Chapter 5
THE
JESUIT TEACHING ON REGICIDE, MURDER, LYING, THEFT, ETC.
The Maxims of the Jesuits on Regecide—M.
de la Chalotais’ Report to the Parliament of Bretagne—Effects
of Jesuit Doctrine as shown in History—Doctrine of Mental Equivocation—The
Art of Swearing Falsely without Sin—The Seventh Commandment—Jesuit
Doctrine on Blasphemy—Murder—Lying—Theft—An Illustrative
Case from Pascal—Every Precept of the Decalogue made Void—Jesuit
Morality the Consummation of the Wickedness of the Fall.
THE three great rules
of the code of the Jesuits, which we have stated in the foregoing chapter—namely,
(1)
that the end justifies the means;
(2)
that it is safe to do any action
if it be probably right, although it may be more probably wrong; and
(3)
that if one know to direct the
intention aright, there is no deed, be its moral character what it may,
which one may not do—may seem to give a license of acting so immense
that to add thereto were an altogether superfluous, and indeed an impossible
task.
But if the liberty with which these
three maxims endow the Jesuit cannot be made larger, its particular applications
may nevertheless be made more pointed, and the man who holds back from
using it in all its extent may be emboldened, despite his remaining scruples,
or the dullness of his intellectual perceptions, to avail himself to the
utmost of the advantages it offers, "for the greater glory of God."
He is to be taught, not merely by general rules, but by specific examples,
how he may sin and yet not become sinful; how he may break the law and
yet not suffer the penalty. But, further, these sons of Loyola are the
kings of the world, and the sole heirs of all its wealth, honors, and
pleasures; and whatever law, custom, sacred and venerable office, august
and kingly authority, may stand between them and their rightful lordship
over mankind, they are at liberty to throw down and tread into the dust
as a vile and accursed thing. The moral maxims of the Jesuits are to be
put in force against kings as well as against peasants.
The lawfulness of
killing excommunicated, that is Protestant, kings, the Jesuit writers
have been at great pains to maintain, and by a great variety of arguments
to defend and enforce. The proof is as abundant as it is painful. M. de
la Chalotais reports to the Parliament of Bretagne, as the result of his
examination of the laws and doctrines of the Jesuits, that on this point
there is a complete and startling unanimity in their teaching. By the
same logical track do the whole host of Jesuit writers arrive at the same
terrible conclusion, the slaughter, namely, of the sovereign on whom the
Pope has pronounced sentence of deposition. If he shall take meekly his
extrusion from Power, and seek neither to resist nor revenge his being
hurled from his throne, his life may be spared; but should "he persist
in disobedience," says M. de la Chalotais, himself a Papist, and
addressing a Popish Parliament, "he may be treated as a tyrant, in
which case anybody may kill him.1
Such is the course of reasoning established
by all authors of the society, who have written ex professo on these subjects—Bellarmine,
Suarez, Molina, Mariana, Santarel—all the Ultramontanes without exception,
since the establishment of the society."2
But have not the writers of this school
expressed in no measured terms their abhorrence of murder? Have they not
loudly exclaimed against the sacrilege of touching him on whom the Church’s
anointing oil has been poured as king? In short, do they not forbid and
condemn the crime of regicide? Yes: this is true; but they protest with
a warmth that is fitted to awaken suspicion. Rome can take back her anointing,
and when she has stripped the monarch of his office he becomes the lawful
victim of her consecrated dagger. On what grounds, the Jesuits demand,
can the killing of one who is no longer a king be called regicide? Suarez
tells us that when a king is deposed he is no longer to be regarded as
a king, but as a tyrant: "he therefore loses his authority, and from
that moment may be lawfully killed." Nor is the opinion of the Jesuit
Mariana less decided. Speaking of a prince, he says: "If he should
overthrow the religion of the country, and introduce a public enemy within
the State, I shall never consider that man to have done wrong, who, favoring
the public wishes, would attempt to kill him... It is useful that princes
should be made to know, that if they oppress the State and become intolerable
by their vices and their pollution, they hold their lives upon this tenure,
that to put them to death is not only laudable, but a glorious action...
