I am quite happy to be called an optimist, but my optimism is not of the utopian variety. It is based on hope. What is an optimist? I can answer for myself in a very simple fashion: He or she is a person who has the conviction that God knows, can do, and will do what is best for mankind.
—Pedro Arrupe, SJ, One Jesuit’s Spiritual Journey
The first time I called the Jesuit novitiate in Boston, one of the novices picked up the phone. “Arrupe House!” he said brightly.
“Oh . . . sorry,” I said, somewhat confused. “I guess I have the wrong number. I wanted the, um, Jesuit novitiate?”
“Yeah,” he said, and I could almost hear him rolling his eyes. “That’s us. Arrupe House.”
Before entering the Society of Jesus, I hadn’t a clue as to who (or what) Arrupe was. Paradoxically, now that I’ve been a Jesuit for some time, it continually surprises me that the name of Pedro Arrupe, superior general of the Jesuits between 1965 and 1983, isn’t more widely known.
It’s not that I believe that someone should be well known simply by virtue of having been superior of the Jesuit Order. Rather, Pedro Arrupe’s life, character, and example are so compelling, and so relevant to contemporary believers, that I am always surprised that more people aren’t familiar with his story.
Pedro Arrupe’s life can, I think, be seen as a microcosm of the life of the twentieth-century church. He was born in Bilbao, in the Basque Country of Spain, in 1907, to a devout Catholic family. After completing his secondary studies, Arrupe began his medical training first in Valladolid, Spain, and later at the University of Madrid Medical School. But after a visit to Lourdes, where he witnessed a spontaneous healing (a polio-stricken boy was able to walk after seeing a procession of the Blessed Sacrament), his life took a dramatic turn. Thanks to his few years of medical training, Arrupe was permitted to be present at the medical verification of the healing, and he concluded that he had seen a miracle.
“It is impossible to tell you what my feelings and the state of my soul were at that moment,” he later said of his experiences at Lourdes. “I had the impression of being near Jesus, and as I felt his all-powerful strength, the world around me began to seem extremely small.” After he returned to Madrid he said, “The books kept falling from my hands; those lessons; those experiments about which I was so excited before seemed then so empty. . . . I was dazed with the memory which upset me more every day: only the image of the Sacred Host raised in blessing and the paralyzed boy jumping up from his chair remained fixed in my memory and heart.”
Shortly afterward, Pedro Arrupe, age nineteen, gave up his medical career to enter the Jesuit novitiate in Loyola, Spain—the hometown of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Society of Jesus. His medical school professors were horrified.
In 1932, along with all the other Jesuits in Spain, Arrupe was expelled from the country by the Spanish Republic and was forced to complete his studies abroad. After studying in Belgium, Holland, and the United States, he was ordained in 1936. Two years later he was sent by his Jesuit superiors to work in Japan as a parish priest in Yamaguchi.
The young priest immediately immersed himself in Japanese culture in order to better understand the country in which he was living. Arrupe studied the Japanese language as well as its customs—the tea ceremony, flower arranging, calligraphy. He also adopted the Japanese style of praying—sitting cross-legged on a simple mat—which he employed for the rest of his life. (During his time as superior general in Rome, his unusual position at prayer would surprise a few traditionally minded Jesuits.)
While in Yamaguchi, he was suspected (falsely) of espionage for “Western powers” and was arrested and thrown into solitary confinement for thirty-five days. Arrupe endured the December cold with nothing but a sleeping mat in his cell. He later said of this period: “Many were the things I learned during this time: the science of silence, of solitude, of severe and austere poverty, of inner dialogue with the ‘guest of my soul.’ I believe this was the most instructive month of my entire life.”
In 1942, Fr. Arrupe was appointed novice director for the Japanese Jesuits and took up residence at the novitiate outside the town of Hiroshima. When the atomic bomb was dropped on the city on August 6, 1945, Arrupe and his novices cared for the sick and wounded, converting the novitiate into a makeshift hospital. Using his medical training, he performed simple surgery on scores of victims. Arrupe spent the next thirteen years in Japan and in 1959 was appointed superior of the Jesuits’ Japanese Province.
