The Jesuits (13 page)

The correspondence was the first product in what developed into the series
Moumenta Historica Societatis Iesu,
a project that has grown into well over 150 volumes of texts, principally correspondence, from the early decades of the Society. The editors, all of them Jesuits until very recently, believed that making such documents available was the best means of refuting the calumnies against the Society, but the project also dispelled pious myths and led to a rediscovery of aspects of the Jesuit tradition that the overlay of centuries had obscured. It revealed a richer and more complex story in which adaptation to circumstances was characteristic. Study of these texts resulted in a less literal and moralistic reading of normative texts, including the
Spiritual Exercises.
When in 1925 the Spanish Jesuits founded the periodical
Manresa,
they began to make the results of their research available to a wider public.

Thus, as part of this historical revival, Jesuit historians turned their attention to the spirituality of the Society, now revealed in a new way. Perhaps the most influential of such scholars was Joseph de Guibert (1877–1942), a founder of the groundbreaking
Dictionnaire de spiritualité,
17 volumes (1937–1995). His influential
La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus
(published posthumously, 1953) was the first such survey ever attempted. By showing that Ignatius was truly a mystic, de Guibert helped reverse the trend that saw in the
Spiritual Exercises
(and hence in Jesuit spirituality) a recipe only for “strengthening the will” in order to achieve moral rectitude. When the French Jesuits in 1954 founded
Christus,
a journal dedicated to research and reflection on the Jesuit spiritual tradition, another decisive point had been reached.

By the end of World War II in 1945, therefore, the Jesuit and the larger Catholic cultural scene was much different from what it had been even a few decades earlier. The old antagonism between the church and Liberalism now seemed an outmoded dichotomy. As information about the horrors of the Holocaust became ever more vivid and undeniable, it provoked profound soul-searching about how Catholics thought and acted toward people of other faiths. The sometimes violent anti-colonialism that erupted around the world after World War II not only destroyed empires but forced Jesuits and others to reexamine the whole missionary enterprise.

Amid these and the other great cultural shifts evolving in mid-century, the Society of Jesus seemed to be faring well. In 1965 it counted some 36,000 members, the largest number in its history. Moreover, in the old mission lands the percentage of Jesuits who were native to the place was now considerable—50 percent, for instance, in the Philippines and Indonesia. The Society ran or was otherwise intrinsically related to more than 4,500 schools, with more than 50,000 non-Jesuit teachers and administrators and more
than a million and a quarter students. In the United States alone the Jesuits conducted more than fifty secondary schools and twenty-eight at the tertiary level. In every province the Jesuits operated retreat houses and staffed thriving churches.

But there were problems. None was more troubling than that Eastern Europe and important mission fields such as China, North Korea, and Vietnam had fallen into Communist hands. The Jesuits in those places suffered greatly. When they were not forcibly expelled, they were often beaten, otherwise physically abused, and cast into prison to languish there without trial. Those not imprisoned had to go underground and were almost entirely cut off from communication with the rest of the Society.

In western Europe, after a large influx of new members into the Society immediately after World War II, the numbers had slacked off considerably by 1950, and in no countries more notably and surprisingly than in France and Italy. Virtually every religious order as well as the diocesan clergy suffered the same way. This was a problem, moreover, that had long afflicted Jesuit provinces in Latin America. By the time Vatican Council II opened in 1962, talk about “the vocation crisis” was common. Explanations for it were multiple, none fully satisfactory. However, leading the list was “the times,” that is, an increasingly secularized society. The decline in vocations, the first since the restoration of the Society in 1814, turned out to be a trend that has continued to the present. By 1970 it had begun to be felt even in the United States, a country that until then had been immune to it.

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), an extraordinarily complex event, was in large part the Catholic Church's attempt to
deal with the new cultural and religious situation that had long been in the making. The Council's decisions had a profound impact on Catholicism around the world and of course on the Society of Jesus. In 1964, just as the Council drew to a close, the superior general, Jean-Baptiste Janssens, died, an event that required the convocation of a General Congregation to elect his successor. As everybody realized, the Congregation, the thirty-first in the Society's history, would also have to provide the Society with guidance as to how to implement the decisions of the Council that affected both the Society's ministries and its internal life.

Before the Congregation's slightly more than two hundred delegates from around the world moved to that large agenda, they had to elect a new superior general. On the third ballot, their choice fell on a Spanish Basque, Pedro Arrupe, fifty-eight years old. At the time of his election he was provincial of the Japanese province, where he had been working for the past twenty-six years. When in 1945 the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Arrupe was living in a Jesuit community just outside the city. Because of his skill and devotion in aiding those injured by the explosion, he excited widespread admiration. The devastation resulting from the bomb was an experience that marked him for life and gave him a profound revulsion at violence in any form.

As a young man Arrupe had trained for a medical career but interrupted it in 1927 to enter the Society. When a few years later the Spanish government exiled the Jesuits, Arrupe was forced to pursue the rest of his Jesuit training outside Spain, which he did in Belgium, Germany, Holland, and the United States. The delegates to the Thirty-First General Congregation had chosen, therefore, a man of cosmopolitan background and broad experience, precisely
the kind of man needed to guide the Society in the unsettled times that were the late 1960s and 1970s.

Unlike previous generals, Arrupe traveled widely, visiting Jesuit communities in every part of the world. More Jesuits met him personally and heard him speak than was true of any previous general, including Saint Ignatius. Although he became perhaps the most beloved and admired general of the Society with the exception of Ignatius, he also had severe critics in the hierarchy and even in a few Jesuit circles, especially in Spain and in Rome itself.