It is a glorious thing to exterminate this pestilent and mischievous race
from the community of men."3
Wherever the Jesuits have planted
missions, opened seminaries, and established colleges, they have been
careful to inculcate these principles in the minds of the youth; thus
sowing the seeds of future tumults, revolutions, regicides, and wars.
These evil fruits have appeared sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but
they have never failed to show themselves, to the grief of nations and
the dismay of kings. John Chatel, who attempted the life of Henry IV.,
had studied in the College of Clermont, in which the Jesuit Guignard was
Professor of Divinity. In the chamber of the would-be regicide, a manuscript
of Guignard was found, in which, besides other dangerous articles, that
Father approved not only of the assassination of Henry III. by Clement,
but also maintained that the same thing ought to be attempted against
le Bearnois, as he called Henry IV., which occasioned the first banishment
of the order out of France, as a society detestable and diabolical. The
sentence of the Parliament, passed in 1594, ordained "that all the
priests and scholars of the College of Clermont, and others calling themselves
the Society of Jesus, as being corrupters of youth, disturbers of the
public peace, and enemies of the king and State, should depart in three
days from their house and college, and in fifteen days out of the whole
kingdom."
But why should we dwell on these written
proofs of the disloyal and murderous principles of the Jesuits, when their
acted deeds bear still more emphatic testimony to the true nature and
effects of their principles? We have only to look around, and on every
hand the melancholy monuments of these doctrines meet our afflicted sight.
To what country of Europe shall we turn where we are not able to track
the Jesuit by his bloody foot-prints? What page of modern history shall
we open and not read fresh proofs that the Papal doctrine of killing excommunicated
kings was not meant to slumber in forgotten tomes, but to be acted out
in the living world? We see Henry III. falling by their dagger. Henry
IV. perishes by the same consecrated weapon. The King of Portugal dies
by their order. The great Prince of Orange is dispatched by their agent,
shot down at the door of his own dining-room. How many assassins they
sent to England to murder Elizabeth, history attests. That she escaped
their machinations is one of the marvels of history. Nor is it only the
palaces of monarchs into which they have crept with their doctrines of
murder and assassination; the very sanctuary of their own Popes they have
defiled with blood. We behold Clement XIV. signing the order for the banishment
of the Jesuits, and soon thereafter he is overtaken by their vengeance,
and dies by poison. In the Gunpowder Plot we see them deliberately planning
to destroy at one blow the nobility and gentry of England. To them we
owe those civil wars which for so many years drenched with blood the fair
provinces of France. They laid the train of that crowning horror, the
St. Bartholomew massacre. Philip II. and the Jesuits share between them
the guilt of the "Invincible Armada," which, instead of inflicting
the measureless ruin and havoc which its authors intended, by a most merciful
Providence became the means of exhausting the treasures and overthrowing
the prestige of Spain. What a harvest of plots, tumults, seditions, revolutions,
torturings, poisonings, assassinations, regicides, and massacres has Christendom
reaped from the seed sown by the Jesuits! Nor can we be sure that we have
yet seen the last and greatest of their crimes.
We can bestow only the most cursory
glance at the teaching of the Jesuits under the other heads of moral duty.
Let us take their doctrine of mental reservation. Nothing can be imagined
more heinous and, at the same time, more dangerous. "The doctrine
of equivocation," says Blackwell, "is for the consolation of
afflicted Roman Catholics and the instruction of all the godly."
It has been of special use to them when residing among infidels and heretics.
In heathen countries, as China and Malabar, they have professed conformity
to the rites and the worship of paganism, while remaining Roman Catholics
at heart, and they have taught their converts to venerate their former
deities in appearance, on the strength of directing aright the intention,
and the pious fraud of concealing a crucifix under their clothes.
