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¶Publish 1,320 periodicals in 50 different languages, including 24 U.S. magazines, e.g., America, Jesuit Missions. ¶Administer 174 houses of retreat (32 in the U.S.).
¶Run 59 colleges and universities, 28 of them in the U.S.
¶Man the Vatican radio, edit the Vatican newspaper, staff Rome's Gregorian University (for ecclesiastics), whose alumni include Pope Pius XII as well as 13 previous Popes, 77 cardinals, 686 bishops and eight saints.
Jesuits are encouraged to develop their special talents or interests, ranging from archaeology to automation, from deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls to spotting the latest comet in the telescopes of the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo. Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, was a paleontologist of world renown who unearthed conclusive evidence that the so-called Peking man discovered in China in 1929 was human. Father Francis J. Heyden of Georgetown University is a recognized expert on eclipses. Many
Jesuits are prominent in seismology and geophysics, e.g., Father J. Joseph Lynch, director of Fordham's geophysical observatory. In Rome, Father Roberto Busa is picking the electrical brains of a battery of IBM machines to sort out the different shades of meaning that St. Thomas Aquinas intended for his 13 million written words. Some 800 Jesuits are deep in theology; about 80 are electricity and physics experts; more than 900 are physicians or have some medical training.
The Man. Whether his eye is fixed on a plant or a planet, a chemical retort or a dialectical retort to Communist propaganda, every Jesuit everywhere owes his unswerving obedience to his tactful, affable and unassuming Superior General. Belgian-born Jesuit Janssens wryly credits his painstaking, lifelong concern for accuracy to the fact that his father was a tax collector. A precocious youngster, young Janssens was first in his class at school every year from the age of nine through 15, won a gold medal and the title primus perpetuus, i.e., everlasting first. At 17, he entered the Society of Jesus, took his first vows two years later in 1909. He took a doctorate in civil law at Louvain University in 1919 and the same year was ordained a priest. Over the next quarter-century, and especially as head of the North Belgian Province (1938-46), Father Janssens developed a kind of subterranean reputation as a quiet, levelheaded administrator. No one was more surprised than the self-effacing Belgian when in 1946 he became the fourth of his countrymen to head the Jesuits.
As Superior General, Father Janssens has never allowed intermittent bouts with asthma and high blood pressure to keep him from his order's austere regimen. His day begins at 5:30 a.m., with Mass, meditation and thanksgiving (by the rule of St. Ignatius, every Jesuit must spend four hours a day in prayer). By 9:15, with his iron bedstead curtained off, he transforms his bedroom into a study and tackles the day's work, sitting on a straight-backed chair behind a large wooden desk (another straight-backed chair for visitors and three shelves of books complete the office furnishings).