Six years later he was elected superior general of the Society of Jesus, during the latter part of the Second Vatican Council and at the beginning of a period of volcanic change in the Church. The Spanish director of novices in Japan seemed to be the perfect man for the times: a person with international vision and experience, a priest who had lived and worked in both the East and the West, and a Jesuit who understood that the Church’s center of gravity was moving inexorably away from Europe and to Asia and Africa. Overall, Arrupe understood the meaning of the word inculturation long before it became popular.
Heeding the call of the council for religious orders to rediscover their roots, the new “Father General,” as he is traditionally called, encouraged his brother Jesuits to adjust the Spiritual Exercises for the current world, to redouble their work with the poor and marginalized, and to promote the “faith that does justice,” in accord with the wishes of the Jesuit General Congregation, the order’s ultimate governing body. This emphasis on justice as an essential component of the gospel was what Arrupe would become most known for. Long before the martyrdom of many Jesuits who worked with the poor (among them the six priests killed in El Salvador in 1989), Arrupe instinctively grasped the importance of such a project, as well as the risks involved in facing down the forces that oppress the poor. To one of the congregations of Jesuits discussing the matter, he said, in essence, If we choose this path, some will pay with their lives.
“Is our General Congregation,” he asked, “ready to take up this responsibility and to carry it out to its ultimate consequence? Is it ready to enter upon the more severe way of the cross? If we are not ready for this, what other use would these discussions have, except perhaps merely an academic one?”
Fr. Arrupe’s term as superior general was remarkably fruitful. “Don Pedro,” as he was affectionately known, visited Jesuit scholastics, brothers, and priests in high schools and parishes, in the slums and the countryside, in universities and retreat houses, and in their novitiates and infirmaries. Arrupe traveled to every corner of the globe and was invited to address major gatherings of church leaders, social leaders, and lay leaders. His writings and speeches focused not only on the promotion of justice and work with the poor but also on such varied topics as the renewal of religious life, ecumenism, inculturation, secularism and unbelief, evangelization and catechesis, the intellectual life, and the Church’s need to reach out to youth.
One of his most important initiatives on behalf of the poor was the founding, in 1980, of the Jesuit Refugee Service, which he began in response to the worldwide refugee crisis. Four years after I entered the Jesuits, I began working with the Jesuit Refugee Service in East Africa, and I heard the simple logic that prompted Arrupe to found the group: There are Jesuits everywhere in the world, and there are refugees everywhere in the world. Why not bring the two groups together?
During his time as superior general, Arrupe came to exemplify the Jesuit ideal of the “contemplative in action.” Vincent O’Keefe, an American Jesuit who was one of Arrupe’s chief assistants in Rome, later remarked: “At home or on the road visiting his brothers, Fr. Arrupe radiated a deep inner serenity that enabled him to move from situation to situation, from crisis to crisis, and from language to language.” The contemplative. At the same time, noted Fr. O’Keefe, “it was easy to tell when Don Pedro was in residence in Rome, for then the Jesuit headquarters was bustling with visitors from all over the world, while the staff did its best to contend with the drafting of letters and speeches.” The contemplative in action.
Even among other religious orders, Arrupe was seen as an inspired and inspiring leader. As a result, he was elected to five consecutive three-year terms as the president of the Union of Superiors General. Arrupe was increasingly seen as a leader within the universal church as well. He attended all the international synods of bishops from 1967 to 1980 and spoke at each one on behalf of both men and women religious orders. Among many he was seen as the “second founder” of the Society of Jesus. Indeed, Arrupe’s appearance—slight build, hawklike nose, intelligent eyes, bald pate—prompted many comments about his uncanny resemblance to his fellow Basque, St. Ignatius of Loyola.
It is difficult to communicate how admired Fr. Arrupe was by so many Jesuits, particularly in the United States and especially among younger Jesuits, for whom his commitment to social justice was so important and inspiring. One obvious sign of that affection is the number of Arrupe Houses in the United States. Both my novitiate and my philosophy community were so named, causing no end of confusion to my non-Jesuit friends. “Is every Jesuit community called Arrupe House?” asked a friend after he received a note on house stationery.
Don Pedro was by all accounts highly intelligent, consistently warm, and typically witty. A friend who worked closely with him told me the story of two American novices passing through Rome on their way to India, in order to work with the poor there.
