Are the Jesuits Catholic?

...A thirty-five-year-old Jesuit adds: "My novice master left to marry, my formation director left for a relationship with another man, et cetera...

...The blood-curdling vows by which the Jesuit binds himself perpetually to poverty, chastity, and obedience are typically made for the first time when the novice is twenty or twenty-five years old—not at the conclusion but at the outset of the ten years of training in which he will learn what precisely he has committed himself to defend...

...Don't misquote me...

...Liberalism had been seen to foster tolerance and mutual respect in pluralist secular communities...

...Their treachery was known long before action was taken against them...

...So I thought I'd check them out, and went to talk to the vocation promoter...

...So, if the situation in the Society of Jesus is really as McDonough and Bianchi describe it in Passionate Uncertainty, why doesn't the pope intervene and make radical changes...

...A close analogy can be drawn with the moles that surfaced in the British Secret Service in the 1950s...

...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 for-matores, Jesuits in charge of training, are homosexual as well...

...It must not be assumed that they fail to see the discrepancy...

...Some years ago an undergraduate at Harvard told me, "From my reading of history I had this idea of Jesuits as bright, kick-ass guys who love the Church...

...On the one hand, the attitude of Pope John Paul II towards religious congregations, female as well as male, is somewhat Darwinian...

...One of the signal services performed by Passionate Uncertainty is that it lets us hear influential Jesuits—those who shape policy—speak their minds frankly, in words unsoftened by the public relations personnel in the fund-raising offices...

...Plausible deniability allowed the Society of Jesus to emancipate itself from the Holy See, but in the same stroke robbed Jesuit leadership of its ability to lead, to articulate a lucid vision, and to give unambiguous marching orders...

...It's a risky business...

...the number of Jesuits who die annually is twice as high as either...

...Entering novices declined from a peak one-year total of 409 to a low of 38...

...American Jesuits went from 8,400 members in 1965 to 3,500 today...

...His account is misleading, however, in suggesting that most of the new breed seek the companionship of women...

...One early reviewer of Passionate Uncertainty (himself a member of the Jesuit nomenklatura) glanced briefly at the indicators of decline given by McDonough and Bianchi—but concluded cheerfully, "The overall portrait is one of men content in their vocations, who have drawn closer to the person of Jesus while leaving an earlier Almighty God figure behind...

...Thus the German theologian Karl Rahner was able to exhort his fellow Jesuits: "You must remain loyal to the papacy in theology and in practice, because that is part of your heritage to a special degree, but because the actual form of the papacy remains subject, in the future too, to an historical process of change, your theology and ecclesiastical law has above all to serve the papacy as it will be in the future...

...The more intelligent and idealistic the aspirant, the more spiritually precarious his position, as he comes to grips with the full power of the Church's adversaries and the all-too-human frailty of her defenders...

...says that this uncertainty "puts priests in a damned if you do (no coherent moral posture) and damned if you don't (old-fashioned repression) dilemma...

...In the same way, and for the same reasons, the popes have declined a dramatic showdown with the new Jesuits, preferring instead, without calling attention to the fact, to give the really important business to more dependable agents...

...Go to lunch...

...The respondents make it clear that their contempt for the pope is based almost entirely on his intransigence, his unwillingness to imitate their own adaptability in the matter of doctrine...

...The result was an institutional nightmare: confusion and cowardice at the top...

...Frankly I think the church is being governed by thugs...

...See the move...

...The result, quite simply, is widespread infidelity to the vows: slackening in poverty and obedience, but, most dramatically, failure in chastity...

...In Passionate Uncertainty McDonough and Bianchi cite one Jesuit in his fifties who—admitting to bafflement over the question "what constitutes adherence to celibacy...

...He just stared at my crotch and kept after me about how often I masturbated...

...A_tion of a revealed religion," says an Oxford philosopher in Ronald Knox's Let Dons Delight...

...Loyola's gamble was that, if a man's own desire for God could be made present to him, he would willingly endure the required sacrifices until he saw the truth "from inside," and was motivated no longer by discipline but by love...

