VITELLESCHI, MUZIO. — Sixth superior general of the Society of Jesus, born in Rome on 2 December 1563, died there on 9 February 1645.
Having entered the Order (1583), and overcome the fierce opposition of his noble family by appealing to Gregory XIII, he was an esteemed preacher, professor of philosophy and theology, provincial in Rome and Naples, assistant for Italy (1608), and finally, on 15 November 1615, superior general.
His thirty years of government, marked by a particular gentleness and fatherliness (Urban VIII used to call him an “angel of peace”), may be counted among the happiest and most flourishing for the Order, especially in the Latin nations, and above all in France. The Colleges increased in number and in students, which brought to maturity an outstanding group of theologians and philosophers (e.g., J. De Lugo, moral theologian and jurist, A. Tanner, controversialist, D. Pétau, master of positive theology), and even more humanists, preachers, and writers (e.g., F. Florencia, A. Vieira, J. Gretser, F. Strada, M. K. Sarkiewski, J. Balde, and Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicini). The development of the missions was parallel and consoling; besides the fields of India and China, already extending toward new conquests, other new ones were opened: Fr. A. de Andrade entered Tibet, Fr. A. White Maryland (United States), and others Angola and Guinea; the Canadian missions among the Native Americans were founded, as well as a college at Québec (1635) and the celebrated Reductions of Paraguay; penetration was made into the Levant, from Turkey to Chaldea, promoting returns to union with Rome or awakening and sustaining the desire for II. There were, nevertheless, also thorns: the dispersions and devastation caused by the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and Sweden; the decline of the Japanese mission under the fury of a merciless persecution; the failure of the mission of Ethiopia; and the grave difficulties arising from the precarious situation of the confessors, at times confessors in name only, of kings and princes, especially in France and Bavaria. V. had to regret some imprudence or defection on the part of the confessors, but had far more reason to rejoice over the many evils averted and the great good achieved, especially in opposing the anti-ecclesiastical designs of Cardinal Richelieu.
V. also had the joy of witnessing the canonization of Ignatius and Francis Xavier (1622), the beatification of Stanislao Kostka, Luigi Gonzaga, and the three Japanese martyrs, Paolo Michi, Giov. di Goto, and Giac. Kisai; and the celebration of the first centenary of the Society, in which Urban VIII took part, attending with his Court the service at the Gesù and granting the Jesuits a jubilee of spiritual graces. This did not escape the notice of their adversaries, for whom the commemorative work Imago primi aneculi Societatis Jesu (Antwerp 1640) furnished further fuel for launching accusations against the intolerable and inflated pride of the Jesuits. It was in fact the product more of understandable youthful enthusiasm, compounded by the hyperbolic conventions of the age, than of history and criticism. At his death, V. left more than 16,000 Jesuits, distributed among 35 provinces, 3 vice-provinces, 521 colleges, 49 seminaries, and more than 360 residences in Europe and in the missions.