A new era of acephality?

What happens to clerical religious in suppressed religious institutes?

It’s likely that every member of the Society of Jesus knows well what happened in 1773, the year the Jesuits were suppressed as a religious order.

The symbol of the Society of Jesus.

But fewer Jesuits — still less non-Jesuit Catholics — know what happened after the order was suppressed, when despite ecclesiastical hopes that former Jesuits would just go away quietly, the opposite happened.

In fact, a lack of attention to the process of suppressing the Society of Jesus became a pressing governance issue in the Church for decades, until the order was eventually reestablished. And while the situation is not exactly parallel, the suppression of the Jesuits might provide a useful lesson to the Church’s Jesuit pope, especially as he has begun this suppression of clerical religious institutes.

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Pope Clement XIV’s decision to suppress the Society of Jesus came after decades of pressure from Europe’s monarchs, amid a shifting social and political landscape in Europe and the Americas.

The Jesuits had angered the Portuguese crown in the 1750s, for example, over their solidarity with the Guarani people they resisted relocation from the South American missions that had become their homes. They had inflamed the issue when a prominent Jesuit said a devastating earthquake was punishment for the sins of the Portuguese people and their government.

And when Portugal’s king was nearly assassinated in 1758, rumors around Lisbon suggested that Jesuits might have been in on the regicide.

In France, the Jesuits found themselves in trouble for opposing the politically powerful Jansenist heresy, and its allies in the French parliament. When the Jesuits also opposed a Gallicanist ethos that would deemphasize the role of the pope, agitation against them increased.

In Spain, the Jesuits were accused in the 1760s of inciting riots and fomenting anti-monarchist plotters, which eventually saw the order expelled from Spain itself, and then from Mexico and the Philippines.

All of that led to wild conspiracies across Europe about the “dangers” of Jesuitism, and the prospect that the Society of Jesus — with its hold over Europe’s most powerful universities, and its place in the royal courts across Europe — was fast becoming a threat to the entrenched power centers of the continent.

The situation got so bad that it basically decided the conclave of 1769, where Clement XIV was elected mostly because he had assured paranoid monarchs that he would suppress the order.

Four years after his election, the pope issued a July 21, 1773 decree, which declared the Society “suppressed and abolished.”

The decree gave few reasons for his decisions, except to suggest that some orders established in prior centuries had “extorted approbation from the Holy See” and to say that the Society of Jesus “is no longer able to produce the very rich fruits and usefulness for which it was founded and approved and enhanced with so many privileges by our predecessors.”

“Indeed, it happens that scarcely or not at all can the true and lasting peace of the Church be restored as long as the Society is intact,” Clement wrote.

As to the ordained members of the order — reportedly more than 10,000 — Clement gave them permission to enter other religious institutes as probationary members, or to “remain outside religion as secular priests or clerics … under complete and total obedience and subjection to the ordinaries of those dioceses in which they fix their domicile.”

It didn’t happen quite as Clement expected, and across the Church, the relationship between Jesuits and diocesan bishops varied considerably.

Some Jesuits did affiliate themselves to dioceses, taking up parishes or administrative positions and incardinating as secular priests.

But others resisted, continuing to exercise ministry as Jesuits, and in some cases continuing to live in common life in the suppressed religious houses of their suppressed religious order.

In Frederick II’s Prussia and Catherine the Great’s Imperial Russia, the decree of suppression was officially withheld by the monarchs from publication. Jesuits continued to operate those countries, with priests continuing to be ordained in Belarus, and novices from across Europe being formed there.

Eventually, given that the Jesuits were operating illicitly in Russia anyway, Pius VII sanctioned that situation, hoping it would bring some stability. It didn’t.

In fact, as “Russian Jesuits” traveled across Europe and the U.S. to perform ministry, there was even more confusion about which clerics belonged where, and to whom they were supposed to be accountable. It was very difficult for ordinary practicing Catholics to know the canonical status of clerics they were dealing, and no less difficult for bishops to ascertain it.

