p. 15 | THE ORDER OF JESUITS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 17, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 40.

THE ORDER OF JESUITS.

THE Jesuit conclave, mentioned in a recent issue, culminated in the election of Francis Xavier Wernz as general. The new "black pope" is a German, and as the New York World says, significance will attach to the choice of a head from the nation which has only begun to reopen the door closed against the Jesuits by Bismarck in 1872. The following brief sketch of this very influential order is also taken from the World:

"The Jesuits date from 1534, the year in which Ignatius Loyola and six associates vowed in a Montmartre chapel in Paris to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land for the conversion of infidels. The order received formal sanction by Pope Paul III. in 1540. In 1902 it numbered in all 15,145 members, of whom 6,647 were professed fathers, vowed after eighteen years of preparation to poverty, chastity, and obedience, and under a further vow to go as missionaries wherever sent by the pope. In the United States the order comprises 2,100 members, of whom 658 are in the New York-Maryland province, of which the Very Rev. Thomas J. Gannon is provincial.

"The Jesuits have been the object of a more persistent political warfare than has been directed against any other religious order. The society has come in conflict with the secular authority of nearly every European state. France has seven times expelled it, England five times, and Spain thrice. From 1773, when it had attained its greatest power and had a membership of 22,600, until 1814, it was under the papal ban.

"The personnel of the Jesuits has always been of a high class. On the rolls of the order are some of the most aristocratic names of Europe. On the Continent, as here, it has control of the highest forms of Catholic education, its colleges embracing a student population of 60,000. In the New York-Maryland province alone it has thirteen residences and nine colleges."