One always has to be very careful when speaking about a religious community. A good rule of thumb is to treat all religious communities as you would any biological family. If John Doe is a looser, I don’t go around saying that the Doe Family is a family of losers. That’s inappropriate and a generalization. Even if there were many losers in the Doe family, the truth is that I don’t know the entire family, nor do I know their circumstance. I only know the little that I see.
When I was a novice, our novice master trained us in the virtue of discretion. We would be severely punished, if we made indiscreet comments about anyone or any group of people, to the point that we all learned never to make comments about anything or anyone without qualifying that we did not know what we were talking about.
It sounds crazy, to say, “I’m going to say something about the Jesuits, but I should warn you that I don’t really know what I’m talking about.” In reality it’s not crazy at all. Do I know 20,000 Jesuits? Over the past 500 years there have been an average 20,000 Jesuits per century, that’s about 200,000 Jesuits. Do I know 200,000 Jesuits? Am I a Jesuit? Do I live with them? Have I studied their constitutions? Have I ever attended a provincial chapter or a general congregation of their order? Do I understand how their infrastructure works? Since the answer to most of these questions is a resounding, “NO.” Then it is not crazy to begin with a disclaimer.
I can say that I have heard this or that. That’s not such a good idea either, because not everything that I hear is true. Catholics love to gossip about their priests and religious. A lot of what is repeated is not true or starts with a truth and picks up mass like a snowball.
I have never understood the mindset of people who tell tales. We want vocations, but we badmouth our clergy and religious where our younger generation can hear us. How does that work? We believe in Original Sin, forget that we too are sinners, and remember everyone else’s sins. How does that work? We claim to be the one true Church, but we repeat a lot of untruths about each other. How does that work?
Having grown up in a Jewish home, to me this was the most aggravating part of being Catholic. In a devout Jewish family, we did not badmouth the Rabbis. We protected Jews from being hurt and ridiculed by others. Behind closed doors, Jews can go at each other like the best of them. Trust me. Rabbis get hired and fired more frequently than you change the oil in your car, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for ridiculous reasons. However, we did not let the rest of the world in on it. We felt about our congregations the same way that we feel about our families.
Catholics don’t do this too well. When we find a group that has a few warts, we tell the world that they have leprosy. Then we wonder why the world takes crack shots at the Church. It seems that these days, the Jesuits are the popular target for Catholics. That’s unfortunate.
They have problems like every family has problems. However, I wouldn’t pull your family’s good name apart on the internet, so I will not do it to the Jesuit family either. At the end of the day, I believe that God loves them and that he has given them to the Church as a gift. Fraternal correction can be just as effective without publicity.
Despite their problems, most of which are due to their size and their infrastructure, which they cannot change, because it would change their identity, they have produced great saints and have done great work for the Church. In fact, the third man in the defense of the Catholic faith is a Jesuit who serves the Church quietly and humbly. He is the second in command at the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, Archbishop Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer S.J.
I sometimes wonder if their infrastructure is the cross that God has given them to bear. If you think about it, it’s a very hard life. They are part of an order, but they don’t have the built-in support systems that the other orders have. Each man has to discipline himself and oversee himself. I can’t do it. I’m glad that I belong to a community where there is a local superior and there is a local community that calls me to accountability once a month at the house chapter and that I’m not allowed to live alone for any extended period of time.
Maybe that’s the reason that they were the last order ever founded. The Church realized that imposing the demands of a religious order with solemn vows on men who are scattered all over the globe and who have to operate as individuals in very demanding situations is very tough on the individual and on the superiors. Observe that all the religious communities founded after the Jesuits are congregations with simple vows, not order with solemn vows.
Those are just my two cents.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
