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COUNCIL MEETS IN ROME
Laity Council Airs Problems
Of Promoting Reconciliation
BY JAMES C. O’NEILL
VATICAN CITY (NC) - The
problems of promoting a “mood of
reconciliation” during the Holy Year in
a world tom by social, economic and
political discontent was a principal
POPE PA UL
VATICAN CITY (NC) - Pope Paul
VI has warned the head of the Jesuits
that his Religious order must not
attempt to introduce new methods of
decision-making that undermine the
notion of obedience and that will alter
the nature of the Society of Jesus.
The warning came in a letter, in
Latin, sent to the Jesuit superior
general, Spanish Father Pedro Arrupe.
Dated Sept. 15, the letter was sent in
connection with the announcement that
the Jesuits will hold a general
congregation in Rome in December
1974.
The congregation will bring together
about 240 elected representatives of the
Jesuits to discuss the future of the
society and changes in its more than
400-year-old structures.
The Pope’s letter to Father Arrupe,
head of more than 30,000 Jesuit priests
and Brothers, said: “There must be no
attempt to introduce new methods of
deliberation and decision-making that
not only undermine the very notion of
obedience, but alter the nature itself of
the Society of Jesus.”
The Papal letter also reminded Father
Arrupe that the Pope’s associates have
“called your attention more than once”
to “certain tendencies” that, “if
fostered and given support, could lead
to serious and possibly irreparable
changes in the essential structure itself
of your society.”
An English-language text of the papal
letter was made available in Rome Oct.
9.
subject for this year’s plenary meeting
of the Vatican’s Council of the Laity.
Twenty-five members and consultors
of the council met in Rome Oct. 2-8 for
a week-long series of meetings to discuss
problems facing the laity today and to
of the general congregation we express
once again our desire, indeed our
demand, that the Society of Jesus
should adapt its life and apostolate to
today’s conditions and needs in such a
way that confirmation be given to its
characteristics as a religious, apostolic,
priestly order, linked to the Roman
Pontiff by a special bond of love and
service.”
Pope Paul laid down the religious
foundations of the Jesuits: diligent
dedication to prayer; austerity of life;
supernatural strength and “complete
observance of the vows, especially
obedience.”
He said that those “should today,
even under changed conditions, still be
the source of strength of the Society of
Jesus.”
The Pope also insisted on the
“ascetical value of community life and
the advantages it offers for the
formation of character.”
He continued: “To these weighty
principles we would also add in a very
special manner the fidelity to the
Apostolic See, whether in the areas of
studies and the education of young
scholastics, who are the hope of your
order, or of the students attending the
great number of schools and universities
entrusted to the society, or in the
production and publication of writings
aimed at a wide circle of readers, or in
the exercise of the direct apostolate.”
Toward the conclusion of the letter,
Pope Paul stated;
convey their views to top officials of the
Vatican.
Because of a busy schedule Pope Paul
VI was not able to receive the group --
the first time he has not been able to
since it was established in 1967.
American participants in the meetings
said it was generally agreed by all that
the most significant factor in the
celebration of the 1975 Holy Year “is
that of reconciliation” and “the least
important, the traditional pilgrimage to
Rome.”
The two Americans who took part in
the meetings were Miss Margaret Mealey
executive director of the U.S. National
Council of Catholic Laity and a member
of the laity council, and Martin Work, a
former council member who is now a
consultor. Work is also director of
administration and planning for the
Archdiocese of Denver.
“All of us, coming from all parts of
the world, rich and poor, are concerned
with the aspect of reconciliation which
Pope Paul has proclaimed as the theme
of the observance,” Miss Mealey said.
“We discussed how such
reconciliation is to be achieved by
laymen on the local level and within
themselves,” she added.
Work said that “questions were asked
in abundance about the relevance of
Holy Year to the Christian life today.
Representatives from Latin America, for
example, asked how will it be possible
to establish a mood of reconciliation in
political and social situations which call
for radical change.”
Part of the meetings were held jointly
with the Pontifical Commission for
Justice and Peace, during which the
subject of Christianity and politics was
discussed, as well as how a Christian can
make himself felt and heard in the
present-day world.
“The discussions ranged from
Watergate to the coup in Chile,” Work
said.
Letter Sent Jesuits
In the letter Pope Paul said that the
general congregation “could be an hour
of decision, so to speak, for the society,
for its future destiny and for its tasks in
the Church, as it is also for other
Religious families.”
The Pope told Father Arrupe that
“on the occasion of the announcement
WASHINGTON (NC) - Pope Paul’s
letter to the Jesuit superior general
concerning the Jesuits’ general
congregation was “a point of clarity
rather than a warning,” according to
Father James L. Connor, assitant to the
president of the U.S. Jesuit Conference.