...This "plausible deniability" is the motto of the new Jesuit nomenklatura, and the men who made themselves superiors in the 1970s understood clearly that you can write or say pretty much anything you want, provided you keep open your semantic lines of retreat...

...For four centuries the gamble worked...

...Deprived of their reason for existence as Jesuits, they respond either by putting an end to their existence as Jesuits (deserters outnumber active members in the United States) or by indulging a willed imbecility in which the explosively divisive questions are never permitted to surface...

...No more...

...So long to that...

...In the whole hour we spoke he never once asked me about my prayer life or anything like that...

...The cost is not negligible...

...Can I work closely with a woman colleague...

...He is not alone...

...But quite clearly they are willing to tolerate the graying in order to expedite the gay-ing...

...He is content to let the healthy groups prosper—Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity are a parade example—while letting the unhealthy ones die out of their own accord, like sick caribou amid the permafrost...

...he's the worst...

...The social typology of the new leadership class is also an important dimension of the current reality...

...On paper, the presidents remain subject to their religious superiors...

...As I get older, I find myself less church centered," says a senior academic...

...I recognized the point of view of the Jesuit elite...

...The Catholic Church understands herself as the legatee of universal and immutable truths about God and man, claiming a divine guarantee that she never has taught, and never will teach, error...

...Their willed imbecility derives not from a lack of brainpower or ingenuity but from a deliberate decision to ignore the clash of commitments and to suppress insurgent attempts to throw light on what, for tactical reasons, is better left in darkness...

...Almost overnight the pope's light infantry became a battalion in which every man decided for himself which war he was fighting...

...spouse, under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth...

...bit by bit they were denied access to sensitive material, simply so that they'd have less to betray...

...One man observes: "Several of my former Jesuit friends would mention the large number of gay Jesuits and the impact that had on community life as being a big reason they left...

...The fate of Father Joseph Fessio, a former student of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and director of Ignatius Press in San Francisco, is a good illustration...

...Can I kiss her good-night...

...Our current Jesuits are all loyal to the papacy, but to the future papacy—that of Pope Chelsea XII, perhaps—and their support for contraception, gay sex, and divorce proceeds from humble obedience to this conveniently protean pontiff...

...Roughly half of the Society under the age of fifty shuffles on the borderline between declared and undeclared gayness...

...There was a price to pay, of course...

...Conventionally liberal, they support condoms and women priests less as a matter of faith than a fashion statement—rather like wearing a baseball cap backwards...

...A spiritual director in his fifties concurs, "If I could remain a Jesuit while joining the Quakers, I could be tempted...

...The website of the California Province portrays its novitiate in frankly camp terms (a photo showing two novices in Mardi Gras masks was captioned "Pretty Boy and Jabba the Slut...

...Spend a night once in a while, as long as it does not interfere with my priestly role...

...despair, rage, and disillusionment in the ranks...

...one of the men I know cares about being a priest," reports a man in charge of theological training...

...none failed to get the message...

...on the contrary, this is fast-track Jesuit chic...

...but no young man—at least no young man with real options—chooses to give his life to a truce...

...As it turns out, she was right: The co-creator of the program and one of the paid consultants were Jesuits—Jesuits, we may surmise, who have successfully left an Almighty God figure behind...

...As a Basque soldier named Ignatius Loyola came to realize with particular clarity, this position is either true or insane: Only moral cowardice or intellectual muddle could make room for a middle ground...

...The authors of Passionate Uncertainty, Peter McDonough and Eugene Bianchi (a political scientist and professor of religion, respectively), portray the Jesuit crack-up most vividly by quotation from the interviews and written statements they took from more than four hundred Jesuits and former Jesuits...

...Worse, the number of priests who jump ship each year roughly equals the number of entering novices...

...The church as we have known it is dying," a retreat master insists...

...Ascetical practice has undergone demystification and has taken on more than a whiff of the pathological...

...The hero of McDonough and Bianchi's story, the passionately uncertain Jesuit, like a man separated from a wife of thirty years, preserves an icy courtesy in referring to his spouse and fulfills the bare minimum of social duties...

...So long to you, my friend, and hello to Jabba the Slut...

...To celebrate daily Mass, simply because it's there or expected, is no longer part of my way of thinking...

...As do all priests, the speakers above took a solemn oath swearing that they "firmly embrace and accept all and everything concerning the doctrine of faith and morals" proposed by the Church...

...The recently published Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits is a quirky yet convincing depiction of the collapse of the renegade Society of Jesus: papists who hate the pope, evangelists who have lost the faith...

...Loyola's companions, given the sarcastic name "Jesuits" by their opponents, organized themselves on military lines with a military love for a clear chain of command, as their founding document attests...

...Here and there are rumors of courage, devotion, even faith...

...The Jesuit is to "serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the Cross, and to serve the Lord alone and the Church, his Paul Shaughnessy, S.J., is a Jesuit priest and frequent contributor to Catholic World Report...

...When Fessio made himself a nuisance to University of San Francisco president Father Stephen Privett earlier this year by assisting in the founding of a two-year Catholic college in the vicinity, he was promptly reassigned as a chaplain at a tiny hospital in Duarte, California...

...They tend to speak little and write less: keeping their heads down, for the most part, and carrying bedpans when they don't...

...Both the spectrum of the speakers presented and the content of their opinions accurately reflect the current situation...

...Men of the type regarded as choice Jesuit material in the 1950s are frequently weeded out before they enter the novitiate...

...As a relatively young Jesuit who is heterosexual, I believe I am in the minority, and that raises questions...

...Not surprisingly, in the absence of a clear objective, the discipline traditionally accepted as a means to the objective begins to chafe...

...Of course, among the 3,500 American Jesuits there are a few recusants: men who are not interested in joining the Quakers, who still feel bound by their vows, who celebrate Mass, who wish, in their unimaginative way, some kinship with the simplicity and zeal of St...

...On the other coast, Boston Magazine recognized the downtown Jesuit parish as the "best place to meet a mate—gay" in its "Best of Boston" awards...

...The teachings of the Church, being largely an irrelevance, has minimal importance in shaping the opinions of the Gallery Owners, who tend to regard orthodox Catholicism—like boxing or hetero-sexuality—as one of the coarse amusements of the working class...

...Hence no faith is more radically vulnerable than Catholicism to the shortfall intimated by Knox's skeptical don, no religion more in need of a nimble, adaptable, and ever vigilant defense...

...As Neuhaus's Law (propounded by First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus) has it, "where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed...

...There is a good deal of dissembling among superiors here: some denying the accusation of the gay influx, some admitting it but insisting that it is a boon, most perhaps shifting from one stance to the other depending on the sympathies of their audience and the exigencies of the moment...

...In McDo-nough and Bianchi's chapter on "Ministry and the Meaning of Priesthood," we hear another man languidly dismiss the notion of sacerdotal duty as an instance of emotional immaturity: "Formal sacramental action is less central, as are religious 'practices,' than they had been in earlier years—but frequently much more engaging...

...Though I align myself with the brainless in this man's typology, I have no doubt that he is right to believe that most of his Jesuit colleagues are of his thinking, and that they live not by their vows but by their own new rules...

...Not that the speakers themselves are always balanced, fair, or magnanimous—the resentments run too deep for that—but taken as a whole the voices give us a true picture of the quandary of America's Jesuits: able yet aimless men, hopelessly compromised by perjury...

...In the Society of Jesus, this applies to diversity of lifestyle as well as of doctrine...

...Yet, being purely negative in content and procedural in application, it proved lethal when imported into an intentional association like the Society of Jesus, one both doctrinally exclusivist and rigidly hierarchical...

...This remark, paradoxical though it seems, is a deft expression of the characteristic disconnection between Jesuit identity (in the new mode) and priestly service of God (in the old...

...Overall, superiors have cautiously abetted the transformation of the gay subculture into the dominant culture within Jesuit houses...

...He may be convinced that he has arrived at the best possible truce given his rocky personal history...

...But the passionately uncertain Jesuit finds himself enclosed in a small corner of a small world, with the waning consolations of sodomy and single-malt whiskey, tottering down the corridors of an increasingly ominous twilight...

...Edmund Campion, Jean de Brebeuf, Miguel Pro, and their company all died for convictions the new breed finds adolescent and embarrassing...

...An academic gloats, "The Society has not sold its soul to the 'Restoration' of John Paul II...

...I am scandalized by Rome's intransigent refusal to reexamine its doctrines regarding gender and sex...

...It should not be imagined that these are the voices of passed-over malcontents...

...As the authors explain in their own jargon: "The incentive structure of sainthood has changed...

...Obviously such forward-thinking men neither have nor wish any part of the retrograde religious world of the Jesuit saints and martyrs...

...I hope and pray that the Society will help to facilitate this death and resurrection...

...in reality the presidents set the tone by which Jesuit life is lived and, on the occasions of a conflict between presidents and superiors, the presidents win hands-down...

...Ignatius Loyola...

...I am appalled by the direction of the present papacy," says a university administrator...

...Vacation together...

...Another Jesuit scholar, a church historian, ranks John Paul II as "probably the worst pope of all times"—adding, "He's not one of the worst popes...

...The Jesuit's mission is "to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine...

...What matters is being a Jesuit...

...Prestigious positions, like university and theologate administrators, are filled for the most part from a group informally known as the "Gallery Owners": discreet, well-spoken, well-dressed gay priests in their fifties and early sixties...

...Jesuits are the flyboys of the church, the teaching intelligentsia most likely to be found drinking pricey wine and traveling abroad and devising interpretations of church dogma...

...Few Jesuits were surprised...

...Two reasons suggest themselves...

...On the other hand, recent popes have judged the political cost of intervening to reform failing congregations as excessive in view of the likely benefits to be gained...

...Where the older Jesuits are notable for the heat of their anti-papal passion, the Gallery Owners display a nearly complete apathy toward religion in all its forms...

...I entered as a way to cope with being gay," says a thirty-six-year-old Jesuit, "although that would not have been the way I put it then...

...You draw a blank check, as it were, by assenting beforehand to its doctrines, not knowing whether there will be enough assets to meet it when you come to look into your account...

...The pro-homosexual sympathies of men placed in the gatekeeping positions make it especially difficult for heterosexual—and doctrinally orthodox—candidates to survive the selection process...

...The trajectory of the decline is not hard to trace, and the Jesuit story, though more dramatic, differs little from that of other progressive religious orders in the decades following the Second Vatican Council...

...One cannot help but get the sense that we of this generation of Jesuits may be the 'last of the Shakers.'" It would be an exaggeration to say there is no concern among superiors at what Passionate Uncertainty calls—in a memorable phrase—"the gaying and the graying of the Jesuits...

...Last year eleven of the twenty-seven American Jesuit universities hosted productions of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, while more humbly employed Jesuits, often inclined to puzzlement at these developments, were officially assured by headquarters that "the Catholic identity of [Jesuit] colleges and universities has never been stronger...

...Given their areas of scholarly interest, it is surprising that McDo-nough and Bianchi fail in Passionate Uncertainty to touch on the single most important post-conciliar change in the command structure of American Jesuits: the shift of de facto power from the formal hierarchy (rectors, provincials) to university presidents...

...Yet at its heart, the crisis is not one of size but of allegiance...

...It would be like an every-night-is-sex approach to a marital relationship...

...It is a lonely senescence...

...In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd wrote of a television drama in which a "hip, glib, cute young priest" drives his penitent to get an abortion: "I didn't think the show reflected the point of view of the entertainment elite or, as some critics have ranted, of its 'non-practicing' Jewish producers...

...His further remarks suggest that repression is the road less taken: "Now everybody (with brains) realizes that the rules have changed...