CHAPTER XIII
CONDITIONS BEFORE THE CRASH
State of the Society – The Seven Years War – Political Changes – Rulers of Spain, Portugal, Naples, France and Austria – Febronius – Sentiments of the Hierarchy – Popes Benedict XIV; Clement XIII; Clement XIV.
Just before its suppression, the Society had about 23,000 members. It was divided into forty-two provinces in which there were 24 houses of professed fathers, 669 colleges, 61 novitiates, 335 residences and 273 mission stations. Taking this grand total in detail, there were in Italy 3,622 Jesuits, about one-half of whom were priests. They possessed 178 houses. The provinces of Spain had 2,943 members (1,342 priests) and 158 houses; Portugal, 861 members (384 priests), 49 houses; France, 3,350 members (1,763 priests), 158 houses; Germany, 5,340 members (2,558 priests), 307 houses; Poland, 2,359 members; Flemish Belgium, 542 members (232 priests), 30 houses; French Belgian, 471 members (266 priests), 25 houses; England, 274 members; and Ireland, 28. Their missions were in all parts of the world. In Hindostan, de Nobili, and de Britto's work was being carried on; in Madura, there were forty-seven missionaries. The establishments in Persia extended to Ispahan and counted 400,00 °Catholics. Syria, the Levant and the Maronites were also being looked after. Although Christianity had been crushed as early as 1644, the name of the province of Japan was preserved, and in 1760 it counted fifty-seven members. There were fifty-four Portuguese Fathers attached to China at the time of the Suppression, and an independent French mission had been organized at Pekin with twenty-three members mostly priests. In South America, the whole territory had been divided into missions, and there were 445 Jesuits in Brazil, with 146 in the vice-province of Maranhão. The Paraguay province contained 564 members of whom 385 were priests; they had 113,716 Indians in their care. In Mexico, which included Lower California, there were 572 Jesuits, who were devoting themselves to 122,000 Indians. New Granada had 193 missionaries; Chili had 242; Peru, 526; and Ecuador, 209.
In the United States, they were necessarily very few, on account of political conditions. At the time of the Suppression, they numbered only nine, two of whom Robert Molyneux and John Bolton survived until the complete restoration of the Society. The French had missions in Guiana, Hayti and Martinique; and in Canada, the work inaugurated by Brébeuf among the Hurons, was kept up among the Iroquois, Algonquins, Abenakis, Crees, Ottawas, Miamis and other tribes in Illinois, Alabama and Lower Mississippi. At the time of the Suppression there were fifty-five Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana.
This world-wide activity synchronized with the Seven Years War, which was to change the face of the earth politically and religiously. The unscrupulous energy of Lord Clive had, previous to the outbreak of hostilities, given Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and the Carnatic to England. Before war had been proclaimed, Boscawen, who was sent to Canada, had captured two French warships and the feeble protest of France was answered by the seizure of three hundred other vessels, manned by 10,000 seamen and carrying cargoes estimated to be worth 30,000,000 francs. In 1757 Frederick the Great won the battle of Rosbach against the French; and in the same year triumphed over the imperial forces. In 1759 he defeated the Russians, only to meet similar reverses in turn; but in 1760 when all seemed lost, Russia withdrew from the fight and became Frederick's friend. In 1758 France scored some victories in Germany, but in 1762 was completely crushed and consented to what a French historian describes as "a shameful peace." Quebec fell in 1759, and Vaudreuil capitulated at Montreal in 1760.
Peace was finally made by the treaties of Paris and Hubertsburg in 1763, in virtue of which, France surrendered all her conquests of German territory as well as the Island of Minorca. In North America, she gave up Canada with its 60,000 French inhabitants. She also lost the River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, the valley of the Ohio, the left bank of the Mississippi, four islands in the West Indies, and her African trading-post of Senegal. In return, she received the Islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie-Galande, Désirade and St. Lucia. In Asia, she was granted Pondicherry, Chandernagor and other places, but was prohibited from fortifying them. Spain yielded Florida and Pensacola Bay to England, in order to recover Cuba and the Philippines; and after a while, France made her a present of Louisiana. Thus, New France was completely effaced from the map of America; and France proper, while losing almost all her other colonial possessions, saw her maritime power, her military prestige and her political importance disappear. She was now only in the second grade among the nations. On the same level stood Spain, while Portugal had long since ceased to count. Austria had declined and Protestant England and Prussia ruled, while schismatic Russia was looming up in the North.
