Jesuit Jubilee Mass

Homily given by Fr Michael Holman SJ, the British Jesuit Provincial, on the Feast of Mary, Queen and Mother of the Society of Jesus, 22 April 2006

This time last month, I was in Rome.  Every year our headquarters organises a two-week course for new Provincials to teach them how to do their job.  This year it was my turn.

We were sixteen on the course.  There were men from North America and Europe; from Zambia and Malawi and Rwanda; from Goa, Madras, the Punjab and Calcutta; from Japan and even China.  The world-wide Society was well represented as we gathered each morning with our Superior General to listen to reports of our work from each of the our areas or to think through knotty problems that either had come up or could well come up: forewarned, after all, is forearmed!

We had all been in post for at least six months and some for as long as a year.  The idea, clearly, was to let us make mistakes before coming for training so that we might be still more eager students.  In my own case, with a good many months and probably as many (if not more) faux-pas behind me, I would have to say that was true!

To the amazement of the many in Rome who rank Rome one notch below Paradise, this was my very first time in the Eternal City.  So before, in between and after class, but never cutting class, I set about seeing some of the sights of Rome.

Our headquarters suits the would-be tourist down to the ground for it's as close to the Vatican City as it is possible for anywhere outside the Vatican City to be: turn left outside the front door and in two minutes you are standing in St Peter's Square.  Thus my Japanese colleague and I stole away early one Sunday morning to make our first visit to St Peter's Basilica.  There, just inside the door, in the first chapel to the right, stands Michelangelo's Pieta: the Virgin holding with such reverence, such delicacy, and yet with such evident strength, the broken body of her son.  It's a picture of the compassion that's at the very heart of any Christian's following of Christ; a picture so convincing it invites us to make this love come alive in our own lives.

As maybe you would expect, there was no shortage of trips organised to the many places in the city connected with the Society of Jesus: to the Church of the Gesu and the tomb of Ignatius, to the adjacent residence with the rooms where he lived in the last years of his life as General of the order, to the Roman College he founded in 1551 and its successor the Gregorian University where we met the Jesuit faculty and were invited to lunch.

Indeed, the visit that meant most to me took place later that same afternoon and we were soon standing inside our destination: a small chapel, measuring no more than six metres by six metres, dedicated to Our Lady, in the town of La Storta, by the side of the Via Cassia, a busy highway in the midst of the Friday rush hour.  This is where we wanted to be because it was here, long ago, in 1537, that, in a sense, it had all begun.

Ignatius was travelling on foot from Vicenza to Rome with his first companion Peter Favre and Diego Laynez, who more than twenty years later would succeed him as the second General of the Jesuits.  Pope Paul III established the Society of Jesus three years later.  Francis Xavier's missions to the East and Peter Faber's travels through Spain, France and Germany, all lay still further in the future.  No matter, it was here in this chapel that something happened to Ignatius, an experience that made a branding-iron impression upon him.  If you want to know what it was that shaped and drove Ignatius and Favre and Xavier and gave them their identity; if you want to know what still shapes and drives and gives us our identity today, then look no further than to what happened in that chapel, one afternoon in the autumn of 1537.  That's why we wanted to be there because, in a sense, it was right there that we had all begun.

When it came to describing the event himself, Ignatius used few words; his companion on that journey, Diego Laynez, gives a fuller report.  Ignatius had for some time been praying earnestly for what he seemed to think mattered more than anything else.  Ignatius was a man of big desires and when he sensed God wanted to give him something, he put his all and everything into it.  He was praying that he might be 'placed with the Son'.  He was determined to get all the help he could: he was praying to Mary that she might intercede with Jesus to obtain from the Father this singular grace, a favour that right now mattered more than any other, to be 'placed with the Son'.

Any journey was a pilgrimage for Ignatius. 'Pilgrimage' was an image he also applied to his life which he understood as a journey with God and to God, not least because God was to be encountered in the people and events of daily life.  So as they entered the village of La Storta and saw the shrine at the side of the road he called in to pray.  As he prayed, it then became clear to him, so clear that no matter what happened he would never doubt that his prayer was answered, that the Father had indeed 'placed him with the Son'.

Facing us in that chapel that Friday afternoon a month ago was a mural of the scene as Diego Laynez had described it: Ignatius was being received by Jesus, being placed at his side.  This was not the Jesus of the nativity, nor of the hidden life, nor the Jesus of the Resurrection.  Ignatius was there, alongside Jesus, carrying his cross.

This was, if you like, Ignatius' core experience: one to which he constantly referred.  The rest of his life lived it out; decisions he took, lived it out; the Society he founded was to live it out.  When Ignatius died four hundred and fifty years ago in 1556 and they looked through his notes, they found again and again references to 'when the Father was placing me with his Son'.

