On the day that the Church remembers Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, Pope Francis sent a message yesterday, July 31, 2017, on his Twitter account. “As Saint Ignatius of Loyola, let us allow ourselves to be conquered by the Lord Jesus and guided by Him, let us place ourselves at the service of our neighbor,” he said.
In an interview with Vatican Radio yesterday, Venezuelan Arturo Sosa, Superior General of the Religious Order, talked about the two great challenges facing the Society of Jesus.
“I would like to synthesize the challenges of the Society in two groups. The first is how we can understand our best contribution to the Church’s mission of reconciliation,” adding that “the contribution has a foundation and the foundation is faith. Therefore, the first challenge is to discern where God is working at this moment in human history and how He does it, in order to be His instruments and to collaborate with what He does.”
Father Sosa affirmed that one must look at the crucifixes of today’s world, marked by inequality and poverty. “Without social justice, reconciliation is not possible,” he stressed, adding that the causes of injustice must be understood and thought must be given to alternative models of human coexistence. “The challenge we have before us is to seek to reconcile these processes, to guarantee to future generations a better life than the one we have today amid inequality and poverty.”
The second great group of challenges identified by the Superior General is to adapt the Society of Jesus to the present time. “to put the Society in the condition to be able to offer a more effective collaboration to these challenges.” This begins, he said, with personal conversion, with the conversion of communal life and, the most difficult, with institutional conversion.
