Fifty Years of the Faith-Justice Mission

Since I entered the New Orleans Province in 1963, I have seen significant development in our appropriation of the faith-that-does-justice mission of GC 32. At the time of my entrance, our province social apostolate had three components. First, a few Jesuits worked in the tradition of the “labor priests,” including Fr. Louis J. Twomey (1905–1969) of the Institute of Labor Relations at Loyola University.^[1] Second, parishes served the Hispanic poor in El Paso, San Antonio, and Miami and the African American poor at Christ the King Parish in Grand Coteau and its rural Bellevue Mission. Third, in addition to our mission in Sri Lanka, we responded to the 1960s call from Pope Paul VI to commit men to Latin America, sending them to Brazil and Paraguay.

In 1975, when the 32nd General Congregation occurred, I was studying theology in Chicago. I greeted GC 32 as an affirmation of directions superiors had set out by sending me to law school and my regency with the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. I also saw the congregation as mandating new directions for the entire Society. I considered it a Jesuit appropriation of directions firmly established by Vatican II, especially in Gaudium et spes and the Synod of Bishops of 1971, the latter of which is often summarized, “Action for justice [is] a constitutive element of the preaching of the gospel.”^[2]

The church saw that worldwide injustice denied not only human dignity but also the very existence of the God who loves all people. This practical atheism was not just person-to-person but structured into social, economic, and political systems. The Gospel then must have, as constitutive parts, denouncing unjust structures, as did the prophets and Jesus, and announcing more just and life-giving ways of living together as children of a loving God.^[3]

Reading the same “signs of the times,” the mandate of GC 32 to serve faith and promote justice seemed to me to pivot around three poles: the mission of faith doing justice; the reality of social structures; and the call to solidarity.^[4] I concluded that we Jesuits and our colleagues, in solidarity with oppressed peoples, must address individual injustices and systems that allow or enforce structural evils. In this spirit, my ordination invitation in 1976 included these words from GC 32: “today the Jesuit is a man whose mission is to dedicate himself entirely to the service of faith and the promotion of justice.”^[5] In the decades following, I closely followed the evolution of this mission and how subsequent congregations treated it.

In retrospect, I see that GC 32 launched us into what GC 33 (1983) called “an experience of grace and conversion,” persecution for Christ’s kingdom—sixty-four Jesuits now have been martyred since the Synod of 1971—difficulty in understanding “the Church’s recent emphasis on changing the structures of society,” and “tensions both in the Society and outside it.”^[6] My experience confirmed the polarization described by GC 33 and the inability of most people to understand social structures. Nevertheless, GC 33 confirmed the faith-justice mission.

It took me some time to understand the new directions from General Congregation 34 (1995), since it seemed to water down the strong pairing of faith and justice from GC 32. From GC 34, we learned that this mission includes two complementary dimensions, the first involving faith and culture. On this point, we saw, in the twenty years between GC 32 and GC 34, that social and economic injustices are woven deeply within cultures. In our country, for example, cultural myths of rugged individualism, manifest destiny, white racial superiority, and economic self-sufficiency are so deep-seated that they deafen many people to the Gospel call to community, stewardship, solidarity, and a special care for the anawim—the “poor of God.” Here, Pope Saint John Paul II diagnosed the diabolical cultural role of the “desire for profit” and “thirst for power” in our worldwide economy and called us to a thorough conversion.^[7] In this, I had misunderstood how culture promotes injustice; or rather, how justice misses its subtle but profound role in preaching the Gospel and building the reign of God.

The second complementary pair has to do with faith and religious dialogue. Certainly, GC 34 required commitment to interreligious dialogue. On this point, given that the transcendent plays a central role in most cultures, transforming culture to pursue justice requires attention to religion. With Christians fewer than twenty percent of the world’s population, the congregation wrote that “our commitment to justice and peace, human rights, and the protection of the environment has to be made in collaboration with believers of other religions.”^[8] Our experiences of terrorism and inter-religious conflicts also underscored religion’s critical role in world affairs and the duty to bridge religious divides.

For GC 34, then, working for justice “cannot be achieved without, at the same time, attending to the cultural dimensions of social life and the way in which a culture defines itself regarding religious transcendence.”^[9] This led me to speak not simply of changing economic and social structures, in the abstract, but also of transforming the economic, political, social, cultural, educational, and religious structures and dimensions of particular societies.

Later, as provincial of the New Orleans Province, I attended General Congregation 35 (2008) and sat on the drafting committee for the decree “Challenges to Our Mission Today.” GC 35 enriched our commitment to faith and justice with a triple reconciliation. Drawing on the image of Jesus as the bringer of jubilee—“a year of favor” (Lk 4)—and echoing the call for unity rooted in Leviticus, the congregation challenged us to promote reconciliation with God, among ourselves, and with creation.^[10]

In this same vein, General Congregation 36 (2016) urged a “mission of reconciliation and justice.”^[11] Here, the congregation developed the triple reconciliation from GC 35, enriched by the 2014 letter on reconciliation from Father General Adolfo Nicolás (1936–2020) and the teaching of Pope Francis “placing faith, justice, and solidarity with the poor and the excluded as central elements of the mission of reconciliation,” and calling us to “hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”^[12] The congregation urged us to change lifestyles, to accompany the most vulnerable, and to analyze rigorously the causes and cures for the environmental and social crisis.

