Making Up with the Jesuits

By Richard N. Ostling

For centuries, the Society of Jesus has been considered both a blessing and a bane to the Roman Catholic Church. The order has been expelled at various times by the rulers of France, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Russia, Japan; the Papacy itself once suppressed the organization for 41 years. In modern times, no episode was as humiliating as the vote of no confidence that Pope John Paul II cast in 1981. After the society's head, Superior General Pedro Arrupe, suffered a stroke, the Pontiff suspended the normal succession and installed his own men as the Jesuits' temporary leaders.

Seven years after the Pope ended that purgatorial receivership, the Jesuits appear to have won John Paul's approval. Confronted with the task of re- evangelizing the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and the newly tolerant Soviet Union, the Pope has called upon the Society of Jesus to direct the task of training priests and rebuilding the long-oppressed clergy of these sensitive areas. Next week Jesuit experts will be gathering in Rome to plan how to go about that job. For starters, East Europeans are being brought to Rome to receive special training at the Pontifical Gregorian University and other Jesuit-run institutions. Many will return to their homelands as seminary teachers to begin the work of strengthening the church in the East.

The assignment signals John Paul's renewed trust in the Jesuit order, which was founded with a special mandate to obey missions assigned by the Pope. The Eastern mission has particular significance for the society right now, since the Jesuits are marking this year's 450th anniversary of their founding and the impending 500th anniversary of the birth of the society's canonized creator, the Basque nobleman Ignatius of Loyola.

The thawed relationship with John Paul is a major accomplishment of Peter- Hans Kolvenbach, 61, who was elected the society's superior general when the Pope restored normal self-rule in 1983. A low-key and unflappable native of the Netherlands, Kolvenbach was formerly a missionary educator in the Middle East and head of Rome's Oriental Institute.

Kolvenbach must lean on reduced forces to tackle the Eastern Europe assignment and other challenges to his men. Although the Jesuits remain the biggest Catholic male religious order, they have declined from a 1965 peak of 36,000 members to the current 23,870 or so. The rate of loss is slowing, however, and the number of seminarians has increased steadily since the nadir in the 1970s. Significantly, the sources of decline are largely limited to the First World; 63% of today's Jesuit recruits worldwide are Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. There are 3,522 Jesuits in the area covering India, Sri Lanka and Nepal, and the 20 Jesuit training houses there have waiting lists.

In all, Kolvenbach's priests and brothers are at work in 113 countries, with about one-fourth of the order's members involved in education. There are 1.8 million students in the 177 Jesuit universities (28 in the U.S.) and 356 secondary schools around the world. One index of Jesuit influence is the fact that the Gregorian University alone has trained one-fifth of all the world's bishops.

The extent of Jesuit influence exacerbated past papal mistrust, especially during the 1970s, when the order appeared to many to take a pronounced leftward tilt. Tensions broke into the open when Pope Paul VI decided that too many of the members were involved in secular matters, including politics, to the detriment of their priesthood. Whenever a papal teaching was questioned, Jesuits always seemed to be in the thick of things, whether the topic was birth control, homosexuality or female priests. Soon after he became Pope, John Paul picked up Paul's refrain, denouncing the order's "regrettable shortcomings."

Whatever willfulness the Pope feared seemed to dissipate with the virtual Vatican takeover in 1981. After John Paul appointed Father Paolo Dezza as acting superior general and Father Giuseppe Pittau as his deputy, "everyone expected a Jesuit revolt," remarks the Rev. John Long, rector of the Jesuits' Russian-studies institute in Rome. When this did not occur, says Long, "the Pope was surprised, and the Vatican Curia was shocked." On the other hand, the Jesuits did not much change their activism but instead adopted a more circumspect profile.

. The administrative leaders of the order who elected Kolvenbach in 1983 wanted him to continue the policies of his predecessor. But Kolvenbach has proved conservative enough, or diplomatic enough, to placate the Pope, even while earning the loyalty of his subordinates. John Paul's warmer attitude was first signaled in 1988, when Kolvenbach was chosen as the preacher for the Vatican Lenten retreat, an honor that was bestowed upon John Paul himself just before he was elected to the Throne of St. Peter. Kolvenbach has been meticulous in carrying out papal directives to the letter, aides say, and he shrewdly picked the Pope's man, Pittau, as his liaison with the Holy See.

Under Arrupe's reign, the society had declared a duty to "show solidarity with all the oppressed and underprivileged everywhere." That commitment was reaffirmed at Kolvenbach's election and again two months ago at a special meeting in Spain of the heads of all 84 Jesuit provinces. Are the Jesuits still too political? "To be human is to be political," responds the order's assistant general, American John O'Callaghan. In any event, Jesuit activism no longer seems to worry John Paul so much, just so long as doctrines supportive of Marxism are eliminated from the society's arsenal of teachings.

Today Jesuit energies are directed at a multitude of causes, from agitating against dictatorships in Africa to championing the cause of India's downtrodden untouchables. The prominence of Jesuits in social change has been underlined in Latin America, where just a year ago six activist Jesuit educators in El Salvador, together with two female helpers, were brutally assassinated. The Jesuit Refugee Service labors with less attention in 75 camps that harbor 1.5 million people. There are also numerous unheralded individual heroes, like Thomas Fitzpatrick, a missionary whose financial acumen helped get food and medicine to the right places during Ethiopia's drought, thereby saving thousands of lives.

Despite their activism, Jesuits are still thought of, in O'Callaghan's phrase, as "an intellectual elite who educate the cream of Catholic society." The rationale for this approach, adds O'Callaghan, is that "if the rich are properly educated, they will learn the needs of the poor and the joy of service." Kolvenbach has no plans, however, to expand the number of Jesuit-run schools; he wants priests to concentrate more on teaching and other duties than on running institutions. The Jesuits constitute the largest missionary body in the Catholic Church, and 3,270 of their number are engaged in parish work.

Even with the signs of renewed papal approval, some Catholic conservatives question whether the Jesuits have changed enough. Father Joseph Fessio, editor of the San Francisco-based Ignatius Press and himself a Jesuit, complains that in the U.S., "I don't see any perceptible change since Kolvenbach was elected. Although there are often professions of loyalty to the Holy See, there is an underlying attitude of dissent toward anything that comes from Rome or from the Pope, and a feeling that 'we have to wait out this pontificate.' "

All factions are united, however, behind the Pope's new mission in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which, says Pittau, "has given us a new sense of purpose. Our first job will be bringing the clergy up to date in theology, biblical studies and Christian ethics." Many churchmen were trained haphazardly, and often clandestinely, and know little of the changes made in Catholic doctrine and liturgy by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.

Even after decades of oppression, 1,203 Jesuits remain in Eastern Europe, some of whom were forced to live and work for years in secret. Before communism's collapse, the East bloc regimes singled out Jesuits for special punishment. Some Jesuits may now go into Belorussia for short-term assignments, and a number of Soviet universities have asked for Jesuits to teach religion courses.

As the anniversary year proceeds, the Jesuits will be showing a higher profile. Festivities to celebrate the occasion include an array of academic symposiums, pilgrimages, museum displays, musicales and plays, as well as a lavish exhibit at the Vatican Library and the restoration of St. Ignatius' living quarters in Rome. What is more important, though, is that the society has returned to a place in what a close observer called "the most difficult and extreme fields, in the crossroads of ideologies, in the front line of social conflict." The words came from Paul VI. John Paul II has since echoed them approvingly.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart

CAPTION: WHERE THE JESUITS ARE

With reporting by James Wilde/Rome