The Jesuits, 1534-1921. Thomas J. Campbell

Styria announced that the most execrable and sanguinary plots were being formed to drown the whole Empire in blood in order to nullify the teaching of the Evangel. "O poor Roman Empire!" he exclaimed, "your only enemies, the only enemies of the Emperor, of the nation, of religion are the Jesuits." Janssen adds: "The facts told a different story."

      Father Peter Pázmány figures at this period in a notable fashion. He was a Hungarian from Nagy Várad, also known as Grosswardein. His parents were Calvinists, but he became a Catholic and at the age of sixteen entered the Society at Rome, where he was a pupil of such scholars as Bellarmine and Vásquez. He taught in the college of Gratz, which had been founded by the Jesuits in 1573 with theological and philosophical faculties. The Archduke Ferdinand enriched it with new buildings and furnished it with ample revenues, giving it also ecclesiastical supremacy in Carinthia and other estates of the crown. Pázmány became the apostle of his countrymen, both by his books and his preaching. He was a master in his native tongue, says Ranke (History of the Popes, IV, 124), and his spiritual and learned work "Kalaus," produced an irresistible sensation. Endowed with a ready and captivating eloquence, he is said to have personally converted fifty of the most distinguished families, one of which ejected twenty ministers from their parishes and replaced them by as many Catholic priests. The government was also swung into line; the Catholics had the majority in the Diet of 1625, and an Esterhazy was made Palatine. Pázmány was offered a bishopric which he refused, but finally the Pope, yielding to the demand of the princes and people, appointed him primate and then made him a cardinal. His "Guide to Catholic Truth" was the first polemic in the Hungarian language. He founded a university at Tyrnau which was afterwards transferred to Buda. The Hungarian College at Rome was his creation, as was the Pazmaneum in Vienna. His name has been recently inserted in the Roman Breviary in connection with the three Hungarian martyrs, two of whom were Jesuits, Pongracz and Grodecz, who were put to death in 1619.

      Italy exhibited a similar energy from one end to the other of the Peninsula. Chandlery in his "Fasti Breviores" (p. 40) tells us that "the first school of the Society was opened in the Piazza Ara Cœli in 1551, and soon developed into the famous Roman College. In 1552 it was removed to a house near the Minerva; in 1554 to a place near the present site; in 1562 to the house of Pope Paul IV; and in 1582 to the new buildings of the Gregorian University." It was in this college on March 25, 1563, that the Belgian scholastic, John Leunis, organized the first sodality of the Blessed Virgin. Fouqueray, however, contests this claim of the Ara Cœli school, and asserts that the first college was at Messina, and was begun in 1547, and that St. Ignatius determined to make it the model of all similar establishments. Its rule was based on the methods that prevailed in the colleges of the University of Paris, with changes, however, in its discipline and religious direction. Its plan of studies was the first "Ratio studiorum." It had two sessions of two or three hours each daily; Latin was always employed as the language of the house, but both Hebrew and Greek were taught. Vacation lasted only fifteen days for pupils in humanities and the higher grades; and only eight days or less for those in the lower classes. The students went to confession every month and assisted daily at Mass. Nearly all the cities of the peninsula had called for similar colleges. In what is now Belgium there were thirty-four colleges or schools, an apparently excessive number, but the fact that they were, with two exceptions, day-schools and that small boys were excluded will explain the possibility of managing them with comparatively few professors. Six or seven sufficed for as many hundred pupils. Moreover, something in the way of a foundation to support the school was always required before its establishment.

