The Society of Jesus is one of the most influential and controversial organizations in the history of the Catholic Church. This book, by Robert J. Breckinridge, offers an English translation of the society's secret counsels, providing an insider's view of this enigmatic institution. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Excerpt from Secreta Monita Societatis Jesu, the Secret Counsels of the Society of Jesus: In Latin and English; The Latin Being the d104 Used in Former Editions; The English, a New and More Literal Version It is a wide, terrible, and peculiar school whose opinions and conduct are here illustrated. And if h be faithfully done, by the laborious compilation and classification of materials drawn from a thousand sources, a more impressive and fair method cannot well be imagined. II. It is certainly past all dispute that this book has, for a very long period, been in possession of the world. Here it is, handed down to us through several centuries. To sneer at it, and pass it by, is simply to establish its unanswerable authority. To be unable to give any satisfactory account of it; is to let it prove itself. It exists; it could not have produced itself. Whence did it come? But three solutions are possible. 1. It is an authentic work, containing the real facts it pretends to contain; and being what it purports to be. 2. It is the work of some expelled Jesuit, and may be more or less true, according to his knowledge of what he tried to reveal, or his integrity in telling truly what he knew. 3. It is the work of an enemy, wire never was a Jesuit, but who has pretended to put into the month of the chief authorities of that order, what he believed they would say, if they uttered their real sentiments on the points here treated (of. III. Let us then briefly examine each of these suppositions in turn And first, is this work authentic? I reply there is scarcely a particle of reason to doubt it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reproduction of the original, first published in 1835.

In recent years scholars in a range of disciplines have begun to re-evaluate the history of the Society of Jesus. Approaching the subject with new questions and methods, they have reconsidered the importance of the Society in many sectors, including those related to the sciences and the arts. They have also looked at the Jesuits as emblematic of certain traits of early modern Europeans, especially as those Europeans interacted with 'the Other' in Asia and the Americas. Originating in an international conference held at Boston College in 1997, the thirty-five essays here reflect this new historiographical trend. Focusing on the Old Society- the Society before its suppression in 1773 by papal edict- they examine the worldwide Jesuit undertaking in such fields as music, art, architecture, devotional writing, mathematics, physics, astronomy, natural history, public performance, and education, and they give special attention to the Jesuits' interaction with non-European cultures, in North and South America, China, India, and the Philippines. A picture emerges not only of the individual Jesuit, who might be missionary, diplomat, architect, and playwright over the course of his life in the Society, but also of the immense and many-faceted Jesuit enterprise as forming a kind of 'cultural ecosystem'. The Jesuits of the Old Society liked to think they had a way of proceeding special to themselves. The question, Was there a Jesuit style, a Jesuit corporate culture? is the thread that runs through this interdisciplinary collection of studies.