“But even as the Jesuits brace for near-extinction in this part of the world, their ideals are spreading,” writes a sympathetic Washington Post reporter in Fewer Jesuit priests this Easter, but more people learning Jesuit ideals.
The lack of new priests, they say, must be part of God’s vision for lay people. So rather than mourn, the Jesuits have been busy building an elaborate system for passing along their beliefs and unique meditative rituals, imaginative prayer known as the “spiritual exercises.” . . .
“Some people outside will see this as a crisis, but we inside don’t see it that way. We see it as an invitation to share our tradition with lay men and women,” said the Rev. Kevin O’Brien, executive director of campus ministry at Georgetown University. “It’s no better, no worse; it’s just different.”
This is the decline she’s describing, of an order whose average age is getting close to 70, at least in America:
When John Langan came to Georgetown University in 1975 as a young Jesuit priest, he was one of 112 brothers from the Catholic order on campus. Jesuit Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, was in Congress, and Jesuit John McLaughlin had recently been in the West Wing advising Republican President Richard Nixon.
Today there are barely half as many Jesuits at Georgetown, the order’s flagship university. Gonzaga, a Jesuit high school in Northwest Washington, is down to 17, compared with 43 in 1970. There’s talk that St. Aloysius, a Jesuit parish in the District known for its social justice efforts, could close when the last remaining Jesuit leaves. And there are no full-time Jesuit staff members at the Washington Jesuit Academy, where the board chairman is Jewish.
The situation is nearly as bad elsewhere in the country and Europe, though reportedly the Jesuits are doing much better in Africa. A once great religious order is now in the institutional equivalent of a hospice. (Though, let me be clear, I know some wonderful Jesuits.)
One can debate the reasons, but one of them seems obvious. As the author puts it, admiringly: “Jesuits are the archetype of priests with PhDs who protest in the streets or otherwise advocate for causes, often politically liberal ones.”
That is the archetype, but only part of it. They are also the archetype of the priests with PhDs who set themselves in opposition to the Church’s teaching and run institutions notorious for their disregard and abuse of that teaching. Think, for example, of the gay pride celebrations at places like Georgetown.
Some Jesuits will complain that this isn’t fair, that it’s a stereotype created by cranky conservatives and a sensationalist press, but to the extent that it is a stereotype, it is one the Jesuits have brought upon themselves and one they’ve done almost nothing to contradict. Has any official Jesuit body disciplined a member? Have they chided their colleges for their homosexualist events? No.
As archetypes go, this really isn’t one likely to attract many young men to a life of sacrifice. The average Catholic young man, even if he grew up entirely within the Catholic educational system, knows that he has a lot of choices for what he wants to do with his life. The priesthood and the religious life have to draw him in and appeal to him in a way all the other options don’t.
He can get a Ph.D. without being a Jesuit. He can protest in the streets without being a Jesuit. He can be a political advocate without being a Jesuit. He can do all that and have a family and a job.
What he has to want, if he’s going to join the order, is to be what only a Jesuit can be. And that archetype includes fidelity to the Church’s teaching. Such a young man these days will be religiously serious, which almost always means traditional and believing. If he’s going to be a Jesuit, he’s going to be an old-fashioned one.
But the Jesuits, revealingly, at least if the Washington Post story is correct, are happy to let their order decline and disappear, with excuses that sound as if they were made up by a public relations firm, like “Some people outside will see this as a crisis, but we inside don’t see it that way. We see it as an invitation to share our tradition.” That is a counsel of despair, however cheerfully expressed.
It’s like a banker watching the money disappear from the accounts and explaining that he’s helping people learn to do more with less, or a ship’s captain letting the leaks grow till the ship starts sinking, and explaining that even though other people see sinking as a crisis, he sees it as an invitation to learn to swim.
April 27th, 2011 | 8:05 pm
The Georgetown Jesuits recently produced a video detailing all the ways they enrich campus life.
In the 15 minutes of interviews there was exactly one passing reference to Jesus Christ. One!
The emphasis was on–can you guess?–the many and various satisfactions of being a Jesuit.
April 27th, 2011 | 9:01 pm
After my couple of years at Fordham, where I worked, I had changed my mind about the Jesuits. Listening to them at daily Mass and in lectures and informal classes and interacting with them as we crossed paths on campus, I soon discovered a few things.
There were in the Jesuit community at Fordham more conservatives than I would have thought, although I’m fairly sure that they and their brother Jesuits would eschew the terms “conservative” and “liberal.” Remember Cardinal Dulles and Fr. Joseph Koterski, for example — great minds and souls to be reckoned with. The scholastics in residence there leaned right, or so I surmised.
