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Jesuit Terms J

Javier

Common Spanish spelling of the name "Xavier."

Jesuit

Noun. A member of the Society of Jesus. The term was originally coined as a put-down by people who felt there was something terribly arrogant about a group calling itself the Company or Society of Jesus, whereas previous religious orders had been content to name themselves after their founder (e.g., "Benedictines," "Franciscans," "Dominicans"). Later the title was adopted as a shorthand name by members of the Society themselves, as well as by others favorable to them.

Adjective. Pertaining to the Society of Jesus. The negative term, now that Jesuit has been rehabilitated, is Jesuitical meaning "sly" or "devious."

The number of Jesuits world wide

  • 6,260 Europe
  • 4,020 South Asia
  • 2,950 United States
  • 2,890 Latin America
  • 1,670 East Asia & Oceania
  • 1,430 Africa

The average age of Jesuit priests in 2007 was 63 years.

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Jesuit Colleges and Universities

Jesuit Colleges and Universities Worldwide

Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States

Homepages (Year Founded)

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Jesuit Education

See Education, Jesuit. 

 

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Jesuit High Schools

Jesuit High Schools Worldwide

Jesuit High Schools in the United States

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    Jesuit History

    Jesuit history falls into two parts separated by the period of suppression (1773-1814): (1) the “Old Society,” 1540-1773, and (2) the “New Society,” 1814-present. To read about “Jesuit History in Brief,” click here.

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    Jesuit History: A Time-Line of Milestones

    1491 - Ignatius Loyola is born in the Basque region of northeastern Spain

    1521 - While Ignatius is defending Pamplona, cannon fire shatters his right knee

    1522 - Ignatius stays in the town of Manresa while struggling with his relationship with himself and God; this experience forms the basis of his Spiritual Exercises.

    1528 - Ignatius begins schooling at the University of Paris where he meets Francis Xavier, Pierre Favre and other early companions.

    1537 - Ignatius and companions are ordained

    1540 - Pope Paul III gives Ignatius and companions official approval to found the Society of Jesus

    1541 - Ignatius is elected Superior General of the Society of Jesus

    1548 - The first Jesuit college opens in Messina, Sicily

    1556 - Ignatius dies in Rome; 34 Jesuit schools have been founded

    1773 - The Society is suppressed by order of Pope Clement XIV

    1789 - Georgetown University is founded, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the United States.

    1814 - The suppression is ended by Pope Pius VII

    1954 - Wheeling Jesuit University is founded, the youngest of the Jesuit universities in the United States

    1965 - Pedro Arrupe is elected the 28th Superior General of the Society

    1975 - General Congregation 32 declares that the hallmark of any work deserving the name Jesuit is its "service of faith" of which the "promotion of justice" is an absolute requirement.

    1983 - Peter-Hans Kolvenbach is elected the 29th Superior General of the Society, which now returns to its own governance.

    1996 - The Cristo Rey model of college-preparatory education for inner-city youth is inaugurated with the founding of Cristo Rey High School in Chicago

    2006 - This Jesuit Jubilee year marks the 450th anniversary of the death of Ignatius and the 500th anniversary of the births of his companions Francis Xavier and Pierre Favre.

    2008 - Adolfo Nicolás is elected the 30th Superior General of the Society

    2013 - Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected the 266th pope, the first from the Society of Jesus, and takes the name 'Francis."
     

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    Jesuit Refugee Service/USA

    The mission of the Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, sponsored by the Society of Jesus, is to accompany, serve and defend persons driven from their homes by conflict, natural disaster, economic injustice, or violation of other human rights.

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    Jesuit Volunteer Corps

    The Jesuit Volunteer Corps provides essential services to low-income people and those who live on the margins of our society. Over 275 JVs each year work for and with people who are homeless, unemployed, refugees, people with AIDS, the elderly, street youth, abused women and children, and people with mental illness or developmental disabilities. JVC has become the largest Catholic volunteer program in the country.

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Jesuits and Jews

On more than one occasion, Ignatius of Loyola, as elected leader of the newly-founded Jesuit order, was heard to say that he would like to have been born of Jewish blood because he would then be closer to Christ our Lord. His attitude here is remarkable because there were strong negative feelings against New Christians -- people descended from recent converts to Christianity from Judaism or Islam -- in his native Basque territory and in all the Iberian Peninsula. New Christians were simply not trusted as genuine Christians and so were forbidden to hold office in church or state.

Diego Lainez, one of the original companions at the University of Paris, was elected to succeed Ignatius as superior general. He was of Jewish blood, and so was Juan de Polanco, Ignatius' secretary and collaborator in the writing of thousands of letters and of the Jesuit Constitutions. But powerful figures like the Archbishop of Toledo tried to force the Society to abide by their limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood") proscriptions.

