Morality of the Jesuits – Incendiary speech by J. Burggraf 1887

Deutsch

During the time when the Jesuit order was not banned without reason in the still young German Empire and the ongoing unrest, Julius Burggraf gave an incendiary speech warning not to let this creeping snake even a foot back into the country. The morals of the Jesuits and their philosophies and teachings are directly opposed to the Gospel.

Burggraf – A contemporary witness

Julius Burggraf (August 31, 1853 in Berlin; † October 15, 1912 in Bremen) was a literary scholar and Protestant pastor at St. Unsgarii in Bremen, Germany (Source). He lived at a time of the most violent unrest in Germany and Europe. Revolutions, revolts and wars for the upheavals that were presumably intended before the First World War. When Burggraf was born, the papacy had already been politically disempowered for more than half a century (1798 – Info).

It is only five years since the revolution in 1848 that a German nation state has existed for the first time. Protestantism and its popular teachings have been in steep decline for around 50 years and the invention of the theory of evolution has not yet been published. In 1871 the Empire was proclaimed. A first-time merger of the mosaic of kings and principalities that existed for many centuries within the “Holy Roman Empire (of German Nation)” (dissolved by Napoleon in 1806).

Church of Rome wants old power back

The Roman Catholic Church was constantly striving to regain its lost sphere of power. The Jesuit order, approved in 1534 and 1540, played a key role in achieving these goals. A militantly organized association of religious brothers who have made absolute obedience (perinde ac cadaver) their mission. Their public and especially secret actions and intrigues are literally legendary and are now treated as pure “conspiracy theories”. But more than 50 expulsions and banishments from even deeply Catholic countries speak a language of their own.

So it was actually only logical that the Jesuit order had to leave German soil after the founding of the Empire. On July 4, 1872, all branches of the Jesuit order were banned in the German Empire. For the Pope in Rome, the gauntlet was thrown right in his face. The papacy was clearly anxious to reinstate the Jesuits who had apparently been removed from its most strategically important area. Sweet-sounding letters of appeal to Emperor and Chancellor Bismarck were intended to soften their hearts. The order is essential for the “eternal salvation of souls” and a “sacred means to the light of truth, to educate the youth in Christian virtues,” according to the “holy song” from Rome recorded on paper.

A dire warning

Julius Burggraf, theologian and literary scholar, obviously knows the brotherhood of the Society of Jesus very well. After all, he is a contemporary witness to the cruel results of their machinations. In February 1887, when the Empire was just 16 years old, Burggraf gave a speech in Berlin with an urgent warning not to let the Jesuit order even touch the country again. In his speech, Burggraf describes the philosophy and, above all, the understood morality of the Jesuits. The speech was published in the same year as a small book entitled “The Morality of the Jesuits” by the publisher v. R. Herrosé published in Wittenberg. Burggraf was the author of several books, but the speech he gave must be searched for explicitly, because “The Morality of the Jesuits” regularly does not appear in the selection of examples shown.

The story began. The Jesuit law was first weakened in 1904 and finally repealed in 1917, i.e. during the First World War. Protestantism continued to decline and one can clearly see the morals and philosophy described by Burggraf in the teachings represented by the Protestant churches today (Info).Today, positions in the ranks of the “public sector” are also consistently occupied by “professionals” who either directly or at least indirectly “enjoyed” a Jesuit education during their careers. This is an explanation for their thought patterns, philosophies, attitude towards people, their logic and also ruthlessness and zero trustworthiness. Another stage victory for this order. Still not sustainable (Info).

Bullet points used in the speech

– World transfiguration, world domination, humanity, churchhood – Page 7
– Infallible Church is an idol for Jesuits – Page 7
– Moral ruin of the Jesuit order – Page 8
– Tragedy of religious delusion, ecclesiastical fanaticism in the final act – – Page 9
– Strategy “Comfortable Piety” – Page 10
– Jesuits want to keep people in a constant state of terror – Page 14
– Flexible moral sentences to appease the conscience – Page 15
– Strategy “Directing Intention” – Page 17
– Jesuit justification for church robbery, unchastity, forgeries, perjury, theft, receiving stolen goods, murder, manslaughter – Page 19
– Strategy of “Probabiltitä” (probability) – Page 21
– The “Dethronement of Conscience” – Page 22
– Ethical Nihilism – Page 23
– Fear of conscience, appeasement of conscience, confusion of conscience, enslavement of conscience – Page 24
– Pity the Jesuits, detest Jesuitism – Page 28
Loyola’s abused saying “came to light a fire on earth” – Page 28
– Peace with Catholics, but no peace with Rome and the Jesuit Order – Page 32

“The Morality of the Jesuits” – speech in book form

The book from 1887 is written in old German script. When copying, the division of the individual pages was retained. The old spelling is adapted to the current standard.

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Distinguished congregation!

The storm of church-political reaction has washed away almost everything that was created in the early 1870s to protect against Romanism. Only one bulwark stands in the middle of these roaring waters, completely intact, like a wistful reminder of times of ideal prosperity that have passed: the Imperial Law of July 4, 1872, which gave the Jesuit Order and its related orders and order-like congregations the territory of the German Empire closed. But the Pope has already raised his voice and complained to the imperial government using Ledochowski’s pretext that “this glorious society, this fruitful nurturing mother of great men distinguished by the glory of holiness, still has to suffer for the sake of justice.”

He wishes with all his heart that “she may continue in the pursuit of her goals for the honor of God and for the eternal salvation of souls,” and that it will again be possible for her to “lead the false believers to the light of truth through holy means and the To educate young people in Christian virtues.” This is a very noteworthy sign under the current circumstances, which allows us to expect pleasant surprises, even if not in the very near future. The thought of the tension that currently exists between the Vatican and the center can hardly calm us down. These enemy brothers love each other way too much.

