Word: jesuitic
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...