Page - 196 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 4196 Catholic worship are found and no worship of the Catholic religion is tolerated, and where our religious dress will need to be exchanged for secular clothing and we on the whole will have to behave in public in such a way that we not only avoid incurring the suspicion of being priests, but on certain occasions even must avoid being recognized as Catholics, we hereby beg, on behalf of myself, my assistant, and my servant, in order to avoid danger, to receive spiritual solace, and to sedate scruples, to be bestowed by His Most Holy Pontiff the most gracious permission for the utterly necessary dispensations that are stated below. First, for as long as we stay among non-Catholics, and even when trav- eling among Catholics, because of the strenuous labors both day and night as well as the incommodities caused by the conditions of traveling, and not least in order to avoid being recognized as priests while among non-Catholics, we beg most humbly to be freed from the obligation of reciting the breviary. Second, we beg most humbly to be allowed to minister at domestic al- tars of Catholic ambassadors, whenever we find such persons, and to be allowed to celebrate Mass upon a portable table that we will bring with us in secret, either in private rooms or at least in tents, during holidays and Sundays. Third, in the event of necessity, for as long as we stay in non-Catholic lands we beg most humbly to be allowed to eat meat even on days prohib- ited by the church when this cannot be avoided.79 In other words, the Jesuit priest prepared himself and his associates for a tem- porary existence as “crypto-Catholics.” We have seen how profoundly Hell’s scientific persona had been shaped around his identity as a Catholic over the previous decades. Yet, for the sake of the expedition’s success, he soberly ac- knowledged a need for dissimulation, to the extent of abandoning the distinc- tive garment, habits of worship, and diet of the Jesuit order. A good decade earlier, a stock of 104 pairs of shoes as well as wigs and countless other items of clothing characteristic of a representative of the service nobility emerging from a middle-class background, together with ones obtained with the specific purpose of integration with the colonial elite, had been indispensable to bold- ly mark out and fix von Jacquin’s identity as a scientific traveler in the 79 Hell to Pope Clement xiii, dated Vienna, March 5, 1768. Vatican See, Archivio Segreto Vaticano, “Archivio della Nunziatura Apostolica in Vienna,” 136:fol. 45r (secretary’s copy).