The Assistants or Councillors of the General now asserted their power. They threatened their General that, if he did not withdraw the work, they would warn the heads of all the Provinces of the Society of the danger he would bring on them. Father Gonzalez offered to omit his name from the title-page and cut out a particularly obnoxious section of the work, but they sternly refused the compromise. He published, and they denounced their General to the Pope for issuing a theological work without papal authorisation. There was now so fierce a controversy in the Society that the Pope suspended the sale of the book, and remitted the affair to the triennial Congregation of Jesuit Procurators in 1693. A feverish intrigue and a number of heated pamphlets from experienced Jesuit pens prepared the way for the Congregation, and, when it assembled, it voted for the calling of an extraordinary General Congregation. Numbers of them were threatening to have Gonzalez deposed. The Pope, however, declared their vote invalid, and the book was published; but his "subjects"--whom so many regard as corpses in the hands of a despotic General--persecuted and assailed Gonzalez until his death.[38]
The interest of the Italian Jesuits is almost confined to Rome during this period. They were now so wealthy and powerful throughout Italy that they held in check the opposing elements, and we find few of those interesting episodes which saved their earlier career from monotony. In 1656 they secured permission to return to Venice, the last stronghold of their enemies. The dwindling commerce of Venice was now gravely menaced by the Turks, and the Jesuits did not scruple to fan the zeal of the Turks. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Venice was hard pressed, and compelled to look for assistance. It is said that the Jesuits paid a handsome sum to the impoverished Republic; it is at least true, and is the same thing in principle, that the Pope promised assistance on condition that the doors were opened to the Jesuits. The dire oaths never to readmit them were reluctantly erased, and the fathers soon restored their old prosperity. Although wholesome jets of criticism were constantly directed against them, especially at Rome, they flourished throughout Italy much as they did in Spain and Portugal. Hardly a year elapsed without some dying noble bequeathing them a palace or a country house, or some small town being induced to invite them to found a college; and when plague or earthquake or famine desolated the land, and they recovered their heroic mood, a shower of blessings and benefactions fell upon them.