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The following are notes, rather incomplete yet intimate ones, written by Pedro Arrupe before his stroke in August 1981. The Jesuits’ Superior General describes celebrating Mass, alone, in his private chapel reserved at the Curia in Rome. He provides glimpses of his passionate intimacy with the Eucharist and of his burdens of his office: “the […]

French Jesuit Jean-Claude Dietsch interviewed Pedro Arrupe in 1981, before Arrupe suffered a debilitating stroke, and their conversation was published the following year. The following is a selection of that interview as published by Jesuit Sources. Here Arrupe speaks to the beginnings of his devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He notes how, during

Appearing below are the concluding paragraphs of the letter Pedro Arrupe sent to all the members of the Society of Jesus following his debilitating stroke in 1981. The letter emerged from an address he had given earlier that February at the end of a program hosted by the Ignatian Center of Spirituality at the Jesuit

In 1540, Francis Xavier joined Simão Rodrigues in accepting the offer of the Portuguese king to serve as a missionary in Asia. Xavier took the place of Nicolás Alonso de Bobadilla, the man originally selected to travel with the Portuguese ambassador to Portugal. On March 15, before leaving Rome, Xavier wrote and signed the following

The following is an excerpt of a manuscript by Jerónimo Nadal on the spirit and practice of prayer. It is unclear if Nadal merely wrote this text (with assistance from Diego Jiménez) or delivered it, but Nadal edited it in 1561 or 1562. The selections below articulate Nadal’s contention that a Jesuit must reconcile a

In December 1551, Ignatius had his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco write to Antonio Araoz, the provincial of Spain, about the Society’s rapidly developing educational apostolate. What resulted was a concentrated epitome of the early Society’s thinking about this enterprise. Polanco swiftly covers issues of “method” (founding, administration, faculty, structure, content), and “advantages,” both for

In the 1740s, Feodosii Smorzhevskii, a Russian hieromonk in Beijing, reported to his superiors on the work of Jesuit missionaries in China. Both the Russian Orthodox and Catholic missionaries attempted to navigate the labyrinthine world of the Qing imperial court. In the selection below, the Russian hieromonk reveals—in vivid detail—the precarious position of Christians in

The official Directory of the Spiritual Exercises was published in 1599. The directory was the culmination of study and experimentation through commissions over the course of four generalates. A committee appointed by the Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (1593-94) appointed the committee that ultimately produced the official directory. To mark the occasion,