ABSTRACT
After the Renaissance and Reformation the position of the Catholic Church in Europe varied from country to country. In Spain, Portugal and Italy the Church was not challenged by reforming movements, retained its traditional hold on the population, and only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to withstand a furious attack from the secularist intelligentsia. In France, Southern Germany and Poland the Catholic party led several religious wars against the strong Protestant party and regained its official supremacy only after an embittered struggle. The North of Europe and Britain, with the exception of Southern Ireland, were irretrievably lost. The policy of the Church had to be differentiated according to the situation. In the South of Europe Catholicism assumed the most orthodox and rigid aspect with an enforced monopoly and persecution of heretical individuals. In France, Southern Germany and Poland the Church in close alliance with the secular power made every effort to maintain the adherence of the masses by alternate policies of conciliation and persecution. In Protestant countries the Catholic Church appeared as the champion of freedom of conscience and legal recognition of minorities. The Protestant movement, both in the seceding countries and in France and Southern Germany, made a rapid advance in the organisation of a reformed system of education, and the old medieval school system of the Catholic Church was entirely inadequate to maintain its ground against the encroachments of the new rivals. A new organisation was necessary to save France, Southern Germany and Poland from going over to the camp of the Reformation. In 1540 the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus and thus provided the Church with means and weapons to start an offensive against the growing menace. Loyola's Society was not an order of monks devoted to contemplation, but a fighting Catholic organisation, on a military model, with a General at its head and highly centralised control. Its double purpose was to conquer new countries for Catholicism through missionary activities, and to preserve or win back the old countries through the control of education. Supported by the Pope of Rome and the Catholic sovereigns, the Jesuits succeeded in building up the greatest international system of secondary and higher educational institutions known in history. In their Constitutions of 1559 a whole book was devoted to education, and their Ratio Studiorum of 1599 served for three centuries as a code for hundreds of Jesuit Colleges. Both the Church and the Catholic kings entrusted them with the education of the upper classes. Old Universities were handed over to them and hundreds of new colleges were founded by municipalities and princes to be controlled by the Society. A well-organised and uniformly directed international system of colleges came into being during the first century after the foundation of the Society. The Jesuits were the spearhead of the militant Catholic Church, and their educational aims and policy were entirely subordinated to the ends of the spiritual supremacy of Rome. They were not concerned with the elevation of the masses, because the ignorant and superstitious peasants were easily controlled by the clergy and kept under the authority of the Church. Even the Constitutions said: “None of those who are employed in domestic service by the Society ought to learn to read or write … for it suffices for them to serve with all simplicity and humility our Master, Jesus Christ.” The danger came from the middle and upper classes which, in view of their superior education and greater independence, could be led astray by reforming preachers and anti-clerical propaganda. The aim of the Jesuit system was to educate the elite, to win all the leading minds irrespective of origin, and thus to secure the domination of the Catholic Church. The Society never established elementary schools for the masses in Europe and concentrated its efforts on secondary and higher education. There was only one exception to this policy; in the Jesuit republic of Paraguay, in order to Christianise savage Indian tribes, the Society did establish a system of elementary education. The masters of Jesuit Colleges belonged to many nationalities, but only the language of the Church—Latin—was used as a medium of instruction and of daily intercourse. National history, national languages and literature were not taught at all. The competition of humanist reformed gymnasia compelled the Jesuits to accept the Latin of the Renaissance and the new methods of teaching Latin and Greek, but they took care to incorporate the external form only without the substance. As the General of the Society, Beckx, declared in 1854: “The colleges will remain what they are by nature, a gymnastic for the intellect, which consists far less in the assimilation of real matter, in the acquisition of different knowledge, than in a culture of pure form.” By these methods of formal training, by their special disciplinary measures and by the complete detachment of pupils from their families, the Jesuits succeeded in training a new generation of devout and subservient members of the Church ready to side with Rome against the interests of their country or nationality. Thus they stemmed the expansion of the Reformation in France, Germany and Poland, and triumphed over more liberal tendencies in the Catholic Church herself. In Poland they even succeeded in converting the Russian Orthodox gentry to Catholicism and Polish nationality, thus creating the cause of the embittered religious and national wars between the Western Russians and the Poles. It is an irony of history that after the suppression of the Society at the end of the eighteenth century in all Catholic countries it found an asylum in Orthodox Russia under the special protection of Tsar Alexander I. The Society continued its official existence in White Russia simply because the Tsar forbade the publication of the Papal Bull of Dissolution in Russia. Restored in 1814, the Society could not regain its previous monopoly of Catholic education, and had to modify its rigidity to suit the post-revolutionary period.
