Search Results for: Lete

The Ignatian Center for Spirituality in Rome closed a five-week conference on Ignatian Spirituality on February 18, 1978, with Pedro Arrupe delivering the following remarks. The Superior General of the Society of Jesus based his remarks on a phrase from the Jesuits’ Formula, approved by Pope Julius III in 1550.  For Arrupe, the phrase “To […]

The following is a partial transcript—as translated by Jerome Aixala and published by Jesuit Sources—of an interview Pedro Arrupe had an Italian television program “Encounter” in September 1975. Among the interviewer’s admittedly “provocative questions” to the Jesuits’ superior general are those on Arrupe’s own personal history (he provides a vivid account of the bombings and

Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus on July 21, 1773. In the preceding decades, the Jesuits had suffered expulsions from the Catholic empires of Portugal (1759), France (1764), and Spain (1767), where they had become handy scapegoats for kings or princes under civic pressure. In Portugal, for example, charges against the Society included

Gaspar Loarte published The Exercise of the Christian Life in 1557 (just a year after the death of Ignatius de Loyola) as the Spanish Jesuit served as the rector of a Jesuit college in Genoa. The slim volume provided prayers, meditations, and general advice to Christians who desired to live a more devout life. Exemplifying

The delegates at the 35th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus address the topic of Jesuit obedience in the following decree. They define “obedience” in the context of the vow the members of the Society of Jesus make to the pope as a vow “grounded in the desire to be sent effectively, to serve

On February 2, 2006, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, having reached an agreement with Pope Benedict XVI to allow for his resignation as the Jesuits’ superior general, dispatched a letter to the Society of Jesus indicating that “it had become more and more clear that the Society has arrived at a situation…which required a General Congregation.” That gathering—the

In the degree below, the delegates of the 34th General Congregation grant certain powers and responsibilities to their order’s new superior general, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, with those powers mainly concerning the issuance of the congregation’s decrees and recommendations. They also require Kolvenbach “to complete the work on the Complementary Norms and the Notes to the Constitutions

“Today, more than ever,” the following decree from the 34th General Congregation states, “the needs of the world constitute an urgent call to put our Ignatian universalism into practice.” The decree recognizes that the “needs that call for common action are many; the difficult search for world unity requires the presence, witness, and involvement of

“In order to ‘feel’ [sentir] the anxieties and aspirations of the dispossessed in an Ignatian way,” the following decree from the 34th General Congregation declares that Jesuits “need direct personal experience” of poverty.  The decree explains poverty’s “apostolic and prophetic dimension” (it serving as the “unequivocal condition of our credibility”), offers guidelines to “renew our

The following decree from the 34th General Congregation is a lengthy discussion of chastity within the context of the Society of Jesus: the call to chastity, its apostolic character, the meaning of the vow of chastity, and some normative principles and guidelines for a chaste lifestyle). The delegates, in approving this decree, did so as