Search Results for: van der Ven

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 founding of the Society of Jesus,” Jesuit historian Joseph Conwell has argued, “begins with a discernment process.” The fruits of that process of discernment appear in the following document, Cum ex plurim, written by Ignatius and his companions in 1539. The document articulates the founders’ vision for what became the Jesuit order. Indeed, five

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