As We See It As We See ItOn the 34th General Congregation
Company invited four writers to contribute their thoughts on the importance of General Congregation 34's documents.
Sr. Frances Makower, RSCJ
Jesuits are both "'men for others' and with others." This familiar phrase strikes me as embodying an important theme running through the documents of General Congregation 34. They span worldwide concerns, but those on mission and inculturation, ecumenism, cooperation with the laity, and the situation of women in the Church I found the most radical and challenging. The thirst for dialogue and the frank admission of guilt spoke to me of present humility and future hope.
"Ours must be a dialogue born of respect for people . . . Our service is to be neither a disruption of the best impulses of the culture in which we work, nor is it to be an alien imposition from outside." The belief that "dialogue reaches out to the mystery of God active in others" is seen as essential, while the concluding commitment to "seek to be enriched by the spiritual experiences, ethical values, theological perspectives and symbolic expression of other religions" contains the seeds of radical advance in interfaith relations.
As for the document on Cooperation with the Laity in Mission, this has the authority of many years' experience behind it. There are now increasing numbers of laity who collaborate as equal partners in many spheres of the Society's mission. This trend is to be developed and the laity are to be invited into fellowship "to share what we are and what we have received."
As a woman, I find the document on Jesuits and the Situation of Women in the Church the most heartening. That the Society, one of the most respected and influential groups in the Church, is demanding a change in attitudes toward women, has pledged itself to work for that change, and is praying for the grace of conversion heralds a real breakthrough.
In 1974 the 32d general congregation broke new and, for some, controversial ground by insisting that "the road that leads to faith is identical to that which leads to justice." Twenty years later, the documents of this general congregation seem to flesh out in some detail the consequences of following that road.
Sr. Frances Makower, RSCJ, has taught history and worked in a drug rehab center in London and is now a writer; recently she published three books while confined to bed in traction.
Jack Miles
THE U.S. delegates at the 34th general congregation came from a country that has a Catholic minority but a Christian majority, a country whose secular culture is far more influenced by Protestantism than by Catholicism. Religiously speaking, this is what makes the American Catholic experience distinctive. Yet the congregation found no moment to accommodate that experience or to address the special challenge it poses.
It may be more intellectually difficult for the Society to be open to alternative forms of Christianity than for it to be open to completely distinct religious traditions, but this is the challenge that presents itself so insistently in the United States. Catholics' exposure to other Christian traditions has waxed apace since Vatican II. Roman Catholics in a Protestant-majority country must recognize that the effect of Vatican II on the local practice of Catholicism has resembled a delayed arrival of the Protestant Reformation: the new importance accorded Scripture, communion under both species, the use of the vernacular in worship, the enlargement of the role of the laity, the spread of a low-church aesthetic in ecclesiastical furnishings, the persistent talk of a married secular clergy, and on and on. Religiously, American Catholics increasingly see themselves as one denomination in a country where many other Christian denominations flourish.
The very word denomination is strange in a place like Catholic Spain or non-Christian India, but what Americans understand by interdenominational need not be empty of content. Substituting conversation and mutual appreciation for proselytization and the exact scholastic delineation of differences can accomplish much, and active contact with other Christians should not be confined to (though it can usefully begin with) common efforts toward social justice. It should go on to inquiries about how Christianity's different forms are actually understood and practiced.
In the States, therefore, Jesuits need to allow for what the congregation ignored in its documents. The documents are extraordinarily subtle, indeed brilliant and eloquent in Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue. But they are perfunctory in the brief document Ecumenism, where the only non-Roman tradition mentioned by name is Eastern Orthodoxy. For this general congregation, Protestantism--aside from one brief mention--is off the screen.
Though the congregation did address the need to encourage vocations, it did not otherwise reflect theologically on the growth or shrinking of the Society. If its growth in its early years was taken to be God-given, may its shrinkage also be seen as somehow providential? If this is a more pressing question for the American Jesuits, then perhaps here too the Society in America may have to attend on its own to a matter that the congregation passed over in silence.
Jack Miles, former editor for the Los Angeles Times and author of GOD: A Biography, is director of the Humanities Center of the Claremont Graduate School in California.
Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
An outsider to the history and documents of the Jesuits' general congregations, I recognized at once in reading those of the 34th general congregation a hermeneutical challenge: What's changed from last time? What's new? What is being modified, advanced? What has been discreetly withdrawn? Because this challenge is too large for a brief comment, I turned to what I knew: the Intellectual Dimension of Jesuit Ministries and Jesuits and University Life.
In the Jesuits' worldwide mission, it may be that intellectual life and education do not loom as large as they do in the United States or that the work of Jesuit prep schools, colleges, and universities does not seem as preeminent as it does to an American Catholic whose life-- intellectual, religious, cultural, and moral--is grounded in what she learned in a Jesuit university. While the work of Jesuit education in other lands may be largely among elites, in the United States, Jesuit higher education has had a particular genius for identifying with the working class, the lower middle classes, and strivers among the poor and marginalized.
The immigrant status of so many American Catholics, perhaps of many Jesuits, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may account for this mission of education in the right place at the right time. But it may also be that the faith that did justice in those decades saw quite clearly that education was a means to work for both faith and justice. Does the brevity and placement of education and intellectual life in the priorities of GC34 suggest that education may become marginal to the mission of the Jesuits? Around the world, where learning how to learn has become a major natural resource for all human cultures, the option for the poor, the works of justice, the mission of the Jesuits would seem to require greater, not less, commitment to higher education and the preparation of young women and men to participate in it.
In the spirit of Gospel values, all Catholics should signal support for the poor, the "other," the marginalized, but a naive romanticism must not lead us to suppose that the poor, the "other," the marginalized have needs any different from our own: to grow in wisdom and in grace, to learn, and to "learn how to learn."
Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is editor of Commonweal magazine.
Ken Woodward
First the Jesuits apologized to women, then the pope did, too. The pope I can understand. He is sending a delegation to Beijing in September for the fourth U.N. Conference on Women, and his agenda is certain to clash with those of feminists. So he apologized, sort of, for whatever sins the Church might have committed against women, and was quite specific about supporting issues such as equal pay for equal work.
But why the Jesuits apologized, why now and for what--the answers elude me. With a few exceptions, the general congregation's text is maddeningly general. The key lines read: "We have been a part of a civil and ecclesiastical tradition that has offended against women . . . However unwittingly, we have often been complicit in a form of clericalism which has reinforced male domination with an ostensibly divine sanction."
If the Jesuits are talking here about excluding women from ordination to the priesthood, they should say so. But "clericalism" is not a sin against women only. Its proper object is the laity of both genders, as any lay man or woman knows who has worked for the Church, especially at the Vatican.
Perhaps the 34th general congregation, being the first in Jesuit history in which representatives from Europe and the Americas were a minority, was alluding mainly to practices in developing countries, such as those mentioned: "female circumcision, dowry deaths and the murder of unwanted female children." If so, one can only say in response, "Yes, by all means protest against these practices, which are, after all, not customs that developed in Christian cultures." (There are, after all, limits to "contextualizing" the Gospel.) And good luck with the leaders of other religions who sanction such cruelties as part of their traditional ways of life.
But pardon me if I find unintelligible, at least in reference to Europe and the United States, potted phrases such as "the feminization of poverty." When last heard, that slogan, invented by American feminists, was shown to be rather empty of content. In the States, the issue is the breakdown of marriage and family, without which the so-called feminization of poverty (in reality, single women with dependent children) would not exist. In other words, "the feminization of poverty" is an ideological, not an empirical, construct.
The document speaks of "the alienation of women in some cultures" but does not say which. Perhaps the Jesuits are speaking of Western culture. If so, I would suggest that what one finds in Western societies today are congregations (and many Protestant denominations, seminaries, and agencies) dominated by women. Men these days, as in the past, are less inclined to be religious or to attend church than are women. That is the alienation which one might expect the Society of Jesus, as a male religious order, to address.
Thirty years ago this declaration would have been interesting and novel and probably would have attracted that celebrity adjective "prophetic." Coming now it sounds terribly me-too. Phrases such as "solidarity with women" have a smoothness that comes from too much use and too little content. Only celibate males could fashion such an apologia. But by all means Jesuits should listen to women. Husbands do it all the time.
Ken Woodward, senior writer and religion editor at Newsweek, is also author of Making Saints, a study of the canonization process.