Missions Overseas
Europe was only a small front for the Jesuits' activity. The Society's missionaries went to India, China, Japan and the New World. In North America they became daring pathfinders and fighters, accepting every hardship of life as a favor from God. In South America, more than any other group of newcomers, they worked to educate the natives and spread scientific agriculture.
Francis Xavier
In 1541 Saint Francis Xavier left Lisbon and, after a year of hardship at sea on a Portuguese ship, reached Goa. He took a bell in hand and walked the streets to gather listeners around him. Once he had them, he preached, explaining the principles of Christianity with such sincerity and eloquence, and describing its moral foundations so simply and plainly, that he brought thousands of Hindus and Muslims, and even some hardened and exiled Portuguese, to the Christian faith.
Because he knew something of medicine and his manner was reassuring, he healed some of the sick and gained a reputation for working miracles; but he never made such a claim himself. The papal bull of 1622 which enrolled Xavier among the saints credited him with the "gift of tongues", the natural ability to speak any foreign language when the need arose. In truth the saint was a modest linguist who spent long hours committing his sermons to memory in Tamil, Malay and Japanese.
At times the zeal of his faith overcame his humanity. He persuaded John III, king of Portugal, to establish the Inquisition at Goa, and ordered that no Hindu should be admitted to church service unless he had several generations of Christian forebears. Perhaps the reason was that he could not bear the thought of a Portuguese Christian kneeling to confess his sins to a native priest. In the end Xavier left Goa, saying, "I want to preach where there are no Muslims and Jews; give the unbelievers and the irreligious into my hands!" In his view they were easier to bring to Christianity because they held no firm convictions of their own.
In 1549 he set out for Japan and studied Japanese on the way. After landing at the port of Kagoshima, Xavier and his assistants began preaching in the streets, and the people listened with perfect courtesy. Two years later he returned to Goa, calmed a disturbance that had arisen among the Christians, and then turned toward China to bring that country to Christ (1552).
After much hardship he reached the island of Shangchuan, off the mouth of the Canton River. The emperor of China had declared the entry of Europeans into his country a crime punishable by death. Even so, Xavier was seeking a way into China when he fell ill and died on 2 December 1552, crying out, "O God, in you I have put my hope; let me never be put to shame forever." He was forty-six years old.
The Jesuits in Europe
The Jesuits of Europe, like their missionaries in foreign lands, did their work with the same sense of duty and self-sacrifice. They stayed at their posts and nursed the sick when plague broke out. They preached to every class and adapted their speech to each audience and occasion. Their learning and good conduct led women, nobles and even kings to choose Jesuit priests as their confessors. They took part in worldly affairs with great seriousness, yet with prudence and tact; Ignatius had always counseled them that more prudence and less piety is better than more piety and less prudence. The Jesuits were generally men of great moral character, and the faults later charged against them had not yet appeared.
Although by their founding principles they upheld the Inquisition, in practice they kept apart from it and tried to reform individuals through education. Their small numbers did not allow them to take on the education of young children, so they devoted their effort only to secondary schools. Because the universities lay under the influence and control of other orders, and especially of Protestant clergy, they founded special colleges for their followers and pupils, always seeking to train an elite of young men who could take social leadership in the next generation. The Jesuits are counted the greatest educators of their age.
Jesuit Schools
In the important cities of Europe the Jesuits founded a number of "preparatory schools", corresponding to the gymnasium in Germany and the lycée in France, that is, secondary schools, and also "higher schools" equivalent to colleges. Sometimes, as at Coimbra and Louvain, they might take over existing universities and run them in their own style. Their free instruction astonished their rivals. Their curriculum was adapted, probably in varying proportions, from the schools run by the Brethren of the Common Life in the Netherlands and Germany, from Sturm's gymnasium at Strasbourg, and from the subjects of the humanist academies in Germany and Italy. The basis was the study of the classics; teaching was in Latin, and use of the vernacular was strictly forbidden to pupils except on holidays. In the upper classes scholastic philosophy was taught, and moral training was again stressed and blended with religious faith.
Every day religious traditions were instilled in the pupils' minds, and the daily routine of prayer, inward reflection, confession, communion, Mass and finally the study of theology so directed the students' minds to orthodoxy that in the second half of the sixteenth century none of them strayed from the well-trodden road of their fathers; and by this means humanism was brought back from unbelief to Christianity. There is no doubt that this method of education also had great defects. It relied too heavily on memory, it left the inquiring mind frustrated and disappointed, and, like the other programs of the time, it was deficient in the study of the sciences; and it passed over the corruptions of history so that it could govern the existing order. Even so, a free thinker such as Francis Bacon said of the Jesuit schools, "As they are, I wish they were ours." During the next two centuries graduates of the Jesuit colleges were prominent in every field and office, except in scientific research.
The Society's Achievement
At the death of Ignatius there were a hundred Jesuit colleges. With their method of teaching, their political skill and their devotion to their purpose, with a zeal founded on discipline and a talent for adapting their goals to the means at hand, the Jesuits managed to push back the advancing wave of the Protestant movement and to bring back to the Church a large part of Germany, most of Hungary and Bohemia, and all of Poland. Rarely has so small a group accomplished such great things in so short a time. Year by year the Jesuits' prestige and influence grew, and less than twenty years after their official founding they were known as the most brilliant result of the Catholic reform movement.
At last, when the Church dared to convene the general council that Europe had long awaited, to end the theological quarrels and bind up its religious wounds (the Council of Trent, described in the next chapter), it was again the Jesuits who won the confidence of the popes; and for that reason the popes entrusted the defense of their shaken power, and the support of the old, established faith, to the learning, sense of duty, ability, discretion and eloquence of the Jesuits.