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"Wisdom Language for the Frontiers"
Address of Father General, Adolfo Nicolás SJ
CLC General Assembly in Lebanon, 4th August, 2013
PDF
1.
The need of the present moment
Today, I want to
share something that has been on my mind for a while. Let me
start with June 25 which is barely a month ago. That morning I
was visited by two Religious. Towards the end of the visit they
asked me “What do you think are the most urgent needs of the
Church today? What should be our priorities? That’s a surprising
question when you feel that the conversation is coming to an
end, because it starts all over again. This is a question that
we ponder over very much in our hearts, in our minds.
That same
afternoon I had an appointment with Pope Francis, and we both
arrived at the same question “How can the Society of Jesus best
help and serve the Church?”
The answer to these
questions had in a way already been given three days earlier
when the Pope had met Fr. Dumortier, the Rector of the Gregorian
University. The Pope had conveyed to the Rector that he expected
Jesuits to take the Intellectual Apostolate very seriously. He
affirmed his desire that priests should go out to the periphery
because it is from there that one gets a better view of the
Church and how it is functioning. He continued by saying that
the experience of the periphery is very important but it needs
to be complemented by reflection at the centre. Without
reflection at the centre, the experience of the periphery does
not bear the fruits of the gospel that the Lord wants. So this
was the Pope’s reflection.
On the other hand, we
had a meeting of Jesuit Universities in 2010 in Mexico. A slogan
that caught the imagination of those present was ‘The biggest
danger today is the Globalization of Superficiality". The
message that came through in Mexico is that we Jesuits have to
aim and direct our efforts at Depth – depth in our reflections,
in our understanding of reality, in our spirituality, etc. This
same message had been given to me often by the previous Pope,
Benedict XVI. Every time I met him, he would hold my hands and
say, “The Church expects depth from the Society of Jesus - depth
in study and depth in spirituality”.
So I think there is a
concurrence that this is the need of the present moment. In
today’s world, we are flooded with information. Just Google a
particular topic and you will find thousands of pages telling
you something on that topic. But nobody tells you what the truth
is, nobody. And Google can’t. There is no sense of the truth, no
criteria for finding out how true the facts are. We risk making
judgements with mere information and therefore make wrong
judgements.
During my flight
coming here, I was reading on my Kindle a book “Difficult
Conversations”. The book is about the fact that all of us have
difficult conversations whether it be in the family, in
religious life, in management etc. People have difficult
conversations because they disagree on something important. The
book goes on to say that there are actually three conversations
which keep criss-crossing. The first is the conversation of
facts “What is really happening?” The second is the conversation
of feelings “Do I feel hurt, neglected, taken for granted?”
Finally, there is the conversation of identity which touches on
my value and self worth “Who does he think I am?” The book helps
us to be aware of these three levels in order to handle the
conversations better.
All of this points to
the fact that we need depth. We need “to know” with a certain
amount of reflection and a certain amount of wisdom.
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