The Jesuits' Return

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 15, 9 April 1903, Page 18

The Jesuits' Return

The whirligig of time brings in his revenges. So runs the well-worn phrase. It has, in Germany, reversed practically the whole of Bismarck's anti-Catholic legislation. Count von Bulow has announced the approaching repeal of the expulsion edict of 1873, by which all the Jesuit establishments in the Fatherland were closed, and German members of the Society were ' interned ' and foreign ones sent into banishment. Somewhere or other the Jesuit Fathers are ever upon the rack. In the unfailing persecution that is ever with' them we can trace the fulfilment of their great founder's prayer, that the cross should be, in a most especial manner, the heritage of his disciples. The reason of the fierce persecution of the Society by anti-Catholic or irreligious was summed up in the French House of Peers in 1845 in a speech by the great orator and historian, Montalembert. ' It has never been asserted,' he said, ' that the Jesuits constitute the Church, but that they are " in " the Church, and " of " the Church ; that they are her most devoted sons and most faithful soldiers ; and that to injure them is to injure the Church.'