The strengths of the responses from US Jesuits and their colleagues to our faith-justice mission are clear to me: repeated calls for greater commitments on the part of all Jesuits and ministries; acceptance of formation for justice for Jesuits themselves and for our students; widespread student immersion experiences; the service and justice commitments of the Jesuit Schools Network of North America, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, Jesuit Volunteers, Ignatian Volunteers, and Ignatian Solidarity Network; university social justice institutes doing social analysis and theological reflection; institutionalization of justice, reconciliation, and ecology at the province offices; and the establishment of Nativity and Cristo Rey-model schools.

On the downside, despite good commitment to immersion for students, many institutions still struggle to implement consistent social analysis and theological reflection. On this note, the number of small communities of Jesuits living among the marginalized has declined sharply. And although our Jesuit communities in the US have more simple lifestyles than fifty years ago, US Jesuits after formation still live largely as upper-middle class families who can afford housekeepers. Furthermore, some social centers have closed and others no longer have Jesuits on staff, while only lay colleagues serve as provincial assistants for social ministries. In addition, many Jesuits seem not to know how to integrate the faith-justice mandate into their preaching, teaching, giving of the Spiritual Exercises, and other works, and most still do not seem to understand how systems and structures shape our ability to love, serve, and preach the Gospel, while others simply resist the mandate of GC 32.

In his course on Vatican II at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago, Fr. Ted Ross (1934–2024) told us that it “takes a hundred years to implement a council.” That is likely the same interval for us to deeply understand, take to heart, and implement the mission of GC 32 across the full span of our ministries and communities. My generation has to trust that newer generations of Jesuits and colleagues will work to strengthen what has worked and to change what the Holy Spirit, through the directions of GC 32 and its successors, still needs to infuse.

Notes:

^[1]  Fr. Twomey assisted Fr. General Pedro Arrupe (1907–1991) in drafting his 1967 letter on the interracial apostolate, https://jesuitportal.bc.edu/research/documents/1967_arrupeinterracial/.

^[2]  Synod of Bishops, Justitia in Mundo (1971), §§1–6, https://christusliberat.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Justicia-in-Mundo.pdf.

^[3]  Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Study and Teaching of the Church’s Social Doctrine in the Formation of Priests (1988), §14, https://www.humandevelopment.va/en/risorse/archivio/dottrina-sociale-della-chiesa/orientamenti-per-lo-studio-della-dottrina-sociale-della-chiesa-n.html.

^[4]  GC 32, d. 2, no. 2; d. 4, nos. 6, 48; Jesuit Life and Mission Today: The Decrees and Accompanying Documents of the 31st–35th General Congregations of the Society of Jesus, ed. John W. Padberg, SJ (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources [IJS], 2009), 291, 298, 309.

^[5]  GC 32, d. 2, no. 31; Jesuit Life and Mission Today, ed. Padberg, 296.

^[6]  GC 33, d. 1, nos. 31–33; Jesuit Life and Mission Today, ed. Padberg, 448–49.

^[7]  John Paul II, Solicitudo Rei Socialis (December 30, 1987), §37, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_30121987_sollicitudo-rei-socialis.html.

^[8]  GC 34, d. 5, no. 8; Jesuit Life and Mission Today, ed. Padberg, 550.

^[9]  GC 34, d. 2, no. 18; Jesuit Life and Mission Today, ed. Padberg, 529.

^[10]  Lv 16:29–34; 19: 18, 34; 23:26–32; 25:1–7; GC 35, d3, no. 12; Jesuit Life and Mission Today, ed. Padberg, 746.

^[11]  GC 36, d. 1; https://jesuits.eu/images/docs/GC_36_Documents.pdf.

^[12]  GC 36, d. 1, no. 3; https://jesuits.eu/images/docs/GC_36_Documents.pdf; Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015), §49, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.

APA

Kammer, F., S.J. (2025). Fifty years of the faith-justice mission. Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 57(2), 23–27. https://doi.org/10.6017/ssj.v57i2.20611

CMOS

Kammer, Fred, S.J. “Fifty Years of the Faith-Justice Mission.” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 57, no. 2 (2025): 23–27. https://doi.org/10.6017/ssj.v57i2.20611.

MLA

Kammer, Fred, S.J. “Fifty Years of the Faith-Justice Mission.” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, vol. 57, no. 2, 2025, pp. 23–27. https://doi.org/10.6017/ssj.v57i2.20611.

Turabian

Kammer, Fred, S.J. “Fifty Years of the Faith-Justice Mission.” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 57, no. 2 (2025): 23–27. https://doi.org/10.6017/ssj.v57i2.20611.