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Anyone who has even a passing knowledge of church history will have no doubt that this idea that is now taking place – here the papacy allied with the government, there the Guelphism inciting the opposition – is a scheming move by the Jesuits , which they will certainly complete masterfully again. Whether the Roman figures on both sides are aware that they are being controlled or not is irrelevant to the matter. They will follow nicely and get along well after the game is over, and when the times are fulfilled and the onslaught of Jesuitism against the aforementioned imperial law can be dared, they will faithfully work into each other’s hands. And what about the defense? Here is a government that has tied its own hands and can hardly avoid the worst consequences of its church policy; there a cartel, internally unclear and divided, in which individual national liberals will raise a manly but weak protest, while the vast majority will behave according to the motives of “conservative interests”; and alongside that is liberalism, which, with a few praiseworthy exceptions, on the whole we can least trust in a strong protection of the evangelical nature due to its bottomless indifference and lack of understanding of religious and moral questions. There is only one solution: we have to pull ourselves together, man by man, and everyone has to do everything for themselves and in their place that they can, so that the Protestant consciousness among the people can once again become a force to be reckoned with must. The German conscience once saved us from the hands of priests, and apart from God’s help, conscience is now the only thing we want to rely on in these serious times. And so this lecture should also be an appeal to the Reformation conscience. I would like to acquaint you a little more closely with ”

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the ethical principles of the men who desire to “lead us erring believers to the light of truth” and to “educate Germany’s youth in Christian virtues.

I note in advance that what you will hear below as Jesuit teaching and as an example of Jesuit views is taken from the writings of the Order. Now, it is a principle that the entire community to which he or she belongs should not simply be held responsible for what the individual speaks and writes. But that does not apply here, since no Jesuit is allowed to publish a book that does not have one The order’s superior, usually the general himself, has issued the testimony through his express approval that no doctrine or opinion was found therein that contradicted the religious and moral teachings of the Society of Jesus. This means that the order takes responsibility for everything and we have to abide by it ourselves.

I.
The slogan of the Jesuits is: destruction of all free movement and all intellectual independence in their own church, mortal hostility above all to the work of the Reformation. But no spiritual movement can survive solely on negation. So what is the positive ideal that Jesuitism strives for in its opposition to Protestantism? This is shown by a look at the two men who were the greatest representatives of these opposite schools of thought. What a strange coincidence! Martin Luther and Ignatius von Loyola’s most momentous day of life is recorded on the same annual page of history. It was in the year 1521 that the German reformer stood before the emperor and empire in Worms and, through his heroic refusal to recant, broke away from the priestly church forever, and it was in the year 1521

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that a cannonball felled the Spanish nobleman in Pamplona and threw him on a sick bed, which forever closed him to his martial profession. The same year make the monk a knight and a knight a monk. The outlaw is taken to the Wartburg, the wounded man to his Basque castle; both find solace in religion. But how different are the books in which they seek consolation, and how different this search itself! Here an ever deeper penetration into the Bible, there an indulgence in the priestly legend. Here the religious seriousness, whose conscience burns the salvation of Christianity and the question of the saving truth; there the religiously heated sensuality that looks for a service of love that the invalid can still practice in the religious dress. Here heart-refreshing and life-shaping thoughts emerge from the writings of the apostles and prophets; There, enthusiastic, meaning-confusing dreams float away from the stories of the saints. It seems to me as if the figures that fill the soul here and there come together to form a picture that the Christian spirit has already prophesied into the Gospel as a characteristic of the life’s work of both men. In the silence of the desert, Jesus sees before him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and a voice speaks to him: “I will give all this to you if you fall down and worship me!” – and the fantastic Spaniard stands in ecstasy before the one with the Church of Christ intended for world domination and vows to her with ardent vows of love that she will establish this world throne for her in Holy Rome; and he goes and gathers a group of religious orders who will stand up for the glory of the Pope’s Church, which will overthrow everything before them, through life and death. But the spiritually profound German continued reading his Bible. There it says: Jesus said: “Get away from me, Satan, for it is written: You shall worship the Lord your God, and him – him alone;

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then he sees Christ’s church before him, poor, lowly and in the form of a servant, but of Spiritual powers emanate from her, which will carry everything that is called human up to the heavenly throne of eternal love; and he goes and gathers together a church to worship God in spirit and in truth, and permeated by their life the world is perfected into the kingdom of God. These are contrasts huge and deep. There is a religious idea on both sides; but here it is the heavenly consecration of the conscience that has broken through, there the worried shimmer of the triumphant, selfish, sensual human being. That is why the ideal here is world transfiguration, there world domination, here a humanity redeemed and matured in grace, there a ecclesiastical world abandoned by the spirit. Auch vor Ignatius hat es Männer gegeben, die sich zu diesem glänzenden Kirchenideal bekannten. But the idea was always somehow present and more or less dominant that the external glory of the church should only be the means for the Christianization of humanity in life and mentality. Here the means itself is elevated to the highest end of religion, the ultimate end goal of all world developments and all human determination: the Roman church power, with its aggravation in the papacy, which was already thought to be infallible at the time, becomes the Jesuit order’s idol.

But finite things are never deified with impunity, every idolatry becomes a worship of sin, and wherever the heart, enticed by the world and thereby straying from God, sets up its altar of lies, even if it is in Christian church halls, there is the sacrifice that burns to dust on it, the moral feeling. Naturally; If something has become the all-determining idol of a person’s life, then everything that promotes the honor of this idol must be fine with him, regardless of whether it is good or evil.

