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Jesuit Communities
Jesuits are called to be "friends in the Lord." Committed to the service of the Catholic Christian faith and the promotion of justice, especially through the reasoned and persuasive transformation of culture, Jesuits build among themselves and with their other friends and colleagues communities of solidarity, prayer, discernment, and resistance.
Jesuits are called to be a compania, a “group sharing bread together.” This is the bread of our everyday lives spent “for others,” in what Jesuits have traditionally called “the Apostolate,” the bold apostolic enterprise like that of St. Paul, which St. Ignatius re-imagined as a mission undertaken for a liege lord, a beloved sovereign.
Here, in the ordinary sharing of our lives, our hopes, our apostolic goals, as well as our failures and frustrations, in the context of a common faith in God, gathered and offered to God with praise and gratitude in our liturgies, we Jesuits continue to enact and celebrate that "companionship" that Christians confess to be an end in itself and a foretaste of the life to come.
We Jesuits commit ourselves to a passionate mission in the world, a mission which, in the humanistic tradition, continues to encourage intelligent and learned, reasoned and persuasive discussion; a mission that also finds expression in fiction, music, visual arts, poetry, and theater; a mission that is also pastoral, committed to renewal, and addresses the whole American Catholic community; a mission that, in our time, needs to be both mystical and prophetic as well.
Our calling and mission as a people is a “messianic” mission, but in the context of a democratic society, —a disciplined, educated, and reasoned promotion of justice in our own country; a mission that requires from us today the disciplined work of social analysis, theological reflection, sustained conversation, and spiritual discernment in common; a mission rooted in acts of praise and thanksgiving, a rejoicing in God’s presence in us and with us.
As Jesuits we acknowledge that we live in a world full of injustices, where too many human beings are suffering needlessly, too many are impoverished, hungry, homeless, lonely, driven from their land, despised, rejected, and oppressed. We live in a world where the gap between rich and poor day after day grows vaster and more dangerous, where suspicion and resentment and contempt each day break out in desperate acts of violent cruelty, where greed manipulates the lives of millions to further enrich the very few, and where prisons further brutalize the souls of prisoners and grant the state a power to murder people as an ultimate penalty under civil law. It is our privilege and our duty to stand in the public resistance to these forces and others.
There is much for us to resist, to question, and to evaluate as best we can from honest Christian perspectives. There are profoundly complicated and powerful forces at work in the world today that need to be demystified, exposed, destabilized, reformed, and renewed. New practices and institutions need to be established. But we are promised, through St. Ignatius, a grace for finding God in all things through this very unmaking and remaking of the world as a place for God's Reign.
 The ideas, skills, and resources we need—and the hope we need—to fulfill this mission must be sown, nourished, and matured in just such companionships and communities. In our families, our parishes, our study and discussion groups, in voluntary associations of various kinds. in advocacy groups, professional associations, and political movements, we engage each other, raise questions, make judgments, arrive at decisions, and take further action in a public world. At every level, though, there's a struggle going on between attention and inattention, justice and injustice, communion and rancor.
The People of God are entrusted with a sacred mission, to imagine and remake the world with less suffering and more justice in it. The Jesuits discern their own callings in reference to the messianic mission of this whole people, but also and in a special way to people outside the church and at its margins.
In the company of our Founder, Ignatius of Loyola, and in the company of Jesus, we Jesuits imperfectly but devotedly live this life of friendship and companionship and mutual help and care. We hold it open to all those women and men who feel moved to join us in this mission, as well as to all those who help us, teach us, forgive us, appreciate us, challenge us, and even become companions and co-conspirators with us, and permit us to become companions and co-conspirators with them.
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