The story of the battle of the Bible Society and the Order of Jesus
may be read in Joly, and in other writers. When that Order was
suppressed in Rome, and the Fathers were banished from every Catholic
state in Europe, a remnant was received into Russia by the insane
Emperor Paul, who took them into his favor in the hope of vexing the
Roman Court, and of making them useful agents in his Catholic
provinces. Well they repaid him for the shelter given--not only in the
Polish cities, but in the privatest recesses of his home. Father
Gruber is said to have been familiar with every secret of the palace
under Paul. These exiles were a band of outlaws, living in defiance of
their spiritual chief and of their temporal prince; but while they
clung with unslackening grasp to the great traditions of their
Society, they sought, by visible service to mankind, the means of
overcoming the hostility of popes and kings. No honest writer will
deny that they were useful to the Russians in a secular sense,
whatever trouble they may have caused them in a religious sense. They
brought into this country the light of science and the love of art
then flourishing in the West; and the colleges which they opened for
the education of youth were far in advance of the native schools. They
built their schools at Moscow, Riga, Petersburg, Odessa, on the banks
of the Volga, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. They sought to be
useful in a thousand ways; in the foreign colony, at the military
station, in the city prison, at the Siberian mine. They went out as
doctors and as teachers. They followed the army into Astrakhan, and
toiled among the Kozaks of the Don; but while they labored to do good,
they labored in a foreign and offensive spirit. To the Russ people
they were strangers and enemies; subjects of a foreign prince, and
members of a hostile church. Some ladies of the court went over to
their rite; a youth of high family followed these court ladies; then
the clergy took alarm, and raised their voices against the strangers.
What offended the Russians most of all was the assumption by these
Jesuits of the name of missionaries, as though the people were a
savage horde not yet reclaimed to God and His Holy Church. Unhappily
for the fathers, this title was expressly forbidden to the Catholic
clergy by Russian law, and this assumption was an act of disobedience
which left them at the mercy of the crown.
But while the Emperor Paul was kind to them, these acts were passed in
silence, and Alexander seemed unlikely to withdraw his favor from his
father's friends. The issue of a New Testament in the native speech
brought on the conflict and insured their fate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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