The eighteenth century is commonly regarded as a time of sullying splendour for Catholic religious institutes. The troubles and unpopularity of just one – the Society of Jesus – have few equivalents: expelled from a series of European realms, it was universally suppressed by the papacy in 1773. For contemporaries, the Jesuit model of priesthood became a legitimate target because it was alleged to encourage numerous worldly tendencies.Footnote 1 Other observers – witnesses and scholars alike – have since linked the Jesuits’ collapse with the ‘reign of philosophy’ and secularised religion.Footnote 2 Cast this way, the destruction of the Jesuit model of priesthood represented the first triumph of the Enlightenment in Europe. Yet focus on one maligned order overlooks the continuing vitality of alternative models of Catholic corporate life. The Jesuits were indeed rejected by many rulers, but other clergy came into vogue. Little is known about these men, nominated as successors to the Jesuits.
Few of the European rulers who commenced official assaults on the Society of Jesus in the eighteenth century reflected long on what would replace it. Indeed, in many European localities replacements depended on local factors. In La Rochelle in France, for example, the townspeople found it almost impossible to find suitable replacements at their former Jesuit college: all the local religious orders and secular priests declined to take over their roles.Footnote 3 Other localities were more accommodating, allowing former Jesuits to stay on and teach, as happened in Freiburg, Lucerne and Soleure.Footnote 4 And in still other sites the need to find Jesuit successors became pressing and successors were willing. In such domains, Franciscans, Dominicans, Benedictines as well as secular clergy all benefited from the fall of the Jesuits.Footnote 5 But one organisation, the Congregation of the Mission (commonly called Lazarists or Vincentians), received an especially prestigious portfolio of ex-Jesuit properties. Inheriting five seminaries in France formerly run by Jesuits, one renowned Jesuit university in Évora (Portugal) and two posts in Lithuania, the Congregation was also offered twelve establishments in the Levant and the Greek Archipelago, including Constantinople and Smyrna (Izmir), as well as the islands of Naxos, Chios, Tinos, Syros, Santorini and Salonica. It then took on responsibilities for Syrian bases in Aleppo, Antoura and Damascus. Simultaneously the Lazarists embraced nine establishments in Italian cities, including in Rome, Bologna and Turin, as well as taking over all the Jesuit establishments in the Electoral Palatinate. Finally, they inherited the former possessions of the Jesuits in China (the Peking mission, 1783) and three former Jesuit colleges in Goa, India (1781–6).
The details of these transfers provide plenty of grist for the historian. It may safely be argued that the European and global events that gave rise to the universal suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, as well as the process of suppression in various realms, are well covered topics.Footnote 6 However, current scholarship delves far less adequately into the longer-term consequences of the disappearance of the Jesuits.Footnote 7 One aspect of the aftershocks – the question of Jesuit successors – rightfully takes its place in discussions of what Salvador Albert christens the ‘continuity of jesuitism’ post-1759, and is itself related to two additional research subjects.Footnote 8 The first is the survival of the Jesuit ethos, which has increasingly garnered interest from historians. Paolo Bianchini's edited collection focuses on processes of survival within various branches of the Society throughout Europe, and the contributors’ recognition that the suppression was not a neatly book-ended event, but instead a process of many phases, is an instructive lesson for students of the Jesuits’ successors.Footnote 9 More global than Bianchini's is the collection by Jonathan Wright and Robert A. Maryks, which demonstrates how Jesuits endeavoured to keep the Ignatian spirit alive in places as far afield as Mexico and Russia, eventually working towards the order's restoration in 1814.Footnote 10 This global perspective serves as a useful reminder that, because the health of the Society's operations usually depended on local conditions and political happenstances in very different states, the multi-phase process of dissolution was nowhere the same. Indeed, keeping the Jesuit ethos alive unleashed highly creative forces. Eva Castelli, in her recent study of the Company of the Faith of Jesus (founded in 1797) highlights some of the innovative processes involved in preserving Jesuit cultural and spiritual patrimony. These processes were often led by other clergy and religious, some of whom founded new religious institutes to continue the Jesuit charism. However, the embryonic Company of the Faith of Jesus was aborted in 1808, demonstrating that while European crowned heads allowed for some degree of transfer to other priests, efforts to preserve the Jesuits’ legacy or succeed them in their functions were often short-lived.Footnote 11
A related theme is the preservation of Jesuit physical patrimony after suppression, a vast site of investigation whose black boxes have yet to yield their secrets. For example, the voluminous collection edited by John O'Malley contains seven essays on the suppression, but only Richard Clay's article delves into its patrimonial legacies, in his case the distribution and conveyance of the Society's buildings and historical artefacts.Footnote 12 Clay's piece usefully highlights the careful steps taken and calculations made after the suppression of the Jesuits in France, yet his main focus is the survival of visual representations in a single building – the Maison Professe on the rue Sainte Antoine in Paris.Footnote 13 In this respect, both the collection by Burson and Wright and the volume edited by Maryks and Wright are stronger, for the few discussions of Jesuit property that they contain are occasionally linked to the question of the patrimony's new custodians. In the former group, Maurice Whitehead illustrates his essay on the Guarani reductions in Paraguay with a statistical table on the Franciscans, Dominicans and Mercedarians who replaced the Jesuits after 1768, yet extended discussion of this topic is missing. Likewise, in his detailed analysis of the process of dissolution in Savoy, Christopher Storrs points to the afterlife of Jesuit establishments in Turin and Mondovi, but he mentions the Lazarist successors there only in passing.Footnote 14 The Lazarists as successors receive similarly cursory attention in Ronnie Po-chia Hsia's essay in the Maryks and Wright volume on the destination of Jesuit property in Peking, confirming the general trend.Footnote 15 Focus to date tends to be on the departing Jesuit communities, and not on providing a sustained study of either their successors’ internal reactions or their subsequent administration.
