The theological contours of our civil war in the Church since 1965 are clearly seen in the contest between the Jesuits and the John Paul papacy. Specifically, let us contrast the "bachelor individualism" of the former with the "conjugal mysticism" of the later.
Notoriously, Pope John Paul took charge of the Jesuits in 1981 to discipline and restore them. To the Catholic mind, this was startling. For 400 years the Society of Jesus, informed by the their fourth vow of loyalty to the pope, had epitomized Tridentine Catholicism as orthodox clarity, manly fortitude, evangelical zeal, and academic excellence. The catastrophic collapse of Catholicism immediately after the Council finds exaggerated expression in the Jesuits. Their contest with John Paul on the mystery of nuptial or spousal love provides insight into the underlying issues of the Catholic Civil War that erupted in 1965 and still rages 60 years later.
In 1965, the Jesuit order had just under 8,400 priests, seminarians, brothers. Today they number about 3,000 but shrinking steadily with an average age of 63. Quantitatively, they are 35% of what they were 50 years ago. But the qualitative change is more pronounced.
It is not that all or even most Jesuits changed so drastically. Rather, institutionally the order changed, spectacularly in its universities and publications. The drastic turn to progressive values, contradictory of traditional Catholicism, was led by a small, but influential group, a "critical mass." An opposing, but ineffectual minority resisted these changes. The vast majority of Jesuits (in my experience) are moderates, strongly aligned with neither side, pragmatic and pastoral, largely abstaining from the battle. But in its affluent, influential institutions, the order has been a primary advocate of an alternate, "enlightened," progressivism. The elite, the influencers... spontaneously, passionately, confidently, immediately...embraced the Cultural Revolution as it exploded after the Council.
Why?
Jesuits, Individualism and the "Bachelor Priest"
The Cultural Revolution at its heart enthroned the INDIVIDUAL as sovereign. It elevated the individual, the autonomous-competent-deliberative-agential Self as superior to all bonds and loyalties of family, Church, sacrament, nation, tradition, and God.
The Jesuit charism, centered largely on the autonomous Jesuit missionary, made it uniquely vulnerable to this individualistic progressivism. In sharpest contrast to monks, friars, cloistered communities and most active orders, the Ignatian charism is strongly individualistic: the 30-day Spiritual Exercises are personal, not communal; the nightly Examen; the private praying of the Liturgy of the Hours; and the overall spiritual culture.
Fr. Charles Murr fondly recalls that while studying at the Jesuit Gregorian in Rome in the 1970s, he walked down the hall where the Jesuit professors lived at the time for vespers. The transoms over each bedroom door were open so that as he passed each room he could hear the priest praying aloud the psalms. (Practice at the time was to read aloud, not silently.) Every single door...a priest praying aloud...alone. This struck him in that it contrasted with the monastic and mendicant practices of communal prayer that preceded it.
The celibate Catholic priesthood has always been vulnerable to a "bachelor syndrome." The "bachelor" is a man not committed to wife and family, detached, alone, individualistic. Religious order priests compensate by their engagement in a community of prayer, brotherhood, and intimacy. The ordinary secular or diocesan priesthood lacks this dimension and so is especially vulnerable to a bachelor individualism.
This is not an invincible impediment to a life of holiness and charity, but it is a difficulty to be overcome, for sure. Many priests succeed: they have wholesome family/friend relationships with women, devotion to our Blessed Mother, a filial intimacy with Holy Mother Church, a spousal relationship with the (bridal) Church they serve, strong priestly friendships, a virile/paternal identity and a deep prayer life.
Interestingly, the Ignatian charism deliberately cultivates individuality, here understood as intimacy with Christ, fortitude of character, patience in solitude and adversity. The Jesuit ideal is St. Francis Xavier, who travelled to the East to save souls. So, for 400 years, Jesuits were rigorously trained as heroic soldiers of Christ, prepared for hardship, persecution and martyrdom. They were trained to be free of community...Lone Rangers, without Tonto.
