Word: kolvenbach
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jesuits, the largest and most influential of male orders, because its members were too frequently challenging church policy. He later installed his own temporary administration at Jesuit headquarters. Though the order is on its own again, it is not yet clear how much new Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach will bend the society to the papal will. John Paul's strictures do not seem to have discouraged vocations: six years ago the worldwide total of candidates for the priesthood was 61,000; in 1982 it had risen...
...selecting Kolvenbach as the 28th successor to the society's founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits may have resolved a point of tension with the Pope: How active should they become in politics? Pope John Paul II has warned all priests against becoming too political, although acknowledging that they have a duty to promote social justice. Father Pedro Arrupe, Kolvenbach's predecessor, encouraged social activity by Jesuits in the U.S. and Latin America. John Paul has also been nettled by Jesuits who question church teachings. When Arrupe, 75, was incapacitated by a stroke in 1981, the Pope...
John Paul was the first person outside the congregation to learn of its choice; he was telephoned the news while on a visit to Austria. Although the Pope does not know Kolvenbach, the Vatican had approved his 1981 appointment as rector of Rome's Pontifical Oriental Institute. Kolvenbach became a trusted adviser to Wladyslaw Cardinal Rubin, the Polish prelate who heads the Vatican congregation that supervises the church's Eastern rites...
...Kolvenbach has a special interest in these churches. Born in Druten, a small village in east Holland, he went to Lebanon as a missionary in 1958; there he became an expert in Armenian (he is fluent in seven other languages). Kolvenbach later earned a doctorate in Armenian in Paris, spent a year of spiritual study at a Jesuit center in Pomfret, Conn., then returned to Beirut as a professor at St. Joseph's University. He later headed the Jesuits' Middle East province (Lebanon, Syria and Egypt). "Father Kolvenbach is a classic Jesuit," says an official in Rome...
After his election, Kolvenbach quoted to friends a passage from St. Teresa of Avila: "Let nothing bother you, let nothing dismay you." He did not finish the quotation: "Everything passes ... Patience gains all... God alone is enough." A fitting motto, perhaps, as the Society of Jesus enters...