Monita Secreta

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The Monita Secreta was a code of instructions alleged to be addressed by Claudio Acquaviva, the fifth general of the Society of Jesus, to its various superiors, and laying down the methods to be adopted for the increase of its power and influence. It is widely accepted that they were a forgery.

According to them, every means is to be employed of acquiring wealth for the order, by enticing promising young men to enter it and endow it with their estates; rich widows are to be cajoled and dissuaded from remarriage; every means is to be used for the advancement of Jesuits to bishoprics or other ecclesiastical dignities and to discredit the members of other orders, while the world is to be persuaded that the Societies animated by the purest and least interested motives: the reputation of those who quit it is to be assailed and traduced in every way.

They are considered to be the work of one Jerome Zahorowski, a Pole, who, having been a member of the Society, had been discharged in 1611. They first appeared in Krakow in 1612 in manuscript, purporting to be a translation from the Spanish, and were printed in the same city in 1614. Various stories were told, however, as to the mode in which these secret instructions were originally discovered; the credit being most commonly assigned to Duke Christian of Brunswick who, having been born in 1599, was a boy when they first saw the light. The place where they were found was variously set down as Paderborn, Prague, Liège, Antwerp, Glatz, and on board a captured East Indiaman.

Attempts were likewise made at various times, as late even as 1783, to excite interest in the work as the result of a new discovery; there was also an undated edition, in the early nineteenth century, which professes to issue from the Propaganda Press, and to be authenticated by the testimonies of various Jesuit authorities. However, they are attributed to a general, "Felix Aconiti", who is completely unknown in the Annals of the Society of Jesus. The censor who purportedly approves the publication bears the name "Pasquinelli", while the titles which, it is alleged, should ensure the esteem of men in general for the Society, include all the crimes and abominations of every kind -- immoralities, conspiracies, murders, and regicides -- which the Jesuits' bitterest enemies have attributed to it.

Amongst those who have argued that the Monita are a hoax are Bishop Lipski of Cracow (1616), Father Bernard Duhr in his Jesuiten Fablen, Fra Paolo Sarpi, the historian of the Council of Trent, the Jansenist Henri de Saint-Ignace, Antoine Arnauld and the "Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques", and Blaise Pascal; plus anti-Jesuits as von Lang, Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Friedrich (the author of Janus), Huber, and Reusch, as well as the Protestant historian Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler. In the British House of Commons, during the debates on Catholic Emancipation, the fraudulent character of the Monita was acknowledged by more than one speaker, while the authorities of the British Museum and likewise the French bibliographer M. Barbier, agree in describing the work as "apocryphal".

The only defence seriously attempted on the other side is that offered by the Reverend Richard Frederick Littledale in his article "Jesuits", in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He acknowledges, indeed, that the work is in reality "both caricature and libel", but pleads nevertheless that it is substantially true, since its author, "a shrewd and keen observer", having noticed how Jesuits actually worked, deduced from his observations the rules by which they were guided. As against this case, the Catholic Encyclopedia argues that the official rules and constitutions of the Jesuits contradict these supposed instructions, for they expressly prohibit the acceptance of ecclesiastical dignities by its subjects, unless compelled by papal authority, and from the days of the founder, St. Ignatius Loyola, the Society has impeded such promotion. The Catholic Encyclopedia also argues that in many cases, genuine private instructions from the Jesuit general to subordinate superiors have fallen into hostile hands, which in many cases they are found to give instructions directly contrary to those in the Monita, it is not even alleged that in any instance they corroborate them.