What Happened to the Jesuits?

From my youth I have loved the Society of Jesus and specific holy Jesuits have influenced and guided me in my adult walk with Christ. But the order is a deep disappointment! Traditionally the brains, the guts, the storm troopers of the Catholic Church, fiercely and militantly loyal (in a particular way to our Holy Father) they, as a society, caved into the cultural-sexual revolution of the 1960s without a fight. Certainly there was, and still is, a tiny remnant of intelligent, noble, even heroic loyalists: Avery Dulles, John Ford, Henri DeLubac, Kenneth Baker, Joseph Fessio, Joe Whelan, James Schall and others. But these lost the battle for the soul of the order to the opposition, a small, militant faction of dissenting, sexual liberators. They lost the fight because the bulk of the Jesuits were indecisive, detached, and clueless in regard to the Culture War that erupted after the Council. Even theological geniuses like Lonergan and Rahner betrayed the Vatican and our Tradition on Humanae Vitae and the cascading flow of issues related to life, family and gender. That 1968 Encyclical was a powerful proclamation: It is either right and inspired from heaven or it is wrong-headed and disastrously toxic! You have to love it or hate it...passionately! But most Jesuits prefer to ignore it. I have known many Jesuits and (paraphrasing Will Rogers)I have never met a Jesuit that I didn't like...and admire...for his intelligence, erudition, humor, refinement and spirituality. But many of them seem to be walking in a world of their own, unconnected and unaware of the powerful, catastrophic, and mimetic cultural forces that are wrecking havoc on our society, particularly our youth. Many have bought into an anemic political ideology of the left and a soft humanist psychology bereft of the virile, vigorous ethos Ignatius left his followers. What happened to the Jesuits? The backbone of the Church for four centuries, why did they fall without resistance after the Council? I see three root causes in their spirituality: individualism, intellectualism, and elitism. The spirituality of the Spiritual Exercises is strongly individualistic, in contrast to the far more communal ethos of the more traditional monks and friars. Rather than immersion in a shared cult, community and culture of faith, the exercitant is led by his director to recognize, in his own spirit, the movements of God and those against God. It is a very individual, private thing. The Jesuit culture is one of individualism; there is not a powerful, shared culture in which one surrenders individuality to find personhood in communion, humility and obedience. Rather, classically, each Jesuit was trained to be another Francis Xavier: a rugged, independent individual, groomed to go alone to India or China or anywhere to share the Gospel. The danger, however, is that you can end up with a group of bachelors: intelligent, refined, pious, and highly motivated...but basically autonomous bachelors. Fine friendships; lively, informed, and enlightened conversation at happy hour; high motivation and brilliant insights; but there is little or no "there-there" in the community. Such a society did not have a shared culture to shelter and defend itself when the broader society went dark right about the time of the Council. Each Jesuit was an individual, in his own field of study or ministry, isolated and vulnerable. And for the most part they continue that way to this day. The epitome of Counter-Reformation, Baroque Catholicism, the rugged individualism of the Jesuits seems to have been reliant upon the broader, embrasive Catholic culture so that it decomposed when that world capitulated to the emergent, "late-modern" secular order of the West. The second cause of debility was a certain intellectualism that tended to be abstract, detached, and elevated above the flesh. Contrast the stark, almost-anti-intellectual corporality of the Franciscans. It is hardly an accident that the dominant theological school of 20th century Jesuits was called "transcendental Thomism." What is the probability of a Jesuit retreat house, college or high school addressing something like our pornography epidemic? There is a quasi-gnostic, ethereal, dualist quality to "Ignatian" spirituality that somehow distances the intellect and spirit from the grimy, messy realities of flesh, sex and real desire. Even the brilliant and flawlessly loyal Cardinal Dulles seemed uncomfortable with the relentlessly conjugal imagery of the Communio theology of the dual papacy he served so vigorously. And so a critical mass of Jesuits accomodated rather than resisted the sexual revolution out of a lack of conviction, a discomfort possibly rooted in the soft Janseenism of their mostly Irish past. Lastly, a taste for elitism moved talented young Jesuits in the mid-20th-century to aspire to academic excellence in terms defined Ivy League culture, just when that world was turning decisively from its Calvinist past to a militant secularism. Eager to "find God in all things," intoxicated by the honeymoon between the Catholic Church and post-WWII America, and opening "the windows of the Church" to the world, young Jesuits flocked to the Ivy's and surrendered themselves trustingly, abandoning the hard, critical realism that had been the glory of the order. Infatuated with a new love, ambitious to succeed in Academia on its own terms, the emerging leadership of the order diminished their affection and loyalty to Mother Church and their appreciation for core Catholic values like virginity and apostolic authority. And so we see that a perfect storm of individualism, de-fleshed intellectualism, and aspirant elitism together made this order singularly unprepared to face and challenge the the libertine, militant secularism that was taking over the broader culture just as the Council ended.