Jesuitism

Doctrine, system and religious, political and social principles of the Jesuits or attributed to them; practice of dissemblance as a system of life. The Society of Jesus, a religious order founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 as an instrument of the Counter Reformation, was suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 (though it continued its activity thanks to the approval of the emperors of Russia and China within their respective territories). In 1814 it was reestablished by Pious VII, and received encouragement from the Holy Alliance. The Jesuits played a very important role in public education and in clandestine political activity. Many times they combined the missionary work of the Church with secret missions of diplomacy and for the secret police of the Catholic powers. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they have sought to present themselves before public opinion in Catholic countries as leaders in the struggle against modernism within Catholicism, and against Masonry outside of it. To conduct secret missions they have at times dressed as laymen and pretended to be partisans of their enemies in order to infiltrate their ranks. This moral “flexibility” and their propensity for political careerism have provided grounds for the accusations of hypocrisy and duplicity that are made against the Jesuits. The literary character Tartuffe in Moliere’s comedy is the archetype of the hypocritically disguised perversity and corruption that is regarded as the personification of J. The thesis, quite dubious from a moral perspective, that a noble end justifies the use of base and unworthy means, is commonly attributed to the Jesuits. However, this image of the Society of Jesus is one-sided and thus unjust, and due largely to tendentious propaganda from their adversaries that exploits certain of the Order’s procedures, customs and traditions that contradict conventionally-accepted norms in social communication, in the common conscience. The names of the well-known Christian humanist from Brazil, Antonio de Viera, and the philosopher and scientist Teilhard de Chardin, who were both subjected to repression by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, attest to the high moral character of some members of this Order, in contrast to the generalized perception.