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When John Paul held his first formal meeting with the Jesuit leadership in September 1979, he criticized its "secularistic tendencies." In particular, he lamented its inadequate stress on the church's official teaching and on the priestly character of the Jesuit mission. The Pope made clear that he was just repeating criticisms voiced by his immediate predecessors, Paul VI and John Paul I. But his rebukes prompted speculation that he was dissatisfied with Arrupe's direction. Arrupe has delegated greater authority to provincial superiors around the world, and one high-ranking Vatican source feels that the Pope may see him "more as an inspirer than a governor."
Nowhere is the crisis in the society more visible than in the U.S., where differences between conservatives and liberals have lately sharpened. The specific issues are familiar: social activism, birth control and the ordination of women. In a general effort to get priests out of politics, John Paul set off shock waves among American Jesuits last May when he kept Massachusetts Democrat Father Robert Drinan from seeking a sixth term in Congress.
To conservatives, the real problem is not political activism but the loss of discipline and intellectual rigor that set in during the experimental '60s. At that time, many younger Jesuits were influenced as much by the radical politics of Antiwar Activist Father Daniel Berrigan as they were by the society's venerable manual, Spiritual Exercises. As Catholic Historian James Hitchcock of St. Louis University sees it, a "self-probing, inward-looking, almost narcissistic" mentality has crept into the order today. Liberals contend that they are only trying to do what Jesuits have always done: make the church and the teachings of Christ more relevant to the contemporary world.
Perhaps the greatest area of papal concern has been Jesuit activity in Latin America: one activist Jesuit has already been murdered in El Salvador and two have been killed in Guatemala for advocating greater social reform. Rumors have spread—so far, officially denied—that the Guatemalan authorities were set to banish the society from the country entirely. As John Paul made clear to Latin American bishops in Puebla, Mexico, two years ago, he approves of the church's defending the rights of the oppressed—but not by political means that have more in common with Marxism than Christianity. Many local Jesuits disagree that any kind of Marxism is their goal. Says Father Jon Sobrino, who teaches at the Universidad Centroamericana José Siméon Cañnas in San Salvador: "We Jesuits have not chosen an ideology. The basic problem is reality itself. When you see corpses or children starving, what makes you react is reality, not some abstract idea."