Religion: The Pope's Troubled Marines

For the Society of Jesus, a change in leadership is at hand

"No storm is so insidious as a perfect calm, no enemy so dangerous as the absence of enemies," St. Ignatius Loyola once told his followers. He need not have worried that the Society of Jesus, which he founded in 1534, would ever be without enemies. Over the centuries, Jesuits have been accused not only of seeking to undermine various rulers (including a number of Popes) but of plotting to assassinate no fewer than four European monarchs. By the 18th century they had become so powerful that enemies referred to...

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