Equivocation they have carried into
civil life as well as into religion. "A man may swear," says
Sanchez, "that he hath not done a thing though he really have, by
understanding within himself that he did it not on such and such a day,
or before he was born; or by reflecting on some other circumstance of
the like nature; and yet the words he shall make use of
shall not have a sense implying any such thing; and this is a thing of
great convenience on many occasions, and is always justifiable when it
is necessary or advantageous in anything that concerns a man’s health,
honor, or estate."4 Filiutius,
in his Moral Questions, asks, "Is it wrong to use equivocation in
swearing? I answer, first, that it is not in itself a sin to use equivocation
in swearing This is the common doctrine after Suarez." Is it perjury
or sin to equivocate in a just cause?" he further asks. "It
is not perjury," he answers. "As, for example, in the case of
a man who has outwardly made a promise without the intention of promising;
if he is asked whether he has promised, he may deny it, meaning that he
has not promised with a binding promise; and thus he may swear."
Filiutius asks yet
again, "With what precaution is equivocation to be used? When we
begin, for instance, to say, I swear, we must insert in a subdued tone
the mental restriction, that today, and then continue aloud, I have not
eaten such a thing; or, I swear—then insert, I say—then conclude
in the same loud voice, that I have not done this or that thing; for thus
the whole speech is most true.5 What
an admirable lesson in the art of speaking the truth to one’s self,
and lying and swearing falsely to everybody else!6
We shall offer no comment on the teaching
of the Jesuits under the head of the seventh commandment. The doctrines
of the society which relate to chastity are screened from exposure by
the very enormity of their turpitude. We pass them as we would the open
grave, whose putrid breath kills all who inhale it. Let all who value
the sweetness of a pure imagination, and the joy of a conscience undefiled,
shun the confessional as they would the chamber in which the plague is
shut up, or the path in which lurks the deadly scorpion. The teaching
of the Jesuits—everywhere deadly—is here a poison that consumes
flesh, and bones, and soul.
Which precept of the
Decalogue is it that the theology of the Jesuits does not set aside? We
are commanded "to fear the great and dreadful name of the Lord our
God." The Jesuit Bauny teaches us to blaspheme it. "If one has
been hurried by passion into cursing and doing despite to his Maker, it
may be determined that he has only sinned venially." 7
This is much, but Casnedi goes a
little farther. "Do what your conscience tells you to be good, and
commanded," says this Jesuit; "if through invincible error you
believe lying or blasphemy to be commanded by God, blaspheme." 8
The license given by the Jesuits
to regicide we have already seen; not less ample is the provision their
theology makes for the perpetration of ordinary homicides and murders.
Reginald says it is lawful to kill a false witness, seeing otherwise one
should be killed by him.9 Parents
who seek to turn their children from the faith, says Fagundez, "may
justly be killed by them." 10 The
Jesuit Amicus teaches that it is lawful for an ecclesiastic, or one in
a religious order, to kill a calumniator when other means of defense are
wanting.11 And Airult extends the same privilege
to laymen. If one brings an impeachment before a prince or judge against
another, and if that other cannot by any means avert the injury to his
character, he may kill him secretly. He fortifies his opinion by the authority
of Bannez, who gives the same latitude to the right of defense, with this
slight qualification, that the calumniator should first be warned that
he desist from his slander, and if he will not, he should be killed, not
openly, on account of the scandal, but secretly. 12
Of a like ample kind
is the liberty which the Jesuits permit to be taken with the property
of one’s neighbor. Dishonesty in all its forms they sanction. They
encourage cheats, frauds, purloinings, robberies, by furnishing men with
a ready justification of these misdeeds, and especially by persuading
their votaries that if they will only take the trouble of doing them in
the way of directing the intention according to their instructions, they
need not fear being called to a reckoning for them hereafter. The Jesuit
Emmanuel Sa teaches "that it is not a mortal sin to take secretly
from him who would give if he were asked;" that "it is not theft
to take a small thing from a husband or a father;" that if one has
taken what he doubts to have been his own, that doubt makes it probable
that it is safe to keep it; that if one, from an urgent necessity, or
without causing much loss, takes wood from another man’s pile, he
is not obliged to restore it. One who has stolen small things at different
times, is not obliged to make restitution till such time as they amount
together to a considerable sum. But should the purloiner feel restitution
burdensome, it may comfort him to know that some Fathers deny it with
probability.13
The case of merchants, whose gains
may not be increasing so fast as they could wish, has been kindly considered
by the Fathers. Francis Tolet says that if a man cannot sell his wine
at a fair price—that is, at a fair profit— he may mix a little
water with his wine, or diminish his measure, and sell it
for pure wine of full measure. Of course, if it be lawful to mix wine,
it is lawful to adulterate all other articles of merchandise, or to diminish
the weight, and go on vending as if the balance were just and the article
genuine. Only the trafficker in spurious goods, with false balances, must
be careful not to tell a lie; or if he should be compelled to equivocate,
he must do it in accordance with the rules laid down by the Fathers for
enabling one to say what is not true without committing falsehood.14
Domestic servants
also have been taken by the Fathers under the shield of their casuistry.
