Strange History: The CIA Partnered with the Jesuits to Create MK-Ultra Mind Control

MK-Ultra was an literal partnership between U.S. Intelligence and Jesuit institutions. The feds turned to the Jesuit Order to learn the skills of soul-craft.

The Society of Jesus did not arise merely to combat Protestant theology—it was formed to conquer Protestant psychology. From its inception, the Jesuit order wasn’t just a theological reaction to the Reformation; it was a psychological counteroffensive, a full-spectrum strategy to reshape the way men think, feel, and obey. While the Reformers aimed to unleash Scripture upon the conscience, the Jesuits aimed to seize the conscience itself.

Their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, was no theologian. He was a wounded soldier with a mystical bent and a knack for domination. What he gave the world was not a catechism or confession of faith, but a manual for internal reprogramming: The Spiritual Exercises. It is still, to this day, the central text for Jesuit formation. But to call it a devotional guide would be like calling a hypodermic needle a bedtime story.

The Exercises aren’t meant to inform the mind—they’re meant to form it. Specifically, they are designed to impose a system of guided visualization and emotional immersion that breaks down resistance and builds up obedience. The practitioner doesn’t debate theology. He doesn’t read Scripture critically. He imagines—under the daily direction of a spiritual superior—Christ’s blood, hell’s fire, the groans of the damned, and the agonies of saints. The technique is relentless, vivid, and theatrical. You don’t study truth. You simulate it. Over and over, until the line between reality and imagination dissolves.

THE DISCIPLINE OF IMAGINATION

Loyola treated the human imagination as a moral instrument. It wasn’t something to be restrained or tested against Scripture; it was something to be wielded—by authority. And just as the Jesuits believed the Pope spoke infallibly, they believed the Exercises could rewire the soul through aesthetic compulsion. In essence, they believed they could engineer repentance.

From a Protestant standpoint, this is pure spiritual manipulation. It takes the heart of Christian conversion—a work of the Spirit through the Word—and replaces it with a process of emotional hypnosis under priestly supervision. The Bible teaches that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Loyola taught that obedience comes by seeing—not visions from God, but staged scenes of torment and ecstasy implanted in the mind through repetition and submission.

And it didn’t stop with private meditation.

THE JESUIT STAGE

By the late 1500s, the Jesuits expanded their control of imagination from the inward world to the outward one. Across Europe, they built schools and colleges that doubled as psychological laboratories. And at the center of this operation was the theater—not the pagan drama of ancient Rome, but a new form of catechesis: morality plays on steroids.

Jesuit theater was moral instruction by emotional spectacle. Elaborate sets, soaring music, choreographed anguish—all meticulously designed to bring the viewer to a preordained spiritual conclusion. The plot was always the same: a soul torn between virtue and vice, heaven and hell, Rome and heresy. But the real function was not narrative—it was conditioning. Viewers weren’t meant to ponder truth. They were meant to feel allegiance.

In Protestant lands, where biblical preaching stirred minds to question tradition, Jesuit theater drowned questions in tears. The Jesuits understood that when you can get a man to cry, you can get him to comply. Their goal was not clarity—it was catharsis.

THE RITUAL OF PERFORMANCE

In many cases, these performances bordered on the liturgical. The actors were seminarians. The scripts, often penned by Jesuit theologians, carried theological weight. Scenes of death, judgment, purgatory, and martyrdom were enacted with an almost sacramental reverence, not just for effect but for indoctrination. Audiences left the theater not enlightened, but broken. Consciences were not sharpened—they were softened, shaped, and sealed.

And because these plays were often staged for youth in Jesuit schools, the impact was generational. A boy might forget a catechism lesson, but he wouldn’t forget the night the archangel dragged a sinner through the flames. What he witnessed was designed to lodge itself deep in the imagination—a second conscience, written not by Scripture but by drama.

MANIPULATION MASQUERADING AS PIETY

This is the defining trick of the Jesuit method: manipulation that doesn’t look like manipulation. A heart moved is assumed to be a heart changed. A tearful response is mistaken for conviction. And authority is smuggled in behind the veil of compassion, beauty, or even art. But in the end, it’s not the Spirit of God that speaks—it’s the spirit of Rome, wrapped in theatrical incense.

And make no mistake—this method didn’t die out with powdered wigs and candle-lit stages. Jesuit theater evolved. It became propaganda. It migrated from the chapel to the classroom, and then from the stage to the screen. The underlying technique remains the same: immersive experience plus guided emotion equals manufactured obedience.

What began as religious drama in the 17th century would lay the groundwork for a new kind of warfare—a theater of the mind. Not through bullets or doctrine, but through scenes, sensations, and suggestions. Once the Jesuits discovered they could control the soul through the imagination, it was only a matter of time before that control extended far beyond the pulpit.

JESUIT ACADEMIA MEETS THE DEEP STATE

By the 20th century, Jesuit institutions had morphed into something even more potent than their baroque predecessors. No longer merely centers of spiritual direction or theatrical indoctrination, they became elite academic factories—places where theology, psychology, diplomacy, and intelligence converged under the seal of Roman authority. What the Reformation rightly feared had become reality: the Jesuit college had become a control node for both ecclesiastical power and statecraft.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in the United States. While Protestants built seminaries and Bible colleges to preach the gospel and send out missionaries, the Jesuits built outposts—Georgetown, Fordham, Loyola, Boston College—each strategically placed in cultural and political capitals. These were not just centers of learning. They were command centers for shaping elite thought, grooming agents of influence, and embedding papal loyalists in key sectors of society.

And during the Cold War, they opened their doors to something even darker. Enter the CIA.

