Note 8 — THE EXPULSION OF THE JESUITS, 1768–1769

This decree, “if we view the occasion of its publication, and the terms in which it is expressed, accepted in the name of the court of Roma the war to which all the Catholic nations were provoking it; and accepted that war without sufficient power to defend itself. The attitude of France, España, Portugal, Naples, and Parma, and later of Vienna, was the result of a new policy which strove to limit the power of the pontificate and to take away its temporal power; and the latter ought not to have begun hostilities without weighing well the consequences, and, above all, without estimating the forces on which it might depend for the combat. The monitory decree of Parma, as the brief of January 30 is called, in which his Holiness protested against all the measures which the Catholic courts were putting into execution, was the origin and cause of the expulsion of the Jesuits by the duchies of Parma and Plasencia; of the prohibition of the circulation in the Catholic states of the bull In cœna Domini and of obedience to it; of the reëstablishment in those states of the pase regio, which had been suspended in España since 1763; of barring from circulation the monitory decree, because it was considered hostile to the regalías of the crown and to the rights of the sovereigns; of the publication by order of the Council, and at the cost of the Spanish government, of the ‘Imperial judgment,’ in which the rights of the Holy See were limited exclusively to the faith, to matters of dogma, and to purely spiritual matters; of the reprisals with which the pope was threatened if he did not revoke the monitory decree; of the occupation of Benevento and Pontecorbo (which was an actual outbreak of hostilities), and the attempt to do the same with Castro and Ronciglione; of a mutual understanding between all the courts hostile to the Holy See; and of the establishment of a general agreement that the extinction of the Society of Jesus would be an indispensable condition for the continuance of correspondence with the court of Roma. The monitory decree of January 30 will signify, in the view of history, the termination of the secular dispute which Roma kept up during two centuries; the triumph of a new policy; and the menace against the temporal power of the popes, which constituted the essential part of the controversy. With the monitory decree, Roma was conquered, and the revolution made rapid advance.” (Danvila, op. cit., iii, pp. 228–230.) ↑