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The boundary between good and evil then disappears from the conscience, and a transverse line now runs through both areas that separates between useful and hindering. Some good things will then also be called good, but only because they serve idolatrous purposes; But in addition, bad things will also find recognition for the same reason of utility. We can observe this shift in the boundaries of idolatry, which dulls the sense of morality, every day in life. However, it always takes place under the more or less vivid awareness of indebtedness; people have a feeling, however dimly, that they are sinning against their God. But here man closes his eyes to what is “written,” written as God’s unchanging word in the depths of his own breast, and falls down in homage to the common and creaturely without the slightest trace of self-accusation. On the contrary. The Jesuit knows how to excuse and approve of the most shameless thing, which would make any pagan naturalist blush, if it serves his ticks, with joyfully exalted satisfaction and with the proud consciousness of having done something completely justified before God and highly deserving for the order; for he does not see at all that the dream of his order’s ecclesiastical world empire, for the realization of which this evil is necessary, has risen from the dark underground of the sensual-selfish desires of human nature; He doesn’t even notice that the church, as his order teaches him to notice, is an idol whose service makes him the most frivolous of all blasphemers. Blinded by the divine appearance and the religious name of his ideal, he lives with the firm belief that he is a Christian, indeed the best Christian, and that he can most faithfully serve the purposes of Jesus through his ruthless behavior, which is why he follows him in a very special way wise. This moral ruin of the order is an extremely disgusting, but even

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more deeply tragic sight; it is the tragedy of religious delusion and ecclesiastical fanaticism in its final act! HE shows us a terrible way into which piety and faith can, indeed must, fall if church power, dogmatic coercion and confessional unity are more important to them than love and truth and life in God.
There is a mockery, a moral indignation, but rather melancholy and pity in the word; si cum Jesuitis, non cum Jesu itis, whoever goes with the Jesuits, who does not live according to Jesus. No! The Jesus of the Jesuit order is not the great, glorious Son of God, the pure heart of humanity, the world-redeeming salvation; He is the false Messiah, against whom his word warned, a Christ who has made peace with the natural human heart and relies on what is common in human nature to achieve church-political goals.

II.
This moral quietism, the basic justification of which I have tried to give you here and which I would now like to describe to you in its practical appearance, is immediately apparent in the education of the order’s novices. Through spiritual exercises the pupil is daily so excited in a more than Methodistic way that he believes he can smell the sulfurous vapor and musty smell of hell and feel its flames on his flesh. But while the imagination is thus acquainted with the curse of sin in order to instill a high consciousness of the glory and omnipotence of ecclesiastical absolution, the entire system of pedagogical influence is unabashedly built into human sinfulness. In a very sophisticated way, speculation is made on ambition, selfishness and self-conceit, on pride and arrogance; through an organized lurking and tracking system with

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mutual surveillance and boasting, mistrust and cunning are aroused and skill in dissembling and apologizing, in stalking and lurking Trained others. Because of the way in which his ignoble impulses are used by his spiritual teachers, the young Jesuit gets the impression that what is evil and sinful in people can become very valuable in the service of the church, if only one person How to deal with it wisely and how to make very useful things even from the dirtiest material. When, on the other hand, the apostle warns that flesh and blood cannot enter the kingdom of God and speaks of a crucification of lusts and desires, he considers this Paul a saint of his church, but a very strange one. He knows better. With a truly Sadducean smile at the impractical seriousness of the Gospel’s conscience, the scholastic studies the moral books of his order. Behold, there is one thing that has already become a familiar and dear advisor to him when he thinks about his future career. It has the auspicious title “la dévotion aisée”, the convenient piety. In it, the Frenchman Le Moyne, a contemporary of Louis He warns against taking life too seriously and believes it is possible to combine a Christian spirit with a light view of life. The saints also had their mistakes and still became saints, the eagle sometimes sinks in its flight and yet remains the eagle. Denying yourself and practicing renunciation are indeed something praiseworthy, but they also have their great difficulties. Anyone who really wants to take on these fights should do so if their temperament tells them to; But whoever prefers the more comfortable path

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will reach his goal more easily and will be just as dear to God. This would look good in a modern travel guide, but in a Christian morality book it is outrageously frivolous. But you will admit to me that following such principles can make a pastor popular and pleasant with the average class of people – and that’s all the Jesuits want.

If a court like that of that French Louis was characterized by particular moral dubiousness, and yet it was very important to have a firm footing there in order to spin political threads in the interests of the church, then a priest appeared there who was from head to toe a supple courtier, an experienced man of the world in every word and every look, who, despite his religious habit, understood the art of coming to terms with the sins of his surroundings and of treating certain hobbies of the great with care. HE has Loyola’s instructions in his pocket, which say that one should not be a nuisance to such great gentlemen, who set such a good example through their zeal (for the Jesuits, that is) with instructions and advice for the improvement of their conscience. Of course you are everything in God and from God and through God that the prince feels, thinks and does, and nothing is further from his lowest servant than to want to be the moral judge of those around him. Listen to how unctuous it flows from the lips when the royal confessor Sirmond speaks of the depth of the divine mysteries at the table, at the game and in the assembly of the courtiers, and explains to his listening hearers that God, according to his admirable goodness towards men, does not I have commanded so much to love him, but only forbidden to hate him. How the gentlemen and ladies feel so angelically good, because whatever they were missing against God’s command, it wasn’t hate, no hate, that’s what they can say. On another occasion the worthy gentleman

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speaks of the indolence of the heart in the hours of temptation and the unwillingness of the heart to rid itself of evil habits. Now things get more tricky. But to reassure them they hear that God does not take much credit for falling and stumbling if the temptation is more than usual and lasts too long, and that persistence in a sinful inclination can be excused if one cannot free oneself from it without great effort or if a person’s position would be jeopardized by resistance to evil, and he would thereby be deprived of the opportunity to do the good that he also does in his position. This makes sense to the dignitaries; the man is becoming more and more valuable. But now he pulls out his strongest stops, he praises the glory of priestly absolution: “Through our pious and religious cunning, through our striving to make people pious, the crimes are cleansed and atoned for more quickly than they are committed, and most of them Men hardly defile themselves with sin faster than we cleanse them.” And how painless is this confessional wash! It’s enough to have the opinion that you feel remorse or just sorrow that you don’t feel any, and then you can temporarily replace what is missing with the pious confession of your mouth. Now we are very clear about the pastor. It’s easy to get along with the man; you can let him in on his most secret thoughts and desires without any fear. He will close his eyes tightly when he is not supposed to see, and open his mouth wide when he has to find a beautiful name for an infamy, because he is clever and understanding. Yes, the Jesuit school does not train court preachers in the style of John the Baptist; the crowned patrons of the order and their followers never heard the “it is not right!”; Rather, they have always been able to use cunning biblical phrases to cover up the sins

