Search Results for: Hus

According to historian John Padberg’s historical account of the congregation, Jesuits sent more than 160 postulata (or petitions) on the topic their brethren’s spiritual formation for consideration at the 31st General Congregation (see Jesuit Life & Mission Today (2009), pg. 18–19). That formation, the following decree observes, “is the work of divine grace,” helping Jesuits in […]

The delegates of the 31st General Congregation used their seventh decree to address the matter of temporal adjuators, or brothers, within the Society of Jesus. The delegates were responding both to the declining numbers of brothers over the last several decades but also to postulata (or petitions) that requested both a clarification of the brothers’

Pope John VI opened the 31st General Congregation by noting the “fearful danger of atheism threatening human society.” Through the Jesuit delegates gathered for the congregation, the pontiff gave to the entire Society of Jesus (the “champion of the Church and holy religion in adversity”) a special task: “the charge of making a stout, united

The delegates of the 31st General Congregation promulgated the following decree, which recognizes both the limitations of the reforms encouraged by the Second Vatican Council and Paul VI’s Magno gaudio (1964) as well as the need for change nonetheless. The decree concludes that “the entire government of the Society must be adapted to modern necessities

The following text was first orally approved by Pope Paul III in 1539. More commonly known as the “Five Chapters,” the document serves the first foundational document of what became the Society of Jesus, stating the key purposes of the proposed religious order. The document was later revised in 1540 (approved in the papal bull

Nicolás delivered the following homily in Rome’s Church of the Gesù on January 20, 2008. The day before, the 217 members of General Congregation 35 had elected Nicolás, the former provincial of Japan and president of the Conference of Major Superiors of East Asia and Oceania, as their order’s new general. For more from the

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued Perfectae caritatis, a proclamation that mandated religious orders seek renewal through reflection and honoring “their founders’ spirit and special aims.” In 2008, the delegates at the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, in part, responded to that mandate with their second decree, “A Fire that Kindles

One month after they elected Alfonso Nicolás to succeed Peter-Hans Kolvenbach as the Jesuits’ superior general, the delegates of the 35th General Congregation gathered, at the pontiff’s invitation, in the Vatican’s Sala Clementina. There, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the men with words of gratitude. He states, “I very much hope, therefore, that the entire Society

Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, delivered the following remarks, over three days, to open the Jesuits’ 34th General Congregation. Kolvenbach reminds the delegates that their gathering had its “source and origins in the spiritual experience of Ignatius and his first companions,” that, in the words of Ignatius, theirs was “a

Fifty-three days after it began, the 33rd General Congregation closed on October 25, 1983. The delegates had passed only six decrees (the 31st passed 16, and the 34th would pass 26). But, for the first time in the history of the Society of Jesus, the delegates had accepted the resignation of their superior general and