Reflection : Protecting the Constitutions

Reflection : Protecting the Constitutions

20/04/2014

AMDG

St Ignatius legacy to the world and the church is immense and almost impossible to measure in a meaningful way.  However there are two works of his that we can focus on.  Firstly the Spiritual Exercises have changed the lives of  hundreds of thousands of people. Because of the incredible influence of the Exercises, the second great  written legacy of Ignatius, the Constitutions are often left in the shade.  Ignatius spent 15 years of his life working on the Constitutions in Rome, editing and refining.  When a Jesuit takes his final vows, amongst the sacristy vows is a vow never to change anything in the Jesuit Constitutions about poverty--unless to make it "more strict". 

Reflecting on the series of crises that preceded the Suppression and similarly the crisis that surrounded  the first General Congregation of the Restored Society - it is interesting to not how much pressure was resisted to change the Constitutions. Even before then, only two years after the death of Ignatius, in 1558, Pope Paul IV overrode the Constitutions insisting that Jesuits must chant the office in common and that the generals term must only last 3 years.  He was to die in the next year - and Laynez, General at the time, received the opinion of 5 distinguished canon lawyers that the Popes orders - verbally given - yielded at his death to legally promulgated bulls of earlier Popes and therefore ceased to carry any further obligation. 

As well as the pressure put on by the Gallicanists in France to change the Constitutions, resisted by the Fr General Ricci and the Pope, at  General Congregation 20, the first one after the universal restoration of the Society had to deal with a crisis around proposed changes to the constitutions.  Fr Luigi Rezzi, a fractious Sicilian tried his hardest to delay the start of eth Congregation so that he could control enough votes to make changes to the Constitutions.  His strategy to delaying the beginning of the meeting was to question the validity of those who took vows in Russia.  When the congregation elected Fr Luigi Fortis as General he (Rezzi) was expelled from the Society.

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20 April 1842 - Jesuits return to Canada

AMDG

Today in 1842, Peter Chazelle was named Superior as the Jesuits returned to Canada.  Chazelle was an outstanding and enterprising pioneer, who stood out amongst that 'refounding' generation of  Jesuits after the Universal Restoration of the Society in 1814. Chazelle  served for a fruitful fourteen years in Louisiana, Kentucky, Montreal, Toronto and Wisconsin, laying the foundations for four provinces. A key moment in his apostolate (before arriving in Canada) was when he accepted St Marys seminary near Bardstown Kentucky from a secular priest and turned into a Jesuit School.

The success of this mission in Kentucky turned out to be a  stepping stone into New York.  Following an invitation from Bishop John Hughes, Chazelle was asked to take over th e running of ST Johns College which he sat up in the Fordham area above New York City.   This gave the Jesuits their most important centrer on the Atlantic seaboard from which to expand, thirty three years after Kohlmann closed his New York Literary Institution.   After these successes Chazelle was invited by the Bishop of Montreal (Bourget) to conduct a retreat for eighty three priests.  On the back of this retreat Bishop Bourget received requests from all sides for a return of the black robes to Canada.

The Bishop wrote his famous Appeal to the Jesuits in 1841 and sent it to Fr General Roothans.  Invoking memories of the heroism of Brebeuf and Jogues, he requested the return of the French Jesuits to the land of St Lawrence.  In response Chazelle led a party of six priests and three brothers.  They created new mission posts, and more and more Jesuits followed in Chazelles footsteps and extended the Church's presence into the great wilds of Canada.  By 1907, Fr General Wernz set up the Canadian Province which by 1914 numbered almost 400 men. 

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24 April 1774 - Letter from Archbishop of Paris in Support of Jesuits

24 April 1774 - Letter from Archbishop of Paris in Support of Jesuits

24/04/2014

AMDG

Christophe de Beaumont, the Archbishop of Paris, wrote a letter today in 1774 regretting the Brief of Suppression and stating his refusal to promulgate it in Paris.  Famous for his austerity, and a lack of desire for the trappings or glory of office, he was an outstanding churchman, respected far and wide.  When the Jesuits had been exiled from France in 1762, he was quick to publish a pastoral letter condemning the encroachment of civil authority into the realm of spiritual authority.

He was famous and consistent in defending the authority of the Church. After his pastoral letter of 1763,  the Gallicanist Parlement was furious and in a spasm of violent indignation they summoned the Archbishop before them.  To save him from this indignity the King ordered him to temporally disappear to the famous Cistercian monastery of La Trappe in Normandy.   The Jesuits appreciated the support but realised it would not affect any change in their perilous situation. Frey de Neuville said the bishops praise 'will at least make a fine epitaph for us'.  It must be remembered that in the absolutist political climate of France - order and justice ultimately relied on the King.  It was to the misfortune of the Society that they were at the mercy of the languid and irresolute Louis XV who happily abdicated his authority on many issues.

