Society of Jesus

John O’Malley’s The Jesuits tells the complex story of the author’s order in a brief 160 pages. The small space lends focus, and O’Malley highlights the innovations and contributions of the Society of Jesus.

Ignatius’s decision to focus on education for lay students gave the Jesuits a profile unlike any other Catholic order: “Through the schools they were drawn into aspects of secular culture in ways and to a degree unprecedented for a religious order. Jesuits became poets, astronomers, architects, anthropologists, theatrical entrepreneurs, and much more.”

This “secularity” was driven by a missionary impulse: “the Society as essentially a missionary order. In the Formula the founders made explicit their dedication to “missions anywhere in the world’’ by a special vow that obliged them to be ready to travel “among the Turks, or to the New World, or to the Lutherans, or to any others whether infidels or faithful.”

Other features of the order not only distinguished the Jesuits from others but symbolically reinforced the Society’s distinctive emphases: “The Jesuits would not wear a distinctive religious habit, for instance, and they retained their family names. Instead of a set term of, say, three or six years, they elected their superior general for life and accorded him much more authority than did the mendicants. . . . the members not recite or chant the Liturgical Hours such as matins and vespers in choir, which up to that point was considered almost the definition of a religious order.” They eschewed the liturgical hours for the sake of being devoted to ministry and mission.

They formed a distinctly un-ascetic discipline: “a proper care to preserve one’s health and strength of body for God’s service is praiseworthy and should be exercised by all,” said the Constitutions. And they emphasized the role of “human or acquired means” that might assist their work, including especially “well-grounded and solid learning . . . and the art of dealing and conversing with others.” As O’Malley says, “Not monastic silence was the ideal but cultivation of the art of conversation. A significant moment had been reached in the history of Catholic piety.”

Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises encouraged a spirituality that led the novice to a “heartfelt, deep, and lifelong” commitment to his vocation, “no matter how difficult the circumstances in which he later found himself. At the time no other religious order had a program for its novices that was anything like it.” The Constitutions too laid out a plan for spiritual growth that exhibited “a judicious mix of firmness and flexibility that allowed the Society to adapt to changing circumstances and still retain its identity.”

It seems just the sort of practical, worldly piety that might eventually produce a Pope Francis.