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of the nobles and to buy their control over them and their influence over their government through pastoral flattery. With the permission of the confessors, most of the Catholic courts of the 16th and 17th centuries wallowed in all the opulence of a Christian-whitewashed paganism, and the gentlemen, through their absence at court and through cleverly arranged sermons in public, cast a halo over the most dissolute court widths. But the people were not allowed to go away empty-handed either. The greatest danger was that, gripped by the Protestant spirit, the more and more people would take heart to throw off the priestly yoke. It was important to develop the entire charm of the papal church. They came over the Alps and brought all sorts of beautiful things with them for the spiritual snacking of the masses. Wherever they directed their steps, the order’s cornucopia poured out spiritual spectacles, miracles and images of saints, places of pilgrimage, relics, amulets and Marian cults across the lands in a completely unusual richness and beauty, and in the middle of these incense-scented glories stood the friendly priest on the head the glory of special holiness, in the mouth the mild reproaches that tasted as sweet as sugar, and in the eyes the understanding smile that was so encouraging, – quite the opposite of the strict Reformation preachers who wanted to read all sorts of things out of the Bible that made people’s lives sour. Truly, one should not have been human if the choice could have been difficult: here, of course, freedom and independence, there the rule and power of the priest, but here also a strict spiritual discipline and there a very loosely held rein that has very little influence on the carnal sense embarrassed.

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III.
But how, you will say, when a priesthood, misled by priestly desires for power, can become so morally wild that it makes a mockery of all pastoral duties, completely loses sight of the sanctification of the human personality and allows carnal nature to run its course virtually uninhibited? Is man just flesh, just sensuality and selfish desire? Aren’t these representatives of “comfortable piety” dealing with people who also have a conscience in their hearts, an innate moral feeling that is aware of their obligation to God, a heart that fears for their happiness?
Certainly, the idea of ​​divine judgment over sin and guilt is precisely the ground on which the Catholic Church has been able to establish the confessional, and the confessional in turn is the firm throne of Jesuit power. He would collapse immediately if the voice in the human breast spoke more about eternity and the damnation of sin. Therefore, one of the main efforts of the Jesuits is not only to keep this consciousness alive, but also to put people in a state of constant terror of hell and the devil. They achieve this through an eloquence that knows how to drive people into a moral fever crisis through fiery glow and supernatural imagination, through excitement of all the senses and devastating proclamation of the law that is devoid of any moments of grace. Now it seems to us to be a difficult task to reconcile such exaggerated judgment sermons with what they see as justified laziness and the speculation on human naturalness that is required in the interest of the church. But it only seems that way to us because we completely overlook the fact that these people don’t have to solve their task with their conscience and sense of truth, but with the subtlety of the sophistic churchman.

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but with the subtlety of the sophistic churchman. But he knows what to do. People have to tremble at the mere thought of sinning or having sinned, otherwise they wouldn’t come to the confessional at all; In the confessional, however, the priest will, under certain circumstances, have to make his confessors ignore certain scruples of conscience and talk them out of some concerns, otherwise certain goals cannot be achieved and their favor cannot be won; So the concept of “sin” that the Christian brings with him in his conscience must be worked on in such a way that it becomes soft like rubber, which the confessor can use as needed. When he speaks in the pulpit and in class about sin in general and about the curse and horror of individual sins, then he probably stretches the sin in a terribly long way, far beyond all limits of evangelical understanding. But when the question arises in confessional practice: is this or that, what the person has done or wants to do, sin! – then he lets go of the concept of sin so that it collapses into a tiny piece that is hardly worth mentioning or is probably completely out of hand. For the production of this Jesuit gum of sin, which is stored up in the casuistics of Escobar, Filliucius, Casnedi, Moya, Sanchez, Busenbaum and others, but especially in the case of Gury, who belongs to the present, one of the most daring mercenaries of the Society of Jesus, whose moral works are in the German seminaries Mainz, Speyer, Regensburg and Freiburg are in use – in order to produce elastic moral principles that serve to appease conscience, the order now needs two tools, one is called reservatio mantalis, the other directio intentionis.

According to the first, perjury or the breaking of an oath-like promise, like lying in general, is a mortal sin through which a person deprives himself of his happiness; but it loses this character when the priest finds that

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the oath has been taken and the promise made with a “secret reservation.” A man in debt dies; Before the creditors come over the estate, the widow brings some of it to safety. When questioned by the judge, she swears that she has not put any of her husband’s property aside. That’s not perjury if she meant by it: not what she didn’t need to make a living. – A murderer assures that he did not murder the person mentioned. He thought of someone else with the same name. This will sometimes be necessary, assures the faithful Sanchez, in order to hide something that must remain hidden and that cannot remain hidden without lies and perjury if it were not done in this way – A woman has betrayed her husband. When asked by him whether she was guilty of the crime, she replied: I am not guilty. The priest will not bother her for this word, she was even allowed to confirm it with an oath, because she had long since confessed to the offense, so she was actually no longer guilty. Notice that perfidious ambiguity in the word “guilty.” Such ambiguities in speech and even in oaths are permitted. According to Jesuit morality, the fulfillment of a word can be tied to conditions of which the person to whom one promises or swears something has no idea. But this theologianship goes even further. One can actually swear to a thing without having the intention of calling God to witness it. In this case the words “I swear to God” would have no more meaning than if a parrot trained by its teacher had uttered them. This zoological moralist who makes the confessional a birdcage and the Christian man an unreasonable creature is called Thomas Tamburini. If we are frightened by this frivolity and become indignant at the fact that oaths are taken here without

