Can the Jesuits Be Saved?
by Russell Shaw - January 10, 2008
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
A friend of mine tells of attending a showing at a Jesuit university of a video produced to mark the centenary of the birth in 1907 of Rev. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., "the Basque Jesuit," who as a missionary in Japan tended the wounded and dying after the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, and was superior general of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He is revered by contemporary Jesuits as the man who not only presided over but initiated many of the changes in the Society after Vatican II.
Questions and discussion followed the video. Someone asked if Father Arrupe would be canonized a saint. According to my friend, the answer was: Not as long as the people currently in charge in Rome are calling the shots.
That strikes the authentic Jesuit note of the last 30 years: a little paranoid, more than a little petulant, quick to blame others – preferably the Vatican – for the Society's troubles. Members of a healthy-minded group with a sense of being in charge of their own destiny don't express themselves like that.
As a product of Jesuit education, I've known many Jesuits and counted them as friends and admirable priests making notable contributions to the Church. Yet the Jesuits as a body are in serious trouble today. That is why the order's 35th General Congregation, which opened Monday in Rome, is a matter of the highest urgency. The Society's very survival could be at stake.
Two items on the assembly's agenda are electing a successor to Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., superior general since 1983, and making policy decisions for the years ahead. The new general may have been chosen by the time this appears, but few except Jesuits – and perhaps not even many of them – will know at once what the choice really means. Nor will the General Congregation's policy statements shed much light. Only time will tell what the future holds for the Jesuits.
Numbers illustrate the Society's long-running crisis but don't explain it. Forty years ago, there were 35,000 Jesuits in the world. Now, though they remain the Church's largest religious order of men, there are 19,000. More important than numerical decline, however, has been the group's sometimes troubled relationship with the Magisterium of the Church.
Clearly, today's Jesuits aren't the same as yesterday's – and that isn't all bad. The Society of 50 or 60 years ago had plenty of faults, though you would never get a Jesuit to admit that to an outsider. But the really big difference between then and now is that Jesuits then were a band of ultra-orthodox papal loyalists, while Jesuits now and for several decades have collectively cast themselves in the role of a shakily loyal opposition. In their disturbing 2002 report on the Society in the United States, Passionate Uncertainty, Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi, himself an ex-Jesuit, conclude that "tacit dissent" was a virtual way of life for many of those they interviewed.