In the postwar era, the Central Intelligence Agency became obsessed with mind control. They feared the Soviets were experimenting with psychological weapons. They feared “brainwashing” techniques used on prisoners of war. But more than anything, they feared losing control over the narrative—over how people think, what they remember, and who they trust.

So they launched MK-ULTRA, a sprawling, clandestine program aimed at exploring every possible method of behavioral modification. Hypnosis. LSD. Electroshock. Sensory deprivation. Sleep disruption. Subliminal messaging. Anything that could crack open the human psyche, erase a memory, implant a suggestion, or create a new identity.

Where did they go for help? Not the Southern Baptists. Not Westminster. Not Geneva. They went straight to the Jesuits

GEORGETOWN: THE CATHOLIC-CIA PIPELINE

Georgetown University—the crown jewel of American Jesuitism—was already deeply embedded in Washington politics. Founded in 1789 by Jesuits and boasting a legacy of elite diplomacy, Georgetown was home to the School of Foreign Service, established by Jesuit priest Edmund A. Walsh. Fr. Walsh was a Cold War hawk who worked hand-in-glove with U.S. intelligence to shape anti-Communist strategy. His students would go on to populate the State Department, the CIA, and every shadowy corridor of the federal bureaucracy.

It is no exaggeration to say that Georgetown was the unofficial seminary of the American intelligence class. The men who plotted coups in South America, ran psy-ops in Southeast Asia, and rigged elections in Europe often took classes in Georgetown’s Jesuit halls. It wasn’t just about policy. It was about formation—shaping a particular kind of elite conscience: pragmatic, malleable, obedient to higher powers.

In time, Georgetown would also become involved in psychological research—including memory studies, behavior experiments, and pharmacological testing—all relevant to MK-ULTRA’s goals. The overlap between Jesuit pedagogy and CIA mind games wasn’t coincidental. It was familial. They spoke the same language: obedience, secrecy, formation, control.

FORDHAM AND THEOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Meanwhile, Fordham University in New York—another Jesuit stronghold—was making its own contribution. The psychology department at Fordham dabbled in early behavioral research, and one of its most notable figures, Dr. James Monroe, was known to consult on government-related psychological contracts.

Fordham was also home to experimental ethics programs—ones that dealt with moral decision-making under extreme conditions. If that sounds eerily close to the kind of studies needed for brainwashing and interrogation, it should. Fordham provided a cover of Catholic moral theology for what was functionally dark science. And just as the Jesuits had long used the confessional to probe the secrets of the soul, now their universities provided sanitized labs where new techniques of confession could be tested—chemical, suggestive, coercive.

LOYOLA, ST. LOUIS, AND THE MEDICALIZATION OF OBEDIENCE

Further west, Loyola University Chicago and St. Louis University extended the Jesuit-CIA relationship into the realm of medicine and psychiatry. Loyola’s Stritch School of Medicine was known for research into psychotropic drugs and behavior-altering treatments. St. Louis University became infamous for a very different reason—it was the site of the real-life exorcism that inspired The Exorcist. But behind the sensationalism was a quieter truth: Jesuits were actively blending spiritual and psychological manipulation, even as the state looked on with interest.

At St. Louis, the line between exorcism and psychiatric breakdown blurred. Jesuit priests worked alongside medical professionals. The rituals of spiritual warfare began to resemble clinical experimentation. And for government agencies interested in “possession,” “altered states,” and “personality disintegration,” this blending of the sacred and the scientific was a goldmine.

In all of these places, what emerged was not merely a cooperative arrangement—it was a shared worldview. The Jesuits believed the soul could be shaped by environment, suggestion, and authority. So did the CIA. The Jesuits believed obedience could be formed through ritual and narrative. So did the CIA. The Jesuits believed reality could be staged to alter conscience. The CIA simply called it “psychological operations.”

What we are witnessing here is a transition—from stage to laboratory. The same mechanisms that once played out in Jesuit drama—the guided narrative, the controlled emotion, the immersive experience—were now being translated into pharmacology, interrogation, and experimental psychiatry.

The spiritual director had become the psychological handler. The confession booth had become the observation room. The same goal persisted: interior compliance under external authority. And the Jesuits had already perfected the method.

Let’s not forget: long before intelligence agencies invented wiretaps and dossiers, the Jesuits had built the world’s most intricate data-gathering apparatus—the confessional. Through sacramental confession, the Society of Jesus had access to the darkest secrets of kings, generals, merchants, and peasants. They could assess, manipulate, and direct the inner lives of entire populations.

Now, in the 20th century, that ancient apparatus was being updated. Psychological profiles replaced penance cards. Voice recordings replaced whispered sins. But the logic was the same: the more a man reveals, the easier he is to control. And Jesuit universities—long masters of the spiritual conscience—were now training technicians of the mental conscience.

HE JESUIT-MK-ULTRA CONNECTION — PRIESTS, PSYOPS, AND THE SACRAMENT OF CONTROL

The Society of Jesus did not simply prepare men for the pulpit. It prepared them for the program. As I explained above, Jesuit universities in the 20th century functioned not merely as religious institutions, but as command centers for elite formation. But the full extent of their role goes beyond shaping diplomats and policy wonks. The truth is stranger, darker, and more theologically urgent: Jesuit institutions in the United States directly facilitated, justified, and in some cases housed elements of the CIA's infamous MK-ULTRA program.

That’s not rhetorical flourish. That’s documented fact.

If you appreciate this work, please consider a paid subscription to access exclusive content (like the rest of this article) for only $8 a month or $80 a year. I promise you it’s worth every single dime, because you won’t find information like this anywhere else on the Internet.

If you don’t do subscriptions but you’d still like to show some love, consider a one-time gift of your choosing by clicking the ‘coffee’ link below. This is one of the things I do to provide for my small farm and big family, so I sure appreciate it.