Pope Francis, Dead Poets, and Jesuit Formation

In July of 2024, Pope Francis (1936–2025, r. 2013–25) issued a letter that deserves our attention. Though it is easily overlooked as a minor type of papal document, its larger effects, given the right reception, could conceivably surpass those of many of his more famous formal pronouncements. The communication is entitled “On the Role of Literature in Formation.” It promotes, urges, and even exalts literary study for “the formation of all those engaged in pastoral work, indeed of all Christians.” The heft of the Pope’s position appears early on in the text, which had originally been intended for seminarians:

Literature is often considered merely a form of entertainment, a “minor art” that need not belong to the education of future priests and their preparation for pastoral ministry. With few exceptions, literature is considered non-essential. I consider it important to insist that such an approach is unhealthy. It can lead to the serious intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of future priests, who will be deprived of that privileged access which literature grants to the very heart of human culture and, more specifically, to the heart of every individual. 5. With this Letter, I would like to propose a radical change of course.^[1]

The Pope’s strongly stated position likely owes much to his own Jesuit formation, which incorporated significant literary study early on in the program. North American Jesuit formation did the same until about 1967. Scholastics entered the “juniorate”—a community whose mission was heavily focused on a two-year period of humanistic studies—immediately after taking their first vows at the end of a two-year novitiate. From there they moved on to three years of philosophy studies, and then usually to teaching (“regency”) in a Jesuit collegium—a school that covered the four high school years and about two of the college ones. There Jesuit scholastics could draw on the expertise in Letters that they had attained in the earlier juniorate years and deepened over the course of three more years of language-use in their philosophical studies. This formational “repetitio,”—that is the return to the earlier literary program, but now as teachers—not only significantly strengthened their communicational abilities (as they became yet more fluent and knowledgeable by having to teach classes in the subjects they had previously studied), but it electrified the collegiate apostolate with the energetic zest of young, devoted religious men who manifested educational competence, vocational commitment, and an apostolic desire to help the young grow into mature Christians. This program kept new recruits coming into the Society: there was always a good number of serious, ambitious youngsters with their own vocational hopes and dreams, attracted by the prospect of personal spiritual growth, even to their own salvation and the service of their neighbors.

The literary dimension of Jesuit formation goes back to Ignatius himself and even further back to the Church’s long-standing involvement in Letters. Pope Francis evokes this larger history, citing Basil of Caesarea [§11] and St. Paul [§12–13], before talking about literature as a way to help us know and keep in sight the flesh that finds salvation not in abstractions but in an incarnate God [§14–15]. The Pope goes on to speak of how literature profits us in many ways, broadening and deepening our knowledge of the world, of others, of life, of the variety of spirits, of dimensions of meaning and the ways in which we attempt to express them. Studying literature well can teach us to see things from new perspectives; it helps us to “attend” and to “digest.” It inculcates wisdom and carries a profound spiritual power, one related to the “primordial task” of naming that God gave Adam and to the mystery of the divine Word itself. The priestly role has an undeniable affinity with that of the poet [§23–25].

If the Pope is correct, we may confidently affirm that by maintaining the juniorate period for hundreds of years, the old formation of Jesuits was following the right, primordially Ignatian and ecclesial path. The ministries of the word, after all, long held a high and special value in the Society’s apostolic vision; no surprise, then, that Jesuit training included immersion in verbal arts of all sorts. I have quoted elsewhere recently, and I repeat here now because of its overarching significance, what seems to be the most powerful and direct official affirmation of humanistic studies in the Society’s formation:

The congregation [General Congregation 7 in 1615] has decreed with the utmost enthusiasm possible that the study of the great masters of humane letters, which has spread far and wide with the Society to the great benefit of the Christian commonwealth, is to be commended to all superiors as one of the most desirable pursuits and as one that is most suitable for achieving salutary benefit among vast numbers of people. Thus superiors themselves, laboring at this most praiseworthy task, may carry on their work with the greatest good will of which they are capable and may encourage all of their men to undertake and pursue this task with great eagerness, so that, expending themselves in this most useful type of erudition and the formation of souls, they may look for rewards from him who does not allow their labors to go unrequited. [. . .] Upon completion of the study of theology, whether they have taught the humane letters before this or not, theologians are to be applied to this study if superiors judge it proper. The congregation wished to commend this matter seriously to all superiors, that they keep in mind not the inclinations of the individual, but the common good and the greater glory of God in this most important and most beneficial type of occupation, and put aside every other feeling.^[2]

