Who Are the Jesuits? (A Protestant Asks)

I know what Catholics are even though I'm not one everybody has a sense of that they can picture the churches they can picture the tradition the associations with Rome but you are not just a Catholic you are a Jesuit which is some kind of subset of Catholic what does that mean kind of yeah if people know a Catholic priest or they know anything about a Catholic priest they probably know the priest in their local Parish but in the Catholic Church there are also religious orders which go back way back to early early Christianity and so I belong to one of these religious orders it happens to be I think still the largest male religious order in the church the Society of Jesus which actually as as an epithet became known as the Jesuits because people were saying you can't be the Society of Jesus Christianity is the Society of Jesus and so they started saying we're going to call you jesuiti the Jesuits and we kind of embraced it and said okay yes we'll take the name of Jesus marking us above all that's what we're trying to do so it's it's a religious order in the Catholic church so other religious orders would be like the order of preachers Saint Dominic right the Dominicans order preachers the benedictines the carthusians the capuchins on and on there's most of those are monks and you're not a monk right right so um in the 16th century which is when the Jesuit order was founded was a period of great kind of ferment in the church and you have a movement from the monks to what are called the mendicants the the ones who go begging those are the franciscans and the Dominicans two finally in the 16th century all these reform movements that become fully apostolically engaged moving everywhere in the world not tied to a particular Monastery or to a particular Priory but really the early Jesuits were great missionaries and went to every corner of the earth and so you have religious orders that are now diffuse widely throughout the world so it's itinerant in the same way that Dominic went around and tried to preach to the cathars but it's not mendicant in the sense that Dominic owned nothing and begged the people he was trying to reach yes in a sense well the distinguishing feature is not the mendicancy not the begging so we we like all religious orders take vows of poverty Chastity and obedience so we only own things in common we we don't marry and we receive our missions from our superiors so that's shared in common with all religious orders the distinguishing feature of the Jesuits from the beginning is um for one thing yes this this kind of we call it a charism a Grace or a character a character of movement one of the early Jesuits said the road is our home the road is our home because the Jesuits kind of moved out to all much like Journey and do you think they had a song about that yeah the road is Hardcore that Journey that's right okay so when I think of the Jesuit movement as an outsider as a Protestant yeah I picture it being like like a similar missionary impulse to that that we see early on in protestantism can I think of Jesuits and missionaries together is that fair the same it's the same same historical era so the Age of Exploration when you think about late 16th century I mean really beginning the late 15th century but the 16th century moving into the 17th century the the circumnavigation of the globe it becomes possible to go to places that people have never been before um the reason that the Jesuits were so interested in that is because of this deep conviction that Saint Ignatius the founder of the Jesuits had that God is already at work in the world we're going to meet him where he's already laboring and we have to find um as it were the conversation as it already exists and look for places where we can propose in a positive way a Christian engagement with this particular culture and so from the very beginning the Jesuits went to Asia to South America to peoples who had never had contact with European civilization and obviously had never had contact with Christianity and looking for the place where you could find in their culture something that was already open to an engagement with the gospel and starting from there this is not the same Saint Ignatius like from way back in the day they got eaten by lions right another guy so this so This Saint Ignatius he actually took his name from that Saint Ignatius of Antioch is the early the patristic uh figure who was you know finally led to Rome and put to death um this is a man from um the very Northern tip of Spain The Basque Country his original name was Inigo and it seems actually that he may have just made a mistake when he put his name into Latin as a student at the University of Paris that he um it really his name should have been enakus in Latin in any case he had a great Devotion to Ignatius of Antioch and um he became known as Ignatius from that point on here on your campus there is a church and it's somehow associated with the name Francis Xavier right is is this another Jesuit how does he connect to the story here it is so um Ignatius Loyola who is the one that you can trace back as the founder properly speaking goes to the University of Paris when it's the greatest University in the world people are coming from around Europe and his first roommates are a man named Francis Xavier and a Frenchman from Savoy called Peter Faber and so here they are just College roommates prior to their encounter Ignatius has gone through he's gone to Jerusalem he's made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem he's encountered lots of people in various parts of Spain and Italy and whatnot and he's developed this new way of praying which he described as like physical exercise so he says These Are Spiritual exercises that you can do and he says okay I'm going to give my college roommates these spiritual exercises you do these spiritual exercises over 30 days and it's essentially trying to use the the scriptures and other meditations that can help you to have a direct personal Encounter With Jesus Christ and with the Saints and and the whole of the tradition he gives these spiritual exercises to his college roommates Peter Faber and Francis Xavier and it turns their lives around their lives around and they decide that whatever plans they