It would be hard to find a Jesuit with such serious reservations regarding the content of the documents of the Society’s General Congregation Thirty-Two as the author of this volume. Fr. Tripole offers a learned and detailed critical analysis of what he views as pivotal flaws in the 1974–75 deliberations that produced these documents, especially its Decree Four (“Our Mission Today: The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice”) and to a lesser extent its Decree Two (“Jesuits Today”). From the outset, Tripole is candid in communicating his expectation that his minority position will invite substantial criticism. By remaining intrepid in his demurral, he offers some insightful commentary that we might otherwise never encounter.
The present volume under review is an expanded and updated edition of a slimmer volume first published in 1994, adding a new preface, a foreword by Claude Pavur, S.J., a new twenty-page chapter (bearing the labels “A Second Look” and “A Retrospective from Thirty Years Out”) and three new appendices. Conveniently, one of those appendices is the full text of the aforementioned document at question, Decree Four. Another consists of a spirited essay that Tripole contributed to a 2001 volume on Jesuit higher education summarizing his overall argument. The third appendix is the text of Decree Two (“Servants of Christ’s Mission”) of General Congregation Thirty-Four which was held in 1995, and the promulgation of which met with the solid approval of Tripole.
Indeed, the inclusion of that 1995 document here is highly significant, as it signals what Tripole considers an important course correction for the worldwide Society of Jesus as it sought to define its mission in the wake of the Second Vatican Council and immense changes in the church and human society more broadly. In a nutshell, the contention of the author is that gc 32 erred in defining an excessively narrow focus in its call for “the promotion of justice” as the central focus of Jesuit apostolates in this new era. Far more satisfactory for him is the broader framing regarding the task of the evangelization of culture found in gc 34—hence the metaphor of “widening the perspective” appearing in the volume’s subtitle. Consequently, Tripole’s “Preface to the Revised Edition” calls attention (16) to the fact that the first edition of this book, appearing as it did in 1994 just months before the convening of gc 34, anticipated this shift in direction (or at least in the articulation of apostolic priorities and motifs employed to describe them). The author expresses his satisfaction that the gc 34 documents written and promulgated in 1995 did provide better direction and hence was able to “overcome the divisions in the Society created by Decree Four” (20) of gc 32. Tripole had called for “a new formulary” (this phrase forms the title of chapter 7 of this work, 113–24) and evidently feels vindicated by developments subsequent to Decree 4, which he had found “to be a troubling one for me” and therefore “ought to be studied and analyzed thoroughly” (19).
Even those who are not troubled by the content of gc 32 (full disclosure: this present reviewer remains solidly an enthusiast) may benefit from the study and analysis contained in this work, for we all surely benefit from the “continual probing of the strengths and weaknesses of Decree Four” (19). Nearly every chapter of this revised volume is successful in contributing to the overall project as outlined so clearly by the author. Indeed, Tripole is at his best in performing the detailed textual analysis that occupies the middle chapters of this work. Here, the author parses the meaning of such terms as justice (41–80) and “the poor” (89–108) and even atheism (81–85). Regarding this last term, it is helpful to remember the call of Pope Paul vi to the Society of Jesus at the time of gc 31 to combat modern atheism and to address its intellectual and existential roots. Tripole does especially well to invoke this challenge, for it serves as a springboard to introduce his subsequent reflections on the nature of Jesuit apostolates precisely as endeavors of a priestly Society. He proceeds to make the case that a broad mandate, such as the evangelization of culture, is a more fitting direction for Jesuit apostolates than what he considers to be a narrower mission (and one that he fears features less precision, coherence, and priestly character), namely the promotion of justice in service of faith.
Lurking in the background in the course of any such deliberations regarding Jesuit apostolic priorities is the future of the hundreds of Jesuit-sponsored schools and the many thousands of Jesuits and their lay colleagues who labor in the educational apostolate. Did gc 32 suddenly render them outmoded or second-rate? Tripole twice (31 and 47) expresses his concern that the academic efforts of an archetypical Jesuit mathematician will be undermined, judged harshly or even somehow disallowed because the gc 32 mandate that Jesuits all work to promote justice will marginalize the intellectual apostolate. The author inquires whether it is only “social activists” who are “praxis-oriented” and enact a “preferential option for the poor” (all three phrases appear on 27) who will be perceived as fulfilling the mandate to promote justice.
Recent Jesuit history suggests that such fears are unfounded. To the satisfaction of this reviewer at least, the commitment to Jesuit-sponsored education has remained undiminished in successive rounds of apostolic planning, on both the local province level and for the worldwide Society. Witness the Universal Apostolic Preferences articulated by Father General Arturo Sosa in 2019, or its immediate predecessor, the Apostolic Priorities promulgated by Peter-Hans Kolvenbach in 2003, or even the several ministries explicitly endorsed in a 1970 letter of Pedro Arrupe himself—the superior general who called and directed gc 32. The enumeration of core apostolates identified in each list includes the educational and intellectual apostolates most prominently alongside the Society’s social, pastoral, and spiritual works.
Rather than portraying a zero-sum competition among discrete sectors, synergies among these works are consistently encouraged. This is so because the Jesuit charism has always included a holistic vision of the flourishing of each child of God—a humanistic perspective which not only includes space for material and spiritual well-being but perceives an integral unity in the horizontal (temporal) and vertical (spiritual) dimensions of human nature. As a splendid example, consider how the work of the Jesuit Refugee Service now includes ambitious educational and even catechetical objectives—rendering Arrupe’s creative initiative to alleviate material suffering a wonderful pastoral tool as well as a life-saving instrument of social justice for “people on the move.” Its service of faith and promotion of justice run seamlessly together in illuminating ways.
As valuable as its call for ongoing self-criticism and precision of language may be, Tripole’s volume would be even more helpful if the text reconceived what it means for a perspective to undergo some felicitous widening and if it made further allowances for what unites all Jesuit ministries under the inclusive and all-embracing banner of the promotion of justice.
