For instance, Jesuits are encouraged to entice promising young men to enter the order and endow it with their estates; rich widows are to be cajoled and dissuaded from remarriage.
Every means is to be used for the advancement of Jesuits to bishoprics or other ecclesiastical dignities and to discredit the members of other orders, while the world is to be persuaded that the Society is animated by the purest and least interested motives: the reputation of those who quit it is to be assailed and maligned in every way.
The censor who purportedly approves the publication bears the name "Pasquinelli", while the titles which, it is alleged, should ensure the esteem of men in general for the Society, include all the crimes and abominations of every kind—immoralities, conspiracies, murders, and regicides—which the Jesuits' bitterest enemies have attributed to it.
Amongst those who have argued that the Monita are a hoax are Bishop Lipski of Cracow (1616), Bernhard Duhr [de] in his Jesuiten Fablen, Fra Paolo Sarpi, the historian of the Council of Trent and Antoine Arnauld and the "Nouvelles Ecclesiastiques"; plus anti-Jesuits such as the Jansenists Henri de Saint-Ignace and Blaise Pascal, von Lang, Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, Friedrich (the author of Janus), Huber, and Reusch, as well as the Protestant historian Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler.
As against this case, John Gerard, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia denies the authorship arguing that the official rules and constitutions of the Jesuits contradict these supposed instructions, for they expressly prohibit the acceptance of ecclesiastical dignities by its subjects, unless compelled by papal authority, and from the days of the founder, St. Ignatius Loyola, the Society has impeded such promotion.