Word: jesuitic
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Mating Dance. Now that the church and the order are trying to understand and learn from the world, many Jesuits are disoriented, looking in vain for the old landmarks: the triumphalist faith, the proud discipline. The tight old Jesuit houses offer little solace. Deserted by the young and the adventurous in favor of small communal residences or private apartments, many of the houses have become sadly depopulated. Too many Jesuits no longer seem to be able to recognize one another. Says Jesuit Kenneth Baker, editor of Homiletic and Pastoral Review: "Ten years ago when you met a fellow Jesuit...
...change. The clenched dictum promulgated in Jesuit schools, Age quod agis (Do what you are doing) begins to seem like a narrow tunnel vision, tempting sidelong glances at the confusing larger world...
Departures. As with the church, the current Jesuit controversy has been simmering for years, but it came to a boil as the Second Vatican Council drew to a close. The society's superior general, John Baptist Janssens, died, and the order convened in 1965 one of its rare "general congregations," both to elect a successor and adjust its ways to the council's rapprochement with the modern world. Jesuit superiors and provincial representatives from around the world converged on Rome. The man they elected as the society's 28th general (to serve, like the Pope, for life) was a career...
...needs it. The Jesuits are already a smaller order than the one Arrupe took over in 1965. Though still the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, they have suffered the same kind of attrition that has affected other groups of priests and nuns. There were 36,000 Jesuit priests, brothers and scholastics in 1966, but by the end of 1972 there were fewer than 31,000. Some of the lost numbers are men abandoning the order?so many in recent years that the newspaper of the society's Oregon province has a feature headlined DEATHS?LEAVES?DEPARTURES...
...Jesuits are in crisis because we are in a world of crisis," says Father John Blewett, who advises Arrupe on educational matters. Indian Jesuit Herbert de Souza observes that Jesuits react to the crisis in one of two ways: "Some of us become numbed while others overreact. There will be a split among thinking men, especially devoted thinking men, in a crisis situation. They will often clash head-on because of a common devotion." Arrupe presides over a sometimes chaotic variety of individuals, whose special Jesuit intensity, a quality of the breed, often gives them individualistic interpretations of the society...