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any religious binding force, the Roman priest Fideldey here in Bremen tries to explain the claims of the religious in this regard in a protective document for the Jesuits and he believes us that they are harmless to convince the same when he points to the actor who declaims an oath in front of the audience and to the judge who recites the oath formula to the witness. That’s right, gentlemen, just cover the pure wisdom of this holy order with the cloak of love through the most harmless erection possible and sew snow-white sheep’s clothing for the wolves who howl behind the border. They will then come and wreak havoc before your eyes that will shock you as Germans and as Christians and as pastors of your communities. With their fine art of appeasing the conscience, these innocent Jesuits will destroy all loyalty, all truthfulness, all mutual trust among the people. – But it gets worse.

If with their “secret reservation” they know how to make the conscientious concepts of perjury, perfidy and lies as flexible as they want, then the second, the “direction of the intention“, must serve the same maneuver on all other sins and vices to exercise. The great, wonderful core idea of ​​Protestant morality, that the character of an act is determined by the attitude from which it emerges, that, for example, a good deed is only pleasing to God if it is done out of love and with joy, but that this also constitutes an injustice, for example an insult becomes more excusable before God and people if it was not done intentionally but perhaps through carelessness – this moral truth is twisted by the Jesuits into a falsehood and abused in the most disgraceful way to justify even the worst sins. The confessor tempts his confessor to lie to himself by using questions and hints to guide him so that he looks for and finds a more harmless,

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if not praiseworthy, intention for his action instead of the reprehensible one. A servant appropriates property belonging to his master because he has been burdened with work against his will that he was not obliged to do. She doesn’t want to give more wages, but a worker is worth a fine wage. Isn’t it simply an offended sense of justice when the girl holds herself harmless? That’s obvious? In his devastating Provincial Letters, Pascal is malicious enough to tell us about a servant of the Jesuits who himself stole from them and then tried to justify himself with this intention. They didn’t realize it then. – Bribery is sin. But the candidate who gave a voter a gift just wanted to enjoy the recipient’s joy and see a really happy face for once. Surely it’s not unchristian to make sure that you are in a position to be able to rejoice with those who are happy? – Homicide in a duel and the duel in general is to be rejected from an ethical point of view. The Jesuit also says that. But should God want to be angry with someone who goes for a walk in a certain place at an hour agreed upon with friends with a weapon in his hand and who, when the enemy comes along and attacks, defends himself? – Frightened in his conscience, a sinful human child flees to the confessional and reveals to his priest that he has helped another to commit a shameful act. How could the confessor not comfort her with the fact that she had secretly disapproved of the other’s sin and had only been forced by external circumstances to take part in the injustice? How could he not be allowed to ask a lost person whether his mind had not been occupied with completely different things when he gave in to evil desires? And isn’t it entirely right that the Jesuit, who is concerned about the advantage of his order, convinces the dissolute nobleman

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that he did not find his pleasure in the injustice itself, but only in the aesthetic way of carrying it out? So it was a harmless satisfaction of his artistic sense that is what it is about? And wasn’t it also something praiseworthy, even if perhaps a bit of overzealous piety, for the son to murder his father – of course not in order to get rid of him, but only so that he could get to heaven more quickly? It is immediately obvious to the religious that this was the reason for his misdeed, given that he is someone who deserves the Society of Jesus. Yes, there are even some among them who, in their fanatical ruthlessness, even dare to advocate the murder of a prince if he endangers the interests of the Roman Church. A Mariana exclaims enthusiastically about such a sacrilegious traitor: “O excellent audacity of the Christian spirit, a higher power has strengthened you (to commit the bloody deed)!” After all this, we will no longer be surprised if the professor of constitutional law Jordan, the one who has been a student of the Jesuits for some time, assures us that in the writings of his teachers he found 2 authorities for church robbery, 17 for unchastity, 59 for forgery and perjury, 24 for theft and receiving stolen property, 36 for murder and manslaughter. So for the worst crimes, justifiable intentions can sometimes be found. “If we want to live safely in Rome, then we need three people, a conscientious doctor, a reliable pharmacist and a faithful cook.” – this saying by Cardinal Prince Hohenlobe, which he did in the 1960s as a German Jesuit What Joseph Kleutgen did as a consultant to the Indian Congregation in Rome sufficiently characterizes what this morality can accomplish. You know the dictum that has become the proverbial expression of Jesuit morality: the end justifies the means. The apologists of the Order are now

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making much of the fact that they have not yet succeeded in discovering this sentence in its literal form in their books, and as a result, in the strongest outbursts of indignation, they complain about the slanders among them the group of “pure fighters of Jesus” have to suffer. O you hypocrites! Isn’t your entire thinking and striving dominated by this thought? Does he not cry out in a thousand voices from your works? Is there a single unfair means that your purposes have not already sanctified? Isn’t it entirely out of your spirit when one of the Eurogen boasts that he wants to deal with the devil himself in the confessional in a quarter of an hour? Truly they should be called advocates of sin! For what I have presented to you here as a “secret reservation” and as a “direction of intention” is other than a bold apology of the flesh – in the Church of Jesus Christ, before the face of God, under holy vestments, through the consecrated priest’s mouth the old Adam, who tries to appease the voice of truth, the conscience, with lies and deceit!