It is reasonable to propose, therefore, that the Society should expeditiously review, boldly reconsider, and finally repent of its old decision to excise the literary period of the juniorate from the formation of North American Jesuits. A new version of the juniorate need not be exactly like the old one, but it deserves “to be”—at least if the Society wants to take the Pope’s words fully to heart and put them into effective practice, and if it wants to return to a fuller form of its essential charism as Vatican II would have it.^[3] Here I would like to make two major points in response to the Pope’s letter and in the prospect of any re-establishment of the juniorate.

Getting the Goods

First, despite the general implications and tone of the Pope’s letter, we must remember that literature is not a pure, unalloyed good in itself. Like all goods, it can be misused. It can be a distraction, daydreaming wish-fulfillment, escape, self-indulgence. It can carry spiritual and intellectual values in deep conflict with the Christian vocation. It can mislead souls, rouse unruly passions, distort vision, and insinuate alien agendas or self-destructive points of view. In the hands of an ill-informed, unconverted, miscreant, or simply immature teacher, even the most edifying of works can be spoiled or put to work against the good, the true, the beautiful, and the holy. Furthermore, a practical consideration obtrudes: how much curricular time is available to read and digest even a few of the great titles, such as War and Peace, or Middlemarch, or Moby Dick, or Kristin Lavransdatter?

Again, how many teachers will we have who are competent to convey the import of such works in a substantially productive way? How do we get a faculty composed of those who not only have the appropriate personal ethos for this mission and the right idea of it, but also the requisite knowledge of the content and the teaching skills needed for the intended audience? Because literature is not a pure good that does its work automatically simply by “being read,” and because there are real dangers of misuse and the limitations of curricular time, we must be all the more discerning about the preparation of these teachers and about the programming. Thus, the Pope’s desire to include literature in pastoral training raises systemic questions that require intelligent attention and prudent management.

At least we have a ready solution to the challenge of limited curricular time: If the class cannot do all of Dante’s Divina Commedia, for example, the students can at least get a good, solid taste of it and a synoptic introduction to it—in one day, or in three, or in six. Just to read well Dante’s first canto in depth already “breaks the ice.” It expands the students’ mental universe with new space. It establishes the beginnings of a larger framework, to be filled later (or at least far more likely to be filled later than if no introduction had been provided). Merely to hear what perceptive critics have had to say in appreciation of a work of genius will often awaken students’ appetites to read more. In fact, simply the way a teacher talks about particular titles has more of an impact on them than we typically suspect.

Nevertheless, the old adage, “not abundance, but depth” (non multa, sed multum) suggests that at least some selected works should be given more than a quick introductory treatment. In fact, even a kind of review or “re-reading” might offer the most valuable results. Repetition, always a favorite Jesuit exercise, can raise deeper levels of meaning to the surface. J. R. Gage shows how this happens in his probing look at a famous 1989 movie. In an essay entitled “The Unintended Brilliance of Dead Poets Society,” he explains how, on first viewing, it seems that the free-spirited, charismatic high-school teacher Keating is the unimpeachable hero, standing over against all soul-killing restrictive rules and system, represented by the dry, analytic, rationalistic, and pragmatic critic Pritchard, but . . .

In the final analysis, the Dead Poets Society reveals to us that both these ideologies, the utilitarian and the romantic, are guilty of the same sin—namely strip-mining poetry to use all its riches for selfish purposes while ignoring the higher beauty it points to. Both Pritchard and Keating are what C. S. Lewis might call “mass men,” worthy of Dante’s second circle of hell where the lustful are punished for worshiping their passions.^[4]

Educators will labor to cultivate a certain attitude that can look back at texts from a larger perspective this way.

