Monita secreta

The Monita Secreta (also known as: Secret Instructions of the Jesuits, or the Secret Instructions of the Society of Jesus) was a feigned code of instructions alleged to be addressed by Claudio Acquaviva, the fifth general of the Society of Jesus, to its various superiors, and laying down methods to be adopted for the increase of its power and influence. The document is considered fake by the Jesuits themselves, as well as many of their supporters and opponents.

According to the Monita, every means is to be employed of acquiring wealth for the order, by enticing promising young men to enter it and endow it with their estates; rich widows are to be cajoled and dissuaded from remarriage; every means is to be used for the advancement of Jesuits to bishoprics or other ecclesiastical dignities and to discredit the members of other orders, while the world is to be persuaded that the Society is animated by the purest and least interested motives: the reputation of those who quit it is to be assailed and maligned in every way.

They are considered to be the work of one Jerome Zahorowski, a Pole, who, having been a member of the Society, had been expelled for disciplinary matters in 1613. They were first published in Krakow in 1615, purporting to be a translation from the Spanish, and were printed in the same city in 1614. Various stories were told, however, as to the mode in which these secret instructions were originally discovered; the credit being most commonly assigned to Duke Christian of Brunswick who, having been born in 1599, was a boy when they first saw the light. The place where they were found was variously set down as Paderborn, Prague, Liège, Antwerp, Glatz, and on board a captured East Indiaman.

Attempts were likewise made at various times, as late even as 1783, to excite interest in the work as the result of a new discovery; there was also an undated edition, in the early nineteenth century, which professes to issue from the Propaganda Press, and to be authenticated by the testimonies of various Jesuit authorities. However, they are attributed to a general, "Felix Aconiti", who is completely unknown in the Annals of the Society of Jesus. The censor who purportedly approves the publication bears the name "Pasquinelli", while the titles which, it is alleged, should ensure the esteem of men in general for the Society, include all the crimes and abominations of every kind—immoralities, conspiracies, murders, and regicides—which the Jesuits' bitterest enemies have attributed to it.

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