In Spain, Charles III had succeeded to the throne in 1759. He had previously been King of Naples, where he had reigned not without honor. It is true he made the mistake of accepting Choiseul's "Family Compact" which united the fortunes of Spain with those of the degenerate Bourbons, but he is nevertheless credited with being paternal in his administrations and virtuous in his private life. Unfortunately while in Naples, he had chosen as his minister of finance, the Marquis de Tanucci, a Tuscan who had at an early stage inaugurated a contest with the Holy See on the right of asylum. "But one seeks in vain anything on which to build the exalted reputation which Tanucci enjoyed during life and which clung to him even after death. His financial system was false; for instead of encouraging the arts, perfecting agriculture, building roads, opening canals, establishing manufactures in the fertile country over which he ruled, he did nothing but make it bristle with custom-houses. Men of science, jurists, archæologists, literary and other distinguished men, he left in prison or allowed to starve" (Biographie universelle).
Tanucci's moral character may be inferred from the fact that when entrusted with the regency at Naples, he purposely neglected the education of the crown prince, keeping him aloof from political life, and giving him every opportunity to indulge his passions. He declared war against the Holy See; he restricted the ancient rights of the nuncios; diminished the number of bishoprics; suppressed seventy-eight monasteries; named one of his henchmen Archbishop of Naples, and forbade a ceremonial homage to be paid to the Pope which had been in use ever since the time of Charles of Anjou. He governed the Two Sicilies for fifty years and took with him to the grave the execration of the nobles and the hatred of the people of the Two Kingdoms. Duclos said of him "he was of all the men I ever knew the least fitted to govern."
The Spanish ministers were very numerous and very bad. There was Wall, whom Schoell described as Irish, whereas Ranke deprives him of that distinction by classing him among the political atheists of that time. Of Squillace, little is said except that he was a Neapolitan and probably belonged to one of the branches of the Borgia family. He is the individual whose legislation caused a burlesque disturbance in Madrid about cloaks and sombreros. The Jesuits were falsely accused of being the instigators of the riot and suffered for it in consequence. Finally, after many changes, there came the saturnine and self-sufficient Aranda, "who," says Schoell, "sniffed with pleasure the incense which the French Encyclopedists burned on his altar, and whose greatest glory was to be rated as one of the enemies of the altar and the throne." A former minister of Ferdinand V with the ominous title of the Duke of Alva was his intimate and shared his many schemes in fomenting anti-Jesuitism. Aranda is described as follows, by the Marquis de Langle in his "Voyage en Espagne" (I, 27): "He is the only Spaniard of our time whose name posterity can inscribe on its tablets. He is the man who wanted to cut in the façade of every temple and unite on the same shield the names of Luther, Calvin, Mahomet, William Penn and Jesus Christ; and to proclaim from the frontiers of Navarre to the straits of Cadiz, that Torquemada, Ferdinand and Isabella were blasphemers. He sold altar-furniture, crucifixes and candelabra for bridges, wine-shops and public roads."
In France, conditions were still worse. During a reign of fifty-six years, Louis XV trampled on all the decencies of public and private life. He was the degraded slave of Pompadour, a woman who dictated his policies, named his ministers, appointed his ambassadors, made at least one of his cardinals, and even directed his armies. Her power was so great that the Empress of Austria felt compelled to address her as "ma bonne amie." She was succeeded by du Barry who was taken from a house of debauch. The coarseness of this creature deprived her of much of the power possessed by her predecessor, except that Louis was her slave. It was Pompadour who brought Choiseul out of obscurity to reward him for revealing a plot to make one of his own cousins supplant her in her relations to the king. For that, he was made ambassador to Rome in 1754, where during the last illness of Benedict XIV, he was planning with other ambassadors to interpose the royal vetos in the election of Benedict's successor. Before that event, however, he was sent to Vienna, from which post, he rose successively until he had France completely in his grasp. The "Family Compact" or union of all the Bourbon princes, which was a potent instrument in the war against the Jesuits, was his conception. He was a friend of La Chalotais, one of the arch-enemies of the Society, and was an intimate of Voltaire, whose property at Ferney he exempted from taxation. The spirit of his religious policy consisted in what was then called "an enlightened despotism," or a systematic hatred of everything Christian.
