TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120390/1203610.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.5 KB | 192 lines

                                                                                RELIGION, Page 89

Making Up with the Jesuits


The Pope gives a new assignment to his church's famed order

By RICHARD N. OSTLING -- With reporting by James Wilde/Rome


    For centuries, the Society of Jesus has been considered both
a blessing and a bane to the Roman Catholic Church. The order
has been expelled at various times by the rulers of France,
Spain, Portugal, Austria, Russia, Japan; the Papacy itself once
suppressed the organization for 41 years. In modern times, no
episode was as humiliating as the vote of no confidence that
Pope John Paul II cast in 1981. After the society's head,
Superior General Pedro Arrupe, suffered a stroke, the Pontiff
suspended the normal succession and installed his own men as the
Jesuits' temporary leaders.

    Seven years after the Pope ended that purgatorial
receivership, the Jesuits appear to have won John Paul's
approval. Confronted with the task of re-evangelizing the
formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and the newly
tolerant Soviet Union, the Pope has called upon the Society of
Jesus to direct the task of training priests and rebuilding the
long-oppressed clergy of these sensitive areas. Next week
Jesuit experts will be gathering in Rome to plan how to go about
that job. For starters, East Europeans are being brought to Rome
to receive special training at the Pontifical Gregorian
University and other Jesuit-run institutions. Many will return
to their homelands as seminary teachers to begin the work of
strengthening the church in the East.

    The assignment signals John Paul's renewed trust in the
Jesuit order, which was founded with a special mandate to obey
missions assigned by the Pope. The Eastern mission has
particular significance for the society right now, since the
Jesuits are marking this year's 450th anniversary of their
founding and the impending 500th anniversary of the birth of the
society's canonized creator, the Basque nobleman Ignatius of
Loyola.

    The thawed relationship with John Paul is a major
accomplishment of Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, 61, who was elected the
society's superior general when the Pope restored normal
self-rule in 1983. A low-key and unflappable native of the
Netherlands, Kolvenbach was formerly a missionary educator in
the Middle East and head of Rome's Oriental Institute.

    Kolvenbach must lean on reduced forces to tackle the Eastern
Europe assignment and other challenges to his men. Although the
Jesuits remain the biggest Catholic male religious order, they
have declined from a 1965 peak of 36,000 members to the current
23,870 or so. The rate of loss is slowing, however, and the
number of seminarians has increased steadily since the nadir in
the 1970s. Significantly, the sources of decline are largely
limited to the First World; 63% of today's Jesuit recruits
worldwide are Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. There are
3,522 Jesuits in the area covering India, Sri Lanka and Nepal,
and the 20 Jesuit training houses there have waiting lists.

    In all, Kolvenbach's priests and brothers are at work in 113
countries, with about one-fourth of the order's members involved
in education. There are 1.8 million students in the 177 Jesuit
universities (28 in the U.S.) and 356 secondary schools around
the world. One index of Jesuit influence is the fact that the
Gregorian University alone has trained one-fifth of all the
world's bishops.

    The extent of Jesuit influence exacerbated past papal
mistrust, especially during the 1970s, when the order appeared
to many to take a pronounced leftward tilt. Tensions broke into
the open when Pope Paul VI decided that too many of the members
were involved in secular matters, including politics, to the
detriment of their priesthood. Whenever a papal teaching was
questioned, Jesuits always seemed to be in the thick of things,
whether the topic was birth control, homosexuality or female
priests. Soon after he became Pope, John Paul picked up Paul's
refrain, denouncing the order's "regrettable shortcomings."

    Whatever willfulness the Pope feared seemed to dissipate
with the virtual Vatican takeover in 1981. After John Paul
appointed Father Paolo Dezza as acting superior general and
Father Giuseppe Pittau as his deputy, "everyone expected a
Jesuit revolt," remarks the Rev. John Long, rector of the
Jesuits' Russian-studies institute in Rome. When this did not
occur, says Long, "the Pope was surprised, and the Vatican Curia
was shocked." On the other hand, the Jesuits did not much change
their activism but instead adopted a more circumspect profile.