Other groups resemble the Jesuits in this individualistic charism. I have familiarity with the Maryknoll Society of priests having studied to be one in my college years. The priests who taught us were men of sound moral character, deep personal faith, high intelligence, impressive agency and confidence. You did not sense among them a shared, communal spirituality. They were not attentive or close to us seminarians. Later, circa 1975, surging with the communal enthusiasm of the Catholic charismatic renewal, I read Come Holy Spirit by Servant of God Bishop John Ford M.M. He died in a Chinese concentration camp in 1952, having been the first Maryknoll seminarian and initial missioner to China in 1918. I was struck at the time by the pronounced individuality of the spirituality. For Martyr-to-be-Ford the Holy Spirit was not a communal, but a personal reality. It is the particular presence of God that was to strengthen him for decades of mission service, imprisonment and a martyr's death. This is bachelorhood at its best, as solitary heroism and sanctity. It is the Lone Ranger as Catholic saint.
Strangely, this Ignatian charism, iron-hard, tested and tried over 400 years in zealous mission labors, martyrdoms, combat with Protestantism, Fascisms, Communism, and paganisms of all sorts...collapsed into the Cultural Revolution 1965. Not only did it lack an immunity or resistance to the emergent cultural individualism, but it showed a propensity towards it. Two other aspects of the Jesuit heritage inclined it this way.
First, their high intellectualism. They spend years of study, detached from the practical and pastoral. Such abstraction carries dangers. They are not rooted in a specific Catholic tradition in the manner of the Thomistic Dominicans. This was not a problem in the Tridentine Church which maintained its own academic traditions detached from the broader, secular society. But the Vatican II impetus to engage the broader culture pushed the Jesuits into the influence of Ivy League academia which was at that very time turning secular.
Another core principle of Ignatian spirituality is "to find God in all things." This assumes, of course, a closeness to God, a strong theology, and a capacity to discern the wheat from the chaff. In retrospect, me must judge that the individualism and intellectualism of the Jesuits did not prepare them to resist the siren call, in this new world, of Cultural Individualism.
Individuality of Influential Mid-Century Progressive Jesuits
At the time of the Council (1962-65) we find a group of extraordinary Jesuits at the height of their influence: Courtney-Murray, Chardin, Lonergan, Rahner and then Arrupe who took charge of the order in 1965. Each embodied the Jesuit ideal: long lives of service to the Church, in a solitary fashion, in prayer and scholarship at once profound and encyclopedic. We might say they are "the last of the Mohicans"...outstanding in loyalty to the Church, intellectual brilliance, erudition, creativity, and personal piety. The problem: their theoretical work built upon the assumption of a bachelor-type individual, alone and isolated. This weakness made their approach vulnerable, especially in their disciples, to the toxicities of Cultural Individualism.
This is most evident in the immensely influential Transcendental Thomism of Rahner and Lonergan. Famously, they labored to wed the metaphysical objectivity of Thomas with the Kantian "turn to the subject." This "turn to the subject" was the problem. It took as its starting point precisely the isolated Self, lonely and detached. They did not start from the Church in worship or the mystic in spousal communion with God. Lonergan attended to the dynamics of the human intellect. Rahner studied the interior longings and urgencies of the individual human spirit. In this they resembled the Existentialism of postwar Europe in its fascination with the lonely, anguished individual suffering interior crisis. They did NOT take communion or, conjugality or family as their first building block.
Their slightly younger contemporary Avery Cardinal Dulles S.J. presents a distinct and illuminative image. Notice: Cardinal... He was honored by John Paul for his fidelity to Catholic tradition. In the 1980s-90s he stood as a solitary Jesuit in defense of basic Catholic beliefs in the face of the progressive militance that swept over the Catholic academia. Particularly in the wake of John Paul's Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Dulles fiercely defended the male priesthood. Part of his argument was that the priest represents Christ in his spousal love of his bridal Church so that his masculinity is intrinsic to the sacrament of Holy Orders. Here he reflected the "conjugal mysticism" at the center of the John Paul magisterium.
In this he distinguished himself from mainstream Jesuit theology of the time in its fashionable feminism. This shows he openness of his intellect. He was himself not strongly inclined to such "communio" or conjugal theology, but was personally a typical "bachelor Jesuit" in style and temperament, although a holy one at that. When I took his Fundamental Theology course in 1969 at Woodstock NY he was very positive about Rahner. Dulles did not fit into any school of theology but had an expansive mind that absorbed Truth from all corners, even as he was the sharpest of critics. In his classic Models of the Church (1974) he noticeably did NOT include "bride" and "mother" as significant models. He was himself not a participant in the Communio school of conjugal mystical theology. But he did clearly affirm their primary insights. He was himself surely the "Catholic Lone Ranger" and "Last of the (Jesuit) Mohicans."
