There were many reasons for the persecution of the Jesuits at that time, almost every European monarch had his own account for the order … (Heading "Well Forgotten")
As a result of the partition of Poland under Catherine II, Russia received with a part of its pie a considerable number of Roman Catholics. Among the monastic orders operating on the territory of Belarus were the Jesuits. The authorities had to urgently determine their attitude towards the most famous Catholic order.
Jesuits in Russia have not been favored for a long time, and the very word "Jesuit" in Russian has a pronounced negative connotation. The modern Russian man in the street, perhaps, will not be able to explain in detail what this is connected with. As a rule, he did not hear about the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola, about the Jesuits' struggle against the reformation, about the rapid rise, fall and new rise of the order. The modern Russian encyclopedic dictionary will help a curious person a little. He only extremely dryly informs that the Jesuit Order was founded in 1534, and in 1719, by decree of Peter I, was expelled from Russia. Then the dictionary, having safely jumped over a century, immediately reports that in 1801 "their (the Jesuits') existence was officially recognized, but in 1820 Alexander I banned their activities."
It is absolutely impossible to understand from this information why Peter “expelled” the Jesuits, who later “recognized” them in Russia, and then why Alexander I again “banned” the order. However, what was guided by Peter, was already discussed in "The Well Forgotten". He did not like the friendship of the Jesuits with Vasily Golitsin, Sophia's favorite.
The pre-revolutionary Russian dictionary, in contrast to the modern dictionary, on the contrary, is voluminous and emotional. He literally seethes with unconcealed and unrestrained anger: “Recognizing the power of the pope as the direct establishment of God, and the power of sovereigns as arising from the will of the people and therefore subject to the control of the people, and in the last instance - to the control of the pope, the Jesuits developed a whole theory of revolutions, disobedience to the laws, resistance to sovereigns, and even "tyrannicide". They not only preached this theory, but also applied it in practice. The moral theories of the Jesuits justify deception, lies, perjury, destroy any noble impulse to moral revival and improvement, unleash the crudest instincts, establish a compromise between God's truth and human untruth."
The above text is a rather typical example of a monarchical conservative-Orthodox mentality for that time - explains why the word "Jesuit" received such a negative connotation in the Russian language.
The Jesuits themselves have never felt themselves "revolutionaries". Joseph de Maistre, the envoy of the Sardinian kingdom in St. Petersburg, complaining not without offense to Alexander I that the government had begun to oppress the order, wrote in 1815: “The Jesuits are the watchdogs of the supreme power. You do not want to give them the freedom to gnaw thieves, so much the worse for you; at least don't stop them from barking at them and waking you up. We are set as huge alpine pines holding back avalanches; if they decide to uproot us, in an instant all the small forest will be demolished."
Ekaterina, for some reason not mentioned in the current Russian encyclopedic dictionary, made the decision to “recognize the existence of the Jesuits” at the most difficult moment for them, when they became outcasts all over the world. The destruction of the order was officially announced by Pope Clement XIV in his bull "Dominus ac Redemptor noster" in 1773.
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There were many reasons for the persecution of the Jesuits at that time; almost every European monarch had his own account to the order. In Portugal, the order was even accused of attempting to assassinate the king, although in fact it was a struggle for power in distant Paraguay, where the Jesuits were complete masters for many decades.
It is not worth taking all these various claims of monarchs to the Jesuits at face value. In fact, it would be more correct to talk, probably, about the conflict of royal Europe (primarily the Bourbons) not with the Jesuits, but with the Vatican itself. The time has come, and the strengthened European absolutism decided to point the Catholic Church to the niche where, from his point of view, it should be. The Jesuit Order, as the Vatican's vanguard, which had accumulated enormous wealth at the time of the conflict and achieved powerful political influence through painstaking and dodgy work, naturally became the main target.
The question of why Catherine decided to give refuge to the persecuted Jesuits is not so easy to answer. Neither past relations with Catholic missionaries, which always aroused only irritation and suspicion among Orthodox hierarchs, nor the dubious reputation of the Jesuits themselves, nor resentment for the insults inflicted by Uniates on Orthodoxy in Lithuania, nor, finally, the obvious risk of causing displeasure among a number of European monarchs - nothing spoke of benefit of such a step.
The empress expressed her point of view on the Jesuit business most fully in a letter to Count Stackelberg on February 18, 1780, where she substantiated her decision with the rich pedagogical experience of the Jesuits, which could be useful to Russians. "Always," writes Catherine, "the best enlightenment was taught through the Jesuit Order." Catherine, at least officially, does not give any other reasons for her patronage of the Jesuits. The Empress did not look at the Catholic educator as gloomily as the leadership of the Orthodox Church, she saw that the Jesuit teachers did not prevent Voltaire from becoming an atheist, and Moliere a comedian.