Crétineau-Joly describes him as follows: "He was the ideal gentleman of the eighteenth century. He was controlled by its unbelief, its airs, its vanity, its nobility, its dissoluteness, insolence, courage, and by a levity which would have sacrificed the peace of Europe for an epigram. He was all for show; settling questions which he had merely skimmed over and sniffing the incense offered to him by the Encyclopedists, but shuddering at the thought that they might fancy themselves his teachers. He would admit no master either on the throne or below it. His life's ambition was to govern France and to apply to that sick nation the remedies he had dreamed would restore her to health. He could not do so except by winning public opinion, and for that purpose, he flattered the philosophers, captured the parliament, cringed to Madame de Pompadour and made things pleasant for the king. When he had gathered everyone on his side, he set himself to hunting the Jesuits."
On the throne of Portugal sat Joseph I, of whom, Father Weld in his "Suppression of the Society of Jesus" (p. 91) writes: "Joseph I united all those points of character which were calculated to make him a tool in the hands of a man who had the audacity to assume the command and astuteness to represent himself as a most humble and faithful servant. Timid and weak, like Louis XV, he was easily filled with fear for the safety of his own person, and, to a degree never reached by the French king, was incapable of exerting his own will when advised by any one who had succeeded in gaining his confidence. To this mental weakness, he also added the lamentable failing of being a slave to his own voluptuous passions. It required but little insight into human nature to see that a terrible scourge was in store for Portugal. To the evils of misrule, it pleased God to add other terrible calamities which overwhelmed the country in misery that cannot be described. The licentious habits of his father, John V had already impaired the national standard of morals. The nobility had ceased to visit their estates and had degenerated into a race of mere courtiers. The interests of the common people were neglected by the Government, and almost their only friends were the religious orders." (The Catholic Encyclopedia, XII, 304).
The real master of Portugal in those days was Don Sebastioa José Carvalho, better known as Pombal – the gigantic ex-soldier who, despite his herculean strength and reckless daring, was ignored when there was question of promotion. He left the army in disgust, and by the influence of the queen, Maria of Austria, and that of his uncle, the court chaplain, was sent as ambassador to London and then to Vienna. In both places he was a disastrous failure, probably on account of his brutal manners. Returning to Lisbon, he paid the most obsequious attention to churchmen, especially to the king's confessor, the Jesuit Carbone, who kept continually recommending him until John V bade him never to mention Carvalho's name. To the Marquis of Valenza, who also urged Carvalho's promotion, John said: "that man has hairs in his heart and he comes from a cruel and vindictive family." At the death of John and the retirement of the aged Motta, the former prime minister, the queen regent, who was fond of Carvalho's Austrian wife made Pombal prime minister: and Moreira, another Jesuit confessor, was insistent in proclaiming his wonderful ability. Never was departure from the principles and rules of the religious state by meddling with things outside the sphere of duty so terribly punished. Father Weld, however, when speaking of Moreira, who was a prisoner in Jonquiera, has a note which says that "Moreira protested to the end that he had never uttered a word in favor of Carvalho."
No sooner was Carvalho in power than the violence of his character began to display itself in the sanguinary measures he employed to suppress the brigandage that was rife in the country and even in the capital itself. The nobility, especially, were marked out for punishment; and when public criticism began to be heard, he issued furious edicts against the calumniators of the administration. He suppressed with terrible severity a rising at Porto against a wine-company which he had established there, and began a series of attacks on the most eminent personages of the kingdom. He dismissed in disgrace the minister of the navy, Diego de Mendoza; and de la Cerda, the ambassador to France; as well as John de Braganza, the Marquis of Marialva and many others. He gave the highest positions, ecclesiastical and political, to his relatives; forced the king to sign edicts without reading them, some of which made criticism of the government high treason, and he extended their application even to the ordinances of his minister; he silenced the preachers who spoke of public disasters as punishment of God; and forbade them to publish anything without his approbation. Though he reorganized the navy, he left the army a wreck, lest the nobles might control it. There was no public press in Portugal during his administration, and the mails were distributed only once a week. He encouraged commerce and organized public works, but always to enrich himself and his family. He flung thousands into prison without even the pretence of a trial, and at his downfall in 1782 says the "Encyclopédie catholique," "out of the subterraneous dungeons there issued eight hundred of his victims, the remnants of the nine thousand who had survived their entombment; and a government order was issued declaring that none of the victims living or dead had been guilty of the crimes imputed to them." This was the man who was declared by the Philosophers of the eighteenth century to be "the illuminator of his nation."