had before they now have to turn are in a new direction that God's opening up a new horizon to them and they're not sure what that Horizon is yet but they have to give themselves totally to him and so that starts the story now several years down the road from that moment um Ignatius is with his original companions in Rome and they've offered themselves to the pope because the pope is supposed to have the view of The Universal Church where are the needs where do we need to place people and where where can we move forward in Mission and there's a deep need for the church to make contact with the peoples of the East first of all with India but moving on further to Japan eventually China Francis Xavier is the one who is um who feels called to this Mission Ignatius sends him and he becomes the great missionary to the east he we think he baptized more people than than maybe anyone else in the church's tradition including maybe even Saint Paul's and it's hard to know it's hard to have records about that but he was the great missionary to the East and he dies on a little island off the south of China looking into the great Kingdom that everyone in the East said you if you want to convert Asia you've got to go to China and he dies on this island within you know just a few miles of of what he understood himself as impelled toward he shouldn't feel bad only Nixon can go to China we mix it would take many more centuries yeah that's what I've heard yeah but but the Jesuits do get China and they they get to everywhere they do everywhere and actually the the Jesuit mission to China is one of the great kind of famous stories it's it'll be an Italian Jesuit Mateo Ricci who goes you know some decades later and within his lifetime they make contact with the Emperor of China shortly thereafter you will have a Jesuit who is the court astronomer and the court painter for the the the Chinese Court in the Forbidden City in Beijing so that happens all around the world the Jesuits fan out on the basis of their um their commitment to deep study and their conviction that the Lord wants to permeate every part of the world and to make contact with every culture in the world not simply wiping it out but finding the place where you can do what the early Christians did which was okay where in Greco-Roman culture can we find something that Christianity can actually affirm and can actually transform that's what the Jesuits tried to do around the world what kind of revitalization in force did this play in the church coming off the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter Reformation I mean how energizing was it to have for the first time new Mission opportunities open up I mean you go back to Colombia and Iona and Patrick and it's been a long time since we'd seen this did it change the church as a whole well the missionary impulse this opens up I mean not only the technological advancements which allows you to go to many places but there's a spiritual advancement here which is going back to this idea of spiritual exercise um Ignatius in the early deserts were deeply deeply distressed by the fragmentation that was appearing in Christianity and the inability of Christians to speak with each other and um Ignatius was was convinced that if people could make spiritual exercises if you could get below the kind of superficial um debates and maybe even the prideful kind of arguments that that that create the division in an even wider kind of sense if you can go deeper so that people have an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ that's the foundation of Christian unity and so already early Jesuits are engaging with people who have now you know they're working in Germany where the Lutheran kind of reformation is happening and they're trying to go across boundaries on the basis of proposing spiritual exercise um the idea is okay how are you going to solve the problem of disunity in the church well it's only going to be through the foundational element of this personal direct encounter with uh Jesus Christ now that actually made people a little bit nervous about the early Jesuits because you had groups in Spain that um the the illuminatos the people who were illuminated right and the concern was aren't the Jesuits just another one of these reforming movements they don't care about uh the structure of the church what's unusual about Ignatius is he seemed to love the hierarchy and the structure of the church as much as he loved the personal Encounter With Jesus Christ and so the coming of these two things together um was something that the Jesuits wanted to offer in a time of great I mean that's Catholicism at its best I think so I mean I'm a Jesuit so yeah you've got some investment in it yeah so what does it do now why does it continue to exist I mean the world's kind of explored people have heard about Jesus what's the point now yeah well I think in a strange way here we are 500 years on almost um the world is at a point once again where there are great fissures and infraction and fragmentation and um the question is how do you make forward movement how do you do that you've got to go to a deeper deeper level the Jesuits have for many centuries now been involved in the education in the world of Education and that idea is that um really it's the formation of people that makes possible the kind of unity that we would like to see at the the level of society and of the church you've got to form people and they can't be formed superficially they have to be formed deeply in the tradition they have to understand also that God works independent of these various means and instruments and so um it's not merely like they have their shapeless dough that has to be shaped into something no they bring something and they bring already a relationship with God um into any encounter that he's going to use and we're going to fan that into flames and try to see what God has to say to us and surprise us even in them so so what do the Jesuits do now we run Retreat houses and universities and the largest high school network in the world and um and we also were involved in parishes and various kinds of Ministries in big cities back uh in the late 1970s we got involved at the point when the Vietnamese boat people crisis was happening in Asia we got involved with