Week 66

 

On July 21^st 1773, Pope Clement XIV decreed the suppression of the Society of Jesus, widely regarded at the time as an instrument of the Pope's ingerence in State's affairs, and therefore a largely unwelcome source of influence over those which had progressively grown to be considered internal, national matters – political issues, as we may regard them nowadays, and not religious ones, prerogatives of the State and therefore subordinate to its authority and not to that of the Church.

Now, out of the many things one may try to blame on the Jesuits, the appearance of Fascism in Italy would be (I think) completely unprecedented. There is of course no direct connection between our starting point and the final events we are working our way towards – and I have no intention to suggest an indirect one.

What played nonetheless a relevant role in the rise of Fascism was the sudden appearance and subsequent rapid dissolution of the Partito Popolare Italiano - the Party of the Italian Catholics, albeit not a “confessional” Party of the Church – and relevant as well to the evolution of the Fascist Regime was the attitude of the Church towards the existence of a Catholic Party in Italy, towards the relations between Catholics and the Church and the Italian State and the perspective and modes under which to come to a conciliation, to a satisfactory solution of the Roman question.

It's fair to say that the Catholic Church vastly outlived the Fascist Party, and there are tendencies and themes within its history that operate in a much wider time frame than those of the Italian early XIX Century political world, of modern political parties in general, even of the long lived ones – this friction of different times and perspectives is in itself something that should be taken into account when one analyzes the Church's interaction and approach to political matters. More so, many of those themes played not only a role in the history of the Church, but in the history of the Italian Nation as well; and for this reason, I think it's convenient – if not strictly speaking necessary – to lay the ground with some care in order to better understand not only the future policy of the Regime towards the Church, but also the policy of the Church towards the Italian liberal system, the fascist movement and the Regime.

 

The suppression of the Society of Jesus with the breve - the Pontiff's brief letter, less “formal” than a proper bull - Dominus ac Redemptor was the culmination of a process of internal tensions that had invested various European nations and affected their relations with the Roman Church (to a larger and larger degree) during the second half of the XVIII Century, as the dominating forces within each State attempted to expand the control of the State over the various functions of society; a process that could not take place without reworking the role of the Church in their national societies, and which entailed, if not necessarily a restriction, at least a subordination of the Church's religious presence, destined to generate friction between the early forms of “modern” administration, the local churches and the Holy See, and especially, for obvious reasons, in those countries which had not already been touched by some form of “national” revision of the relations between State and Religion.

Such revision and expansion of the State's administration worked in the direction of abandoning the strong compenetration of political and religious power that had marked – I won't say feudal society, but many of the institutes that constituted the fabric of society and authority during the previous centuries, especially within the Catholic countries, and perhaps (albeit under different fashions) within the Italian States, where the process of regularization of feudal institutes has taken place somewhat belatedly in comparison to other European nations. The political and religious doctrines of enlightenment, a distinction I am making but which is significantly modern in itself comparatively speaking, proved good instruments for the affirmation of a “jurisdictionalist” view of the State and Church relations – that is the idea that the State should control and regulate its own “national clergy” and discipline its powers, largely to support its internal needs – by attacking the regressive impact of the Church, with its opposition to scientific progress, to administrative reforms, its damaging political actions, as well as its sectarian obstinacy in promoting superstition and backwardness. In many circumstances these attacks and the concurrent action of the State were paired with an attempt to revoke and suppress various practical privileges of religious institutions and organisms – ranging from the collection of tithes, to the exemption from taxes (within the Italian States, religious orders were still those most favored by the old mortmain customs, as many of those privileges had been expanded through donations and legacies during the XVI and even XVII Century), to the autonomy from State's jurisdiction, to the presence of ecclesiastical courts of law, to the traditional issue of the authority of the Pontiff over internal religious matters and how his proclamations on matters of doctrine as well as religious legislation should affect each State's subjects.

In this context, the suppression of the Society came to represent – with the Jesuits themselves being characterized as both the symbol of this pervasive religious presence and the practical enforcers of these practices of ingerence in State's affairs, as well as the champions of all the clergy's privileges – the success of the jurisdictionalist tendencies over those tendencies that within France and the German States were known broadly as “ultramontanism”, a term which had taken itself a more political meaning during the XVIII Century due to its close association with the anti-Jesuit polemics.

We can find a first evidence of those specific matters of conflict with the State's powers directly in the formulation of the breve. After detailing the policies of his predecessors on the matter of religious Orders and enumerating examples of the Church's authority to suppress them, Clement XIV explained how during the reign of his predecessor Clement XIII

Day by day, louder and louder noise and protestations rose, and the most dangerous seditions, riots, divides and scandals which, weakening, almost to the breaking point, the bounds of Christian charity, had vehemently incensed the souls of the faithful towards particular passions, towards hatred, towards enmity. The damage and the danger had risen to such a point that […] our dearest sons in Christ, the King of France, of Spain, of Portugal, of the Two Sicilies, were forced to expel the members [of the Society] from their Kingdoms, States and Provinces; being persuaded that this was the extreme measure against such evils […]

After a long and thorough investigation, the Pope had then resolved

taken into account the fact that the Society of Jesus could no longer produce those healthy, abundant fruits and benefits it had been constituted for […] we extinguish and suppress the aforementioned Society, and we dissolve and abolish any of its offices, ministries and administrations, houses, schools, colleges, hospices and any other place existing […] its statutes, customs, consuetudes, decrees, constitutions, even if sustained by sworn oath […] Furthermore we declare the authority of the Superior General extinguished, forever and absolutely, […] as well as of any superior of the aforementioned Society, both in spiritual and in temporal matters; we want those jurisdiction and authority to be transferred entirely […] to the local Ordinaries

The members and applicants were allowed to pass to another Order, but could not make use of their previous ranks, nor preach without the consent of the Church's authorities. More so

those of the Society of Jesus who practiced teaching […] either in colleges or schools, are to be removed from the governance, administration and direction of the education process. [...]