Jesuits prepare to rethink everything: members must decide which works to emphasize, how to reorganize

On Jan. 6, preaching at the funeral of my friend Jim Loughran, a Jesuit and president of St. Peter's College, I looked out over the packed congregation from a high pulpit in St. Aedan Parish, glanced down at the 60 Jesuit concelebrants in the front rows and thought: We're old.

This was not a judgment, but a spontaneous observation. As if I had thought, we're many, we're faithful or we're wearing white.

But we're also at the brink of a major turning point in the history of the American Jesuits, a moment when, paradoxically, as our numbers decrease we are taking on more work.

The following week, elected members of all 10 American provinces met to elect delegates to the 35th General Congregation to assemble in Rome in 2008 to elect a new general, replacing Peter Hans Kolvenbach, who will be 80, the first general in modern times to formally resign his office to make way for new blood.

It was the first step in a "strategic discernment consultation," a months-long process involving community and area meetings, workshops, a Web-based survey, and the writing of postulata--petitions to the congregation on issues such as the quality of community life, refugees, the environment, "entrenched poverty," international education, vocations, and the Jesuit identity of our institutions--that will determine our priorities for the next generation.

Based on conversations with leading Jesuits in different parts of the country, there's reason to believe that this congregation will be a critical one--on the scale of the 31st General Congregation, which embraced the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and the 32nd, which committed the society to the struggle for faith and justice, a commitment that then-general Pedro Arrupe warned would lead to some of us being killed.

Since St. Ignatius Loyola and six fellow students declared themselves "friends in the Lord," and took vows in a Paris chapel in 1534, the Society of Jesus has faced two great crises in its lifetime. The first was its worldwide suppression, 1773-1814, when the pope caved in to political pressure in Europe and juridically wiped us out. A remnant held out in Russia or by forming substitute religious congregations, but it was a traumatic event that made the restored society in some ways a timorous shadow of its former self.

The second crisis was the cultural revolution of the 1960s in which the new freedoms offered by Vatican II and a radically changing secular society both decimated our ranks and allowed those who stayed--thanks to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Karl Rahner and John Courtney Murray--to embrace the modern world on a higher intellectual plain. We also went through not a crisis but a bump in the road in 1981 when Pope John Paul II, misled by critics both within and outside the Jesuits, temporarily blocked the society from electing a successor to the ailing Arrupe and imposed his own delegate to run the order. Though appalled by this treatment of Arrupe, we quietly submitted and in 1983 our autonomy was restored.

In 1960 membership in the American society peaked at 8,338. Today there are 2,991. A year ago there were 3,079, including 2,620 priests, 201 scholastics and 176 brothers. To put these numbers into perspective, 40 novices entered in 2005. Their average age was 28.7 years, including several in their 40s. The latest vocation brochure depicts the smiling faces of 50 young men, including some born in Germany, the Netherlands, Korea and Vietnam, who joined the American assistancy in 2006. Based on past records, of those who entered, a third will remain through ordination.

The average age of today's Jesuit is 65, but they are a young 65. The older Jesuits are the generation that embraced the reforms of Vatican II. They were inspired by the pioneers who stuck their necks out in the 1940s and 1950s--sometimes facing opposition from fellow Jesuits--to integrate our schools, stick up for the working man, reform the liturgy, and in the 1960s, raise the academic standards of our universities.

Now they must rethink everything. First by deciding which works to emphasize, then by reorganizing the Jesuit national map, which now consists of 10 provinces--from New York (424 men) to Detroit (164)--so the men would be better distributed to get the work done.

Readers of the right age will recall the great comic Jimmy Durante's song, "The State of Arkansas," where Jimmy decides that the basis of the nation's problems is that "Arkansas is in the wrong place." His answer: Move Arkansas to Nebraska, then Nebraska to I-da-HO; the Idaho to Alaska, and Alaska to O-hi-O! To stimulate the economy of New Mexico, he moved New York down there, where rich New Yorkers would buy Indian blankets.

Perhaps inspired by that song, Jesuit cartographers have drawn up four maps, named for the Jesuit missionary-explorers--Isaac Jogues, Pierre De Smet, Eusebio Kino and Jacques Marquette--that reduce the present 10 provinces to five or six. Some examples: I now belong to New York; under the Jogues plan I'd belong to the Blue Ridge Mountain Province, which stretches from New York to South Carolina. Under the Kino scheme, a Chicago Jesuit would belong to the Lake Superior Province, which stretches east from Nebraska to bite off the west half of New York and Pennsylvania. Under all four, California reaches east over about a third of the country.