In addition, another major authority for Catherine - Montesquieu wrote about the Jesuits more than favorable: “In Paraguay we see an example of those rare institutions that were created to educate peoples in the spirit of virtue and piety. The Jesuits were blamed for their system of government, but they became famous for being the first to instill in the inhabitants of distant countries religious and humane concepts. They set out to correct the evil done by the Spaniards, and began to heal one of the bloody wounds of mankind.
It can be assumed that such statements prompted Catherine to decide to give the order refuge in Russia. Finally, if the authorities had any concerns about the Jesuits, then at that time they lost their sharpness: the order was no longer a mighty and influential force, but only a fragile ship in distress. Meanwhile, in fact, only the visible organizational structure of the order was drowning, and not its ideology. Ideology, as time has shown, had its own unsinkable resource.
Mikhail Pogodin, a well-known Russian historian, in his "Aphorisms" very accurately noted: "States consist of land and people … but there are also states of such and such a thought, such and such belief - theological, philosophical, political, and their boundaries, their incorporeal links spread, … are transferred … ex. the Jesuit order, philosophy of the 18th century, the school of Aristotle."
It is curious that of the three examples given by Pogodin, two are directly related to the Catherine period. It turns out that Catherine voluntarily opened the Russian borders for two powerful "states of thought" (French philosophy and the Jesuit order) at once. Moreover, it was about two states-antipodes, at the head of the first was the atheist Voltaire, and at the head of the second was the religious fighter Loyola.
The opposition from the Orthodox Church, as well as the psychological and bureaucratic barriers to the penetration of both ideologies into Russia, were approximately the same. But the result of the spiritual intervention was different. The expansion of French philosophy was crowned with undoubted success. The influence of the Jesuit Order was more modest. In the correspondence dispute between Ignatius Loyola and Voltaire, a Frenchman won: by the middle of the 19th century, there were significantly more atheists in Russia than Jesuits.
The Jesuits were patronized by Catherine herself. Attempts by the Vatican to stop the activities of the order in Russia did not lead to anything then. Their privileges only expanded. The Jesuits were given the Catholic Church of St. Catherine in St. Petersburg, and the school located with it was transformed into a Jesuit college.
The son of Catherine, Emperor Paul I, showed special concern for the order; he obtained a bull from the Pope in 1801, which officially restored the organization in Russia. When this document reached St. Petersburg, it fell into the hands of the next Russian emperor, Alexander I. The new sovereign, after hesitating, nevertheless published the bull. For more than ten years, the influence of the order and under Alexander went up. Jesuit missions appeared not only in St. Petersburg, but also in Moscow, in the Saratov province, Astrakhan, Odessa, Riga and even in Siberia. The decree of January 12, 1812 elevated the Polotsk Jesuit College to the degree of an academy and gave it all the advantages granted to universities.
The fact that the Russian authorities just a few years later (after the order was officially restored by the Vatican) decided to expel all the Jesuits from the country, of course, is difficult to consider a coincidence. The logic of the authorities is clear: a crushed and lost Catholic order can be given asylum, and vice versa, a Catholic order that is gaining strength again is dangerous. This is quite obvious if you carefully read the official documents on the expulsion of the Jesuits. “Now it has undoubtedly been revealed, proclaims the Decree, that they (the Jesuits), not retaining the debt of gratitude and not remaining humble in spirit, as the Christian law commands, and the meek inhabitants of a foreign country, thought to shake the Orthodox Greek Faith, which has dominated our Kingdom since ancient times.”
In fact, from 1812 to 1815, the Jesuits did nothing fundamentally new, compared to what they were doing in Russia before. It is difficult to read the decree of the Senate on December 20, 1815 without irony. The authorities in St. Petersburg "suddenly discovered" that which every Orthodox priest in any of the most remote Russian parishes from century to century was loudly broadcasting. There is not a single new thesis in the document.
The minister's report, Prince Golitsyn, on the "Jesuit case" ends with specific proposals "who exactly, when and through what places will be sent and will go abroad." The imperial resolution on the document reads: "Be this way."
The decision of Catherine II played not only a saving role in the fate of the order itself, but also left a certain imprint, albeit inconspicuous at first glance, on the spiritual and intellectual Russian elite. It could not be otherwise. Among the Russian surnames who studied at the Jesuit boarding house, you can find many famous ones: Golitsyns, Tolstoy, Pushkins, Kutuzovs, Odoevsky, Glinka and so on. Echoes of an education and way of thinking so unusual for Russia, if you look closely, can be found here and there in the works and letters of Russian Western intellectuals of the late 18th - early 19th centuries, or in the actions of some Russian Decembrist revolutionaries.
Such a result, of course, would not suit the founder of the Jesuit order Ignatius Loyola, one of the main mottos of which was: "Become everything for everyone in order to gain everyone!" In Russia, this task was not achieved. The Jesuits became just "something for some" and acquired a few.