The Jesuits, 1534-1921. Thomas J. Campbell

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СКАЧАТЬ be the victims of the same kind of persecution as Canisius and his associates had to undergo. From this difficulty arose the idea of the Collegium Germanicum already referred to, an establishment in Rome under the direction of the Jesuits, to which young Germans distinguished for their intellectual ability and virtue could be sent and trained to be apostles in their native land. It was the Collegium Germanicum that saved to the Faith what was left of Germany and won back much that was lost.

      "The German College at Rome," said a Protestant preacher in 1594 (Nothgedrungene Erinnerungen, Bl. 8), "is a hotbed singularly favorable for developing the worst kind of Jesuitry. Our young Germans are educated there gratuitously; and at the end of their studies they are sent home to restore papistry to its former place and to fight for it with all their might. You find them exercising the ministry in a great number of collegiate churches and parishes. They become the advisers of bishops and even archbishops; and we see these Jesuits under our very eyes defending the Catholic cause with such zeal that we Evangelicals may well ask ourselves in what lands and in what towns such fervent zeal for the beloved Gospel is found among our own party. They seduce so many souls from us that it is too distressing even to enumerate them." Martin Chemnitz, the Protestant theologian, said that if the Jesuits had done nothing but found the German College, they would deserve to be regarded for that one achievement as the most dangerous enemy of Lutheranism. "These young men," said another Protestant controversialist in 1593, "are like their teachers in diabolical cunning, in hypocritical piety, and in the idolatrous practices which they propagate among the people. They preach frequently, pretending to be good Christians, they frequent hospitals and visit the sick at home, all out of a pure hypocrisy saturating the very hides of these wretches. They are again persuading the simple and credulous people to return to their damnable papistry" (Janssen, op. cit., IX, 323, sqq.).

      Echsfeld, Erfurt, Aschaffenburg, Mayence, Coblentz, Trèves, Würzburg, Spires and other places soon felt the effects of the zeal of these students of the Collegium Germanicum. Their manner of life meant hardship and danger of every kind; assaults by degenerate Catholics and infuriated heretics; vigils in miserable huts and pest-laden hospitals, resulting sometimes in sickness and violent death; but "these messengers of the devil," as the preachers called them, kept at their work and soon won back countless numbers of their countrymen to the Faith. Similar establishments also grew up at Braunsberg, Dillingen, Fulda, Munich and Vienna. Representatives of other religious orders entered into the movement and gave it new life and vigor. Janssen (IX, 313) informs us that the foundation of seminaries for poor students also was due to Canisius and his fellow-workers. At their suggestion Albert V founded the Gregorianum at Munich in 1574; and Ingolstadt, Würzburg, Innsbruck, Halle, Gratz and Prague soon had similar establishments. As early as 1559 Canisius assumed the responsibility for two hundred poor students, and by having them live in common was able to supply all their needs. After each of his sermons in the cathedral, he went around among the great personages assembled to hear him, to ask for alms to keep up his establishments. Father Voth, following his example forty years later, collected 1400 florins in a single year for the same purpose.

      The work of regeneration was not restricted to the foundation of ecclesiastical seminaries. Janssen (l.c.) gives us an entire page of the names of colleges taken from the "Litteræ annuæ," in some of which there were nine hundred, one thousand, and even thirteen hundred scholars. Between 1612 and 1625 Germany had one hundred Jesuit colleges. In all of them were established sodalities the members of which besides performing their own religious exercises in the chapel, visited the hospitals, prisons and camps and performed other works of charity and zeal. On their rosters are seen the names of men who attained eminence in Church and State – kings, princes, cardinals, soldiers, scholars, etc. These sodalities had also established intimate relations with similar organizations all over Europe. Naturally, this intense activity aroused the fury of the heretics. Calumnies of every kind were invented; and in 1603 a preacher in 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 СКАЧАТЬ