St. Ignatius Loyola and the Future of the Society of Jesus:
Museum or Mission?



A talk to the Triennial Convention of Alpha Sigma Nu, Baltimore, MD, 18
October 1997.
by Robert Blair Kaiser

Earlier this week, I told Father Walter Burghardt, a most eminent
member of the Jesuits' New York Province, that I was going to talk here
about the future of the Society of Jesus. He chuckled and said, "You're
going to give a short talk, huh?" Gallows humor? Yes, Father Burghardt
knows that the Jesuits that in this country are dying. And it hurts so
much, all he can do is laugh.

Fact is, recruits are few. Dropouts and the dying are many. Last
year, in the Oregon Province, one new man entered the Novitiate. Six
died and seven departed. So the Jesuits had a net of minus 12 last year
in Oregon. In the New England Province, there were five new novices.
But 18 died and six left, for a net of minus 19. Last year, the
California Province admitted 11 new novices. But six died and eight
left the Order, for a net of minus 3. This year, one lone novice
entered in California.

That's the way it's been going all over the U.S. for more than three
decades. In 1965, there were 8,393 U.S. Jesuits. As of January 1,
1997, there were less than half that many: 3,928. In 32 years, 5,764
Jesuits have left the Society. Some of those have undoubtedly died.
Even so, today, there are probably more ex-Jesuits in the U.S. than
Jesuits.

It is not hard to figure out what this means to the future of the Order
in this country -- and, what may be even more important, what it
portends for the future of the Ignatian vision. Father Don Merrifield,
provost of Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, says, "By the year two
thousand and five, we may only have two or three Jesuits teaching here
at Loyola Marymount." I'm sure the situation at Boston College, at
Fordham and Georgetown and the four Loyolas, at St. Louis U. and Santa
Clara and my alma mater, Gonzaga, is pretty much the same. At each of
the Order's colleges and universities (and high schools) in the U.S.,
we'll see a handful of (mostly old) Jesuits holding the fort.

Is the Jesuit Order becoming more of a museum, then, than a mission?
I have one weird news item that says it is. In Rome, they're exhuming
the body of Father General Pedro Arrupe, so they can set up a little
shrine to him in the Gesu in Rome. Please don't misunderstand. I have
the highest regard for Father Arrupe, and I like the course he set for
the Society from 1965 to 1983 (even though the pope didn't). But the
Society ought to be making other, more radical moves. And it is not.
That's the bad news.

The good news is that we still live in an age of miracles. And this is
my main message this afternoon: If the Jesuits would dare to be as
different today as they were 450 years ago, if they would have the guts
to do the practical things they need to do to meet the new challenges of
the 21st century, then the Order could survive, and thrive in the United
States. (It is, curiously, surviving and thriving in places like India,
but that's another story.)

You may wonder where I get the authority to say such a thing. My
authority comes from my Jesuit roots. As Father Tom Regan told you, I
was a Jesuit for ten years. Then I left the Order. But not really.
>From the time I left, more than 40 years ago, until now, I have been a
Jesuit-at-heart, still impelled to dare greater things than I could have
done had I stayed in the Order. I am also a self-appointed spokesman
for more than a million Jesuit alumni in the U.S. (You know what they
called self-appointed spokesmen in the Old Testament: prophets. You
also know what happened to the prophets. They were stoned to death.)

At the risk of stoning, then, I want to say this: Today's Jesuits like
to think the Order is theirs. It's not theirs. It is ours. The
Jesuits belong to us, and to the Church. We can't let them die, these
trustees of a great tradition. If they were to die, then something of
value would be taken from us, and from our children, and their children.

And what is that something of value? Perspective. The Jesuits have
always helped us see the big picture. They've helped us see God in all
things and all things in God., so that nothing in the universe is merely
secular or profane. They've helped us listen to the Spirit and discern
what to do with our lives. They've helped us be loyal, intelligent
Catholics, even when we must take a critical stance toward authority and
the pretensions of authority. In a word, they've helped us grow, and
grow up.

I'd like to give you a for instance here. It has to do with the famous
birth control debate of the late 1960s, and the work of the papal birth
control commission. (I spent 18 years gathering string on this story,
and published a book on the pope's birth control commission called The
Politics of Sex and Religion.) The most highly regarded member of that
commission was a German Jesuit named Joseph Fuchs of the Gregorian
University, a man who had been a staunch defender of the old papal line
until he was appointed to the commission. Once there, he not only
listened to some key laymen and laywomen on the commission, he dared to
change his mind, and then he shared his change-of-mind with all the
others, including some of the world's leading cardinals, who went along
with Father Fuchs' revisionist views on birth control -- and against
the pope's advisers in the Holy Office (formerly known as the Holy
Office of the Inquisition). Members of the Holy Office warned the pope:
if you change the Church's teaching on birth control, we'll lose our
moral authority. Arrogantly, one of them said, "What will we do with
all those people we sent to hell for practicing birth control?"