The Society of Jesus was in 1814 reestablished, after Europe’s political landscape changed dramatically. But for the 41 years in which the Jesuits remained suppressed, confusion about the identity, ministry, and authority of particular Jesuits was a not infrequent phenomenon in some parts of the Church.

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Historians will debate for centuries the wisdom of suppressing the Jesuits — and the strange political and social circumstances surrounding their suppression in the first place.

But from the perspective of governance, it is clear that their suppression led to the creation of a class of quasi-acephelous clerics, whose place in the Church was not clear, even as many continued ministry, often in high-profile positions.

Diocesan bishops were expected to take responsibility for them, but in many cases had a difficult time of even getting a sense of what former Jesuits were living in their dioceses, and what they where up to.

Unless former Jesuits were especially conscientious — and many of them were — it was virtually impossible to sort out the pragmatic consequences of suppression, including questions about sacramental authority and faculties.

For the most part, the Church seemed to have learned a lesson from that phenomenon, about the issues which need specific oversight and attention if a clerical religious institute is to be suppressed, to avoid the problem of a large group of clerics with no hierarchy to obey, and no public clarity about who they are, who they belong to, and what they are doing.

On the whole, considerably more care has since been exercised to ensure that a broad band of displaced clerics aren’t subject to a kind of ecclesiastical honor system at the time they’re put out in the street.

From its very first centuries, the Church has always been wary about the risks inherent among clergy without clear lines of ecclesiastical supervision, and generally been conscientious to do what she can to avoid functional acephality.

Indeed, sources close to the Dicastery for Consecrated Life have told The Pillar that when the Legionaries of Christ was subject to a global apostolic visitation in the early 2000s, the question of what to do with their clerics — and concerns about creating a class of quasi-acephelous ex-LCs — was one contributing factor as the Apostolic See decided to try reform the order, rather than to see it disbanded.

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But the suppression of two religious institutes this year has raised questions about whether the Holy See will remember some of its hard-won lessons about what happens when a religious institute is suppressed — and about what precautions should be put in place.

In January, The Pillar broke the news that the Apostolic See had decided to suppress the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Peruvian-based religious community, and this month, the Argentine bishops’ conference announced the suppression of Miles Christi, a clerical institute founded in 1994.

In both cases, the Apostolic See provided no advance notice to members ahead of decisions to suppress — in fact, sources close to the former institutes have told The Pillar that in both cases, several members of the institute only learned about the suppression when they read news reporting.

And while Rome has provided in both cases for commissaries to wind down the orders over the next year — and to work with clerics on figuring out “what’s next” — The Pillar has confirmed that no information about next steps has yet been conveyed by the Vatican to the dioceses where members of those institutes work — including questions about faculties, oversight, and incardination.

In short, there has been little information, little clarity, and seemingly little advance notice about what should happen next — or even about what individual diocesan bishops should do with religious in their dioceses.

That leaves both clerics and bishops in an unusual situation.

Given that the Church’s universal canon law does not explain what happens the incardination of clerical religious when their institute is suppressed, even the current relationship between members of those suppressed institutes and their dioceses of domicile is undefined, with the prospect of more ambiguity to come.

It could be that papally-appointed commissioners are themselves in the process of preparing appropriate communications to bishops and religious superiors about how they should handle any displaced former religious who come knocking. But while the status of clerics is a matter pertaining to the common good, communication on the status of the religious in question has not been publicly forthcoming.

In short, as the Vatican has seemingly begun suppressing a class of newly established orders, each with problematic founders, it’s worth asking whether the lessons of the Jesuit suppression have been remembered.

And unless communication on the subject is direct and clear, canonists and diocesan bishops may well begin to wonder if the Church is on the verge of a new era for functionally acephalous former religious.

There would be fewer than there were at the great suppression of 1773, but that may well make it more likely that their juridic status could slip through some cracks.

For suppressions taking place in the age of the Church’s first Jesuit pope, the irony of that situation would be noteworthy.