migrants because it was becoming clear that migration is one of the signs of the times if people are on the move the church has to be on the move and we have to go to the places where things are are most difficult where there's most tension we've defined a way to help the church be present in those places so I'm going over to your College Church yeah that bears the name Francis Xavier as a savior I mean this is a it's a Catholic church but it's with a Jesuit flare right I haven't seen it yet what do I need to look for that would be the distinguishing marks that associated with the Jesuit movement well you know the Jesuit order I'm gonna get it right see I'm learning just an order yeah it's um in St Louis it's known as the college church and the reason for that is because it was the Church of the college even when the college was first founded downtown in the early 1800s so you're going to notice that it's a church that's built for students that's really the the idea okay um it's a church of the Society of Jesus so part of the way that you're going to teach the students you're going to open a kind of horizon for them is by proposing to them some of the kind of Glorious things that God has done in members of the Society of Jesus and the most the thing that you want to pay most attention to therefore are the windows the windows are extraordinary they're made by a company here in in in St Louis originally from Germany Amo fry and the plan of these windows is each set of Windows tells the story of a single Jesuit Saint including Above All Saint Francis Xavier who's in the front right across from him his friend Saint Ignatius of Loyola the founder of the Jesuits and then every set of Windows going back from that point to the back of the church are pairs of Jesuit saints that are related to each other in some way so you have great doctors of the church Peter Canisius on one side Robert Bellarmine on the other side behind that you have this great figure um Alphonsus Rodriguez who was a Jesuit brother he wasn't a priest he was not ordained but a member of the Jesuit order and um his great kind of Glory was that he answered the door at one of our Jesuit colleges simple simple task but when he answered the door he had the absolute conviction that the person he was going to meet was Jesus Christ and it turns out that in the the midst of during this work he got to know one of the Jesuits young Jesuits who were studying to be a priest and he could see his heart was a flame and he says you know what you should do you should ask to be a missionary to the new world go to go to South America and this man Peter Claver went and he he made himself as he said a slave of the slaves he greeted the slaves as they would come off the ships being brought against their will by these Colonial powers and when no one else would care for them or even look at them he would go and tend their wounds and care for them so you've got Alphonsus Rodriguez on one side the great brother who worked at the door who proposed to this young man this young Jesuit student go to the new world care for for these people and it goes on and on so look for the pairings of the Saints the other thing to look for is they did a very clever thing when they um designed the plan of these windows what you have are three columns three vertical columns with three panels each three separate Windows each and what you've got on the outside the the outside two columns is simply the story of the Saints life chronologically starting at the upper left making your way down and then upper right down to the bottom just tells the story of the saint but they did something very clever the middle column has in the top of the three panels the um the story or the um what was distinctive about the Saints life that kind of sums up what that saint has to to offer what what Grace that Sync has to offer and then immediately below it which is now the center of the whole thing not a panel about that Saint's life so here we are at the center of telling the Saints story and the middle panel is not about that Saint it's a mystery from The Life of Christ which the the ones who planned these windows said okay what mystery of Christ's life is this saint showing forth in his life and you look above and you see how it played out in his life but its roots is its root is the the mystery from Christ's life and then below that where the pain that's slightly obscured by the confessional down below appropriately is a scene from the Old Testament that prefigures the mystery from Christ's life that will play out in this particular way in the Saints life so there's really four levels being described in that window then the Old Testament sign Christ's fulfillment is Matthew 5 17 of whatever that story was exactly followed by that playing out in the life of the individual that you and I can relate to and look up to and then implicitly the fourth non-visible panel is what are you going to do with it this is exactly what happened so my very first right after I was ordained I was assigned to that church before I came into the university proper as a professor and I was well I spent a lot of time in the church and I walked around and I was like hmm I wonder what's going on with these windows and I had not read about them and it sort of clicked for me what the what the plan was at one point and then the excitement is oh my golly okay you want to run from window to window and see what did they say like look for your favorite Saint what mystery from Christ's life did they propose explains the same and then exactly as you're saying the question very quickly becomes what is the mystery of Christ's life that he wants to display in my life now in 2022 it um it's a very good catechesis it's great for students because the question finally is what kind of Saint is god making me what mystery of his life does he wish displayed in mine and so I ran from window to window and I have to tell you the thing that was the biggest surprise for me was right across from Saint Francis Xavier well to back up what's the mystery of Saint Francis Xavier he's the one who was sent by Ignatius Loyola to the ends of the Earth I mean really the ends of the Earth in those days so the mystery from Christ's life the sending of the Apostles okay makes sense yeah I can see