Well, you know the end of that story. The pope didn't listen to his
own commission, and he didn't change the Church's teaching on birth
control. He issued an encyclical called Humanae Vitae, and, ironically,
he and the Holy Office lost their moral authority. Catholic
commentators around the world wrote openly about how the pope was
wrong. Bishops conferences wrote pastoral letters telling Catholic
couples they had to learn to exercise their own consciences. And, in
his next ten years as pope, Paul VI would never write another
encyclical.

Was Father Fuchs not obedient, or a bad Jesuit? Hardly. He'd been
appointed by the pope, not to tell the pope what he thought the pope
wanted to hear, but what his own reason and research revealed. Fuchs
was only doing what many Jesuits, starting with their founder, Ignatius
Loyola, had been doing from the beginning. They practiced intelligent
obedience, even when they had to fight off the pope (or, more
accurately, the pope's advisors in the Roman Curia). In fact, if Father
Fuchs had been an even truer son of St. Ignatius, he might have
polticked inside the Vatican to make the commission's recommendations a
reality -- as members of the Holy Office were themselves doing.

If Father Fuchs had done this, he would only have been following in the
footsteps of his founder. Once Ignatius Loyola decided what needed to
be done, he went after it. Loyola preached a virtue he called
indifference. But he didn't live this indifference, not according to
Father M.M. Meissner, a New York Province Jesuit and the author of a new
biography of Loyola subtitled "The Psychology of a Saint." Meissner
(who is a psychoanalyst and a professor at Boston College) writes that
when Ignatius was trying to gain papal approval for his vision of a new
religious order, he "flagrantly contradicted this advice [on
indifference] on countless occasions." Ignatius's Company of Jesus
couldn't take the Good News to other peoples and other cultures if they
wore a distinctive habit, or were tied down with the obligation of
singing the Office throughout the day and night, in choir, or if they
took vows of stability in a single house. At the time, the pope's
cardinal-advisors insisted the Company couldn't drop these things --
habit, choir, stability -- and remain as "religious" in the Church. No
one, they said, had ever done it this way before

But Ignatius Loyola was a man of his time. This was only a few decades
after Columbus had discovered America. Loyola lived in an age of
discovery, an age of adventure. So Loyola lobbied the pope. He drummed
up a letter-writing campaign. He and his companions caused hundreds of
endorsement letters to pour in to the Vatican, from the high and mighty
all over Europe, even from princes and kings (because, you see, Ignatius
and his companions had already proven themselves by working, as laymen,
with the poor and downtrodden, the lame and the halt and the blind,
remembering to do the things that Jesus had bidden them to do in Matthew
25: "As long as you did it for the least of my brethren, you did it for
me.") Ignatius also told his companions to start saying their Masses
-- he actually ordered up 3,000 Masses -- for one intention: the pope's
solemn approval of the Company of Jesus.

The lobbying and (maybe) the masses moved the pope, finally, to go to
his cardinals and say, "What if we approved this new kind of religious
order, but limited the number of professed priests to 60 members?" So
that's what they did. The curia compromised with the pope, they went
along with this crazy Basque, they tossed Ignatius a little bone, and
they let him start his little Company of Jesus.

Pretty soon, the pope began to see the quality of men that Ignatius had
drawn to the Company. The pope wanted to give a cardinal's hat to one of
them, James Laynez, one of the most articulate theologians at the
Council of Trent. "No," screamed Ignatius. "If members of our Company
become cardinals, then they'll be co-opted by the pope. We need to be
more independent." And so he politicked with every cardinal he could
find to change the pope's mind, and, when that didn't work, he enlisted
the help of Margaret of Austria, daughter of King Charles V.. She went
to the pope, persuaded him to delay a decision until he heard from the
Emperor;. The Emperor told the pope to let the matter drop. And, when
the pope did so, Ignatius ordered a solemn Te Deum sung in thankgiving
for a happy ending to "this trial and scourge."

(Nothing, of course, is forever. Since the Society's beginnings in
1540 up through 1997, there have been thirty-four Jesuit Cardinals. The
list includes some well-known names: Robert Bellarmine, Augustine Bea,
Jean Danielou, Henri De Lubac, Carlo Martini, and Paolo Dezza. The
latest to be made Cardinals (in 1994) were Fathers Alois Grillmeier
(Germany), Augusto Vargas Alzamora (Peru) and Julius
Darmaatmadja Riyadi (Indonesia). Cardinal Martini of Milan, as you
probably know, is a media favorite to become the next pope.)

I'm digressing. Back on track now: Remember, I told you that the pope
had given his approval for a small Jesuit Order -- no more than 60
professed fathers? Well, sixteen years later, in 1556, Ignatius Loyola
could say, as he lay dying, that he had kept the letter of the law. He
had kept the number of professed fathers in the Society of Jesus down to
50. In fact, at the time, he actually had more than 1,000 Jesuits at
work in 74 countries.

