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That includes the most painful choice of all—the decision to dismiss someone from the Jesuits. Indeed, Ignatius carefully outlined the steps to be taken after the decision is made to ask someone to leave. This particular example of a compassionate superior could be profitably used by the corporate world.

First, said Ignatius, the superior should ensure that the man is able to leave the house with the respect of his peers, without any “shame or dishonor.” Second, the superior should send him away “with as much love and charity for [the community] and as much consoled in our Lord as is possible.” Third, he should “guide him in taking up some other good means of serving God, in religious life or outside . . . assisting him with advice and prayers and whatever . . . may seem best.”

Ironically, this no-nonsense to-do list is among the most touching of all of Ignatius’s writings. The gentle heart of Ignatius is revealed more openly than anywhere else in the Constitutions. Ignatius sees even this wrenching decision under the governance of love. (Compare that with the way firings and layoffs are sometimes handled in the business world.)

All Jesuits understand the goals of obedience. But there are times when, even with that understanding, it remains a challenge. Let me tell you two brief stories about that.

TWO STORIES ABOUT OBEDIENCE

Strange as it may seem today, Robert Drinan, S.J., was for many years a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving a congressional district in Massachusetts. In the late 1960s his prayer and discernment led Drinan, at the time a law professor at Boston College, to conclude that entering political life would be the best way to effect lasting change in society, and he received the approval of his superiors to run for office. Drinan served until 1981 and became famous for being the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon in 1973, in light of his actions during the Vietnam War.

But in time the Vatican decided that priests should not be involved in political life so directly. So Pedro Arrupe, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, being obedient to his superior—PopeJohn Paul II—ordered Drinan not to run for reelection in 1980. Drinan’s comments at a press conference were striking. Here is a Jesuit relinquishing his important work and—most important—trusting in the obedience that he had made at his first vows.

I am proud and honored to be a priest and a Jesuit. As a person of faith, I must believe that there is work for me to do which somehow will be more important than the work I am required to leave. I undertake this new pilgrimage with pain and prayers.

Afterward Bob became a popular law professor at Georgetown University and a distinguished author of many articles and books on international human rights, respected by those inside and outside religious circles. In later years, before his death in 2007, he was criticized for some of his writings on abortion. (And I disagreed with him on this myself.) Still, I always respected him as someone who showed what it meant to trust that God was at work even in painful decisions.

A few decades earlier, another prominent Jesuit, the theologian John Courtney Murray, confronted a similar order. A tall, erudite man who, one Jesuit said, “entered a room like an ocean liner,” Murray was a brilliant scholar who once appeared on the cover of Time magazine. But his renown did not prevent him from accepting a hard decision from his superiors.

In the 1950s, a group of talented theologians, including Murray, were “silenced” by Vatican officials and their own religious orders. Murray, a theology professor at the Jesuit’s Woodstock College in Maryland, had written extensively on the question of church and state, proposing that constitutionally protected religious freedom, that is, the freedom of individuals to worship as they pleased, was in accord with Catholic teaching. The Vatican disagreed, and in