IV.
But no matter how carefully the Jesuits go about their work in such endeavors, no matter how much they are averse to anything clumsy and clumsy, always move on their toes and are able to give the most questionable appearance the most harmless appearance, the eyes of moral feeling will not be opened , will it not then tear apart this tissue-pastoral deceit of conscience and appeal from the misguided conscience to the infallible, to the divine law in the human breast? – This is a step that would be self-evident and easy on Protestant soil, difficult and questionable on Catholic soil, but impossible and, in any case,

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completely hopeless on Jesuit soil. The necessary precautions against this have been taken through the last and absolutely worst trick that is practiced in Loyola’s discipleship, which is the teaching of “Probabiltität“, a true masterpiece from the workshop of lies. Wherever the Jesuits have influence, be it openly and freely or hidden and unnoticed – because without religious dress they are often closer to us than we think and they stand right among us – there they try to spread the opinion that among the various Because of which one has to choose between the moral decisions of life, it is not, as every healthy feeling tells itself, that the one dictated by conscience and conviction is the only right one and therefore must be followed unconditionally, but that there is often one more thing besides that give to others for whom “reasons of weight” can be given. For if this other path becomes acceptable and permissible, the reasons make it feasible, probable, and it is now doubtful which is the more probable. For example, a farmer cut wood in a foreign forest. Should his confessor make him compensate for the damage or return the other person’s property? That goes without saying for us. Yes, says the Jesuit Burghaber, that is very much the question: there was no enclosure around the forest, he used what he took to meet his domestic needs, and moreover he did not cause any devastation in the wooding, not even one undue defeat inflicted; All of this speaks in favor of not requiring him to pay compensation; it is a doubtful case. He decides to retain what he stole as the more likely option! – Or an example from Gury: Two people got engaged. Shortly before the wedding, the groom receives an unexpected inheritance and becomes a wealthy man. Of course he will immediately rush to his bride and share his joy with her, we can’t

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imagine taking any other step. But the professor at the Jesuit college in Rome, a master in the art of arousing moral doubts, asked quite boldly: Shouldn’t he instead cancel the engagement? I will now let him continue speaking entirely in his own words, in order to acquaint you with the Order’s language, which is so characteristic of its moral character; One can become morally nervous with this cunning twist and turn of the Jesuits. So Gury answers his question as follows: It is disputed whether he can resign. However, it seems that this should be answered in the affirmative, because in fact there is now a significant inequality between the engaged couples. But this is usually contradicted because nothing has changed in the other part and therefore it cannot be abandoned. In this particular case, however, it seems to me as if the man, at least according to the more likely opinion, should not be worried that he has given up the engagement because there has been a very striking inequality between him and his bride – all respect to this man of honor!

Of course, these “probabilities” of the Jesuits are again a means of negotiating with the impure things in the human heart through secret channels. But of all the order’s immoral principles, this teaching is the worst, because it is no longer just a matter of deceiving and appeasing, of numbing and lulling the conscience, but of a formal indignation, of a dethronement of the Conscienceis an attack on the most indispensable asset of personality, on the sacred basis of all morality. The firm, divinely ordained blocks of the eternal, unbreakable moral commandments in the human breast are thereby caused to waver and sway and are pushed aside more and more: Certain convictions become controversial opinions, absolute necessities

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become dubious possibilities, reasonable insights become arbitrary assumptions, conscience decisions become prudential calculations. This is a terrible, diabolical work of destruction at the basis of moral consciousness, ethical nihilism! By denying the rights of the demands of conscience and robbing them of their obligatory character, they undermine the moral law with its holy “thou shalt!”, on which, along with the individual life, the domestic, social, civil and political life as a whole, in short the entire order of society human society rests. Jesus our Lord came not to abolish this law in us, but to fulfill it; Those who name themselves after him, instead of fulfilling it, dissolve it, they dissolve the divine obligation into a human desire. And a conscience confused by Jesuit influence should still be able to reflect on its truth and muster a strong protest against the crime committed against it? Moments will certainly come to moral feeling, moments of deepest repugnance against the Jesuit confessional dirt, and the person will then follow the poet’s instructions: In the sacred, silent spaces of the heart you must flee from the urge of life. But in the temple of God, which has been desecrated for a long time, it is neither quiet nor holy. Above him rumbles the frightening thunder of judgment, the voice that speaks more earnestly of guilt and responsibility day by day, and whose fatherly sound of love a sophisticated priesthood has managed to tune to merciless jealousy – above him is the judgment and below him a trembling of all foundations of conscience that people can no longer find their way in this artificially created confusion and despair of all their own moral judgment: Here the threatening command, there the complete helplessness, what else is left for him?

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Just as the exhausted pigeon flies into the claws of its strangler, and the hunted game allows the yapping mob to come upon it without any resistance, so in the end, without objection, the human being gives himself into the hands of the priest, who is able, with a complete renunciation of the freedom of his self-determination His infallible insight and his learned casuistic knowledge must know and alone can know what is right, what is most likely at any time, that he advises conscience for the good and guides it as he sees fit. And so Loyola’s system once again worked well. First came the order’s preachers, chosen as decoys, with their brilliant oratorical performances, who knew how to unnoticed but surely and firmly exert a completely unevangelical fear of conscience under intoxicating oratory. When they had fulfilled their mission and captured many, then the obliging confessors appeared, who, always taking into account human weakness, knew how to lure the frightened into the labyrinth of conscience. The natural sense was happy to accept this and he followed. But the further he allowed himself to be drawn into these aberrations, and the less often a ray of light from the free world of God penetrated his soul, the more undisturbed they were able to begin the described work of confusion of conscience in the dark. And if this has also had the desired result, then what they wanted has been achieved: the willless slave of conscience under the hands of priests and church commandments. Because a report is sent to the professed people, in whose hands all the threads come together, and with fervent prayers of thanks for the saved soul, the general draws a new name in the order’s large ledger, which has Gruy’s words as the title page: These are the perfect Christians , who submit themselves to the Church like God himself, who discover all their affairs to their scholar and wise confessor with frankness and simplicity and who no longer make any decisions

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in life without his advice. Anyone who acts like this certainly no longer has to give an account of their actions to God! – Here you have once again, frankly and freely expressed, the idolatry of your religious principle: The Church is God, and as its realization in the field of morality, the infamous cadaveric obedience as the crown of all Christian perfection and the final goal of all human destiny.

