There have been huge changes in the Society of Jesus over recent years, but not in their mission: ?To the greater glory of God?. The director of the Jesuit development service in El Salvador looks back over five decades with the Society. THE memory is still fresh of that September day in 1949 when an inexperienced youth not yet 18 set out with his parents for Manresa House in Roehampton, just as the long-forgotten Brabazon airliner, on its maiden flights from Farnborough Aerodrome, passed right over our home nearby. I was one of 38 companions, mostly my own age, who were leaving the world to embark on a life we could little imagine and still less predict. We were joining another 36 who, having already survived a year, were our seniors and angel guardians, entrusted with the task of initiating us into the arcane customs and minutiae of the daily ordo.

When not officially recreating, we were expected to communicate in Latin, avoid particular friendships, address each other as brother, wear leg-chains, beat ourselves with disciplines once a week, denounce each other?s shortcomings during public circles or rings, and occasionally perform public penances such as telling our fault, eating supper on our knees at a little table or begging our food from our companions. We slept in spartan cubicles, were read to during meals, and did most of the housework, gardening and peeling vegetables while listening to The Practice and Perfection of Christian Virtues, a turgid two-volume treatise written by a seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit, Alphonsus Rodr?guez. Its sole redeeming feature was the improbable stories contained in recurring chapters at the end of each section entitled: In which what has been said is confirmed by sundry examples.

High days and holidays were celebrated with double-tables or VPPs (vinum post prandium) and long walks in pre-selected groups of three to Richmond Common or some similar London landmark, a shilling occasionally being given for bus fares. Visits from family, known as parlours, were rare and sometimes fraught, while those from previous friends or companions were non-existent. In that pre-television age, newspapers and radio were proscribed, the only source of outside news being occasional and carefully selected asides from the novice master during his morning exhortations.

Not that all was gloom or grim penance. On the whole we were a happy and largely unreflecting group, borne along on the tide of each other?s eccentricities and companionship. Practices that now appear arcane or even repugnant were taken in our stride and accepted uncritically as part of the shilling. For two years, first in Roehampton itself, where Gerard Manley Hopkins had made a very similar noviceship 81 years before, and then in a mock-Elizabethan pile near Grantham in Leicestershire, we were subjected to the meticulous scrutiny of Fr George Walkerley, the novice master, who alone had the power to decide whether we were fit to continue. Borrowing from a recent encyclical of Pope Pius XII, we irreverently nicknamed him the Mystical Body, owing to his propensity to sway on one foot during moments of intense devotion. Some of us lasted only a few weeks, others several years, and some have long since gone to their reward.

Today 14 of us are left in varying physical and mental states: three in Zimbabwe, one in Guyana, nine in the United Kingdom and I myself in El Salvador. Between us we have occupied most of the posts in the province catalogue from cook, infirmarian, house minister, newspaper editor, parish priest, college headmaster, university professor, novice master, tertian instructor and provincial. With an average age rising 71, our present occupations are predominantly pastoral, though two of us are still teaching and two running social works.

But we live in a different world. When we joined in 1949, Europe was just beginning to emerge from the Second World War. The Marshall Plan was in full force, though clothes and sweet rationing had not yet been abolished. The pound was devalued from US$4.30 to US$2.80 and the Berlin blockade finally lifted, having cost over US$200 million. It was the year Mao Tse-Tung entered Peking and, in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, declared China a Communist Republic. Shortly before, Pope Pius XII issued an apostolic act excommunicating those who knowingly and freely join or support the Communist Party. Alec Guinness played Fagin in Oliver Twist, George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four and Carol Reed produced The Third Man. On a more frivolous note, Crawfie, governess to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, created shock waves by publishing her memoirs in the American magazine Ladies? Home Journal, revealing that her charges owned a stable of 30 toy horses that had to be unsaddled each night.

The Society we joined has also undergone traumatic changes. In 1949 there were 29,973 Jesuits in the world, the vast majority of whom were European or North American. Though there was a Jesuit presence in what we now call the Third World (Asia, Africa, Latin America), there were only seven independent provinces, all of them in Latin America. The remaining areas were mission territories controlled by European or North American provinces.

Today there are fewer Jesuits world-wide (21,965) and the centre of gravity has shifted dramatically. Nearly half of them (10,078) belong to 43 independent provinces and four regions, all of which are in the Third World. On the Indian subcontinent alone there are 17 provinces with 3,757 members. And the age structures show that this trend will become even stronger in coming years. The average age of the Jesuits in Western Europe and the United States is nearly 62 years, as compared with just over 50 years in the Third World. The statisticians have calculated that a ratio of one Jesuit in training to four fully formed will maintain existing numbers in a province. In the rapidly growing provinces of India and Asia the ratios are less than 1:4 and in some cases less than 1:2, whereas those in Europe hover between 1:7 (the UK) and 1:35 (Holland).

A snapshot of the then English province of the Society of Jesus as it was 50 years ago could hardly be more different from the British province, its successor today. Working within the province in 1949 were 1,004 Jesuits (105 belonging to other provinces), of whom 258 (25.7 per cent) were scholastics in training and 124 were brothers (12.3 per cent). Today the province contains 373 Jesuits (60 from other provinces), of whom 53 (14.2 per cent) are in training and 27 are brothers (7.2 per cent).

