(LifeSiteNews) — St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast day is celebrated on July 31, has been measured by the stature of the order of priests and brothers he founded in the sixteenth century—the Society of Jesus (the “Jesuits”). Unfortunately for the Society and the whole Church, that order is now in serious decline. In a 2022 memo to fellow cardinals just before he died, Cardinal George Pell suggested an official investigation:

Despite the dangerous decline in the West and the inherent fragility and instability in many places, serious consideration should be given to the feasibility of a visitation on the Jesuit Order. They are in a situation of catastrophic numerical decline from 36,000 members during the Council to less than 16,000 in 2017 (with probably 20-25% above 75 years of age). In some places, there is catastrophic moral decline. The order is highly centralized, susceptible to reform or damage from the top. The Jesuit charism and contribution have been and are so important to the Church that they should not be allowed to pass away into history undisturbed or become simply an Asian-African community.¹

The glory days

The Society of Jesus was the premier religious order in the Catholic Church until shortly before the Second Vatican Council. Before then it had set the standards for erudition in many fields of study and for its evangelization and missionary work. From my own experiences with Jesuits at two of their universities and from much personal research, I believe that the pre-Council vintage “old-school” Jesuits truly earned the Jesuit “mystique.” Jesuits then, formed in academic and ascetic rigor, were well-prepared for hostile times and heroic endurance in evangelizing the Faith. They were faithful, orthodox, tough, innovative, intellectual, adaptive, pragmatic, scholarly, efficient, and loyal—and topped off those attributes with an Ignatian soldierly obedience and justifiable swagger. Magis, “more,” was the Society’s fitting motto, and the old-school Jesuits lived it. Former Jesuit Malachi Martin (d. 1999) described them well:

While the Jesuit onslaught against the enemies of Rome was mighty, their pervasive influence on Roman Catholicism itself has never been equaled. . . They were giants, but with one purpose: the defense and propagation of papal authority and teaching. . . Jesuits as Far Eastern explorers and missioners outdid anything ever dreamed of by their contemporaries, and constitute a heroic tale that tastes of the almost magical. . .²

The mistakes

The Jesuit decline probably began in the Enlightenment era’s spirit of reform that led to nineteenth century heresies condemned and labeled as “modernism” by Pope St. Pius X in 1907. The Jesuits, as virtual leaders of the intellectual Catholic world, simply had to explore the exciting new ideas. By the Second Vatican Council they owned them all: scriptural skepticism, historicism, human conditioning, contextualism, and—brushed with a bit of pantheism—an experientialism and immanentism that centered the truths of Revelation in subjective personal conviction. This constituted a new religion, very much flourishing in the Church today, known as liberal, progressive, or cafeteria Catholicism—something G.K. Chesterton had earlier  labeled a “God Within” religion. “That Jones shall worship the god within him,” Chesterton said, “turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”³

Jesuits were the chief propagandists for the modernism that asserted itself particularly after the Council years (1962-1965), when their numbers began to plummet. Jesuit Julio Fernández Techera, rector of the Catholic University of Uruguay, described the condition of his Society in 2024 as in “deep decline”:

There are many signs in the current life of Jesuit ministries, in the documents that are published and the guidelines that are given, that give the impression that we are in an NGO [non-government organization] . . . [The Society] is in deep decline. It doesn’t know it, or it doesn’t want to know it, which is the same thing. It wants to believe that this is the situation of all the other realities of the Church that surround it and that therefore it is what it should be . . . [I]n a few years the Society will have disappeared from several European countries and will become insignificant in others in Europe, America, and Oceania. . . [T]he problem is not only that many die and few enter, but also that we do not know how to retain many of those who enter.⁴

With its worldwide education enterprise, the Society’s decline is particularly apparent: it should be booming with vocations among the thousands of young men emerging from its schools each year. But it is not.

The reformers

Three Jesuits were most critical to the Society’s decline: Karl Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin, and Pedro Arrupe, the Society’s Superior General from 1965 to 1983.

