Pope Francis Evangelisation and the Jesuits
by Christopher Pedley S.J.
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Spiritual Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 The Early Jesuits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 St Francis Xavier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Matteo Ricci and De Nobili: Dialogue with the Cultures of Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Evangelisers of Europe and the Americas . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Second Vatican Council and the Mission Today . . . . . . 43
All rights Reserved. First published 2014 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. Š 2014 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society.
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Introduction Many Catholics will have had the experience of being asked about Pope Francis. In the first months since his election he has changed perceptions of the papacy and the Church. One question is, “what difference does it make that Francis is the first Jesuit to be Pope?” Are there things in what he says and in his way of life which reflect his background as a member of the Society of Jesus? One of Pope Francis’ great themes is the joyful spreading of the Gospel. One of the earliest documents he produced was Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the Gospel 1, written in response to the Synod on Evangelisation in 2012.2 This emphasis is not new. When Pope Francis says preaching the Gospel is “the first task of the Church” he is quoting Pope St. John Paul II.3 However, his personal enthusiasm for evangelisation and his message about the Gospel as a Gospel of joy have caught the imagination. There is much in this enthusiasm which reflects Pope Francis’ Jesuit inheritance. We will look at this inheritance and see how it mirrors some of Pope Francis’ themes. That is not to claim that everything Pope Francis says or does stems from his being a Jesuit. His message in so many things is the same as that of previous Popes, although said
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in his own way. Similarly in looking at the Jesuit role in evangelisation since the sixteenth century, it is important to acknowledge that they shared in the work of many other religious congregations, priests and lay people. However, there are some important themes we can identify when we look at some key moments in the history of the Jesuits’ work of evangelisation.
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The Spiritual Exercises Twice during his training, in 1958 and 1970 4, Pope Francis experienced the full thirty day retreat which is the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. He was also Master of Novices and directed Jesuits in the Exercises. The Exercises are based on Ignatius’ own experience of conversion and of discerning the way God was leading him. They are aimed at enabling the person to have the freedom to be open to God’s will and to follow that path. The Exercises are a programme of meditations and contemplations directed towards this freedom. While they seek to help the person to be free to take whatever path God is leading, they are oriented towards an active response to God’s love. Pope Francis contrasts such an active response with a spirituality which is merely comforting. In warning of the dangers facing pastoral workers he says, “At the same time, the spiritual life comes to be identified with a few religious exercises which can offer a certain comfort but which do not encourage encounter with others, engagement with the world or passion for evangelisation.”5 There are a number of ways in which the Spiritual Exercises promote the kind of engagement Pope Francis has in mind.
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The First Week In the First Week of the Exercises, Ignatius gets the retreatant to look at the reality of sin in the world and in their own lives, he gets them to look at God’s merciful response shown in Christ on the Cross and then gets them to ask, in response, “What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What am I going to do for Christ?”6 The emphasis is on an active response. The Call of the Earthly King Ignatius is often described as a soldier but this conjures up too modern a vision. He was brought up in court and his preferred reading was novels of courtly romance. Before his conversion, his ideal was that of the medieval knight performing daring deeds for the favour of his lady. In his own mind he was more a knight of the Round Table than the kind of disciplined soldier characteristic of armies since the days of Oliver Cromwell or Frederick the Great of Prussia. This romantic ideal is reflected in the meditation he places at the start of the Second Week of the Exercises where he pictures a medieval king going off on crusade and calling knights to join him in the hardships of the campaign. He then presents the call of Christ and compares that to the call of the earthly king saying how much more worthy of consideration is the call of Christ.7 Again the retreatant is led to a commitment, to an active following of Christ.
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The Incarnation Ignatius follows up the Call of the Earthly King by leading into a week considering the mission of Christ depicted in the Gospel. He starts this with the key contemplation on the Incarnation. In this he paints a picture of the world, “those on the face of the earth, in all their diversity of dress and appearance, some white and some black, some in peace and others at war, some weeping and others laughing, some healthy, others sick, some being born and others dying etc”. He then turns his gaze to the Holy Trinity who look down on this world and all its peoples, “living in such great blindness, and dying and going down to hell”.8 Their response is that the Second Person should become part of this world and become human to save the human race. We are then led to the scene of the Annunciation with the Angel Gabriel being sent to Mary in Nazareth. Again we are challenged to make a response. Here perhaps is the key scene in the Spiritual Exercises which provides the impetus for evangelisation. To look with the Trinity at the world and respond to its need for the Good News of God’s love, God’s healing. This pity for the world is reflected in the quotation from St Bede’s commentary on St Matthew’s Gospel which Jorge Bergoglio took as his episcopal motto “looking with pity and choosing him”.9 Ignatius follows up this contemplation on the Gospel scene of the Incarnation with a series of contemplations of the life of Christ. This is so that the retreatant can
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be moved by the experience, grow in the love of Christ and take Christ as a model to be followed joyfully and enthusiastically. Pope Francis makes this kind of experience of Christ central to the whole process of evangelisation: “The primary reason for evangelisation is the love of Jesus which we have received, the experience of salvation which urges to ever greater love of him. What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?”.10 The Contemplation to Attain Love Having led the retreatant through the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Ascension and Christ’s call to follow him in the poor, insulted and rejected and humble, Ignatius places a final contemplation at the end of the Exercises. The Contemplation to Attain Divine Love looks at the way in which God showers his gifts on us and then asks for a response. It is a response of total freedom to follow the will of God: “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. You gave it all to me; to you Lord I give it all back. All is yours, dispose of it according to your will. Give me the grace to love you, for that is enough for me.”11 This idea that remembering God’s gifts leads us to a commitment to God’s service, to a joyful sharing of the
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Gospel with others is one to which Pope Francis alludes. He says, “the joy of evangelising always arises from grateful remembrance...the believer is essentially ‘one who remembers;”.12 He goes on to show how important remembering was to the people of Israel, to the apostles and to the early Church. Remembering the day is an important part of Ignatian spirituality and Jesuit life. Looking back at the end of the day, at where God has been present and at work, at where there are things which need God’s healing and forgiveness, the “examen” prayer is something Pope Francis would have practiced every day. There is something else which is characteristic of St Ignatius which Pope Francis mentions in the same passage. In every prayer St Ignatius gets us to think about the grace we are asking for, what do we need from God? Pope Francis says that grateful remembrance is “a grace we constantly need to implore”. This asking for the grace we need is also part of the “examen”. Having looked back at the day we notice what we need as we go forward to tomorrow and ask for that grace from God. Consolation and Desolation The Spiritual Exercises do not provide a readymade road map showing how a person should live out the Gospel. What they do is to provide some tools, recognising that each person is an individual with their own particular
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relationship with God. The Exercises themselves can be seen as a process of evangelisation and as Pope Francis says, “Evangelisation aims at a process of growth which entails taking seriously each person and God’s plan for his or her life”.13 In helping the retreatant to discern the will of God and choose the right path, Ignatius identifies two movements, two experiences we may have in the spiritual life. One is consolation, characterised by joy, peace and an increase in faith, hope and love. The other movement is desolation, characterised by “a lack of confidence in which the soul is without hope and without love; one find oneself thoroughly lazy, lukewarm, sad, and as though cut off from one’s Creator and Lord.”14 Pope Francis recognises that such desolation can affect the Church’s “missionary dynamism” when he says “no to selfishness and spiritual sloth”.15 This arises in part because activity is undertaken “without adequate motivation, without a spirituality which would permeate it and make it pleasurable”. This leads to something which “far from being a content and happy tiredness, this is a tense, burdensome, dissatisfying and, in the end, unbearable fatigue”.16 From this comes the threat of what Pope Francis calls “a tomb psychology”17, “the most precious of the devil’s potions.”.18 Ignatius encourages us to examine desolation and recognise its roots in ourselves. He also provides a spirituality which, through its focus on Christ and his call, encourages that “joy of evangelisation” of which Pope Francis speaks.
