The New American Jesuits

“What we’ve really been saying is that we’re fighting over the last deck chair on the Titanic.”

The Jesuit who spoke was summarizing the first day of discussions about the situation of the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—within the larger context of the American Church. Ten Jesuits, all of them around thirty and all of them friends, came together during the Easter holidays to talk about the future of their religious order, amimore important to them—what their future within that order might be. An extraordinary aspect of the meeting was that religious superiors who had been neither consulted nor informed nonetheless sent their blessings on the project and asked to be informed on opinions and decisions. More extraordinary still was that this meeting was convened at a time when vast overhauling of the structures of religious life was under way and when the occasions for expressing dissident opinion were practically unlimited. These young Jesuits were not concerned, however, about the opinions or plans of superiors or about expressing grievances. They were pursuing something far more essential to their lives: a way of living out their religious commitment which would assure some kind of effectiveness in their work, affectivity in their social life, and some sense of corporate unity more meaningful than merely the wearing of similar clothes and the sharing of a common house.

“All the Jesuits coming along have decided to do their own thing,” one remarked. “They’ve even been encouraged to do their own thing. And that s fine. But if you’re going to do just your own thing, be a spiritual loner, then you might as well do it outside the Jesuits. What we’ve got to discover is in what way we are a special group, what our corporate identity is. Because the Society of Jesus is going to be what we make it. We are the Jesuits just as surely as we are the Church.”

What the Jesuits are is a phenomenon far more difficult to describe than what they do. Primarily they are educators. The largest order in the Church, the Jesuits today number more than 34,000 men, almost two thirds of whom are involved somehow in education, whether in teaching or administration or as students in Jesuit schools. Of the 8000 Jesuits in the United States some 2400 are studying for the priesthood and another 700 are vowed Brothers who live the religious life of the Jesuits but who will not be ordained priests. These 8000 men run twenty-eight colleges and universities, from the vast sprawling complexes of Fordham and Georgetown and the University of San Francisco to the relatively small and specialized Wheeling and Holy Cross. They also run fifty-four high schools, which enroll 38,000 students. Though surveys show that only 42 percent of American Jesuits are involved in teaching, these figures are misleading, since another 20 to 25 percent are preparing for teaching careers, and most of the men on mission duty also are involved in education.

Jesuits engage, of course, in numerous other occupations; in limited numbers they are retreat masters and army chaplains and editors of religious publications; in even smaller numbers they are employed as lawyers, psychiatrists, labor arbitrators. But their principal work traditionally has been and today remains education. And this is perhaps the single most debated point in the Jesuit program of renewal: whether they own their schools or whether the schools, limiting mobility, imposing huge financial and manpower obligations, have come to own the Jesuits.

The Easter meeting at which the ten young Jesuits discussed their own and their order’s future was one of the more hopeful, positive signs of the dramatic changes occurring in the Jesuits today. For well over five years the Jesuit order has been under heavy and unrelenting attack from outside and from within. It is the men on the inside who have brought about the most impressive changes. Protest marchers, draft-card burners, professional rebels were at first rebuked by their superiors and some, like Daniel Berrigan, exiled by them. But time passed. Massive and highly publicized defections from the priesthood which once embarrassed Jesuit officials now merely dismay them. What remains utterly baffling is the new spirit of indifference. The new American Jesuit acts in consultation with his conscience and his friends; how his superior will react is not a matter of importance to him. This because, so he feels, authority lias ceased to be a problem; by its years of righteous inconsideration for the individual it has phased itself out. Today the word “obedience” is rarely mentioned when Jesuits get together.

