Survival of the Jesuits in India
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TiefFenthaler died in Lucknow in 1785, and was buried in Agra.18 One companion of many years survived him. Francis Xavier Wendel had come to India in 1751. From 1763 onwards he was in Lucknow. He was a much less interesting man than Tieffenthaler, but he seems to some extent at least to have shared his scientific interests. 'A Russian named Czernichef had travelled in 1780 from Bukhara through Kashmir to Lucknow and Father Wendel interested himself in his experiences, communicating the diary of his travels to the learned Colonel Wilford at Benares.'19 Wendel was so favourable to the British that he even fell under suspicion of being a British agent. The quiet old man died on 29 March 1803. So the mission to Mogor reached itsfinalend after nearly two and a half centuries ofexistence, having long survived the days of its greatness and gradually faded away to extinction.20 The very last survivor of the old line, seems to have been Fr Andreas, who died on 31 December 1818 at the age of seventy-seven. He lived to see the restoration of the Society of Jesus and to be readmitted to membership of that order which he had joined so many years earlier in the days of his youth. There are many ironies in history. A pope decided totally to destroy and to exterminate the Society ofJesus. Yet the Society managed to maintain itself, albeit at times precariously, in Poland, Austria and Russia. Jesuits were able to open a novitiate in White Russia in 1780. In England they could not call themselves Jesuits, yet they retained their property, and in 1794 actually transferred the famous school which had long been 'St OrnerY to Stonyhurst. One pope had affirmed that what he had done was for ever, and that it would not be possible for any later pope to undo it; a later pope exercised no difficulty in undoing what his predecessor had done. On 7 August 1814, in the bull Sollicitudo Omnium Ecclesiarum, Pius VII reconstituted the Society which, it was supposed, had for ever disappeared. From that day to this the Society has prospered. Among its most prosperous missions are those in India; the first Indian bishop of the Latin rite, Mgr Tiburtius Roche, consecrated as bishop of Tuticorin in 1923, was a Jesuit. Though the Paris missionaries and the Capuchins had done their best, it remains true that, insofar as the missions of the Jesuits were cared for at all, the great majority of their Christians found themselves in the hands of Goanese priests, hastily intruded without regard to the wishes or prejudices of those whom they were sent to serve. No doubt resentment has coloured most of the descriptions of these clerics which survive; there were among them devout and faithful men. But even the cautious and temperate Archbishop Laouenan draws of them an extremely unfavourable picture: It was these men who, educated in haste and ordained without due consideration, were sent out in all directions to replace the former missionaries. The total contrast
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