Disciples must be obedient in faith

OF ALL THE ORDERS of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus has been for centuries the biggest, the strongest and among the most distinguished and the most disciplined. Without the Jesuits, the Council of Trent might have amounted to a series of pius platitudes and the Counter, or the Catholic, Reformation of the Catholic Church would have been impossible. In September, this paper was delighted to carry a report of a letter sent by Fr Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the Jesuit Superior General, to the 200 Jesuits of the British Province in which he praised God for the work of their predecessors and drew attention to the unprecedented 29 canonised and beatified martyrs produced by the province in the first 200 years of its existence. The feats of the British Jesuits have indeed been remarkable but today sadly their numbers are in decline. As JeanMruie du Plessis reveals in The Catholic Herald this week, there were about 850 Jesuits in the. British Province at the beginning of the 1960s hut current trends suggest that within the next decade there will be fewer than 80 under the age of 75 years.
This decline, of course, is not entirely the fault of the Jesuits. The laity must take a fair share of the blame. It could be argued that declining vocations do not necessarily represent a vote of no confidence in the Church and its religious orders. Other forces are at work in the world today, perhaps most significantly a declining birth rate which has hit professions such as teaching and medicine just as hard as it has hit the Church. Catholics have proved little different from their non-Catholic counterparts when it comes to having children; most Catholic couples choose not to raise large families simply because in most cases it would be neither practical nor economically rational to do so. If such couples settled for just one or two children, it would be reasonable to assume that they would be less likely to encourage inchoate vocations among their offspring than the parents of larger families in earlier generations.
On this basis alone, it would have been equally fair to conclude that it was inevitable that the Jesuits would face a problem of decline. However, this assumption is contradicted by the growth in other parts of the Church, principally in the new movements and in what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has described as "convinced communities".
Both he and the Pope believe these communities to be among the authentic fruits of the Second Vatican Council. John Paul specifically named one of them, Youth 2000. in his address to the English and Welsh bishops at the end of their ad limina visit to Rome last month. It is easy to understand his optimism. These groups appeal to the young and are delivering vocations out of all proportion to their sizes. Consider the Neo-Catechurnenates, for example, a movement merely tolerated in the Archdiocese of Westminster but which is providing so many candidates for the priesthood there that Allen Hall seminary in Chelsea would probably struggle to stay
open without them. It is the priests of the new movements and the Neo-Catechumenate in particular who have replenished the churches of Rome during the pontificate of John Paul II: there were 22 candidates for the priesthood in his diocese in 1978. and now there are 193, more than a hundred of whom attend the Neo-Catechumenate seminary.
So what arc the new movements of the postconciliar Church doing that the modern Jesuits are not? For a start, they do not owe their success to beliefs in liberation theology and the Pill. On the contrary, what characterises many of the movements is their essential orthodoxy, understood properly as the radical fidelity to the papacy and the teaching Church that was not only die boast of the Jesuits but also their foundation. It was this fidelity, according to John Paul 1, that helped to win the Jesuits the trust of bishops and people in the past. It is this fidelity to which the Jesuits have been urged to return by three successive popes, a message
echoed by the two most recent Jesuit Superior Generals. One of the latter, Fr Pedro Arrupe, went as far as to warn the Jesuits that they would be signing their own death warrants if they failed in this regard. It is sad that so many Jesuits, mostly of a generation which is now passing away, appeared to have paid little attention to Fr Arrupe's solicitude.
THOUGH the fashion for reactive Catholicism — where priests behaved like rebellious adolescents in response to the teachings of the Church — is dying out, the issue of fidelity remains as pertinent as ever. Amid all the crises which trouble the Church in the West, it is abundantly clear that the Pope believes that fidelity is the key to renewal. Ile offered it as the solution to the sexual abuse scandals that convulsed the American Catholic Church last year and it was a theme to which he continually returned during his message to the English and Welsh bishops last month. "It is by fidelity to the
ordinary Magisterium of the Church, by strict adherence to the discipline of the universal Church, and by the positive statements that clearly instruct the faithful, that a bishop preserves God's people from deviations and defections," he said.
Yet fidelity is not only a matter for bishops alone and it is for this reason that the appointment of Fr George "Jock" Earle as English Jesuit Provincial in 1981 is of relevance to the Church today. The affair demonstrates the perverse lengths to which some people will go to make sure that Catholics loyal to the papacy and the magisterium are kept from positions of authority within the Church. As the investigation by Jean-Marie du Plessis reveals, it appears likely that Fr Earle was something of a pawn in a strategy to keep the orthodox Jesuit Fr Michael Kyne from becoming Provincial. To those who orchestrated this manoeuvre, it mattered little that Fr Earle had been accused of the sexual abuse of a teenage boy since this, they claimed, would soon be "forgotten". They were wrong. The English Jesuits, for their part, do not conic off too badly from this shameful episode though some members of the Province must have colluded with the Jesuit curia in Rome in the appointment of Fr Earle. At least the outgoing Provincial, Fr William Maher, and his consultors, who preferred Fr Kyne to Fr Earle, behaved responsibly by raising the sex abuse allegation with the appropriate authorities in Rome both before and after Fr Earle was named as Provincial. A delegation of English Jesuits later travelled to Rome with the testimony of the boy whom Fr Earle was alleged to have abused.
The sidelining of Fr Kyne on account of his fidelity represents just one case among many of its kind at every level in the Church in the last 40 years. The lesson we can draw from it is that, yes, fidelity does matter. But fidelity must be appreciated as a virtue and rewarded as such instead of being penalised. It is the only way to halt decline. It is also time to accept that the revolution is over.