The same strong front against limpieza continued during the generalates of Lainez and Borja (the third general). But then trouble came. Polanco was the obvious choice to succeed Borja, but a small minority of Jesuits mostly from Portugal lobbied Pope Gregory XIII to decree that the next Jesuit head could not come from Spain. Jesuits on both sides of the question knew what the real reason was for the prohibition. The next general congregation elected Everard Mercurian, a Belgian.

Antonio Possevino, an Italian Jesuit likely of Jewish lineage and Mercurian's secretary for several years, wrote a long and compelling "Memorial" to his leader, arguing the urgent need for action -- a letter -- from the general because he alone had the authority to address the growing dissention within the Society. It would be a call for unity and faithfulness to Ignatius' constitutional principles and practice of non-discrimination. The letter that Possevino called for was never written. The issue did not go away.

"Possevino foresaw, with a clarity that few men of his generation possessed, that the effort to exclude New Christians would inevitably lead to the exclusion of other groups." It would have important implications for the Jesuit mission to non-Europeans. 

See Thomas M Cohen, "Jesuits and New Christians: The Contested Legacy of St. Ignatius," Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits (Autumn 2010).

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    Jesuits, Famous and Not-so-famous

    Alphabetical List of

    In his excellent book Ignatian Humanism, historical theologian Ron Modras devotes five chapters to the lives of five Jesuits who, he believes, exemplify the Ignatian humanism he has described in earlier chapters. No claim is made that the biographical mini-essays scattered through this A-Z section of our jesuitresource.org website are illustrative of Jesuit spirituality to the same degree. But taken as a group, these 60-some bios surely add up to more than just a bunch of individual pieces. See what you think. Look for the mini-biographies of the following men and woman under their individual names:

    Acosta, Jose
    Amaladoss, Michael
    Aquaviva, Claude
    Arrupe, Pedro
    Barry, William A.
    Bea, Augustin
    Bellarmine, Robert
    Bergoglio, Jorge
    Berrigan, Daniel
    Bolland, John
    Boscovitch, Roger
    Brebeuf, John
    Buckley, Michael J.
    Campion, Edmund
    Canisius, Peter
    Carroll, John
    Claver, Peter
    Clavius, Christopher
    Delp, Alfred
    De Mello, Anthony
    De Smet, Peter
    Dulles, Avery
    Dupuis, Jacques
    Ellacuria, Ignacio

    Espinal, Luis
    Faber, Peter
    Farrell, Walter L.
    Gonzaga, Aloysius
    Grande, Rutilio
    Gray, Howard
    Hopkins, Gerard Manley
    Hurtado, Alberto
    Ignatius of Loyola
    Juana
    Kino, Eusebio
    Kolvenbach, Peter-Hans
    LaFarge, John
    Lainez, James
    LeMoyne, Simon
    Lonergan, Bernard
    Marquette, Jacques
    Martini, Carlo Maria
    Murray, John Courtney
    Mveng, Engelbert 
    Nadal, Jerome
    Nicolas, Adolfo

    O’Keefe, Vincent
    O’Malley, John W.
    Owen, Nicholas
    Padberg, John W.
    Pieris, Aloysius
    Polanco, Juan
    Pozzo, Andrea
    Rahner, Karl
    Regis, John-Francis
    Rhodes, Alexander
    Ricci, Matteo
    Rodriguez, Alphonsus
    Segundo, Juan Luis
    Spee von Langenfeld, Frederick
    Starkloff, Carl
    Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre
    Valignano, Alessandro
    Xavier, Francis
    Zipoli, Domenico
    Zucchi, Nicolas

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    Jesus

    Jesus [the] Christ, meaning Jesus [God's] anointed one

    The historical person Jesus of Nazareth whom Christians acknowledge to be, by his life (what he taught and did) and his death and resurrection, the true revelation of God and at the same time the exemplar of what it means to be fully human. In other words, for Christians, Jesus shows what God is like and how they can live in response to this revelation: God is the compassionate giver of life who invites and empowers human beings, in freedom, together with one another, to work toward overcoming the forces of evil — meaninglessness, guilt, oppression, suffering and death — that diminish people and keep them from growing toward ever fuller life.

    In his Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius has the retreatant devote most of the time to "contemplating" (i.e., imaginatively entering into) the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, so as to become more and more a companion of Jesus. And when Ignatius and his companions from the University of Paris decided to establish a religious order, he insisted that it be called the Company or Society of Jesus [see "Jesuit" — noun].

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    Jesus Seminar, The

    A group of New Testament scholars and other interested people led by Robert Funk (The Westar Institute).

     Especially active in the 1980s and 1990s, it sought and gained a certain notoriety because of its method, at meetings, of voting on the sayings of Jesus to determine whether and how far they go back to Jesus himself:

    • definitely what Jesus said (red bead)
    • Jesus probably said something like this (pink bead)
    • Jesus did not say any such thing, though it may contain
    an idea Jesus had (gray bead)
    • Jesus did not say any thing like it; it was added by a
    later community or the gospel writer (black bead).

