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IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY IN MEN AND WOMEN FOR OTHERS
Ignatian Spirituality Conference
"Companions in the Mission of Christ"
Saint Louis, MO
July 29 - August 1, 1999
John W. Padberg, SJ
The Institute of Jesuit Sources
St. Louis, MO
Ignatius of Loyola, from whom Ignatian spirituality takes its name and inspiration, is not a
twentieth or twenty-first century person. But that spirituality is alive in the twentieth and
appropriate for the twenty-first century. As a matter of fact, Ignatius is also neither a
fifteenth nor a sixteenth century person. He straddled both centuries and partook at one and the same time of the last of the Middle Ages and of the first of the ages of the modern world. He was both influenced by and drew upon a past upon the point of vanishing and he drew upon and was influenced by a modernity in its birth pangs. Maybe in our own age we are at a past upon a point of vanishing and at the beginning of a new and different modernity than that of the last several centuries. As a result, what we now know as Ignatian spirituality may be particularly appropriate for "Companions in the Mission of Christ" today.
This morning Monika Hellwig and I want to reflect upon the development of Ignatian spirituality in forming men and women for others as companions in the mission of Christ. My approach will basically, be historical. In broad strokes, very broad strokes indeed, I shall sketch for you two moments in the historical development of that spirituality. They are separated by a period of four hundred years and for our purposes today I will highlight only one thing from those four centuries. Monika will look at Ignatian spirituality from another perspective. In the broadest possible terms, I shall talk the past, she will talk the present. I shall talk institutions; she will talk persons. . Neither is understandable without the other. They are meant to be complementary.
The first of those moments exemplifies some fundamental originating insights or dominant themes, insights or themes in the brief decades, the forty years from 1523 at Manresa to 1563, the closing of the Council of Trent. These are the years when in the minds and hearts and actions of Ignatius Loyola and Ignatian spirituality began to take shape and the Society of Jesus was born. The second moment embraces the thirty-year period of the last four General Congregations of the Society of Jesus, from the thirty-first in 1965 to the thirty-fourth in 1995. So, forty years, four hundred years, and then the thirty most recent years.
First, let me briefly say what I mean by "spirituality and "Ignatian spirituality." By
Christian spirituality I mean, very simply, what we think and say and choose and do, what we experience, in knowing and loving and serving God in accord with God's self-revelation, especially in the greatest of God's deeds, Jesus Christ Himself. By Ignatian spirituality I mean a set of particular emphases which arise out of the heritage of Ignatius of Loyola. Those emphases have been placed on some particular aspects of the doctrine and practice of Christian spirituality as a whole. Originally and today, too, but less exclusively now, the Society of Jesus as a whole and individual Jesuits and succession of Jesuits throughout the generations developed and transmitted those emphases so a certain amount of what I shall say here involves Jesuit history. But today others, too, other religious and laywomen and men, are active agents of that development and transition in Ignatian spirituality.
Before I list such dominant themes of that spirituality, let me illustrate them with a story
that puts them into practice. It is not the story of Ignatius's wounding at Pamplona,
conversion at Loyola, graces at Manresa, pilgrimage to Jerusalem, studies in Barcelona, Alcala, Salamanca and Paris, gathering of companions at Paris and Venice, vision at LaStorta, nor the approval of the Society of Jesus at Rome. With all of that history many of you are familiar. If not, there are plenty of books about those major circumstances. All of them, of course, influenced the story with which I am about to begin this first part of my swoop through history. And they all influenced, of course, another story with which I shall end that flight in the third part of this presentation.
On February 16, 1543 Ignatius received from Pope Paul IV the papal document formally
establishing a confraternity, the Compagnia della Grazia, to support a new work. To find the initial funds for that work, he charged Pietro Codazzo, the treasurer of the Society's first permanent house in Rome at Our Lady of the Way, to sell some old Roman marble antiquities that had come to light during work for the foundations of the house. Then he went to several influential friends of the still very new and very small Society of Jesus and asked them for money or influence to support his new venture. Those benefactors were persons who ranged from distinguished society women of Rome to more than a dozen cardinals. With the approval and the money in hand, he established that new work. What was it? The Casa Santa Marta, a house for Roman prostitutes desirous of changing their lives. Prostitution was rife in Rome, but if women wanted permanently to get out of it, they had usually only the possibility of permanently entering religious life. This new house provided a temporary shelter for them, plus the then novel idea of providing dowries for those who wanted to marry, plus help for those who wished to become religious, and a reference point for some who entered into the service of the households of the aristocratic supporters of Santa Marta. Ignatius took up the work personally.