The liberal Jesuits were serious about their faith. Their love for the Church shone through. Their homilies were about the gospel. They were never tendentious. They never got preachy when they preached.
Esteem and affection among the Jesuits easily crossed ideological lines. They were less interested in right and left than in right and wrong. I saw this in the way they spoke of each other and in the way they spoke to each other, at meals, after Mass, and so on.
The president undertook, quietly and tactfully, a campaign to reinforce Fordham’s Catholic identity. Fordham’s official seal was posted everywhere. All departments and units were required to display it on their letterhead. In my office, this raised some eyebrows. My colleagues smirked and complained but said that in the end it wasn’t such a big deal because they’d find a way around it. And so they did, in the end. The reason for their upset? The same reason, I suspect, that the president thought to tie Fordham’s identity more closely to its seal in the first place: At the center of it is the Cross.
April 27th, 2011 | 9:27 pm
Quite right. The Jesuits were always at their most attractive when they were what St. Ignatius made them to be: a purely intellectual and spiritual army. People joined the Jesuits precisely in order to fight the good fight for Christ and His Church; people respected (and sometimes feared!) the Jesuits precisely because they were disciplined enough to be extraordinarily good at it as a Society. The Jesuits don’t seem to have been getting any stupider or less effective individually, but it really does seem like they’ve lost the capacity to function as a disciplined group, and become more of a rag-tag mob. And no matter how good people in the mob might be, they simply won’t get things done the way soldiers in a unit will. It’s as if the U.S. Army started taking the slogan “An Army of One” so literally that it just sent soldiers any-which-way on the battlefield and encouraged them all to make their own decisions about what to do; that in itself would be a reason not to join the Army. The people who take joining the Army seriously don’t do it in order to do their own thing, but to do the Army’s thing, which is to fight for country and Constitution. And serious young men don’t really join the Society of Jesus to do things they can do anywhere; they join it to do what the Society of Jesus was made to do.
April 27th, 2011 | 10:03 pm
Whereas the neighbors of the Georgetown Jesuits, the Dominican House of Studies in DC, just had seven men take solemn vows. The Dominicans are growing precisely because they remain faithful to the church’s teaching, have the same level of academic rigor, and aren’t afraid to claim Christ.
Though to be fair, the Jesuits have done such a lousy job of maintaining their earlier tradition that I’m not particularly worried that they’ll successfully pass it along to laypeople.
April 27th, 2011 | 10:42 pm
St.Ignatius Loyola was a soldier ..
Spiritual warfare has to be one of the most challenging vocations within the vocations in our times and we hear how there is massive need for same !
As an order that carries power within its very name , let us hope that they will be blessed to be all that they can be , including may be an exciting return to the very basics of just knowing Him and His power , through long hours of prayer and Adoration and faithful lives !
April 27th, 2011 | 10:50 pm
St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us. St. Francis Xavier, pray for us. St. Robert Bellarmine, pray for us. St. Peter Canisius, pray for us. St. Edmund Campion, pray for us.
Personally, I’m partial to the Dominican tradition, but “conservative Catholics” must pray for the Jesuits. It would be tragic if such an important “way within the Way” were lost.
April 27th, 2011 | 11:40 pm
I would be all for entering the Jesuits if they would live their charism. I love their charism, their life, their spirituality, their dedication to the Gospel. I would join them in a heart beat. Unfortunately, I think they’ve lost their charism and do not see God calling me to a charism-less order, so now I am, after discernment with my spiritual director, continuing the process of training for the Diocesan priesthood. It is truly sad that the Jesuits (not en-masse, of course, but in image) have lost their charism.
April 28th, 2011 | 12:21 am
There is no question of the Jesuit charism’s influence in the past in the Catholic Church. I do not believe there is any danger of this charism disappearing either for it is obviously of God.
I sense, although I do not know, that the original article and Jesuit interview is based on a certain secularizing that arises from a certain-by no means the only-interpretation of Fathers Teillard de Chardin and Karl Rahner
My experience of Jesuits, and they are many [although I was not educated by the Jesuits] has been very positive. I also see a turn around in many of the “Jesuit Universities” which is reemphasizing the Catholic identity of the said university or college.
However, just as the universal Church, the Jesuit order and any Jesuit university does not turn on a dime. Faculty hired in more confusing and ‘liberal’ times are still in the faculties and it will take some years for the changes to take place.
