A Justice of Faith
Kindling New Fires at the Frontiers
On the day we elected Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., we, the members of the 35th General Congregation, realized how much he is an insp ired choice—a choice that was guided by gifts of the Holy Spirit and human wisdom.
In reflecting on that election, I have seen clearly that the three Superiors General—the other two being Pedro Arrupe, S.J., and Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, S.J., both of whom I have also met—were all inspired choices. All three “servant” leaders are exceptionally gifted and deeply spiritual men who have ensured that the mission of the Society is rooted in a faith that does justice in order to advance the more universal good of society—and this will give God greater glory.
Father Pedro Arrupe, with his big heart and keen mind, embraced the task of guiding the Society through the tumultuous waters following Vatican II in the late 1960s and 70s, when we needed to realign our mission to address new realities. Vatican II was the context for the Society of Jesus while Father Arrupe was the Superior General. Navigating the sea change that Vatican II brought was no easy task; but with new hope and renewal the Church and the Jesuits ventured into a modern world where the integrating principle of the service of faith and the promotion of justice would become Father Arrupe’s lasting legacy.
Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, with extraordinary intellectual gifts and a quiet sense of humor, personally lived very simply but managed the complexities of the Order during a rapidly changing, globalizing world—a reality he recognized before many others. He guided the Society intellectually, spiritually, and morally for 25 years. His legacy both expanded and enriched the universal principle of faith doing justice, for he recognized that fashioning a more humane and just world called for a faith and justice that had to be lived in the context of cultures and inter-religious dialogue.
Father Adolfo Nicolás is an inspired choice of GC35. He is the ideal person to provide fresh “servant” leadership in an even more critical time in the Church and world. We felt guided by the Holy Spirit in electing him, and our prayer and ultimate decision set a tone and context for subsequent reflections, lively debates, and final decrees. He will initiate a process of extended reflection and renewal of Jesuit religious life to recreate a Society of Jesus for our particular times, global realities, and frontiers, where people, cultures, and the Earth itself are in need of healing. His legacy will be a creativity that inspires an aggiornamento in the Society: to bring a justice of faith to diverse peoples, cultures, and faiths and to a justice of ecology that cares for creation, and to discover as we always have that God is already there at work.
Following the election of Father Nicolás, the great desire of many members of GC35 was to reflect on and issue writings that would inspire a redefinition of who we are in the world as Jesuits, to be more closely allied with collaborators, and to renew our ministries to effect change in every region of our rapidly globalizing world. Our call is to make the world more humane, sustainable, and just through a lived Christian faith that leads to harmony among all people, while giving preference for those in greatest need, not just economically but also spiritually, educationally, and socially.
Whether we achieve that ideal, others will have to judge. Nonetheless, I’m sure Father Nicolás was an inspired choice. Inspiring also was the diversity of the Jesuits from all parts of the world, speaking different languages, representing different cultures and socioeconomic classes, and reflecting a wide variety of ministries among today’s global realities. Yet we shared a common spirituality and mission. One could hear in each other’s voices the experience of working with indigenous people, teaching the poor through Fe y Alegria and Cristo Rey as well as in financially well-endowed schools, caring for refugees, serving as theologians in the finest universities, researching social problems to overcome poverty, analyzing climate change, and the list could go on. We learned more about the world through the eyes and hearts of our fellow Jesuits, especially as they reflected the faces, hands, eyes, and hearts of those they have served.
We grew in our understanding of those realities different from our own experiences and the effects of globalization, both its benefits and perils. We saw globalization as the new context for our mission and ministries. This awareness— together with the realization that global problems need global solutions, but enacted effectively only at the local level—increased our appreciation for the universality of the Society of Jesus—a global order with a universal orientation and outlook. Yet our diverse experiences always brought us back to understanding the importance of and commitment to the local people, cultures, and religions.
We better understood globalization when we listened to each other—as we could see reflections of our own hopes and dreams, our faith and love for our collaborators and for the people we served. The lesson was that our mission is at new frontiers—noting that developing technologies, eco-sustainability issues, and various reasons for, and ways of, people migrating around the world further accelerate and complicate globalization.