    More recently the Seminar voted on the acts (deeds) of Jesus in a similar way.

    Among the best known members of the Seminar are John Dominic Crossan (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography[1995]) on the left and Marcus Borg (Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Revelance of a Religious Revolutionary [2008]), closer to main stream NT scholarship. Borg invested time with one of the best of more conservative scholars, the British (Anglican) N. T. Wright— The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (2007). Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory University is a major critic of the Jesus Seminar.

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    Juana, SJ (1535-1573)

    The only woman known to have lived and died a Jesuit

    Second daughter of Emperor Charles V, Juana was married in 1552 to Joao Manuel, the heir apparent to the Portuguese throne. They were married only two years when her husband died. Shortly thereafter her brother Philip (II), who had married Mary Tudor of England, appointed her Regent of Spain in his absence. And in that same year (1554), Juana approached superiors of the Society of Jesus about becoming a Jesuit. Careful debate and deliberation followed. As Lisa Fullam, a specialist on Juana, puts it: “Juana, widowed at nineteen, was an eminently marriageable young woman. To admit her to the Society would risk enraging her father the Emperor, himself no fan of the Jesuits. But at the same time, to refuse her request was to risk the displeasure of the Regent of Spain... a move that could have serious consequences for the work of the Society there” (“Juana, SJ,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. [November 1999]).

    In their hushed deliberations, Jesuit superiors used the name “Matteo Sanchez” for Juana. They considered many other factors in her case. In the end, they decided to admit her in secret as a “scholastic,” a Jesuit with first vows in the process of formation. And all through her short life—she died a Jesuit at 38—they continued to care for her growth in the spirit.

    The life of Juana provides an opportunity to clarify, not just her own case, but the larger question of Ignatius and the Society in regard to women. As Fullam sums up:

    [M]ost women in Ignatius’s time could not embody the availability for mission that is essential to the Jesuit charism. Ignatius’s group was a religious order. The question of the admission of women to the Society was, in most cases, a non-starter in Ignatius’s time, because women were either cloistered if they were religious, or not religious if they were not cloistered. On grounds of mobility Ignatius consistently rejected the idea of women belonging to the Society. And Juana’s admission underscores the idea that sex cannot be the deciding issue here—Juana was no less a woman after her admission than before. What she was after her admission was a woman living under the religious vows of the Society of Jesus while substantially assisting the Society’s work in Spain. To an unusual extent, Juana was able to overcome the catch-22 that kept most women from being able to live as Jesuits: her political influence was an avenue to a kind of apostolic availability for the work of the Society, and at the same time it served as leverage that enabled her to force the question of her admission on the Jesuit leadership. And, as it turned out, they let her in. Beyond that, they admitted her in a strikingly ordinary way. The infanta Juana, Regent of Spain, became—a scholastic. An extraordinary person in extraordinary circumstances was seen to fit into a very ordinary niche. It is her ordinary admission, freely undertaken, that is salient about Juana’s case: when all was said and done, the Jesuits decided that Juana was a Jesuit—an unusual Jesuit, to be sure, but a Jesuit nonetheless. (ibid.)

    A Woman Jesuit

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    Judaeo-Christian Vision

    Here is a version of the Judaeo-Christian vision or story, told with certain emphases from Ignatius of Loyola.

    The great and mysterious Reality of personal love and self-giving that many call God is the origin and destiny of all creation, the whole universe. God is present and at work in everything, leading it to fulfillment. All things are originally good and potentially means for those creatures called human beings to find the God who made and works in them. Still, none of these things are God, and therefore they are all radically limited.

    Indeed, in the case of human beings (who somehow image God in a special way), their relative freedom results in a new dimension of being whereby not just good but also evil exists in the world: selfishness, war, domination — racial, sexual, economic, environmental — of some over others. Human history, then, is marked by a struggle between the forces of good, or "life," and evil, or "death."

    God has freely chosen to side with struggling, flawed humanity by participating more definitively in human life and living it "from the inside" in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. This irrevocable commitment of God to the human enterprise grounds and invites people's response of working with God toward building a community of justice, love and peace—the "kingdom" or "reign" of God that Jesus preached and lived.

    As with Jesus, so for his followers, it takes discernment — a finely tuned reading of oneself and one's culture in the Spirit of God — to recognize in any given situation what helps the coming of God's reign and what hinders it. In the face of human selfishness and evil, the way ultimately entails self-giving, going through suffering and death in order to gain life — indeed, life everlasting. And along the way, because the followers of Jesus are wary of idolizing anyone or anything (that is, making a god of them), they are less likely to become disillusioned with themselves or others or human history for all its weight of personal and social evil. Rather do they continue to care about people and the human enterprise, for their hope is in God, the supreme Reality of personal love and self-giving.

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    JESUIT A TO Z: An expanded version of the publication "Do You Speak Ignatian?"