How the Jesuits Got So Worldly

By John O’Malley, SJ

Rome’s Santa Maria in Aquiro was for hundreds of years the site of an orphanage established by the earliest Jesuits that is still in existence. The Society founded many such ministries, says author O’Malley, simply to promote the common good.

W

e've all heard countless jokes in which a Franciscan, a Dominican, and a Jesuit are pitted against one another. The Franciscan and the Dominican always come off as otherworldly and the Jesuit as the opposite.

Here’s a typical one: a guy goes to a Franciscan and asks him to say a novena so that he can win a

Lexus in a lottery.

“What’s a Lexus?”

“It’s a luxury car.”

“O me, o my, Saint Francis would see that as violating poverty, so I could never possibly pray for a thing like that.”

So he asks the Dominican, “Would you please say a novena so that I can win a Lexus?”

“What’s a Lexus?”

“A luxury car.”

“O me, o my, Saint Thomas Aquinas warns against love of such worldly goods. I couldn’t possibly pray for that.”

In desperation he asks a Jesuit, “Please, Father, would you say a novena so that I can win a Lexus?”

“What’s a novena?”

Jesuits are worldly. But of course we are not. All you have to do is read our literature, study our history, or talk to any one of us. We are, after all, Catholic priests and brothers, members of a religious order with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and, like all Christians, we profess that we have not here a lasting city.

Yet, to return to our joke, we all laugh at it because, in its obvious exaggeration, it hits a reality we all somehow recognize. Ignatius’s two great heroes were Francis and Dominic, and to a large extent he fashioned the Society of Jesus according to the pattern they set for their orders, but not entirely. Not without some significant modifications—modifications that gave it a care for this world that was new for a religious order—a care that has persisted to this day.

Changes

The first tweaking he did was insisting that the Society’s members not recite or chant the liturgical hours like matins and vespers. Members of other orders had to come together at least five times a day for the liturgies. The reason Ignatius and his founding companions gave for not wanting to do that was it would be “a considerable hindrance to us, since besides other necessary duties, we must frequently be engaged a great part of the day and even of the night in comforting the sick, both in body and spirit.”

Because of the Jesuits’ massive commitment to schools, we sometimes forget how committed they have been throughout their history to works of social assistance. In the description of the order Ignatius submitted to the pope to ask him to approve the order, Ignatius gave as the order’s purpose “the progress of persons in Christian life and doctrine,” a strictly religious purpose.

But when in that same document he spelled out what it meant in practice, a large part of the Jesuits’ job description was helping others in this world: “to reconcile the estranged, compassionately to assist and serve prisoners in jail and the sick in hospitals and indeed to perform any other works of charity as will seem expedient for the glory of God and the common good.”

In the description of the order Ignatius submitted to the pope to ask him to approve the order, Ignatius gave as the order’s purpose “the progress of persons in Christian life and doctrine,” a strictly religious purpose.

Ignatius founded the first orphanage in the city of Rome, which is still in existence and functioning today, and he and his companions founded hospices for pilgrims and pharmacies for the sick.

Perhaps their most innovative undertaking was the House of Saint Martha, one of the first halfway houses ever founded. It was a house for prostitutes who wanted to get out of their profession. Most were in it, of course, out of sheer desperation. The Jesuits provided a clean, comfortable home where the women could stay for several months and get back on their feet. Jesuits also organized lay people to provide dowries for them so that they would not have to slip back into prostitution.

The Franciscans and Dominicans, of course, also engaged in works of mercy. Charity, after all, is intrinsic to being Christian. Peculiar to the Jesuits, however, was the explicit articulation of works of mercy as an essential element of what the order was about. They were not only preachers of the Word and ministers of the sacraments, but also and professedly agents engaged in works of social assistance and devoted to the “promotion of the common good.”

