on March 12, 1622 in a ceremony that was “an unprecedented display of ecclesiastical pomp, pageantry, and extravagance.”⁷ One eyewitness described the event as “an expression of the reborn spirit of the Catholic Church, of the triumph of the Blessed Virgin over Luther and Calvin.”⁸

RIDING the crest of humanist exuberance following Loyola’s canonization, Jesuit priest Athenasius Kircher (1602-1680) contributed powerfully to Jesuit theatre as sensory experience. With his megaphone, which enabled the voice of one to reach thousands, Kircher invented broadcasting. He also fathered modern camera theory with his perfection of the lanterna magica. The magic lantern projected sharp images through a lens upon a screen, giving audiences the illusion of burning cities and conflagrations. Kircher’s work influenced the creation of the phenakistoscope (1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinematoscope (1861), the kineograph (1868), the praxinoscope (1877), and finally, Thomas Alva Edison’s kinetograph for filming action to be projected onto a screen through his kinetoscope (1894). Edison had a pet name for the tar-papered studio in West Orange, New Jersey, where all his prototypical films were made. He called it “Black Maria,” a term that aptly described the image to whom Iñigo de Loyola dedicated his life in 1522 – the Black Madonna of Montserrat.

The American cinema’s earliest subject matter to capture the popular imagination – the “cowboy” – was a Jesuit contribution as well. Eusebio Kino, whose statue is one of two representing Arizona in the U.S. Capitol building, was a Jesuit professor from Ingolstadt College in Bavaria. Between 1687 and 1711 Kino introduced cattle and their management to southern Arizona. For this he is gratefully remembered as “Father of the Cattle Business.” Pondering the works of Kircher and Kino, we come to a rather astonishing awareness: Kino’s cowboys, as projected through Kircher’s magic lantern, indoctrinated America’s earliest movie audiences with the underlying message of Jesuit theatre and Roman Catholic theology – that knowing and obeying Scripture is not necessary in comprehending the ways of good and evil, or in doing justice under natural law.

Using cinema and radio to unite Catholic laypersons with the Roman hierarchy was a main purpose of “Catholic Action.” Catholic Action was inaugurated in 1922 by Pius XI, whose two confessors, Fathers Alissiardi and Celebrano, were Jesuits. The first pope to install a radio station at the Vatican (1931) and to establish national film review offices (1922), Pius XI ordered Catholics into politics. In the letter Peculari quadam (“Containing the flock”) he warned that “the men of Catholic Action would fail in their duty if, as opportunities allow it, they did not try to direct the politics of their province and of their country.”

The men of Catholic Action did try. Their first major effort was to employ Black Pope Vladimir Ledochowski’s strategy of bringing the Catholic nations of central and eastern Europe together into a pan-German federation. To head the federation, Ledochowski required a charismatic leader charged with subduing the communistic Soviet Union on the east, Protestant Prussia, Protestant Great Britain, and republican France on the west.9 Ledochowski chose the Catholic militarist Adolf Hitler, who told Bishop Bernind of Osnabruch in 1936 that

there was no fundamental difference between National Socialism and the Catholic Church. Had not the church, he argued, looked on Jews as parasites and shut them in ghettos? ’I am only doing,’ he boasted, ’what the church has done for fifteen hundred years, only more effectively.’ Being a Catholic himself, he told Berning, he ’admired and wanted to promote Christianity.’¹⁰

To promote Christianity as taught him by Roman Catholicism, Hitler appointed Leni Riefenstahl to create the greatest fascist films ever produced. Her deification of Hitler and romanticization of autocracy in spectacles like Triumph of the Will are, in themselves, the history of German cinema in the thirties and early forties. In print, Ledochowski’s pan-German manifesto took the form of Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), ghostwritten by the Jesuit Father Staempfle¹¹ and placed beside the Bible on the altars of German churches.¹²

After World War II, during September 1957, Pope John XXIII gave Jesuit theatre even broader horizons with his encyclical Miranda prorsus (“Looking ahead”), saying,

To Catholic film producers and directors, Miranda prorsus delivered

a paternal injunction not to allow films to be made which are at variance with the faith and Christian moral standards. Should this happen – which God forbid – then it is for the Bishops to rebuke them and, if necessary, to impose upon them appropriate sanctions.

