Jesuit Preachers and Confessors by Markus Friedrich

 

Sermons

In just the forty days of Lent in 1769, no fewer than 1,835 sermons were delivered in Madrid. The intensification of Catholic sermonizing reflected in this enormous number had commenced in the late Middle Ages, but it jumped yet again  in the sixteenth century, not least in response to the Reformation, in which sermons played a major part. The Council of Trent took up the topic several times, elevating the sermon to a key element of pastoral ministry. There was also the influence of humanism, from which at least two important ideas derived: one was the call that sermons should focus more closely on the Bible reading of the day; the other was the view that sermons had to influence the audience.

The primary purpose of a sermon was defined as seizing and moving (movere) people. For the Jesuits, a sermon might ‘defeat kings, check the lusts of powerful men, conquer cities’ for the faith, and ‘impose discipline on profligate lasciviousness’ – in brief: influence the audience towards a Christian end. According to General Acquaviva, a sermon above all had to ‘persuade and stir the emotions’- classical formulas of humanistic rhetoric. Sermon should be like cannons that  blast through the walls of evil and open the way for people to the good, in the words of Francisco de Borja.

Whence should this persuasiveness come, and how should this shaping of wills, feelings, and ideas occur? First, we should point to a clear charismatic element in the Jesuit understanding of sermons. Many of the great, innovative preachers at the time, like Luis de Granada or Juan de Avila, were convinced that the Holy Spirit had to contribute to a successful to sermon. Rhetorical effectiveness was primarily as a gift of the Holly Spirit, less so as a product of human labor. Of course, for Borja and other Jesuits, that did not mean one should disregard the human the human element of preaching. One seventeenth-century author characteristically stressed that ‘it is necessary to work hard and study much to know how to preach, because a preacher cannot expect God to instill all knowledge directly to him.’ Human virtuosity and earthly preaching aids were thus in high demand as additional means of reaching audiences effectively.

 

To that end, Jesuit preachers of the seventeenth century were especially fond of integrating images and props into their sermons. The orator himself was the first ‘image’ that the audience saw – he embodied the same pious way of life that was the point of the sermons. The Jesuits reported that Borja once stood at the pulpit even though sickness had left him barely able to speak – and still his mere presence deeply moved the audience. Already the early Jesuit relied on props to lend emphasis to their words. Crosses, skulls, and nooses underscored their message. In the seventeenth century, this blossomed into a broad tradition of full-fledged dramatic productions on the pulpit. Wolfgang Rauscher from Dillingen composed an entire sermon as an ‘anatomy or dismemberment of a skull from limb to limb.’ Hence it was a common expression at the time that one ‘preached for the eyes,’ which meant both the eyes of the body and the eyes of the mind, both spiritual and physical seeing at the same time. It thus was not unusual when Father Anton Khabes had three pictorial representations of scenes from the Old Testament mounted high above the alter in the church of the Professed House in Vienna in 1745, and then proceeded to preached about them. Sermons became synesthetic spectacles.

The Jesuits were also firm believers in the power of ancient rhetoric to ensure that their message affected the lives of their listeners. Cicero and Quintilian were considered the most important stylistic models for preaching, but it was not always clear how far one really had to follow them… They judged the admissibility of certain rhetorical effects less by the criteria of absolute fidelity to Cicero than by actual success. ‘Popular preachers’ of the seventeenth century, such as Francesco de Geronimo or Gregorio Rocco in southern Italy, who frequently spoke to passersby on the streets, often used a more simplistic style. The Spaniard Miguel Angel Pascual argued in 1698 that the structural principles of a missionary sermon might be completely at odds with a solemn, scholarly or conventional sermon by the parish clergy.

Very many preachers of the seventeenth century made use of rhetorical techniques and tricks that one might describe as ‘opulent’ and ‘bombastic’ in hindsight. They style they cultivated aimed for grand gestures, overpowering oratory, and elaborate effects. With such complexities  as the concepto –puzzles and ostensibly nonsensical wordplay and even indecipherable pictures (hieroglyphs)- they tried to go beyond stirring hearts to surprising and impressing the audiences’ wits. With such complexities, baroque preachers tried to thrill, seize, and put their audience under the spell of their message.. This flourishing of the baroque in sermons, however, was criticized constantly both inside and outside the Society, especially in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. A more moderate style should prevail, the skeptics argued, instead of the ‘grand sermon,’ which was often viewed as ambivalent, exaggerated, and potentially dangerous. Sforza Pallavinco, a Jesuit cardinal and a famous stylistic theorist, railed against preachers who ‘abandoned the cause of Christ on the pulpit to celebrate their own ingenuity and to reap praise’.

