What Happened to the Jesuits?

What Happened?

For four hundred years, for the Tridentine-Counter-Reformation Church, the Society of Jesus was the backbone, the Jedi Council, the Navy Seals, the Knights of the Round Table, the epitome of virile heroism, fortitude, intelligence, erudition.

Think: Francis Xavier crossing southern Asia, Matthew Ricci in China, Edmund Campion and scores of British martyrs,  the marvelous reductions of South America (movie The Mission), the brilliant Robert Bellarmine, the fingerless Isaac Joques and the North American martyrs, Peter Claver (who baptized 300,000 slaves), Miguel Pro calmly facing his executioners, Claude de la Columbiere, Walter Ciszek enduring the Soviet Gulag. What group could boast a comparable litany of 20th century theological geniuses: Danielou, DeLubac, Balthasar, Lonergan, Rahner, Chardin,Courtney-Murray, Dulles and more? 

A Critical Mass

Suddenly, with Vatican II, a critical mass of the order surrendered to theological liberalism. What happened?

Arguably I am unfair to the Jesuits. Didn't the same happen to all the orders. Well, no. Not exactly. The Jesuits are different: they fell from such a height to such a depth. Their influence was unsurpassed: both for the good over four centuries and for the bad for now half a century.

The idea of critical mass is essential here. It is not that the entire order changed in this way. They remain, as individuals, mostly erudite, sophisticated, holy men. But their public image and influence...particularly through their prestigious universities...has for the last 50 years been entirely influenced by a minority of gifted, intelligent, passionate progressives. Can you name five American Jesuits who cumulatively wield the influence of  James Martin? A smaller minority of Jesuits, outliers and solitaries, have opposed this direction with equivalent passion and intelligence, in the tradition of the order. But these last have had limited influence. My own impression is that the vast majority, perhaps 80%, live quiet, dignified, pious lives of moderation without clear convictions on the contested issues (contraception, women priests, gay marriage, etc.). They have more sympathy with the progressives and therefore have quietly surrendered the order to them.  

My Love for the Jesuits

I did not get a Jesuit education growing up, but have always felt close to them. I grew up with America magazine. When I was a child, my father participated as a union leader in the St. Peter's Institute for labor relations of the Jesuits in Jersey City. Upon graduating high school I wanted to be either a Jesuit or a Maryknoll Missioner. I went with the later as my enthusiasm was more for the poor and the missions than academia. 

After college I studied theology at Woodstock Theologate, newly moved to Manhattan in 1970. There I came under the influence of renowned theologian Avery Dulles and a mystic theologian Joe Whelan. Both deeply influenced me. At the same time I taught part time at Xavier High School where my supervisor and then spiritual director was Neal Doherty, a classic Jesuit holy man. For most of my adult life I was guided spiritually by John Wrynn, also a quiet, scholarly, holy, Irish-American Jesuit. 

My own spirituality is not particularly Ignatian, but I have been greatly blessed by the influence of these wise, profound men who so love our Lord and his Church. Because of this, the fall from grace of the Society of Jesus (in a critical mass) is a cause of grief.

Two Causes

I see two possible causes for this unhappy development. I am sure there are more. The first has to do with the inner structure of the Ignatian charism; the second with the immersion in elite academia just as it was turning secular and dark.

Individualism. In stark contrast to the intense communal nature of the monastic and mendicant life, the Jesuits have about them a striking individualism.  This is rooted in the core of Jesuit piety: the Spiritual Exercises. These are pronouncedly an extended encounter of the individual with the person of Jesus Christ: very isolated from any community other than the director. The director himself is very non-directive, almost "Rogerian," in that his own subjectivity diminishes in order to facilitate the individual's own discernment of the "spirits" as evident in the movements of the heart which lead to or away from Jesus himself. 

And so, when we think of the great Jesuits...Xavier, Jogues, Miguel Pro...we imagine a lonely, heroic figure, unsupported by a close community. They are self-contained, independent and autonomous, sustained by a profound inner communion with our Lord that springs from the Exercises. Traditionally the Jesuits have nourished a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, especially under the influence of St. Claude de Colombiere. 

