Thank you very much for the ping. Your little opus here was wonderful! Thank you for that. I am late to the Church (2000-01). I knew nothing of this really, regarding what you chronicled, and I’m grateful you made it so digestible here.
The Jesuits are also a chapter of Church history of orders, I have not studied. I see brows rise in all discussions where there name comes up.
As an example of a Jesuit, I have my first one, Pope Francis, and it’s a sad case for his own sake, and may be a dangerous example. How it is that he relates to his Jesuit Order and to his pontificate, I don’t fully understand.
I had just thought he was simply sub-par academically, broadly ignorant, occasionally silly, and prideful as we all are, and possibly senile. At worst, I wonder if he is possibly in cahoots with the Masons, athiests, and similarly a mule for Marxists, whom he seems to have placed at his hem line, all around him.
I don’t know quite what to do in the pseudo schism we live in, divided from the man but not the Church. I think we are all waiting for some kind of an *announcement* that heralds the Return of Christ, or the Illumination of the Soul, or the Three Days of Darkness, but vandalizing the Holy Mass and savaging the “praxis” of the Faith is not a sign of Peace. (sigh.)
To understand Francis, it makes sense to study what happened to the Jesuit order (the Society of Jesus founded by St, Ignatius Loyola). In my youth, they were still accurately referenced as "God's Marines" but the heresy of Modernism was infecting the rank and file of the order and undermining its long-standing loyalty to Thomism, the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. The Jesuits were being tempted to be "of the world" as well as "in the world). They were being polluted by the context of their times, reaching crisis in the 1960s when an evil Superior General, Pedro Arrupe, SJ, was elected in about 1962. He was eventually removed with a crow bar by Pope St. John Paul II and was the first Jesuit general to be removed in the history of the order. He had been attending cocktail parties at the Kremlin before becoming disabled physically, which disability was the excuse for his removal.
I won't attempt to give the entire history of the progressive degeneration of the Jesuits but will point you to two other 20th Century Superiors General (all generals being nicknamed "Black Popes"). First, the magnificent Superior General of the era from WWI to WWII: Wlodomir Ledochowski of Poland. He is apparently justly criticized as being a part of the problem in his attitude against Jews but I saw none of that from my Jesuit teachers. Other than that, Ledochowski was a great General. He had a sister who has been canonized and another who has been beatified.
When Ledocowski died in 1942, there was an interregnum due to the war until the election of a Belgian Jesuit, Jean-Baptiste Jansenns who was considerably more liberal than Ledochowski and inspired the thoroughly Catholic Pope Pius XII to casually say to his inner circle on many occasions of controversy related to Jansenns' liberalism: "Bring me the head of John the Baptist."
The degeneracy of the order was cemented in place by the election of Arrupe who became a full-fledged radical as a result of being present in the Hiroshima suburbs on the day of the atomic bombing and seeing the dead, dying and maimed, flesh melting off the bones of the still living, first hand.
One thing you may take to the bank is that a Jesuit of Francis' generation is NOT ignorant. If Argentina's Jesuit province had the same rules as those in the US, he would have had to receive not one, not two but three academic doctorates before ordination: Sacred Theology, Philosophy and an academic subject which he would be qualified to teach. I believe Francis (then Fr, Bergoglio) taught Math and Chemistry. I also think it quite unlikely that he is affected by any degree of senility.
Francis is not likely a tool of the Oriental Lodges of Freemasonry (distinguishable from the American variety) who are the real problem in that group. He is all too friendly disposed towards atheists, agnostics, homosexuals, feminists and Marxists but more importantly towards the worst elements in the Church hierarchy itself: Cardinals Marx, Kaspar, Madariaga and other radicals whom he has named to his eight member group of inner circle cardinal advisers. St. John Paul II effectively stuffed these radicals in an iron box for nearly three decades and Benedict XVI kept them there.
The late great former Jesuit, Fr. Malachi Martin, wrote a history of the Jesuit Order that is likely still available from Amazon or ABE Books or such. I recommend also his The Final Conclave written in advance of the 1978 conclave that elected John Paul I and Windswept House, a dark novel of St. John Paul II in the winter of his papacy which is as close an account of evils rising in the Church as we are likely to get. If Fr. Martin were alive, he would certainly have published by now an authoritative account of what went wrong in the conclave that elected Francis.
Don't EVER let these enemies of the actual Church drive you from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the legitimate sacraments or the actual Teaching Magisterium of the Church. We have had far worse popes (check out Alexander VI) than this and survived now for nearly 2000 years. I know you won't leave but those of weaker Faith will be so tempted. Offer it up for the souls suffering in Purgatory, for the restoration of our Church and the restoration of our republic.
God bless you and yours!