Jesuit deathwish?

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Feb 19, 2005

Today's Times of London has an article on the British Province of the Society of Jesus, focusing on the choice of new provincial superior to succeed Fr. David Smolira, S.J. (To view the article, go here, type "Jesuit" into the search box, choose "search the site," and click on the top result title.) Grim reading:

The Jesuits today are controversial only in their enthusiasm for what their conservative critics regard as ideological and theological fads. Whether or not this is justified, they have gone from being the country's biggest, most powerful, most confident and most prosperous Roman Catholic religious order, with 900 members in 1939, to little more than a sideshow. There are now 230 Jesuits in the British province, yet within five years there will be no more than 75 under the age of 75, and a high proportion of these will be over the age of 60. Just one British novice is in training for the British province.

The author names three top candidates to succeed Smolira, and discusses the prospects of each.

Whoever is nominated will be handed a rather poisoned chalice, though hardly any less bitter than that from which Father Smolira himself had to drink. His appointment as Provincial in 1999 coincided with a police investigation into abuse allegations at Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit public school in Lancashire. He has since laboured over the rationalisation of the society in the light of its evaporating manpower.

That sounds familar, as does the relentless renewal of those antiquated structures of religious life that produced 900 Jesuits from a Protestant nation.

[Former promoter of vocations Fr. Paul] Hamill was part of Father Smolira's inner circle when it was decided to close Campion House College, the seminary in Osterley, Middlesex; to withdraw priests from all but a few schools; to hand over parishes in Lancashire and Wiltshire to their respective dioceses; and to close down The Month, the magazine that first published Cardinal Newman's Dream of Gerontius. Alongside such pruning has been a major investment into a home for the elderly in Boscombe, near Bournemouth, to look after the growing number of Jesuit priests who need geriatric care. It was under Father Hamill, however, that vocations to the Jesuit novitiate dried up.

So, who's on the short list to remedy the situation? The men most keen on the programs that brought the Jesuits to their present predicament. This concerning the front-runner, Fr. Brendan Callaghan:

His judgment has been questioned in some quarters, however, over his role in the appointment in 2002 of a self-proclaimed Wiccan "high priestess" to lecture at Heythrop on the psychology of religion, a move which attracted criticism as having perhaps stretched interfaith dialogue a little too far.

Then too, as the Wiccan was a high priestess, there's the chance that her hierarchical rank would have had a "chilling effect" on the free exchange of ideas in the larger Heythrop community. Last one to leave please turn out the lights.