Clement XIV suppresses the Jesuits; CCWV.LIFE

Under sustained pressure from the Bourbon courts, which had expelled the Society of Jesus from Portugal, France, and Spain, Clement XIV's brief Dominus ac Redemptor of July 1773 suppresses the order everywhere. Some five and twenty thousand Jesuits are dispersed; the order survives only where the brief goes unpublished, in Prussia and Russia, until its universal restoration in 1814.

Tagged: Catholic

The Event

Date: 1773 (exact)
Era: The Confessional Age; Standard periodization of Catholic history
Location: Rome; today Rome, Italy
Traditions: Catholicism
Streams: Catholic
Key figures: Clement XIV
Key texts: Dominus ac Redemptor

Connections

Illustration for The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith

History Event The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith 1622 dissolves the order that staffed much of the Propaganda's mission field

Primary Sources

Clement XIV, Dominus ac Redemptor, 1773.

Secondary Sources

Chadwick, Owen. A History of the Popes, 1830-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Duffy, Eamon. Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Hastings, Adrian, ed. A World History of Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. London: Penguin, 2009.
O'Malley, John W. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Provenance: HIST-1335; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.