As the Church mourns the passing of Pope Francis, we recall with fondness our Jesuit brother, whose pontificate reflected his Jesuit training and Ignatian spirituality.
Jesuits around the world were stunned when one of their own, Jorge Bergoglio, cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected pope on March 13, 2013. Their confusion was understandable. In the 473-year history of their order, no Jesuit had ever sat on the chair of St. Peter, and many thought none ever would. Jesuits take a special vow to refuse higher offices in the Church. Another vow, of special obedience to the pope in matters of mission, gave them their reputation as “the pope’s Marines,” and one of their own receiving this special service seemed somewhat backward. Bergoglio had become bishop, then archbishop, then cardinal at the express command of Pope St. John Paul II. While some Vatican-watchers counted the Argentinian Jesuit as papabile – that is, likely to be elected pope – it still took his brother Jesuits by surprise when his name was announced in the Latin proclamation on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica after the election.
Since then, Jesuits have become immensely proud of their contribution to the successors of St. Peter. A joke to be found on the internet reads, “A humble Jesuit? A rarity! A Jesuit pope? An impossibility! A humble Jesuit pope? A MIRACLE!” From the very first gestures of his pontificate, such as riding a bus with the cardinals, paying his own hotel bill, and living in the Vatican guesthouse instead of the apostolic palace, Pope Francis eschewed pomp and formality and embraced a simple, humble style that is historically characteristic of the religious orders, whose members take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
He never lost sight of his Jesuit roots; he would famously drop in on the Jesuits at their headquarters in Rome on special occasions.
Perhaps the reasons Jesuits are most grateful to Pope Francis are the ways he shaped the culture of the Church according to his own Jesuit spirituality. In guiding the Church’s decisions, he called its members to discernment, the practice of perceiving the movements of God’s Spirit and thereby determining what God is calling his people to do. Although he knew that the big decisions ultimately lay with him, he used a consultative governing style, typical of Jesuit leadership, in order to listen to where the Spirit was blowing. This approach resulted in a renewal of the ancient Christian reliance on synodality, which centers on the gathering and conversation of Church leaders in a common effort to find God’s will.
Jesuits are also known for reaching out to those on the margins, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. He broke tradition by naming cardinals from places around the world that did not customarily have this honor, often developing countries and lesser prelates, which dramatically reshaped the College of Cardinals. Concern for the well-being of the poor led him to choose the name Francis (after St. Francis of Assisi), and he was well known for lending a compassionate ear to those often shunned within the Church, such as LGBTQ persons and the divorced and remarried. Jesuits, historically famous as confessors, have tended to emphasize leniency to sinners, and accordingly, Pope Francis constantly stressed the mercy of God, even declaring a special Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2015-16.
The Jesuit proclivity to “find God in all things” was on display when Francis insisted that God is to be encountered in the world of today, when he maintained that the Church must play a role in society, even in politics, and when he issued his famous encyclical on care for the environment, Laudato si’ (2015), and its sequel, Laudate Deum (2023). Finally, just as Jesuits prize apostolic zeal and seek to speak to God’s people through their particular cultures, so Francis famously declared that the clergy ought to be shepherds who have “the smell of the sheep.”
Now, more than twelve years after he became bishop of Rome, Pope Francis has passed away on Easter Monday, a day still pregnant with the mystery of the Resurrection. It is a time suffused with hope, during the Jubilee Year of Hope that the Church has been celebrating at Francis’ urging. He will be laid to rest as he instructed, in a simple wooden casket (unlike his predecessors), in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, the church where St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, celebrated his first Mass.
We Jesuits mourn his passing, but we are simultaneously filled with joy that a Jesuit could be such a prophetic, Christ-like figure in a world that desperately needs one. While Ignatius probably never imagined a Jesuit pope, we believe that he is welcoming Francis into heaven as a fellow companion of Jesus who served faithfully under the banner of the cross for the service of faith and the promotion of justice – as all Jesuits strive to do.
~ Fr. Steven A. Schoenig, SJ
Enjoy this video of the life of Pope Francis through the eyes of his Jesuit brothers, produced by Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ, for the Jesuit Curia in Rome:
