Pope Benedict AND THE JESUITS

As 2022 came to a close, we heard of the death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. His address to the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus inspired Jesuits worldwide, especially those who heard it first-hand, including Fr Michael Holman SJ.

From January to March 2008, I was a delegate to the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus. Our primary task, in addition to reflecting on many aspects of our Jesuit life and mission, was to choose a successor to Fr Peter Hans Kolvenbach as superior general. On 19 January we duly elected Fr Adolfo Nicolás.

The congregation was already in its seventh week when we made our way from the General Curia building, across St Peter’s Square, to the Apostolic Palace. There, in the magnificent Sala Clementina, we were addressed by Pope Benedict.

We could not have been more encouraged by what the pope had to say, nor more sure that he had confirmed our life and mission in the Church and the world today.

He told us, firstly, that the Church relied on Jesuits to go to those ‘spiritual or physical places which others do not reach or have difficulty in reaching’. The frontiers to which the pope sent us were not only geographical but also those places where faith and culture meet – wherever, he said, quoting Pope Paul VI, ‘there is a confrontation between the burning exigences of man and the perennial message of the gospel’.

Province Statement

There we were to bring the full tradition of the Church and to form ‘people with a deep and sound faith, a well-grounded culture and genuine human social sensitivity’. This in turn required a Jesuit formation, personal as well as intellectual, as thorough as it ever had been. ‘Only in this way will it be possible to make the Lord’s true face known to the many for whom he is still concealed or unrecognisable’.

The pope, secondly, affirmed our commitment to the poor, in a world marked by new causes of poverty, ‘by grave financial and environmental imbalances, by globalisation processes prompted by selfishness rather than solidarity and by devastating senseless armed conflicts’. Our option for the poor, he reminded us, had its origins not in ideology but in the fact that Christ the Son of God had become human for our sakes ‘so as to enrich us with his poverty’. He especially commended our work with refugees, ‘gathering and developing’, as he put it, ‘one of Fr Arrupe’s last far-sighted intuitions’.

Finally, the pope asked us to focus our attention on the ministry of the Spiritual Exercises. It was our task to continue to make them available as a means for ‘initiation to prayer, to meditation in this secularised world where God seems to be absent’.

The Jesuits in Britain would like to pay tribute to the memory of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

As pope, he led the global Church through a delicate period, drawing on his faith and his vast theological expertise to provide spiritual sustenance and stability during turbulent times. His historic state visit to Britain in 2010 strengthened the faith of many Catholics here and cemented friendly and fruitful relations between the UK and the Holy See.

The Jesuits have a special, affective bond to the pope, expressed in a vow of obedience to him in regard to missions. We pray for him in death as in life. Pope Benedict was unfailingly generous in his understanding of our vocation of service to the Church, and for this we will always be grateful.

May he rest in peace.

The pope’s words had a profound effect on the rest of the congregation. His summons to us to go to the frontiers was especially important in our reflections on our identity, and the decree on our contemporary mission in which those frontiers were understood in terms of working to bring about reconciliation in our world, with God, with each other, and with creation.