Mass to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Fr Pedro Arrupe SJ, 1907 - 1991

Homily given by Father Michael Holman SJ at Sacred Heart Church, Wimbledon, on Saturday, 10 November 2007.

'To be witnesses of Jesus always, but even more in our secularised world, requires men and women of faith, of wide experience of God, and generous in their communication of that experience.'

Early next week, the present General of the Jesuits, Fr Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, will travel to Bilbao in the Basque country of northern Spain.  On Wednesday, he will celebrate Mass in the city, the birthplace of Fr Pedro Arrupe one hundred years before.  Fr Kolvenbach retires in January: this is expected to be his last journey abroad as our General and it will a journey to pay tribute to his predecessor.

An article appeared in The Tablet yesterday and another will be published in the Catholic Herald next week, just two examples of the interest the world's media still has in Fr Arrupe.

An Italian historian, Professor Gianni La Bella, has published a collection of articles amounting to more than 1000 pages on every aspect of Fr Arrupe's life and work.  It has already been translated into Spanish and French and right now, in our parish on the Caribbean island of Barbados where he runs a holiday home for Jesuits in Guyana, one of my own predecessors, Fr Michael Campbell-Johnston, is translating much of the collection into English: a labour certainly, but a labour of love.  He worked alongside Arrupe for many years in Rome and he is just one example of the many in whom Don Pedro continues to inspire much affection.

Then there is this celebration and when I met Fr Kolvenbach during a meeting in Poland just three weeks ago, I asked if there were to be many like it.  He replied that indeed there were and that they were happening quite spontaneously.  Evidence, perhaps, of that kind of abiding interest and affection which we commonly attribute to holiness.

But why all the interest and why all the fuss about a man dead 16 years and whose ministry ended more than 25 years ago when he suffered a debilitating stroke? Certainly, he was a significant and influential figure in the Church.  He was General of the Jesuits, who then numbered some 30,000 men, for 18 years.  His influence spread far beyond the Society of Jesus, not least because for 15 years he was president of the association of the superiors general of all religious orders in the Church.  As this was a time of change almost like no other, he attracted praise and controversy in equal measure.  But many such figures have come and gone while he remains, why?

Pedro Arrupe was our General in my early years as a Jesuit.  Of course, I never met him personally.  My only memory of him is of his visit to England in 1979 when he came to address our province meeting at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire.  I can still see his small figure, hunched and stooped, bearing, as everyone says, an uncanny likeness to St Ignatius himself, standing in the shadows at the top of the main school staircase.

In recent years, and not least since beginning my present job, I have found him (what he wrote, yes; but far more his life and example) an inspiration and a motivation like no other.  Truth to tell, this came as something of a surprise and it's helped me appreciate what inspires and motivates not only many of my brother Jesuits but so many others too.  For, as Fr Kolvenbach has written, Pedro Arrupe belongs not just to the Society of Jesus, not only to the Church but to the world.  He is not only a figure from the past, but decidedly a prophet of the future.

It's taken me some time to work out precisely the nature of the hold this man continues to have on me and many others.  A few years ago when I was head teacher here at Wimbledon College, a young Jesuit was working with me whose father had written Arrupe's biography.  He gave me a copy and this story of a life lived right at the heart of the 20th century, with a faith not depleted but shaped and even strengthened by events, captivated me then and it still does today.  But why?

It's partly that his story carries the kind of authority that comes from living through that event which most of all shaped the late 20th century.  On 6th August 1945 he was our novice master, in Japan, in Hiroshima in Japan.  So when later he taught about the Church and the mission of the Church, his challenge could not fall on deaf ears.  His Christian witness was known to have been cast in that furnace, pleading with us to be credible witnesses of the God who, incredibly, still smiles on our world.

It's partly also because what he taught us, and goes on teaching us, he lived with his life.  He tried to get us Jesuits to recognise what St Ignatius himself taught, namely, that first and foremost the success of our work, whatever the expertise a long training had given us, depended never on ourselves but always on God and on our giving in to God's leading in the world.

As a young man he volunteered to leave his native Spain and to live the rest of his life in Japan.  He arrived in 1939, with little of the language and even less understanding of the culture.  After the attack on Pearl Harbour and the declaration of war two years later, he was imprisoned on suspicion of being a spy.  He had nothing, but with God he had everything; this wasn't second best, this was the best; this wasn't failure, this was success.  This is why his words in his final illness, give us the character of that faith which shaped the whole of his life, and can give shape to our lives too: 'More than ever I find myself in the hands of God.  This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth…but now the initiative is entirely with God'.