How did he do that? He wrote new rules. He set up two classes of
Jesuit, professed and coadjutors. Only the professed were full-fledged
Jesuits. The spiritual coadjutors, a class unheard of 'til then in any
other order, were priests, but not professed. There were also temporal
coadjutors, called brothers, who did much of the heavy lifting. And
there was a fourth class of Jesuit, called "scholastics," men in
training, who were also out there teaching in the new Jesuit colleges
that were springing up all over the place. (This Jesuit idea was
obviously an idea whose time had come. One hundred years after the
founding of the Society, in 1640, the Jesuits had 15,683 members in 868
houses..)

What was St. Ignatius doing? He sure wasn't working for the pope.
More history: When Loyola and his companions first arrived in Rome, they
weren't even sure they wanted to start a new religious order, much less
become priests. Priests of that time were a randy lot. They hardly
ever said Mass. The best of them (including the pope himself, Paul III)
had concubines, and passels of children, and the worst of them led lives
of gross licentiousness. Loyola and his Company had bigger horizons.
Still stunned by Columbus and his recent discoveries, they contemplated
a new world, or worlds, out there, filled with people who had never
heard of God Incarnate, or of his saving message. They wanted the
freedom to go, as Christ bid his own apostles, and win over all nations
in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,
enlightening minds, enkindling hearts.

Ignatius was a layman when he wrote and gave the Spiritual Exercises to
hundreds of men and women. He and the others only agreed on accepting
the priesthood because they thought they could accomplish more as
priests in a world where the Church was still a major cultural and
political force. In fact, my fantasy is that if Ignatius Loyola were
beginning all over today, he would probably not ask for ordination as a
priest at all, but seek membership in the Writers Guild of America, the
screenwriters' union. And write a TV series for ABC called "Nothing
Sacred." Or teach psychiatry at Harvard. Or work for NASA on projects
searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Or serve as a legal
ombudsman for the Indians on the reservation at Guadalupe. Or go to
federal prison for demonstrating against the U.S. Army college at Ft.
Benning, Georgia, that trains assassins to kill those working for social
justice in Latin America.

In fact, Jesuits are doing these things today. Some, like the French
author Jean Lacouture, see them as representing "a transitional form,
between the religious of yesterday and the layman of today." Indeed,
Lacouture observed that some Jesuits were leaving the Society in order
to have the freedom to do these new things, while others were choosing
to attempt them while staying in the Order. He cannot understand those
who stay. He asks, "Why have so many men of such diverse genius chosen
to add to the yoke the Church imposes on its ordinary priests the even
more tyrannical yoke of the Company?"

I don't think Lacouture quite understands that the Jesuit Order is just
now beginning to see how much freedom is at the heart of their
tradition. In a brilliant new book, Impelling Spirit, Jesuit Father
Joseph Conwell tells about his discovery in the Jesuit archives in Rome
of a radical new paradigm for the Society of Jesuis. He found this new
paradigm in a seminal document, written by St. Ignatius and his original
nine companions, for the signature of Pope Paul III, then laid aside and
lost in the archives for centuries. That document, says Conwell, erases
our old view of Ignatius as the soldier-saint, a man of steely will, a
coldly rational, orderly administrator. Conwell says that view
"betrayed Ignatius and his first companions and has long pervaded both
the practical application of the Spiritual Exercises and the practical
living out of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus."

The new paradigm gives the rationale for an impelling spirit that has
long been the hallmark of the creative, pioneering Jesuit. "That
impelling spirit," according to Conwell, "is the Holy Spirit,
passionate, creative, innovative, wildly beyond the rational,
propelling, driving, pushing, blowing like an untamed hurricane with no
predictable path."

I do not think the Order has officially begun to cope with the
implications of Father Conwell's discovery. That, and a more careful
reading of the Order's history (which revisionist historians inside the
Society are now writing) should prompt the Society of Jesus to act in
radical ways to save the Ignatian vision, AMDG, which I translate as
"the greater good of the people of God."

You remember AMDG. In our Jesuit high schools, we wrote AMDG at the
top of our English composition papers. We still see AMDG carved in
stone on Jesuit buildings all over the world. For me, the motto doesn't
stand up to critical analysis. For the greater glory of God? How can
God be greater than He already is? He's unchangeable, isn't he?
Already has all the glory He needs? I rather think that AMDG was really
an example of anthropomorphizing God. What AMDG really meant was that
Jesuits (and we, their students) would work for the greater good (not
glory), and it wouldn't be for the greater good of God, but of God's
creatures, starting with our own families, and moving our way out to all
the peoples on the face of the earth. In this, I am only following St.
Irenaeus, an early Father of the Church, who said, "The glory of God is
humanity fully alive."

