ROME, December 2, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — Speculation has arisen lately about the status of the Society of Jesus, now that the highest office in the Church is held by a member of the Jesuits.

Historically, the Society has been the object of considerable suspicion from more traditional religious orders and from sections of the Catholic laity. Pope Paul IV, who served from 1555 to 1559, described the Society’s internal structure as a tyranny, and in a difficult and bad-tempered exchange with the second superior general of the Jesuits, he alleged that if they did not begin the choral recitation of the office, one day “Satan would arise from their ranks.”

Famously, one of the greatest theological disputes in the history of the Church, the de Auxiliis controversy, was left unresolved because of Pope Paul V’s fear that condemning the Jesuit theology of grace as heretical (as the older theological schools insisted that it was) would do irreparable harm to the society’s prestige, damaging the Counter-Reformation.

The celebrated French author and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, reproached the society for having compromised the Augustinian doctrine of God’s grace and led their penitents into moral laxity.

Through the first two hundred years of its history, the society was adorned with many saints whose missionary labors were prodigious and who gave their lives for the Gospel and for the unity of the Church. Undoubtedly, the Jesuits struck fear into the hearts of Protestants and secular enemies of the Church.

In 1773, under huge pressure from so-called “Enlightened” despots then ruling Catholic Europe, Pope Clement XIV (a Franciscan) “forever annulled and extinguished” the Society of Jesus. In the period following their dissolution, certain theological positions dear to the Jesuits but less congenial to the more traditional schools sank beneath the waves, and in the words of Francis Sullivan, SJ, “hardly any Catholic theologians dared to question the traditional teaching.”

And yet, in 1814, in the wake of ...-->

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