Last year was the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Pamplona, the occasion when a cannonball shattered the leg of a Basque gentleman soldier, Ignatius of Loyola, who had a kind of spiritual conversion during his convalescence while reading the lives of Christ and of the saints. It led him to form the Society of Jesus in 1539.
How does the Society of Jesus look now, 501 years on, at least in Britain?
The man who knows is Fr Damian Howard, for the past four-and-a-half years Provincial of the British province, whom I met at the Jesuit office next to Farm Street church in Mayfair. He is courteous, quietly spoken and articulate; he was also a little wary. I had suggested in the email I sent asking to meet him that the Society of Jesus was now better known for its work with refugees than for making converts and for the intellectual formation of Catholics; he bristled a bit at that. Fr Damian is proud of the work Jesuits do with refugees – it’s one of the Society’s four priorities for mission – but he was keen to emphasise what the order is actually about.
“The Society of Jesus doesn’t have a specific activity. What Ignatius does at the outset is set up a group of highly educated companions around him at the University of Paris and they head off to Venice on the way to the Holy Land because that’s where he thinks God wants him. When that fails and they get stuck in Venice, they decide to go to Rome to put themselves at the disposal of the pope because he thinks the pope is the one with the clearest vision of the common good. And that’s the charism of the order – it’s to be available to the pope, to go wherever he wants us. And once I’ve said that, it answers the question of whether the charism of the order has changed – its priorities are in harmony with the pope’s.”
In other words, the Jesuits are flexible; they answer the needs of the Church as the pope sees them.
At the beginning, what they were called to do was set up schools. And for the next centuries, the Jesuits were the schoolmasters of Europe, famous for their systematic pedagogy, based on humanist principles.
With that classical education, Jesuits went out as missionaries, learning the languages of indigenous people – that tradition is carried on still: there’s a young Jesuit in Campion Hall in Oxford writing a grammar of a small Indian community.
Jesuit education “was about forming people in a particular vision of what it was to be human,” said Fr Damian. “In some senses that project is still with us today in a very different context. It’s a very important mission but it doesn’t define us. To put it dramatically, we could lose all our schools tomorrow and it wouldn’t impinge on our identity.”
In Britain, Jesuit schools have an excellent reputation, even if they’re not now staffed by Jesuits. I was impressed by a visit to Stonyhurst, not least because it incorporates elements of Jesuit spirituality (like the midday examination of conscience) into school life.
“Our schools,” says Fr Damian, “are better, more Jesuit than ever. These days the young are different; the methods of Jesuit schoolmasters of the Forties and Fifties simply would not be tolerated. We have much more professionalised teaching – that can have its difficulties; the curriculum can push some of the spiritual formation to the margins – but we’re pretty good at holding to those things and ensuring our lay partners continue to form the whole person. That’s really crucial, I think. It’s more and more under threat with this government, which has shown little enthusiasm for forming human beings rather than those who can contribute to the economy. It’s a real danger and we should be very concerned about that.”
The work with the young isn’t just about schools; it’s one of the order’s priorities to accompany young adults in their spiritual life. “That is frontline work these days,” he says. “Even if someone is brought up a Catholic, it doesn’t mean they know what the faith is, or have the wherewithal to live it in a healthy way.”
The Jesuits run three important university chaplaincies at Birmingham, Manchester and Oxford. Then there are young adult ministries in London: a youth mass at Farm Street every Sunday evening which attracts between 140 and 170 people, with retreats and training sessions; and two houses in Brixton, in south London, to offer spiritual direction.
“There’s lots going on,” said Fr Damian. “We’d like to do more. So, OK, it’s not Evelyn Waugh and Alec Guinness being instructed in the faith, but it’s serious young people who are struggling to find a way to make sense of what the Church teaches in a world that contradicts 90 per cent of it.”
If the Jesuit mission is to help out the pope, does it help that Francis is himself a Jesuit? “We understand him,” said Fr Damian, “although he was a bishop, not a typical Jesuit. We understand what he’s about.”
One of Francis’s priorities is, of course, the environment, or, as Fr Damian says, “ecological engagement with theological depth”. That’s another Jesuit project, the Laudato Si’ Research Institute at Oxford, which was set up to help the church engage with environmental issues. “The world is going green, right?” says Fr Damian. “The question is, what kind of green? Do you want it to be misanthropic, where human beings are the problem, or a Catholic version, one that is positive about human beings at the centre of creation?”
The centre was part-funded by the proceeds of the sale of Heythrop, the London college for theology and philosophy associated with the Jesuits that closed in 2018. “It was a blow,” said Fr Damian, “and I won’t pretend to be happy about it. The governors decided it had to close. It relied on a business model paying university lecturers £10,000 a year because they were Jesuits or religious; the model was viable so long as you had a large number of religious to staff the place, people who had taken a vow of poverty.”
The Heythrop library – open to new members – is now situated in the Order’s Mayfair base, alongside another successor institution, the London Jesuit Centre, which only opened recently. It offers retreats and courses on spirituality and theology, including, brilliantly, New Testament Greek.
The Society of Jesus, like every other order, is far smaller than it was in the 1960s, though in Britain it still runs ten parishes, far more than most provinces; a third of British Jesuits work in parishes. “We’ve got 15 men in formation out of a province of 95, so not too bad,” says Fr Damian. “The men coming forward are of a very high quality – gifted, energetic, idealistic, willing to give themselves to this life in a remarkably generous way. I think morale is very high just now.”
His own vocation as a Jesuit came at Cambridge in the Eighties – he read music at Trinity College before switching to theology. “I met a remarkable Jesuit who was doing intellectual work as an astronomer but he was also a bit of a theologian and working in a refuge for battered women as well as being dean of St Edmund’s College. I met him, and thought, gosh, this is the dream. It was a comprehensive service of God, and a way of being fully human.”
The challenge for him and the Society now is twofold: to spread Jesuit ethos and practice to laypeople, and attract vocations for actual Jesuits. “The two must go together,” he says. “This is not to demean lay spirituality, but there is something about people who are able to give their full life to this kind of mission, which means, I think, it’s expressed in a radical way. Quite simply, if there are no more Jesuits, there won’t be the work that we do.”
And what a loss that would be. In 1541 Ignatius wrote to Francis Xavier, before he set off for India, saying: “ite, inflammate omnia” (go, set the world on fire). In its own way it’s what the Society of Jesus is still doing.
There’s lots going on. We’d like to do more. So, OK, it’s not Evelyn Waugh and Alec Guinness being instructed in the faith, but it’s serious young people who are struggling to find a way to make sense of what the church teaches in a world that contradicts 90 per cent of it.
This article first appeared in the Easter 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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