A satisfactory modern history of the Jesuits' suppression remains to be written. The paucity of detailed evidence from many provinces is frustrating, although recent studies have shown how accurately local variants of the Suppression and its aftermath can be reconstructed. There is also a major conceptual issue obstructing any account of the destruction of the most dynamic religious order in the Roman Catholic world. How could it possibly have come to pass? A series of national suppressions in Portugal, France, and Spain (their colonies and satellite states included) culminated in the 1773 papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor which blotted out the Jesuits' corporate existence across almost the entire globe. It was, as John Henry Newman later put it, “one of the most mysterious matters in the history of the Church.” Crucially, we must abandon the notion of a simple, over-arching explanation of the Suppression. In earlier historiography, this was harder to achieve than one might suspect, not least because the Suppression occurred at a moment when grand historical movements were seemingly in full flow. It has always been tempting to assume that one of these movements was responsible for the Society's demise. The Enlightenment is just one case in point. A religious order that was portrayed (often with scant justification) as stubbornly obscurantist seemed an obvious target for the self-styled syndics of reason and progress. Nor were the French philosophes bashful about claiming credit for the Jesuits' destruction.