Nor was there much comfort to be hoped for in Austria. Maria Theresa was undoubtedly pious, kind hearted and devoted to her people, but as ruler is very much overrated. Her advisers were commonly the men who were plotting the ruin of all existing governments – Jansenists and Freethinkers. Even her court physicians were close allies of the schismatical Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, and they made liberal and constant use of the great esteem they enjoyed at Vienna to foment hostility to the Holy See. They even succeeded in persuading the empress, though they were only laymen, to appoint a commission for the reform of theological teaching in the seminaries; and one of their friends, de Stock, was appointed to direct the work. The Jesuits were removed from the professorships of divinity and canon law; lay professors were appointed in their stead by the politicians, in spite of the protests of the bishops; and books were published in direct opposition to orthodox teaching. At this time appeared the famous treatise known as "Febronius" by Hontheim, a suffragan bishop of Treves, who thus prepared for the coming of Joseph II. The universities were quickly infected with his doctrines; and new schools were established at Bonn and Münster out of the money of suppressed convents in order to accelerate the spread of the poison. When the University of Cologne protested, it was punished for its temerity.
It goes without saying that if Maria Theresa, with her strong Catholic instincts, was so easy to control, it was not difficult for the statesmen who governed France, Spain, Portugal and Italy to carry out their nefarious schemes against the Church. The Free-masons were hard at work, and immoral and atheistic literature was spread broadcast. It had already made ravages among the aristocracy and the middle classes, and now the grades below were being deeply gangrened. Cardinal Pacca writing about a period immediately subsequent to this, says: "In the time of my two nunciatures at Cologne and Lisbon, I had occasion to become acquainted with the greater part of the French émigrés, and I regret to say that, with the exception of a few gentlemen from the Provinces, they all made open profession of the philosophical maxims which had brought about the catastrophe of which they were the first victims. They admitted, at times, in their lucid moments, that the overturning of the altar had dragged down the throne; and that it was the pretended intellectuality of the Freethinkers that had introduced into the minds of the people the new ideas of liberty and equality, which had such fatal consequence for them. Nevertheless, they persisted in their errors and even endeavored to spread them both orally and by the most abominable publications. God grant that these seeds of impiety, flung broadcast on a still virgin soil, may not produce more bitter and more poisonous fruit for the Church and the Portuguese monarchy." The editor of the "Memoirs" adds in a note: "They have only too well succeeded in producing the fruit."
"I remember," continues Pacca, "that during my nunciature at Cologne, some of these distinguished "emigrés" determined to have a funeral service for Marie Antoinette, not out of any religious sentiment, but merely to conform to the fashion followed in the courts of Europe. I was invited and was present. The priest who sang the Mass preached the eulogy of the dead queen. In his discourse which did not lack either eloquence or solidity, he enumerated the causes of the French Revolution, and instanced chiefly the irreligious doctrines taught by the philosophy of the period. This undeniable proposition evoked loud murmurs of discontent in the congregation, which was almost exclusively composed of Frenchmen; and when the orator said that Marie Antoinette was one of the first victims of modern philosophy, a voice was heard far down in the church crying out in the most insulting fashion: 'That's not true.'" When laymen who professed to be Catholics were so blind to patent facts and would dare to conduct themselves so disgracefully in a church at a funeral service for their murdered queen, there was no hope of appealing to them to stand up for truth and justice in the political world.
The hierarchy throughout the Church was devoted to the Society, but it could only protest. And hence as soon as the first signs appeared of the determination to destroy the Order, letters and appeals, full of tender affection and of unstinted praise for the victims, poured into Rome from bishops all over the world. There were at least two hundred sent to Clement XIII, but many of them were either lost or purposely destroyed, as soon as the great Pontiff breathed his last. Father Lagomarsni found many of them which he intended to publish but, for one reason or another, did not do so.
