The Christian Life

Abstract

The quarrel with the Jesuits’ moral slackness in the confessional continued long after the publication of the eighteenth Provincial Letter and the work’s condemnation by Pope Alexander VII. Where Pascal and his Jansenist friends had begun, the whole Assembly of the French Clergy now took over. Significantly, the parish priests of France voiced a deep objection to the activities of an international religious movement, organized on semi-military lines, which had so much less responsibility than they for the guidance and moral welfare of simple people. As early as May 1656 the parish priests of Paris had urged the Assembly of the Clergy to take steps to condemn the Jesuits’ lax probabilism. They were followed in this by the parish priests of the dioceses of Rouen and Amiens. So much for the practical impact of the fifth to the tenth Provincial Letters, all published between 20 March and 2 August 1656, in which the narrator and Jesuit priest between them expose the rottenness at the heart of Jesuit morality.