“They’re going all the way to India?” asked Arrupe. “It certainly costs a lot of money to teach our men about the poor!”
As comfortable as he was with his brother Jesuits, he was equally at home with laypersons, no matter what their background. The Vatican historian Peter Hebblethwaite, himself a former Jesuit, told of running into Arrupe in Rome when Arrupe’s car had been involved in a minor accident. At the time, Hebblethwaite’s wife, Margaret, was meeting a certain Jesuit for spiritual direction. Hebblethwaite described the scene in an article for America magazine:
His driver was expostulating with the other driver. We stopped. “This is my wife, Margaret,” I said. His eyes lit up: “Margaret,” he said, “you are doing a retreat with Father Herbie Alfonso?” She was. So the wife of an ex-Jesuit discussed the Spiritual Exercises with the Father General, while I twiddled my thumbs. I suspect it was a unique moment in Jesuit history.
But Pedro Arrupe was not popular everywhere. Because his efforts on behalf of social justice seemed to carry the whiff of socialism or, worse, communism, Arrupe earned the displeasure of some in the Vatican. Within some Roman circles (and even some Jesuit circles), he was thought naive, not so much charismatic as impractical, and even dangerous. This misunderstanding greatly pained Arrupe. As Vatican officials complained, as denunciations from segments of the Catholic press rolled in, and as bishops cornered him at various meetings to bitterly bemoan “socialist” Jesuits in their dioceses, Don Pedro would typically defend his men loyally. (At the same time, he used to say to those Jesuits in question, “Please make it easier to defend you!”)
But in case any Jesuits misunderstood Arrupe’s stance toward the Church, he pointedly mailed a photo of himself to Jesuit communities around the world showing him in his black cassock kneeling at the feet of Pope John Paul II. The caption, taken from one of the founding documents of the Society of Jesus, reads Soli Domino ac Ecclesiae Ipsius sponsae, sub Romano Pontifice, Christi in terris Vicario servire (“To serve the Lord alone and the Church, his spouse, under the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth”).
In 1981, at age seventy-four, Arrupe suffered an incapacitating stroke. Unable to continue as superior general, he turned over the governance of the society to Vincent O’Keefe, charging him with guiding the order until a General Congregation could be called to elect a successor. But in a move widely seen as a critique of Arrupe’s leadership and a stinging personal rebuke, Pope John Paul II replaced Fr. O’Keefe with his own “delegate,” another Jesuit, who would lead the Society until the election of the next superior. It was a crushing blow for the ailing Arrupe. In his book Pedro Arrupe: Essential Writings, Kevin Burke, SJ, writes, “Overcome with grief when he learned of this extraordinary intervention into the governance of the Society, Arrupe burst into tears. He was embarking on the most difficult decade in his life, a decade of forced inactivity and silence, a season of profound spiritual poverty and surrender.”
In response to this move by the Vatican, Arrupe, ever faithful, instructed Jesuits around the world to accept John Paul’s decision with loyalty, as he himself had. It was a move that astonished many of his detractors, who thought him essentially disobedient, and won him the favor of the Vatican. In the end, the Jesuits successfully weathered the ecclesial storm—but also continued their work with the poor.
For the next ten years, Don Pedro lay in a hospital bed, crippled by his stroke—partially paralyzed and increasingly unable to communicate—in the Jesuit headquarters in Rome. Pope John Paul II would visit him a few days before his death in 1991.
In Elizabeth Johnson’s book Friends of God and Prophets, the theologian outlines two models of relating to the saints. The first, perhaps more well known in Catholic circles, she calls the “patronage model,” where the faithful request favors from the saints. Since the saints are closer to God in heaven (and now have no needs themselves), it’s natural to ask them for help. Though it is always God to whom we pray, we ask the saint to “intercede” for us, much as we might ask an older brother or sister to approach a parent on our behalf.
But, as Johnson points out, this model did not predominate in the early church. There we find something else: the “companionship model,” where the saints are our friends, those who have gone ahead of us and are now cheering us along, brothers and sisters in the community of faith, the great “cloud of witnesses.” This is a more egalitarian notion of sanctity and sainthood. St. Paul, for example, speaks of all the Christian faithful as saints.
