The Jesuits

On October 6, 1981, the bomb dropped. Pope John Paul II informed the Jesuits that a new Congregation could not be held until he approved and, more shocking, that he had appointed his own vicar to replace the vicar Arrupe had designated before his illness, the American Vincent O’Keefe

First, when the Congregation tried to change the stipulation in its legislation that only a restricted category of Jesuits could take part in the Society’s governance at the higher levels, the pope and his advisers saw the attempt as an instance of the Jesuits’ playing fast and loose with their traditions. At the audience with the delegates at the beginning of the Congregation, the pope communicated that he did not want a change, but he did so in opaque terms that seemed, at least to most of the delegates, to

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

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.

Moreover, French had replaced Latin as the international language of diplomacy and of intellectual and literary communication. The ability to speak and write in Latin lost practical appeal except for clerics.

Although the schools seemed to be flourishing, they had to deal with two new challenges to the very foundations of their program. The first was the attack on the assumption that the classics of Greece and Rome were “the best” literature and alone to be taught in the schools

The notoriety surrounding Lamormaini and the well-known fact that Jesuits were confessors to other monarchs gained for them the reputation of political meddlers and international schemers

He and his colleagues were, as university graduates, almost by definition committed to the “war against ignorance and superstition” that in the sixteenth century engaged both Protestants and Catholics

The Exercises are not, then, a book to be read but to be used so as gently to lead an individual along a spiritual path consonant with the person’s gifts and personality

By consulting his inner experience in this way, he gradually came to the conviction that God was speaking to him through it, and he finally resolved to begin an entirely new life. This process of self-examination by which he arrived at his decision became a distinctive feature of the way he would continue to govern himself and became a paradigm of what he would teach others