He was often seen walking through Rome with one or more of such women whom he was escorting to Santa Marta. The example of such a house caught on and others came into being in cities of Italy and Spain where Jesuits had gone to work. When Ignatius was taxed with the futility of the work, since some would all too easily go back to their trade, he replied that if all his efforts brought only one persons refraining from sin for one night alone, it was well worth the effort "for His majesty our Lord" and for the person involved. Within the next six or seven years some 300 hundred women received help at Santa Marta. The building still exists in Rome; it is now a police station right across the street from the greatest of the old Jesuit schools, the Colegio Romano, later to be known as the Gregorian University.
While Ignatius personally established this work and founded the home, he also founded the confraternity of lay persons to whom he turned over responsibility for the work and the house once it was established. This was not an isolated instance. He did the same with several other works, for instance a confraternity for supporting houses for orphan children. And again in 1543, with the help of Margaret of Austria, the wife of Pope Paul's grandson, he set up two houses to assist prospective Jewish converts to Christianity and established a confraternity for that purpose. A few years later, he persuaded the Pope to agree to another confraternity, this one for the young daughters of prostitutes so they could be sheltered from taking up the profession of their mothers. Its name is usually put in English as the Confraternity for Unfortunate Single Women. A literal English translation of the original Italian, Compagnia dell Vergini Miserabili, is not too fortunate. It comes out as the Company of Miserable Virgins.
But why tell this story? Basically because it is an instance, not the best known, nor the most widespread, but an instance of certain abiding characteristics of Ignatian spirituality that inform men and women for others. They are characteristics in complementary tension. Let me simply begin by mentioning them here. They are, for example, the characteristics of experience and reflective discernment on that experience, discernment followed by action, service of the needy and cultivation of the powerful, individuality and community, spontaneity and organization, initiative and divestment, Jesuits and others as companions in following in love the example of Christ, the human common good and the infinite majesty of God (for Ignatius best expressed in his ardent devotion to the Holy Trinity), finding God in all things, and accommodation or adaptation to the real circumstances in which this spirituality was to be lived out.
This example of Santa Marta, early in the life of the Society of Jesus exhibits all of those
characteristics. Ignatius, as any inhabitant of Rome at the time could hardly avoid
experiencing the presence of prostitution there. His reaction to that experience was to ask
himself what to do about it and then to take action in an organized way to alleviate the
problem. Those anions certainly served the poor and the powerless, and to make that service possible and a lot of other activities like it throughout his life, Ignatius took the human needs of cultivating the rich and powerful. He was interested enough to seek out these women individually, one by one, but right from the beginning he established a community setting as the best way to help them. That help was a human common good, good in itself but even better as a way of following Christ in his mission and as a loving service of "the divine majesty" as he regularly called God. While he took the founding initiative and directive action, and worked with lay men and women in the apostolate, once the work was well established, he divested himself of it, turning it over to that confraternity of lay people in the Compagnia della Grazia to carry on. and it was the real circumstances of a real Rome and real people to which the adapted that work. Finally, in this work, as in all others, he found God actively at work. So much for an example, one example among many, of Ignatian apostolic activity taken from the very early history of the Society of Jesus.
