LOS JESUITAS. DE JONATHAN WRIGHT. CAPTULO 5. Rapsodia de calumnias. La creacin de la leyenda antijesutica.

Empieza con una cita de la calumnia como una accin realmente nefasta, tomada de la humildsima representacin de los jesuitas de Espaa. 1617. Otra cita de El fantasma de San Ignacio. Obra de 1700. Empieza con el primer punto, lujuria eclesistica. Pecar por Pecar. Habla de cmo escriban en metforas. Cmo en los comienzos de la era moderna se saba escribir en metfora. Se utilizaba mucho la mefrora y a travs de ella se vilipendiaba a los jesuitas. Es importante hay unos puntos que destacan, los ersos mal rimados, sin mucho arte acerca de para ridiculizar a los jesuitas, para jean batiste girard, verdadero demonio al habers seducido s una jovencita religiosa Catherine cadier. Incluso algunos versos de mal gusto. Mala poesa lasciva. Estos se repartan por o se distribuan a travs de la literatura del corel, del olportage. Porque se colgaban al cuello su insturmentoso para distribuir pasquines. Dice que este escndalo tuvo mayor difusin que aqul famoso affair dreyfus de finales del sibglo XIX. Tuvo una amplia difusin. Gracias pues al famoso padre Girard, sin escrpulos. Por supuesto que hubo estas transgresiones escondidos en el hbito de las rdenes religiosas, pero para los enemigos de los jesuitas esto se magnificaba. No puedes hacer generalizaciones sobre esto. Evidentemente estos casos son muy sonados porque hablamos de personas que juraron fidelidad a sus ordenes religiosas. Los enemigos de los jesuitas, 1631, se regodeaban con ello. Los situaban engolfados en los placeres prohibidos. Muchas situaciones unidas a todo esto, todos los siete pecados capitales juntos y algo ms, perversin, sodoma, bajeza humana. Diablicos eran calificados, corruptores de menores, una cosa es que fueran pedfilos y alcahuetes y otra que montaran una campaa poltica para hacerlos dueos del mundo. Desde lo bajo hasta las miras al poder. El pecado como estrategia. En ese mundo indefinido de la leyenda, los jesuitas, el estereotipo de jesuitas en su papel de malos, eran insuperables a la hora de armar el brazo de los asesisnos polticos. El aspecto poltico, eran implacables, los califican. Se hablaba de riquezas impresionantes. Crnica de 1610 cuando enrique IV de francia, ellos presentaron al futuro asesino. Eran los que armaban el brazo de los ejecutores. Segn los protestantes, el principal mvil era ganar influencia poltica. Se discuta con ardor como estos uitilizaban en beneficio de ellos mismos sus influencias polticicas. Otros decan que laproclamada subordinacin y lealtad a los jesuitas era falso. Guerra civil, seguramente la mano de la compaa. 1580, sixto XV se indispuso contra los jesuitas. Graves acusaciones. El libro est plagado de ancdotas, todo lo que tiene que ver con los detalles, acciones, citas. Nos habla de Guy de pathn de la facultad de medicina, universidad de pars, que daban venenos, purgantes, etc. El pupilo del jesuita Whalpole, Edward de squire, recurran a la farmacologa p para sus propsticos.+ La propaganda, de tal suerta era que si la educacin, williamn crashow, la compaa los ms ingeniossos del mundo, adiestrarlos de manera que al papa no le faltasen instrumentos para