One of the most intriguing experiences of GC35 was a sense of renewal of our identity and mission together with the realization that our ministries also define who we are as Jesuits in the world of the 21st century.
At different times and in different ways during the Congregation, we saw Ignatius’s vision at La Storta as the path to understanding our own call, identity, and mission for this century. We saw what he saw for himself and his companions: to be placed by God the Father with his Son and to be sent out to those places throughout the world where the need was greatest and other ministers of God’s saving power, generally, were not present.
Our writings –“A Fire that Kindles Other Fires” and “Challenges to our Mission Today: Sent to the Frontiers”—attempt to capture who we are in the world and where we are to go: “Fundamental for the life and mission of every Jesuit’s mission is an experience that places him, quite simply, with Christ at the heart of the world” to labor for good.1
We reaffirmed clearly and emphatically our commitment to an active justice of faith, but within a new context at new frontiers:
Faith and justice; it is never one without the other. Human beings need food, shelter, love, relationship, truth, meaning, promise, hope. Human beings need a future in which they can take hold of their full dignity; indeed they need an absolute future, a “great hope” that exceeds every particular hope.2 Following Jesus, we feel ourselves called not only to bring direct help to people in distress, but also to restore entire human persons in their integrity, reintegrating them in community and reconciling them with God. 3
The preferences at new frontiers remain but with a new twist for the definitions of the frontiers: the people of Africa and China, refugees and immigrants, the poor and the young of every continent, those with access to technology and the Internet and those without, and those in the intellectual apostolate.
The preferred ministry at the frontier, personal for me, is the intellectual dimension of all Jesuit ministries. More than ever before we realized that rigorous scholarship and critical thinking are absolutely necessary to engage the realities of the world and to overcome the root causes of seemingly intractable problems, such as poverty, the rapid depletion of natural resources and global warming, human rights violations and the problem of fundamentalism, and all other sorts of concerns. The Congregation wished, a wish confirmed by Father Nicolás, to expand the scope and responsibilities of the secretary for higher education to include the “intellectual apostolate.”
We realized our mission was one of reconciliation—building bridges—with God, with other people while also respecting their cultures and faiths, and with creation. Reconciliation of creative tension meant unifying “being and doing; contemplation and action; prayer and prophetic living; being completely united with Christ and completely inserted into the world with him as an apostolic body…. [These] mark deeply the life of a Jesuit and express both its essence and its possibilities.”4
The complexity of the problems we face and the richness of the opportunities offered demand that we build bridges between rich and poor, establishing advocacy links of mutual support between those who hold political power and those who find it difficult to voice their interests. Our intellectual apostolate provides an inestimable help in constructing these bridges, offering us new ways of understanding in depth the mechanisms and links among our present problems.5
In the end, like all Jesuits and their collaborators, our mission is to go with both spiritual vigor and intellectual rigor to “new frontiers” where the “Jesuit identity [and mission are] relational; [they grow] in and through our diversities of culture, nationalities, and languages, enriching and challenging us.”6
“Nations” [Frontiers] beyond geographical definitions await us, [these] include those who are poor and displaced, those who are profoundly lonely, those who ignore God’s existence and those who use God as an instrument for political purposes. There are new “nations,” and we are sent to them.7
God is already there, but when we bring love and hope to a world in all its beauty and tragedies, possibilities and contradictions, we together discover God again. The knowledge born of contemplation helps us to realize that God is always working among us. The knowledge born of action teaches us love. To achieve the magis and the more universal good, we know that we have received grace under the banner of his Son and are sent to serve the Church and world as did Jesus.
Endnotes
1 General Congregation 35, Decree 2, paragraph 4 [hereinafter GC35, 2:4]; cf. GC35, 2, 3, 4, 6, 11; GC35, 3:16.
2 Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (Nov. 30, 2007).See paragraphs 4 and 35, for example.
3 GC35, 2:13.
4 GC35, 2:9. Cf. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Sobre la vidareligiosa, (Havana, Cuba, June 1, 2007), 1.
5 GC35, 3:28
6 GC35, 2:19
7 GC35, 2:22. Cf. Adolfo Nicolás, Rome, Homily on the dayafter his election as Superior General of the Society of Jesus(January 20, 2008).