Cardinal Saldanha was appointed "visitor and reformer of the society," with full power to reform whatsoever abuses should be found to exist, and if, after investigation, "any grave matters" were discovered, he was required to report them to the pope, who would then decide what subsequent steps were to be taken.[106] The proceedings up to that point were therefore judiciously conducted. The death of Benedict XIV, however, within about a month after the date of this brief, passed it over to Clement XIII, his immediate successor. The Jesuits strive hard to show that although the pope referred in his brief to the reform of abuses, he did not intend thereby to signify that he had then decided that reforms were necessary. If they be allowed the benefit of this argument, it does not avail them against the fact that Cardinal Saldanha, after investigation, made a report in which "the fathers of the society in Portugal, and its dominions at the end of the earth, are declared, on the fullest information, guilty of every crime of worldly traffic that could disgrace the ecclesiastical state."[107] Whilst the special accusation here made had reference to the commercial traffic by which, in express violation of the rules of the society, the Jesuits had accumulated immense wealth in all parts of the world, and in direct violation of their vow of "extreme poverty," Pombal considered himself justified, with the assent of the king, in requiring of the cardinal patriarch of Lisbon the issuance of an official order "to suspend from the sacred ministry, or preaching and hearing confessions, all the religious of the Society of Jesus," in the Patriarchate of Lisbon. An order to that effect was accordingly issued by the patriarch, which made the issue more serious and complicated than ever; for it was a direct and practical procedure which everybody could understand. In their own defense, the Jesuits urge that the patriarch was intimidated by Pombal, and that, in consequence, he died of remorse within a month, and confessed his error upon his death-bed. Such defenses as this are of no weight as arguments, in the face of actual and known occurrences, and especially when it is well known that the Jesuits are in the habit of resorting so frequently to death-bed repentances, obtained in private by themselves, as to excite general suspicion against them. Even, however, if their statement in this case is accepted as true, the order of the patriarch was carried into effect by the Government of Portugal, and proved, in the end, to be the most fatal blow ever aimed at the society before that time. The proceedings were not arrested by the death of the patriarch; for the vacancy made by it was immediately filled by the appointment of Cardinal Saldanha as his successor, which the Jesuits were compelled to construe as a censure of their society, inasmuch as he had already, in his report, charged them with crimes disgraceful to the "ecclesiastical state." As this appointment was