Eleven years later - when the Pope finally succumbed to the pressure to universally suppress the society - the consistent and forthright Archbishop de Beaumont wrote these incredible and strong words to Pope Clement XIII.  "This brief which destroys the Company of Jesus is nothing other than an isolated and particular judgement, pernicious, reflecting little honour on the Papal tiara and deleterious to the glory of the Church and to the glory and propagation of the orthodox (i.e. Catholic) faith….. Holy Father, it is not possible for me to commit the Clergy to the acceptance of the said brief. I would not be heard on this point were I wretch enough to lend my ministry to it, which I should be dishonouring"

7 April 1859 - Jesuit banished from Florence due to Freemasons

7 April 1859 - Jesuit banished from Florence due to Freemasons

28/04/2014

AMDG

The Jesuits  were born during a period of great change in Europe marked by the Renaissance. Their rebirth after the Suppression was also marked by a great transitional period  - that of the industrial and democratic revolutions of the 19th Century.  It was more difficult to adjust to the changes after their rebirth - particularly as a widespread current, inherited from the French Revolution was the de-christianisation of the state.  One of the most potent groups trying to secularise the state were the Free Masons,  where a speculative and naturalistic deist point of view had become influential.

In the 18th century, especially in France, an alleged rivalry between the Freemasons and the Jesuits had arisen. Intellectual attacks on Jesuits were seen as an efficient rebuttal to the anti-masonry promoted by conservatives. Conspiracy theories flourished and persisted into the 19th century as an important component of French anti-clericalism. It was, however, largely confined to political elites until the 1840s, when it entered the popular imagination through the writings of the historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet of the Collège de France, who declared "la guerre aux jesuites", and the novelist Eugène Sue, who in his best-seller Le Juif errant depicted the Jesuits as a "secret society bent on world domination by all available means"

In the 19th century the population of Florence doubled. A foreign community came to represent one-quarter of the population in the second half of the 19th century. In 1859 Austrian rule was to end in defeat at the hands of France and the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.  In the shift of power - the protection that Austria had offered the church was lost, and one of the first anti-Catholic acts was to banish the Jesuits, allegedly due to masonic influence.  Tuscany became a province of the united kingdom of Italy in 1861 and then 4 years later Florence replaced Turin as Italy's capital in 1865.  Various Popes published objections against Freemasonry. The first in 1738 was Pope Clement XII In Eminenti the most recent  Pope Leo XIII in 1890 Ab Apostolici. The 1917 Code of Canon Law stated that becoming a Freemason entailed automatic excommunication (Code 1399).   

Baby's kick dissuades pregnant model from abortion

 

London, England, May 1, 2014 / 07:04 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A 19-week pregnant model who had said she would have an abortion to further her career in U.K. reality television now says that feeling her unborn baby kick made her turn away from an abortion clinic.

“I just couldn’t do it,” Josie Cunningham told U.K. tabloid The Mirror. “I really thought I would be able to but I couldn’t. I’d felt the baby kick for the first time 24 hours earlier and I couldn’t get that feeling out of my head.”

Cunningham already has two sons, ages six and three.

“I’d forgotten what the feeling was like. It was magical. It was like the baby was telling me not to go through with it.”

She said the kick “took me totally by surprise” and was “a real boot.”

“I never imagined how hard it would be to have an abortion after that.”

Two weeks ago, the 23-year-old model had said she was a candidate to appear on the U.K. reality show Big Brother, but started considering an abortion after the show’s producers “suddenly turned cold” when they learned she was pregnant.

“This time next year I won’t have a baby. I’ll be famous instead,” she said.

Her remarks about wanting an abortion in order to pursue other offers to further her career, fanned by the media, had triggered a backlash against her in social media and criticism from other media personalities.

However, the day before her appointment, Cunningham felt the baby suddenly begin to kick. That night, she began watching videos of abortions of unborn babies close to Britain’s 24-week legal limit.

“What I saw horrified me,” Cunningham told The Mirror.

She said she felt “physically sick” in the taxi drive to the London abortion clinic the next day; she was shaking and “burst into tears.”

“I wanted to throw myself out of the moving car to get away. I had my hands on my bump and I had the strongest feeling I couldn’t let anyone take my baby away,” Cunningham said.

“As soon as I realized I was going to keep the baby, I felt happy – like a weight lifted.”

Cunningham is still angry with those who criticized her plans to have an abortion, saying “no one had the right to threaten me and publicly humiliate me the way they did.”

However, she added that her mother is supportive and excited by her decision to keep her baby.

“I lost control and I wanted to be famous so badly I lost sight of what matters,” she reflected. “I’m disgusted with myself and I’m sorry – not to the haters but to the child I’m going to have. Now I’ve made this decision I am determined to be a good mother just like I am to my other children.”

John Padberg on the Suppression and Restoration of the Jesuits: Part 1

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