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While the Jesuits had been banned from more than one country for short periods of time before, in the mid-18th century, after their reputation for financial chicanery and political machination had developed into the full-fledged Black Legend of a clandestine and occult order bent on nothing less than subjugating the world to the Vatican, the tide would finally turn on the Society of Jesus. When it turned, it happened relatively quickly, over the course of only about a decade. It started with a terrible earthquake in Portugal, which in conjunction with the resulting fires and tsunamis killed several tens of thousands in Lisbon and destroyed King Joseph I’s palace. The Jesuits were not blamed for this catastrophe, but they were blamed for an attempt on the king’s life during the aftermath, when the king was living in a tent outside the devastated city. The assassination attempt resulted in a witch hunt focused on the Távora family, relatives of the king’s mistress, whose Jesuit confessor was also implicated in the affair. Within a year of burning the family’s Jesuit confessor at the stake, the king expelled all Jesuits from the territories he controlled. Meanwhile in France, things were also coming to a head. Ever since their brush with being again banned for supposedly plotting regicide in the assassination of the first Bourbon king of France, Henri IV, they had kept their heads down and slowly but surely accumulated wealth and influence while avoiding the teaching of controversial doctrines about tyrannicide. They became the strident orthodox opponents of Jansenists and even triumphed over them in their suppression of the cult at Port-Royal abbey and the persecution of Jansenist clergy under the papal bull Unigenitus, all of which I discussed in detail in my series “The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France.” But Jansenism survived in the underground convulsionnaire movement, and the enemies of the Jesuits, which included the anti-clerical Philosophes and Encyclopédistes of the Enlightenment, would eventually find their opportunity to turn all of France against the Jesuits. In the 18th century, several events provided the pretext they needed. First, Jesuits were accused of swindling an old man named Ambroise Guys out of his fortune in a scandalous court case. Then came the controversial Cadière Affair, when a Jesuit priest named Jean-Baptiste Girard was accused of sexually assaulting and corrupting a young woman, a court case that, as I explained in my patron exclusive “The Stigmatic Maiden and the Wanton Jesuit,” was used by the enemies of Jesuits to argue that all Jesuits were morally bankrupt and a corruptive influence. Finally, in 1757, an unstable man made a lame attempt at assassinating King Louis XV with a penknife, and even though the assassin appeared to be angry that French Catholic clergy were not providing the holy sacraments to Jansenists, anti-Jesuits linked him to the Society of Jesus because he worked as a servant in a Jesuit college. Following Portugal’s lead a few years later, these incidents, as well as the litany of sins attributed to the order by their Black Legend, served as the ammunition their enemies in government needed to dissolve the society in France and banish any Jesuit who would not renounce the order. In Spain, King Charles III was somewhat disposed to favor the Jesuits. However, after a law forbidding the wearing of long cloaks and broad-brimmed hats touched off a mob revolt in Madrid, rumor had it that the Jesuits had orchestrated it as a coup, despite—or more accurately because of—the fact that Jesuit priests were the ones who talked the mob down. As difficult to confirm as the truth behind the rumors of Jesuit riot incitement is the tale that anti-Jesuits who had already driven the order from France and Portugal convinced King Charles III of Spain to suppress them by forging a letter to make it seem like the Superior General of the Jesuits was claiming Charles was illegitimate. No matter the truth of Charles III’s motivations, another huge domino had fallen, and in 1767, the Jesuits were expelled from Spain and all of her colonial territories in the Americas. Pope Clement XIV, reading the room after the expulsion of the Jesuits from so many European countries and their extended empires overseas, finally ordered the abolishment of the Society of Jesus once and for all. It was a true sea change, a dramatic change of fortune for the most influential arm of the Catholic Church and a severe blow to papal power generally. Thus the fact that within fifty years the Jesuits would return and reaccumulate the influence and wealth that had been taken from them cemented forever the notion that the Jesuits were a nefarious and scheming cabal that had never been defeated and had only gone dark until such time as it could rise again to power.

