The Jesuit Pope

A remarkable man has passed from the scene. The Society of Jesus got its start nearly five hundred years ago and soon grew to become the most influential (and feared) religious order in post-Reformation Europe. Francis was the first Jesuit elected to the chair of St. Peter—a historic milestone that defined his tenure as chief pastor of the Catholic Church.

Historians will look back and weigh the specific achievements and failures of his twelve years as pope. But the tone, tenor, and tendency of his leadership of the Church reflected the distinctive personality of the Society of Jesus, colored by his own fiery temperament.

Jesuits are operators. It’s encouraged by their formation. At the center of their training are the Spiritual Exercises, a pattern of meditation and prayer established by the founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola. The exercises are undertaken in solitude. Their purpose is to make God immediate, so that the Jesuit in formation can receive God’s distinct mission for him, and him alone. I have undertaken an eight-day version of the Spiritual Exercises. (The thirty-day version is required for Jesuits at various stages of their formation.) I can report that it is a very powerful tool for discerning the one thing God is calling you to do.

The effect of this formation is holy single-mindedness, which often produces an impatience with impediments, even those created by moral and religious duties. 

For example, St. Ignatius allowed members of the order to dispense with the historic obligation of clergy to say the divine office, the morning and evening prayers known as the breviary. They could do so if their apostolic mission required. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit who went to China in the sixteenth century, famously dispensed with clerical garb and took on the appearance of a Confucian sage, the better to evangelize Chinese elites.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits wormed their way into royal courts, famous as confessors who were not too demanding. They were accused of permitting duplicity, especially in their own ministries. During that era, the term “Jesuitical” was coined. It means making nice distinctions that turn prohibitions into permissions. All of this and more was akin to St. Ignatius’s suspension of the obligation to say the divine office: One must do what is necessary to succeed in one’s mission assigned by God.

The pontificate of Pope Francis manifested a Jesuit impatience with constraining traditions and limiting rules. For many centuries, the archbishop of Milan and the patriarch of Venice were made cardinals. Today, neither is a cardinal. It was a venerable tradition that Pope Francis broke away from. 

Although Amoris Laetitia, the controversial document that seems to permit divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion, features nice—and dare I say Jesuitical—reasoning, Pope Francis appears to have cared little about the theological details. What mattered was the outcome. In my estimation, this approach arose from a subtle cultural-political calculation that a very moderate concession to the sexual revolution would buy time, allowing the Church to navigate the choppy waters of today’s non-traditional attitudes toward sex, marriage, and many other intimate aspects of life. If this is the case, I must allow that it was not a foolish move on the chessboard of cultural politics. Under his leadership, the Catholic Church made no significant changes to the teachings that are at odds with the sexual revolution.

I think Francis was also making a clever move in the contest between the German Church and Rome. The small concession of allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion, along with rhetorical gestures suggesting that much greater concessions were forthcoming, allowed Francis to stiff-arm the German demands for formal and official accommodations to the sexual revolution. As I noted, Jesuits are operators.

A similar path was taken with the Chinese Church. A secret agreement was made with the Chinese Communist party concerning the governance of the Church in China. No surprise there; secrecy is the ideal métier for a Jesuit, allowing for all matters to be dealt with behind closed doors, relying on diplomacy and intrigue. If China becomes a Catholic nation in the next hundred years, Francis will have been vindicated in his tactics.

Pope Francis’s most widely read encyclical was Laudato Si. It, too, was politically clever. The topic addressed was environmentalism, especially climate change. This represented a shift away from marriage, abortion, and sexual ethics, themes treated by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict. Catholic teachings on these topics are unpopular with Western elites. By contrast, they are enthusiastic about climate activism, and at points Laudato Si sounds like a U.N. panel on climate change. Yet the encyclical also includes what is in effect a denunciation of Western capitalist and technological culture. Again, a remarkable political move: cozying up to Western elites while undermining the economic-cultural foundations of their power.

In his relations with the United States, Pope Francis was less nimble. The effort to suppress the Latin Mass in the United States was ham-fisted. Perhaps the political missteps arose because he and his inner circle were troubled by the combination of wealth and vitality in American Catholicism, a combination that made the American bishops harder to manipulate. Or maybe it reflected the habitual anti-Americanism of Latin Americans of his generation. Whatever the cause, it was an exception to the usual misdirection and double messaging that characterized his style of governance.

Argentines have a joke about General Juan Perón. He’s sitting in the back of his limousine as it approaches an intersection. The driver leans back, asking, “Generale, which way should I turn?” Perón answers, “Signal left, turn right.” The same joke could be told of many Jesuits.

Pope Francis was a Perónist and a Jesuit. His pontificate amounted to twelve years of maneuvering, sometimes artfully, sometimes not so artfully. Everything was made into an instrument, including doctrine, synodal meetings, church offices, and more. In this regard, the pontificate was purely personal, resting in the mystery of the one thing that God was calling Jorge Bergoglio to do as a soldier of Christ. As a result, the pontificate’s distinctive character dies with him, leaving very little other than our astonishment.

I pray for the repose of Pope Francis’s soul. May he rest in the arms of Christ, whom he sought so ardently to serve.

Image by the Republic of Korea. Image cropped.