For a number of reasons, the Lazarist succession offers a solid vehicle in which to cross this terrain. Yet, at first sight, the similarities between their Congregation and the Society of Jesus suggests that the succession was unremarkable. After all, both were missionary institutes created out of the Catholic Reform's agenda of renewal in the face of Protestant threats and church abuses. Canonically approved in 1540, the Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius of Loyola and several companions with the core objective ‘to help souls’ through their myriad ministries.Footnote 16 Originally conceived as a travelling order of preachers and catechists, the Society soon achieved dominance in other fields, especially education. At the time of its suppression in 1773, the Society ran 669 colleges in Europe, Asia and the Americas.Footnote 17 The Lazarists were similarly versatile. Vincent de Paul founded the Congregation in 1625 to devote itself ‘entirely and exclusively to the salvation of the poor country people’ through missions, but it too expanded into education, later becoming one of the dominant forces in seminary management in Europe. In ancien régime France alone, for instance, the Congregation administered forty-nine major diocesan seminaries.Footnote 18
Yet demonstrable differences – not similarities – were crucial in the search for a replacement for the Jesuits. It was the Jesuits’ very versatility that lay behind eighteenth-century accusations that their many worldly avocations had made them too bold and powerful. In contrast, the secret to the Lazarists’ succession lay in their distinct model of priesthood, which emphasised discretion and humility. It was this that first brought them to the attention of the French monarchy. To prepare the way for their succession in multiple European realms, the Lazarists needed to convince other rulers of these virtues and build the kind of trust that would further distinguish them from the Jesuits. But a rise in their international standing would not guarantee a smooth succession, for the process imposed heavy organisational challenges on the smaller Congregation of the Mission. Exact figures are hard to produce, but one estimate of Jesuit statistics in 1773 suggests a priestly membership of 11, 415.Footnote 19 In 1789 the Lazarists’ membership hovered around just 800 in eleven provinces, a disparity which points to the first organisational problem: did the Lazarists have the human resources to fill the Jesuits’ sizeable shoes?Footnote 20 Given the sheer diversity of the arrangements made for the Lazarists’ succession, adequate funding for their new portfolio became the other major internal issue. After all, securing an enduring succession entailed burdensome responsibilities, including dealing with Jesuit debts, ensuring a long-term income from ex-Jesuit patrimony and even managing ex-Jesuits. The challenges posed to manpower and resources therefore had the potential seriously to affect the succession.
Of course, the Lazarist successions offer insights which go beyond these practical questions. Precisely because the Lazarists were invested with an ethos highly distinctive from that of the Jesuits, their nomination offers another perspective on the fate of Catholic religious agents in the latter half of the eighteenth century. More pointedly, it demonstrates that, even though European monarchs emphatically rejected the Jesuits’ model of priesthood, their widespread endorsement of the Lazarists suggests that Catholicism remained highly adaptable even in an era of sharpening anticlericalism. However, the Lazarists’ tenure as successors was soon interrupted by momentous events which were in many ways beyond the control of the dynastic monarchs who had patronised them. In the final analysis, the encroaching secularisation of the European landscape, war and the campaigns to restore the Society all endangered the Lazarist succession.
I
The Jesuit suppressions are often understood as a rupture, but they also triggered a process of re-balancing in favour of other models of Catholic priesthood. From 1759 onwards, key European rulers judged that the Jesuit model had lost all its virtue, and thereafter sought alternatives among other religious. Before moving to that story, however, a brief reminder of the Jesuits’ own ethos and pre-suppression troubles is in order.
Starting with Ignatius of Loyola's original intention to live ‘in a state of preaching in poverty’, a broad body of scholars has searched for the defining symbols of the Jesuits’ way of proceeding as it took shape after their approval by the papacy in 1540.Footnote 21 Some have located it even before this date, chiefly in key texts of Jesuit spirituality, such as the Spiritual Exercises. As a means of promoting virtue in its practitioners, the Ignatian Exercises became mandatory for new Jesuits and thereafter constituted a tool uniquely characteristic of their common life and labour.Footnote 22 Other pronounced features emerged as the Jesuits’ esprit de corps became codified in prescriptive literature. For example, the mandates found in the Formula and Constitutions, establishing the Society's unusually tight leadership structure and stringent formative regime, shaped their internal operations and government, creating what one commentator has called their especially ‘high level of group coherence and loyalty’.Footnote 23 Lastly, core Jesuit ministries were also highly emblematic of their group values. Above all, the soon-flourishing Jesuit schools became intrinsically linked to the objectives of their ethos, promoting not simply their renowned adherence to humanist education but acting as hubs for their booming works of mercy.Footnote 24
The Jesuits’ way of proceeding therefore produced novelties in the spiritual, organisational and ministerial domains. John O'Malley highlights another extremely significant one: a ‘plasticity’ in their praxis which produced many unforeseen roles.Footnote 25 For instance, attention-grabbing Jesuit ministries, such as the care of former prostitutes begun in 1543 at the Casa Sancta Martha in Rome, were nowhere mentioned in their foundation documents. However, broad references to corporal works had at least featured prominently in the original Formula; few would therefore contend that its short list of consueta ministeria was ever meant to be exclusive. More tellingly, the Jesuits’ elastic ethos produced other duties – especially those that cultivated intimacy with secular powers – which clearly strayed from their original ken. By the opening of the seventeenth century, Jesuits were highly represented as confessors to Catholic royalty in Europe, and these were offices which brought them into close contact with temporal rulers.Footnote 26 On just one imperial stage, Dauril Alden has unveiled another set of deeply mixed Jesuit roles, from their service as diplomats, custodians of armaments, and even minters of currency in the Portuguese dominions, to their setting of policy in their colonial mission lands.Footnote 27 Of course, these roles may have simply represented an enthusiastic extension of Ignatius’ prior command ‘to retain the benevolence … of noble and powerful persons’, but they nevertheless were at the root of significant criticism in the suppression era.Footnote 28