      In 1564 the Roman Seminary was entrusted to the Society; and in 1578 the Roman College. Five years previously, the Collegium Germanicum, after Canisius had presented a memorial to Gregory XIII on the services it was expected to render, obtained a subsidy for a certain number of students. The Bull, dated August, 1573, exhorted the Catholics of the German Empire to provide for a hundred students of philosophy and theology. The Pope gave it the palace of St. Apollinaris, the Convent of St. Sabas and the revenues of St. Stephen on Monte Cœlio. Over and above this, he guaranteed 10,000 crowns out of the revenues of the Apostolic Treasury. In 1574 it had one hundred and thirty students and in a few years one hundred and fifty. The philosophers followed a three years' course, the theologians four. Between 1573 and 1585 the Pope disbursed for the Collegium Germanicum alone about 235,649 crowns – equivalent to about a quarter of a million dollars. Besides this, as early as 1552 St. Ignatius had obtained from Julius III a Bull endowing a college for the study of the humanities, in which young Germans could prepare themselves for philosophy and theology. In its opening year it had twenty-five students, and in the following twice as many. Under Paul IV when the establishment was in dire want, St. Ignatius supported it by begging, and he told Cardinal Truchsess that he would sell himself into slavery rather than forsake his Germans. It was while engrossed in this work that Ignatius died. His memory is tenderly cherished in the Collegium Germanicum to this day. When his name is read out in the Martyrology on July 31, the students all rise, and with uncovered heads listen reverently to the announcement of the feast of their founder.

      CHAPTER III

      ENDS OF THE EARTH

      Xavier departs for the East – Goa – Around Hindostan – Malacca – The Moluccas – Return to Goa – The Valiant Belgian – Troubles in Goa – Enters Japan – Returns to Goa – Starts for China – Dies off the Coast – Remains brought to Goa – Africa – Congo, Angola, Caffreria, Abyssinia – Brazil, Nobrega, Anchieta, Azevedo – Failure of Rodriguez in Portugal.

      When John III of Portugal asked for missionaries to evangelize the colonies which the discoveries of Da Gama and others had won for the crown in the far east, Bobadilla, Rodriguez and Xavier were assigned to the work. Bobadilla's sickness prevented him from going, and then His Majesty judged that he was too generous to his new possessions and not kind enough to the mother country; so it was decided to keep Rodriguez in Portugal, his native land, and send Xavier to the Indies.

      Xavier arrived at Lisbon in June, 1540, and waited there eight months for the departure of the vessel, during which time he and Rodriguez effected a complete reformation in the morals of the city. He then began a series of apostolic journeys which were nothing less than stupendous in their character, not only for the distances covered during the eleven years to which they were restricted, but because of the extraordinary and often unseaworthy craft in which he traversed the yet uncharted seas of the East, which were swept by typhoons and infested by pirates, and where there was constant danger of being wrecked on inhospitable coasts and murdered by the savage natives. Three times his ship went to pieces on the rocks, and on one occasion he had to cling to a plank for days while the waves swept over him. Several times he came near being poisoned, and once he had to hide in the bush for a long time to escape the head-hunters of the Moluccas. The distances he traversed can only be appreciated by having an atlas at hand while perusing the story.

      Leaving Europe, his course lay along the west coast of Africa, rounding Cape of Good Hope and then making for far away Mozambique. From there he pointed across the Arabian Sea to Goa on the west coast of Hindostan. Shortly afterwards, he continued down the coast to Cochin and Cape Comorin and across to Ceylon, then along the eastern side of the peninsula to the Pearl Fisheries, and back to Goa. Soon after, he is sailing across the Bay of Bengal to distant Malacca, which lies north of Sumatra; from there he penetrates into the Chinese Sea, and skirting Borneo and the Celebes, he arrives at the Molucca Islands, going through them from north to south and back. Returning to Goa, he again makes for Malacca and points north to Japan, passing the Philippines on his way, though it is claimed that he landed at Mindanao. From Japan he returns to Goa and then sets out for China. He reached an island opposite Canton, pined away there for a month or so, as no one dared to carry him over to the coast. He then took his flight to heaven, which was very near.

      It was a great day for Lisbon when, on April 7, 1541, which happened to be his birthday, Xavier set sail for India. He was papal nuncio and King John's ambassador to the Emperor of Ethiopia. Nevertheless the princes and potentates whom this poorly clad ambassador met on his way must have gazed at him in wonder; for in spite of his honors, he washed and mended his own clothes, and while on shipboard refused the assistance of a servant and scarcely ate any food. The crew were a rascally set, as were most of the sea-rovers of those days; but this extraordinary papal nuncio and ambassador passed his time among them, always bright, approachable and