Once the doctrine of tyrannicide had become an embarrassment to important sections of the Society, it could be side-lined or suppressed without any grave loss. And it was. But upholding some generic papal authority to intervene in the affairs of secular rulers and commonwealths was another matter. Most of the leading spokesmen of the Society in this period regarded its defence as a war pro aris et focis. Circumstances were, however, unpropitious.

THE ‘TERRITORIALISATION’ OF THE CHURCH AND THE SOCIETY OF JESUS

The first decades of the seventeenth century in Europe were a period of Catholic resurgence and self-confidence. The Catholic Church had not only stopped the advance of the Protestant Reformation, but was actively pushing it back in France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Eastern Europe. In the Holy Roman Empire the more aggressively Counter-Reformation princes and their theologians were increasingly able to interpret the Peace of Augsburg in a highly restrictive sense unfavourable to Protestants. The churches of the Reformation were visibly on the defensive, especially in view of their mutual denominational hostilities and the divisions over grace and predestination which in the United Provinces in particular proved politically intractable. The Catholic renaissance was, however, not only or even principally the ascendancy of political Catholicism. On the contrary, the period saw an efflorescence of spirituality (‘devotion’), not least in France, as well as a sustained effort at domestic ‘mission’.