In my own life, I find both models operative. In general, I relate most often to the saints as companions, as models, and certainly as cheerleaders. But there are many times when I feel the need for help in approaching God, and the saints are fine people to turn to.
Thérèse of Lisieux, for example, is the person I think of when feeling dejected or discouraged. She had a deep understanding of the way grace works through the struggles of everyday life, and her example helps me to more peacefully accept what the day places before me. And when I feel overwhelmed by the day’s burdens, I turn to her for her prayers. In my office, I have posted a favorite prayer card of Thérèse, given to me by a friend who visited Lisieux. In her Carmelite habit, Thérèse stares at the camera with her typically frank expression. Underneath the photo is her spidery handwriting: Je suis venue au Carmel pour sauver les âmes, et surtout afin de prier pour les prêtres (“I have come to Carmel to save souls, and especially in order to pray for priests”). Thérèse of Lisieux acts as both a model for me and an intercessor.
When I am having difficulties with my vocation—say, when I am trying to accept a difficult decision from a superior—I turn to either Ignatius of Loyola or Thomas Merton. I figure Merton knows a little about difficulties with religious superiors (even the briefest glance at his journals shows that he struggled with his vow of obedience almost daily). And I figure Ignatius knows a little about Jesuit obedience. (Though as one Jesuit remarked, “What does he know about it? He was always the boss!”) I turn to Aloysius Gonzaga when I’m struggling with chastity. To John XXIII when I am struggling with the Church. And to Dorothy Day when I am finding it hard to live as simply as I should.
And for the record, whenever I lose something, I inevitably fall back on one of the first prayers I was taught in childhood, to St. Anthony of Padua, finder of lost things:
St. Anthony, St. Anthony,
please come around.
Something is lost
and cannot be found.
Frequently, the speed with which I find the lost object after saying that prayer is close to alarming.
Pedro Arrupe has always been a patron for work with the poor and the underprivileged. Since the novitiate, I have found inspiration in his writings to Jesuits, his speeches about social justice, and his constant encouragement to be a “man for others.” In one of my favorite passages from a book entitled Justice with Faith Today, Arrupe, speaking on Good Friday in 1977, compares the cry of Jesus from the cross to the cry of the poor today:
“Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, the poor and powerless, you do to me.” These words are strikingly clear and unmistakable. Jesus identifies himself with the poor. The thirst in the throat of Jesus is a real thirst that cries to heaven as it did then on Calvary. And that cry of Jesus at the point of dying is repeated in thousands of throats that today are clamoring for justice and fair play, when they beg for bread, for respect for the color of their skin, for a minimal medical assistance, for shelter, for education, for freedom.
So it is to Arrupe that I pray when seeking guidance for ministry among the poor, the marginalized, or the hopeless. I prayed for his help, shortly after his death, when I was working in East Africa with refugees. I prayed for his intercession while working as a prison chaplain in Boston during my theology studies. And I prayed to him during one of the most challenging ministries I’ve ever undertaken.
At the time of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I was living in New York City and working at America, a Jesuit magazine. Two days later, I began ministering to the firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers at the site of the former World Trade Center. Almost immediately I was joined in this work by a number of my brother Jesuits.
In the first few days, gaining entrance to the site was easy: all you needed was a Roman collar. But within a week, as security around the area grew tighter and more organized, it became more difficult to pass through the chain-link barricades erected by the police, the National Guard, and the U.S. Army.
One morning a Jesuit friend and I approached two surly-looking police officers manning one of the checkpoints. Sensing that getting in might prove difficult, we decided to pray for some intercession. Turning to Pedro Arrupe immediately came to mind, not only because we felt he would look out for us as Jesuits, but also because we remembered his experience ministering to the victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. We figured he knew something about the type of ministry we were doing: working with confused and sad men and women following a man-made disaster. So Bob and I stood on a crowded street corner in lower Manhattan as fire engines and police cruisers raced past us, sirens blaring, and asked Fr. Arrupe for his intercession: “Help us get into the site and do God’s work.”
As we drew nearer to the police officers, their faces softened. Smiling and nodding, they greeted us cheerfully: one, it turned out, had gone to a Jesuit university, Boston College. He asked for a blessing. We had no trouble passing through the barricade.