At bottom, judgements made against the Jesuits in the eighteenth century bore on the conviction that their more worldly roles had led to deviancy, making them incompatible with the commonweal. Woes began in South America, when decades-old criticism of the Jesuits by Spanish and Portuguese settlers – often fuelled by jealousy of their properties and independence – reached fever pitch in the 1750s, with colonial despatches accusing them of consistently thwarting civil instructions to protect their allegedly vast wealth.Footnote 29 Subsequent accusations that they acted as spiritual confederates of those who attempted an assassination of King José i on 3 September 1758 sealed their fate; they were expelled from Portugal a year later.Footnote 30 In the same decade, damning evidence of Jesuit profiteering emerged in the French realms when the financial transactions of Antoine Lavalette in Martinique came to the attention of his Jesuit superiors and the commercial courts in Paris.Footnote 31 In the words of one historian, Lavalette's misdemeanours were the Jesuits’ ‘Achilles case’, but his bankruptcy stoked a cauldron already hot from anti-Jesuit sentiment produced by an array of adversaries, including Jansenists, parlementaires and the press.Footnote 32 Louis xv finally yielded to the will of his parlements and banned the order in 1764, but the campaign against the Jesuits spread further. By the end of the 1760s the rulers of Spain, Naples and Parma had similarly banished the followers of St Ignatius.Footnote 33
Much of this history has been narrated, but the suppression edicts remain largely unparsed for the doors that they left open to superior forms of clerical sanctity. Contrasting them with ‘all the other Regular orders’ who had ‘always maintained themselves in laudable and exemplary observance’, the king of Portugal in 1759 acted against the Jesuits because they were judged ‘corrupt’ and ‘deplorably alienated from their holy institute’.Footnote 34 In 1762 the Paris parlement similarly invoked theologically-infused language, saying that the Jesuit model did not ‘aspire truly and solely to evangelical perfection’ but was a ‘political body’ geared to usurp power.Footnote 35 Of course, this negative Jesuit ‘mystique’ was built largely on myth and legend, a point convincingly argued by A. Lynn Martin.Footnote 36 Yet, whether real or imaginary, claims that the Jesuits had fallen away from their ‘holy institute’ are the key to the Lazarists’ perceived suitability as successors. Starting with the Bourbons, rulers and patrons throughout Europe steadily deemed them worthier aspirants to ‘evangelical perfection’. Core elements of their ethos – humility and discretion – allowed them to build relationships of trust which made their Congregation ideally suited to take over from the Jesuits.
II
A discussion of the Lazarists’ ethos must begin with their founder Vincent de Paul. Hailed as one of the most influential churchmen of his time, de Paul imbued his Congregation with a distinctive ethos that emphasised its separation from other ecclesiastical groupings. In the Common Rules that he prepared for the Lazarists in 1658, he insisted that his Congregation be a ‘little Company’ of humble missionaries, who were commanded to avoid ‘uncurbed ambition’, ‘appointments of distinction’ and ‘the false glamour of superficial fame’.Footnote 37 At a time when the Jesuits occupied influential roles at the French court and publicised their widely-read colonial adventures, it is plain from these Rules that he did not wish his missionaries to become like them.Footnote 38 But beyond this rhetoric lay more concrete differences between the two organisations. In training, Jesuits regularly spent up to ten years in academic study, while Lazarists destined for ministry often went straight into missionary work after a novitiate of just two years.Footnote 39 Yet, if sometimes unfairly denigrated as inferior, the Lazarists’ modest formation was in complete accord with de Paul's design. Because they were geared mainly towards ministries among the rural poor, de Paul had determined that the Lazarists required a programme of study narrowly tailored to acquiring common virtues – such as humility and simplicity – rather than what he called ‘lofty insights’.Footnote 40 This focused pastoral vision also meant that, for much of their early history, they did not share the Jesuits’ global footprint; although they were sent to Ireland, Scotland and North Africa, for the first forty years of their existence the Lazarists’ sole colonial venture was the mission to Madagascar, which ended in spectacular failure in 1671.Footnote 41
The Lazarists soon ascended from the ‘dregs’ to higher precincts, but this is a complex tale that cannot be fully recited here.Footnote 42 For the purposes of tracing their inheritance of former Jesuit properties, it suffices to begin with their relationship with the French monarchy. In their early history, the Lazarists’ prominence in France owed much to the virtuous renown of their founder and the distinct ethos that he devised. Alison Forrestal has uncovered the ways in which, during the period between his ordination in 1600 and his death in 1660, Vincent de Paul's studious cultivation of virtue, especially humility, helped him to promote his agenda of ecclesiastical reform in Europe. Crucially, his humility attracted many supporters, for it conferred a purity on his intentions which convinced many well-placed patrons, including Louis xiii, aristocrats and bishops, to back him.Footnote 43 His heirs then drew further dividends from this strategy. Early on in his personal reign, Louis xiii’s son Louis xiv was persuaded by his mother Anne of Austria to appoint Lazarists as parish priests in Fontainebleau in 1661, then at Versailles in 1672. Unlike the Jesuits, who exercised powerful advisory roles as confessors, the ‘sons of Monsieur Vincent’ – as they were often known – were appointed to conduct missions and dispense charity on the royal estates, and their distinctive services set them apart in a clerical universe which was already crowded by ambitious bishops and religious institutes (such as the Oratorians) which had become skilful at disgracing themselves.Footnote 44 Of course, their promotion was not entirely consensual: the Lazarists’ superior general told Anne of Austria in 1664 that ‘poor village priests are hardly appropriate for the court’.Footnote 45 However, this humility only increased their credit with the Bourbon dynasty, which remained a devotee of de Paul's cult right up to 1791. For example, Louis xv continued the trend set by his forebears by appointing Lazarists as parish priests of Versailles’ second parish in 1727 and then chaplains of his École Militaire in 1753.Footnote 46 By the time of the French Revolution, the Congregation possessed seventy-nine houses in France alone, many sponsored directly by the monarchy.Footnote 47
Success in one European court smoothed the way in others. The states of Italy were among the first countries outside France where the Congregation built further on its good reputation. Since de Paul's time, the Lazarists had established a distinguished pedigree, particularly in Rome, where successive popes came to admire their virtue. From 1642 the Lazarists had been giving retreats to members of the Roman clergy before ordination, a service which became so prized that Alexander vii published a bull in 1659 requiring all Roman clergy to attend the retreats before taking orders.Footnote 48 Moreover, the benefits of the Lazarists’ popular missions drove the opening of new Italian houses in the seventeenth century. Five were founded in the Papal States alone, including mission bases in Perugia (1680), Macerata (1686) and Ferrara (1697), with seven founded elsewhere in the peninsula, including Pavia in the duchy of Milan (1682) and Florence in Tuscany (1703).Footnote 49 In the first half of the eighteenth century, esteem for the Lazarists was further bolstered by de Paul's beatification and canonisation processes (1697–1737), causes which allowed the Congregation to showcase de Paul's virtue and, indirectly, their own record of pious pursuits with the Roman authorities.Footnote 50 And they simultaneously harvested the fruits of their enhanced profile in the Roman see. For instance, Pope Innocent xii assigned to them the lucrative Roman abbey of Giovanni e Paolo in 1697, and in 1705 Clement xi invited the Congregation to direct a new establishment, the Academy of Noble Ecclesiastics, a Roman seminary which later trained the papal diplomatic corps.Footnote 51 The Congregation maintained the directorship of this institute until 1739.Footnote 52
