Dextere sinistram vertere : Jesuits as military chaplains in the papal expeditionary force to France (1569–70); discipline, moral reform, and violence

In 1569, Pius v dispatched an expeditionary force to assist the royal armies in the Third War of Religion in France. This was the background against which the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, commissioned by Superior General Francisco de Borja and the militant pope himself, published Il soldato christiano, a short book that outlined a spiritual model of the disciplined soldier, far from previous heroic and aristocratic archetypes. Copies of the catechism were distributed to the officers and chaplains who accompanied the contingent. This essay aims to analyze the conditions in which the papal military intervention in France was conceived and the effects of Jesuit catechesis on the men who made up the papal army, as well as their reactions to this encroachment of "confessionalization" into the profession of arms.