In former Jesuit Malachi Martin’s view, it was the brilliant Karl Rahner who led the “wolf-pack” of modernist theologians:

While Rahner did not work in lonely fields; his stature, his uncaring boldness, and his success mark him as the leader in what can be aptly described as the wolf-pack of Catholic theologians who, since 1965, have lacerated and shredded not merely the ranks but the very substance of Catholicism. . . [Rahner] trained the heavy artillery of his logic and his vast reputation as a theologian on the sacrosanct authority of popes. He chose the long-accepted, immemorial formulas of belief as his targets. . . Yet his voice seemed so authentic that he was taken by many to be more authoritative than three successive Popes when it came to interpreting the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.⁵

Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, an esteemed theologian, often condemned Rahner’s theories. Siri notes, for example, his pananthropist views:

The assertion of Rahner on the identity of the essence of God and man, is probably the fruit of speculations on that immense mystery. This is said here because the assertions of Rahner regarding the Incarnation and the Hypostatic Union leave no doubt that if one cannot accuse him of pantheism, one can, in any case define his thought and his doctrine as ‘pananthropist,’ and in that expression one can understand many things.⁶

Rahner sold his version of modernism to a very large portion of American Catholic clergy and academics and to fellow Jesuits worldwide. He taught that God was not a Trinity of persons but a single person portraying himself in Scripture as acting only in “modes” of being. This is modalism, one of the most ancient of all Church heresies, and not the only heresy Rahner taught. John Hardon, S.J. identifies his belief in “transfinalization”—that the Eucharist represents only symbol and meal—instead of transubstantiation. Rahner’s personal life, not well known, would disappoint even ardent fans.

Teilhard de Chardin’s theo-scientific creations set the stage for Karl Rahner’s novelties by proposing transhumanism and a universe evolving from matter towards final “convergence” with Christ. Cardinal Avery Dulles disposed of Teilhard in the kindest possible manner: “Teilhard’s synthesis of science and theology was based on scientific theories that may not be broadly accepted today; it also neglected some important theological data.”⁷

Pedro Arrupe, who witnessed the 1945 nuclear horror in Hiroshima, opened the vast Jesuit educational enterprise not only to Rahner’s modernism but also to his own signature “social justice” program for remaking the world. He deceived many in the Church by claiming his program was Catholic Social Teaching and that it could replace evangelization and missionary work.

Arrupe totally overhauled his seminaries to train “new” Jesuits for a new era. He had a new mission his for social justice priest-warriors: fighting to bring economic relief to the world’s poor. He overhauled Jesuit seminaries with modernist theology, optional spiritual formation, relaxed discipline, and, in the U.S., the Rogerian “sensitivity training” program that completely destroyed the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the late sixties. The social justice mania, which we experience today as wokeism, transgenderism, and DEI, may well be modern fall-out from Arrupe’s complete re-missioning of the Society into a social justice task force.

Arrupe used liberation theology, which is infused with Marxist principles, to justify upheavals in Latin America that followed and achieved nothing while driving a dominant Catholic culture out of much of the area. On that sad fact Jesuit Cardinal Avery Dulles reflects:

One wonders what the Jesuits of those days would have done if they were alive today to see the defection of so many Latino Catholics from the church in the United States and in Central and South America.⁸

Needless to say, Jesuit schools, colleges and universities, heirs to all the theological novelty, now offer little to suggest that they are Catholic. They feature instead social justice indoctrination, modernist theology and morality, adulation of all things “Ignatian,” and an ambiguous Christianity. A little research reveals that the modernist morality principles of “situation ethics” are currently taught even in Jesuit secondary schools.