In Portugal, the Lazarists’ beginnings were similarly rooted in their pious record. Negotiations for their establishment began in Rome, when the superior of the Roman house persuaded the pope to intervene on their behalf with the Portuguese crown. Approving their foundation in 1714, João v admitted that he was doing so because Pope Clement xi – by this stage a Lazarist devotee too – wished to encourage the spread of the Congregation due to the ‘great spiritual benefits that the exercise of its functions produces’. Moreover, he had taken notice of the testimony of ‘many princes and illustrious persons’ who had already vouched for the Congregation's ‘utility’ to the pope during de Paul's beatification process.Footnote 53 Thereafter, the Congregation steadily built up its reputation and favour with the monarchy. In 1719 the superior general boasted that the Lisbon house ‘was well-desired by the king, who has honoured it with his presence at the divine offices’ and in 1724 he blushed at the king's ‘great bounty and a truly paternal affection’.Footnote 54 As in France, the monarchy's munificence endured. Later in his reign, in 1742, the king generously endowed the Congregation with additional royal funds, and in 1743 the superior general reported that the king ‘has newly bought a vast allotment in order to build lodgements more proportionate to the object of his foundation’.Footnote 55 The reasons for the Portuguese monarchy's close sponsorship of the Lazarists remain largely unexplored, but it is clear that the weight of Vincent de Paul's cult was a compelling factor. For example, after de Paul's canonisation in 1737, the royal family visited the Lazarists’ house in Lisbon every day for an octave, attending mass and venerating the new saint's image. Yet when the superior general presented effusive thanks for this surprising gesture, the king reasoned that he was moved only by the ‘piety which the heroic virtues of’ de Paul inspired in him, explaining further that he dispensed his affection on the Lazarists because ‘they were de Paul's “sons”’.Footnote 56 This admission testified to a trend prevalent in many of the realms where the Lazarists later succeeded the Jesuits: by sponsoring Vincent de Paul's followers, rulers clearly aimed to tap into their ‘father's’ widely acknowledged virtues.
The widespread support which the Lazarists’ humble ethos garnered from church authorities and Europe's reigning dynasties therefore provides a solid backdrop to their succession. Yet more crucial was the fact that the Lazarists’ ethos had taught them to avoid the kind of worldly roles and controversies that preoccupied the Jesuits. In 1658 Vincent de Paul had enshrined in their Rule the maxim to avoid intervening in what he called the ‘affairs of Princes’, and the Lazarists maintained a reputation for obeying this command.Footnote 57 For instance, when the subject of Jansenists and Jansenism besieged the French province of the Society of Jesus, their counterparts in the Congregation of the Mission remained largely untainted by the on-going debates.Footnote 58
A minor shock occurred in 1724 when two Lazarists urged their confrères to disobey the official church position on Jansenism, but they were swiftly expelled.Footnote 59 Unsurprisingly, this steady discretion converted the patronage of ruling elites into genuine trust. In 1782 France's minister of the marine neatly summarised the regime's feelings towards the Lazarists, urging them to accept the Peking succession ‘with the same zeal that you and your Congregation have always demonstrated in everything that concerned the good of religion and the State’.Footnote 60 Similar sentiments were repeated elsewhere. As in France, the Lazarists of Portugal preferred a quiet Congregation that habitually remained aloof from trouble. In contrast to the Portuguese Jesuits, they had not acquired possessions in South America and exercised no official roles at court, facts which insulated them from the debates concerning the Jesuits’ foreign wealth and political influence.Footnote 61 And as in France, enduring trust emanated from this; a clear indication of the Lazarists’ standing in Lisbon came in 1759, when the crown insisted that Lazarists give the sermon at the execution of those accused of conspiring, under Jesuit influence, against the king's life.Footnote 62 Moreover, the trust which monarchs lodged in the Lazarists in those realms where they later succeeded the Jesuits was doubly important, for it persuaded others with no prior history of Lazarist patronage. When the Lazarists were appointed to succeed the Jesuits in the Palatinate, an internal document underscored that the Prince Elector Karl Theodor had done this after receiving an ‘explanation’ of the Lazarists’ previous activities, and that they thereafter commenced their work ‘satisfied with [his] trust’.Footnote 63
Trust also filtered downwards. Although the ultimate decision to confirm the Lazarists as successors to the Jesuits rested with sovereigns, local bodies of all stripes also endorsed it. In Évora, the Lazarists’ appointment sprang from missions that they had carried out in the city and surrounding areas just a year before they took possession of the former Jesuit college: four corporations of the city, namely the ‘chapter, the numerous clergy of the cathedral, the senate with the nobility, and the town judge with his assistants’ petitioned Queen Maria for their appointment.Footnote 64 Patrons elsewhere turned to the Lazarists as safer hands when their initial choices had failed to impress, as was the case with many of the French seminaries that they inherited. After entrusting the former Jesuit-led seminary at Rodez to secular priests for a number of years, Bishop Jérôme Champion de Cicé installed the Lazarists because, in the words of the foundation contract, ‘the seminary could not solidly continue, nor the direction thereof be durable, unless united to a Congregation of ecclesiastics’. As regards that particular choice, the Congregation was already known in the locality (having another seminary in the town), but de Cicé was further swayed by the Congregation's wider reputation, acknowledging its ‘experience … in the government of seminaries’ and the fact that it already guided ‘several seminaries in the kingdom’.Footnote 65 This wider renown, rather than direct knowledge of the Lazarists, persuaded even the departing Jesuits. In 1779 the Lazarist superior general Antoine Jacquier revealed that it was the local Jesuits in the Levant who had recommended that the Lazarists succeed them there.Footnote 66
Patrons were uniformly confident in the Lazarists’ ability, yet the beneficiaries themselves remained diffident. On several occasions the leadership picked up the old theme that Lazarists – as poor country missionaries – were unequal to the tasks. On being appointed to the Jesuits’ Peking mission, Jacquier wrote to the French minister of marine that the ‘duties that await us there scared me because they appear superior to our strengths’.Footnote 67 Two years later, Jacquier similarly described the Lazarists’ new posts in the Palatinate, saying that they ‘pre-suppose superior talents’. However, on other occasions, he expressed his belief that appointments were perfectly in tune with the goals of his own institute. For example, when the French government offered the Levant missions to the Lazarists, Jacquier commented in 1780 that the new posts were ‘so analogous to the designs of our holy founder’.Footnote 68 Given such contradictions, the need for an objective assessment of the succession, and how it was managed by the Congregation, becomes apparent. This appraisal demonstrates that the real burden of replacing the Jesuits lay firstly in the demands imposed on the Lazarists’ limited human resources, and secondly the significant financial responsibilities attached to former Jesuit properties.
