reports of their missionary successes in the Far East and America, and while these Relations served primarily to encourage support for the Jesuits in the Catholic world, they had the additional effect of confirming Protestant fears. Enemies of the order explained its success in much the same way modern historians do, by arguing that the Jesuits encouraged pagans to become Catholics by drawing on similarities between Christianity and paganism. In a fictional dialogue among three Jesuits published in 1689, for instance, a missionary to Siam bragged that he stressed the common points between Catholicism and the local religion, especially “Worship of Images” and “a blind tame submission to the Doctrines, Worship and Ceremonies of their false Religion, [which] makes them resemble our People absolutely.” If this tactic did not work, the missionary advocated changing the principles of Catholicism to suit local circumstances; for instance, he believed that by deifying the saints he could convince adherents of polytheistic eastern religions to embrace the faith. To Protestants, these reports—fabricated though they were—reinforced the Jesuits’ reputations as dissemblers and casuists who would lie without shame to advance their cause, and who had particular success with impressionable pagans. It also proved that their true goals were not religious, but worldly: they wanted power above all else, and would not let principles stand in their way.7
The picture of Jesuits in propaganda was exaggerated and in some respects entirely false, but it did bear at least a superficial resemblance to reality. Many Jesuits did pride themselves on their ability to win back “heretics” to the true faith, and especially in the English dominions the priests considered the reestablishment of Catholicism as a primary goal. The behavior of Maryland Jesuits helps to demonstrate why Protestants were afraid. Even without the establishment they desired, Maryland provided the priests a degree of freedom unknown in England or other colonies: they no longer needed to travel in disguise, and they could openly conduct worship services. As one prospective priest put it in a letter asking to be assigned to the new colony, “Where I live, I am abriged of liberty in doing the good I could wish, wch maks me more earnest to be els where imployed.” Besides ministering to Maryland’s small but influential Catholic population, the priests set out to create as many new Catholics as they could. This goal appeared clearly in a catechism from the mid-1670s that survives in the archives of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus. Probably intended as a guide to young priests in proper doctrine, it attempted to combat the most fundamental Protestant teachings. It stated that the Church received its imprimatur from Christ himself, and therefore “we cannot call in question the truth of any one thing the Catholick Church teaches without making Christ a Lyar.” It also argued that scripture only contained part of the truth, and “we cannot tell wch is the true scripture from the false” without help from the church. In short, Maryland Jesuits traveled the countryside extolling with great zeal a message that directly refuted the most basic tenets of Protestantism. It is not surprising that many people took offense.8
Another story from the Jesuits’ own writings helps to illustrate the threat the order posed to Protestantism. From its earliest days, and especially after the 1640s, Maryland welcomed a large number of Reformed Protestants, many of whom migrated from the less tolerant Anglican colony of Virginia and settled near the Severn River in a community called, in typical Puritan fashion, Providence. These settlers saw the Jesuits as devious rivals who would do anything to convert heretics, as one episode made clear. In the late 1630s, according to a Jesuit report, a Protestant man fell ill from a snakebite. A local Jesuit endeavored to see the sick man, partly to treat him, but mainly to win his soul for the Church before he died. These deathbed conversions were particularly offensive to Protestants, who believed that Catholics took advantage of the mental and physical weakness preceding death to poach souls. In this case, a friend of the sick man stood guard to make sure the Jesuit could not gain access to the patient. “Nevertheless,” the report stated, “the priest kept on the watch for every opportunity of approach; and going at the dead of night, when he supposed the guard would be especially overcome by sleep, he contrived, without disturbing him, to pass in to the sick man; and, at his own desire, received him into the Church.” Despite appearing in a Jesuit letter, this story could have served as a potent piece of anti-Catholic propaganda, as it reinforced the belief that Jesuits used trickery and artifice to advance their cause.9
The Jesuits’ penchant for trickery made it critical for Protestants to resist the order in any way they could. Some colonies banned the presence of Jesuits, and even in places like Maryland where the priests could legally reside Protestants prided themselves on the ability to resist their advances. But even if all Protestants stayed true to the faith, the Jesuits posed a problem. As one tract explained, resistance to their designs only made the Jesuits more devious: “where they cannot convince,” it explained, “they labour to destroy.” They could succeed because of a network of foreign allies whose main ambition was to “massacre the whole Protestant Party” and clear the way “to build a corrupt Church.” In England opponents of the Jesuits believed that the order intended to invite the French or Spanish to invade the kingdom, but another tactic was to target inhabitants of foreign nations who did not have the training or intellect to resist Jesuit advances. This had particular relevance in America, where a large population of natives lived among the colonists, and where Jesuits had already begun to establish missions.10
In the 1640s, particularly in Maryland, English colonists began to worry about what would happen if the Jesuits insinuated themselves into Indian communities. They had a useful precedent from Ireland, another part of the empire where Jesuits and other popish priests had labored, with astonishing success, to infiltrate a population of common people most English considered impressionable and uncivilized. The lessons from Ireland could not have been encouraging. Despite the expectations of reformers in the sixteenth century, the “wild Irish” clung tenaciously to the Catholic faith, and Protestant observers tended to blame two factors: the depraved state of the populace and the underhanded methods of the clerics. Moreover, the priests’ successes had dire consequences for Ireland’s Protestant minority, as the Irish peasantry became willing shock troops for the Catholic cause.11
The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was an epochal event in the history of British anti-Catholicism. Before this time, antipopery had been a less potent force in Ireland than elsewhere, mainly because the vast numbers and diversity of the Catholic population forced Protestants to accept that the true face of Catholicism was more complex than their conspiratorial logic suggested. The events of October 1641, when Irish Catholics rose up in a bloody rebellion against English Protestant rule, immediately prompted Irish Protestants to place their own struggles within a global context. More important, the reports of “popish” atrocities in the rebellion quickly spread to England and beyond, becoming an important source of propaganda as the nation moved toward civil war.12
This propaganda—as popular in the 1680s as in the 1640s—provided a salient example of how uncivilized people could aid the popish cause. Protestant writers targeted the usual shibboleths of antipopery: Jesuit priests; infiltrators from foreign countries, especially Spain and France; and unscrupulous “evil counselors” who pretended to be Protestants but really promoted popery. None of these masterminds could have succeeded without “the blind, ignorant, and superstitious people,” who “rise up and execute whatever they command.” In addition, the wild Irish served as the agents of popish cruelty: according to one propagandist, “they acted with that brutish fury, as if the wild Beasts of the Deserts, Wolves, Bears and Tigres, nay Fiends and Furies had been let loose from Hell upon the Land.” Not even unborn children were safe, as “their Hellish Rage and Fury extended also to the Babes unborn, ripping them out of their Mothers Womb, and destroying those Innocent Creatures, to glut their Savage Inhumanity.” In this reading of the rebellion, the Jesuits were the masterminds, but the wild Irish provided the savage violence that brought the rebellion to its terrible conclusion. It would not be difficult to imagine a similar scenario in America, and in time colonial witnesses would describe native attacks using almost identical language.13
Nonetheless, there was no reason to assume that Indians would naturally fall into the role of the Irish. Early colonization tracts usually expressed optimism that the Indians would gravitate toward alliance