In order to continue to push toward that goal, the greater good of the
people of God, I would like Jesuit alumni all over the world to ask the
Order to make some radical changes. But I do not think these changes
are any more radical today than the changes Ignatius made in the Church
of his day, more than 450 years ago. In order to get the job done, and
remain obedient to the pope, who limited the number of professed priests
in the Order to 50, Loyola instituted a new grade in the Society, the
non-professed Jesuit called "spiritual coadjutor." And he even signed
up a woman, as a perpetual scholastic, who would never live in a Jesuit
community, but work AMDG, from her position of great influence in
Spain. That woman was a 20-year-old widow who happened to be Princess
Juana, Regent of Spain, daughter of Charles V and sister of Philip II.
Juana was a secret Jesuit, whom Ignatius had given a code name, Matteo
Sanchez. She took her vows on October 26, 1554. She wasn't headed for
the priesthood. But she was, and would be, a Jesuit, to her dying day.

I submit that the Ignatius-Juana model may be the way of the future for
the modern Society. The Jesuits taught us a theorem in minor logic:
esse ad posse valet illatio. "If it has been done, it can be done."
The Jesuits should put shoes on that theorem and walk it into the 21st
century. They should open up their membership to men and women, yes,
even married couples, who would not join old-fashioned Jesuit
communities, or, become ordained as priests, but continue to live as
they have been living, and working, AMDG, in the real world, in academe
(either in Jesuit universities or in other private universities, or
state universities), in the world of government and business, in social
work, in the media, in law and medicine and science and engineering,
while they find spiritual sustenance and the occasional companionship
and moral support of men and women with like minds and the same willing
hearts.

The Jesuits could make these bold moves if they let themselves be led
by the Spirit -- by the creative, innovative, propelling, driving,
pushing spirit that Father Conwell has identified at the core of the
Society's original vision.

Perhaps the Spirit will speak through you, an elite band representing
Jesuit alumni across the nation. Worldwide, there are several million
Jesuit alumni out there. We have power. More power than we realize. I
would hope that our power -- the power of reason, not the power of
power -- could propel the Jesuits to make bolder moves. In 1995, the
Jesuits' 34th General Congregation encouraged some experiments in what
the Fathers of the Congregation called "lay collaboration," but they
stopped short of saying these collaborators should become a new kind of
Jesuit. In fact, they said explicitly these collaborators "will not be
admitted into the body of the Society."

Why not? One of the fathers who was there tells me five members of the
Congregation wanted to do just that. But they were ignored by others
who said specifically that they did not want to "blur the line between
lay and religious." I told my source that I wondered how helpful that
distinction was to the mission of this General Congregation -- "to meet
the challenges and opportunities of the modern world." I told him I
didn't think the Society could meet its challenges as long as it kept
drawing that line between "lay" and "religious" -- which I suspect are
code words for "celibate" and "non-celibate." "Who drew that line?" I
asked him. "God? Or men? And if men drew it, then why can't men
undraw it?"

This man -- he was then an American provincial from the midwest --
was amazed at me. But he seemed to enjoy my frankness. I don't think
he will try to have me stoned for speaking as frankly as I have this
evening, to this group, or to any other.

In the conclusion to his book, Impelling Spirit, Father Conwell says
the Spirit must impel the Society even today. "We must set aside fear,"
he writes, "fear of the future, fear of change. The call is to listen,
listen to the Spirit within, listen to one another, listen to events
outside, listen to the sights and sounds of the times, listen to the
needs of God's people and God's world."

I will continue to insist (and I hope you, the members of Alpha Sigma
Nu, will start insisting) that the Society listen in new ways to the new
needs of God's people. We can push for this, in the court of public
opinion. If this reform makes any sense, then public opinion will grow,
and, in the end, the General and his advisors will take up the
proposition -- that the Society of Jesus should start recruiting men
and women -- new kinds of Jesuits -- for the momentous times ahead.
If the Society fails to do this, I believe the Society will die, or
become a living fossil.

I am sure that any reform of the Society along the lines I am proposing
will meet with opposition, from traditionalists in the Society who fear
change and so do nothing, and from some in the Roman Curia whose fear of
change leads them to fight it with all their might. But these are
political problems. Politics is people, and, as the biography of
Ignatius Loyola tells us, and the history of Church demonstrates, almost
anything is possible for those who have the political skills and the
patience.

I am also bettting that the Holy Spirit will have some say in this. At
the next conclave, I pray She will give us a pope who is ready to
approve new kind of Jesuits, men and women who are "passionate,
creative, innovative, propelling, driving, pushing, blowing like an
untamed hurricane" -- for the greater good of the people of God.

Robert Blair Kaiser
14249 N. Third Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85023
(602) 548-8827
rbkai@amug.org