The changes are even more dramatic when one looks at the work they were and are doing. A rough comparison shows 145 Jesuits teaching full-time in 19 colleges or schools in 1949, as against 18 in eight colleges or schools today. And though the Society is working in almost as many parishes today (21) as then (26), in 1949 they were served by 128 priests and 17 brothers as compared with 46 priests and three brothers today. In 1949 the province had nine communities with 35 or more resident members, Heythrop College in Oxfordshire holding the record with 197. Today our largest community is Farm Street with 26 resident members, of whom 17 are over 70.

But figures tell only part of the story. In the very year we joined, fundamental changes of direction were being advocated from on high. On 10 October 1949, Fr Janssens published an Instruction on the Social Apostolate, the first time a Jesuit Superior General had addressed the whole Society on this topic. It called not only for the setting up of social institutes but for direct action among the poor and underprivileged, together with the need for some fathers to take part in the actual manual toil of the mines, the factories, or the workshops. Other apostolic works of the Society must also strive to establish a right social order, especially colleges whose students should not acquire any spirit of a special, privileged social class.

But perhaps the most striking and original part of the instruction, foreshadowing subsequent developments, was the call for the whole Society to become trained to that sincere and active charity which today is called ?a social attitude? or ?social-mindedness?. To achieve this, Fr Janssens told us, it was necessary that Jesuits should see what it means to spend a whole life in humble circumstances, to be a member of the lowest class of mankind, to be ignored and looked down upon by other men; to be unable to appear in public because one does not have decent clothes nor a proper social training; to be the means by which others grow rich . . . and at the same time to behold about one the very men for whom one works, abounding with riches, enjoying superfluous comforts, devoting themselves to liberal studies and the fine arts, loaded with honours, authority and praise. Such an unbalanced state of mankind is unjust and calls for profound change on the part of the Society: to prevent our Society from justly being classified with the rich and capitalists, we must direct with utmost zeal many of our ministries towards the poorer classes. . . . It is certainly necessary, especially in some provinces, that superiors make sure our ministries are not almost exclusively conducted among the rich and the cultured.

THOUGH a far cry from the preferential option for the poor or the commitment to promote justice as an integral dimension of the service of faith, leitmotifs in later years of the Society of Jesus as of many other religious congregations, this great letter was a catalyst for many and still has its relevancies. It was, however, soon superseded by other ecclesiastical events and, in particular, by the Second Vatican Council whose call for profound renewal and change is more familiar and has had such far-reaching effects on religious life and apostolic work. More changes will doubtless come in the years ahead, since the process of renewal is never-ending. But looking back over these years, I often find myself wondering whether, with all our modern insights and techniques, we are any better, holier or more Jesuit, than our predecessors. The answer has to be no. The players, their styles, their uniforms, and the spectators have changed dramatically, but the goal posts have not shifted. The basic rules of the game are still the same. Ultimately all that really matters is whether, in our various doings, we have been able to increase by ever so little the amount of love that exists in the world. All the rest are trappings, the icing on the cake, accidentals to be carefully distinguished from the substance.

Some years ago I remember reading of an American Jesuit, Erwin Toner, who had just died in Spokane in, as his obituary put it, his fiftieth year of rheumatoid arthritis. For most of his life he was a semi-invalid and spent his last 18 years in a wheelchair. Yet this was the period he described as his most profitable and the happiest of my life. The moral is obvious: it is being, not doing, that matters, the how not the what, quality not quantity. Increasing age accompanied by infirmities makes this truth ever more obvious. The love that we have wasted, O God of love renew ? a line from the Church?s morning prayer for Tuesday in week one that has always struck me, and does so now with greater force as I reflect on this fiftieth anniversary as a Jesuit. There is much to regret, many things left undone, errors and mistakes committed over the years.

But one of the advantages of increasing age is that God gradually takes control of one?s life and movements. The initiative shifts. As the late Fr Pedro Arrupe put it after suffering his stroke: More than ever, I now find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life, from my youth. And this is still the one thing I want. But now there is a difference: the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in his hands. The challenge is to see and accept this as something positive, as a fulfilment. Humanly speaking it makes no sense. Without belief, we have only the resignation and despair so graphically expressed by Walter Savage Landor in his famous self-epitaph:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed both hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Faith tells another story. The self in our lives must diminish if the divine is to grow. As Teilhard de Chardin put it in Le Milieu Divin: God needs to hollow us out, to empty us in order to make room for himself. But it is still painful to acknowledge that he does not really need my work, my plans, my efforts, my gifts, however essential these may appear to me. It is me myself he wants to possess, which means I have to let go of all that is not him. As St John the Baptist says: I must decrease so that he can increase. This is the purification process, the stripping-away so vividly described by Francis Thompson in his poem The Hound of Heaven. It is not a lessening, however much it may appear so. Rather it is growth and fulfilment at a different and much deeper level. Rejecting Landor, I once composed an alternative, though doubtless poetically inferior, version of his epitaph. It expresses the Christian hope and joy I pray for on completing 50 years as a Jesuit and which I wish every reader of this article:

I strove for all since all were worth my strife, God I loved, and next to God, Mankind; All that I have and am I gave to life, It sinks, but now a fuller life I find.

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