Some of these papers, however have been reproduced by de Ravignan, in his "Clément XIII et Clément XIV." They fill more than a hundred pages of his second volume, and he chose only those that came from the most important sees in the Church, such as the three German Archbishoprics of Treves, Cologne and Mayence, whose prelates were prince electors of the empire. There are also appeals from Cardinal Lamberg the Prince-Bishop of Passau, from the Primate of Germany, the Archbishop of Salzburg, the Primates of Bohemia, of Hungary, and of Ireland. The Archbishop of Armagh says "he lived with the Jesuits from childhood, and loved and admired them." There are letters from the Cardinal Archbishop of Turin; the Archbishops of Messina, Monreale, Sorrento, Seville, Compostella, Tarragona, and even from the far north, – from Norway and Denmark, where the vicar-Apostolic begs the Pope to save those distant countries from the ruin which will certainly fall on them if the Jesuits are withdrawn. They are all dated between the years 1758 and 1760. The Polish Bishop of Kiew begs the Pope to stand "like a wall of brass" against the enemies of the Society, which he calls a religiosissimus cætus. For the Bishops of Lombez, it is the dilectissima Societas Jesu, quæ concussa, confugit in sinum nostrum – "the most beloved Society of Jesus which, when struck, rushed to our arms." The Bishop of Narbonne declares: "It is known and admitted through all the world that the Society of Jesus, which is worthy of all respect, has never ceased to render services to the Church in every part of the world. There never was an order whose sons have fulfilled the duties of the sacred ministry with more burning, pure and intelligent zeal. Nothing could check their zeal; and the most furious storm only displayed the constancy and solidity of their virtue." Du Guesclin denounces the persecution as "atrocious; the like of which was never heard of before." "I omit," says the Archbishop of Auch, "an infinite number of things which redound to their praise." The Bishop of Malaga recalls how Clement VIII described them as "the right arm of the Holy See." The Archbishop of Salzburg bitterly resents "the calumnious and defamatory charges against them." And, so, in each one of these communications to the Holy Father, there is nothing but praise for the victims and indignant denunciations of their executioners.
The three Pontiffs who occupied the Chair of St. Peter at that period were Benedict XIV, Clement XIII and Clement XIV. Benedict died on May 3, 1758, eighteen days before Father Ricci was elected General. Clement XIII was the ardent defender of the Society during the ten stormy years of his pontificate; and finally Clement XIV yielded to the enemy and put his name to the Brief which legislated the Order out of existence.
Perhaps there never was a Pope who enjoyed such universal popularity as the brilliant Benedict XIV. His attractive personality, his great ability as a writer, his readiness to go to all lengths in the way of concession, elicited praise even from heretics, Turks and unbelievers. As regards his attitude to the Society, there can be no possible doubt that he entertained for it not only admiration, but great affection. He had been a pupil in its schools, and had always shown its members the greatest honor. He defended it against its enemies, and lavished praise again and again on the Institute. It is true that he re-affirmed the Bulls of his predecessor condemning the Malabar and Chinese Rites, but he denied indignantly that he was thereby explicitly condemning the Jesuits. It is also true that he appointed Saldanha, at the request of Pombal, to investigate the Jesuit houses in Portugal; but in the first place, that permission was wrung from him when he was a dying man; and there is no doubt whatever that in doing so, he was convinced that the concession would propitiate Pombal and not injure the Jesuits, whose conduct he knew to be without reproach. Moreover, he had put as a proviso in the Brief that Saldanha who, though the Pope was unaware of it, was an agent of Pombal, should not publish any grievous charge if any such were to be formulated, but should refer it to Rome for judgment. Finally, as the Brief was signed on April 1, 1758, and as the Pope died on May 3, Saldanha's powers ceased. That however, did not trouble him and he did everything that Pombal bade him to do, to defame and destroy the Society. He was not Benedict's agent.
Far from being prejudiced against the Society, Benedict XIV did nothing but bestow praise on it during all his long pontificate. In 1746 in the Bull "Devotam," he says that "it has rendered the greatest services to the Church and has ever been governed with as much success as prudence." In 1748 the "Præclairs" declared that "these Religious are everywhere regarded as the good odor of Jesus Christ, and are so in effect," and, in the same year, the Bull "Constantem" affirmed that "they give to the world examples of religious virtue and profound science." Benedict died in the arms of the Jesuit, Father Pepe, his confessor and friend.