I also must say that I find many hypercritical of the Jesuits but not looking at the real or wider picture.
For example, many of the sad changes that have compromised Catholic identity were made at the 1967 Land of Lakes Conference which was a meeting of Catholic college and university presidents who, presumably in good conscience, thought that their proposal was consistent with Vatican II. It effected Catholic Higher education across the board and not just the Jesuit schools. Much of what then was decided has undergone at least a course correction if not a turn around, as we gain more perspective on what Vatican was and was not calling the Church to do [this is in any area of Catholic Church life]
I pray that ‘the company of friends of Jesus’ may increase and multiply. They have survived many bouts before and I am sure will survive this one!
April 28th, 2011 | 7:14 am
I have a remarkably mixed experience of the Jesuits. My community sent me to study for priesthood at a Jesuit constitution, where I found dedicated and caring Jesuit professors from whom I learned much and received a fine theological education that served me well in ministry. Now, some years later, I find myself sent to another Jesuit institution where my community has asked me to pursue a doctorate, and where I have found the same encouragement and inspiration in my teachers.
On the other hand, however, I have seen the misfortune of an educational culture that sometimes promotes religious indifferentism, syncretism, and homosexuality, compounded by the poor pastoral care that seems to seek to initiate young lay people into these ‘enlightened’ ways. That being said, I have also had the great encouragement of meeting many young Jesuits who, as the post suggests, are “religiously serious” and without apology for their fidelity to the Church.
April 28th, 2011 | 8:18 am
So little seems to have changed, since Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters:
“”Know then that their object is not the corruption of manners- that is not their design. But as little is it their sole aim to reform them- that would be bad policy. Their idea is briefly this: They have such a good opinion of themselves as to believe that it is useful, and in some sort essentially necessary to the good of religion, that their influence should extend everywhere, and that they should govern all consciences. And the Evangelical or severe maxims being best fitted for managing some sorts of people, they avail themselves of these when they find them favourable to their purpose. But as these maxims do not suit the views of the great bulk of the people, they waive them in the case of such persons, in order to keep on good terms with all the world. Accordingly, having to deal with persons of all classes and of all different nations, they find it necessary to have casuists assorted to match this diversity.”
April 28th, 2011 | 9:26 am
That bit about seeing it as an opportunity to spread the Jesuit teaching to laypeople reminds me of that Anglican bishop a few years back who, in a story on the Anglicans declaring England a non-christian country, said he and the other bishops were encouraged because it meant a ton of opportunities to evangelize.
Loyola’s my favorite Catholic saint and it’s sad to see an institution founded by such an extraordinary man circling the drain.
April 28th, 2011 | 9:56 am
David: Has any official Jesuit body disciplined a member?
I know of one Jesuit who has been rather strictly disciplined … for defending the Church’s teaching and for not kowtowing to dissenters in SJ leadership.
April 28th, 2011 | 10:31 am
Robert Drinan, SJ defended partial birth abortion.
Do you know what Georgetown did?
The law school named a chair in “Human Rights” after him.
April 28th, 2011 | 11:15 am
I think we’re seeing the same kind of decay in the Jesuits that we see throughout the Church. Were orthodoxy and faithfulness to Church teachings have become lax, numbers decline. I wonder how many vocations have been fostered at Georgetown recently? Certainly, few men will feel especially called to join an order that says it’s just as good to turn everything over to the laity. Moreover, what kind of priest would spend time trying to encourage vocations if he doesn’t value them?
In the end, though, the men who join the Society of Jesus will be more faithful than their predecessors. It will not disappear. I think Pope Benedict’s metaphor of the rose bush that must be pruned so that new growth can occur.
My only fear is that in the intervening lean years, the Jesuit universities will lose their Catholic character to such a degree that when the Jesuits once again have the faith to assert themselves it will be too late.
April 28th, 2011 | 11:56 am
In reference to Blaise Pascal, whom I admire and respect in many ways, remember that he was (at least) of Jansenist tendencies [for those not familiar with this particular 'heresy' in the post Tridentine Catholic Church, it could be referred to as a "catholic Calvinism" or a calvinistic Catholicism].
The Jesuits were a bulwark against these harsh tendencies of the Jansenists, profoundly influenced by their Spiritual Exercises and the grace offered through Christ. This in turn became symbolized by ‘the Sacred Heart of Jesus’
There is no question of a need for reform, renewal along the hermeneutic of continuity prposed by both (Blessed) John Paul II and Pope Benedict. However there can be a harsh and even hard, hammer-like quality to some espousing what they believe to be ‘orthodoxy’ but actually mimics if not actually perpetuates a Jansenism even today.
