Lots of good information at Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam on the Jesuits' GC35 in Rome, where the Society of Jesus is meeting to pick a new General, including this tidbit:
Four of the last seven theologians admonished by the Vatican are Jesuits: Roger Haight, Jacques Dupuis, Anthony De Mello and Jon Sobrino. The dilemma between the call to obedience and dialogue "with the street" is something the Company ought solve in these crucial days.
The best thing that could happen, in my view, is that the Jesuits get a General who returns them to the intent of their founder and to the traditions of their order, namely:
- Absolute loyalty to the Pope.
- Absolute fidelity to the Magisterium of the Church.
- A return to the Spiritual Exercises and traditional Jesuit formation.
- A re-engagement with the Scholastic theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.
- A re-embrace of the Sacred Heart as a Jesuit devotion.
I view this as unlikely. The Jesuits have this romantic notion of themselves as the intellectual vanguard of the church (instead of simply following the Pope, as Ignatius of Loyola founded them to do), and in my view, have collectively fallen to the terrible sin of Pride. They think of themselves as being the Church, rather than of themselves as soldiers of the Church -- or, they define the Church according to the tenets of Liberation Theology, as some sort of collective unconscious of the people, rather than seeing it as an organization that is hierarchical, and built on the rock of Peter.
I do not doubt that there are good Jesuits in the order, but I despair that there are far too few to save their order from the radicals. I'd like to see a Jesuit General take the five steps outlined above, but suspect they'll do the exact opposite.
In which case, I hope that the Pope does what Paul VI should have done in the 1970s, which is to suppress the order. I say that with some sadness, for my father was Jesuit-educated, and I owe much of my understanding of the faith to him and to his teachers.
It's a shame, because I think an order set up as Ignatius originally founded it is a) desperately needed, and b) would be hugely successful.
But I think the Jesuits have lost interest in that.