matar reyes. En su hber hubo infinidade de personajes que los apoyaron, hasta llegar a teora conspirativa. Hasta on presidentes de los etstados unidos, Garfield, mackinsey, Taylor zachary, hasta Abraham Lincoln. Buena parte de las acusaciones ms extravagantes que se lanzaron contar los jesuitas eran absurdas 1. Qu fue lo que dio lugar a tan virulenta campaa jesuita? 2. Por qu se desarroll una campaa contra la poltica en las formas concretas en que lo hizo. Cayeron como cada aleatoria, desde Inglaterra 1561, se dicen cosas tremendas. Muchas historias. Una sorprendente semejanza de hechos eran ms astutos y saban generar leyendas. La ciencia de los jesuitas. Habilidad en la mecnica, en la ciencia. Era una de sus tradiciones ms socorridas. Su habilidad. Hacienda de san jernimo, suponemos que en Mxico, o en su hacienda Villa. No era una organizacin mendicante. Miles de cepas de uva, propiedad jesuitas. Caa de azcar. Todos estos elementos acrecentaban leyenda: cientficos, engaos, participan en muertes de reyes, todo lo imaginable en perversin y maldad. Mitos propagandsticos, que constituyeron buena molienda para la molienda de la historia. Crticos franceses (cuna de la ilustracin), maquina contra los jesuitas, autnticas camaraderas. Disturbios, matanza de San Bartolom. John Donne, ingls, sembrar envidias, rencillas, agravios, confiscacin de patrimonios, tormento de cuerpos, perplejidad en la conciencia, dispuestos a provechar cualquier actividad beneficiosa para el papa. Por qu se empeaban en calificar a los jesuitas como una cepa fracasada? Muchos resentimientos contra la orden jesuita. Desde Cracovia, Praga, Lovaina, hasta Bolonia. Profesor jesuita, Juan Maldonado gozaba de popularidad. Dominicos, franciscanos se indignaban cuando eran remplazados por jesuitas como confesores, grandes rivales en la educacin de los franceses, a los capuchinos, en todas partes movan las envidias. En una comunidad catlica de Mxico, Juan Palafox y Mendoza mont en clera porque confesaban sin soportar la oportuna venia del ordinario, administraban fuera de sus jurisdicciones. En la Inglaterra Isabelina, etc. Vanidososos, se empinan sobre los coturnos de su formacin puritana. Sigue datos. Exagerados. El autor se excede en datos anecdticos. JANSENISMO, ah est el verdadero quid del asunto. EL jansenismo, que nace dentro de la misma esfera catlica. Heredero del pelagianismo, ser humano nace originalmente libre de pecado. Se inspiran en san Agustn, herejas catlicas. Pelagio es del siglo IV, Jansen es del siglo X XVI De agustinos, naturaleza pura, naturaleza pelagiana. Nocin de gracia eficaz. Movimiento rigorista ANtoine A Arnauld y anglica Arnauld, duverger, ayuda a expandir el Jansenismo. 1543, libro de

en Espaa, antijesuita, condenaban la costumbre de la comunin frecuente, crtica de la infalibilidad del papa. Jansen, Cornelio, telogoy obispo, rigorismo moral, antijjesitico, 1585 1638 janesenismo moral, teolgico y moral espiritual. Concilio de trento. Hermanos Arnaud. Se va a los extremos: El jansenista flaco y austero, el jesuita gordo y concupiscente como el Tartufo de Moliere. Comienzos del siglo XVIII, la compaa de Jess no era menos combatida que popular, no menos odiada que amada. Misioneros y educadores, viajeros y descubridores, cartgrafos y gegrafos, hombres de teologa y espada, de ciencia y espiritualidad, conspiradores polticos o pacificadores, los jesuitas han sido, desde la fundacin de la Compaa de Jess por Ignacio de Loyola (1491-1556), una de las rdenes religiosas ms importantes, controvertidas y respetadas de la cristiandad. Jonathan Wright, especialista en movimientos religiosos dotado de una extraordinaria capacidad narrativa, conduce al lector por la leyenda y la realidad, las tramas secretas y las gestas de estos intrpidos aventureros

The spiritual SAS

Simon Callow finds Jonathan Wright's account of the Jesuits engaging but not illuminating

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inShare0 Email Simon Callow The Guardian, Saturday 31 January 2004

Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories by Jonathan Wright To those of us growing up Roman Catholic in the 1950s and 60s, the word Jesuit had a very particular ring to it. Not for us the pejorative associations of common usage, comprehensively and magisterially summed up by the OED in its definition of the adjective jesuitical: "having the character ascribed to the Jesuits; deceitful; dissembling; practising equivocation, prevarication or mental reservation of truth. Often used in the sense of 'hair-splitting', keenly analytical".