III
One of the main problems in replacing the Jesuits was the ability to marshal enough resources to take on their manifold activities. In one five-year interval alone, from 1774 to 1779, the Congregation took possession of a former Jesuit house of spiritual exercises in Foligno (1774), a church and house in Perugia (1774), colleges in Bologna and Savona (1774), seminaries in Albi and Varniai (1774), properties in Turin and Mondovi (1776) and finally establishments in Évora (1779) (see table 1). Responsibility for managing this growing portfolio fell under the general oversight of one man, the superior general Jacquier, who had himself been educated by Jesuits.Footnote 69 The pressure on him became intense and, as he admitted candidly,
I have looked for none of these establishments, and when they are proposed to me, I stand up for myself as much as possible; but sometimes the requests are so animated, and the persons who make them so pious and respectable, that I fear, in refusing them I might oppose the designs which Providence has for us.Footnote 70
Lazarist successions to former Society of Jesus houses post-1759
Italics indicate appointments not accepted.
Sources: Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission et de la Compagnie des Filles de la Charité, Paris 1833–1963; Alfred Hamy sj, Documents pour servir à l'histoire des domiciles de la Compagnie de Jésus dans le monde entier de 1540 à 1773, Paris 1892; Julia, ‘L'Expansion de la Congrégation de la Mission, 362–417; Angelo Manfredi and Giacomo Martina, Vescovi, clero e cura pastorale: studi sulla diocesi di Parma alla fine dell'Ottocento, Rome 1999; Mémoires de la Congrégation de la Mission: la Congrégation de la Mission en Chine, Paris 1912, ii.528; RC.
* This refers to capital income or endowments in the year of transfer to the Lazarists only and/or as determined by foundation contract.
† My thanks to Dr Andrew McCormick, who supplied many of the dates for the Levant houses.
Whether these persons were so pious is perhaps open to debate, but Jacquier was doubtless correct in calling them respectable: the final list of patrons of the Lazarist succession included two European kings, a queen, a Congregation of Cardinals, an elector of the Holy Roman Empire and numerous bishops. However, even this illustrious group of sponsors could not cope with the practical problems that soon arose.
Confronted by the Jesuit establishments, the Lazarist leadership did ‘stand up’ for itself occasionally (for example, refusing the mission in Peking no less than three times before relenting) and this resistance seems to have been based primarily on doubts that the Congregation had enough manpower to replace services once operated by a larger organisation like the Society of Jesus. In some locations, the scale of the mission assumed made human resources a constant issue. In the Levant, where the Lazarists initially would replace the Jesuits in eight locations, a reconnaissance report sent in 1779 by the Lazarist Pierre Viguier recommended that fourteen staff members (including brothers and priests) would be necessary, but as the situation developed at least twenty-nine missionaries would be needed in the future.Footnote 71 The leadership also had to find men with the specific skills required to perform the Jesuits’ impressive gamut of tasks. In Salonica, one of the Levant missions, Viguier testified that Lazarists would be required to tend to activities as diverse as chaplaincy to the French consul, parish ministry, as well as pastoral care of sailors, schools and ‘schismatics’. Specifications were often very precise and made the task of selection even more difficult. Chios, for example, required men with (among other things) ‘good health, love of solitude and good memory’, as well as the ability to speak Greek and Italian.Footnote 72 However, it soon became clear that the Congregation lacked such candidates. In 1784 the leadership reported that ‘the workers we have sent are not sufficient. We will increase their number as soon as circumstances allow’.Footnote 73
The Lazarists’ problems with manpower appear to have been an especial feature of former Jesuit establishments in more exotic locations outside Europe. Yet, at a time when the Congregation was invited to accept a whole range of new establishments, even finding candidates for Europe was tough.Footnote 74 On 20 June 1774 the archbishop of Bologna, Cardinal Vincenzo Malvezzi, assigned the former Jesuit novitiate of St Ignatius in the city to the Lazarists. Among its responsibilities, the new arrivals were charged with operating the abutting church, saying masses and hearing confessions. In addition, the foundation contract required that they ‘give missions in the diocese’ and ‘give spiritual exercises to ecclesiastics and laypeople’.Footnote 75 Two years later, a diocesan administrator, Don Andrea Vele, noted that the Lazarists were leading public exercises for laymen and women (in separate groups), as well as giving spiritual exercises to ordinands. However, there were simply not enough priests to cover a diverse range of topics for the three types of exercises. Vele reported that there was ‘difficulty’ in giving public exercises to members of the clergy, because the ‘Fathers of the Mission, being in most restricted numbers of only five priests, cannot change subjects’.Footnote 76 This was a clear instance of the smaller body simply being unable to match the former local Jesuit community. Indeed, in 1775, a year after the Lazarists’ appointment and just a year before Vele's report, the number of ex-Jesuit priests in the city still hovered around thirty, outnumbering the community of Lazarists by six to one.Footnote 77
In other locations, however, the Lazarists appear to have managed well. There is no evidence, for example, of staffing problems in former Jesuit bases in Portugal or Germany. Although the reign of José i had previously caused difficulties for Lazarist recruitment – prohibiting them from accepting new members without permission for instance – by the time that his daughter Queen Maria i approved the Évora appointment, the Congregation appeared to have sufficient manpower for a wide range of activities in the surrounding region.Footnote 78 Records indicate that the Congregation sent two Lazarists to run missions in Évora diocese as early as August 1779;Footnote 79 it began holding spiritual exercises for visiting clergy in Évora from December 1779;Footnote 80 by 1792 it even had enough personnel to supply confessors to various neighbouring monasteries.Footnote 81 In Germany, Karl Theodor made every effort to ensure that the handover was as smooth as possible in terms of maintaining staffing levels. According to Jacquier, the elector initially asked for only three priests to manage the former Jesuit colleges at Mannheim and Heidelberg.Footnote 82 In addition, the foundation contract lightened the burden on the Congregation by creating a novitiate to generate home-bred Lazarists.Footnote 83 The idea for a novitiate appears to have paid off; in 1783, Jacquier reported that the new seminary, based in Heidelberg, had already nine budding Lazarists, and that ‘a number of others are presenting themselves’.Footnote 84 In 1789 he concluded that ‘in a few years our confreres from Germany will be self-sufficient’.Footnote 85
