The Enigma Of The Jesuits

By J. J. Murphy from The Converted Catholic Magazine on the Lutheran Library website.

ROMAN CATHOLICS will not believe how much their own church has been opposed to the Jesuits, and think that anti-Jesuitism is the product of Protestant intolerance. They do not know that the Jesuits are a faction in their church that has sought for centuries, against the bitterest opposition from Catholics, to completely dominate the policies and practices of Roman Catholicism. Precisely because the Jesuits today have practically succeeded in their aim, the evils they created and fostered in society are now poohpoohed as mere inventions of prejudiced Protestants.

Entirely overlooked is the mine of incriminating evidence against the perversities of Jesuitism to be found in the writings of unimpeachable Catholic authors. Among them is the devout Catholic genius Blaise Pascal, whose integrity has never been questioned. His famous Provincial Letters are a sample, and were written in 1656, when the last and unsuccessful attempt to stave off the lax moral practices of the Jesuits was being made in France.

The greatest of all Catholic authorities, the infallible (sarcasm no doubt) Pope of Rome, condemned and abolished the Jesuit Order in terms that leave no doubt concerning the immoral principles it practiced. They can be read today in historical works just as they appeared in the famous papal Brief penned by Pope Clement XIV in 1773.

Speaking of this Brief the Encyclopaedia Britannica (XV,346) gives this summary of it:

“Finally on the 21st of July, 1773, the famous Brief Dominus ac Redemptor, appeared suppressing the Society of Jesus. This remarkable document… briefly sketches the objects and history of the Jesuits themselves. It speaks of their defiance of their own Constitution, expressly revived by Pope Paul V, forbidding them to meddle in politics; of the great ruin to souls… their condescension to heathen usages in the East…

“Seeing that the Catholic sovereigns had been forced to expel them, that many bishops and other eminent persons demanded their extinction, and that the Society had ceased to fulfill the intention of its institute, the Pope declared it necessary… that it should be suppressed, extinguished, abolished and abrogated forever with its houses, colleges, and schools… It has been necessary to cite these captions of the Brief because the apologists of the Society allege that no motive influenced the Pope save the desire of peace at any price, and that he did not believe in the culpability of the Fathers. The categorical charges made in the document rebut this plea.”

John Adams, early and distinguished President of the United States, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson on May 6, 1816, made an accurate prediction of the power the Jesuits would come to wield in this country. How truly prophetic this was may be seen from newspaper pictures of President Truman, accompanied by Jesuit Father Gannon, walking in procession behind two cardinals to receive an honorary degree from the Jesuit University of Fordham, in May of this year 1946. It was something that fifty or even twenty-five years ago could not have been conceived of as possible.

Following is what John Adams had to say. It is quoted from volume six, page 604, of the official edition of the writings of Thomas Jefferson:

I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits. They have a general now in Russia, in correspondence with the Jesuits in the United States, who are more numerous than anybody knows. Shall we not have swarms of them here? In the shape of printers, editors, writers, schoolmasters, etc.?”

At that time the Jesuits were contriving by every means to defeat the ban of the Pope. They managed to deceive the church itself and remained organized in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere under the pretext that the papal decree of suppression had not been promulgated in those particular territories and therefore did not bind them in those countries. This is another instance of the juggling of legalisms in which the Jesuits specialize. They have made a science of using one phase of the law to defeat another.

In spite of their definite and solemn suppression by the supreme authority of their church, the Jesuits not only survived but came back into power. This time, they decided that they would get control of the Vatican, the supreme power of the church itself, so that never again could they be suppressed. In addition, this precaution would also open up to them the surest and easiest way to dominate the whole church. This was the strategy they planned and successfully carried through: to get control of the Vatican court, then to glamorize the papacy as a means to centralize in it supreme authority over every phase of the world-wide church. The dogma of the infallibility of the pope in 1870 fulfilled their greatest ambition. From then on their power over the universal church was rapidly consolidated.

Dr. William Walker Rockwell of Union Theological Seminary wrote years ago of the Jesuit march to power. But what they had attained at that time was only the groundwork of the triumphs they are reaping today when they have succeeded in rallying Western Europe, Protestant England and the United States, into a budding crusade of holy war against Soviet Russia.

In the July, 1914, issue of the Harvard Theological Review, Dr. Rockwell wrote as follows of the Jesuit Order:

“The 19th century saw the dead rise. And the 20th sees it at the right hand of power in the Church of Rome. The outstanding political fact in the history of the Catholic Church is the risorgimento of the Jesuits. Called back from suppression and repudiation precisely a century ago, on August 7, 1814, they have worked their way to such influence in the game of ecclesiastical politics, as played under Pius IX and Pius X… that the Jesuits are trumps.

“Certainly the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854, the Syllabus in 1864, the definition of papal infallibility and absolute sovereignty in 1870, the condemnation of Modernism in 1907, and at this very moment the codification of canon law by the centralized authority of a papal autocracy based on divine right — these are monuments to the principles for which the Jesuits have contended on their march to power.”

The historian, Robert M. Johnson, in his book, Roman Theocracy and the Republic (p. 17), describes the Jesuits and their policies as follows:

“A veiled and secret power that had for many centuries sucked into its own dark vortex all the directing force, intelligence, and purposeness of the Catholic Church — that of the Jesuits and their allies. Deep and devious was their way, nearly undistinguishable their track… Unmarked by any badge or distinctive dress, with lay associates as well as clerical, they were to be found in every rank of life, generally intelligent, frequently ambitious, without exception zealous, disciplined, and yielding unquestioned obedience to the General of the Order… The secrecy and centralization of their activity combined to make of the Jesuits a force greater and more enduring than that of kings and emperors, greater than that of the Head of the Catholic church itself… Secret in their ways, more anxious to disappear behind the pomp of the throne than to obscure it by the announcement of their achievements, striving more to bring new splendor and strength to the Papacy…

Here in the United States, as they did in Europe, the Jesuits use their schools to get control of the future leaders of the country. In Italy, they concentrate on the sons of the nobility, in France on the sons of the military, while in democratic America they choose leaders from the ranks of the ordinary people and push them into positions of political prominence. Our Federal government now has Catholics in countless key positions. The Jesuit School for Foreign Service at Georgetown, established in 1919, has worked hundreds of its protégés into our State Department.

Recognizing the growing power of labor, the Jesuits have also established labor schools to train their carefully chosen candidates for leadership in the AFL and the CIO. Philip Murray, head of the CIO, is a Roman Catholic, and also Matthew Woll, vice-president of AFL. Many others are prominent in the Labor movement.