For four decades the most powerful religious order in Catholic Europe legally did not exist — kept alive, ironically, by an Orthodox empress who found it useful.
By the mid-18th century the Jesuits had accumulated enormous political and economic influence — as royal confessors, colonial landowners, and the most effective educators in Catholic Europe — which made them a target for the Bourbon monarchies of Portugal, France, and Spain, all of whom expelled the order from their territories between 1759 and 1767 amid accusations of excessive wealth, political meddling, and theological laxity in the mission field (a charge that traced directly back to the Chinese Rites controversy).
Under sustained pressure from these Catholic monarchies, Pope Clement XIV issued the brief Dominus ac Redemptor in 1773, suppressing the Society of Jesus worldwide. Roughly 23,000 Jesuits were affected; some were imprisoned, many were laicised, and the order's vast property was redistributed to other institutions or seized outright by the crowns that had lobbied for the suppression.
The suppression was never total: Catherine the Great of Russia, who valued the Jesuits as educators and had no interest in publishing a papal brief she considered none of her business, simply declined to promulgate Dominus ac Redemptor in Russian-controlled territory — meaning the Society survived, technically intact, for over four decades entirely outside the reach of Rome, sustained by the goodwill of an Orthodox monarch rather than the Catholic Church that had just dissolved it.
In the more conservative political climate following the Napoleonic Wars, Pope Pius VII issued Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum in 1814, formally restoring the Society of Jesus worldwide, drawing in part on the Russian remnant that had never actually disbanded. The order rebuilt its schools, missions, and influence over the following century, eventually producing, in 2013, the first Jesuit pope — Pope Francis.
Loyola's background as a soldier shaped the order's governing style: unlike older monastic orders organised around individual, largely autonomous abbeys, the Society of Jesus is centralised under a single elected Superior General, who serves for life and directs Jesuits worldwide from the order's headquarters (the Curia Generalizia) in Rome, near the Vatican.
In addition to the traditional monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, professed Jesuits take a distinctive fourth vow of special obedience to the Pope regarding missions — meaning a Jesuit can be sent anywhere in the world at the Pope's direct instruction. This unusual degree of centralised discipline is the origin of the popular, informal nickname for the Superior General: the 'Black Pope', after the plain black cassock Jesuits traditionally wore, in implicit contrast to the Pope's white — a nickname with no formal governing meaning, though it later became a favourite detail of conspiracy literature (see the Conspiracy Theories page).