    The administrative leaders of the order who elected
Kolvenbach in 1983 wanted him to continue the policies of his
predecessor. But Kolvenbach has proved conservative enough, or
diplomatic enough, to placate the Pope, even while earning the
loyalty of his subordinates. John Paul's warmer attitude was
first signaled in 1988, when Kolvenbach was chosen as the
preacher for the Vatican Lenten retreat, an honor that was
bestowed upon John Paul himself just before he was elected to
the Throne of St. Peter. Kolvenbach has been meticulous in
carrying out papal directives to the letter, aides say, and he
shrewdly picked the Pope's man, Pittau, as his liaison with the
Holy See.

    Under Arrupe's reign, the society had declared a duty to
"show solidarity with all the oppressed and underprivileged
everywhere." That commitment was reaffirmed at Kolvenbach's
election and again two months ago at a special meeting in Spain
of the heads of all 84 Jesuit provinces. Are the Jesuits still
too political? "To be human is to be political," responds the
order's assistant general, American John O'Callaghan. In any
event, Jesuit activism no longer seems to worry John Paul so
much, just so long as doctrines supportive of Marxism are
eliminated from the society's arsenal of teachings.

    Today Jesuit energies are directed at a multitude of causes,
from agitating against dictatorships in Africa to championing
the cause of India's downtrodden untouchables. The prominence
of Jesuits in social change has been underlined in Latin
America, where just a year ago six activist Jesuit educators in
El Salvador, together with two female helpers, were brutally
assassinated. The Jesuit Refugee Service labors with less
attention in 75 camps that harbor 1.5 million people. There are
also numerous unheralded individual heroes, like Thomas
Fitzpatrick, a missionary whose financial acumen helped get food
and medicine to the right places during Ethiopia's drought,
thereby saving thousands of lives.

    Despite their activism, Jesuits are still thought of, in
O'Callaghan's phrase, as "an intellectual elite who educate the
cream of Catholic society." The rationale for this approach,
adds O'Callaghan, is that "if the rich are properly educated,
they will learn the needs of the poor and the joy of service."
Kolvenbach has no plans, however, to expand the number of
Jesuit-run schools; he wants priests to concentrate more on
teaching and other duties than on running institutions. The
Jesuits constitute the largest missionary body in the Catholic
Church, and 3,270 of their number are engaged in parish work.

    Even with the signs of renewed papal approval, some Catholic
conservatives question whether the Jesuits have changed enough.
Father Joseph Fessio, editor of the San Francisco-based Ignatius
Press and himself a Jesuit, complains that in the U.S., "I don't
see any perceptible change since Kolvenbach was elected.
Although there are often professions of loyalty to the Holy See,
there is an underlying attitude of dissent toward anything that
comes from Rome or from the Pope, and a feeling that `we have
to wait out this pontificate.'"

    All factions are united, however, behind the Pope's new
mission in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which, says
Pittau, "has given us a new sense of purpose. Our first job will
be bringing the clergy up to date in theology, biblical studies
and Christian ethics." Many churchmen were trained haphazardly,
and often clandestinely, and know little of the changes made in
Catholic doctrine and liturgy by the Second Vatican Council of
1962-65.

    Even after decades of oppression, 1,203 Jesuits remain in
Eastern Europe, some of whom were forced to live and work for
years in secret. Before communism's collapse, the East bloc
regimes singled out Jesuits for special punishment. Some Jesuits
may now go into Belorussia for short-term assignments, and a
number of Soviet universities have asked for Jesuits to teach
religion courses.

    As the anniversary year proceeds, the Jesuits will be
showing a higher profile. Festivities to celebrate the occasion
include an array of academic symposiums, pilgrimages, museum
displays, musicales and plays, as well as a lavish exhibit at
the Vatican Library and the restoration of St. Ignatius' living
quarters in Rome. What is more important, though, is that the
society has returned to a place in what a close observer called
"the most difficult and extreme fields, in the crossroads of
ideologies, in the front line of social conflict." The words
came from Paul VI. John Paul II has since echoed them
approvingly.


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WHERE THE JESUITS ARE


    Asia and Pacific   5,043
    Africa             1,167
    E. Europe          1,203
    W. Europe          7,281
    Latin America      3,807
    North America      5,378