A second major change inspired by humanism was to tie sermons much more closely to the text of the Bible than had been customary in the Middle Ages. Instead of the ‘thematic sermons’, ‘homilies or ‘postils’ were now preferred. The Bible should no longer merely serve as an excuse for discussing a stand-alone religious subject that the sermonizer then covered with rigorous logic and multiple minor points. Instead, humanist speakers argued that sermons should above all interpret and explain the text of the Bible. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus reflected this position.

Preachers in the Society of Jesus, however, often still remained faithful to the thematic model of sermons. Simply following the Bible, Antonio Viera wrote in 1655, was no more than ‘teaching’ and ‘interpreting’ whereas a sermon should ‘convince’ and ‘move’, ‘homilies’ simply failed to pack the desired punch..  Every sermon should explore one-and only one- truth or theme, and the sermon should engage directly with the Bible only to the extent that it made sense to do so.

At any rate, early modern contemporaries expected a lot from speakers. The office might accordingly be very challenging. One problem was the sheer number of sermons that a successful preacher regularly had to produce. The Viennese Jesuit Ignaz Wurz wrote in 1770, ‘A preacher in our lands is truly far too overburdened. Composing 60, 70, even 80 sermons throughout the year is work that, if performed correctly, exceeds almost all human power’. Hence it was only understandable that Jesuits produced and used aids for composing such texts. There were numerous manuals and textbooks a preacher could turn to in preparing his next sermon. There were also numerous printed collections of model sermons from which a preacher might either draw inspiration or deliver unchanged. It was even whispered that a shop in Paris had stockpiled two or three thousand manuscripts of finished sermons that a clergyman could buy.

What all sermons had in common, however, was the fact that, regardless of how they were prepared, everything depended on the delivery from the pulpit. A sermon was a performative act. The key factor in a sermon was its execution. Simply reading words from a prepared text was out of the question. Nothing was more embarrassing then when a preacher lost his place in the pulpit – he was guaranteed to receive humiliating ridicule. Of course, such lapses were completely understandable: sermons in the early modern period could be very long. A speaking time of about sixty minutes was usually recommended, but even longer sermons were not uncommon.  Extravagant speaking times often led priests to schedule their sermons from the pulpit at a time outside the mass itself, so that the sermon became a distinct event in its own right.

Confession

Sermons, confession, and communion constituted a triad and ultimately stood on the firm ground of the Council of Trent, which had explicitly taken up all three topics. Though confession and communion had ceased to play a major part in popular religious life in the early modern period. That changed with the arrival of the Jesuits.

A conventional confession in the sixteenth century was rather a formal in nature. Time and place were central to the practice: confession was a seasonal affair that usually occurred only once a year, at Easter, the prescribed minimum set forth  by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Confession took place seldom and certainly not in the context of an intense personal relationship between penitent and confessor. In the late Middle Ages, Catholics could largely determine for themselves to whom they wanted to confess, which presumably meant that they intended to avoid awkward personal encounters. Confession was primarily about the dutiful performance of an indispensable ritual. For the faithful, the goal of confessing was first and foremost to receive absolution from the priest at the end. One did what was necessary; there was neither reason nor occasion to think of confession as a process of self-revelation. Confession was also closely linked to the interests of the Inquisition: it was asked whether it might be a useful resource to facilitate the search for and detection of erroneous thoughts and acts. The Inquisition thus broached an understanding of confession focused primarily on its potential to detect, control, and thus repress deviance. Hence traditional, ritualistic confession was viewed with a measure of skepticism and treated like a duty that one had to perform.