Should a servant deem his wages not enough, or the food, clothing, and
other necessaries provided for him not equal to that which is provided
for servants of similar rank in other houses, he may recompense himself
by abstracting from his master’s property as much as shall make his
wages commensurate with his services. So has Valerius Reginald decided.15
It is fair, however, that the pupil
be cautioned that this lesson cannot safely be put in practice against
his teacher. The story of John d’Alba, related by Pascal, shows that
the Fathers do not relish these doctrines in praxi nearly so well as in
thesi, when they themselves are the sufferers by them. D’Alba was
a servant to the Fathers in the College of Clermont, in the Rue St. Jacques,
and thinking that his wages were not equal to his merits, he stole somewhat
from his masters to. make up the discrepancy, never dreaming that they
would make a criminal of him for following their approved rules. However,
they threw him into prison on a charge of larceny. He was brought to trial
on the 16th April, 1647. He confessed before the court to having taken
some pewter plates, but maintained that the act was not to be regarded
as a theft, on the strength of this same doctrine of Father Bauny, which
he produced before the judges, with attestation from another of the Fathers,
under whom he had studied these cases of conscience. Whereupon the judge,
M. de Montrouge, gave sentence as follows:—"That the prisoner
should not be acquitted upon the writings of these Fathers, containing
a doctrine so unlawful, pernicious, and contrary to all laws, natural,
Divine, and human, such as might confound all families, and authorize
all domestic frauds and infidelities;" but that the over-faithful
disciple "should be whipt before the College gate of Clermont by
the common executioner, who at the same time should burn all the writings
of those Fathers treating of theft; and that they
should be prohibited to teach any such doctrine again under pain of death."16
But we should swell beyond all reasonable
limit, our enumeration, were we to quote even a tithe of the "moral
maxims" of the Jesuits. There is not One in the long catalogue of
sins and crimes which their casuistry does not sanction. Pride, ambition,
avarice, luxury, bribery, and a host of vices which we cannot specify,
and some of which are too horrible to be mentioned, find in these Fathers
their patrons and defenders. The alchemists of the Middle Ages boasted
that their art enabled them to operate on the essence of things, and to
change what was vile into what was noble. But the still darker art of
the Jesuits acts in the reverse order; it changes all that is noble into
all that is vile. Theirs is an accursed alchemy by which they transmute
good into evil, and virtue into vice. There is no destructive agency with
which the world is liable to be visited, that penetrates so deep, or inflicts
so remediless a ruin, as the morality of the Jesuits. The tornado sweeps
along over the surface of the globe, leaving the earth naked and effaced
and forgotten in the greater splendor and the more solid strength of the
restored structures. Revolution may overturn thrones, abolish laws, and
break in pieces the framework of society; but when the fury of faction
has spent its rage, order emerges from the chaos, law resumes its supremacy,
and the bare as before tree or shrub beautified it; but the summers of
after years re-clothe it with verdure and beautify it with flowers, and
make it smile as sweetly as before. The earthquake overturns the dwelling
of man, and swallows up the proudest of his cities; but his skill and
power survive the shock, and when the destroyer has passed, the architect
sets up again the fallen palace, and rebuilds the ruined city, and the
catastrophe is effaced and forgotten in the greater splendor and the more
solid strength of the restored structures. Revolution may overturn thrones,
abolish laws, and break in pieces the framework of society; but when the
fury of faction has spent its rage, order emerges from the chaos, law
resumes its supremacy, and the institutions which had been destroyed in
the hour of madness, are restored in the hour of calm wisdom that succeeds.