John XXIII urged that Pius XI’s national film reviewing offices

be entrusted to men who are experienced in cinema, sound broadcasting, and television, under the guidance of a priest specially chosen by the Bishops…. At the same time We urge that the faithful, and particularly those who are militant in the cause of Catholic Action [Jesuits and their protégés], be suitably instructed, so that they may appreciate the need for giving to these offices their willing, united, and effective support.

In 1964 , Pope Paul VI amplified Miranda prorsus with the decree Inter mirifica (“Among the Wonders”), saying “it is the Church’s birthright to use and own … the press, the cinema, radio, television and others of a like nature.” Paul cited

a special responsibility for the proper use of the means of social communication [which] rests on journalists, writers, actors, designers, producers, exhibitors, distributors, operators, sellers, critics – all those, in a word, who are involved in the making and transmission of communications in any way whatever…. They have power to direct mankind along a good path or an evil path by the information they impart and the pressure they exert. It will be for them to regulate the economic, political, and artistic values in a way that will not conflict with the common good….

The quality of entertainment’s content was decreed in a section of Inter mirifica encouraging ”the chronicling, the description or the representation of moral evil [which] can, with the help of the means of social communication and with suitable dramatization, lead to a deeper knowledge and analysis of man and to a manifestation of the true and the good in all their splendor.” Emboldened by this papal decree, social communicators since 1965 have pushed the constitutional guarantees of “free speech” to the limit by chronicling, describing, and representing moral evil with such progressively vivid, repulsive, prurient, yet often appealing detail that entertainment has become, in the opinion of many, a veritable technological “how to” of moral evil. It clearly does not lead audiences to a deeper appreciation of Holy Scripture. This fact identifies entertainment today as a successful Jesuit theatrical mission.

DURING its four centuries of existence, the Jesuit educational/theatrical enterprise has produced a proud, poised, and imaginative graduate. He or she is enlightened by the Medici Library’s humanities, facile in worldly matters, moved by theatricality, and indifferent toward Holy Scripture. Producing Jesuitic graduates has become the aim of modern public education, despite the heavy price of ignoring Scripture (which, as Luther warned and the Columbine murders attest, has indeed turned the public schools into “widening gates of hell”). Jesuit theatre and the Spiritual Exercises, whose original purpose was to bring human understanding into papal subservience through esoteric emotional experiences, have evolved into the full panoply of contemporary social communication.

The great objective of obscuring Scripture has operated to discourage the formal study of the basics of which the Bible is the cornerstone – literature, science, and history. Research by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) of U.S. News & World Report’s annual listing of “America’s Best Colleges” (including both private and public) disclosed startling figures.¹⁵ In 1914, nearly all of these institutions had required courses in English composition; by 1964 the figure was 86%; in 1996, 36%. In 1914, 82% of the best colleges and universities had traditional mathematics requirements; by 1964 only 36% did; by 1996, 12%. In 1914, 1939 and 1964, more than 70 % of the institutions required at least one course in the natural sciences; that figure fell to 34% in 1996. Literature courses were required at 75% of the institutions in 1914, and at 50% in 1939 and 1964. Today, not one of the “best” institutions has a literature requirement. Most colleges today are turning out graduates who have studied little or no history. In 1914, 90% of America’s elite colleges required history; in 1939 and 1964 more than 50% did; by 1996 only one of the 50 best schools offered a required history course. The day is approaching, perhaps, when the only historians will be amateurs who study history as self-help, who examine the past in order to make sense of the present and not be caught unprepared by the future.

America’s understanding has been systematically bent to the will of the Church Militant, while the intellectual means for sensing the capture have been disconnected. Most of the content of modern media, whether television, radio, print, film, stage, or web, is state-of-the-art Jesuit ratio studiorum. The Jesuit college is no longer just a chartered institution; it has become our entire social environment – the movies, the mall, the school, the home, the mind. Human experience has become a Spiritual Exercise managed by charismatic spiritual directors who know how to manipulate a democracy’s emotions. Logic, perspective, national memory, and self-discipline are purged to the point that “unbridled emotional responses,” as economist Thomas Sowell put it, “are all we have left.”

Despite its ascendancy over American life, few Americans understand the term “Jesuit.” In our next chapter, we shall examine how this term is defined in our basic reference works. These definitions will help us to better understand the kind of character produced by Ignatian psychological technique.

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