No, for us young Catholics, the Jesuits were a kind of intellectual aristocracy within the church, fiercely intelligent, practical, effective, radical; another, altogether superior breed of men to our waffling and well-meaning parish priests, the thuggish Christian Brothers or the piously praying Dominicans. They epitomised the romance of the priesthood which still held such a seductive power for the young and religiously inclined, like me. They were fearless explorers, both geographically and intellectually; the priest-palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was proposing his cosmogenetic synthetic vision of the evolutionary order, while worker-priests of the Society of Jesus were deeply involving themselves in the lives of villagers in ever remoter parts of South America. The military imagery which has been an intrinsic part of their profile since they were founded in 1533 by the soldier and nobleman Ignatius Loyola suggested to us that they were a kind of spiritual SAS, and when, for a brief year, at the age of 10, I was taught at a Jesuit college, I was mesmerised by the priests' elegance of expression and deportment, by their toughness of mind and by the breadth of their culture. I was very taken, too, by their glinting sense of humour. I was even, dare I say it, rather impressed in a terrified sort of a way by their penchant for vigorous corporal punishment: the heavy thud of the gutta-percha ferule, administered with fierce muscular energy, confirmed quite how formidable they were. Had I stayed longer, or started younger, I would no doubt have fallen completely under their spell. Every Catholic knew their famous claim: give us a child until he is seven, and we'll give you the man. Jonathan Wright's book is essentially a survey of the society's history and the way in which it has been perceived. It is certainly an extraordinary story, which Wright tells colourfully enough, if somewhat erratically from a chronological point of view. He gives us the sudden conversion of the battle-wounded Loyola, idly leafing through the Lives of the Saints as he convalesced ("a Spanish gentleman", d'Alembert laconically remarked a couple of centuries later, "having had his head heated by romances of chivalry and afterwards by books of devotion, took it into his head to be the Don Quixote of the Virgin"), and his consequent determination to found, with a group of six trusty friends (Francis Xavier among them), an order which would revitalise the spiritual life of the Church. The Reformation was in full swing and the papacy was perhaps at its lowest ebb just after the sack of Rome by the Hapsburg emperor Charles V, but the young Society of Jesus, as they called themselves, was interested less in counter-Reformation than in spiritual renewal. Loyola composed the devotional manual Spiritual Exercises , which would form the core of Jesuit religious practice, while Xavier spearheaded the drive to conversion which so characterised the movement, involving him in exceptional and hazardous travel to the furthest ends of the known world. Meanwhile the first Jesuit schools and colleges were created, establishing the educational dominance which was so significant an aspect of their work. A mere seven years after its foundation, the order was sanctioned by the Pope and duly pledged itself to direct allegiance to Rome. Its progress was rapid, unstoppably so, as it seemed to anxious contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and was almost immediately demonised by the latter, its capacity to have a finger in every pie producing lurid paranoid fantasies on all sides.

