The Jesuits Read Free Page A

stability and esprit de corps remarkable for such a rapidly expanding and geographically sprawling enterprise as the Society of Jesus early became.
    In choosing Juan Alfonso de Polanco as his secretary, he found a person of broad culture who at the same time showed a genius for organizing how the central office of the order could keep effectively in touch with members spread far and wide. In choosing Jerónimo Nadal as his “agent in the field,” he found a man of extraordinary energy and persuasive powers who traveled across Europe visiting Jesuit communities, interviewing eachmember, and then explaining and exemplifying what it meant to be a Jesuit. The collaboration among these three men accounts for the cohesion and stability (amid much confusion!) that the new order enjoyed from the beginning.
    Secondly, Ignatius, with the aid of Polanco, composed the Jesuit
Constitutions,
which broke new ground for the genre. Unlike the correlative documents of other orders, the
Constitutions
were not a simple collection of ordinances and regulations but a coherent presentation of ideals and goals. The originality of the
Constitutions
was nowhere more striking than in the developmental design according to which they followed the Jesuit from entrance into the Society through his training and commissioning for ministry. The final part of the
Constitutions
describes the qualities required in the superior general, which amounts to a portrait of the ideal Jesuit. It was a book, therefore, with beginning, middle, and end.
    Like the
Exercises,
the
Constitutions
were based on a presupposition that psychological or spiritual growth will take place, and they provided for it by prescribing certain things as appropriate for beginners and suggesting others as appropriate for more seasoned members. In so doing the
Constitutions
evince a judicious mix of firmness and flexibility that allowed the Society to adapt to changing circumstances and still retain its identity. Undergirding it was an implicit theological assumption of the compatibility of Christianity with the best of secular culture, according to the axiom of Thomas Aquinas, the theologian the
Constitutions
prescribe for the order, that grace perfects nature. The Jesuit adoption of the axiom suggests, once again, the ongoing impact of Ignatius’s “turn to the world” at Manresa.
    Thirdly, Ignatius decided, after the Society had been in existence less than a decade, to commit it to the staffing and management of schools for young laymen, a bold new undertaking for a religious order. Leadership, though a gift difficult to analyze, certainly consists in large measure in vision, in the ability to see how at a given juncture change is more consistent with one’s scope than staying the course. That is the quality Ignatius displayed at this juncture. The decision to found, staff, and operate schools meant that the Jesuits, while retaining their identity as missionaries, now also had an identity as resident schoolmasters. It was an identity not only not foreseen in the
Formula
but seemingly inconsistent with it. Somehow the Jesuits managed to hold the two ideals together.
    The Jesuits now had a ministry that made them distinctive. They threw themselves into it unreservedly. By the time Ignatius died more than thirty schools were in operation, principally in Italy but also in other countries. Ten years later there were thirty in Italy alone but others in France, Germany, and elsewhere. Two, for instance, had just opened in Poland. Besides offering instruction, the schools served as excellent bases for other ministries. Moreover, the Jesuits discovered that the schools gave them access to a population, such as the parents of their students, that might not be attracted to their churches. The schools, some of which grew to physically imposing structures, developed into important civic institutions. They also immediately began to be a source of vocations to the Society and in that