The Jesuit, however, took a broader view of the purpose of confession. For them, confession was not (merely) a ritual to obtain grace and not (merely) a strategy to uncover deviants; the Jesuits viewed confession as an opportunity to disclose one’s inner spiritual life to a trusted, well-known confessor, who in turn was supposed to use this confession to personally tailored counsel and advice as to how one should live. In their eyes, confession no longer served only to mark the end of one’s sinful path but also to explore the causes of that sin with an eye to improvement in the future. Going to confession had a therapeutic and pedagogical function that went beyond its sacramental and inquisitorial relevance. In their view, a confessor should always practice caritas (charity) and look out for the salvation of a penitent’s soul. In a word: the faithful should receive encouragement, solace, and fortification from confession, and not fear an accusation. ‘Proceeding like an inquisitor’ was therefore  wrong in the eyes of many Jesuits.

Concretely, this pastoral conception of confession translated into a call for people to go to confession as often as possible. Frequent confessions would help one realize the effects of the sacrament – one would come to know one’s sins better, which in turn helped one banish mistakes. It also kept one’s conscience sharp and attentive. “By confessing repeatedly, one  might more easily come to  know oneself,’  as Francis Coster concluded.

By the same token, this Jesuit view led to calls for a comparatively ‘gentle’ confession procedure. The Jesuits did everything in their power to prevent confession from being a fear-inducing event. They tried to ensure to the best of their ability that people did not have reservations about coming to confession because they were afraid of the consequences of their statements. Hence, oral confession conducted as a conversation in a confessional – a form that appeared toward the end of the sixteenth century – was especially attractive to them. It created the necessary privacy for speaking openly about difficult subjects in a protected space. The Jesuits refused to demand public, written recantations – as the Inquisition sometimes did – when they encountered a heretic in the confessional. They also refused to summon the Inquisition, even when they encountered details in the confessional that genuine concerned the Sanctum Officium. Sins stayed between the penitent, his confessor, and God. Publicity was counterproductive, because it generated ‘shame’ and dampened willingness of the faithful to carry-out honest self-investigation out of fear for their ‘reputation,’ as Paolo Segneri Jr. once noted.

In this way, the confessional became a starting point and an integral part of an individual, personal, and devout process of renewal for the Jesuits, which they otherwise associated with the Spiritual Exercises. Accordingly, the figure of the confessor transformed from a mere dispenser of guaranteed grace to a far more intimate counselor and spiritual guide; confession and meditation merged. Moreover, there were connections between the Exercises and the Jesuit conception of confession in the special form of ‘general’ or whole-life’ confession. This type of confession was presumably not invented by Ignatius, but its practice had become part  of the Exercises. In a sense, this form of confession amounted to a (preliminary) account of one’s life. The cumulative realization  of all one’s sins (to the present) was regarded as a cathartic experience because it increased the pain one felt on account of one’s own conduct – a positive development. Whole-life confession helped one to recognize the (poor) state of one’s religiosity in dramatic fashion. It was therefore good to make such general confessions more regularly, perhaps once a year. That made it possible to see progress over time, which in turn might help penitents focus their efforts on improving the particularly sinful areas of their lives. The Jesuits also viewed general confession as an important symbolic act that accompanied life-changing situations. Prostitutes had to give general confession to demonstrate their earnestness in entering one of the Society’s charitable institutions, as did fellows joining Marian congregations. Confessio generalis  came to symbolize the awakening of true piety and a pivot towards  the spirituality of the Society.

Whole-life confession in particular presupposed thorough self-knowledge. But in general, confessions from which sins were omitted were regarded as defective. Preachers from the Society accordingly always warned in very traditional fashion that forgotten sins invalidated a confession. Because this problem continued to bother the Jesuits, Ignatius gave instructions for how one could visually represent the sins one had uncovered by drawing lines of varying length on a paper. The Jesuits are reported to have used such lists to keep track of their own sins. Every day when people examined their consciences, Vincenzo Bruno noted, they might also take note  about the sins they had uncovered. In the process, the Jesuits adapted  to penitents’ local oconditions and capabilities: in Peru, newly baptized indigenous people were expressly advised to use their traditional form of writing, knotted quipus, to record their sins.