the formula taking shape and go down below and you've got the Old Testament it's Elijah sending Elisha okay so you've got the prefigurement it's a beautiful kind of display but then you go directly across to the paired window which is sandinasius Loyola a friend of Francis Xavier the one who sends him Ignatius Loyola is known for the spiritual exercises for kind of understanding a new way to pray and to discern and have this contact with um with Jesus directly and I looked at the middle panel of his window I mean I'm not kidding you for 45 minutes and I could not figure out what mystery from the life of Jesus was there and I I was already thinking to myself like hmm what mystery would I choose if I were doing this panel and I looked and I looked and I looked and I got up on a chair and I'm getting closer and I'm like I took a picture and I blew it up just try to see it closer it turns out that the mystery of Christ's life that the people chose for Saint Ignatius Loyola was Christ ing in the desert weird I I would be willing to wager that um you ask anyone who knows the Society of Jesus knows does what spirituality knows the spiritual exercises ask any Jesuit not a single one of them would choose Christ's fasting in the desert we're going to edit this out but that's what I had that was my guess oh really yes are you serious yeah I just didn't want to interrupt you well because what you described he's doing these spiritual exercises to demonstrate he's trying to pass a test that all the people failed Jesus passed it with flying colors Loyola didn't he's a human he failed the test we all failed but he tried to think of ways to mitigate that through great intentionality and so where do we see Jesus passing the test this is the first time I've asked people a lot about like what would you guess I mean um well I could be lying no but but I think that's I think that's the intuition that Ignatius he's seeking God he's searching God he goes into the desert and the Old Testament window that pairs with that is Elijah being fed by the Ravens in the desert he has to receive his full sustenance from God yes who gives him everything and so you see in the midst of the tensions of the Reformation The Counter Reformation the man who wants to let himself be fed in the desert where you see no hope no possibility the man who lets himself be fed by what God gives personally is the founder of this order who now wants to take these spiritual exercises into the world to be fed by God in places where you see maybe very little very few signs of Hope and yet the hope is there it's there God's already laboring he's already he's already providing he's already working you could do this for each one of the windows in that church they're remarkable they're really a lot they're theologically profound but there's a misdirection in that one that's interesting because you would expect if you want to celebrate the life of the guy I'm not using the proper Catholic language you know I'm a Protestant but if you want to celebrate or properly show reverence to a saint who came before you and accomplished this you go with the highlight of their career yeah which even is an outsider I know is the Jesuit thing and you started a whole movement you went and pitched it to the Pope I mean you even got an audience with the Pope are you kidding me that's a great accomplishment let alone make this thing happen let alone have it succeed if I did it I would have slopped a league on in there and just made a whole Monument to his logistical achievement but the people who made the window were saying the real highlight is this hard-earned deeply sought after hunger in the wilderness pursuit of intimacy with God that then fueled and enabled the the larger movement that came out of it precisely well said I mean I've never heard it better said actually you're kind though I think that's right and there that panel does exist the panel of him before the pope asking for approval of the Society of Jesus which would become this huge order that would found institutions around the world it's there but it's not the central mystery the central mystery of his life is Ignatius in in this little cave where he prayed intensely and asked God to show him how he could transmit to other people what God was doing in his soul which was exercising his soul to be able to have this deep deep personal intimate contact with the word the Eternal Word which remains permanently um permanently in movement around the world there's one moment in the spiritual exercises where Ignatius proposes to the retreatant to imagine the Trinity before they send the sun into the World Imagine The Trinity father son and spirit beholding the world what do they see and they see all kinds of things they see people being born coming into existence they see people on their deathbed they see people some people arguing some people consoling each other they see people of every kind of race and tongue across the whole face of the Earth and he says and I want you to imagine use your power's imagination now what does the conversation between father son and spirit look like as they behold the world with all of its complexity and all of its difficulty and they see that we're in a serious serious state of trouble which we cannot get out of by ourselves like sheep without a Shepherd sheep without a Shepherd when the sun comes you know he's as he's making his way across Galilee and he sees these crowds and his Hearts moved his his as the Greek says like his inter his innards are moved right um that's how the father son and the spirit view the world and that's what they have to teach us we have to let ourselves be moved in that way and verses be formed by them so that we can see the world that way and then go and try to be part of their mission to the world it's not my mission it's theirs thank you for taking the time I know I asked you a relatively simple question that I think we both suspected would take us into a much larger story and uh it's fascinating it's encouraging I appreciate it amen great pleasure to be with you

Channel: Matt Whitman

Views: 191,649

Keywords: Bible, Theology, Study, Matt Whitman, TMBH, No Dumb Questions, Matthew, Jesus

Id: C9aryIT7Xpw

Length: 24min 38sec (1478 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2023