But if you want to get a clear idea of ​​this ethical ideal of the order to which we should also be led, then look at the Jesuit himself and see what he has become under the hands of his educators. All ties of life are broken. He no longer knows about any family affiliation, he is only allowed to speak: I had parents, I had siblings, I had friends; he must manage to act like Ignatius of Loyola, who, after a years-long absence from Europe, threw the letters from his family, which he had accumulated in the meantime, into the fire unread; and if he is a convert, he must confess: “We call our parents accursed, who brought us up in the heretical faith, the accursed doctrine.” The member of the order reads in the writings, which are now his gospel, that the son is allowed to kill the father by depriving him of food and in any other way if the father threatens to endanger his own salvation through heresy. This is how fanaticism brutally smothers all filial piety. The order has become the Jesuit’s family, the order is also his fatherland: he is heartless towards the interests of his homeland. The young Germans in the Collegium Germanicum in Rome have to allow themselves to be trained to become blind tools for the Romanification of Germany, and every impulse of patriotism, which even the most reprobate considers something sacred, is in their eyes a sinful alienation from what was their only love should, from the order of Jesus. The world is considered dead,

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and it should be dead to itself: all individuality, whose vigorous development is the source of all found moral life, is destroyed, all independent meaning and will is killed, and in their place of personality the physiognomy of the order has taken place. The individual is lost in society and thinks, thinks, feels and wants only what those above him want. He speaks in the vow in which he swears unconditional obedience: “I am in the hand of my superior a soft wax that can be kneaded into any shape he wants to give it; I am an old man’s stick that he takes, that he puts down, that he uses when and how he wants to use it!” And this goes so far that he has to obey, even if it is against his conscience. As it is expressly stated, he himself must do sinful things when the general commands it in the name of Jesus Christ. How many noble, God-pleasing impulses must first be suffocated, how many difficult battles must be fought against better feelings, how often the poor human heart will sigh and writhe in despair before the Jesuit slavery of conscience destroys the human being, the child of God called to freedom. to this absolute lack of will, to this mindless desolation of souls in the service of the church! Truly, v. Wildenbruch is right when he lets Wimar Knecht speak in his “new commandment”: Unnaturalness has robbed itself of holiness’s garments, stolen teachings, longing for domination of the world, it rises, it strides forward, insensitive to human feeling, heartless over people’s hearts – wherever it goes, the seed withers!

V.
This is the morality of the Jesuits. If my topic had required the character of this or that individual Jesuit, I would probably have had occasion to point out how their fanatical zeal for the Church and the enthusiastic desire to win the souls to the rule of the papacy

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also included acts of heroic sacrifice for their sake thing could come about, as mission history in particular has to show many Jesuit martyrdoms, which, although they did not arise from the sole godly motive of merciful brotherly love, can at least claim a certain recognition. Perhaps I would then have been in an even more pleasant position to show you that even with a Jesuit the experience can confirm that the human heart is sometimes bigger than the untrue idea that fills it, and that the better feeling goes unnoticed to be able to break through the spell that lies on it. We don’t want to forget, for example, that the poet Joh. Scheffler (1624-1677), the author of that wonderful song “After me, says Christ, our hero,” which is entirely based on healthy evangelical morality, and that deeply and truly pious song “Love, you who made me the image of your divinity,” was a mystic with close ties to the Jesuits. Even though he composed the songs mentioned before his conversion to Catholicism, since he was still a Protestant, and after this step he wrote very unjust diatribes against the Protestant Church, we want and can assume that the Jesuit-minded convert also basically his heart still possessed some of the spirit in which he once confessed: Love that has bound me to its yoke, body and mind; Love that has overcome me and has lost my heart; If I love you, I surrender to remain yours forever. Yes, there may also be respectable characters among the Jesuits, and may have been at all times, who, drawn into their nets or caught in them from childhood through the power of education, through personal religiosity and virtue in the place where they stood, some did not allow the moral wrongness of the Society of Jesus to

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come into play. We would like to believe all of this, just as our accusation is not directed against individual members, but against the ideas of the Order. But these are chains of Satan, by which Christian souls, blinded by a false halo, seduced by the lure of their own naturalness, have allowed themselves to be bound. We pity and apologize for the individual Jesuits, we detest and condemn Jesuitism! At the end of my presentation, however, I do not know how to formulate this decisive judgment of rejection, which must be made about the morality of the order from the standpoint of Protestant morality, more accurately and convincingly than the Jesuits themselves did.

They built an extremely magnificent church for their saint in Rome to honor the eternal memory of his religious foundation. But the dome of the Jesuit church is decorated with the murder scenes of Jahel and Judith, Samson and David, and in the middle of these figures dripping with blood and these terrible atrocities of religious fanaticism stands Ignatius of Loyola, fire in his eyes and jealousy in his eyes Faces as he hurls consuming flames in all four directions of the world, and underneath the words: I have come to light a fire on earth! – Reflecting on this word from Jesus, we look at the Jesuit painting. Behold, these figures come to life, the Old Testament features transform, and we recognize people who are closer to us. This king who collapses here, struck dead, is it not Ravaillac’s unfortunate victim, Henry IV of France, whose heart was pierced by the Jesuit assassin, which, although he had converted to Catholicism, still beat silently for his former co-religionists? And the prince who falls prey to the insidious lurker in his chambers, is he not the great William of Orange, the stronghold of Protestantism

