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Jean-Yves Calvez,sj
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Jean-Yves Calvez,sj
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The founder, Ignatius of Loyola, gave the example of a commitment to those
in need, concretely through an institution for the prostitutes of the city
of Rome, Saint Martha. He also gathered help for the poor of Rome… during
a war. He wrote in the basic document of foundation to be approved by the
highest authority in the Catholic Church, that the members of his community
would take to heart to engage in the proposition of the Christian faith
but would also employ themselves "in peacefully resolving conflicts,
in reaching out with sympathetic support to those who languish in jails
and hospices, or by taking up any work that love inspires as being for
God’s glory and the good of all". Ignatius also recommended to the
companions he sent to the great and solemn assembly of the Council of Trent
(second half of the XVIth century), that they should spend their spare
time in the hospitals. Hospitals were then rather asylums (homes) for poor
people, they existed in that sense in most European cities. He wrote once
to some of his companions how much he expected them to have some poor as
their friends. The Jesuits have done a lot of different things in close
to five centuries of history but they have never stopped giving part at
least of their attention to the poor sections of the populations.
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One of the most outstanding recent achievements in that area is the JRS,
Jesuit Refugee Service. Not only Jesuits work in this service, but other
catholic religious men and women too, lay people as well. It began one
night in the terrible period of the boat people adrift in the Chinese sea,
along the coast of Indonesia too, ransacked by pirates… Father Pedro Arrupe,
superior general at the time, listening that night to radio news on the
plight of those people, generally of Vietnamese origin, had his secretary
write immediately - that very night - to the Jesuit superiors of the Far
East and South Asia, on the one side, and to those of Europe and America,
on the other, to ask them to figure out what they could do in order to
help either locally, close to the scene, or in countries capable of receiving
those refugees because, in the presence of such a misfortune, the Jesuits
could not "do nothing". He received a great amount of suggestions
not to speak of commitments. He created JRS, a very small JRS when it began.
But it grew... Father Arrupe, the founder of JRS, had spent 27 years of
his life in Japan, was very well-known in Japan, is still known of many
I think. He had lived in Japan the difficult war years, he had even got
imprisoned some time then, under the suspicion of being a spy - because,
being a foreigner of Spanish origin, he owned a radio capable of international
communication. He was, later, in the outskirts of Hiroshima at the moment
of the atomic explosion and helped with his medical knowledge -he had been
a student of medicine -, he did his best to serve a few hundred people
terribly burnt and irradiated by the explosion. No wonder that he remained
extremely sensitive to all mishaps, hazards and violence suffered by people
whom he encountered all over the world. Not by mere chance he spent the
last active day of his life, before a brain stroke, in the refugee camps
of Thailand on the border of Cambodia at the worst moment of the Cambodian
crises.
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I know that students of Jochi University have served in many ways with
JRS particularly in Cambodia. If I also try to go back to my personal memories
of Japan, which I visited a few times through the years, I remember with
emotion a day and a night spent at Kamagasaki, near Osaka, observing how
a few Jesuits and their collaborators took care of the day workers living
there, undocumented, and without social protection... as a witness of love
for some of the most unhappy of the people in Japan.
The Jesuits have worked in all kinds of ways, too, in the many countries
of Latin America suffering from the military dictatorships in the seventies
of the last century, too often persecuting the poor people who suffered
and protested. They simultaneously tried to work for pacification, speaking
with the insurgencies, as in the case of El Salvador in Central America,
running great risks as a consequence. Six of them, together with their
cook and her daughter, were thus savagely slaughtered in the Fall of 1989
at the Jesuit University of San Salvador in El Salvador. Other Jesuits
have died in Latin America in those years for similar causes. I am thinking
of one, a Brazilian, Burnier, who was killed just for having tried to get
some information for his relatives on the fate of a poor man imprisoned
by the police in Mato Grosso. All this was action for social justice, involving
high risks. Not all times are as dangerous, anyhow the work for people
in great need goes on in favelas of Brazil, in rural areas of central America,
in precarious urbanization of Argentina or Santo Domingo, in the Philippines
as well. And no less in Europe, think of some sectors of Berlin or of Marseilles
or of Brussels, of Barcelona.
