Word: jesuitism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
When John Paul followed that action by calling the international Jesuit leadership to Rome for further instructions, the grumbles and concern mounted. Some of the North and South Americans arrived for the meeting in T shirts and blue jeans, a minor act of sartorial insouciance, given John Paul's insistence on traditional dress (they wore clerical garb when they met the Pontiff). Many of the leaders were in a fighting mood, armed with massive documentation on the good works they were accomplishing...
Neither does anyone else. The men at prayer are among 10,000 surviving Kakure Kirishitan (crypto-Christians)-members of a fossilized faith that is unique in church annals. The poignant tale of the sect begins in 1549, when Jesuit Missionary Francis Xavier brought Roman Catholicism to Japan. The new creed soon gathered 300,000 followers, including most of the inhabitants of Ikitsuki, but its success also spelled its doom. Fearing the Christians' growth and foreign links, the warlord ruler Hideyoshi and later shogun mounted terror campaigns in which tens of thousands perished, often gruesomely. Christianity was all but stamped...
...Kakure Christians? Jesuit Diego Yuuki calls their faith "a melange of Buddhism, Shintoism, animism and what Kakure think is Catholicism. They have no Bible. The meaning of the Trinity has been lost on them." Nonetheless, the church would like to bring its long-sundered sons and daughters home again. During the first papal visit to Japan last February, John Paul II pointedly embraced four Kakure who turned out to greet him and held a meeting with a number of the sect's chief priests. But one of those who greeted the Pope, Dominico Hayakichi Masuyama, 73, says they...
...nearly two thousand years Catholicism was a rigidly repressive force in this world, acting to preserve, not to change. As Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino, a professor of theology at a Salvadoran university, says in the preface to his Christology at the Crossroads. "For some reason it has been possible for Christians, in the name of Christ, to ignore or even contradict fundamental principles and values that were preached and acted upon by Jesus of Nazareth." You have your Inquisition and your Crusades and your indulgence-selling and your papal imperialism, and in some ways you have a pretty grim picture...