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By paying attention to these movements of consolation and desolation we can come to recognise what in us comes from the good spirit and what from the bad spirit. This “discernment of spirits” is at the heart of the Spiritual Exercises. They are designed to help us be more aware that we can be tempted away from the path of God’s service, we can see where God is leading us. In Evangelii Gaudium Pope Francis says, “We need to distinguish clearly what would be a fruit of the kingdom from what runs counter to God’s plan. This involves not only recognising and discerning spirits, but also – and this is decisive – choosing movements of the spirit of good and rejecting those of the spirit of evil”.19 This ability to discern what is of God and what is not, to choose what is of God, are things Pope Francis would have learned from applying the experience of the Spiritual Exercises day by day. It is an experience which points people towards a joyful commitment to sharing the Good News with others. The “joy of evangelisation”, the drive and enthusiasm to take the Gospel into the world can be seen in some of the key figures in the history of the Society of Jesus. They had an enthusiasm to accompany Christ into the world inspired by the Holy Trinity and the Contemplation on the Incarnation. For many Jesuits, this took the shape of a close involvement with those to whom they ministered and with their culture, that living with “the smell of the sheep” which Pope Francis talked about in his homily at
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the Chrism Mass, 28th March, 2013 as well as in Evangelii Gaudium 20. For many it involved accepting insults and rejection as Ignatius suggests in the Spiritual Exercises.21 As we shall see, for some, such as Roberto de Nobili, it involved living radical actual poverty, while for others, such as Matteo Ricci, it involved having to adopt the life style of the elite in order to proclaim the Gospel to them.
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The Early Jesuits Who are the Jesuits, the members of the religious order the Society of Jesus to which Pope Francis belongs, and where does this enthusiasm for evangelisation come from? As we have seen, they are men shaped by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius but their first intentions were rather different from their subsequent history. When St. Ignatius of Loyola and his companions first pronounced their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in Paris in 1534, they had a particular mission in mind. Things were to turn out very differently. Ignatius had come to Paris as part of his own journey of conversion. He was wounded at the siege of Pamplona (1521) and during his convalescence underwent a conversion from an ambitious courtier to a man imbued with a desire to serve God. Ignatius later referred to himself as “the Pilgrim� and his conversion led him on a physical and spiritual journey. The key part of this journey was his time spent in prayer and reflection at Manresa, in Catalonia. Out of this experience Ignatius produced the Spiritual Exercises, this way of helping others to see the way God was leading them and to seek the Greater Glory of God. He soon discovered that if he was to use this tool to help others without arousing
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suspicion he needed to be educated and become a priest. It was to his fellow students that Ignatius first gave the Spiritual Exercises, including to the small group of men he gathered round him in Paris. Ignatius’s own journey had taken him to Jerusalem but the situation of the time prevented him from staying. However, the desire remained and Ignatius and his Paris companions intended to go and spend the rest of their lives in the Holy Land. Nevertheless, the question arose of what they should do if travel to the Holy Land proved impossible. Their desire was to find the best way to “praise, reverence and serve God our Lord”, as Ignatius put it in the Spiritual Exercises. They decided that the one who could best guide them in this was the Pope and they would put themselves at his service. After waiting, unsuccessfully, in Venice, for a boat to take them to their intended destination, they duly set out for Rome. Their offer to Pope Paul III was accepted but it meant that members of the group would be sent off to different places. How were they to maintain the bond between them? The answer was to form a religious order, but one with mission at its heart. The founding document set out their intentions: “Whoever wishes to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone his vicar on earth, should keep what follows