But interestingly and importantly, the Ignatian apostolic spirituality behind that activity, the theory behind the practice, itself had taken time to develop. In the very early Ignatius a spirituality of personal concern for personal individual salvation through an ascetical life stands out as primary. Ignatius began his journey to God as an individual, first as a former gentleman-at-arms and then as a solitary pilgrim. Even while such a pilgrim, he is, at least at the beginning a rather warlike one if we can judge from his almost sanguinary encounter with the Moor on the way to Manresa. Bit by bit, the lone pilgrim is less caught up with individual asceticism and turns, in his phrase, to "helping souls." Once the Society of Jesus is born, the figure of pilgrim becomes associated with mobility, availability for whatever ways God might be served. Even more importantly, as the Society of Jesus itself grows, the individual soldier and pilgrim images give way to a new image, that of a group of companions, "friends in the Lord" who are laborers in a vineyard, with the connotation of stable presence, human means and common endeavor. The term, "vineyard of the Lord" is especially present in the seventh part of the Jesuit Constitutions, the section dealing with the mission of the Society of Jesus, the part written very early and for which Ignatius was probably most personally responsible.
Gradually Ignatius in his life and thought and writings, in his understanding of himself, moved from a more ascetic, traditional, spiritual concern with the personal goal of saving his own soul to an apostolic spirituality concerned with helping others. His constant goal was the love and service and glory of God. His understanding of how to give such a loving service evolved over the years in the light of experience. The Spiritual Exercises are sometimes accused, when taken in isolation, of fostering simply an individualistic spirituality, as a matter of fact, for more than four centuries those Exercises have been presented in the light of the apostolic spirituality of the Jesuit Constitutions as that
spirituality was lived out and reflected upon. In so doing they inculcated a spirituality that
helped form men and women for others, sharing a companionship in the mission of Christ, came into being.
So much for the first moment. Now let me turn to the long years from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The Spiritual Exercises, the Jesuit Constitutions, the propagation of Ignatian spirituality through preaching and writing and teaching did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a church increasingly centralized and hierarchized from the Council of Trent up until a few decades before the second Vatican Council. Spirituality was primarily for priests and religious; it came from priests and religious; if it came to lay folks, it came at best derivatively. If there were an apostolic spirituality of the laity, it was to be fostered in so far as it was at the service of clergy and hierarchy. The patterns of holiness on the part of the laity and a spirituality undergirding those patterns were to be modeled on those of the clergy and religious. To keep to the example of the Society of Jesus, it is not that the Jesuits did not want the laity to be holy. Indeed they did. But by and large the patterns of holiness were often those of the clerical and religious life. It was thought to be a happy occasion when men and women could be so imbued by Jesuit spirituality that they would assist the Society of Jesus in its apostolic work. The same was true of other religious orders and of pastors or bishops in their apostolic work. Indeed, as recently as the 1920s, Catholic Action, which was officially defined as the way for Catholics best to exercise apostolic activity was also officially defined as "the participation of the laity in the apostolate of the hierarchy."
But whatever the official definition, the reality increasingly escaped its confines. Especially the decade and a half from the end of World War II to the beginning of Vatican II saw a gradual change in conceiving of what a spirituality appropriate for the laity might be. Vatican II, without denying those more recent developments, broke out of all the categories, very obviously in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudiium et Spes, but also at least implicitly, and therefore perhaps more importantly, in almost every conciliar document.
Such were the circumstances the led up to the second moment in this account of the development of Ignatian spirituality. That moment embraced three important steps in the last thirty years. Those steps dealt primarily with Jesuits as such but they greatly influenced Ignatian spirituality. Two such steps were unofficial, and one was official. The first unofficial step seems today so utterly obvious as to be banal. But it turned out to be far from commonplace. Individual Jesuit translators and editors begin to make widely available to their brethren translations into the major vernacular languages of the fundamental source documents on the spirituality and history of the Society of Jesus. That sounds utterly pedestrian; as a matter of fact it became extraordinarily influential. People find it incredible that the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, the central structuring and governing document of the Society, written in Spanish and Latin in the late 1540s and early 1550s, was not published in full in English until 1971. It is equally incredible that the Spiritual Diary and the Autobiography of Ignatius Loyola lay untranslated and unpublished in the archives of the Society for three hundred years.
