Reporting the death of a Jesuit

What were the causes of Jesuit deaths in the past? How was a death reported? Where can a researcher find this information?

We dedicate today’s episode, in view of its proximity to the feast day dedicated to the memory of the dead, precisely to the Jesuits who are no longer with their deaths and us.

When a researcher reconstructs the biography of a Jesuit, having arrived at his death, he often finds only the place and date of death, thanks to the catalogus defunctorum.

Sometimes the historia domus contains the obituary but rarely provides detailed information on how death occurred. Was he ill? What symptoms did he have? How long had the illness lasted? How did he live out his last hours? These questions open a window into the study of diseases and symptoms and their treatment in the past.

Our researchers also include scholars interested in the history of medicine and social history that investigates conditions and lifestyles. For these scholars, therefore, the catalogus defunctorum alone is not sufficient to answer their research questions.

Sources for research

This information can be found in several sources. In personal files, diaries. Sometimes, as in the case of Lonigo, the Jesuits also kept a diary of the infirmary.

Thanks to the papers in our archive we can see at first hand, for example, how the Jesuits reacted to an epidemic.

Reporting the death of a Jesuit

Howerver there is another source available to our researchers: correspondence.
As soon as a Jesuit passed away, the Superior of the community would take pen and paper and write to the Provincial to inform him of the death. As in the case of Fr Paolo Invernizzi, who died on 27 January 1830 Fr Paolo Invernizzi, who died on 27 January 1830.

Our Archives preserve a corpus of letters, within the Veneto – Milanese Province fund, concerning the death of many Jesuits. It consists of more than 200 missives, written between 1817 and 1851, addressed to rectors and provincial and written by the superiors of novitiates, colleges and residences where the death of their brother had occurred. The death of the fathers was promptly communicated to his Province.

They are the result of a collation: in the past, they were extracted from the correspondence, which contained letters from various practices, to form this corpus.

The letters concern both elderly Jesuits, at the end of their lives, but also many young students, who died in the early years of their religious formation.

The corpus has been reordered and a list has been compiled containing the names of the deceased Jesuits and those who signed the missives with the date and place of the letter. We are thus able to analyse a significant sample of letters on the deaths of hundreds of individuals in the first half of the 19th century.

Symptoms and diseases

The terms used by the writer are not the same as those used by today’s medicine, and in some cases it is also very difficult to understand what the disease is.

A letter written from the Collegio Romano on 5 January 1844 reads:

I receive notice of the death of F. Pietro Ricci, trained temporal coadjutor, which occurred this morning in the aforementioned House an hour and three quarters before noon. An organic vice, from which he was afflicted, caused him hydrops, for which he suffered a real martyrdom, for more than two and a half months.

Sometimes we find terminology that is familiar to us, such as ‘fever’, ‘gangrene’, ‘stomach pains’, ‘phlogosis’, ‘apoplexy’ ‘convulsions’, ‘ethisia’ or ‘typhus’.

Many historians, however, question what the doctors of the past meant by ‘typhus’, perhaps a different disease than the one we know.

At other times, there are definitions that do not fit into the terminology of today’s medicine: ‘nosocomial fever’, ‘malignant inflammatory fever’, ‘black fever’, and ‘ethical fever’.

The writer, while not dwelling on too specific descriptions, provides some details on the symptoms and the course of the illness: ‘he repeatedly gave blood by mouth’, ‘he was seized with a strong chestache, nausea of food, pains in the head, from which followed some bloody spitting’.

Here is a passage from the letter describing the death of Fr Clement Rossoni, which occurred in Rome on 3 September 1819.

He took to her bed after lunch on the 27th of August last with a fever, which the doctor believed to be a tertian fever, and was treated for a few days as if it were a tertian: but afterwards he became so delirious that it came close to raging, such was the vehemence of the illness. Three doctors were consulted, the Pope’s, the King’s and the House’s, and it was decided to be a malignant nervous fever. It was treated as such, but in vain. In the seventh, without the usual delusions, he quietly expired with the sacraments.

A common style

The letters follow a common style that ‘standardises’ the deaths. All received Extreme Unction in time, all received death sanctimoniously by enduring long agonies, always with apostolic resignation. All gave an edifying example of enduring pain. Finally, all received Extreme Unction, some in articulo mortis.

Certainly, the account of death is mediated by the need to evangelise or create new vocations. The letters were in fact intended for public reading at table, in novitiates as well as in Jesuit colleges and formation houses, both in the provinces and in the missions.

Death was therefore a moment when the Jesuit provided a concrete example, the last one: how to face the passage to the afterlife.

Reporting the death of a Jesuit was also an opportunity to recall his virtues, humility and life spent for others. Let us read the rest of the letter concerning the death of Fr Clement Rossoni.

He was a very observant religious, and an example to this entire community. He depended on the Superior’s nods like a novice, devout, docile, affable, always the same; ready to do service to all, very humble, since, although His Majesty usually wanted him at his side and loved him as a son, nothing at all was attached to him of vainglory or haughtiness.

Immediately after the death of a father or brother, preparations were made for the funeral of the deceased.

The use of the source

As we have already mentioned, the letters are useful for medical historians who can census the terms used and learn more about the cures used at the time. They also provide information for the biographies of these fathers and brothers, of whom we are able to know precisely not only the place of death but also often also the time, the manner, how they lived the last days and hours of their lives, who was with them, sometimes the place of burial.

This source also tells us how death was reported, not only to the Jesuits but probably also among the laity, since it is a common language.

These letters represent the last testimony of the earthly life of so many fathers and brothers of the Society of Jesus.

Maria Macchi