Yet, even when human resources were plentiful, managing former Jesuit establishments demanded considerable financial reserves. The obvious source of funding for the continuation of Jesuit-provided services was the pool of Jesuit assets which had been revealed during the suppression process: buildings, movables and financial investments. Some of the Lazarists’ succession contracts and general accounts appear to indicate that their Congregation tapped into all three categories. Shortly after the suppression in the Papal States, the superior general wrote to the Congregation detailing some of the temporal gifts acquired from handovers in Italy, mainly in the categories of buildings and movables. In 1774 the general boasted about two former Jesuit houses and their contents, saying that the pope ‘showered us with his favours’ by granting the Lazarists the ‘beautiful and vast house of Sant'Andrea on the Esquiline hill’. Prior to this, Sant'Andrea had been a Jesuit house which trained novices. The general also added that the property in Bologna was ‘a magnificent house, well-furnished, and endowed with abundant provisions’ in that city.Footnote 86 Just a few years later, in 1777, the general again notified the Lazarists that the pope ‘on his own volition and without any request by us’ had given the ‘confrères of the house at Sant'Andrea in Rome all the silverware that had been removed from the church during the suppression’. The precise quantity and value of the silverware is unknown, but the general called this donation a ‘very considerable object’ which merited their ‘entire gratitude’.Footnote 87
The terms of several handover agreements in other locations were equally generous. In the Palatinate, the elector transferred the former Jesuit colleges at Mannheim, Heidelberg and Neustadt, as well as the mission station at Ingelheim. In addition, the Lazarists were also given the Carolinum College in Heidelberg, a preparatory seminary, and the School of Music in Mannheim. The Lazarists therefore took over important buildings, but the foundation contract also included an extensive list of items from the other two categories as well. The elector's decree consigned not only the colleges themselves, but ‘all of their associated churches, buildings, goods, rents, favours, capital, interests, church instruments, available movables, cash, wine, fruit and duties’.Footnote 88 In the Greek Archipelago, the Lazarists likewise were bequeathed a seemingly impressive list of properties and a large financial endowment of 36,000 livres tournois.Footnote 89 The portfolio in Constantinople included the Jesuit residence (in stone), a large garden, as well as seven separate houses and nine storehouses which brought in a yearly rental income of 3,000 piastres. In Smyrna, the Lazarists inherited the Jesuit residence (in wood), as well as a number of properties that produced rental income, including two small homes, ten storehouses and four shops.Footnote 90 Finally, the property in Naxos brought with it significant parcels of land, including six plots of arable farmland dotted around the island.Footnote 91
Silverware aside, such grants often turned out to be less profitable in reality. Beyond the initial acceptance, the Congregation soon discovered that replacing the Jesuits was a costly affair. Of course, patrons were legally responsible for ensuring a smooth financial handover, but they were not always prompt when it came to disbursing the necessary funds. The succession in Évora is a case in point. Shortly after the Lazarists accepted Évora, the superior general reported that the queen had promised to fund the new establishment, but a firm commitment to provide monies for the twelve Lazarists in residence did not emerge until more than three years later.Footnote 92 When Maria i finally agreed to provide a stable income, the evidence suggests that it was the fruit of some prodding by the new occupants. The resulting decree in 1783 approving 6,000 cruzados annually for the successors came only after a petition addressed to the monarch by the Congregation, and referred to the fact that it still lacked money to maintain the building and carry out ‘at its own cost, according to its custom, the expenses of the missions’, as well as expenses for worship and sacred ornaments.Footnote 93
Lazarists sent to the Greek Archipelago were not as lucky as their counterparts in Évora, for they could not rely on (even tardy) royal income, and instead had to farm their lands themselves in order to generate operating revenues. In a report dated 19 May 1790, the superior of the house in Naxos, Louis Guibert, acknowledged that while the properties transferred to the Lazarists were ‘very considerable in themselves’, they were able to produce only a fifth of their potential income due to various factors, such as the ‘poor state that we found them in’ and the ‘scarcity of farmers’ on the island.Footnote 94
Other features of the succession contracts had financial implications. It is important to remember that the new Lazarist establishments were not new religious foundations; rather they came with a history of burdens, obligations and often debt. For example, properties in two locations – the Levant and Palatinate – came with significant debts attached; in the former case, the Congregation agreed to accept the charges only on condition that the French government agree to settle debts with the ex-Jesuits’ many creditors.Footnote 95 Further, the details of the Évora petition, particularly the reference to maintenance costs, are a helpful reminder that Jesuit buildings were in various states of repair when the Lazarists took them over. Some had lain vacant since the suppression; others had been partially destroyed in the interim. For example, Viguier's 1779 report referred to two ‘burnt out’ houses among the properties bequeathed in Constantinople, and a royal decree from 1780 noted that the Lazarists would only be able to establish themselves in Smyrna when they were in a ‘position to restore the church and the burned houses’.Footnote 96 The same year, Jacquier confirmed that Lazarists headed to Chios and Smyrna would be mostly occupied in ‘rebuilding the destroyed churches’.Footnote 97 Indeed, so off-putting were the burdens in the Archipelago that the Congregation eventually declined the missions in Chios, Tinos and Syros.Footnote 98