With such guidelines in their mental baggage, thousands of Jesuits in the early modern period got to work, hearing  confessions from countless people in Europe and the New World. They were advised to be in the confessional early in the morning, especially on Sundays and holidays, ‘because it is disgraceful and unbecoming to keep the penitents waiting long.’ And that was absolutely necessary advise because on innumerable occasions Jesuits reported from their everyday pastoral life that they heard confession from morning to evening without interruption for days and weeks on end and were still not done. The faithful normally went to confession after the Jesuits preached or taught catechism – these different forms of pastoral care were seamlessly connected. The Jesuits were especially pleased when individuals who had not confessed in years at last did so under their direction. The Jesuits constantly emphasized that they raised not only the frequency of confession but also the quality of confession- it was thanks to their work that people had ceased to give confession ‘sacrilegiously.’ Prior to the Jesuits’ arrival, some had (allegedly) ‘never confessed correctly.’ By confessing ‘correctly’ to the Jesuits, ‘they put their lives back in order,’ as one individual noted. Confession gave people ‘long desired, but previously unattained peace of mind,’ which led to the ‘consolation of souls’ or to a ‘joyous spirit’ and ‘the greatest peace.’

The Jesuits, moreover, were often psychologically astute enough to recognize that people in such moments of existential renewal might overshoot the goal in their enthusiasm. They therefore refused to permit people to make long-term vows and promises in confession itself or in the glow of absolution. In this way, the Jesuits balanced pastoral pragmatism and realism with their great confidence in the consolatory, admonitory and cathartic purpose of the sacraments. Confession was a start, but it by no means guaranteed a new life.

None of that, obviously, precluded the Jesuits from resorting to coercion in certain circumstances – even they neither could nor would break completely with the repressive and disciplinary function of confession in the early modern period. ‘Force’ was certainly combined with confession among the Jesuits – even on a massive scale- at least when people fundamentally refused to go to confession at all. Ignatius men advocated the use of so-called schedulae confessionis, written documents that confirmed one had gone to confession within an obligatory time period, thus supporting the authorities efforts to enforce mandatory confession. It would be remiss to downplay these aspects of the Jesuits’ confessional practice. But despite  their support for these controls measures, we still find that the Jesuits were interested  primarily in other aspects of confession; their focus lay clearly on the new uplifting and consoling pastoral use of confession.

The consoling and encouraging conception of confession that the Jesuits advocated continually gained ground. Yet the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still witnessed heavy criticism of the Jesuits’ ‘gentle’ and pedagogical confessional practice. The rigorist Jansenists wanted to take much stricter action than the ‘lax’ Jesuits. The first targeted the frequency of absolution: penitents had to possess ‘all-surpassing,’ ‘extraordinary’ love of God before they could be absolved – but that was hard to obtain and even harder to confirm. Restraint therefore was the prime directive. Contritionists like Jean Neercassel, for example, the apostolic vicar in the Netherlands and a declared enemy of the Jesuits, demanded in their sermons: ‘Catholics should go to confession only two or three times a year and should be more concerned that the show an act of true contrition.’

 

The Jesuits vehemently opposed such rigorist severity. But they also found themselves asking how they might ensure that the effect of conversion – which in their view brought about rather than presupposed- would last. The textbook writers therefore set penitents on their way with a series of suggestions for how they might avoid sin in the future. By far the most effective means of extending grace imparted by confession was, in the eyes of the Jesuit confessors, the practice of receiving communion regularly. In general, confession and communion were closely linked, since it was theoretically possible to receive the Eucharist only after one had confessed.

 

The practice of receiving communion was handled in a wide variety of ways over the history of the church. In the ancient church, communion was often taken frequently, even daily. This went completely out of style, however, in the High and Late Middle Ages even though prominent theologians – Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Vincent Ferrer, Girolamo Savonarola- recommended that one often approach the alter. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 found it necessary to require every catholic to take communion at least once a year on threat of excommunication. In light of this, calls to receive communion more regularly became the hallmark of church and devotional reformers. The Imitatio Christi*, which Ignatius himself read so closely, was decidedly in favor of frequent communion. In the sixteenth century, Francisco de Osuna, Juan de Avila, and Luis de Granada also declared in favor of frequent communion. Spanish Jesuits were heavily influenced by these thoughts and soon brought them to Italy, where they found a local tradition of frequent communion already in place . . .almost from the get-go, the Jesuits set out more or less in solidarity to defend and promote this practice broadly . . .


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imitation_of_Christ