The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [11]
Knowing, for example, that the early Jesuits set up such varied ventures as schools for boys and a house for reformed prostitutes, while serving as advisors to popes and an ecumenical council, gives a sense of their openness to new ministries in a way that reading the Constitutions does not. And reading about their early work in education underlines the emphasis that Ignatius placed on reason, learning, and scholarship.
The history of the Jesuit saints who followed Ignatius is another resource for understanding his way. These men applied their own insights to the Ignatian way in both everyday ways and in extreme environments. Whether they were working among the Huron and Iroquois peoples in seventeenth-century “New France,” like St. Isaac Jogues and St. Jean de Brébeuf, or secretly ministering to sixteenth-century English Catholics while enduring persecution under the crown, like St. Edmund Campion. Or surviving in a Soviet labor camp in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, like Walter Ciszek. Or working alongside the poor, like the Salvadoran Jesuits who would be martyred in the 1980s. Each of the lives of these saints and holy men highlights a specific facet of Ignatian spirituality.
But holiness is not confined to the past. Over the last two decades I have met many holy Jesuits who have given me the gift of their examples.
In many religious orders, the members whose lives embody the ideals of their order are called “living rules.” Were the community somehow to lose its rule or constitution, it would need only to look at these men or women to understand it again. These living rules, whose stories I will share, are another source of insight on Ignatian spirituality.
Finally, there is the resource of experts who have made the study of Ignatian spirituality their lives’ work. Happily, this extends far beyond Jesuit priests and brothers. In a development that would have delighted Ignatius—who welcomed anyone onto his spiritual path— Catholic sisters, priests and brothers from other religious orders, clergy and laypersons from other Christian denominations, and men and women from other religious traditions have all embraced the way of Ignatius. Some have become among the most astute commentators on his spirituality.
THE WAY OF IGNATIUS
The way of Ignatius has been traveled by hundreds of thousands of Jesuits over the past 450 years, in all parts of the world and in almost every conceivable situation, many of them perilous.
Ignatius’s insights inspired the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci to live and dress as a Mandarin in order to be granted entry into the imperial Chinese court in the 1600s. They encouraged Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French paleontologist and theologian, to set out for (literally) groundbreaking archeological digs in China in the 1920s. They galvanized John Corridan, an American social scientist, to work for labor reform in 1940s New York. (His story partly inspired the film On the Waterfront) They consoled Alfred Delp, a German Jesuit, when he was jailed and awaiting execution for aiding the Resistance movement allied against the Nazis. They comforted Dominic Tang, a Jesuit who, beginning in the late 1950s, spent twenty-two years in a Chinese jail for his loyalty to the Catholic Church. They motivated Daniel Berrigan, the American peace activist, in his protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam War.
And thousands of Jesuits somewhat lesser known to the world have found Ignatian spirituality a guide for their daily lives. The high-school teacher struggling to connect with inner-city children. The physician working in a remote refugee camp. The hospital chaplain counseling a dying patient. The pastor comforting a grieving parishioner. The army chaplain accompanying soldiers trying to find meaning in the midst of violence. This particular list is