Creating the whole program need not be done independently and “from scratch”; there is a long pedagogical tradition to instruct us. Newer elements that are judged to be worthwhile, appropriate, and promising can be grafted in and incorporated over time, but the default aim is the retrieval from a new historical vantage point of what has proven widely instructive and edifying for a considerable amount of time. The essential posture is that of wanting to learn from well-approved wisdom figures. The adoption of such a sapientially-oriented attitude is in itself an important counter-cultural strategy: our age is all-too-presentistic or even futuristic, and often overly impressed with itself because of its technological brilliance and scientific progress. We may be able to create all the conveniences and gadgets we could ever want, but if we fail to produce healthy-minded, happy, well-grounded people who can generate solid families whose progeny can likewise generate similar ones in turn, the entire culture will, in a very short time, sink in its spiritual sterility like a rock in the ocean. Furthermore, if all “old” literature is useless, as some prominent people are saying and as common prejudice affirms,^[5] then even the most sacred texts of Christianity are exposed to deprecation rather than elevated and enlivened as they deserve to be. This work of culture is an ethical responsibility. It makes a great difference in the quality of spiritual life that a people can generally attain, individually and communally. Ignatius’s desire to help souls is therefore being carried on in this literary formational labor. That should be well understood by all Jesuits and their colleagues in mission.

The greater challenges are developing the right faculty and having them all working out of and towards the same general idea. They will have to elaborate the program’s details and oversee its immediate operation. Perhaps what is first needed is a school in which “career teachers” might be prepared, under appropriate review and ongoing supervision. These teachers might help the Society’s leadership craft a new plan of studies in all its salient details.^[6] Granting that the best teaching is high art and cannot be micromanaged, we can still hold that the overall plan, the content chosen, the manner of the delivery, and the sequencing of material should be the subjects of careful deliberation, with the ends kept in view. The overall logic of the program needs to be coherent, proportionally arranged, and subject to the teachers’ well-informed oversight. The formation team needs to be asking, “What results are our efforts actually yielding or realistically promising?” Such a question cannot be answered in a positivistic, detailed manner at a definite moment, since the maturation of seeds always takes time and hidden influences manifest themselves in different ways for different people. A larger consciousness is emerging in the students, and a greater sensibility is being gradually formed, like the “seed growing secretly” (Mark 4:26–29). Nevertheless, a well-formed pedagogical judgment is required to make a reasonable, honest assessment of students’ progress. What can be perceived more immediately are students’ diligent efforts and general attitudes, advances in reading competencies, improvements in memory and communication skills, and simply the basic faithful coverage of the assigned reading, which is the necessary starting point for a meaningful discussion of the texts. When such a system is in place, the Society will have retrieved and adapted for our times much of the genius of its historically successful educational infrastructure.

Elevating and Extending the Vision

The second major point I wish to make is that the creative literature that Pope Francis highlights is a very good focus but far too narrow a one, given the full range of related formational needs that seminarians have. I posit that those who are preparing for pastoral ministry should be trained in all that “Letters” used to mean in early Jesuit education—and in even more than that. The very category of literature could be expanded to include some newer media (for example, movies, documentaries, short videos), but there is also much of essential formational import in older formats—for example, in essays and histories and philosophical exhortations and dialogues and didactic expositions and political disputations and sermons. One might take up famously influential texts like the Hippocratic Oath and the American Declaration of Independence and great hymns like the Dies Irae. The Pope’s letter, like much education today, leaves such literature aside.

The traditional Jesuit course also laid a deep foundation by employing the study of grammar, humanities (or humanistic scholarly learning), and rhetoric. It used Greek and especially Latin to broaden and deepen the rhetorical consciousness and the literary skills of students. It made of the young not just readers, but active writers and speakers, people who could debate propositions in public and deliver stirring addresses. All the involved functions supporting these activities are invaluable for pastoral training. Such studies make possible a greater understanding of society; they carry significant apostolic power.

