The Jesuits' Search For a New Identity

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1971 as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. A former associate editor of America magazine and a defeated antiwar Republican candidate for the Senate from Rhode Island in 1970, McLaughlin became a vocal supporter of Nixon's Viet Nam strategy. This has prompted Jesuit William Van Etten Casey of Massachusetts' College of the Holy Cross to call him "a Judas."

≫ Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. (TIME cover, Jan. 25, 1971), convicted of destroying draft records, led the FBI on a merry chase up and down the Eastern seaboard, finally to be carted off, smiling, by two stern-faced agents. He was paroled from prison last year after serving 18 months.

≫ Shortly after Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law last September, American Jesuit Vincent Cullen was clapped into jail. The reason: Cullen was a social action director on the island of Mindanao, where his labors on behalf of minorities and poor farmers in a land dispute provoked the wrath of local officials. Now Cullen has been released, but is under the custody of the Philippines provincial. While Cullen chafes, a fellow Jesuit, Father James Donelan, regularly offers Mass at Marcos' Malacanang Palace, and other Jesuits have given retreats for the President.

≫ Jesuits are at loggerheads in Latin America over a Christian-Marxist synthesis known as the "theology of liberation." A Chilean Jesuit, 50-year-old Gonzalo Arroyo, wants to put its principles into action through a cadre of Christian Marxists called the "Group of Eighty" (TIME, June 5). But longtime Political Activist Roger Vekemans, a Belgian Jesuit who has spent years backing Christian social democracy in Latin America (most particularly Chile's former President Frei), decries the theology of liberation as simplistic and totalitarian.

≫ Young Dutch Jesuits who were popular student pastors in Amsterdam created a stir when they married but insisted on continuing their ministry. The controversy has left the Jesuits in The Netherlands split fifty-fifty between sympathy for the student pastors and sympathy for a growing group of hardline conservatives.

≫ In San Diego, Calif., an inner-city Jesuit parish called Christ the King became the focus of disputes with the local bishop when the Jesuits assigned there twice offered the church as sanctuary to sailors who refused to board Viet Nam-bound vessels.

≫ Within the Pope's own bailiwick, a veteran moral philosopher disobeyed Arrupe. A faculty member of the Jesuits' prestigious Gregorian Pontifical University since 1961, Father José Maria Diez-Alegria set off the squabble last December by publishing his autobiography, I Believe in Hope, without Jesuit clearance. The book is sympathetically leftist, and somewhat candid about priests' sexual frustrations, but what piqued Arrupe was Diez-Alegria's refusal to submit to Jesuit censorship before publication. Arrupe has since suspended the Spaniard from the society for two years. One important reason for his action: the case revived talk among a group of conservative Jesuits in Spain about starting separate houses where they could follow a traditional, disciplined regime.

Rogue. Such conflicts of interest and direction are not exclusive to the Jesuits; they bother other religious orders as well. But the Jesuits, almost since their

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