Clement XIII, whose name was Carlo della Torre Rezzonico, was born at Venice, March 7, 1693; after studying with the Jesuits at Bologna, he was appointed referendary of the tribunal known as the Segnatura di Giustizia, and later became Governor of Rieti, cardinal-deacon and in 1743 Bishop of Padua. He was called a saint by his people; in spite of the vast revenues of his diocese, he was always in want for he gave everything to the poor, even the shirt on his back. On July 5, 1758, he was elected Pope to succeed Benedict XIV. The first shock he received as head of the Church was in 1758 from Pombal, who insulted him by sending back an extremely courteous letter which the Pontiff had written in answer to a demand for leave to punish three Jesuits who happened to know a nobleman against whom a charge had been lodged of attempting to assassinate the king. Pombal followed up the outrage by flinging all the exiled Jesuits on the Papal States; and then, in 1760, by dismissing the Papal ambassador from Lisbon. In 1761 Pope Clement wrote to Louis XV of France, imploring him to stop the proceedings against the Jesuits: in 1762 he protested against the proposed suppression of the Society in France; and in 1764 he denounced the government programme which he declared was an assault upon the Church itself.
Spain was guilty of the next outrage when, in 1767, Charles III imitated Pombal by expelling the Jesuits and deporting them to Civita Vecchia: and then refusing to answer a letter of the Pope who asked for an explanation of the proceeding. Naples and Parma insulted him in a similar fashion. And to add injury to outrage, the Bourbon coalition seized the Papal possessions of Avignon and Venaissin in France, and Benevento and Montecorvo in Italy. Finally, when Spain, France and Naples sent him a joint note demanding the universal suppression of the Society, he died of grief on February 3, 1769. He was then seventy-five years old, and had governed the Church for ten years, six months and twenty-six days. Canova, one of the last of the Jesuit pupils, built his monument, putting at the feet of the Pontiff two lions – one asleep, the other erect and ready for the combat. It was a representation in the mind of the sculptor portraying the meekness of Clement, combined with an indomitable courage which defied the kings of Europe who were attacking the Church.
De Ravignan says of him: "Not because I am a Jesuit, but independently of that affiliation, I regard Clement XIII as endowed with the most genuine traits of grandeur and glory that ever shone in the most illustrious popes. He brings back to me the lineaments of Innocent III, of Gregory VII, of Pius V, of Clement XI. Like them he had to fight; like them he had to face the powers of earth in league against the Church; like them he knew how to unite the most inflexible firmness with the most patient moderation. Alone, as it were, in the midst of a Christendom that was conspiring against the Chair of Peter, he suffered and moaned, but he fought. He was not a politician; he was a Pope. As a worthy successor of St. Peter, he stood solidly on the indestructible rock. Always in the presence of God and his duty, when every earthly interest and when the most appealing entreaties seemed to suggest to him to be silent and to yield basely, he heard within his soul the strong voice of the Church, which can never relinquish the rights with which heaven has invested it; and neither threats, nor outrages, nor spoliations nor sacrilegious assaults availed to bend his resolution to resist, or induced him to display any suspicion of feebleness for a single instant. Until he died, Clement fulfilled the august mission of a Supreme Pontiff. He fought for the Church though it cost him his life. His death was really that of a martyr."
The successor of Clement XIII was not so heroic. He was Lorenzo or Giovanni Antonio Ganganelli. He was born at Sant' Archangelo near Rimini on October 31, 1705; and received his education from the Jesuits at Rimini and from the Piarists at Urbano. At the age of nineteen, he entered the order of the Minor Conventuals, and changed his baptismal name of Giovanni to Lorenzo. His talents and virtue raised him to the dignity of definitor generalis of his order in 1741. Benedict XIV made him consultor of the Holy Office, and Clement XIII gave him the cardinal's hat at the instance, it is said, of Father Ricci, the General of the Jesuits. On May 18, 1769, he was elected Pope by 46 out of 47 votes. By eliminating a great number of possible cardinals, the veto power of the Catholic kings had restricted the choice of a Pope to four out of the forty-seven in the Sacred College. In the beginning of his career, Ganganelli was extremely favorable to the Jesuits: but when he was made a cardinal, a change of disposition manifested itself, although in giving him the honor, Clement XIII had said that he was "a Jesuit in the disguise of a Franciscan." Once on the Papal throne, he refused even Father Ricci an audience, possibly through fear of the Great Powers; for, before Clement's accession the work of the destruction had already begun, and the new Pope found himself in the centre of a whirlwind. It was now clear that the Society could never weather the storm.