Yet it was upon the concept of absolute obedience that Ignatius Eovola in 1540 founded his Society of Jesus. The religious order he established was at once an amalgam of what lie found effective in traditional religious orders and what he intuited would succeed for his times: a highly centralized monarchical government controlling widely dispersed and highly mobile apostolates. In such an organization, unquestioning obedience teas essential, and it is not by accident that he chose the traditional monastic representation of that, virtue as “blind” and compounded the image in his Constitutions: “Each one should convince himself that they who live under obedience must allow themselves to He carried and ruled by God’s Providence through their superiors as though they were a dead body which allows itself to be carried in any direction and to he treated in any manner whatsoever, Ignatius had been a soldier before his conversion, and when he founded his religious order, he elevated and spiritualized military obedience; it remained total and unquestioning; only the motive for obeying was changed. It was his genius to make such absolute obedience a liberating rather than a constrictive force.

From the beginning Ignatius placed heavy emphasis on teaching and on missionary work. Though not founded as a direct response to the Reformation, the Society of Jesus Won its greatest fame in combating the sweepingly successful Protestantism in France, Central Europe, and the Low Countries. And at the Council of Trent, Rome’s belated response to Luther’s success, it was again the members of the Society of Jesus who as periti prepared the speeches and framed the documents which made Church reform possible for the first time in centuries.

By 1650 there were on the Continent at least five hundred colleges run by Jesuits. This is the great baroque period when Jesuit drama, ballet, art, and music flourished. It is also the period when the accusations of “Jesuit pride” began, the political machinations of court favorites that would finally lead to the suppression of the Jesuit order.

The third century of Jesuit existence saw expansion of institutions and membership, but little of the brilliance or sanctity which characterized Ignatius’ early Society. Not surprisingly after 1750, the Jesuits who had so fiercely battled heresies and the men who made them now found themselves battling for their own existence. But their schools and their pulpits were too great a threat to the absolutist monarchs of France and Spain and the Two Sicilies; cooperating for the first time in a common effort, they brought such pressure to bear on Pope Clement XIV that in 1773 he suppressed the Society of Jesus for unspecified reasons which were “suggested to Us by the principles of prudence and which We retain concealed in Our breast.”

Restored in 1814 the Society of Jesus was at once the same and immensely different. Constitutions, ascetic ideals, and educational policies remained as they had been. But the spirit was gone. The effort to regain what was irrevocably lost led Jesuit superiors, and principally the Superior General Roothaan, to a blindly conservative dedication to rules and procedures; emphasis was on prayer and personal sanctity: social involvement of any kind not specifically spiritual was to be eschewed. The Jansenism against which Jesuits fought had influenced them more than they realized, and a spirituality of the will, mathematical and readily controllable, became a central part of Jesuit training. Inevitably, the absolute obedience upon which Ignatius insisted and which enabled him to deploy his men throughout the world, wherever their maximum effectiveness might be, now became not a liberating force but a restrictive one, a kind of personal trap which could be opened only by the word of the superior. Creativity in theology, philosophy, poetry, and art gradually withered. Tradition, with its safety and its aura of respectability, embalmed the restored Society of Jesus.

What had happened is what almost always happens when men try to revive lost institutions. In the attempt to get back to original ideals, they look to principles and structures, to the external formalities of law books and censures, and the society they create is in imitation of a pure ideal which is unattainable and which never existed in the first place. This is what happened to Judaism after the Babylonian exile, and it is what happened to the Jesuits after suppression. The spirit was crushed beneath mountains of legislation, and the Jesuits became a group of dedicated and harmless schoolteachers for the sons of the upper middle class.

When a few years ago change finally came to the Jesuits, it came with a rapidity and a violence for which neither they nor the Church was prepared. In 1957 the Superior General summoned a Congregation in Rome to enact, so it was whispered, “sweeping legislation.” Whatever the General’s supposed intentions, the Congregation came to nothing. Almost before the delegates could meet, they were told by Pope Pius XII that “either they remain as they are or they cease to exist,” and aware of their desire for change, he gave them some: he told them to stop smoking. That was in 1957. Before ten years had elapsed Latin had disappeared from the Jesuit seminary classroom, Jesuit theologates had formed consortiums with Jewish and Protestant theological schools, a Jesuit was chairman of Harvard’s Near Eastern language and literature department and another was chairman of the music department at Brown. Further, Jesuits were in trouble with shadowy undesignated people for fighting slumlords in Chicago, in trouble with chanceries throughout the country for advocating birth control; they were silenced for defying the redoubtable Cardinal O’Boyle, and were jailed for defying the United States government.