Each time I approached a barricade with my Jesuit friends, we would pray to Pedro Arrupe. And as I began to work with other young Jesuits at the site, the prayer to Arrupe seemed more and more natural—younger Jesuits in particular consider Fr. Arrupe a hero because of his openness, his sense of humor, his dedication to the poor, and his total commitment to Jesus Christ. And each time we asked his intercession, we were able to pass through another barricade.
One morning, a group of five of us walked to the site, hoping to celebrate Mass with the rescue workers. There were plenty of supplies to lug along: chalices, patens, hosts, wine, a stole. Upon arrival, we stumbled upon an unusually long line of volunteers—steelworkers, doctors, counselors, construction workers, psychologists, engineers, sanitation workers—all standing under a hot September sun, patiently waiting to enter the site. When I inquired about the delay, a sanitation worker said, “The FBI has just declared the place a crime scene. It’s gonna be impossible to get in, Father.”
After waiting for an hour in the broiling sun, I approached a soldier from the National Guard and explained our desire to celebrate Mass.
He was implacable. Get back in line, he said, and wait your turn.
Glumly I returned to my Jesuit friends. “We can’t get in,” I said. Bob turned to me and smiled.
“Of course we can’t,” he laughed. “We forgot to pray to Pedro Arrupe!”
This time I said a short prayer to Fr. Arrupe. A few minutes later I ambled over to another police officer and asked for entrance. I told him we’d been waiting for more than an hour.
“Of course you can come in!” he said. “You just have to know who to ask for help.”
In September of 1983, as the Jesuit General Congregation convened in Rome to elect his successor, Fr. Arrupe, by now unable to speak, provided a personal message to be read to the delegates by another Jesuit. “How I wish I were in a better condition for this meeting with you,” it began. “As you can see, I cannot even address you directly.”
In the message that marked the end of his eighteen years as superior general, Don Pedro first gave thanks to God and then expressed gratitude to his fellow Jesuits. “Had they not been obedient to this poor Superior General, nothing would have been accomplished.” He thanked the Jesuits for their obedience “particularly in these last years.” He asked that young Jesuits surrender to the will of God. Of those who were at the peak of their apostolic activity, Arrupe said he hoped they would not “burn themselves out.” Rather, he said, they should find a proper balance by centering their lives on God, not on their work. To the old and infirm Jesuits, “of my age,” he urged openness.
Finally, with many Jesuits weeping in the hall, Arrupe’s message ended with some thoughts and a favorite prayer, taken from the conclusion of The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and made more poignant by what he had experienced as superior general and what he now experienced as a human being:
I am full of hope seeing the Society at the service of Our Lord, and of the Church, under the Roman Pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth. May she keep going along this path, and may God bless us with many good vocations of priests and brothers: for this I offer to the Lord what is left of my life, my prayers and my sufferings imposed by my ailments.
For myself all I want is to repeat from the depths of my heart: “Take, O Lord, and receive: all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and all I possess are yours, Lord. You have given it all to me. Now I return it to you. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me only your love and your grace, and I want nothing more.”
For me, the story of Pedro Arrupe is the story of a dedicated man whose ultimate cross was not only his physical sufferings but also misunderstanding from the Church he loved so much. Even throughout those difficult times, his hope and his faith in the Church and in God remained. He was, as he said often, “an incorrigible optimist.”
Initially, what drew me to Pedro Arrupe was a little prayer card I was given during my philosophy studies, shortly after his death. On its front was a black-and-white photograph of Fr. Arrupe at prayer, in his favorite Japanese style. Wearing a cassock, he sits in the Eastern fashion, feet tucked under him, on a bare floor. His scuffed black shoes lie to his side.
But it was not the image that captivated me but what was printed on the back: a prayer written by Arrupe shortly after he had suffered his stroke, and read out during that same address at the 1983 congregation. It was one of the most moving expressions of surrender I had ever read.
“More than ever,” he wrote, “I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.”
For a long while I wondered: What could enable a person to approach life in this way? He wrote these words during a time of public censure after many years of service, and in the middle of a debilitating illness. What could account for his open and trusting attitude? An answer came when I stumbled across the story of an Italian journalist who interviewed Arrupe in the late 1970s. The journalist asked, “Who is Jesus Christ for you?”