The congregation-to be held in
December 1974 in Rome-will bring
together about 240 elected
representatives of the Jesuits to discuss
the future of the society and changes in
its more than 400-year-old structures.
Nothing in the Pope’s letter, Father
Connor said, disagrees with anything
that the Jesuit superior general, Spanish
Father Pedro Arrupe, has said in the
past.
All of the statements in the Pope’s
letter, he noted, were consistent with
subjects which Father Arrupe already
has “developed at great length.”
In his letter to the Jesuits, Pope Paul
“What we have written should show
you and your companions what is
expected of you by us, who know well
what influence the Society of Jesus has,
what the task is that is has to fulfill,
what confidence it enjoys. All this must
be carefully considered, both with
respect to the society itself and with
respect to the Church.”
said the Jesuits should resist attempts to
introduce new methods of
decision-making that undermine the
notion of obedience and that will alter
the nature of the Society of Jesus.
The papal letter also reminded Father
Arrupe that the Pope’s associates have
“called your attention more than once”
to “certain tendencies” that, “if
fostered and given support, could lead
to serious and possibly irreparable
changes in the essential structure itself
of your society.”
Father Connor said the Pope was
saying only that he was “very interested
in and concerned about the upcoming
general congregation.
“The Pope,” Father Connor
explained, “is clearly supporting the
(superior) general.” He added that the
Pope, ‘‘throughout his
letter . . .expresses his affection for the
society . . .He recognizes the good
work of so many Jesuits throughout the
world.”
Although the meeting was not
designed to lead to specific resolutions
by the council, Miss Mealey said, “it did
permit a free airing of the views of
laymen and women from various parts
of the world. These views in turn will be
passed on to Vatican and Church
authorities.”
Work added; “The discussions didn’t
have a definite and fixed goal but they
were important in that a Vatican-based
organization actually brought them out
on to the table and tried to examine
how a Christian can function in the
political world.”
A third subject on this year’s agenda
was the contribution that the Council of
the Laity can make to the 1974 World
Synod of Bishops disucssion of
evangelization.
Miss Mealey said the council “took a
look at the broad picture of
evangelization” and did not merely limit
itself to the discussion of missionary
problems.
“We discussed how you can train the
laity in terms of evangelization, of
spreading the Gospel within the
individual’s situation in life, in the
family and in the community,” she said.
The council began work on a
statement of policy along those lines
that will be added eventually to the
total preparation for the 1974 Synod.
The statement, still in draft form, is
expected to be completed by the end of
February next year.
American Jesuits React
RALLY IN CHICAGO -- Several thousand Illinois
residents attend a rally in Chicago’s Civic Center and
join a March for Life to start Respect Life month in
the archdiocese. In the background is Picasso’s
unnamed sculpture. Cardinal John Cody wrote to
priests and pastors of the archdiocese: “We must speak
out against these attempts to degrade human life,”
urging them to “join forces to stop nefarious attempts
to prevent the beginning of life as well as to encourage
the destruction of life.” (NC Photo by Jim Kilcoyne)
MOTHER TERESA:
“Love Begins in Homes”
LOS ANGELES (NC) - A nun famed
for her work among the desperately
poor of the slums of Calcutta told
Catholic women here that love “must
start in our own homes.”
“We think sometimes that poverty is
only being hungry, naked and homeless.
The poverty of being unwanted,
unloved and uncared for is the greatest
poverty,” Mother Teresa told 1,500
persons at a Ladies of Charity meeting
in the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
“We must start in our own homes to
remedy this kind of poverty,” said the
woman who founded the Missionaries of
Charity. “Sometimes we can’t smile at
the children, at husbands.”
This can be changed, she said, if “we
give Jesus full power and possession in
our homes.”
Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of
Charity, started in the Calcutta slums,
now have 870 Sisters in India, Tanzania,
the Middle East, Yemen, Venezuela,
Rome, London, New York, Ceylon and
Mauritius.
“The world today is hungry for
love,” she told the Ladies of Charity,
“and you and I can meet this hunger if
we give the world the love of Jesus.”
“If we go to the poor to give them
the love and peace of Christ and they
see Jesus in us and His love and
compassion, the world will soon be full
of love and peace,” Mother Teresa said.
“The poor are brave and loving
people,” she said. “In 23 years I have
never heard a poor person curse or
grumble.”
“I remember one day I picked up a
poor person from the street, half eaten
with maggots. He said to me ‘I have
lived like an animal, but I’m going to die
like an angel.’
“This is the greatness of our people.
The poor are rich in love.”
“When we ask our Sisters who would
like to go and work with the lepers,all
raise their hands,” Mother Teresa said.