What had happened during those ten years is typified by Woodstock College, where in fact many of the changes actually began. The Jesuits’ largest and most prestigious theological school, “Woodstock in the 1960s boasted a faculty headed by such men as Avery Dulles, Gustave Weigel, John Courtney Murray, Joseph Fitzmyer, Walter Burghardt. Its student body, men engaged in the four-year study of theology required of candidates for the priesthood, was the envy of any graduate school: 85 to 90 percent had at least one M.A., many had two, and some 20 percent had completed work for a Ph.D. Many had published books, all had taught school, some were already distinguished members of the artistic and literary world. Some two hundred and seventy of these men lived together at Woodstock in an immense stone fortress far outside the city of Baltimore.

Woodstock was the penultimate stage in the Jesuit course of training, which was a fifteen-year affair. Two years of novitiate, working and praying and becoming familiar with the principles of the spiritual life, brought the novice to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience which marked the beginning of his properly Jesuit life. There followed two years of classical studies, three years of philosophy, three years of practical experience called Regency (usually spent teaching in a Jesuit school, though sometimes spent in getting an advanced degree), and three years of theology, after which the Jesuit was ordained a priest. Ordination was followed by another year of theology and a third and final year of novitiate. Today this lengthy course has been modified to something nearer ten years, although it varies with individuals.

In 1959 Woodstock was a fairly typical school of theology, though better staffed and far more liberal than most. Classes were still being conducted in Latin, lectures were dutifully delivered and just as dutifully transcribed and redelivered at exams (also conducted in Latin), courses were the same as they had been ninety years earlier when Woodstock was founded. Most oppressive was the enormous number of lectures required for each course, a number determined by Rome at a time when books were an expensive rarity and the learning process was rooted in the functions of memory. Canon law and moral theology were presented as eternally fixed bodies of truth; speculative theology was a precise science whose definitions preserved one safe from heresy. Liturgy was inflexible. Theology had nothing whatsoever to do with society or, for that matter, with living.

Given the student body and the generally high caliber of the faculty, change was inevitable. Professors were as much irked as students at the teaching strictures imposed by the Curia. But to annoy Rome was to invite reprimand, as Father Murray discovered when he published articles on Churchstate relations and was forbidden to publish anything further on the topic. Though the fear of Rome’s disapproval was great, pressure from the Woodstock student body and their own discontent finally obliged the faculty to abandon Latin. And after Latin, the deluge.

Students began to form committees to assess their theological training and to make recommendations regarding course content, number of lectures, new approaches to theologizing. They began to assign relative values: they questioned the significance of canon Jaw, the validity of much of moral theology, the relevance of speculative theology to their own lives.

It was the mass defections, rising to fifteen in one year, and the almost universal unrest of the students that finally brought change. The president was removed from office in 1964. Class boycotts and sit-outs forced radical curriculum changes. Certain professors, brilliant in their field but unwilling or unable to change, stormed out in anger, vowing never to return to the theologate. For a year or more the men at Woodstock fought bitterly among themselves, forgave one another reluctantly and sometimes not at all; but what emerged from the chaos was a modern democratic religious institution in which, Rome and Jesuit history notwithstanding, students have a determining voice in their education and in their life-style.

Why all this began at Woodstock is unclear, though partial explanation can be found in the generally liberal cast of professors and the theological sophistication of most of the students. Another explanation is the presence of Weigel and Murray at the Vatican Council and their evident disappointment in the vacillations of Pope Paul. Perhaps the most basic explanation lies in Pope John, who, more than any other single influence, gave student Jesuits hope that sweeping change was not only good hut immediately realizable; at his death these same Jesuits began to feel that if change were ever to come about, it would have to begin with their own efforts. These, of course, are external explanations. Fundamental to an understanding of the radical changes in the Jesuits— and in religious orders throughout the Church— is a realization of the sense of repression and frustration so many religious were experiencing. Legalistic evasions of the rules and the occult compensations of private pleasures did nothing to mask widespread discontent with the religious life, ft was inevitable that in an age of unparalleled social and psychological freedom, the mind-bending rhetoric of the religious life would be challenged; and though the Woodstock reform was many years in the making, it is only within the past three years that all religious orders have found themselves under open attack from within their own structures.

