Word: dezza
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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...
...Pope's crackdown began last year after Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe, considered Catholicism's second most powerful leader, suffered a serious stroke. In October, John Paul cast aside Arrupe's choice of an interim leader and landed control to his personal delegate, Jesuit Father Paolo Dezza. Some 5,000 protest letters came to the order's headquarters from the 86 Jesuit regional units around the globe. A group of 18 West German Jesuits, including eminent Theologian Karl Rahner, complained sharply to the Pope that it was difficult to "recognize the hand of God in this...
Except for one session in Rome, the meeting took place at the Villa Cavalletti amid the vineyards of the Frascati region twelve miles outside Rome. The bucolic setting may have helped. In any event, the anticipated confrontations never occurred. Dezza, 80, won more esteem from the Jesuit leaders than had been expected. But his very strength as a master of the Vatican bureaucracy also meant, said one participant, that his "mindset was such that it would be useless to debate." The assembled priests quietly decided that he was unable to comprehend how Jesuits out in the provinces must work...
...climactic confrontation, John Paul sought to ease that-at least a little. During a 75-minute audience in the Vatican, he informed the group that some time this year Dezza would call a General Congregation to elect Arrupe's permanent successor. This assuaged the Jesuits' fear that the emergency regime would continue indefinitely. The call for the meeting will be only the first step in a complex procedure; the election itself will not take place until...
...need for "more thorough preparation of the society" before a General Congregation is held. That is being read as a signal that John Paul wants the Jesuits to shape up before the election of a new leader. As a result, no one in Rome sees a replacement for the Dezza-Pittau administration until at least 1983 and perhaps years beyond that...