Besides bringing the millstones of destroyed or decaying physical infrastructure, former Jesuit establishments sometimes provided a home for ex-Jesuits. The suppressions had mixed effects on the vocations of former members. The great majority of Portuguese Jesuits, for instance, became refugees and re-settled as secular clergy in the Papal States; in France, smaller numbers became country curates or were absorbed into regular orders such as the Carthusians and Benedictines.Footnote 99 However, sizable groups of ex-Jesuits remained at their former posts, even sharing their residences with successors. In 1780 Jacquier reported to Propaganda Fide that, with the exception of two Jesuits in Salonica, all the former Jesuits in the Greek Archipelago had agreed to what he called ‘cohabitation’ with the Lazarists.Footnote 100 In Peking, the Lazarist superior Nicolas Raux reported in 1788 that eight ex-Jesuits continued to live in their former house with the new Lazarist community.Footnote 101 But these seemingly confraternal arrangements also saddled the successors with extra costs. The foundation contract for the Palatine establishments directed the Lazarists to pay ‘in orderly fashion’ adequate pensions to former Jesuits from the revenues of the colleges.Footnote 102 Just a few years later, an internal document signed by the Lazarist superior Johann Theobald revealed that eighteen Jesuits remained on the payroll in Mannheim.Footnote 103 Financial responsibility for ex-Jesuits was similarly attached to the Chinese and Levantine houses, and in these cases the successors doubled not simply as caretakers of Jesuit property, but as carers of ex-Jesuits.Footnote 104
By the 1780s it had become clear that the Lazarists’ organisational responses to the succession depended on the fine detail of each local deal. However, from the leadership's perspective, the Lazarists were adapting well to their roles as Jesuit successors. After all, aside from the three Greek islands, all the other offers had been accepted; the balance sheet rose to at least thirty-four establishments in thirty-two different locations. Of course, organisational issues continued to affect the on-going management of the Jesuit patrimony, but in the long run these did not adversely affect the success of the handovers. Indeed, with one or two exceptions, evidence suggests that patrons remained impressed with the Lazarists’ progress. In the Palatinate, for example, the general referred in 1790 to the prince-elector's continued ‘munificence’, boasting that ‘this prince has desired to take care of our needs, and he has himself assigned the funds necessary for our endowment’.Footnote 105 Yet if an enduring Jesuit succession appeared likely at this point, decisive world events soon intervened.
IV
European politics and the status of the Catholic Church had changed dramatically since the first Jesuit suppression in Portugal in 1759. Indeed, in the religious sphere, the suppression of the Jesuits took place alongside much broader exercises of control over all spiritual agents. The anticlerical measures introduced under the marquês de Pombal in Portugal (1699–1782) were first applied to the Jesuits, but they soon imposed restrictions on most religious orders, blocking them from receiving financial legacies, then forbidding new entrants into their ranks.Footnote 106 Likewise, the reforming policies of the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph ii, effected equally drastic changes to the Church's religious life. Besides the suppression of hundreds of male and female religious institutions, legal decrees in the Habsburg hereditary domains wrought havoc on the ordinary course of administration within religious congregations, such as the 1781 measure forbidding links between individual members and their superiors general.Footnote 107 In France, under the administrations of the 1790s reform sprouted into persecution and schism. Successive measures taken by the revolutionary National Assembly first targeted the Church's patrimony, seizing tithes, seigniorial rights and monastic property. After monastic vows were dissolved altogether, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy split the Gallican Church in two.Footnote 108 The profound changes of the era did not halt there, for Napoleonic hegemony remodelled the territorial and political structure of the continent, further spreading the secularisation embraced by the Revolution. Church properties were laicised in France and Italy, Rome fell to French invaders in 1798 and the temporal power of the popes was curtailed.Footnote 109
These events created an uncertain world for the Congregation of the Mission. It soon became clear to the Lazarist superior general, by this time Jean-Félix-Joseph Cayla,Footnote 110 that the anticlerical forces behind the suppression of the Jesuits were growing in intensity and would not spare their successors. On 23 December 1795 Cayla mused gloomily that the states of Europe ‘are threatened with total subversion by this spirit of fanatic liberty which is winning out everywhere’. According to Cayla, this fanaticism had foisted ‘immense losses’ on the Church, spreading ‘false politics’ and ‘impiety’.Footnote 111 And it is not hard to explain his bewilderment, for developments in France targeted the dynastic house first responsible for the Lazarists’ rise, simultaneously destabilising his own Congregation. On 13 July 1789, a day before they stormed the Bastille, Parisian crowds attacked and sacked the priory of Saint-Lazare, causing immense damage and depriving the Lazarists of their headquarters. Besides dissipating precious material goods, the Revolution in France sent dozens of Lazarists to prison, exile or death.Footnote 112 The resulting dismantling of the Lazarists’ French provinces – which eventually forced Cayla to settle in Rome at the invitation of the pope – was immediately damaging to all their dependent houses, including recently-inherited Jesuit property. Writing from Rome in January 1795, Cayla revealed that ‘our Levant missions sustain themselves with much difficulty since the loss of their income from France’, adding rather bitterly that their possessions were in danger of being ‘lost by the schemes of the ministers of the French revolution’.Footnote 113 Later that year, however, he reported that the leadership had taken measures to ‘prevent the agents of France from taking our houses and our churches’ in the Levant, although he failed to reveal what these steps were.Footnote 114 The gradual unfurling of revolutionary forces throughout Europe was similarly ruinous. For instance, the French invasion of certain Italian provinces in 1796 caused the Congregation's former Jesuit possessions in Bologna, Mondovi and Turin to be lost.Footnote 115
