‘Tanto di Capuccini come di Giesuiti’: Religious Orders, Exceptionalism and the Absolution of Heretics in Early Modern Italy

From the first history of the Society of Jesus, written in the late sixteenth century, to modern scholarship on the order, texts by and about Jesuits have suggested that their approach to sacramental confession distinguished them from other religious groups in the eyes of the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Recent histories have suggested that the particular spirituality, approach and talent of the Society’s confessors compelled popes to single out the Jesuits for privileges, empowering the Society as a papal task force in the fight against heresy. Focusing on the privilege of absolving heretics in confession, this article challenges this notion, arguing that popes empowered religious orders, including the Jesuits, for pragmatic reasons, not because of their particular charism or way of proceeding. The article compares the status and character of religious orders that emerged in the same period as the Jesuits to show that it was the Society’s scale, availability and orthodoxy that compelled popes to grant them the privilege of absolving heretics, allowing them to reconcile heretics autonomously where papal inquisitors could not. Using records from the Jesuit archive and the archive of the Roman Inquisition, the article confirms this conclusion with a case-study of privileges granted to Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries in Savoy–Piedmont at the turn of the seventeenth century. There, popes empowered both orders alike depending on practical need and availability, and despite the fact that the Capuchins had initially refused to administer the sacrament of confession.