But the havoc the Jesuit inflicts is irremediable. It has nothing in it
counteractive or restorative; it is only evil. It is not upon the works
of man or the institutions of man merely that, it puts forth its fearfully
destructive power; it is upon man himself. It is not the body of man that
it strikes, like the pestilence; it is the soul. It is not a part, but
the whole of man that it consigns to corruption and ruin. Conscience it
destroys, knowledge it extinguishes, the very power of discerning between
right and wrong it takes away, and shuts up the man in a prison whence
no created agency or influence can set him free. The Fall defaced the
image of God in which man was made; we say, defaced; it did not totally
obliterate or extinguish it. Jesuitism, more terrible than the Fall, totally
effaces from the soul of man the image of God. Of the "knowledge,
righteousness, and true holiness" in which man was made it leaves
not a tree. It plucks up by its very roots the moral constitution which
God gave man. The full triumph of Jesuitism would leave nothing spiritual,
nothing moral, nothing intellectual, nothing strictly and properly human
existing upon the earth. Man it would change into the animal, impelled
by nothing but appetites and passions, and these more fierce and cruel
than those of the tiger.
Society would become simply a herd
of wolves, lawless, ravenous, greedy of each other’s blood, and perpetually
in quest of prey. Even Jesuitism itself would perish, devoured by its
own progeny. Our earth at last would be simply a vast sepulcher, moving
round the sun in its annual circuit, its bosom as joyless, dreary, and
waste as are those silent spaces through which it rolls.
Footnotes
1 "A quocumque privato potest interfici."—Suarez
(1, 6, ch. 4)—
Chalotais, Report
Constit. Jesuits, p. 84.
2 "There are," adds M. de la Chalotais, in
a footnote, "nearly 20,000
Jesuits in the world
[1761], all imbued with Ultramontane doctrines,
and the doctrine of
murder." That is more than a century ago. Their
numbers have prodigiously
increased since.
3 Maxiana,. De Rege et Regis Institutione, lib. 1,
cap. 6, p. 61, and lib. 1,
cap. 7, p. 64; ed.
1640.
4 Sanch. OP. Mot., pars. 2, lib. 3, cap. 6.
5 Mor. Quest. de Christianis 0fficiis et Casibus Conscientice,
tom. 2, tr. 25,
cap. 11, n. 321-328;
Lugduni, 1633.
6 It is easy to see how these precepts may be put in
practice in swearing the oath of allegiance, or promising to obey the
law, or engaging not to attack the institutions of the State, or to obey
the rules and further the ends of any society, lay or clerical, into which
the Jesuit may enter. The swearer has only to repeat aloud the prescribed
words, and insert silently such other words, at the fitting places, as
shall make void the oath, clause by clause—nay, bind the swearer
to the very opposite of that which the administrator of the oath intends
to pledge him to.
7 Stephen Bauny, Som. des Peches; Rouen, 1653.
8 Crisis Theol., tom. 1, disp. 6, sect. 2, Section
1, n. 59.
9 Praxis Fori Poenit., tom. 2, lib. 21, cap. 5, n.
57.
10 In Proecep. Decal., tom. 1, lib. 4, cap. 2, n. 7,
8.
11 Cursus Theol., tom. 5,disp. 36, sec. 5, n. 118.
12 Cens., pp. 319, 320—Collation faite d la requete
de l’U’niversite de
Paris, 1643; Paris,
1720
13 Aphorismi Confessariorum—verbo furtum, n. 3—8;
Coloniae, 1590.
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