Jesuit Terms

Noun. A member of the Society of Jesus.* The term was originally coined as a put down by people who felt there was something terribly arrogant about a group calling itself the Company or Society of Jesus, whereas previous religious orders* had been content to name themselves after their founder (e.g., “Benedictines,” “Franciscans,” “Dominicans”). Later the title was adopted as a shorthand name by members of the Society themselves, as well as by others favorable to them.

Adjective. Pertaining to the Society of Jesus. The negative term, now that Jesuit as been rehabilitated, is Jesuitical meaning “sly” or “devious.”

A Jesuit brother is a man who consecrates his life to help the mission

A Jesuit priest is ordained for sacramental ministry in the Church. His title is “Father.”

A young Jesuit who plans to be ordained as a priest is called a “scholastic” until he pronounces his Final Vows. Why? Because much of his formation involves studies.

(also “Jesus [the] Christ,” meaning Jesus ‘[God’s] anointed one’)–The historical person Jesus of Nazareth whom Christians acknowledge to be, by his life (what he taught and did) and his death and resurrection, the true revelation of God and at the same time the exemplar of what it means to be fully human. In other words, for Christians, Jesus shows what God is like and how they can live in response to this revelation: God is the compassionate giver of life who invites and empowers human beings, in freedom, together with one another, to work toward overcoming the forces of evilmeaninglessness, guilt, oppression, suffering, and death-that diminish people and keep them fromgrowing toward ever fuller life.In his Spiritual Exercises,* Ignatius* has the retreatant devote most of the time to “contemplating” (i.e., imaginatively entering into) the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, so as to become more and more a companion of Jesus. And when Ignatius and his companions from the University of Paris decided to establish a religious order,* he insisted that it be called the Company or Society of Jesus*[see “Jesuit” – noun].

Here is a version of the Judaeo-Christian vision or story, told with certain emphases from Ignatius of Loyola.*The great and mysterious Reality of personal love and self-giving that many call God is the origin and destiny of all creation, the whole universe. God is present and at work in everything, leading it to fulfillment. All things are originally good and potentially means for those creatures called human beings to find the God who made and works in them. Still, none of these things are God, and therefore they are all radically limited.Indeed, in the case of human beings (who somehow image God in a special way), their relative freedom results in a new dimension of being whereby not just good but also evil exists in the world: selfishness, war, domination-racial, sexual, economic, and environmental-of some over others. Human history, then, is marked by a struggle between the forces of good or “life” and evil or “death.”God has freely chosen to side with struggling, flawed humanity by participating more definitively in human life and living it “from the inside” in the historical person of Jesus* of Nazareth. This irrevocable commitment of God to the human enterprise grounds and invites people’s response of working with God toward building a community of justice, love, and peace–the “kingdom” or “reign” of God that Jesus preached and lived.As with Jesus, so for his followers, it takes discernment*–a finely tuned reading of oneself and one’s culture in the Spirit of God–to recognize in any given situation what helps the coming of God’s reign and what hinders it. In the face of human selfishness and evil, the way ultimately entails self-giving, going through suffering and death in order to gain life–indeed, life everlasting. And along the way,because the followers of Jesus are wary of idolizing anyone or anything (that is, making a god of them), they are less likely to become disillusioned with themselves or others or human history for all its weight of personal and social evil. Rather do they continue to care about people and the human enterprise, for their hope is in God, the supreme Reality of personal love and self-giving.