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By Peter McDonough
6 line figures, 10 tables based via Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus continues to be the most important and such a lot debatable spiritual order of fellows in Catholicism. because the Nineteen Sixties, in spite of the fact that, Jesuits within the usa have misplaced greater than half their contributors, they usually have skilled a tremendous upheaval in what they suspect and the way they paintings and dwell. during this groundbreaking ebook, Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi draw on interviews and statements accumulated from greater than 400 Jesuits and previous Jesuits to supply an intimate examine turmoil between Catholicism's mythical best-and-brightest. monks and previous monks communicate candidly approximately their purposes for becoming a member of (and leaving) the Jesuits, approximately their sexual improvement and orientation, approximately their religious crises and their engagement with different non secular traditions. They talk about concerns starting from celibacy to the ordination of girls, homosexuality, the reason of the priesthood, the demanding situations of neighborhood existence, and the divinity of Jesus. Passionate Uncertainty strains the transformation of the Society of Jesus from a pretty unified association right into a smaller, looser group with disparate objectives and an elusive company id. From its position as a conventional lifestyle throughout the days of immigrant Catholicism, the order has turned into an amalgam of countercultures formed round social venture, sexual identification, and an eclectic spirituality. the tale of the Jesuits displays the predicament of clerical authority and the deep ambivalence surrounding American Catholicism's come across with modernity.
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Additional info for Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits
Sample text
They are liable to express bafflement at, instead of outright dismissal of, those who remain or, if they are still Jesuits, to hint of skepticism about the motives of those who have left. But negative judgments tend to be muted. The men may be in separate camps—the military imagery is frequent—but they were comrades once. The code of individual choice prescribes tolerance of divergent paths, of routes taken and not taken for God knows what reasons, and it sanctions a wistful indifference. Such tender stoicism cannot escape the poignancy of loss over departed companions and the sadness of vanquished dreams.
Certainly many men desire more intimacy than is healthily and happily available to them in the Society. Loneliness is a fundamental issue for many people who have left the Society. Emotionally and relationally, in the Society, there is less there than meets the eye. Some men stay in the Society because they are able to live integrated and healthy lives. Others remain because they are afraid to consider the alternatives. A sixty-one-year-old former Jesuit, recalling his years in the order from 1950 to 1965, singles out the connection between the hierarchical nature of the organization and inhibitions against opening up: Life in the Society then did not really provide certain necessary emotional or psychological ingredients.
Career anxiety and sexual anxiety . . rather than by appropriately religious motives. At this point, I was anything but full of rage at the Society. I knew that nothing had been asked of me that my superiors had not asked of themselves. I saw that they had spent hours freely attempting to help me solve my personal problems, never pushing for an earlier resolution or ever inquiring about what was going on in these therapy sessions. I knew, as well, that I had received a powerful education— one with some deficits, to be sure, but with enormous strengths.