Ironically, there is evident here a similarity to the American Evangelical cult of "Jesus and Me" piety which is of course critiqued by a more sophisticated Catholic sense of community and sacramentality.

But this Jesuit individualism has always co-existed, strangely, with a fierce commitment to the institutional Catholic Church, the sacramental economy, the papacy, the Magisterium, the academic tradition and the organizational needs of the broader Church. So what we find in the traditional Jesuit is at once a fierce individualist and a determined "organization man."

To have dinner with a community of Jesuits is an striking experience. One can hardly imagine such erudite, sophisticated, entertaining, charming, gentle, intelligent, cultured, and yet idiosyncratic individuals. There is an evident respect among them, but also a distance. They are priestly, but not clerical, preferring to wear the black and collar on the rarest occasions. They are fraternal. They feel like a group of congenial bachelors. (Disclaimer: most of the Jesuits who have befriended me are Irish-American of a specific cohort: the Quiet Generation, born before or after World War II, a little older than me,  the big brothers I never had as oldest son.) 

My son Paul, when studying at St. Peter's College in Jersey City was invited one night to dine with the Jesuits and the following night, by coincidence, with a small group of Salesian priests. He laughed at the contrast: the former had quality alcohol, excellent food, and an aura of elegance and taste. The later had cheap beer,  dinner out of cans, and a relaxed/rugged feel. He admired both. He felt more at home with the later. 

This individualism was a strength for the martyrs, missionaries, and mystics of the Tridentine Church, but became a liability, I am suggesting, in the encounter with the triumphal individualism of the new liberalism of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The solitary Jesuit was prepared for the torture of the rack and the loneliness of the missions, but not resistant to the corrosive individualism of Cultural Liberalism. Without a strong communal rooting, the Jesuit had a weak immune reaction to the emergent and corrosive individualism of secular liberalism. 

This vulnerability was heightened by being combined with the second factor: the academy.

Immersion in an Elite Academy Gone Secular

The endpoint of Jesuit life is to "find God in all things." To find God in the world. Thus they are not sequestered in monasteries but involved with the broader society. This requires, of course, a shrewd discernment of the spirits in order to be "in the world" but "not of the world."  And so it is here that we find the crisis of the order in the 1960s. 

For 400 years the Jesuits created their own staunchly Catholic universe of academies: a world unto itself, fortifying the Catholic Church intellectually, set off from Protestant and secular higher education. But coming out of Vatican II the Church, especially the intellectuals, the "best and brightest," surrendered to an intoxicated, euphoric, open-minded (but inadequately critical) dialogue with and embrace of the best in broader society, especially the academy. It became intellectually fashionable to reject the alleged narrow, defensive, reactionary Church prior-to-1960 and celebrate the explosion of new findings, theories and speculations of Modernity. 

The problem: our best and brightest made this passionate act of Trust in Ivy League culture just as it was turning secular, atheistic and dark. The WASP civil religion that had reigned over society, including elite academia, into the post-war period was disintegrating just as the Catholic Church was surrendering herself in a blind infatuation with the elite academia. 

A good friend of mine was a scholastic and young priest in these years. He explained that he got to study theology at a fine German university because at that point in time all the really smart young Jesuits no longer wanted to go to prestigious Catholic schools in Europe but preferred Harvard/Princeton/Yale.

We see here a perfect storm gathering: the individualism of the Ignatian charism left the "best and the brightest" of the young Jesuits particularly vulnerable to the Catholic infatuation with an Academy just then turning dark.

What followed was, in retrospect, predictable. Jesuit moralists played a key role in a gathering of the Kennedy brain trust in the late 1960s that prepared the liberal Catholic acceptance of legal abortion. America magazine tracked consistently to the left both politically and theologically. Jesuit universities, especially the more prestigious, participated in the Land of Lakes Conference, and continued to renounce explicitly Catholic influence in their  uncritical mimesis of Ivy League schools.