Pope Clement XIV who officially suppressed the Jesuits after their expulsion from many European nations. Public Domain.

Before we can discuss the resurrection of the Jesuits decades after their papal suppression, it is important to clarify that the Jesuits did not disappear. Many, it is true, became refugees in Italy when they were expelled from other European countries, while some renounced their vows and were permitted to remain. In Prussia, Frederick the Great at first resisted the papal suppression, and in the United States Jesuits continued establishing schools and instructing students. In Russia, Catherine the Great defied the order’s suppression and encouraged their continued operation, even eventually obtaining papal approval of the continued existence of the Society of Jesus in Imperial Russia. But for the most part, the order had been extirpated in Europe. Still, this did not curtail the suspicion that Jesuits remained lurking among the clergy and the laypeople, hiding in plain sight, manipulating the political situation and waiting until the optimal moment to strike. In England, despite—or perhaps because of—their long history of Catholic persecution and anti-Catholic hysteria, sentiment began to swing more toward toleration among the middle and upper classes in the late 1770s, and legislation was passed to reduce some of the penalties previously enacted against papists. However, rumors still ran rampant, including the claims that an army of Jesuits was gathering in tunnels beneath London, planting explosives in a plot to detonate the banks of the River Thames and flood the city. The passage of legislation that many believed would make England a gathering place for Jesuits and enable their treasonous plotting led to the most destructive mob rampage in English history, the Gordon Riots. Throughout the long history of anti-Jesuitism and anti-Catholicism generally in England, the Catholics were viewed as a Fifth Column, a population working together, in concert and secrecy, to achieve the goals of the country’s enemy, the Pope. This is the doctrine at the heart of Jesuit conspiracy theories, even today. A more precise term for this loyalty not to one’s own country but to a foreign religious authority is Ultramontanism. It is derived from a medieval ecclesiastical term, papa ultramontano, referring to a pope elected from outside of Italy, beyond the Alps. However, it later became a term referring to those whose loyalty belonged only to the man beyond the mountains, the supreme pontiff, the Pope. Eventually, ultramontanism would come to describe not only religious faith and political leanings, but a more defined political movement favoring a return to theocracy, a movement closely associated, in the minds of anti-Jesuits, with the Society of Jesus.

Before counter-revolution would have to come the revolution itself. Anti-clericalism was a major component of the French Revolution. The revolutionary regime declared that all clergymen would have to swear allegiance to their National Constituent Assembly, and clerics who resisted were locked up or exiled. Persecution of Catholics increased, to the point that women would be caught on their way to Mass and assaulted in the streets. This evolved into an organized dechristianization program, in which revolutionaries established a non-religious Cult of Reason to replace the Church, and seized churches to convert them into Temples of Reason. During the Reign of Terror, tens of thousands of clergy were exiled and hundreds executed using the guillotine, a contraption, ironically, invented by a former Jesuit. This was the era in which the left-right spectrum of politics was conceived, as I spoke about in part one, and as those on the right began to formulate their paranoid view of current events, seeing secret societies at work everywhere, so too did those on the left take a paranoid view of politics. The Reign of Terror in France was perhaps the worst outgrowth of the paranoid style of politics, with the mistrust of a conspiratorial enemy becoming institutionalized and resulting in the campaign of murder. Revolutionaries saw conspiracies to overturn their new political order everywhere, and during the Terror, it was considered a civic duty to accuse any you suspected of conspiring against the Revolution. It was claimed one hero of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, especially disliked the Catholic Church because the Jesuits had supposedly ruined his family financially. During the French Revolutionary Wars, as Napoleon ostensibly fought to spread the ideals of the Revolution, Pope Pius VI opposed its spread and even considered restoring the Society of Jesus as a counterforce to the Revolution. Pius VI would die while imprisoned by Napoleon’s invading forces. The restoration of the order would fall to his successor, Pope Pius VII, who struggled continually against Napoleon after his seizure of power and establishment of a military dictatorship. After surviving his own imprisonment by Napoleon, Pius VII promptly issued a bull authorizing the reestablishment of the Jesuit order in all nations, believing the Society of Jesus to be the most effective bulwark against the forces of revolution. Many who were pushing for the restoration of the Jesuits appear to have believed the conspiracy theories of Abbé Barruel that the forces of revolution were orchestrated by secret societies like the Masons and the Illuminati, so it is tempting to suggest that their belief in the Jesuits as the best defense against them confirms the notion of the Jesuits as a similarly conspiratorial order, but just because some of their proponents believed this about them doesn’t mean this is what they believed about themselves. And it must be remembered that the chief ministry of the Jesuits was education, and one prong of the supposed conspiracy believed to have fomented the French Revolution was the godless Enlightenment philosophy spread by philosophes. In other words, it may have just been Jesuit education that was viewed as the best defense against revolutionary ideology.