We need Saint Ignatius’s wise ‘discernment of spirits’ to sort out things today, not sledge-hammers.
April 28th, 2011 | 1:19 pm
Botolph
It is doubtful whether Pascal was actually a Jansenist heretic; there is nothing in his remarks on grace that cannot be found in the later Augustinians, like Berti, Bellelli and Cardinal Norris, who were vindicated against the charge of reviving Jansenism by Benedict XIV (Dum praeterito mense of 3rd July 1748). Their views on the Jesuit proponents of Molinism are instructive.
More to the point, most of the examples of the moral teaching of the Jesuits satirised in the Provincials was among the 65 propositions condemned by Bl Innocent XI on 2 March 1679.
April 28th, 2011 | 5:27 pm
It seems that only conservative Catholics write these articles and they suggest to the reader that they know God’s will and that they represent the fullness of the faith. They don’t! Conservative Catholics and fundamentalists protestants are paving the way for an America where basic social justice is forgotten and where whole parts of the Gospels are ignored. You can’t be pro-life and support wars, the death penalty, bigotry, and policies that make the American middle class poor.
April 28th, 2011 | 9:13 pm
I am a Jesuit because I heard Our Lord Jesus say to my heart while I was on retreat: “Will you be a Jesuit for me?” I answered immediately from my heart: “Yes, Lord, I will.” I am now the assistant to the provincial for vocations for the Jesuits of the Missouri Province so I am working all the time to identify, accompany and assess young men who feel that God is calling them to become Jesuits. I am in contact with many Catholic men from different backgounds and with different approaches to Church life. The main aspect of our assessment is whether the applicants know Jesus personally in their lives, are active members of the Catholic Church, and are responding to His call.
I beg Our Lord to send a whole bunch to join our novitiates each summer and I am very grateful to Our Lord for those who are responding generously to his call. I am assure you that while the number of Jesuits is smaller we are not disappearing from the face of the earth nor from the United States. I ask you to pray with me that Our Lord will keep calling many to all religious vocations: deaconate, priesthood, men and women religious.
I was grately encouraged by the inspiring words of our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, to our General Congregation: “As my predecessors have often told you, the Church needs you, counts on you, and continues to turn to you with confidence . . .” February 21, 2008
April 29th, 2011 | 12:02 am
Just visiting the Church of St Ignatius in SF, the gay vibe is off the hook. I’d wager it is close to impossible to succeed as a Jesuit candidate without hiding conservative beliefs. And I’d bet money if you are vocal in your affirmation of the Church’s teaching that gay sex is mortal sin your chances are probably zilch. But hey, let’s not be *too* hard on things, right? I mean there are good solid conservative Jesuit schools or organizations, and not just a few noble greying exceptions like Fessio and Schall, somewhere, right? Like… um, never mind.
April 29th, 2011 | 5:51 am
The various orders, including the Society of Jesus, of the Roman Catholic Church should go back to the teachings in the Bible and test their works using the Bible as the one and only standards for their theological and societal positions or doctrines.
For example the Pope’s current position on the death penalty for murderers run counter to the Biblical teaching that declares: “Whoever shed the blood of man shall his blood be shed.” God’s reason? “For in the image of God has God made man!” This was/is to instill in man the sanctity of human life that belongs to God and God alone.
At no time did Jesus, by words or deeds, abrogate that Law. The Church may pray or even forgive the murderer’s soul but she has not been authorized to teach the abrogation of God’s Law that demands the death penalty for murderers that Jesus, by words, deeds, implication had not abrogated nor supportable by exegesis or eisegesis.
April 29th, 2011 | 11:45 am
The comments remind me of my primary duty in regard to the rather corrupt condition of much of the SJ’s in USA is to pray for them…and for me…and for the Church.
I confess I mostly criticize them for having gone off the rails. This is, of course, the root cause of their dying off as a group here–or at least being mightily pruned.
The need is for more prayer. Amen.
By the way, while agreeing with the comment on the Dominicans being in better shape, they had better not be too smug. It’s a matter of place and group. Many Dominicans are off the rails in dissent as well. I spent a few days recently at a Dominican house of prayer, where the doxology was morphed into something like ‘Glory be to the Creator, and the Redeemer, and the Spirit of God.” The liturgical sign of the cross was also done in the same terms. It was very jarring to experience seemingly grown people doing this. It finally occurred to me: this is what happens when the contraceptive mentality is superimposed on the Trinity–it renders it sterile, and as such, contrary to the truth.
