Witness to the Apocalypse

His face is thinner than that of the order's founder, but his high, broad forehead and strong nose bear the same Basque imprint. It is an open face, quick to smile. "He is optimistic by disease," says one colleague. But the Very Rev. Pedro Arrupe has reason to be optimistic. He is a survivor of a cataclysm next to which the problems of his Jesuits must instantly pale. As rector of a Jesuit novitiate in wartime Japan, he was in Nagatsuka, a suburb of Hiroshima, on Aug. 6, 1945, when the atomic bomb struck. "Arrupe," says a Jesuit associate, "has seen the Apocalypse."

Arrupe started toward that rendezvous in Hiroshima some two decades earlier in Madrid, where he had gone to study medicine. The only son among five children of a wealthy architect and newspaper publisher, he had grown up in comfort in the Basque city of Bilbao. The slums of Madrid shocked him: "I found terrible suffering -widows with children begging for bread, sick people begging for medicine, waifs running through the streets like stray dogs."

The daily visits to the slums pricked Arrupe's conscience. "I began asking, 'Why did I come into this world?'" he later wrote. He made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where he witnessed what he was certain were three miraculous healings. "I felt that God was calling me not only to cure bodies but also to cure souls." In 1927, at the age of 19, he entered the Jesuit novitiate at Loyola.

When the new, anticlerical Republican government expelled Spanish Jesuits in 1932, Arrupe finished his studies in other parts of Europe and the U.S. After his ordination in 1936, he began to study psychiatry, but was stopped short by superiors who were then uneasy about a marriage between Jesus and Freud. His new assignment: Japan.

At a mission parish in the western Honshu city of Yamaguchi, Arrupe became an aggressive Japanophile. So well did he learn the language (one of the seven he speakes) tht he went on to write eight books in it. He also wrote haiku, studied caligraphy, practiced the tea ceremony. Once he advertised a "great concert at the church. The musicians proved to be three Jesuits, one of them Arrupe. He still likes to sing Spanish songs at the top of his lungs in a deep bass.

Arrupe was transferred to Nagatsuka in 1942. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, his old medical experience proved priceless. Disregarding reports of poisonous gases in the ruins, he and his fellow Jesuits waded into the smoldering city, taking victims back to the temporary infirmary they had set up in the novitiate.

Arrupe stayed in Japan for 27 years; when the country became a Jesuit province in 1958, he became its first provincial, a post he held until his election as superior general. He still loves Japan, but mourns the "brusque change of values" that brought abortion to "a country that loved children so much."

At the Jesuits' Roman headquarters, a severe, palazzo-ike building on Borgo Santo Spirito, a stone's throw from St. Peter's, Arrupe still emulates Japanese ways. In the tiny private chapel off his room, he prays, sitting Zen-style on a cushion, each morning and evening that he is there. Often he is not. Though previous Jesuit generals stayed close to Rome, Arrupe has logged 200,000 miles on more than 30 trips. Says an aide: "His face lights up when he's on the road."

Traveling or at home, Arrupe puts in an 18-to 20-hour day. But his labors as superior general can bring criticism from both sides. Many Jesuits accuse him of being a second-rate administrator. Conservatives say that his permissive standards have weakened the order. Liberals sometimes think that his most daring innovation has been the automatic Pepsi machine he installed at the austere Jesuit headquarters. Through it all, Arrupe proceeds with a deep serenity that his friends find saintly and his foes infuriating.

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