Of the many other mistakes made by the Society since the Council, perhaps its worst was its virtual abandonment of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, despite former Jesuit leadership having promoted this devotion from its inception. Even Pedro Arrupe would lament:

Some [Jesuits] in fact experience a difficulty in accepting any type of spirituality that could limit personal freedom or give the impression of being imposed indiscriminately from without. . . It may be added that many experience an instinctive revulsion to the over-emotional, inartistic, and often tawdry representations of the devotion. . . It follows that the Society, if it is to remain faithful to its tradition, has the duty of reflecting seriously on what is essential in the Sacred Heart devotion and of finding ways to channel and present it to the world of today.⁹

Impact on the Church

We have seen the progression of the “New Jesuit” theology not only among Jesuits themselves but also among other clergy in the wider Church. As mentioned above, studies in the U.S., for example, show how young diocesan priests inhaled Karl Rahner’s theories for several decades after the Council. Some of them later became the bishops who tolerated modernism in colleges and universities, overlooked homosexuality in their seminaries, and covered up clergy abuse among their priests.

But homosexuality appears to have particularly infected the Society itself. Sadly, two well-respected old-school Jesuits have noted in recent years that the Society has become corrupted by homosexuality among many of its priests. In 2003 Fr. Paul Mankowski reported:

 . . . between fifty and sixty percent of the men who entered religious life with me in the mid-70s were homosexuals who had no particular interest in the Church, but who were using the celibacy requirement of the priesthood as a way of camouflaging the real reason for the fact that they would never marry.¹⁰

And in a 2002 review of the book Passionate Uncertainty, Jesuit Fr. Paul Shaughnessy expounded further on the disaster in Jesuit formation:

Roughly half of the Society under the age of fifty shuffles on the borderline between declared and undeclared gayness. In 1999 the American Jesuits decided to give priority to the recruitment of gays (under the rubric of ‘men comfortable with their sexuality’), and the majority of American formators, Jesuits in charge of training, are homosexual as well. . .¹¹

Disobedience

Finally, in often subtle ways, Jesuit leadership has been disobedient to all popes prior to Pope Francis, to their own detriment and to that of the wider Church. Such of course was in total contradiction to what St. Ignatius of Loyola specifically required when he formed the Society of Jesus: strict obedience to papal authority and “thinking with the Church.”

Mainly because of a growing turn to modernism and existentialism, many Jesuit theologians, and non-Jesuits, were scrutinized closely by popes after Pius X and occasionally forbidden to write or teach. Nevertheless, censored work often leaked out to influential people, assisted by superiors who looked the other way. Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, for example, boasted of his “clandestines” that were mimeographed and distributed secretly to avoid Vatican censors.

Fr. Arrupe promoted liberation theology while knowing that John Paul II opposed it. The pope’s Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had to write two major documents condemning it. His Instruction on Certain Aspects of the “Theology of Liberation” (1984) needed to be followed up only two years later with Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation because the Jesuits weren’t getting the message.

At the Society’s 1965 General Congregation, Pope Paul VI assigned the Jesuits a new mission—to fight atheism. However, Arrupe and his Jesuits had their own agenda, and fighting atheism wasn’t part of it. Their plan was to prepare the whole Society for the “new era” in which modernized Jesuits would bring social justice to the world. His solution was to subsume the pope’s assignment within the social justice plans, stating very briefly in a few Congregation Decrees that atheism springs from poverty, especially in under-developed countries, and thus fighting social injustice was fighting atheism. Problem solved. Obedience deftly deflected.

Universities

In 1967, four major Jesuit universities in the U.S. joined the University of Notre Dame in publishing their “Land O’Lakes Statement” which declared that universities must be academically free, open to all ideas, and thus must be emancipated from episcopal supervision. Almost all Catholic universities signed on to the statement, and thus began the liberalization of Catholic academia.

Late in 1992, and again under Jesuit lead, Catholic universities essentially ignored Pope St. John Paul II’s 1990 encyclical Ex Corde Ecclesiae which would restore episcopal supervision over standards of “Catholic” identity. In this country, and probably elsewhere, episcopal supervision of Catholic college identity factors remains a dead issue after thirty years.