One imagines that the seen-it-all journalist probably expected any one of a host of dull responses. The superior general could be counted on to say something like Jesus Christ is my friend, or Jesus Christ is my brother, or Jesus Christ is my leader.
Don Pedro, however, said this: “For me, Jesus Christ is everything!”
It was this radical stance, this utter dependence on and trust in Jesus Christ, that enabled Pedro Arrupe to fulfill his vow of obedience even during what for him must have been the most difficult situation imaginable: a public rebuke by the Vatican. And it is here that Arrupe inspires me the most and has become an increasingly important figure to me.
Over the centuries, many loyal and devout Catholics have been misunderstood and treated unjustly by the Church. This is not a controversial statement. Think of Galileo, or, more to the point, Joan of Arc. In the past century, too, a number of committed Catholics have suffered mistreatment at the hands of the church they love. Before the Second Vatican Council, for example, many talented theologians, including such towering figures as the Jesuit John Courtney Murray and the Dominican Yves Congar, were “silenced” by Vatican officials and their own religious orders.
Murray, a theology professor at the Jesuits’ Woodstock College, 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 please, was in accord with Catholic teaching. The Vatican, however, disagreed, and in 1954 Murray’s superiors ordered him to cease writing on the topic. But almost ten years later, Fr. Murray was asked by the archbishop of New York, Francis Cardinal Spellman, to accompany him as an official peritus, or expert, at the Second Vatican Council. It was there that the previously silenced Murray served as one of the architects for the council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, which drew on Murray’s earlier, banned work and affirmed religious freedom as a right for all people. Toward the end of the council, John Courtney Murray was invited to celebrate Mass with Pope Paul VI, as a public sign of his official “rehabilitation.” Murray died a few years later, in 1967.
Yves Congar’s story is similar. The French Dominican priest, whom the Encyclopedia of Catholicism calls “perhaps the most influential Catholic theologian of this century prior to Vatican II,” wrote extensively on the Church, specifically regarding questions of church authority, tradition, the laity, and relations with other Christian churches. Thanks to his groundbreaking work, Congar was a popular teacher, lecturer, and writer. In 1953, however, his book True and False Reform in the Church was abruptly withdrawn from circulation. The next year he, too, was ordered to cease teaching, lecturing, and publishing. Like Murray, however, Congar’s work proved foundational to the Second Vatican Council. As a participant in the council, Congar made major contributions to two central documents: the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church and the Decree on Ecumenism, both of which drew from his earlier, banned writings.
Yves Congar’s eventual rehabilitation was even more dramatic than John Courtney Murray’s: in 1994, he was named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II.
Before the council, many may have looked at the situations of Murray and Congar and said, “How foolish of them to keep silent!” Others might have said, “How absurd to keep their vow of obedience when they know that their writings would help the church!” Or, more simply, “Why don’t they just leave their orders and write what they please?” And over the years many who have been silenced or prevented from doing certain kinds of ministries have left the priesthood or their religious orders or even the Church in order to say what they wanted.
What enabled Murray and Congar and other good servants of the Church, as well as Fr. Arrupe, to accept these decisions was their trust that the Holy Spirit was at work through their vow of obedience, and that through their dedication to their religious vows, God would somehow work, even if these decisions seemed illogical or unfair or even dangerous. (Significantly, one of Congar’s final works was entitled I Believe in the Holy Spirit.) The stance is similar, I think, to the seriousness with which couples take their marriage vows during rocky periods in their relationship. They trust that even though things are rough at the time or their marriage makes little earthly sense, their vows are a sign of God’s fidelity to them, a symbol of the rightness of their commitment, and a reason to trust that God will see them through this period.
Murray and Congar were not the only ones silenced or prevented from carrying out their ministries in the twentieth century. During the latter part of his life, Thomas Merton faced growing fears that he would be prevented by the censors of his Trappist Order from publishing any writings on the cold war. In 1962, the publication of his book Peace in the Post-Christian Era was forbidden by his Trappist superiors, who also ordered him to cease writing on issues of war and peace. Merton was furious at the decision, saying that it reflected “an astounding incomprehension of the seriousness of the present crisis in its religious aspect.” His book, which contains what are by now widely accepted critiques of war and militarism, was finally published in 2004.