The first substantial edition in English of the letters of Ignatius, a little more than two
hundred of the almost seven thousand letters, appeared only in the late 1950s. The same kind of situation obtained also for such works as the complete letters of Francis Xavier and the MemoriaZe of Peter Faber, works of the two closest early companions of Ignatius, and for all of the original Directories of how to give the Spiritual Exercises. The list could go on. Apart from the Spiritual Exercises, the source documents of the life and spirit of the Society of Jesus were mostly a closed book. All of these precious sources began to be presently available due not to any official policy but to the initiative of a few imaginative people. This was a vivid example of accommodation to the real linguistic circumstances of our present day.
The second unofficial step brought the recovery of individually and personally directed
retreats for religious and laity alike as the usual way to give the Spiritual Exercises, and
the recovery of retreats given in the course of ongoing, everyday life. Certainly through all of the nineteenth century and most probably through all of the eighteenth and part of the seventeenth centuries, retreats for the laity and most of the time for religious were preached group-retreats for a specified number of days. Both of these new retreat movements only began to take place in the English speaking world in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and both started with individual initiatives. Those unofficial steps led not only to the recovery of the richness and variety of a spiritual tradition. It also led to the realization that the spirituality initiated by Ignatius Loyola was indeed a Jesuit spirituality in so far as it was incorporated into the Society of Jesus but that it was also much wider than the Society of Jesus, and that as Ignatian spirituality it was appropriate to and should be made available to a great variety of men and women. And that availability was not to come from Jesuits alone but from whoever, lay or religious, men or women, had experienced it, made it part of their lives and wished to help extend that gift to others.
The official step taken by the Society of Jesus was, as a group, the four general congregations that the Jesuits held during and after Vatican II. A general congregation is the supreme governing body of the Society. Jesuits chosen from all over the world make up its membership. Within those gatherings the Society of Jesus looked back to the past and reappropriated its original charism. It looked around in the present at the church and the world in which and for which it lived and worked in the service of the Lord. It looked forward to how best in the future it might live its life and work for others and serve that Lord.
I shall not go into everything those meetings did. That would take at least another several
hours here. Suffice it to say that in 1965-66, the Society of Jesus sought to renew and adapt itself, especially in its internal life, in the context of Vatican II. In 1975, after ten years of change and sometimes upheaval in the world and in the church, it sought to respond to opportunities and challenges that that church and that world presented to Jesuit life and especially to Jesuit apostolic works. Potentially, the most fruitful and certainly the most controversial response at that congregation stated that "the mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement. For reconciliation with God demands the reconciliation of people with one another." (GC 32, IV, 2 [481) In many ways that statement repeated and gave a particular Jesuit voice to what the church had been saying in the voices of Vatican II, John XXIII, Paul VI and the international synods of bishops. But controversial the statement indeed became inside and outside the Society and subject to fierce debate and criticism about its meaning and import. On the other hand, the shortest and almost unnoticed document of that meeting in 1975 was in the long run of almost equal importance. Only a page and a half in length, it promoted "the work of inculturation of both faith and Christian life in all the continents of the world." (GC 32, V, 1 [131]) That brief statement was to come to fruition twenty years later as I shall point out in a moment. In 1983, the Jesuits elected a new Father General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, and made clear, as their single major document said, that as "companions of Jesus sent in todays world," they were going to continue on the paths set out in the previous decade and a half. Finally, in 1995, just four years ago, the 34th General Congregation said forcefully of the Society's mission "that the faith that does justice is inseparably the faith that engages other traditions in dialogue and the faith that evangelizes culture." (GC 34 II 21 [491) The service of faith, the promotion of justice, a dialogue with the other religious traditions of humanity, and the interrelated evangelization of culture and inculturation of the Gospel sum up the current expression of the perennial Jesuit mission. The dialogue with other religions and especially the dialogue with other cultures, with all that "culture" implies, has been and will continue to be one of the Society's most fruitful breakthroughs. It helps us to see and to make the church and the Gospel far more than simply a Western-world structure and a Western-world proclamation of revelation. Maybe we shall really begin to sense the implications of a God who embraces the whole wide world.