Actions for peace have developed too at important moments as in Sarajevo
during the Balkan wars following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, or in Belfast
when there was a wall in that city too and when a few inter-religious communities
had established themselves near this wall in order to give an example of
reconciliation and cultivate a spirit of pacification between the two sides
in confrontation. Similar actions are in progress at this very moment in
some so called peace zones in Colombia, South America, in these peace zones
there live populations who refuse to share in any of the causes of the
different guerrillas and profess to live unarmed, running risks of course
on the different sides but giving examples nevertheless of a pacified Colombia.
If justice is a goal for the Jesuits, so is peace and pacification, too,
a similar goal. Peace is for them the outcome of justice.
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A great moment for the Jesuits and their friends and collaborators was
the winter of 1974-75. It was little after a Roman gathering (a synod)
of Catholic Bishops which had dealt with "Justice in the World",
1971, and spoken of the commitment of the Church in that area, "a
constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel", they had said.
A General Assembly of the Jesuits gathered in its turn, during the winter
of 74-75, in order to make a general review of the activities of their
community. They tried to listen to the voices of poverty and injustice
in the whole world at that moment, and confronted these voices with their
foundational documents. They concluded by declaring that their service
of the faith in God, concretely speaking service of the Christian faith,
of necessity includes a service to men and women in need of justice as
well: today as ever, maybe, but nevertheless very especially today. They
made the promotion of justice -these are their words- an "intrinsic"
part of their fundamental activity, service of the faith. Thus they gave
a new start and a new look to a traditional commitment in that area, it
was so to say modernized and began to develop anew, including everything
I have said at the beginning, very specifically all that which has to do
with the refugees, the other kinds of migrants too, being a cause of such
magnitude in the present world. There is hardly any country today where
the problem is not acute. There is the case of the people who run away
to escape political, ethnic, even religious persecution, there is the case,
too, of those who try to escape hunger and destitution in countries with
hardly any hope of development (as are maybe some sub-Saharan sahelian
countries, quite distant from the seas which would give them a chance to
trade, constantly threatened on the other hand by the great uncertainty
of the rains). The plight of those people is generally very hard, the situation
on the other hand involves most difficult political issues. If you want
to work for justice, you have to get involved in both. The Jesuits are
indeed involved in them in many places. Advocacy is a part of their social
activity in these times too. Concerning for instance the poor people from
Black Africa trying to cross the Mediterranean sea in order to get to Europe
today.
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A precondition for all this activity stated a more recent General assembly
of the Jesuits, (1995), summing up that of 1974-75, is the encounter with
the poor and marginalized, a life in solidarity with them, and readiness
to take up their cause. "Our hearts, says the 1995 assembly, will
be powerfully drawn to such a mission by the contact with these ‘friends
in the Lord', from whom we often learn so much [too] about faith".
"Our communities should whenever possible be located among ordinary
folk". Another precondition for this service being "dialogue
rooted in respect for persons, specially the poor, so that we share in
their cultural and spiritual values while we offer them our own treasured
culture and spirituality". To which one can add, according to the
1975 document, "solidarity and ready availability in face of the international
dimensions of the major problems of our day", first of all great awareness
of those dimensions. Finally, all this should be practised by all Jesuits,
not only by those specifically in social action or social apostolates.
And they should not be afraid, a special mention being certainly made by
the 1975 assembly, of the "fears" as well as the "apathy"
that may come in the way of this commitment.
The why of all this passionate involvement is in the interest shown by
the Christian churches towards the issues of justice, peace, reconciliation
all through the last century, and even more than a century if you go back
to the Letter of pope Leo XIII in 1891 on the condition, that is in fact
the plight of the working people in the ascending period of industrialization.