It is in that radical, post-Council seminary environment that Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio, later Pope Francis, would have acquired his modernist and social justice indoctrination. There he became the pure distillate of Jesuit theological and moral formation as evidenced in just about everything he said, did, and touched as pope. Francis and his team of New Jesuits affected the whole Church by further dividing it between pre-Vatican II backward-looking “indietrists” and “Church of tomorrow” reformers wishing to “update” the Church’s Tradition-Deposit theology in keeping with a “spirit” of the Council—a spirit that only modernists can detect. Francis encouraged departure from Church teaching on numerous matters, ignored the homosexual activity of friends in high places, and among other disastrous actions on the world stage, told us that even though the government of China was vigorously pursuing a program of “sinicization” of Catholicism for 12 million Chinese Catholics, good would somehow come from his still secret “China deal.”

Recovery?

By the turn of the new millennium Cardinal Avery Dulles seemed pessimistic about internal reform of the Society of Jesus:

But some religious orders, even in the United States, are increasing rapidly, and some dioceses are attracting large numbers of seminarians. The vocations seem to be there, but the Jesuits, at the moment, are getting too few of them. Decisive action on the part of superiors is needed to reverse this trend. The higher administrators, for the most part, are competent managers. While they keep the machinery going rather smoothly, they seem unwilling or unable to correct obvious defects and to project an unambiguous vision of what the Society of Jesus is about.¹²

However, in the same article this authentic Jesuit could also write more optimistically:

Because of the undying imprint that St. Ignatius has made upon his order, and the reverence in which he is held by Jesuits today, the Society of Jesus has extraordinary resources for its own self-renewal. . . The Jesuit enigma never ceases to fascinate and to attract. The particular spirit and style that St. Ignatius bequeathed to his order was never more needed than it is in the rapidly changing and polymorphic world of our day.¹³

If the Jesuits can get their Ignatian act together again, I do believe they could fix the Church, make this country Catholic, and, as their founder proposed, “set the world on fire.” This will not happen unless they return to devotion to the Sacred Heart. Recovery will also be possible if the still living old-schoolers could see that their loyalty is best served in speaking up. Would that they step out of the shadows and make their objections heard despite the prospect of punishment for so doing. Ironically, their love of the Society, which commands loyalty and obedience in silence, also restrains their corrections, and thus their loyalty remains sterile at a time when corrections are most needed.

Notes

1. Pell, George, “The Vatican Today,” Lent 2022, in “The Cardinal Pell memo in full,” January 13, 2023
2. Martin, Malachi, “The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church,” Simon & Schuster, 1987, 357
3. Chesterton, Gilbert K., “Orthodoxy,” The Bodley Head Ltd. 1908, Reprinted 1934, Amazon-Kindle, 57
4. Silva, Walter S., “Prominent Jesuit: The Society of Jesus is in ‘profound decline’” Catholic World Report, May 24, 2024
5. Martin, “The Jesuits,” 1987, 22–23
6. Siri, Giuseppi, “Gethsemane: Reflections on the Contemporary Theological Movement,” Franciscan Herald Press, 1981, 79
7. Dulles, Avery, “Jesuits and Theology: Yesterday and Today,” Theological Studies, 1991 52.
8. Dulles, Avery, “What Distinguishes the Jesuits?” Fordham University Lecture, November 9, 2006, reprinted in America Magazine, January 15, 2007
9. Arrupe, Pedro, “Renewing Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” Boston College, Portal to Jesuit Studies, April 29, 1972
10. Mankowski, Paul, “What Went Wrong,” Catholic Culture, July 15, 2003
11. Shaughnessy, Paul, “Are the Jesuits Catholic?”, Weekly Standard, June 3, 2002
12. Dulles, Avery, “The Jesuit Enigma,” First Things, April 2002
13. Dulles, Avery, “The Jesuit Enigma”

Stephen J. Morrissey is the author of The Jesuits: Nearing the End, available on Amazon.com.