The Holy Founder

The Holy Founder
St. Ignatius of Loyola

Welcome the "Reforming the Jesuits" blog.

This blog has the objective of reforming the Jesuits. The logic is first to show that the Jesuits need to be reformed and second to consider the means needed to achieve that end.

Why should non-Jesuits be concerned about reforming the order?
The Jesuit order like any religious order has as an end to serve Christ by serving His Church. The members of the Church have the right to control the quality of the service that it is receiving.

The service that the Catholic faithful receive comes from institutional decisions and from individual Jesuits. Many love the traditional Society of Jesus, her saints, her mysticism, and her history but are dismayed by the direction taken by the current management. Many have been served by pious orthodox Jesuits but are scandalized by others. It seems that there is an identity crisis. The very institution does not know what its ends are. While the documents of the order are clear, institutional discipline has broken down, some members are confused and leaders have refused to lead.


What should be done? Some argue that the Society should be suppressed again. That would be a shame. Given that the name of the Society of Jesus in Spanish is La Compañía de Jesús, maybe what should be preferred is a hostile takeover of the Company. That does not seem possible. During the crazy post VCII days some Orthodox Spanish Jesuits advanced the proposal of the establishment of a reformed ordered following the example of the Carmelites and Trapists, others proposed the foundation of "strict observance" provinces.


This blog aims to apply moral pressure advancing arguments for what seems to be a clear truth: the Jesuits need reformed. Then it invites brain storming looking for possible solutions. Ideas are powerful but prayer is more powerful. We invite readers to pray. Invoke the Jesuit saints.

Followers

Friday, October 26, 2007

One more reason for reform quote from Pete Hamill

An article from the NY Times gives another testimony as to why the Jesuits need reformed.
White Ethnic Politics: Irish and Italian Catholics and Jews, Oh, My!
By Sewell Chan
An Irishman, an Italian and a Jew walked into the grand auditorium of the New York Academy of Medicine on Wednesday evening – not to tell jokes (or be part of one), but to engage an audience of some 400 people in a discussion about white ethnic groups and their evolving roles in the politics and culture of New York City.

The panelists — Edward I. Koch, mayor from 1978 to 1989; Pete Hamill, the journalist and author; and Frank J. Macchiarola, schools chancellor from 1978 to 1983 — had been invited by the Museum of the City of New York to reflect on a new book, “White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics,” by the historian Joshua M. Zeitz.
Snip-- snip---

Mr. Hamill is famous for his storytelling abilities, and he did not disappoint. He recalled guys from the neighborhood, looking for movie listings in The Tablet, a diocesan newspaper in Brooklyn, and making jokes about Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, whom Mr. Hamill called, rather irreverently, a “strike-busting fat boy.”
Mr. Hamill was equally irreverent about the Catholic schools he attended:
They had a kind of madrassa in the morning: “Hail Mary, full of grace.” It’s like these kids you see in Pakistan learning things by rote. But I ended up in a Jesuit high school and the Jesuits have one thing they gave to everybody who’s ever gone to one of these schools: doubt. They’ve probably created more atheists than communism ever did, and standards of excellence that none of us can ever approach.
There is some to his comments. Some Jesuits seem to have the objective of spreading doubt which they call “critical thinking”.

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