Religion: Army in Black

At other major church gatherings in Rome, the scene would have been bright with signs of clerical identity—the scarlet of cardinals, the purple of bishops, the variously shaded sashes of the seminarians. But the 180 priest-delegates who assembled in Rome last week, though members of an order that is organized like an army, wore plain black cassocks without sign of rank. The austere tradition recalls St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), who when he first took up a life of poverty insisted on wearing a woolen tunic, which earned him and his earliest followers in Spain the jeering nickname ensayalados, the men in wool.

In the Jesuit headquarters in Borgo Santo Spirito near St. Peter’s Square, the modern men in wool met in Extraordinary General Congregation, the sixth since Loyola’s death, to settle pressing business facing the Society of Jesus, largest and most powerful order in the Roman Catholic Church.

In the chapel, the delegates sang the Gregorian chant Veni Creator Spiritus (some priestly voices were off key; the Jesuits have never been famed for their singing), then briskly moved to a large, barnlike room and took their seats on plain wooden benches facing writing desks. From a raised table they were greeted—in Latin, the order’s normal business language —by alabaster-pale, 67-year-old Jean-Baptiste Janssens, 27th Superior General of the Society of Jesus, also known (like his predecessors) as “the Black Pope.”

Father Janssens, whose authority is as nearly absolute as any military commander’s, called the Congregation for one major reason: to reorganize the command structure of his vast religious army (50 provinces, 33 vice-provinces, 5,000 communities all over the world), and to delegate part of his own power.

The Issue. For years, it has been plain that the top command job in the Jesuit order was too much for one man, that ailing Father Janssens’ personal decisions were meticulous but sometimes slow. Toughest problem: every day Janssens must appoint from two to five new rectors or heads of globally scattered missions. Under the present system, the order’s Provincials (roughly equivalent to local field commanders) submit names to Janssens’ eight Assistants* (staff officers), but Janssens himself reviews all cases, makes all final decisions.

Issue before the Congregation: whether to vest some of Janssens’ appointive powers in the Assistants or Provincials. Insiders believe that the delegates will plump for more power for the Assistants, fearing too much decentralization otherwise. But one powerful bloc—from the U.S. and Britain—favors increasing the Provincials’ local powers. Since agenda and voting are secret, the decision may not be known till after the two-month meeting is over.

The Order. Whatever form the organizational change takes, the need for it is plain merely in the statistics of Jesuit growth and activity. Numbering 15,000 at the turn of the century, the Society of Jesus has since more than doubled in size, now stands at a record 33,732. Largest single contingent: the 8,156 Jesuits of the U.S. In various parts of the world, Jesuits:

¶Work in 71 missions, 6,640 mission stations, some 4,000 schools, 350 hospitals and 16 leprosaria.

¶Publish 1,320 periodicals in 50 different languages, including 24 U.S. magazines, e.g., America, Jesuit Missions. ¶Administer 174 houses of retreat (32 in the U.S.).

¶Run 59 colleges and universities, 28 of them in the U.S.

¶Man the Vatican radio, edit the Vatican newspaper, staff Rome’s Gregorian University (for ecclesiastics), whose alumni include Pope Pius XII as well as 13 previous Popes, 77 cardinals, 686 bishops and eight saints.

Jesuits are encouraged to develop their special talents or interests, ranging from archaeology to automation, from deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls to spotting the latest comet in the telescopes of the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo. Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, was a paleontologist of world renown who unearthed conclusive evidence that the so-called Peking man discovered in China in 1929 was human. Father Francis J. Heyden of Georgetown University is a recognized expert on eclipses. Many

Jesuits are prominent in seismology and geophysics, e.g., Father J. Joseph Lynch, director of Fordham’s geophysical observatory. In Rome, Father Roberto Busa is picking the electrical brains of a battery of IBM machines to sort out the different shades of meaning that St. Thomas Aquinas intended for his 13 million written words. Some 800 Jesuits are deep in theology; about 80 are electricity and physics experts; more than 900 are physicians or have some medical training.

The Man. Whether his eye is fixed on a plant or a planet, a chemical retort or a dialectical retort to Communist propaganda, every Jesuit everywhere owes his unswerving obedience to his tactful, affable and unassuming Superior General. Belgian-born Jesuit Janssens wryly credits his painstaking, lifelong concern for accuracy to the fact that his father was a tax collector. A precocious youngster, young Janssens was first in his class at school every year from the age of nine through 15, won a gold medal and the title primus perpetuus, i.e., everlasting first. At 17, he entered the Society of Jesus, took his first vows two years later in 1909. He took a doctorate in civil law at Louvain University in 1919 and the same year was ordained a priest. Over the next quarter-century, and especially as head of the North Belgian Province (1938-46), Father Janssens developed a kind of subterranean reputation as a quiet, levelheaded administrator. No one was more surprised than the self-effacing Belgian when in 1946 he became the fourth of his countrymen to head the Jesuits.

As Superior General, Father Janssens has never allowed intermittent bouts with asthma and high blood pressure to keep him from his order’s austere regimen. His day begins at 5:30 a.m., with Mass, meditation and thanksgiving (by the rule of St. Ignatius, every Jesuit must spend four hours a day in prayer). By 9:15, with his iron bedstead curtained off, he transforms his bedroom into a study and tackles the day’s work, sitting on a straight-backed chair behind a large wooden desk (another straight-backed chair for visitors and three shelves of books complete the office furnishings).

Outside Janssens’ room are eight letter boxes, each containing the mail from the order’s eight “assistancies.” These letters, sometimes as many as 20,000 a day, are summarized paragraph by paragraph by secretaries, and annotated by the Assistant of the area involved before a final reply goes out. At 12:45, like every Jesuit throughout the world, Father Janssens does his 15-minute examination of conscience. After lunch, during which he sometimes waits on table for fellow Jesuits, he gets back to his desk. The day ends with a 10:15 visit to the chapel and a 10:30 lights-out. This schedule is relaxed slightly on weekends, when the general packs the omnipresent letters, plus a private secretary, into a diesel-engined black Mercedes, and heads for the Jesuit-owned Villa Cavallatti in the Alban Hills, where he tends a flower garden described by him as “a great love.”

The eleven years of Janssens’ generalship have been marked less by spectacular achievements than by a policy of steady, quiet realism, well illustrated by Janssens’ decision to close many of the order’s colleges that for centuries trained young aristocrats, instead open colleges in Italy’s Red districts. Balancing up the eleven years of Father Janssens’ generalship, the delegates may well conclude that the order has gained not only in numbers but in public esteem and within the church itself. Intramural friction with other Catholic orders is at a minimum. The society enjoys the personal favor of Pius XII (both the Pope’s secretaries are Jesuits, as is his personal confessor). In an age of ideological conflict, many intellectuals (including non-Catholics) have come to appreciate the discipline and diligence Jesuits have brought to the battle of ideas. Much of the distrust aroused in the past by the order that was instructed by its founder to be “all things to all men” has disappeared. There are few who would today second the sputtering judgment of John Adams: “If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of Loyola’s.”

* For the U.S., Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Eastern Europe, Latin America.