Mind-Munitions

The Thirty Years War 111
Catholics to Austria, converting most of Poland, and extending its
mission to South America and China. The Jesuits fully recognized
the importance of discipline and of educating their recruits from an
early age. Loyola was made a saint in 1622. It was also in that year
that Pope Gregory XV decided to extend the methods of the Jesuits
by creating a new papal department – the ‘Sacra Congregatio de
Propaganda Fide’, the Congregation for the Propagation of the
Faith. This body was charged with the task of reviving Catholicism
in Reformation Europe and strengthening it in the New World.
Five years later, in 1627, Pope Urban VIII founded the Collegium
Urbanum to serve as a training ground for a new generation of
Catholic propagandists who were given a remarkable amount of
discretion concerning the methods to be employed in the field. In
the context of the Thirty Years War, this often involved secrecy,
whether of production or distribution of material, and these characteristics
have left a cloud of suspicion over the word ‘propaganda’
ever since, especially in north European Protestant countries.
Despite this ‘modernization’ of propaganda, many of the old
methods were still in evidence, although they were refined in accordance
with scientific and technological discoveries. Astrology, for
example, was given further credence in the eyes of a superstitious
public by the writings of such respected scientists as Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642) who were commissioned to
produce astrological charts for leaders. If favourable, they were
published as propaganda tracts to indicate predestined success. The
appearance of a comet in 1618 at the outset of the Thirty Years
War was subject to a wide variety of propaganda interpretations,
much as Halley’s comet had been in 1066. Similarly, heretics and
undesirables were easily branded with the stigma of witchcraft and
numerous pamphlets were printed on demonology, describing in
graphic detail with explicit instructions the ‘symptoms’ and
‘evidence’ as extracted under torture. The Malleus Maleficarum –
the Catholic handbook on the right qualifications for burning, first
published in 1486, had been reprinted more than thirty times by
1669. The mere threat of being burned at the stake was an invaluable
aid to any attempt to bring lost souls back to the true faith,
although many Jesuits opposed this style of terror campaign at the
expense of their preferred method of indoctrination and education.
Even so, actual executions by fire reached epidemic proportions in
Germany in the 1620s.