Language, in fact, stands at the heart of culture. One cannot hope to build a sturdy bridge to a foreign society without learning its language. Nor can one wield influence in a society without being able to use that language well. By opening students to the larger range of verbal expression, students’ souls, hearts, and minds are broadened. Knowing intimately the workings of language at the grammatical, syntactical, lexical, and semantic levels, they can enter upon the higher studies of philosophy and theology with a sober sense of how language may or may not be used, what its ambiguities might be, how expressions can mislead in translation, and so on. As for Latin and Greek, their distinctive excellences have been praised convincingly and at length elsewhere. I would stress here that the study of classical languages carries not only the great value of connecting with another culture, but also the added benefit of connecting with another time—and not just with any culture or just with any time, but with precisely those times and cultures that are foundational to our own Western / World culture. They are part of who “we” are. They stand at the origin of a stadial progression of cultural configurations that have brought us to where we are now. Even non-Westerners have adopted much from this long-developing mega-cultural synthesis. If this is true, then our cultural self-knowledge at the corporate and individual levels is impossible without some studied attention to our roots. The perennial refreshment of many traditional elements can thus be assured rather than distorted and discarded.

By having students encounter even a small part of the most influential particulars of our cultural heritage, the juniorate program offers large vision, cultural stability, educational continuity, and student maturity. It makes for a many-sided, many-voiced vision of history, culture, and human existence. Reading serious works, the young can more realistically aspire to an adult frame of mind, and hopefully also to adult virtues and responsibilities. Real education has an ethical and inspirational function; it helps to constitute, unify, stabilize, and edify communities. It should therefore never be limited to technical expertise or to the varying whims of individual faculty or students. Most of all, it should not be subject to persistent, tendentious, blanket “debunking” (e.g., the decrial of “dead white males”) to the point of discrediting all the positive achievements to which we stand indebted.

To this second point, I offer a corollary. Since literature and rhetoric take us into cultural and societal issues of many kinds, a revived and updated juniorate program might also incorporate other valuable material that will not likely be given much attention in philosophy or theology studies. For example, solid education today calls for some kind of familiarity with social issues, economics, anthropology, psychology, historical developments of culture (such as Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, modernity, post-modernity) and of science (evolutionary theories, the discovery of DNA, the development of nuclear energy, cosmological speculations). Even if only thumbnail sketches of certain select issues can be given, it will be of considerable value to incorporate them in a competent manner, whether within the formal program itself or in “extracurricular study groups” previously known as academiae.

How to do all this? Completeness is admittedly impossible . . . and it always was. Did we ever teach Latin or Scripture or systematic theology or even the Iliad “completely?” But clearly it is possible to have better or worse attempts in such an encyclopedically alert effort, and there is always the pedagogical lure and practical utility of the idea of a summa. Selection will always be necessary. We can choose to teach what we think most valuable and timely, in the fullest possible way and within the given limitations. In light of what is at stake, it is worth making the effort to think it through.

In any case, the decision to excise the two years of the juniorate should probably not only be reversed but even “acted against” (in the tradition of Ignatius’s agere contra) with the addition of a third year. We have so much to make up for, and the world has gotten to be all the more confusing and complex, while humanistic education has become, for so many, all the more pointless and unproductive. The formational time of seminarians needs to be used most deliberately and intentionally. It deserves extensive consideration and careful planning. Not only are there now more controversies of a radical nature, but the very communication of content has fallen under increasing suspicion (fake news, conspiracy theories, ideological bias). It would be a grave mistake to have pastoral leaders plunge into the controversies of the day in a spontaneous, immediate, and superficial way, lacking the larger vision, the deeper grounding, and the fuller maturity that the juniorate was designed to begin giving.

The final year of Pope Francis’s pontificate gave us, in his letter on literature, something precious as well as prescient. Let us not ignore it.

Notes:

^[1]          Francis, “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation,” July 17, 2024, accessed August 4, 2025, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240717-lettera-ruolo-letteratura-formazione.html. Emphasis added.