“I tell them that when the priest
touches the bread and wine he is
touching the body and blood of Jesus.
You touch the body of Jesus under the
appearance of the broken bodies of the
lepers.”
Her Sisters take a fourth vow, in
addition to poverty, chastity and
obedience. They vow to give free service
to the poorest of the poor.
Cardinal Timothy Manning of Los
Angeles, in closing the gathering, said
the coming of Mother Teresa was good,
but disturbing.
“Mother Teresa, you’re disturbing
us,” the cardinal said: “Your presence
here is too much of a shock to our
complacency and our pursuit of beauty
and pleasure. It really hurts us when
you come among us. But we are glad
you came.”
Collective Amnesia Explains Confusion, Cardinal Says
VADSTENA, Sweden (NC) - A
“collective amnesia explains much of
the confusion in our purposes and
actions” today, Cardinal John J. Wright
told a celebration here marking the
600th anniversary of the death of St.
Bridget.
The cardinal, former bishop of
Pittsburgh and now prefect of the
Vatican Congregation for the Clergy,
said that in this collective amnesia “we
have forgotten not only from whom we
came and where we have been, but who
we are.” The confusion that results, he
said, is “commonly defined nowadays as
an ‘identity-crisis.’”
An earlier generation, Cardinal Wright
said, “had a more clear and confident
self-consciousness” because it was able
to relate to its past, “with all its history,
ancestry, wisdom, experience, sorrows
and joys.”
People of an earlier generation, he
said, “were less likely to be excited and
bewildered by the headlines of the
newspapers and the slogans of the
present because they were straightened
and given perspective by the small print
of the history book, the poetry and
philosophy, however simple and
popular, of the past in their personal,
family and social traditions.”
The cardinal said that an anniversary
such as that of St. Bridget can “enrich
us, restore joy and inspiration from the
memory of our historic great moments,
especially the memory of our dead
heroes and great saints.”
In this way, he said, “we come to
appreciate that we do not start our lives
as persons or peoples without wonderful
riches behind us, but that we come into
the present already great with memories
and ‘conditioning’ from the past.”
It is easy to measure the economic,
political, geographical and other
tangible factors that explain the power
of a nation, because “these can be
programmed into the calculating
machines or computers . . .But it is
much more difficult to appreciate the
part of the saints in the formation of
the soul of a nation, its moral integrity,
its spiritual dignity and all the values
which economic, demographic, purely
political and institutional factors
become mechanical, even decadent or a
burden, lifeless and wasted.
“It is impossible to program into the
computers the spiritual generosity, the
piety, the austerity of the people; yet
the well-being of the nation depends on
these even more than it does on
economic resources or political
strategies.”
Those “intangible moral values,” the
cardinal went on to say, preserve us
from the decay that results from
material affluence or from the despair
caused by poverty, economic crises or
political defeat.
St. Bridget “was a mystic and a
visionary,” Cardinal Wright said, but she
was also “an intensely active, pragmatic
personality who put the grace of God at
work in the service of the political and
religious world wherever she went,
rather than keeping God’s grace to
herself. She did not hestitate to remind
kings, political leaders, prelates and
people of their duties.”
Explaining the “characteristics of her
personality and evidences of her
power,” Cardinal Wright said that God’s
grace “builds on our basic nature. God’s
grace elevates and transforms nature,
but it presupposes it. In the case of St.
Bridget her human nature, temperament
and background where inherited from
her Swedish parents, people of obvious
stability . . .she was a daughter of God
and of the Church, but she was born a
true Swede with the best qualities of her
native land . . .Bridget was a citizen of
the world, devoted to Sweden with the
best qualities of her native
land . . .Bridget was a citizen of the
world, devoted to Sweden but open to
all the world in her times.”
St. Bridget, the cardinal said, “had a
remarkable sense of what we would call
nowadays ‘social responsibility,’
especially to the poor. She would not
allow her associates to retain much
money or to live in great display, but
each religious could have as many books
for study as he or she desired. She was
an intellectual of the first magnitude
and she helped make Vadstena the
literary center of Sweden by the 15th
century.
“In her practical efficiency she was
an exemplar of masterful ‘know-how’;
in her intellectual spirituality she was a
model of mmystical ‘know-why’. Our
civilization has an abundance of
‘know-how’ knowledge, but it does not
have proportionate ‘know-why’ wisdom.
We know how to murder, for example,
and to destroy life by abortion or by
bombs; we do not always know why we
must work for life, for peace and for
God. That is why we need so urgently
to remember our saints, particualrly
saints like St. Bridget, who knew how to
combine ‘know-how’ knowledge, and
‘know-why’ wisdom in the service of
peace and life, of man and God.”