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in Holland, which was hard pressed by Alba, whose murder was expressly approved in the Jesuit confessional? And we will hardly be mistaken if we think we recognize Pope Clement XIV in that poison-distorted face, who dared to abolish the Jesuit order in the enlightened age of Lessing and Kant. And behind these greats of the earth “the graves of three centuries open up and a mournful funeral procession emerges from them, stretching from the valleys of the Cevennes to the banks of the Neva,” all bloody witnesses to the Christian morality of the Jesuits. There you will find the 30,000 Huguenots, men, women and innocent children, those slaughtered on the terrible night of St. Bartholomew. I hear the bells ringing in Rome and the cannons of Castel Sant’Angelo thundering in glorification of this brilliant Jesuit victory. But there, before our eyes, appear before our eyes the burning sites and fields of death of the Thirty Years’ War, which, brought about by their agitation and directed by their councils of conscience at princely courts, inflicted such deep wounds on our fatherland: The hordes of Ferdinand II, this dishonorable butcher in the German imperial mantle, who, educated by the Jesuits, learned in their school how to swear oaths to his people in order not to keep them, and how to take their oaths with a cold heart, are marching across the devastated land Murders subjects. And further our gaze falls on the Reformed Palatinate, which Louis XIV’s hordes of robbers are flooding; and this fivolous Louis was a crowned and exempted member of their order. Ha, how Loyola’s flames ignite here, how the conflagration rages through the cities, how every memory of Luther burns down in Worms, how Heidelberg’s proud castle falls into ruins! And who doesn’t recognize there in this long procession the poor people of Salzburg, plundered and robbed of their fatherland, trembling in the winter frost and with sadness in their hearts, moving out into the foreign world, and behind them the whip of the order! The spirit of

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entire nations raises its voice in lamentation against these men who have persuaded weak or arrogant princes that the peoples are not worthy and sane to determine themselves, that they must be punished forever like underage children; and he accuses them of the fact that bloody revolutions in unceasing succession have deprived the countries of their strength and peace. And next to them, in a conspicuous row, are all the broken families in whose bosom their reckless religious zeal has sown hatred and discord and destroyed love and harmony. And who can count all the individual human souls who have lost their salvation and happiness in the service of the Society of Jesus, who have been cheated of their innocence in the confessional, whose hearts, once rich in love and life from above, have been destroyed by the infamies of… set on fire by the Jesuit spirit and turned into a desolate, sad desert. – Yes, you unfortunate Spaniard, you have come to light a fire on earth! But it is the fire of dishonest fanaticism and wild greed that you have thrown into Christianity, so that the flames spread everywhere and your idol receives its victims everywhere. You also have your torches ready for the newly rebuilt Germany, and your disciples are looking over in wait to see whether the time is now when their prophecy is to be fulfilled, that the decisive battle will be fought on the Brandenburg sands. Lifting the ban on Jesuits! – that is the bold demand of all non-German Catholics, which is getting louder and louder, – that is the heartfelt wish of the “Peace Pope,” who is a Roman through and through, a hierarch, and does not have a trace of German sympathy in his heart. Repeal or weakening of the Jesuit law – that is the anxious fear that oppresses many friends of the fatherland and especially us Protestants. Will the church-

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political reaction of the present really lay hands on this last bulwark against Romanism so that the clergy’s war militia, which darkens spirits, enslaves consciences and devastates piety and morality, is allowed to attack our fatherland again inexorably?

Now, in us children of the Reformation there still lives the man who once spoke to the society of Jesus through the mouth of a pope: I never knew you, depart from me, you evildoers! – Jesus Christ, who lit among us the bright light of his gospel of God’s grace and human salvation, the pure fire of enthusiasm for our Protestant freedom from priestly fraud and human bondage, for our Christian nobility in God, in God alone; – the Lord and Master, whose spirit and name glows in our hearts as holy love for all that is good and true, as the indelible ideal of the Kingdom of God. Friends, the time is serious, very serious, dangers threaten. Let us uphold the noble idealism of Protestant Christianity, which our fathers in the Church of the Reformation handed down to us! Out of the heart that false worldly wisdom which is able to sacrifice the most sacred interests of life to the miserable dust of the earth! Away with that indifference of the cold heart, which, not warmed by any heavenly heat of religion, without its own position in questions of faith, feels no holy anger against the dishonest and untrue under the mask of piety! Down with all strife and all party bickering in your own camp, this worthless argument about dogmas that become trivial things when the common enemy storms the ramparts with great power and a lot of cunning! Come forth, finally come forth with the Protestant sense of honor! We want to have high respect for everything that means tolerance, reverence for every conviction, no matter how foreign, whose strength and authenticity is demonstrated by good, charitable fruits of life, and we want to live

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in peace and compatibility with our fellow Catholics, including them blinded people, including those who are prisoners, they are our brothers and citizens of our fatherland; – but no peace with Rome! Diplomacy may now enter into such a peace, it must know why it is doing it and it will have to answer for it; But the German-Protestant conscience of the people will never, ever make such a peace. Between him and Rome there is more than the Alps, there is a deep swamp of immorality, over which there is no mediation, that is the Jesuit order. Until the papacy has got rid of it, we will continue to defend ourselves against Rome for the sake of our conscience. Protestants, get back in your place with word and writing, in deed and life, in love and truth! Our Christian right to this resistance lies in the words of Jesus: I have not come to bring peace, but the sword – and our watchword in this spiritual battle is Paul’s words: So now there is freedom, so that Christ has set us free. Be manly, be strong! –

More voices about the Jesuits

“About the discipline that unites him in spirit with all his colleagues, each one of them acts and thinks with the intensity of thirty thousand others. This is Jesuit fanaticism.”
“As a result of a special calling – and despite some honorable, even famous exceptions – they are the mortal enemies of freedom of thought! Brainwashed brainwashers!”
(André Mater, “Les Jésuités” (1932), page 193)

“They have made obedience their idol”
(Henri Petit, “L’Honneuer de Dieu”, page 25)

“Jesuit fanaticism, which is now more terrible than ever, has, as the absolute master of the Roman Church, drawn it deeply into the struggles of world politics, in which the militant and military spirit that characterizes this company takes great delight.”
(Frédéric Hoffet, “Politique romaine et démission des protestants” , page 172)