Pope Pius VII, who restored the Jesuits after his imprisonment by Napoleon Bonaparte. Public Domain.

The restoration of the Jesuit order coincided with the fall of Napoleon and the beginning of the Bourbon Restoration period of French history, during which the brothers of the king executed during the Revolution, Louis XVI, took back the French throne as a constitutional monarchy. This period was marked by a struggle between the supporters of the Revolution and the forces of counter-revolution, with the principal political questions being what revolutionary reforms should be retained and what aspects of the Old Regime should be restored. Under the first Restoration Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII, a variety of political factions emerged. Those on the far left, calling themselves Republicans and Socialists, and liberals of the center-left pushing to keep or restore democratic reforms of the French Revolution and resist any movement toward absolutist monarchy or theocracy. On the center-right, favoring the balance of monarchical power and the parliamentarism set forth in the new Royal Charter, were the so-called Doctrinaires, and on the far right were the Ultra-royalists, among whom were counted Ultramontanes, who would have liked to do away with revolutionary reforms altogether and restore entirely the old political and social order, the Ancien Régime. It was during this period that those on the Left resurrected the Black Legend of the Jesuits as a kind of whataboutism. When it was argued by the Right that the politics of the Left seemed to lead inexorably to bloodshed and regicide, those on the Left protested by raising the age-old specter of Jesuitical regicide, suggesting that it was the Jesuits and their Ultramontane political allies who were the real threat to the new Bourbon monarch, just as they had been to the very first Bourbon Monarch, Henri IV. Pointing fingers at a supposed Jesuit conspiracy behind Ultramontane politics was also a simple retort to accusations that Liberals were the front for an Illuminist conspiracy. In fact, this equivalence even led some to suggest that they might have been one and the same conspiracy, acting under different guises through different sorts of agents to accomplish the same goal of overthrowing power structures and seizing control. The growth of anti-Jesuitism on the Left in this time represented concerns about the influence and success of Ultra-royalism and Ultramontanism and the counter-revolution’s efforts to roll back democratic institutions. Therefore, when the elections of early 1824 resulted in a conservative, Ultra-royalist government, and a new monarch, Charles X, favorable to Ultramontane politics, acceded to the throne, and together they passed a spate of conservative new laws, the Liberal presses began to sound the alarm that Jesuits were no longer an underground threat but rather had seized power and become a tyrannical regime.

