Jesuit Father François Annat and his Role as Minister for Religious Affairs in 17th Century France


Book Description

This book explores the tremendous impact of Jesuit Father François Annat (1590-1670), a French government appointee at Court. His religious superiors approved of his taking on this work for the Crown. He served as Minister for Religious Affairs, or Royal Confessor or ‘keeper of the king’s conscience’, for Louis XIV. During Annat’s confessorate of sixteen years, no internal conflict in the Gallican Church was so strong as the Jansenist controversy. Today everything seems different, as revisionist history has viewed Jansenism as an orthodox Augustinian alternative to explain the Catholic Faith, in contrast to the prevailing Spanish Molinism and Suarezianism, whose roots were in Thomism and Aristotle. There was intense internal struggle within the French Church to devise a legal formulary that might decrease the strength of Jansenism. The present work examines the life of Annat in all of its complexities, a life which may have been forgotten by history if not for the celebrated literary figure Blaise Pascal, who was a committed Jansenist and foe of François Annat.










Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas


Book Description

The present volume is a result of an international symposium on the encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Asia and the Americas, which was organized by Boston College’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College in June 2017. In Asia, Protestants encountered a mixed Jesuit legacy: in South Asia, they benefited from pioneering Jesuit ethnographers while contesting their conversions; in Japan, all Christian missionaries who returned after 1853 faced the equation of Japanese nationalism with anti-Jesuit persecution; and in China, Protestants scrambled to catch up to the cultural legacy bequeathed by the earlier Jesuit mission. In the Americas, Protestants presented Jesuits as enemies of liberal modernity, supporters of medieval absolutism yet master manipulators of modern self-fashioning and the printing press. The evidence suggests a far more complicated relationship of both Protestants and Jesuits as co-creators of the bright and dark sides of modernity, including the public sphere, public education, plantation slavery, and colonialism.




The Catholic Church and the Dutch Bible


Book Description

In The Catholic Church and the Bible: From the Council of Trent to the Jansenist Controversy (1564-1733), Els Agten studies the impact of Jansenism and anti-Jansenism on the ideas regarding vernacular Bible reading and Bible production in the Low Countries in the broader seventeenth century. The book provides a review of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book censorship and an analysis of the ideas and the writings of ten protagonists, including theologians, Bible translators, ecclesiastical authorities and representatives of Port-Royal. This way, Agten demonstrates that the Jansenists were stimulating the laity, with the inclusion of women and children, to read the Bible in the vernacular, with no restrictions whatsoever. Their opponents, in contrast, adopted a more wary position.




The Secret History of the Jesuits


Book Description

Secrets the Jesuits don't want Christians to know Out of Europe, a voice is heard from the secular world that documents historically the same information told by ex-priests. The author exposes the Vatican's involvement in world politics, intrigues, and the fomenting of wars throughout history. It appears, beyond any doubt, that the Roman Catholic institution is not a Christian church and never was. The poor Roman Catholic people have been betrayed by her and are facing spiritual disaster. Paris shows that Rome is responsible for the two great world wars. Author Edmond Paris explains why he wrote this book... "The public is practically unaware of the overwhelming responsibility carried by the Vatican and its Jesuits in the start of the two world wars -- a situation which may be explained in part by the gigantic finances at the disposition of the Vatican and its Jesuits, giving them power in so many spheres, especially since the last conflict." "In fact, the part they took in those tragic events has hardly been mentioned until the present time, except by apologists eager to disguise it. It is with the aim of rectifying this and establishing the true facts that we present in this and other books the political activity of the Vatican during the contemporary -- activity which mutually concerns the Jesuits." "This study is based on irrefutable archive documents, publications from well-known political personalities, diplomats, ambassadors and eminent writers, most of whom are Catholics, even attested by the imprimatur."







The Oxford Handbook of Descartes and Cartesianism


Book Description

An illustrious team of scholars offer a rich survey of the thought of Rene Descartes; of the development of his ideas by those who followed in his footsteps; and of the reaction against Cartesianism. Epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics are all covered.




History of the Jesuits


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The Jacobite Lairds of Gask


Book Description