Suppression of the Society of Jesus

The abolition of the Jesuit Order in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV to pressure of the kings of France, Spain and Portugal. In the previous attacks on the Jesuits various conspiracy theories played a major role. The unique in modern church history process during the Enlightenment robbed the papacy an important support. In the fight against the Jesuits reconnaissance and Freemasons were instrumental. The suspension was made ​​in 1814 by Pope Pius VII reversed.

Prohibition in Portugal

In Portugal, the Marquis of Pombal was chief minister, a follower of enlightened absolutism. He had the Jesuits been therefore an eyesore because it attempts opposed to subdue the Portuguese Church of the absolute power of his king, Joseph I, . The specific cause of enmity against the Order were the Indians Jesuit Reductions in South America. As in 1750 seven of these settlements should be evacuated because their territory should fall in a land swap to the Spanish crown, the resident Indians defended themselves by force against their resettlement. Although the Order had called the Indians to obedience, Pombal made ​​him for the five -year guerrilla war responsibility. This was enough along with the accusation that the Jesuits would form in the colonies a " state within a state " to be resolved, the remaining reductions in Brazil. The public preaching of the Italian Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida, after the devastating earthquake of 1755 that destroyed Lisbon, the punishment for the ungodly and anti-Church policy to the Government that further poisoned relations.

An assassination attempt on the king in September 1758 broke the camel 's back. Pombal asked to present without sufficient evidence, the Jesuits were behind the attack and called Malagrida and nine other priests arrest. In decrees of Joseph I of 19 January 1759 assets of the Order was confiscated and the Jesuits prohibited leaving their homes and all traffic with the mundane; a law of September 3, 1759 regulated the " immediate and complete expulsion " of the members of the Society of Jesus, in October was the expulsion of all Jesuits from Portugal.

Ban in France

In France, the Order fell by emerging Jansenists under pressure. This partially pursued by the church piety direction was soon after its establishment in opposition to the Jesuit Order. So they spread the rumor, for example, the Order did Robert François Damiens in 1751 tasked to assassinate King Louis XV. to commit.

On the other was the international Order of the Crown of the way: In the wake of the Gallican, which was introduced by the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges from 1438 and in the Gallican articles of 1682 was continued, the kingdom was anxious to limit the pontifical power. As late as 1730 the Jesuits seemed to have triumphed over Jansenism.

Cause for resolution then offered concrete - as in Portugal - the missionary activities of the Order overseas. Antoine de Lavalette, Superior General of the Jesuit missions in Latin America was being targeted in Martinique for illegal trading activity. When he went bankrupt in 1755, leaving debts worth 2.4 million livres, rejected the French Jesuits from a total liability of the Order. This led to a trial before the Jansenist dominated " Parlement " ( court ) of Paris, in the 1764, were uncovered previously secret Constitutions of the Order.

The fact that the French priests the Pope owed ​​absolute obedience, which is more than loyalty to the French crown, sparked considerable outrage. The Paris Parlement forbade the Jesuits then any association with their superiors and pulled out a their possession. In November 1764 King Louis XV followed. with an edict, in which the remaining Jesuits allegiance was demanded on the crown, but to make the only six of them were ready. Thus, the activity of the Order in France was over.

Ban in Spain

In Spain also offered the Jesuit state of Paraguay one of the outer events prohibiting the Order. To set the so-called " reductions " repair and defend itself against the slave- hunters from São Paulo, the infamous Bandeirantes, the Jesuits had their Indians allowed to arm themselves what the prejudice that they strove for their own political power, given more food had.

When in 1766 the so-called "Madrid Hutaufstand " came - the government had to bear with the prohibition sombreros, and a simultaneous tax increase aroused the wrath of the citizens - were again made against the evidence, the Jesuits as an alleged mastermind responsible. On February 27, 1767 Order was in Spain by a decree of King Charles III. banned, arrested its members and out of the country. Simultaneously, the reductions in Paraguay were dissolved and expelled all Jesuits from the Spanish colonies.

Abolition of the order

A territorial dispute between the Bourbon -ruled Duchy of Parma and the Papal States finally offered to the other Bourbon thrones of France and Spain and Portugal a lever to exert increased pressure on the papal curia, about the lifting of the hated Order altogether. After tough negotiations, Clement XIV added and lifted on July 21, 1773 by Dominus ac Redemptor the Breve to the Order. The following year, the Papal States were returned three smaller territories that had been occupied by the Bourbon powers to exert pressure on the Curia.

Follow

After the end of their order, the Jesuits gathered in various cooperatives to the Sacred Heart devotion, who took over even the Jesuits rule in part, for example, in 1794, founded the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or three years later donated Paccanaristen. With the dissolution of the Order of the conspiracy against him by no means ended: Man suspected he would continue his work in secret, and when Clement XIV died in September 1774, rumors of the Enlightenment Jean Baptiste d' Alembert in a letter to King Frederick II of Prussia, the Pope is certainly died of a poison attack the vengeful Jesuits.

In Russia and in Prussia, where the non-Catholic governments papal authority not recognized, found some of the Jesuit sanctuary, mainly because the ruler of enlightened absolutism, Catherine does not want to give up the Great and Frederick II, the benefits of Jesuit education system and because both rulers of the Catholic population of Poland, which had been divided between Russia and Prussia, pastors needed.

A few years after the ban, however, was the absolutist conception of the State, for which the international order was a nuisance, so massively shaken by the French Revolution from 1789 onwards that the ancien régime should recover from it no longer. Consequently, took Pope Pius VII in 1814 the return of the papacy to the international law parquet to fight with the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum to restore the Jesuits, who had partially survived the repeal again. Although the Order has the shock of the repeal in 1773 may never completely come to terms, he presented a number of leading theologians in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Jesuit bans, there has also in the sequence. For example, the Order was banned from 1872 to 1917 in Germany ( Jesuit Act), as part of a series of measures in the culture war. The Swiss Federal Constitution of 1874 (Article 51) forbade the Order in Switzerland. The article was only lifted in 1973.