Note 25 — THE EXPULSION OF THE JESUITS, 1768–1769
Reading edition
Referring to the Order of St. Francis, since many of its members were martyred in the Japanese persecutions. (About the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits, their enemies declared that, while martyrs abounded in the other religious orders, the Jesuits escaped that fate among the heathen.) In the other missions, the allusion is to the noted controversy over the Chinese rites, in which the Jesuits were accused of undue laxity and connivance with heathen customs; the same accusation was also made against them in some of the American missions. ↑