Revolutionary furore was doubly significant for Jesuit successors, for it shone a light on and even stoked residual pro-Jesuit sentiments in various realms. Of course, some fervent, and often highly-placed, Jesuit supporters had remained committed to the Society throughout the suppression process. Catherine the Great famously shielded the Jesuits dwelling in the Russian Empire from the universal ban, insisting that they maintain their apostolates post-1773.Footnote 116 Other sovereigns based their attachment on a fear of emerging voids, such as the gap in collegiate education. For instance, in 1774 Frederick ii of Prussia wrote candidly to his agents in Rome, stressing that the Jesuits were ‘necessary for the education of youth’ and that he wished to keep their colleges open in his realms.Footnote 117 No wonder: closure of the Jesuits’ hundreds of colleges left a significant portion of the European elite without educators. It is no surprise then that, as the tumult spreading across Europe compounded unease, increasing numbers of commentators counted the restoration of the Jesuits as among possible cures to instability. Files held at the Jesuit archives in Rome are full of their writings. For example, a missive of January 1790, pleading with the emperor of Austria to restore the Society, begged the sovereign to ‘compare … the current mind-set on what concerns the principles of government and the administration of states with that from the time when the Jesuits flourished’.Footnote 118 As the century came to a close, this comparison was gaining currency. In a letter of 1796 to the patriarch of Venice, who had joined a chorus of European voices calling for the restoration of the Jesuits, Cardinal Gianfrancesco Albani cast his eyes over ‘so many calamities’ in Europe and stated that the restoration of the Jesuits ‘would console all good people and be an efficacious remedy to [the] disorders’.Footnote 119
In some places the Lazarists understood that their tenure was tethered to the longer-term fate of the Jesuits. In the Palatinate, their Congregation accepted the missions on the condition that ‘if the Society of the Jesuits should … be re-established, [the Congregation] would restore it to the possession of their goods’ and functions.Footnote 120 If this proviso evinced the Lazarists’ customary humility, it also foreshadowed some judgements of their inadequacy on the ground. The Lazarists’ brief period there (1783–93) ended with an unfortunate storm, spurred by accusations that they had betrayed the Jesuits’ educational record in the Palatinate's colleges and seminary. In a lengthy contemporary work, Johannes Mathy called the Jesuits’ successors ‘unworthy foreigners’ (‘unwürdigen Fremdlinge’) who had abused the trust of the monarch. More seriously, he painted a very poor picture of their tenure as caretakers of the Jesuits’ educational patrimony. Alleging that arts and sciences had since ‘fallen into decline’, he further claimed that the Lazarists had ‘neglected the education of the most important Estate in the realm (the Clergy)’.Footnote 121 Mathy's heavily-criticised work has not been fully explored, but the Lazarists left the Palatinate soon afterward amid circumstances that still remain mysterious.Footnote 122 Yet even in localities where the Lazarists' succession had not been as controversial, simply replacing the Jesuits had not eroded desires to see them return. Although the Lazarists had provided services in Bologna since 1774, the people of the town clearly missed the particular form of service provided by the Jesuits, appealing to the pope in 1820 for their restoration, and singling out their role in creating a ‘good foundation, especially of the youth of the city of Bologna, in religion, customs and sciences’.Footnote 123 Just how widespread these opinions were is difficult to judge, but these two cases suggest that in some places the Lazarists were viewed not so much as successors but as less-than-perfect surrogates.
The drama of European revolution and the goal of Jesuit restoration, which was finally achieved in 1814, meant that, by the opening of the new century, the Lazarists’ holdings of ex-Jesuit properties had dwindled significantly. Besides the loss of the German establishments, by 1800 the Congregation had been stripped of its clutch of five former Jesuit seminaries in France, all of which had been closed by the Revolution in 1790. Napoleon's Peninsular Wars (1807–14) then led to the sacking and closure of the Lazarists’ establishment in Évora in July 1808. The college was reopened, however, and remained in use until 1834.Footnote 124 The fate of the ex-Jesuit portfolio in Italy was mixed. Having survived the short-lived Roman Republic (1798–9), and the French occupation of Rome (1808), the superior general reported in 1819 that the former Jesuit house of Sant’Andrea had been handed back to the Jesuits upon their restoration, ‘by the singular desire of the Holy Father’.Footnote 125 He simultaneously reported that the Lazarists’ house was to be re-established in Bologna, although he did not mention whether they would return to the former Jesuit possessions that they had owned in that city.Footnote 126 In Turin, the Lazarists did not recover the one-time Jesuit house that they had occupied but they did regain their former house in Mondovi in 1822.Footnote 127 Outside Europe, the Levantine establishments continued to suffer from shortages of human and financial resources. Although initially supported by Napoleon, the Lazarists lost them briefly when the Congregation was suppressed in the French Empire in September 1809.Footnote 128 However, they were regained and have remained the most enduring group of ex-Jesuit possessions held in Lazarist administration.Footnote 129
The Lazarist succession constitutes a small, but important, chapter in the Jesuit afterlife. The evidence suggests that, while the suppression of the Society undoubtedly marked an enormous rupture for Catholicism, the Church remained adaptable. The seeds of the succession were sown long before 1759. In fact, as the Jesuits fell, selection of the Lazarists as an alternative model was built on an impressive background of patronage, which began during Vincent de Paul's time and continued right up to the suppression era. On the one hand, therefore, the Lazarist succession should be viewed as a continuance of their already good standing, rather than a new level of support. Yet evidence that their selection made good sense cannot be ignored either. The Lazarists were not simply Jesuit substitutes: their humble ethos was the perfect antidote to a Jesuit model which was causing European rulers significant agitation in the eighteenth century. This humility, moreover, drew on the strong credit that the Lazarists enjoyed as sharers in Vincent de Paul's saintly virtues, a cult which had generated an enduring following among ruling dynasties. But virtue did not pay the Lazarists’ bills. The new missions made heavy demands on personnel and the Congregation's finances, and its responses were uneven. These challenges force the conclusion that the Jesuits’ numerical strength was in many senses unmatchable. In the end, however, it was not organisational issues, but events in the wider world that condemned most of the Lazarist takeovers. The spread of anticlericalism, war and the restoration of the Jesuits ensured that the majority of their ex-Jesuit offices were transitory.