During the reign of Charles the X, the paranoid anti-Jesuit rhetoric of some on the Left was transformed by Liberal newspapers into a public outcry. Claims of a secret conspiracy appeared to be confirmed by the revelation that a secret society composed principally of Catholics called the Chevaliers de la Foi, or Knights of the Faith, had played a significant role in achieving the recent Ultramontane domination of the government, and that many of the Knights of the Faith had been involved with La Congrégation, or the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin, a lay religious association founded in Rome by a Jesuit professor. These facts were transformed by the anti-Jesuit press into a vast conspiracy of lay people who were supposedly secretly beholden to the Society of Jesus. The term “the Congregation” became the watchword of every conspiracy-minded polemicist, used to accuse any member of government or public official who could not be concretely tied to the Jesuits through known associations, regardless of whether they had ever actually been associated with the charitable Roman association or the Ultra-royalist Knights of the Faith. If someone acted against the democratic principles of the Revolution or enacted any ultra-royalist program, they were branded a member of the Congregation, a secret servant of the Jesuit conspiracy. The term became as loosely and frequently cast about during those years as the term Deep State is carelessly flung today by conspiracists on the Right. This rhetoric, which argued that the entire government was just a front for the Jesuits, only quieted for a time after Liberals were successful in getting the government to forbid Jesuit education just to appease them. However, the conspiracy claims peaked again after Ultra-royalist Jules de Polignac, a man supposedly known to be a member of the Congregation and thus a servant of Jesuits, rose to the position of Prime Minister. The Liberal press kicked their conspiracy-mongering into high gear again, reporting on an unsubstantiated rumor spread by a German naturalist who claimed to have overheard a secret Jesuit meeting at a traveler’s hostel in the Alps at which the members of the order indicated that their man in France, Polignac, would help them enact their final counter-revolution through another violent reign of terror. Thereafter, when Polignac enacted a series of repressive and anti-democratic ordinances in July 1830, suspending the freedom of the press, dissolving the government, and limiting the franchise before arranging a new election, the conspiracy rumor seemed confirmed. The result was the July Revolution, three days during which Jesuits were widely persecuted and King Charles X and his Ultra-royalist government were overthrown, resulting in the July Monarchy, which saw the Royal Charter of 1814 revised to establish a “Citizen King” rather than a kingship by divine right.

A romanticized depiction of the July Revolution, which in many ways was precipitated by conspiracy theories about Jesuits. Public Domain.

The struggle between Revolution and counter-revolution continued to be waged through the Revolutions of 1848 and beyond, and the specter of the Jesuits was raised again and again to characterize ultramontanist and monarchist politics. And this culture war spread across the Atlantic, to America, which had long been kept out of such controversies. Perhaps this was a result of our founding principle of religious tolerance, or perhaps because Catholics, and even specifically Jesuits, had proven themselves patriots in the American Revolution. While it is true that some Founding Fathers, specifically John Adams, were known to have harbored suspicions about the Jesuits and the spread of Roman Catholicism in America (as they might resent the influence of any European power in the young republic), among their cosignatories on the Declaration of Independence was a Jesuit-educated Catholic named Charles Carroll, whose Jesuit priest cousin, John Carroll, would become the first Bishop and Archbishop of the United States during the period of the order’s suppression. John Carroll was a champion of republican ideals, but after the restoration of the order, an influx of European Jesuits and lay Catholic immigrants brought ultramontanist attitudes that would eventually lead to the 19th century anti-Catholic conspiracy theories I have already spoken about in various episodes. In 1834, mobs destroyed the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1835, Samuel Morse’s Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States was published, and the following year, The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk became the most widely read book in the country, perpetrating a hoax that would deal lasting harm to the image of Catholics in America. The 1840s saw nativist riots and anti-immigrant violence, and the 1850s brought the founding of the nativist Know-Nothing political party by a secret society called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner. This party’s candidates regularly accused their political rivals of being crypto-Catholics, raising fears of the election of an American President who might be the puppet of the Man Beyond the Mountains.