In a moving letter to Jim Forest, a fellow peace activist, Merton explained his decision and his understanding of obedience. His letter is quoted in Peace in the Post-Christian Era:
I am where I am. I have freely chosen this state, and have freely chosen to stay in it when the question of possible change arose. If I am a disturbing element, that is all right. I am not making a point of being that, but simply of saying what my conscience dictates and doing so without seeking my own interest. This means accepting such limitations as may be placed on me by authority, and not because I may or may not agree with the ostensible reasons why the limitations are imposed, but out of love of God who is using these things to attain ends which I myself cannot at the moment see or comprehend. I know he can and will in his own time take good care of those who impose limitations unjustly or unwisely. This is his affair and not mine. In this dimension I find no contradiction between love and obedience, and as a matter of fact it is the only sure way of transcending the limits and arbitrariness of ill-advised commands.
Pedro Arrupe, of course, having just suffered a stroke, was not able to write as eloquently about his obedience during his own trial. Nor is it likely that the more mild-mannered Arrupe would have used the same words that Merton did. But though he accepted things with greater equanimity than did Merton, the Vatican’s decision still pained Arrupe. One need only recall his tears at the news. Yet Arrupe’s short prayer about being in God’s hands, like Murray’s and Congar’s assent to their silencing, and like Merton’s remarks about knowing that God was at work in ways that he “cannot at the moment see or comprehend,” was a way of expressing his commitment to his vows, his belief that God would ultimately bring about good, and the fact that, for him, Jesus Christ was “everything.”
When I entered the Jesuits, I expected that obedience would prove to be the easiest of the vows. Poverty—giving up so much and living with so little—seemed obviously difficult. And I knew chastity would be a great challenge, too; it’s difficult to live without sexual intimacy and to experience loneliness so frequently. But obedience didn’t trouble me as much. After all, you just have to do what you’re told, right? Do the job you’re asked to do.
But recently, during the course of writing this book, I was asked by my superiors not to write about certain topics that are still too controversial in the Church. So, wanting to remain faithful to my vow of obedience, and bearing in mind the words of Thomas Merton and the example of Pedro Arrupe, I accepted this decision, though I hope and trust that one day I will be able write about these things more freely.
Or perhaps, in the course of events, I will discover that my conscience moves me to speak more openly or explore other avenues of discourse. The longstanding tradition of the Church, after all, is of the primacy, dignity, and inviolability of the informed conscience. St. Thomas Aquinas famously said that he would rather disobey church teaching than sin against his conscience. More recently, the Second Vatican Council, summing up Catholic teaching on the topic, declared, “In all his activity man is bound to follow his conscience faithfully, in order that he may come to know God. . . . It follows that he is not to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his conscience.”
“Conscience,” wrote the Council, “is the most secret core and sanctuary of a person. There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.”
There is a long list of saints and holy persons who have felt duty-bound to speak out about matters concerning the good of their church, even at risk to themselves. Their consciences impelled this. During a time of crisis in the Church in the fourteenth century, St. Catherine of Siena, the renowned mystic, wrote to a group of cardinals in Rome saying, “You are flowers that shed no perfume, but a stench that makes the whole world reek.” When asked how she could possibly know so much about Rome from her faraway post, she replied that the stench reached all the way to Siena. In 1374, in a letter to Pope Gregory IX, exiled in France, she instructed him to return to Rome. “Be a man! Father, arise!” she wrote. “I am telling you!”
Catherine could not remain silent.
But for Murray, Congar, and Merton, silence was not only what their vow of obedience demanded, but also what their consciences obliged. For their contemporary Pedro Arrupe, the issue was not so much remaining silent as it was patiently accepting mistreatment in the Church and guiding the rest of the Jesuits, through his example, to respond with charity.
Needless to say, I am no Murray or Congar or Merton or Arrupe. But I know that God will somehow work through all of this. And I trust that both my vow of obedience and the desire to rely on my conscience will, together, prove in some mysterious way to be a source of life for me and for others.
I trust in all this because, as Don Pedro said, “For me Jesus Christ is everything.”