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in mind that once he has made a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, he is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine for the propagation of the faith by means of the ministry of the word, by spiritual exercises and works of charity, and specifically by the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity”.22 (Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, September 27th, 1540 – translation Institute of Jesuit Sources 1996). The purpose of the Society was the same as Ignatius’ aim when he began to give the Spiritual Exercises, “the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine” which we might also call evangelisation. The mission would determine the way the new Society was structured, how its members lived, the work they undertook and the way that they carried it out. In later years the Jesuits would be accused of teaching that “the ends justified the means”. To their opponents this meant using any means, whether moral or not. What was true was that the Jesuit approach meant that the means chosen were the ones most likely, in any given situation, to achieve that end of the “progress of souls”. This was reflected in a flexibility, a readiness to use a wide range of different means and undertake a great variety of different kinds of work. It was reflected in the distinctive change the Jesuits brought to religious life. Their commitment to the work of mission meant that
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they would not gather at various times of the day to sing the Divine Office in choir. Indeed the early Jesuits were soon scattered around the world and the Society was held together through correspondence. Instead of going off to the Holy Land to preach to the Muslims Ignatius spent the rest of his life at his desk writing letters. All of this reflected the idea which Ignatius set out in the First Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises: “The human person is created to praise, reverence and serve God Our Lord, and by doing so to save his or her soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for human beings in order to help them pursue the end for which they are created. It follows from this that one must use other created things in so far as they help towards one’s end, and free oneself from them in so far as they are obstacles to one’s end. To do this we need to make ourselves indifferent to all created things, provided the matter is subject to our free choice and there is no prohibition. Thus as far as we are concerned, we should not want health more than illness, wealth more than poverty, fame more than disgrace, a long life more than a short one, and similarly for all the rest, but we should desire and choose only what helps us more towards the end for which we are created.”23 Everything is subordinate to the end for which we are created, the service of God. The choices which are made
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are determined by what is most conducive to this end. For Ignatius and his companions those choices were sometimes different from their preconceived ideas. This remained true as the Society of Jesus grew and developed. What were the criteria Ignatius and his early companions used to make choices between different opportunities and requests to go and work for the “progress of souls” which presented themselves? The Constitutions which Ignatius wrote for the new order provided some guidelines for the Superior General to ensure that when deciding to send Jesuits to particular places, “that may always be done which is conducive to the greater glory of God and the universal good”.24 The first criterion is that of greater need, “because of lack of other workers, and because of the wretchedness and infirmity of the people there”. The second criterion was that of “where greater fruit is likely to be reaped”. This depended on the “devotion and desire” of those involved or in their “condition and quality” and the likelihood of “preserving the fruit produced”. Here straightaway we encounter the possible tensions involved in such decisions. On the one hand the desire to go where there were no other workers already in the field, on the other hand the desire to respond to those who were most insistent on their need for the Jesuits and most likely to welcome what they had to offer. This is not just a tension Ignatius experienced but one modern Jesuit Provincials would recognise. A related
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criterion likely to keep Jesuits closer to home was that of greater indebtedness to those involved because of their previous support of the Society’s work. The desire for the more universal good produced a preference for working with what today might be called “multipliers”, “persons and places, which, once they had benefited themselves, are a cause of extending the good to many others who are under their influence or take guidance from them.” This in turn produced a preference for “important and public persons”, “large nations” and “important cities or universities”. In general the more good was to be preferred to the less good and the more pressing to the less urgent. These criteria had an impact on the choices which were to shape the direction the new Society was to take. On the one hand, in response to instant requests and with an eye to forming “multiplers” the Society found itself heavily committed to schools and colleges in major cities, something which still characterises much of its work. This corresponds to the first two settings of evangelisation identified by Pope Francis: ordinary pastoral work and work with the baptised whose lives do not reflect the demands of baptism.25 However, our emphasis here will be on the third setting of work with those who do not know Jesus Christ. The desire to respond to the those most in need and to reach out to the largest numbers helped drive the missionary effort to those places Ignatius would have known as the “Indies”.
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