The Congregation undertook a thorough review of every aspect of Jesuit life, and it did so in the light of what it called in its first decree the profound “social and cultural transformations” of the contemporary world. In an implementation of the Council, it issued for the first time in history a decree on ecumenism that encouraged Jesuits to become involved in the movement and to promote understanding among all religious traditions—something that earlier would have seemed impossible for a group of men popularly known as sworn enemies of the Reformation.

The Congregation reviewed the whole process by which Jesuits were trained. It made recommendations as to how they could be made more responsive to modern needs but also more in accord with the early traditions of the Society that the new scholarship was making clear. Vatican II in its decree
Perfectae caritatis
had bidden religious orders to make such an examination of their origins. It was an examination that had been under way in the Society for some time, but the Congregation now made some of its results officially operative.

In response to serious questions some Jesuits raised about whether the schools were worth the effort and were as effective in accomplishing the Society's mission as they were said to be, the
Congregation issued a long decree affirming their validity and recommending measures for their improvement. It also issued another important decree on the so-called social apostolate, whose purpose it defined as an endeavor “to build a fuller expression of justice and charity into the structures of human life.”

The Congregation further urged the Society “to devote its efforts” to parts of the world struggling with “hunger and other miseries of every sort.” Individual Jesuits and groups of Jesuits had of course from the beginning of the order worked to this purpose, but the decree gave them and others a new impetus and encouragement. Father Arrupe himself later founded an organization that fulfilled this mandate in a specific way. By the late 1970s, he had become deeply concerned over the plight of the Vietnamese “boat people,” who were clandestinely fleeing their homeland in highly risky sea voyages and seeking refuge any place that would accept them. It was particularly this situation that prompted him to take action. On November 14, 1980, he wrote to the Society announcing the establishment of the Jesuit Refugee Service as an official ministry of the Society.

The Service has in the meantime grown to a large and effective international organization under the direct authority of the general. Operative now in more than fifty countries, its mission is “to accompany, serve, and defend the rights of refugees and forcibly displaced persons.” The Service, with a staff of about 75 Jesuits, 50 nuns, and 1,200 laypersons from all religious backgrounds, provides education, emergency relief, and psycho-social and pastoral services that every year reach over a half million refugees and others in distress.

When the Thirty-First General Congregation ended in 1966, nobody was prepared for the upheavals in the church and in the
world that erupted just two years later, in 1968. No fully satisfactory explanation has emerged since then to explain the convergence of so many, such unexpected, and such peremptory public protests demanding often radical change in so many areas of life. In many parts of the globe, university students rioted, occupied classrooms and offices, and cried for changes of all kinds. Former colonies of European powers, even after they had ejected their former masters, were now often torn asunder by bloody internal conflicts. In the United States, the Civil Rights movement for equality for African Americans and the sometimes violent reaction to it had repercussions in other countries. Reaction against the war in Vietnam that the United States continued to wage excited violent protests against American foreign policy and ignited riots in countries far distant from the United States. In Italy, France, and elsewhere, Communist-inspired demonstrations and strikes paralyzed cities. The list could go on.

Although these and other upheavals of course had an impact upon the church and the Society, it was the so-called sexual revolution that hit them most directly, especially through the negative reaction to
Humane vitae,
Pope Paul VI's encyclical in 1968 on birth control. A number of theologians, priests, laypersons, and even bishops expressed dismay at the document and sometimes disagreement. A few Jesuits publicly criticized it. Others made clear they could not accept it and applied to leave the Society rather than be called upon to uphold it.

Meanwhile in Latin America bishops and theologians had for some years become ever more concerned about the plight and exploitation of the poor and about the injustice of the concentration of immense wealth in the hands of a minuscule percentage of the population to the detriment of the rest of society. They were
critical of the church's failure effectively to address the problem. Out of this situation arose a form of reflection on the relationship between the Gospel and social issues that came to be known as liberation theology. Several Jesuits were prominent in developing its tenets, among which was the need for the church to play a much more proactive role in addressing social problems. Some theologians maintained the church had identified itself too closely with the interests of the wealthy and privileged classes.

Liberation theology deeply influenced decisions taken in 1968 at the extremely important meeting of the General Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín, Colombia.

Pedro Arrupe addressed the meeting and spoke in favor of the direction it was taking. Shortly after the meeting, however, some highly placed ecclesiastics took an extremely negative attitude toward the liberation-theology movement and accused it of being influenced by Marxist ideology, which was not entirely off the mark. In their minds, moreover, the Jesuits with Arrupe at their head had taken the lead in this dangerous and even unorthodox movement. Under Arrupe's leadership, they insisted, the Society had lost its bearings, as indicated by Jesuits' public criticism of the papacy and by the large numbers leaving the order.

It was against this background that Arrupe determined to convoke another General Congregation to meet in early December 1974. The avowed purpose of the Congregation was to review issues that had arisen since the Thirty-First Congregation and to finalize several important matters that that Congregation had consigned to commissions for study so that the next Congregation could make a better-informed decision on them. Understood but left unsaid was that the present Congregation was to be a referendum on Arrupe's leadership.

The question under the questions at the Congregation, therefore, was whether Arrupe was appropriately leading the Society. Unlike the Fifth General Congregation in 1593 that dealt with the leadership of Claudio Aquaviva, this Congregation never explicitly addressed the question. It did not need to. From the very first moment, the delegates made clear that they overwhelmingly approved of the direction Arrupe had given the Society and that he had their full support.

Nonetheless, the Thirty-Second General Congregation, which lasted three and a half months, turned out to be one of the most difficult in the whole history of the Society because of a series of unfortunate misunderstandings between it and Pope Paul VI. The criticisms of Arrupe had made their way into the Vatican and therefore to the pope. Complicated though the misunderstandings were, they can be reduced to two.