Then came the US Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and after the capture of assassin John Wilkes Booth, it came out that there was a Catholic connection. Booth and his co-conspirators apparently met to plan the assassination at a boarding house owned by the Catholic Mary Surratt, who let rooms mostly to Catholic boarders. Her son John, a conspirator in the assassination, afterward escaped to seek refuge in a Montreal rectory and was helped to join the Papal Zouave, a kind of Catholic Foreign Legion, under a false name. This discovery led to conspiracy theories that the whole plot had been yet another example of Jesuit assassination. The more investigators looked for Catholic connections, the more they saw them, for a Catholic doctor had set Booth’s leg, broken when he had leapt to the stage after shooting Lincoln, and Catholic priests acted as character witnesses for Mary Surratt. But of course, to a less conspiracy-addled mind, none of this proves anything. Naturally Catholic priests witnessed on behalf of their parishioner. The Catholic doctor’s part in the plot remains unclear; he was convicted for conspiracy in a murder mainly because he didn’t report Booth’s injury for a day, but the fact remains he did report it, and eventually he received a Presidential pardon. But even if he was complicit in the assassination, there is nothing to suggest his religion was a motivating factor. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the priests in Montreal who helped John Surratt knew what he had done, and when he was recognized while serving in the Papal Zouave, he wasn’t protected but rather had to flee through sewers to avoid arrest. In the end, though this further stirred up Jesuit conspiracy claims in America, there is no evidence that Catholicism had anything to do with their reasons for murdering Lincoln, and certainly none that a single actual Jesuit was involved. The entire conspiracy theory appears to have been single-handedly cooked up by Charles Chiniquy, a former Catholic priest turned anti-Catholic nativist conspiracy monger, whose credibility we might logically question.

A newspaper drawing of Mary Surratt receiving comfort from one of the priests permitted to visit her in her prison cell. Public Domain.

Within a few years of Lincoln’s assassination, Pope Pius IX gave many who feared the influence of the Man Beyond the Mountains legitimate cause for concern when at the First Vatican Council he moved to dogmatize the doctrine of papal infallibility. This sparked Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, or cultural struggle, and the expulsion of Jesuits in some German states, such as Bavaria, as I recently discussed in my series on Ludwig II. And as I explained in my patron bonus episode, the Myth of the Iron Chancellor, Bismarckian politics would later be exploited by Hitler, who espoused anti-clerical rhetoric as well, partly because of his affinity for neopaganism, as discussed in my series on Nazi occultism. Unsurprisingly, given Hitler’s tendency to see enemies conspiring everywhere, he particularly hated the Jesuits. Conspiracy theories about the Society of Jesus, while originating from leftist rhetoric, had always appealed to some on the right, for many royalists in the 19th century also feared their reputation for regicide, but in Nazi Germany, it was taken to new levels. Jesuits were interned alongside Jews in the priest barracks of concentration camps like Dachau, and many died. They have been persecuted alongside the Jews and accused of the same sort of far-reaching world domination plots. They were the counterpart to the fabled Illuminati, said to use the same methods of intrigue and terror to achieve similar ends. They have even been likened to the Knights Templar as a secretive militaristic religious society that had gathered wealth before being suppressed, and surviving their suppression. So in the modern era, the Jesuits have entered the realm of elite conspiracy lore, mentioned breathlessly as being one and the same as the Knights Templar, the Illuminati, and the Jewish World Conspiracy. Look to the insane ramblings of one such as Eric Jon Phelps, whose website and book Vatican Assassins blames just about everything on the Jesuits. The Holocaust was their fault, he’ll say, despite the fact that Jesuits died in camps alongside Jews. They killed JFK, he’ll claim, even though JFK was our first Catholic president. They run Hollywood and the international banking system. And they even have underground military bases in which they perform genetic experiments, creating a class of hybrid creatures to pilot their antigravity aircraft—that’s right, the Gray aliens and their UFOs are also the work of the Society of Jesus. Surely Phelps lost his mind, what little of it he had left, when in 2013 a Jesuit priest was for the first time elected pope. It is hard to logically reconcile the idea of a Jesuit conspiracy bent on world domination and a return to theocratic rule with the moderating influence that Pope Francis has proven to be, or to reason why it took such a supposedly all-powerful order nearly 500 years to put one of its own into the most powerful position in the church. But then, conspiracy theorists don’t typically rely much on logic and reason, and have no problem accommodating such cognitive dissonance.

The Rise and Fall of the Society of Jesus: Part Two - The Man Beyond the Mountains

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