c. 2008 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ Jesuits are famous for efficiency and hard work, so it’s characteristic that their newest leader has lost no time in taking on his job.
The Rev. Adolfo Nicolas, who on Saturday (Jan. 19) was elected the 30th superior general in the 468-year history of the Society of Jesus, celebrated Mass the next day in the order’s mother church in Rome.
Then on Monday, the “Black Pope” (so nicknamed because the Jesuit leader normally serves for life, like the pope, but dresses in the ordinary clerical black) began to preside over the society’s 35th General Congregation.
For the next six weeks to two months, the 226 delegates at the congregation will assess the state of the order and set goals for the future.
With nearly 20,000 priests and brothers around the world, the Jesuits are the Catholic Church’s largest religious order and one of its most influential. Prestigious schools, universities, hospitals and social services for migrants and refugees are among their widely varied activities.
Ten Jesuits _ more than from any other order _ sit in the College of Cardinals, the highest level of the hierarchy below the pope.
Yet the society’s continued prominence is far from guaranteed. Membership has fallen by 45 percent since the early 1960s, and the trend shows no sign of reversal.
“One of the challenges is how do we make Jesuit life an attractive and viable and fundamentally meaningful alternative in today’s world,” said the Rev. Thomas Smolich, president of the Jesuit Conference in the United States. “We think it is, but we’re not doing a particularly good job of getting that message out.”
Another challenge facing the new leader is relations with the Holy See.
In his homily Sunday, Nicolas dismissed what he called journalistic “cliches” about supposed struggles with the pope. “It is all so superficial, so artificial!” he said. “These are but crumbs for those who love politics.”
Yet recent statements from the highest church sources provide grounds for such speculation.
At a Jan. 7 Mass to open the Jesuit meeting, the Vatican official in charge of religious orders delivered a largely complimentary homily that nonetheless expressed “sorrow and anxiety” over the unwillingness of “some members of religious families” to “think with the church” and obey the hierarchy. “Doctrinal diversity,” warned Cardinal Franc Rode, “disorients the faithful and leads to a relativism without limits.”
Then Pope Benedict XVI himself, in a letter to Nicolas’ retiring predecessor, asked the congregation to reaffirm its “total adhesion to Catholic doctrine, in particular on those neuralgic points which today are strongly attacked by secular culture,” including “the relationship between Christ and religions, some aspects of the theology of liberation,” divorce and homosexuality.
Jesuits take a unique vow of obedience to the pontiff, which over the centuries has earned them the nickname of the “pope’s light cavalry.” But in recent years, the Vatican has censured several Jesuit theologians for deviations from orthodoxy on such matters as the uniqueness of the Catholic church as a means of salvation and the compatibility of Christianity with the teachings of Karl Marx.
Yet the image of the Jesuits as a hotbed of dissent is “more of a stereotype than a reality,” says the Rev. Keith F. Pecklers, an American Jesuit who teaches at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. “Some Jesuits are some of the most conservative people I know, others are some of the most progressive, most are in the middle.”
According to one observer, obedience to tradition and authority are actually stifling the order’s growth.
“I think the Jesuits and other religious orders will eventually have to redo their constitutions to form orders of men and women, married, single, celibate, etc.,” says Eugene C. Bianchi, a former Jesuit and professor emeritus of religion at Emory University. “But don’t expect anyone to get up and say that with Benedict XVI breathing down their necks.”
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Not surprisingly, traditionalists see things differently.
The solution to attrition is “very simply to return the Society to its original charism of fidelity to the Holy See,” says the Rev. Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit and founder of Ignatius Press in San Francisco. “There would be many young men who would want to be Jesuits” in that case, he says.
Fessio, who studied theology under Benedict at the University of Regensburg, Germany, in the 1970s, predicts that the pope will give the new superior general a year or two to bring the Jesuits into line.
If there are no “concrete results” by then, Fessio speculates, the pope is unlikely to remove or punish Nicolas; but “he might find some formula that would allow some within the Society of Jesus to follow the traditional form of life.”
KRE/PH END ROCCA
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