Expelling the Jesuits
Often expelled, the Jesuits have as often returned. The unpopularity they excited was largely due to the power they exercised. How they came to acquire so much influence, writes E.E.Y. Hales, is “certainly one of the enigmas of history”.
“The Jesuits were expelled.” This is I what we are told first in any historical account of a revolutionary movement in modern history. And rightly so, because expelling the Jesuits has generally, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, been the first act undertaken on such occasions.
We can be sure, when we read that the Jesuits were expelled, that we shall go on to read of a series of reforms, “enlighted,” liberal, democratic, secularist. We shall read that much else, besides the Jesuits, was soon swept away from around the Throne and around the Altar; very often we find that the Throne itself disappears soon afterwards, sometimes the Altar too. A new order—republican, constitutional-monarchist or dictatorial—has commonly been constructed.
But always, in the end, though sometimes only after several decades, we find that the Jesuits are back again. Since 1956, when they were restored to Norway, they are indeed to be found once more in every western European country. Yet they have been expelled from them all, and from most of them several times.
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