I’d say it’s bad luck to try to so remake God as a political foil, but they are. They won’t be missed. St. Dominic, pray for us. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us. St. Catherine of Siena, pray for us.
April 29th, 2011 | 12:43 pm
First of all, I’m not entirely sure of the purpose of this article. Is it simply one of bashing the Jesuits; one of calling for reform; twisting the words of a well-intentioned Jesuit at Georgetown? What is the purpose of this article? Maybe I’m so confused because I find the logic of the author…well, illogical or just simply pernicious. But more on that later. Secondly, what is the purpose of this discussion? Is it simply an argument of who is more conservative (i.e. No I’M more conservative than you!)? According to the Spiritual Exercises (#20), I should assume the best of the author and those posting here but wow. Seriously? Nevermind. In any case, I suggest the author do some serious research to discover the wonderful things that the Jesuits do, the wonderful varied spectrum of the Church that they represent and study the countless contributions Jesuits have had and continue to have on Catholic theology. Let me give you a poignant example: Pope Benedict XVI, considered by most (sources) to be a very conservative pope (not to mention a predecessor of an even more conservative JP II, for whom he worked as head of the CDF) quotes Jesuit Archaeologist/Theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book Jesus of Nazareth on numerous occasions (check it out, it’s fascinating scholarly work on both parts). This is also a pope who was a dear friend and colleague of Karl Rahner, who I might add was magnificently influential (and silenced much like Chardin) preceding, during and after VII. This alone should put to rest a silly argument about conservatism but I know it won’t. In fact it will only spark more debate about something Catholics shouldn’t be arguing about in the first place. Rather, the dialogue should confront what it is that conservatism proposes to be really? Or what is it in the Catholic church? Or simply, “What is conservatism?” Does it mean how much one religious group does to chastise or discipline its “wayward liberal” members or how they discipline and chastise in general? Because in all of the chatting going-on I can’t say that it’s orthodoxy ya’ll are looking at. Finally, I would like to add that in the spirit (aggiornamento) of VII the Jesuits made significant effort to return to their Company roots and initial charism (FYI the Jesuits were founded collaboratively: Favre, Xavier, Ignatius and other Companions of Jesus). This would be a reason for the return of individual retreats during the Spiritual Exercises or the new translations of the Exercises and Ignatius’ biography. And the Jesuits continue to re-identify with said tradition not only in their schools and institutions but every time there is any meeting of superiors, novitiate staff, General Congregation, annual province gathering etc. Yes, the Jesuit order is declining in numbers, so is every religious order in the US and Europe except for maybe the Sisters of Charity. The truth of the matter or better the falsity of the author’s argument is that “conservatism”, which in the article and its responses looks like a forced pre-vatican II Catholicism, will save the Jesuits. No. A patience and profound understanding of the complexities of religious vocations is what will help religious vocations. Could a so called orthodoxy (I’m thinking Chesterton here) be made more apparent in all religious orders? Yes, but this does not inherently mean forced discipline or conservatism or a boost in vocation numbers. Rather, orthodoxy is much more didactic, meaning that we have to get men and women in novitiates/seminaries (wherever) before we can force them, I mean instruct them to be “conservative”. Such vocational growth (pre-novitiate/seminary) can only be left to prayer and perhaps that is the problem: too much arguing over who is the best conservative, a biblical pounding of one’s chest and too little genuine prayer, voicing the need for holy women and men in Catholic religious orders (or holy men and women in general). And this is the heart of a deeper problem, which is a lack of appropriate support for religious (i.e. holiness) and those who hear the call. An article such as the one posted does not do any good; it is defamatory, inflammatory, reactionary, instead of supportive, informative, truthful.
May 3rd, 2011 | 1:16 am
My father went to Holy Cross and he was the most faithful person I have ever known.
Some of the talk here is very high falutin’, but I don’t think it is SO HARD to follow Christ.
What I know I know from my dad, who lived it every day in every way. He hated the sin, but loved the sinner. He worked as a child welfare worker in NYC in the 1970s, so you know he saw it all. He never gave you any excuse when you were in the wrong, but he loved every person, because God had made that person.
I think the Jesuits may have over-intellectualized themselves into incoherence and that is sad.
Maybe they need to listen to a few good bluegrass religious songs or something and get straightened out that way.
Because my dad was pretty intellectual, but he never got confused about the fundamentals.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact