In his recent posting on the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814, Kevin Burns asked, “After 41 years of invisibility, how was it that the Society of Jesus managed so quickly to re-establish itself around the world?”
My area of expertise is not history, so I’ll have to leave to those more qualified the historical facts about the rapid growth of the Jesuits in the mid-1800s. However, I do know something about Ignatian spirituality, the charism that is at the heart of Jesuit life.
My sense of living it for 35 years and imparting it to others for almost as many years, is that Ignatian spirituality becomes very much a part of the person who experiences it. There are certainly exceptions, but a general rule of thumb is that once a person has made the complete Spiritual Exercises or lived Jesuit life for a number of years, Ignatian spirituality gets in their veins. It has a power over them and influences their lives, their relationships, their teaching and writing, their decision-making and their views on life.
Some writers speak negatively of brainwashing. Others, like Canadian writers Douglas Letson and Michael Higgins, speak of the “Jesuit mystique,” a kind of aura that surrounds Jesuits. We are actually seeing an increase of the strength of that aura in these days of Pope Francis.
The Jesuit historian, Fr. William Bangert writes of the Society being strong enough, even in suppression, to capture the hearts of youth. Here is my personal image of those stalwart survivors, the men who remained Jesuits in their hearts.They knew deep down that God was behind the founding of the Society of Jesus. It would be crazy to think that just because a pope suppressed the Jesuits, that men who had been trained as Jesuits would forget their inner Jesuitness. Whatever their ministry and work after the suppression, they inevitably worked out of their Ignatian nature.
Many of them served as pastors, mentors, spiritual directors and professors to young men who would listen and find their hearts moving within them. Many of those young men responded with eagerness and desire when Pope Pius VII restored the Jesuits around the world. That Ignatian and Jesuit spirit is not so easily suppressed!