CLEMENT
37
CLEMENT
I should probably have acted, as he did. The Com-
pany, founded and maintained for the good of the
Church, perished for the same good: it could not have
ended more gloriously."
It should be noted that the Brief was not promul- gated in the form customary for papal Constitutions intended as laws of the Church. It was not a Bull, but a Brief, i. e. a decree of less binding force and easier of revocation ; it was not affixed to the gates of St. Peter's or in the Campo di Fiore ; it was not even communicated in legal form to the Jesuits in Rome; the general and his assistants alone received the noti- fication of their suppression. In France it was not published, the Galilean Church, and especially Beau- mont, Archbishop of Paris, resolutely opposing it as being the pope's personal deed, not supported by the whole Church and therefore not binding on the Church of France. The King of Spain thought the Brief too lenient, for it condemned neither the doctrine, nor the morals, nor the discijiline of his victims. The Court of Naples forbade its publication underpain of death. Maria Theresa allowed her son Joseph II to seize the property of the Jesuits (some $10,000,000) and then, "reserving her rights", acquiesced in the suppression "for the peace of the Church". Poland resisted a while; the Swiss cantons of Lucerne, Fribourg, and Solothurn never allowed the Fathers to give up their colleges. Two non-Catholic sovereigns, Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia, took the Jesuits under their protection. Whatever may have been their motives, whether it was to spite the pope and the Bourbon Courts or to please their Catholic sub- jects and preserve for them the services of the best educators, their intervention kept the order alive until its complete restoration in 1804. Frederick per- severed in his opposition only for a few years; in 1780 the Brief was promulgated in his dominions. The Jesuits retained possession of all their colleges and of the University of Breslau until 1806 and 1811, but they ranked as secular priests and admitted no more novices. But Catherine II resisted to the end. By her order the bishops of \Miit* Russia ignored the Brief of suppression and commanded the Jesuits to continue to live in communities and to go on with their usual work. Clement XIV seems to have ap- proved of their conduct. The empre.ss, in order to set at rest the scruples of the Fathers, engaged in sev- eral negotiations with the pope and had her will. In France, too, the persecuted Jesuits were not alto- gether without friends. Madame Louise de France, daughter of Louis XV, who had entered the Carmelite Order and was, with her sisters, the leader of a band of pious women at the court of her royal father, had worked out a scheme for re-establishing the Jesuits in si.x provinces under the authority of the bishops. Bernis, however, defeated their good intentions. He obtained from the pope a new Brief, addressed to him- self and requesting him to see that the French bishops conformed, each in his diocese, to the Brief " Dominus ac Redemptor".
After the death of Clement XIV it was rumoured that he had retracted the Brief of abolition by a letter of 29 June, 1774. That letter, it was said, had been entrusted to his confessor to be given to the next pope. It w.as pviblished for the first time in 1789, at Zurich, in P. Ph. Wolf's " Allgemeine Geschichte der Jesui- ten". Although Pius VI never protested against this statement, the authenticity of the document in ques- tion is not sufficiently established (De la Serviere).
The first and almost the only advantage the pope reaped from his policy of concessions was the restora- tion to the Holy .See of Avignon and Benevento. These provinces had been seized by the Kings of France and Naples when Clement XIII had excom- municato 1 their kinsman the young Duke of Parma (1708). The restitution, following so clo.sely on the suppression of the Jesuits, seemed the price paid
for it, although, to save appearances, the dvike inter-
ceded with the two kings in favour of the pope, and
Clement, in the consistory of 17 January, 1774, took
occasion from it to load the Bourbon princes with
praises they little deserved. The hostile and schis-
matical manceiuTes against the Church continued un-
abated in many Catholic countries. In France a
royal commission for the reformation of the religious
orders had been at work for several years, notwith-
standing the energetic protests of Clement XIII;
without the pope's consent it had abolished in 1770
the congregations of Grandmont and of the exempt
Benedictines; it had threatened the Premonstraten-
sians, the Trinitarians, and the Minims with the same
fate. The pope protested, through his nuticio in
Paris, against
such abuses of the
secular power,
but in vain. The
Celestines and the
Camaldolese wen'
secularized th:it
same year, 1770.
The only conces-
sions Louis X\'
deigned to mak(>
was to submit to
Clement the gen-
eral edict for the
reformation of the
French religious
before its publi-
cation. This was
in 1773. The pope
succeeded in ob-
taining its modi-
fication in several
points.
In 1768 Genoa had ceded the Is- land of Corsica to France. At once a conflict arose as to the introduction of "Galilean usages". The pope sent a visitor Apos- tolic to the island and had the gratification of pre- venting the adoption of usages in opposition to the Roman practice. Louis XV, however, revenged him- self by absolutely refusing to acknowledge the pope's suzerainty over Corsica. Louis XV died in 1774, and one is rather surprised at the eulogy which Clement XIV pronoimced in a consistory on "the king's deep love for the Church, and his admirable zeal for the defence of the Catholic religion". He also hoped that the penitent death of the prince had secured his sal- vation. It may be surmised that he was prompted by a desire to please the king's youngest daughter, Madame Louise de France, Prioress of the Carmelites of Saint-Denis, for whom he had always shownagreat affection, attested by numerous favours granted to herself and to her convent.
During Clement XIV's pontificate the chief rulers in German lands were Maria Theresa, of Austria, and Frederick the Great, of Pru.ssia. Frederick, by pre- serving the Jesuits in his dominions, rendered the Church a good, though perhaps unintended, service. He also authorized the erection of a Catholic church in Berlin; the pope sent a generous contribution and ordered collections for the same purpose to be made in Belgium, the Rhineland, and Austria. Maria Theresa lived up to the title of Reyhui Apnxloliai l)e- stowed on her by Clement XIII. But the doctrines of Febronius were prevalent at her court, and more than once she came into conflict with the pope. She refused to suppress a new edition of Febronius, as Clement XIV requested; she lent a willing ear to the "Grievances of the fierman nation", a scheme of re- forms in the Church making it more dependent on
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Monument of Clement XIV — Canov,^
(Church of the Apostles, Rome)