Within a mere few decades it had somehow secured a virtual monopoly of the confession boxes of the powerful, indeed, the all-powerful: monarchs, cardinals, ministers. But this politically influential role was only one aspect of the Jesuits' presence: their missionary work took them both to the heathen - in India, China, Japan, Africa - but also to newly-Protestant lands such as England. As often as not they met with violent death, a destiny which they joyfully welcomed- an embrace of martyrdom which has startling modern resonances: "So eager are they to shed their blood for Christ that this forms the constant topic of their conversation," wrote a Protestant polemicist,"... many would shorten the time of their studies to be free to rush into the fray... when the news is brought from England of some fresh outbreak of heretical rage and cruelty, it enkindles the desire to undergo in their turn the like afflictions and tortures." They regularly demonstrated, as Wright puts it, "the desire to suffer as excruciatingly as possible on distant shores". But they were equally active in the centres of great Catholic cities, embracing the way of the world, removing themselves from the cloister, and propelling themselves into real life, the life lived by men and women, whether that took them into the streets or into the royal confession box. The qualifications for membership of the society give a vivid sense of what sort of men were called for: potential Jesuits should not be married, subscribe to erroneous religious opinions, or suffer from mental instability, nor should they suffer from stomach trouble or headaches or from "some other bodily malfunction", nor, equally important, "notable ugliness". The prime qualifications were spiritual vigour, an affection for the society, a good memory and a pleasing manner of speech. Their ministry was a practical one, designed to reveal, in Loyola's great phrase, "the God in all and all in God". They showed, both at home and abroad, a disposition toward what was pejoratively dubbed "accommodation", a willingness to adapt and adjust the rules. This was seen in its extreme form in the foreign missions - Father Robert de Nobili going native in Maduras, wearing the saffron robes of the Buddhist priesthood, becoming vegetarian, learning Tamil and Sanskrit, and eventually changing his name to Tattuva Bodhakar - but also encouraged a relaxed attitude in matters of doctrine, which partly provoked the violent attack launched on the order by the pro-Jansenist Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters (1660). Jansensists were fundamentalists, so the accommodating Jesuits were their sworn enemies, hated with the hatred hard-liners reserve only for liberals. It is a classic example of the power of genius that Pascal's biased, unproven and wildly generalised polemic crystallised for ever the image of the Jesuit, an image vividly summarised at the beginning of the 20th century by HI Roper: "To tread softly, to whisper in the ear, to work mole-like underground; to glide to and fro, and in and out, like the serpent, through the windings of society; concealed beneath whatever mask may best subserve their ends." This perception acquired a life of its own: Jesuits were accused of venality, of sexual depravity, of corruption, cruelty, intellectual subversion. At the same time, they were held to be enemies of progress, suppressing the scientific enlightenment, a judgment spectacularly wide of the mark, as among their ranks were to be found visionary scientists from every discipline, mathematical, astronomical, botanical, geographical, philological. But their subtle pursuit of the truth, while gracefully squaring it with the prevailing orthodoxies - a consequence of their commitment to Rome - was not enough to protect them. "Jesuits were in fact part of the very same culture that

destroyed them," says Wright. "More important, they helped to create the culture that destroyed them." Having been expelled from France, Spain and Portugal, the order was abruptly dissolved in 1773. But its activities continued quietly, and by 1814 it had been restored, and began slowly to regain its momentum. The paranoia of its enemies if anything increased during the 19th century; the Monita Secreta, a forged document as scandalous as the notorious anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to be the Jesuits' master plan for world dominion. The order transformed itself in the 20th century into a very different kind of organisation, its missionary purpose less to do with conversion, more to do with liberating people to determine their own lives. It continues to field intellects as formidable as they are urbane. All of this is well covered in Wright's book, which, though waywardly organised, is full of vivid incident and well-recounted background. What it almost completely lacks is detailed analysis of the intellectual position of Jesuits, or of their spiritual experience. There is no word of quotation from Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (nor indeed from the Provincial Letters ); there is no account of what it is like to be a Jesuit, of the process by which someone commits himself to such a life, or of the theological or doctrinal issues, the sort of empathetic insight that made Fiona Maddocks's recent Hildegard of Bingen so riveting. Nor, despite some amusing vignettes, are the towering figures of the order brought to life. And although Wright briskly refutes the accusations against the Jesuits, he makes little attempt to understand what fuelled the savage loathing and profound suspicion that has dogged the order virtually from the beginning. The result is a book that is engaging but not illuminating. It also abounds in infelicitous phrases. I suppose the verb to mission - as in "missioning" - is a technical usage, but telling us that the order was "renewed, reformed, rewhatevered" is simply annoying.