This certainly has a hold over me, but there's much more.  Fr Arrupe never failed to paint an attractive picture of the God we can depend on, whom we would want to depend on, a God whose name is first and foremost 'Compassion'.  God taught him this in his experience.  As a medical student, he travelled with his mother and family, shortly after his father's death, to Lourdes where he encountered his Jesus tangibly present amongst the poor, Jesus the compassionate one. 'In one solemn moment', he later remembered, 'a paralysed nun and Jesus Christ came face to face.  I don't know how they looked at each other but in that instant there was a great contact of love between them'.  This experience gave him his vocation and it seems to me to have shaped the rest of his life.

This man of compassion, who wouldn't be motivated by his example? Once as Jesuit General walking in the streets of a city in Ecuador, Fr Arrupe was approached by a child beggar offering to shine his shoes, he knelt down and polished the boy's shoes instead.  The Christ who became poor is to be served in the poor and the poor are only served when like Christ we share the life of the poor.

This conviction has inspired countless men and women to work for a world order that's on the side of the poor and even - in Brazil, Guyana, El Salvador and Zimbabwe and elsewhere - to give their lives witnessing to Christ and to his love for the poor.  And such was the inspiration behind what many regard with reason as Don Pedro's lasting memorial, the Jesuit Refugee Service, which he founded in 1980.  How proud we all were when at a lecture in the London School of Economics a year ago an eminent refugee lawyer from the University of Michigan judged that in his experience JRS does more good for more refugees in more ways and in more places than any other organisation.

Three months ago I received a letter from the provincial of the Jesuits in Bangalore, India, who wanted to thank me for the involvement of Wimbledon College in the work of a school his men run for the poorest of the poor, for dalit, for untouchable children.  Our help has meant a primary school has been built and a secondary school is being planned.  But did I know, he wondered, the impact the project has had on our students who first came as sixth formers and who have returned many times since with their friends from work or university? 'Many', he went on, 'have changed their attitudes and even their life-style'.  I know others have found their Christ there.

Such is one result, one small result perhaps, of the revolution in our world-wide educational network which Arrupe promoted when in 1973 he asked 'what kind of a man or woman are needed by the Church and the world?' and he famously replied 'a man and a woman for others'.

Another lasting memorial which also goes a long way to explain the hold this man continues to have on me and, yes, on so many others.  But what has struck me most of all, not least in the last two years while I have been doing my present job, is, if you like, what lies under it all, the source of it all.

That was Pedro Arrupe's personal love for Jesus, his companionship with him and his familiarity with him.  It's this that seems to have inspired and motivated everything else.

The way he put that love, honestly before the world, hoping that what gave him life might give others life too, is a model for us all in the urgent business of evangelisation that is the challenge that above all we face today.  Why? Because his convictions about Jesus and his enthusiasm for him are just what makes the sceptic want to get closer to Jesus too. 'For me', Fr Arrupe once famously said in a television interview, 'Jesus Christ is everything.  Take him from my life and everything would collapse - like a human body from which someone removed the skeleton, the heart and the head'.  For him, Jesus Christ was everything.

Pedro Arrupe followed Jesus, and was able to do so radically, because he was in love with him.  And because he was in love with him, he loved the Eucharist where he was present, the Church which was his body and the Pope who was his vicar.  His following of Jesus was not only on the outside but on the inside too.  He wanted a share in his heart: he wanted nothing more than that Jesus' thoughts might be his thoughts, that what Jesus wanted might be what he wanted as well.  As he once said to a gathering of young people,

'Look upon Jesus as your friend, as your confidant.  Learn to go and see him, to visit him, to 'remain' with him, and you will see how many things you will learn.  It is a wisdom which he alone can give you, the true knowledge that makes people wise, holy, and even happy.  If you go with Jesus, if you remain with Jesus, you will certainly yourself become another Jesus. '

'Nowadays', he once wrote, 'the world does not need words, but lives which cannot be explained except through faith and love for Christ poor'.  If we and our fellow men and women are to come closer to Christ, we need such a witness.  It's his personal love for Jesus, and his living of this love, as he put it, with total commitment and with no compromise, by being as Jesus was, poor amongst the poor and on the side of the poor, which makes Pedro Arrupe far more than a figure from the past, far from it, for he shows the Church, which means he shows you and me, the way to the future.

Servant of God Pedro Arrupe: pray for us!

Michael Holman SJ