The way in which change came about at Woodstock is the way in which it is only now coming about in the secular colleges of this country. There were no building take-overs —few theology schools have resident chapters of the SOS—and the violence was merely verbal. But the pattern is the same. It is, presumably, the way change will come about in the Church at large: men will determine their own actions in a way radically different from traditional Church teaching, an existential situation will be presented to the hierarchical Church of Rome, Rome will authenticate that situation by recognizing it— whether it be the practice of birth control, the marriage of priests, the validity of divorce.

Life at Woodstock is not paraclisal any more than life in the Church will ever be paraclisal. But the changes brought about by the insistence of the young Jesuits and the inspired leadership of the school’s president, Felix Cardegna, have fostered a new kind of American Jesuit. He is a man intensely involved in the world around him; he demands a theology which is relevant to the problems of people rather than to the ancient and uninteresting debates of Scholasticism; he asks evidence ol dynamic spiritual leadership in the men who are making decisions about his life and the life of his friends; he seeks a style of living consonant with the two most significant facts of his life—that he is a vowed religious, that he has only one life to live and it must be lived productively.

This is the positive side of the new Jesuit. There is another. He is also a man who admits to being profoundly uncertain about what being a Jesuit means and about what the religious life is or ought to become. His uncertainty often makes his commitment a tenuous one. His vows do not awe him as they did his predecessors, and he is aware that the stigma of the married priest exists no longer. In the more extreme cases he is likely to feel that, having given over ten years of his life to the Jesuits and with no pressing arguments to persuade him otherwise, he will go ahead with ordination to the priesthood; later, if it doesn’t work out well, he will leave. “You follow the Spirit, keeping in mind that you’re a very limited man.”

This new kind of Jesuit has emerged from religious situations other than that of the seminary in revolt. In all age brackets, in all occupations, Jesuits have re-examined their motives and their ideals and have arrived at questions rather than solutions. Men in their fillies, painfully aware of the irrelevance of die theology they were taught, have returned to school to study the new theology. Others have suddenly broken out of a fifteen-year position on a Jesuit campus to work in a struggling Negro college in the South. And many, finding their priestly lives not: so much open-ended as dead ends, have left the priesthood to marry. Regardless of age or background, the new Jesuits have a common experience. They are invariably men who have questioned all existing authority and found it wanting; and at the same time have found no adequate substitute for it. They are men who, in faith, are waiting.

What this new uncertain Jesuit takes most for granted is his freedom. He works hard. He is constantly involved with lay people. He very often has an active apostolate that keeps him out oE the Jesuit community for a large part of the day or night. He is doing what he has chosen to do, for Christ he hopes, but in any case it is something that must be clone and he intends to do it—whether it be living in the slums or arguing law cases for those who cannot afford legal aid or invading Dow Chemical to expose and then destroy its records. Similarly he celebrates Mass in homes without authorization from Chancery, he preaches against the Vietnam War or, more dangerous for him, against the misapplication of the Pope’s statement on birth control, he experiments with the liturgy to discover the most effective way of making Mass a meaningful event for his congregation. The question of obedience or disobedience never arises: these men are acting in conscience, and most of them have traveled so far from the authority issue that they have forgotten that for a great many others it still exists as a problem.

The freedom, the activity, the uncertainty of the new Jesuits seem to have grown out of three basic issues: the failure of the rhetoric of spirituality, a lack of spiritual leadership in the men who are making decisions, and an uncertainty about what religious life is or should be, about what the priesthood means.