And now, at this point and in the context of this particular conference on Companions in the Mission of Christ, let me come to the final story in this second major moment in this presentation. Right from the beginning of the general congregation in 1995, the two hundred and more delegates wanted to make a major, explicit statement about the Society of Jesus and lay men and lay women. More requests for such a statement had come from Jesuits from all over the world than on any other topic. Over a period of weeks that turned into a month and then stretched into almost two months, the special committee set up to prepare a draft statement struggled with how to describe and develop the implications of the cooperation of the laity with the works of the Society. The level of frustration rose as what was being proposed simply did not work either in the committee or when presented tentatively to the whole congregation.
Finally, pasta provoked a possible breakthrough. The anxious committee was meeting during dinner one day (a noontime dinner as is the custom in Italy) and the discussion was going nowhere until one of the members, perhaps nourished by the usual pasta and enlightened by the usual table wine, ("In vino veritas"?) suddenly said, "We've got it all wrong. Turn the question around. It shouldn't be 'How can lay people best assist the Society of Jesus in its apostolic life?' It ought be 'How can the Society of Jesus assist lay men and lay women in their apostolic lives?' Our question shouldn't primarily be 'What do we get?' but rather 'What do we give in working with the laity and others in mission?"' From that 180 degree turn in perspective came the document of the congregation, 12 "Cooperation With the Laity in Mission." Of course, Jesuits receive much from others, from their experience and their insights, as we work together. That is obvious. This document on cooperation begins by stating quite simply that "the church of the next millennium will be the church of the laity . . .The congregation acknowledges [this] as a grace of our day and a hope for the future....We seek to respond to this grace by offering ourselves in service to the full realization of this mission of the laity and we commit ourselves to that end by cooperation with them in their mission." (GC 34, XIII, 1 [3311) "Jesuits are both 'men for others' and 'men with others.' This . . . calls for an attitude and a readiness to cooperate, to listen and to learn from others, to share our spiritual and apostolic inheritance." ad, XIII, 4 [334]) The congregation went on to say, "We offer Ignatian spirituality as a specific gift . . . [that] respects the unique spirituality of the individual and adapts itself to present needs; it helps persons to discern their call and 'in all things to love and serve the divine majesty.' Perhaps most importantly we journey with them in companionship: serving together, learning from and responding to each other's concerns and initiatives, dialoguing with one another on apostolic objectives." (I, XIII, 7 [3371)
Hence this present meeting here and now in St. Louis.
I started this talk with an example, an instance from the life of Ignatius, in the moment of the first forty years of the Society life, the years that directly laid the foundation of Jesuit spirituality and indirectly of Ignatian spirituality. The founding of Casa Santa Marta clearly exhibited some of the characteristics of that spirituality. As in that instance, those abiding characteristics are experience and reflective discernment on that experience, discernment followed by action, service of the needy and cultivation of the powerful, individuality and community, spontaneity and organization, companionship in following in love the example of Christ, the human common good and the infinite majesty and greater glory of God (for Ignatius best expressed in his ardent devotion to the Holy Trinity), accommodation to the real world as it really exists and finding God in all things. Another characteristic of that instance at Casa Santa Marta, initiative and divestment, the handing over of an apostolate to others after it had been established, was a characteristic that fell all too much into disuse in the ensuing centuries and has only in recent decades begun to take place on a large scale again. No longer are Jesuits simply laborers in the vineyard; they are working together with others, lay men and women and other religious, in that vineyard, and often handing over a portion of the vineyard to them.
Let me now end this presentation with a quotation that goes far back beyond Jesuit spirituality and Ignatian spirituality and that sums up the utterly fundamental circumstance in which God accommodated himself to the human condition and in which we as Christians carry on Christ's mission. The quotation comes from Gregory of Nazianzus, the great fourth century theologian: "This is indeed an unheard of commingling and a paradoxical fusion. He who is becomes; the Infinite is created and contained in space; . . . the Word becomes reachable by the senses; the Invisible is seen; the Inaccessible touched; the Timeless steps into time; the Son of God becomes the Son of a woman and the Son of Man." Such is the Christ of whom we, whatever the century, are companions on mission.
Talks '02: Duckro | Cowan | Fleming
'99: Cowan | Hellwig | Padberg
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