So when Ignatius and his first companions wondered what name the new religious congregation might take, it was clear that it had to take the name of Jesus since Jesus alone was their head: he had taken them all into his company and that made them companions of him and companions of each other, friends in the Lord.

When Ignatius was debating with himself what kind of poverty they should live, it was enough for him that Jesus was poor and that meant these men whom Jesus himself had chosen would make a choice for poverty too.

Their desire to be with Jesus, where Jesus had placed them, with him under the cross, set them free to make that specifically Jesuit contribution to the Church.  It set them free to go where the need is greatest, to the frontiers, to those places where no one else will go, and to accept the pain this involved, since they wanted to be up alongside Jesus, under the cross.  So Francis Xavier went to the furthest geographical frontiers of the Church, to India, China and Japan; Peter Favre went to its internal frontiers, to dialogue with the Lutherans, to those frontiers where one interpretation of Christianity met another; and Ignatius himself went to arguably the toughest frontier of them all, to those places where the comfort of the past met the uncertainties of the future, as he accompanied the Church in change.

And the motor of it all? Not a policy programme, nor a manifesto, but a relationship.  Ignatius was a man in love.  He had given his life for the Jesus who had given his life for him.  That Jesus who made himself so affectively present that Ignatius, the hardened war veteran, could weep at the very thought of him.  It wasn't a matter of just doing his work; it had to be always more.  Ignatius wanted to do that work as Jesus would have done it, with the mind of Jesus, with the heart of Jesus, always with the poor alongside Jesus, himself another Jesus.  He wanted the name of Jesus to be deeply imprinted within him.  One day in 1544, holding the host at Mass, he found himself saying spontaneously that he would never abandon Jesus for all the world.

Such it was to be 'placed with the Son'.

The chapel in which we stood that Friday afternoon was not the original chapel in which Ignatius had seen these things that mattered so clearly: that was long gone.  This one had been built just thirty years ago, replacing a shrine the US Air Force had unhelpfully blasted to bits as the Allies made their way towards Rome in 1944.

Writing to the Society of Jesus as we made preparations to celebrate the Jubilees of our founders, Fr General Kolvenbach asked us to remember that Ignatius, Xavier and Favre are not history lessons, but men whose spirit is to be lived today.

It was Fr Pedro Arrupe, Fr Kolvenbach' s predecessor as General, who had been responsible for the rebuilding of the Chapel at La Storta.  I have only the dimmest personal memories of this remarkable man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Ignatius himself.  I can just about still see him standing at the top of a flight of stairs at Stonyhurst College during a meeting of our province he attended some twenty seven years ago.  His memory was alive for us that afternoon in La Storta for in so many ways he's the one who tells us what it means to live the spirit of the first companions, what it means to be 'placed with the Son', today.

Here's something many have heard before, but it's worth hearing again. Fr Arrupe was famously asked in an interview a question that took him by surprise since the interview was about other topics entirely, 'Fr Arrupe, what does Jesus Christ mean for you?' 'For me,' Arrupe replied, 'Jesus Christ is everything.  For me, Jesus Christ is everything….Take Jesus from my life and everything would collapse - like a human body from which someone had taken the heart, the bones, the head.  For me, Jesus Christ is everything.'

To be a Jesuit in today's Church, is to be a man for whom Jesus Christ is everything.  A man who desires nothing more than that Jesus be everything for every other man and woman today and who dares to say so (a frontier if ever there was one!).  He's a man who makes his faith in Jesus known by living the Gospel of Jesus as Jesus lived it, with his whole life; who makes it credible, by living with the poor, for the poor, amongst the poor, following Christ poor.  He's a man who has himself encountered Christ and helps others encounter Christ as he has encountered him, in the way of Ignatius; a man who can bring Christ to the toughest issues of our time, with people who struggle with the toughest issues, knowing that he often struggles with them too, and to do so creatively, respectfully, responsibly, faithfully and truthfully.  And in all of this seeking others, collaborating with others, who will do the same.  That's what it means to offer quality service in today's Church.

What could be more necessary? What's more worthwhile?

Such it is to be placed with the Son.

If your reaction to all this is, as it is mine, 'but that's quite beyond me!' , well and good! For people like you and me, Diego Laynez underlines two further features of Ignatius' experience in that Chapel at La Storta.

Firstly, there was a promise.  The Father promised Ignatius, 'I will be favourable to you in Rome'.  That means we can have confidence.  As it's He who has begun it, so it will be He who will bring it to its conclusion.  Secondly, Laynez wanted to make the point that it was all gift and he emphasises this by stressing that it was a gift given to Ignatius through the intercession of Mary.

Mary, Queen and Mother of the Society of Jesus, pray for us.

Michael Holman SJ