Common good

“Promotion of the common good”! That’s the expression they used, and I don’t know any other order that has “promotion of the common good” as an official, explicit, and essential aspect of the order’s purpose. Does that make them worldly? Not quite, but it does imbue them with an intriguing concern for this world qua this world. But the big shift to worldliness came when, a few years after the order was founded, Ignatius decided the order would run schools for young laymen. These schools were to inculcate and foster Catholic belief and practice in the students, but first and foremost they were to produce upright citizens of this world. In a letter to the whole Society of Jesus after the first schools were founded, Juan de Polanco, Ignatius’s secretary, stated the Jesuits’ purpose succinctly: they were to run the schools so that “those who are now only students will grow up to be pastors, civic officials, ministers of justice, and will fill other important posts to everybody’s profit and advantage.”

The Jesuits were the first order to run schools for the laity on a programmatic basis. And the laity went to the schools, as Jesuits knew well, to make their way in this world . . . a goal toward which the Jesuits were happy to assist them.

Of course, the Jesuits had hopes for their students beyond that, and those hopes were expressed in Polanco’s line; Jesuits were—and still are—interested in the character formation of the students to promote the common good and build a just society and a peaceful world.

Those goals are not, therefore, some idea the Jesuits cooked up in the 1960s but have been at the heart of the Society from the beginning. One of the greatest examples of Jesuit commitment to the betterment of this world is the Paraguay reducciónes, those great cities of Amerindians founded by Jesuits in the late sixteenth century to protect them from Spanish and Portuguese villains who wanted slaves. Some historians have described reducciónes as perhaps as close as human beings will ever come to realizing the kind of human and humane society Thomas More dreamed about in his Utopia and was convinced would never come to pass.

But back to the schools! They transformed the Society of Jesus, and, gosh, in so doing they helped make the Jesuits worldly. From the very beginning the schools ate up large amounts of cash as fast as it came in, and in that regard the schools were quite different from traditional Christian ministries. An English scholar, not a Catholic, convincingly argues in a wonderful article that the schools turned the Jesuits into “the world’s first professional fundraisers.” To the naked eye, fundraising does not quite look like preaching the Gospel!

Civic institutions

We need to realize, moreover, that from the beginning the schools were conceived primarily as civic institutions—usually requested from the Jesuits by the city or by some of its citizens, in some form or other paid for by the city and established to serve the families of the city. They were often the leading cultural institution in the city, providing public entertainment through theater and music and providing library resources in an age before public libraries. The apex of the curriculum was rhetoric, the art of public discourse, the art of winning consensus so as to unite the citizens behind a common cause for the good of the city or the state.

For the Jesuits, Cicero was the great and unparalleled teacher of rhetoric. The Jesuits taught his book de Officiis (On Public Responsibility) in their schools year after year, and they probably knew most of it by heart. Here is a well-known passage:

“We are not born for ourselves alone . . . Everything the earth produces is created for our use, and we, too, as human beings are born for the sake of other human beings, that we might mutually help one another. We ought therefore to take nature as our guide and contribute to the common good of humankind by reciprocal acts of kindness, by giving and receiving from one another, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents work to bring human society together in peace and harmony.”

Jesuits, I believe, would easily have correlated these words of Cicero, a pagan author, with the Spiritual Exercises, which affirms we were created for the praise, reverence, and service of God, and the Jesuits knew well that that praise, reverence, and service could not be divorced from concern for one’s neighbor.

Yet the passage from Cicero is directed to the betterment of this world qua this world. The Jesuits would see it, therefore, as an amplification of the words of the Exercises that gave those words an important new modality. Please note, moreover, that Cicero’s “We are not born for ourselves alone” sounds hauntingly like Pedro Arrupe’s “men and women for others.” And “men and women for others” is not a bad thumbnail description of what the Jesuits and their lay colleagues working with them in their ministries are all about. 

John O’Malley, SJ, theology professor at Georgetown University, wrote The First Jesuits (Harvard University Press 1993) and What Happened at Vatican II (Harvard University Press 2008), among many other works. This article is based on an address he gave at a Woodstock Donor Appreciation Dinner at Georgetown.


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