The rhetoric of spirituality began to sound hollow on the day a Master of Novices explained that on the altar of obedience we make our lives a holocaust to God, and the novice asked if it wouldn’t make more sense to use them in God’s service instead. Once the questioning of the spiritual canards began, they collapsed altogether, and when the rhetoric collapsed, many of the practices it canonized, or at least justified, collapsed with it. The daily breviary, a collection of psalms and readings obligatory on all priests under pain of mortal sin, was largely abandoned as irrelevant to an active priesthood. The hour meditation and two fifteen-minute examinations of conscience were at first modified to something simpler and less time-consuming and finally abandoned in favor of prayer with other Jesuits—not communal recitation of printed prayers but a personal prayer shared with others. The annual eight-day retreat spent in silent contemplation has been for many supplanted by group retreats spent in discussion. Failure of the rhetoric of spirituality brought with it a distrust for all Church rhetoric, something which explains in part the new Jesuit indifference to Pope Paul’s periodic laments about dissident priests and schism in the Church. “That’s just Curialese,” one Jesuit remarked at Easter. “What the Pope means is that,

by God, we’d better all knuckle under to the thinking of a few conservative Roman cardinals. What he fails to appreciate is that the Church of Christ is far more extensive titan the merely hierarchical Church, and if I have to choose one or the other, I’m afraid my allegiance is with Christ.”

The new Jesuit, however he may appear in statements like the preceding, insists that he is profoundly dedicated to the spiritual; what he has no regard for is a spirituality sanctified by tradition alone—“because we’ve always done it, it must be right.” And what he finds most lacking among the Jesuit hierarchy is spiritual leadership in the men who are making decisions. The new Jesuit is not ready to say what spiritual leadership is or to propose ways to come by it, but he is certain that it is lacking. He points to decisions about Jesuit presence in a given geographical area—whether that presence involves retreat work or the construction of a university—and indicates that decisions about what to do and how to do it have more often than not been made pragmatically by men of limited vision and of limited concern for the men who are their subjects and for the people those men will serve. High schools have been opened, universities founded, missions undertaken without prior consultation with the men who will staff them, with the result that the new Jesuit feels hi’s order is shackled by these institutions. Further, shackled or not. he questions their validity and their viability, asking how they differ from purely seerdar institutions, asking why so many highly trained Jesuits should be engaged in work that laymen do as well or better.

Some definite type of spiritual leadership, he feels, would emancipate the Jesuits from their schools and leave them free to engage in the kind of life Ignatius supposedly envisioned when he founded the order: an active priestly involvement in the social, political, religious issues of the present day. Seeing the nonimplementation of Vatican II, he has come to disbelieve in the likelihood and sometimes even in the possibility of change originating from the hierarchy. He suspects his highest superiors of clinging to the old ideas while talking glibly about the new. What actually is being done, be asks, to create programs for the poor, the Negro, the victims of the slumlords and the military-industrial complex? He asks, realizing he must create the programs himself, somehow coaxing the heavy machinery of the Jesuits into working order. Sometimes lie shrugs and continues his work outside the order.

Finally, in his attitude toward the vows, the new Jesuit insists upon a positive orientation; he rejects altogether the idea of the vows as deprivation.

To a vow of poverty he prefers a firm commitment to use money and goods for others. He proposes a small community of Jesuits living together, pooling their incomes, using whatever is left over for communal projects which have something specific to do with involvement in a Christian community—rather than purchasing a fleet of cars or wall-to-wall carpet for the house. What he proposes, then, is a far more strict adherence to the essential spirit of poverty than now obtains in large Jesuit communities; it is more like the poverty of the early Society of Jesus. As traditionally lived, the new Jesuit complains, the vow of poverty does not focus on doing for others but rather on renunciation of money in such a way that formalism is its norm. If a man has his superior’s permission for whatever he spends, he is legally observing his vow. This has led invariably to a situation in which individual religious consume a great share of this world’s goods without ever actually owning any of them. The new Jesuit feels that the vow of poverty is a comfortable double standard which allows men to profess virtue without being inconvenienced by it.