^[2]          Society of Jesus and John W. Padberg, S.J., For Matters of Greater Moment: The First Thirty Jesuit General Congregations: A Brief History and A Translation of the Decrees, ed. John L. McCarthy, S.J., trans. Martin D. O’Keefe, S.J. (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1994), 260. I have cited this passage in “Ignatius of Loyola Takes Up Latin Grammar—Why It Matters,” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2^nd ser., 1, no. 1 (2025): 59–71, https://doi.org/10.51238/NTCBBgJ. Note that the translation breaks up a larger sentence and loses the effect of a purpose clause: where it says “Thus superiors themselves . . . may carry on their work with the greatest good will of which they are capable . . .” we might read, following straight through from the earlier clause, “. . . the study is to be commended, so that the superiors themselves . . . may carry on their work with the greatest good will of which they are capable . . .”

^[3]          Paul VI, Perfectae Caritatis [Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life], October 28, 1965, accessed October 4, 2024, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html.

^[4]          From J. R. Gage, “The Unintended Brilliance of Dead Poets Society,” Law & Liberty, October 4, 2024, https://lawliberty.org/the-unintended-brilliance-of-dead-poets-society/.

^[5]          See Claude N. Pavur, S.J., “Are the Humanities Useless?,” in Saving Culture, Saving Souls, Saving Grace (pub. by author, 2022), 1–6, for an argument against Stanley Fish’s contention that the humanities are simply “for their own sake,” with no extrinsic justification being possible.

^[6]          Career teachers were in fact directly prescribed by the Ratio studiorum of 1599. The 24^th rule for the provincial reads as follows: “He should prepare as many career teachers of grammar and rhetoric as he can. Now this will come about if, after their studies of cases or even of theology are completed, he promptly assigns to this undertaking some whom he has judged in the Lord to be capable of being of greater assistance in this than in another work of the Society and urges them to devote themselves completely to such a good work in order to make an even greater act of submission to God.” See The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education, trans. Claude N. Pavur, S.J. (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005), 22, no. 47. So important was this dimension of the studia that the very next rule begins, “It will also be advantageous to accept some into the Society only on the condition that they are willing to dedicate their lives under holy obedience to this teaching of language and humanistic literary studies.” Ibid. (emphasis added).

Francis. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis on the Role of Literature in Formation.” July 17, 2024. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2024/documents/20240717-lettera-ruolo-letteratura-formazione.html.  

Gage, J. R. “The Unintended Brilliance of Dead Poets Society.” Law & Liberty. October 4, 2024. https://lawliberty.org/the-unintended-brilliance-of-dead-poets-society/.

Paul VI. Perfectae Caritatis [Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life]. October 28, 1965. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19651028_perfectae-caritatis_en.html.

Pavur, Claude N., S.J., “Are the Humanities Useless?” In Saving Culture, Saving Souls, Saving Grace. Published by the author, 2022.

Pavur, Claude N., S.J. “Ignatius of Loyola Takes Up Latin Grammar—Why It Matters,” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1, no. 1 (2025): 59–71. https://doi.org/10.51238/NTCBBgJ.

Pavur, Claude N., S.J., trans. The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education. Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005.

Society of Jesus and John W. Padberg, S.J. For Matters of Greater Moment: The First Thirty Jesuit General Congregations: A Brief History and A Translation of the Decrees. Edited by John L. McCarthy, S.J., trans. Martin D. O’Keefe, S.J. Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1994.

APA

Pavur, C. N., S.J. (2025). Pope Francis, dead poets, and Jesuit formation. Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 1(3), 375–383. https://doi.org/10.51238/mM7Fjee

CMOS

Pavur, Claude N., S.J. 2025. “Pope Francis, Dead Poets, and Jesuit Formation.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1 (3): 375–383. https://doi.org/10.51238/mM7Fjee.

MLA

Pavur, Claude N., S.J. “Pope Francis, Dead Poets, and Jesuit Formation.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., vol. 1, no. 3, 2025, pp. 375–383. https://doi.org/10.51238/mM7Fjee.

Turabian (9th Edition)

Pavur, Claude N., S.J. 2025. “Pope Francis, Dead Poets, and Jesuit Formation.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly. 2nd ser., 1 (3): 375–383. https://doi.org/10.51238/mM7Fjee.