Conclusion

Yesterday, July 31, 2022, the 500th anniversary of the conversion of Ignatius, Jesuits all over the world joined with their Superior General in rededicating themselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Let us join our prayers to theirs: that their marvelous legacy of faith and erudition be rekindled and that we may all of us draw closer to that merciful Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of his mother. 

Postscript

Conversation after posting the above pointed to other trends contributing to the trajectory of the Society of Jesus since the Council.

1. Theologically, the Transcendental Thomism of Rahner and Lonergan has been largely influential in the order, for example in the Gregorian in Rome. Those two geniuses were, like their generation, firmly grounded in the Tradition and St. Thomas. But they engineered a pivot towards German Idealism, a Kantian shift towards subjectivity of the Self as knower, as seeker of God, and away from an epistemological realism rooted in the objectivity of Creation. Already in 1968 Rahner and Lonergan both rejected Humanae Vitae and approved of contraception. Rahner's protege, Johann Metz, went on to develop a leftist political theology that influenced liberation theology and other leftist theologies. So we see that this highly abstract theory opened the door to the two primal troubling directions of post-Council Catholic liberalism: sexual liberation and leftist politics. The two are distinct but in the atmosphere of America politics they are allies. So we sense the gravitational pull as Catholics who are lukewarm about Cultural Liberalism will unfailingly vote pro-choice out of their political loyalty to the Left.

2. Over the last five decades, the Order has become increasingly more gay-friendly. This is evident in its elite universities and America magazine. It is noteworthy that in the wake of the priest sex scandal these pushed back fiercely to obscure the overt homosexual nature of the crisis: over 80% of the violations were of post-pubescent males, not so much girls and not so much children. And so they have surely become attractive to religious men who identify as "gay."  This has, of course, intensified the detachment from Catholic traditions of chastity, state of life, spousal fidelity, and celibacy.

3. Pope Francis is himself a good example of the 80% or so of Jesuits who remain confused, uncertain and undecided about the Culture War issues. In his core love for the person of Jesus, for the Church and for the poor he is Ignatian in an exemplary, outstanding manner. But his emotive aversions...against clericalism, the Latin Mass, border walls, global warming, capital punishment, populisms of the right, the Evangelical-Catholic coalition in the USA...fog and confound his thinking. About sexuality he seems at times to be progressive, other times conservative, and often indifferent, as if it doesn't matter. He has in fact NOT reversed traditional teaching on gay marriage, women priests, or contraception. But he has given encouragement and influence to culture warriors of the left, such as Martin and Paglia, so he has in fact been an enabler of cultural liberalism within the Church, if in a convoluted fashion. In this he unhappily images the broader Jesuit Society.

4. It is widely understood that the primary theological contest in the Church since the Council has been between the "Concilio" school of Rahner and the "Communio" school. In the broader Church, the later prevailed decisively throughout the dual pontificate of John Paul and Benedict who were leaders of that school. Other founders of the Communio school were brilliant, prominent Jesuits: Balthasar, DeLubac, and Danielou. We might add Avery Dulles who was not exactly a member of that school but certainly sympathetic with it orthodox, traditional-yet-innovative direction. Yet, with notable exceptions, that entire body of thought has been ignored by the bulk of Jesuits and renounced by that critical mass of progressives. This has been a momentous drama, entirely contradictory of the staunch Catholic loyalty of the Jesuits over 400 years.

5. Interestingly, our beloved Balthasar very reluctantly left the Jesuits in 1950, just before their catastrophic pivot. He was told he could not start the new Community of St. John while still in the order. He obediently did the thirty-day Exercises, as directed, and discerned a very unusual, specific call to leave and start this new endeavor with Adrienne von Speyr. He was the most Ignatian of Jesuits. He attributed his vocation to the Jesuits to a mystical intervention of Ignatius himself. His writings are full of Ignatian themes of call, obedience, discernment, etc. He directed many in the Exercises including some who joined the Society. Adrienne herself experienced mystical encounters with St. Ignatius as a child, before she knew anything about the saints. This move suggests that the charismatic Ignatius, from heaven, may have sensed the emergent individualism of his Society and proactively inspired a new direction.