And so, it is clear that the foundational realities...women priests, contraception, homosexuality, legalized abortion, leftist politics...in which the Jesuit leadership systemically renounced Catholic tradition for progressivism...all build upon a fundamental "bachelor individualism" and indifference to or rejection of the spousal basis of Catholicism as articulated authoritatively by John Paul, Benedict and their school.
Conjugal Mysticism
The clear, distinctive theological school of John Paul, Benedict, Balthasar and their comrades has been well described as "conjugal mysticism" since it finds in marriage a foundational image for our communion with God and it places immense importance on the actual reality of marriage and family. This is a continuation of the "Resourcement" theology that developed strongly after WWII and largely informed the Council itself: DeLubac, Danielou, Congar, Bouyer, and others. They "returned" to the patristic sources, even as they remained rooted in basic Thomistic metaphysics and engaged contemporary thought. Influenced by classic Thomists (Gilson, Maritain, Pieper), they strongly engaged contemporary phenomenology and personalism (Stein, Hildebrandt, Blondel, Marcel, Buber). Their focus on the person differed from that of Rahner/Lonergan in that primacy was placed upon relationship, communion and marriage/family. Pronouncedly in John Paul's Theology of the Body and the fierce Catholic view of gender in Stein and Hildebrandt, we find a spousal mysticism that places the masculine/feminine reality at the center of Creation and Providence. And so, in a marriage of traditional with contemporary thought, new life springs from Catholic practice of the sacraments of matrimony and holy orders, the fecundity of sexuality, the holiness of the family and new life.
With a few notable exceptions (Oakes, Pacwa, Fessio), the Jesuit theological guild ignored when it did not oppose the conjugal mysticism and the theology of the body of the dual pontificate. In this they reflected the broader Catholic academy. John Paul brought his announcement to the Catholic laity largely without the the mediation of our dominant intelligencia. Or more accurately, he attracted a small, alternate cadre (West, Everet, Janet Smith, Waldenstein, and the entire international John Paul Institute) to lead a revolutionary, populist, theological movement.
In large measure, influential Jesuits resisted. Already in 1964 the Kennedy family convened at Hyannis Port a gathering of progressive theologians, many disciples of Courtney-Murray, including Jesuits Fuchs/Drinan/McCormick, to lay the groundwork for Catholic support of legalized abortion. Richard McCormick along with leading Jesuits and their schools forcefully rejected Humanae Vitae (1968), although John Ford SJ strongly endorsed it and Arrupe clearly exhorted his order to obedience. Presidents of the prestigious Jesuit colleges joined in the infamous Land of Lakes Conference (1967) which declared Catholic Academy's independence from the hierarchy. And, finally, we have the Catholic LGBTQ movement and its encouragement by our Jesuit pope.
We see clearly a Church divided in its anthropology, its view of the person. Within the Jesuit order we find a "bachelor-individualist" version of Cultural liberalism which champions individual rights: women can be priests and abort, gay sex deserves full honors, and the conjugal imagery is diminished to honor the autonomous, independent, agential Self. On the other side, we have the Conjugal Mysticism which exalts the masculine/feminine as reflective of the unity/diversity of God as Trinity.
Conclusion
Our entire, received Catholic legacy is founded upon the sacredness of marriage as reflecting our spousal communion with Christ: the holiness of marriage and orders, the virginal-bridal form of the religious life, our rigorous sexual ethic, the mystery of femininity/masculinity, the foundational form of the natural family, and the reality of the person-in-communion.
Catholic, largely Jesuit, Progressivism proposes an alternate anthropology: the autonomous, sovereign Self...sterile, contracepting, same-sexing, "choosing" of abortion and gender, solitary rather than maternal/paternal.
In response to the Cultural Liberalism which exploded in 1965, John Paul and his cohort have given us a traditional-yet-contemporary Catholic proposal that is encouraging and inspiring in its moral and intellectual splendor. This is a wonderful time to be Catholic.
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