Reading a number of autobiographical narratives which have been gathered
recently, this very year, in another publication of the Jesuit headquarters,
The spirituality of Jesuit social apostolate, one realizes that what has
led to the deep personal involvement of individual Jesuits or friends of
theirs, has generally been, as I already said, the encounter, on whatever
occasion, with people in situations of destitution, in great need, with
migrants, people in jail, people about to be deported, etc., treated in
a way in which mankind should never treat any of its members. You read
this, case after case, in the publication I quote.
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"I was shocked, says a woman collaborator of the Jesuits, and demoralized
that we allow human beings to live like this. How can the economic policies
of our world allow hundreds of millions of people to go hungry every day".
A Spanish Jesuit then tells how he went to Germany to study philosophy,
there came across the "large numbers of Galician and Andalusian immigrants...
working in wretched conditions, far from their families, supplementing
the precarious Spanish economy with their remittances to their loved ones
back home". "It was then, he says, that I learned to distinguish
the hidden mechanisms at work within our historical and social reality".
This reminds me, by the way, of Father Arrupe visiting the Spanish
speaking people in the New York jails, on his way to Japan just before
World War Second, being profoundly struck by their treatment as real underdogs
in comparison with American nationals. The Spanish Jesuit I was just quoting
adds for his part: "I also witnessed radical Christian living there
such as I had never seen before; for example, Marcelino, a Spanish diocesan
priest, an intellectual and a mystic who lived in the hovels of the working-class
ghetto while completing his doctoral thesis". Others of our storytellers
have decided to change neighbourhood after discovering humbler people,
poor and disenfranchised. Others have met the marginalized populations
of the huge Amazonian area of Brazil, especially "the villagers of
the riverbanks". For still another one, everything began with a soup
kitchen in his novitiate in Sri Lanka: "I remember the bright-eyed
Veeran who coughed badly in the soup kitchen queue... I still remember
him and sometimes wonder whether he died early of TB. Why was he so poor?"
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Some commentators of the aforesaid narratives note that today's Jesuits
in comparison with some of thirty years ago do not feel themselves as capable
of offering great solutions, or, it is said, they are "soberly aware
of the limitations of all earthly political and institutional projects"
so that they'll be satisfied with "being" or "living"
"with the poor", they feel by the way that "the poor are
often revelatory of the best of humanity". Or they discover that "the
religions' ability or willingness to set the world aright appears thin".
At the same time it is the companionship discovered in some foundational
encounters that leads to the unrelenting work of quite a few for justice
and more human social order.
A number of them, I would even say most, refer their encounter of some
poor, very poor people, people suffering injustice, to their encounter
of Jesus of Nazareth, who, as you know, is at the center of the Christian
religion and appeared typically poor and humble, close to the poor of his
time and people, he is of course the most essential reference for the Jesuits.
In the back finally of all this, there is currently among the Jesuits a
view of God himself, as the poor one near us, not the mighty, paradoxically
(paradoxically because we say he is God) as the one who deprives himself
of everything for us even if we do not repay.
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Already as he creates us he gives of himself, he gives himself (the Gospel
says he lets his sun shine for all, good and evil people alike). It is
a religious view of this kind which animates the Jesuits, many of them
at least, in their attention for the poor, the sick, the people in need,
the disenfranchised, it animates them in their love for all these, one
can say. Not just a moralistic or an ethical view, it is rather a question
of encountering that Jesus of Nazareth and of encountering God himself
in the poor and humble people and when working for them. That does not
say that they do not build up an ethical view as a consequence, but the
spring of their action is then directly religious too.
Why did all this finally get so much enhanced in the years 50 to 80 of
the last century? Probably, it was because poverty and injustice have struck
more in the aftermath of the 2nd World War and because war was fought by
quite a few in order, among other things, to free people "from want".
In certain countries too there was the feeling that all, including the
poor, had terribly suffered from the war, and that the poor deserved as
a consequence to be really recognized as equal partners and citizens, which
they were not always before. In the Church it led to a Council, Vatican
II, which presented the war against injustice as an essential element of
the Christian commitment. It is there that the Jesuits themselves of course
belonged and still belong, with the hope that this attention to the poor
and to all the unjustly treated never die in their community.
St. Ignatius Church, Tokyo,
July 8, 2006 |
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