Page - 17 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

17Introduction offered positive inroads for those stimuli to take effect, and even participated in preparing the ground for some aspects of the Enlightenment to strike roots. 3 The Society of Jesus and Jesuit Science Yet, there is one aspect of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholic world that has quite stubbornly resisted integration in the “smooth” picture, and is described in most of the literature as standing apart from—indeed, in antagonism to—the Enlightenment trend in Catholicism: the Society of Jesus (somewhat ironically, an organization whose close association with the Tri- dentine church has also been widely acknowledged). To contemporary reform- ers within and outside the Roman Catholic Church, as well as to posterity, the Jesuits seemed the major obstacle to achieving Enlightenment in Catholicism and more broadly. The order’s expulsion from various European countries be- ginning in 1759 and the general papal suppression of 1773 was even hailed as a major triumph for the cause of the Catholic Enlightenment (although subse- quently the polarization of European thought into more radical trends and anti-philosophie made the integration of secular and Catholic Enlightenment discourse complicated indeed).42 Anti-Jesuitism came to be regarded as an almost defining feature of the Catholic Enlightenment for three main reasons. The first was internal: the need for ideological and rhetorical tools to be employed—such as the alleged laxity of Jesuit moral theology and spirituality, for example43—by rivals jealous of the Jesuits’ excessive control over the sinews of power and resources within the church. The second was political: given the Society’s quasi- autonomous global organization, and the mechanism of its management strongly centralized in Rome, it was seen as an embodiment and the main supporter of papal univer- salism, thus a barrier both to the ideals and the program of decentralization pursued at that time by nearly all other religious orders and many in the secular clergy and the chief tool of Roman intervention in affairs increasingly under- stood as pertaining to the sovereigns and the administrative personnel of secu- lar states. One of these was schooling, and indeed the third reason for wide- spread resentment toward the order was its alleged “ near-monopoly” in the 42 Burson, “Introduction,” 18; cf. Dale K. van Kley, “Religion and the Age of Patriotic Reform,” Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 252–95. 43 Richard van Dülmen, “Antijesuitismus und katholische Aufklärung in Deutschland,” in van Dülmen, Religion und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur einer Religionsgeschichte der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), 141–71.