Chastity is little problem for him. The sex issue has long since been solved; it takes only a year or more for him to discover whether or not sex is going to make the living of a chaste life impossible. He is aware that the sex drive is lifelong, and he does not expect it suddenly to disappear. Celibacy is quite another matter. The new Jesuit fears that not to marry may in some important way stunt his personal development, that he will be less the man he ought to be. And yet he realizes from the example of men who have preceded him that an effective life is not only consonant with a vow of: chastity but is even necessary to sustain it. And love need not inevitably lead to sin or to marriage. By his vow of chastity, the religious is obliged to love—not all men and women, but individual ones, without demanding or even expecting a return of love from them. He hopes for it, of course, but he cannot count on it. The new Jesuit expects his assurance of love, of acceptance, to come from the religious community itself, and therefore that community must be small, open, warm, and generous. Unless it is these things, it cannot be a viable religious community, and his vow of chastity becomes an intolerable burden. But most new Jesuits do not concern themselves excessively with celibacy; they expect that within five years it will no longer be required for the priesthood.

Obedience, or the question of authority, has ceased to be the important issue it was only two or three years ago. The Jesuit is now encouraged to become the kind of person his talents and his shortcomings indicate he ought to be. When he has chosen what he will do with his life, how he will use it within the apostolates of his order or to create a new apostolate, then the superior ratifies the man’s choice. In that ratification lies the subject’s obedience.

Less well thought out is the problem of what the priesthood should mean to contemporary Jesuits. For most of them it means a life of service to others, not necessarily in social reform, although that is where their major efforts are concentrated, but in a life which is inspired by the Gospel message of Christ and which manifests that message. It implies a large degree of selflessness, a tendency toward revolutionary thought, an impatience with a religion which tends to justify its divine claims rather than reveal the compassion of Christ. The priesthood for these men is not the safe harbor of salvation it was for another generation.

The new Jesuits are found not only among the young; they include college presidents, lawyers, theologians, scientists, and one luminous philosopher-and-superior who is seventy six years old. At the other extreme of the new Jesuits are the not-new, who find those alarming men a stumbling block and sometimes a scandal. Having invested their lives in an immovable institution whose laws were their consciences and whose rhetoric was their deepest thought, they feel threatened and betrayed by what they see happening around them. They agonize, they condemn sometimes, but mostly they are sad. It seems to them that they are indeed on a doomed Titanic, In the middle stand the large numbers of Jesuits who are neither new nor not-new. They applaud the work of the younger men, their involvement in politics and in social reform, and they see in them the realization of a Jesuit ideal. But their training has been conservative and rationalistic, and their willingness to shatter categories of thought or action is limited. They worry and they pray. Thev place great hope in the possibilities of reform by a natural process of evolution, and they center these hopes in the innumerable Jesuit congresses work ing for renewal. For these men the rest of their lives depends upon what will happen in the next few years.

In short the Jesuits today are a society in flux. It is as impossible to define a Jesuit as it is to define a Jew. Throughout the United States consulting agencies have been hired to advise the Jesuit hierarchy on restructuring the entire American organization-phasing out schools, redistributing manpower, turning colleges over to lay trustees. Major superiors are showing greater concern than ever before about the public face of their institutions and, simultaneously, greater concern for the spiritual and intellectual welfare of the individual Jesuit. They are prepared to do anything—abandon any outdated project, begin any new and valuable one—to make the Jesuits the dynamic Christian force they were at their inception.

But the new American Jesuit wonders if change has perhaps come too late. The giant overhauling of a vast and powerful religious organization is possible, he knows, but how long will it take and what will be the concrete results? Meanwhile, far from the machinery and the task forces and the immense outlay of Christian zeal being expended in his interest, he meets with his friends who are Jesuits and asks what their corporate identity is. Because the new American Jesuit is certain that whether or not change comes from above, the Society of Jesus is going to be what he decides to make it. □