Dossier, Volume 13 #4

Gospel of Life: Three Perspectives

Opening to Culture Recalls Early Jesuits

In The Gospel of Life, Pope John Paul II seeks to expand our understanding of the value of life. He sees the need to "promote a serious and in-depth exchange about the basic issues of human life with everyone" (n. 95). To do so he uses a cultural vocabulary to analyse the current situation: "This situation, with its lights and shadows, ought to make us all fully aware that we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the 'culture of death' and the 'culture of life'" (n. 28).

To help build a "culture of life," he sees that we need a contemplative outlook (n. 83), an appreciation and good use "of the wealth of gestures and symbols present in the traditions and customs of different cultures and peoples" (n. 85), the protection of families from poverty (n. 91) and "a patient and fearless work of education" (n. 88).

Culture, in the pope's view, molds people's perceptions and behaviour; it is an environment of images, ideas and motivations from which an individual learns and absorbs attitudes that affect and even motivate decisions and actions. The pope realizes that at times the resource-rich "culture of death" seems to have the upper hand (n. 87), and so he accurately casts our struggles for a culture of life in a David-and-Goliath perspective.

The breadth of concern behind the pope's expression culture of life will remind people who admire Ignatian spirituality--Jesuits and others--of an earlier period in the church. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Jesuits and their collaborators were very much involved in the creation of a religious attitude towards culture that was important to the reform movement in the Catholic Church.

One among many of the forces for change in the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Society of Jesus was approved in 1540 by the first of the reformer popes, Paul III. The pope hoped for allies in the struggle for renewal, and he was not disappointed. Animated by the mystical and religious spirit of St. Ignatius, the Jesuits of the period saw themselves as a body of creative people working at different religious tasks--spiritual, intellectual, cultural and pastoral--but with a common vision: they were active with Jesus in the world as his companions.

Far from trying to hide the rich cultural traditions of the church, which some iconoclastic Protestants wanted to destroy as distractions from God and Scripture, the Jesuits were finding evidence of God's presence in all things, including the culture around them, and used images from their cultural environment to express their developing faith.

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Jesuits were very much involved in the creation of a religious attitude towards culture that was important to the reform movement in the Catholic Church.

This faith was embodied in Jesuit colleges, the first of which opened in 1551. The order's early colleges developed into what we would now call cultural centres. They were charged with exuberant intellectual and imaginative life and the Jesuits welcomed the complexity of their cultural environment and made space and time for it in the colleges' many-faceted curricula. Mathematicians, astronomers and natural scientists competed with one another for space, classroom time and money for equipment. And all of them contended with philosophy and theology professors and negotiated with those who taught history and languages, poetry and rhetoric.

Drama and other performing arts such as ballet and music were highly valued as well and made additional claims on the available space, time and resources. Performances, which were often excellent, represented an important way in which the Jesuits actively contributed to the artistic cultures around them.

Of course, the most impressive space in a Jesuit college was the chapel. Here contemporary painting and sculpture complemented and enhanced the best architecture that the Jesuits could muster, sometimes transforming the space with illusions of infinite expanse. Regular masses and preaching for students and the public were not the only events in this chapel. The Jesuits created theatrical liturgies complete with elaborate settings to entertain and teach and preach about God and God's presence and activity in the world.

There was no distance or alienation in these Jesuit colleges between religion and the vigorously expanding European culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another of their strengths was that although individual Jesuits often intensely developed their talents in one special field or another, they did not see themselves as competitors, as modern specialists sometimes do, but as collaborators. They shared a common religious and spiritual view of the complexity of energies and forms that was their culture.

These Jesuit centres were in turn one of the main channels for the dissemination of this cultural view throughout most of Europe and to the New World. The Jesuits' Roman colleges and the Gesù--the first church they built in Rome--were begun in the late sixteenth century. These architectural complexes became models for Jesuit colleges and churches in most of Europe. By the time the Society of Jesus was suppressed in 1773, they had created an international network of more than 800 Jesuit institutions of learning, not only in most countries of Europe but also in the Americas and Asia. The Collège des Jésuites in Quebec City was an interesting example. It opened its doors in 1635 and taught science and mathematics in addition to the humanities and theology. By 1708 the Collège had a hydrography school teaching physics and astronomy to navigators and surveyors.

Sidebar on St. Ignatius Altar at the Gesù in Rome; Photo: 66K.

The Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century was the last major crisis the church faced with such a vigorous comprehensive cultural response. By the time of the next major crisis, the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, the church's position in European culture had changed profoundly. Having suppressed the Jesuits in 1773, even if the church could have created a vision of an ongoing integration of faith and culture, it no longer had an international educational system to broadcast that vision. Having disengaged itself from dialogue with developing scientific, philosophical and political thought, the church could not confront its opponents with an alternative to their cultural energies. Instead, it withdrew into defensive strategies and fought from that narrowing world by updating the Index of Forbidden Books and, in 1864, by proclaiming the Syllabus of Errors.

These reflections lead us back to John Paul II's Gospel of Life, in which he articulates new dimensions of the movement to value the sacredness of life. The pope recognizes that the church's affirmations about the value of life have generally not been heard. He sees that they have been proclaimed against a cultural situation--he calls it "the culture of death"--that has successfully ignored or vigorously opposed them.

In John Paul's view, this culture of death approves and fosters abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment and poverty, and it provides the context for his discussion of these issues. Decades of demonstrations by the pro-life movement have not produced the hoped-for victories against pro-abortionists. In most jurisdictions of the developed world, abortion is legal, considered a right of the child's mother and even paid for by medicare, all of which the pope deplores. Although he wisely does not equate the culture of death with all of modern culture, he sees the culture of our time as suffering from excessive, self-centered individualism and an "excessive preoccupation with efficiency" (n. 64) that measures the value of an individual by the work he or she can do.

But faced with the culture of death, John Paul is not content to be merely defensive. He would confront and ultimately replace the culture of death with the culture of life. He sees that a vast range of persons and talents must be involved in actively building this new culture. This represents a shift in emphasis, going beyond biological concerns and dogmatic assertions about abortion to the political, social and cultural dimensions of life.

The pope sees the culture of our time as suffering from excessive, self-centered individualism and an "excessive preoccupation with efficiency" that measures the value of an individual by the work he or she can do.

The pope's view of the cultural task is broad--"no one must feel excluded" (n. 98). Individuals and local and international agencies can contribute by establishing "a true economy of communion and sharing of goods" (n. 91). In another paragraph he solicits the cooperation of intellectual and imaginative workers who can influence culture:

"Intellectuals can do much to build a new culture of human life. A special task falls to Catholic intellectuals who are called upon to be present and active in the leading centres where culture is formed, in schools and universities, in places of scientific and technological research, of artistic creativity and the study of man" (n. 98).

Thus John Paul II envisages a communal struggle for a culture that respects life in all its levels and manifestations. With this breadth of view, the church can enlist the talents of all in the active struggle to affirm the many dimensions of the value of life. It will thus regain some of the credibility it has lost, in many quarters, by seeming to defend too narrow a view of life and treating the creative lives of people and their ideas and images with constant suspicion and rejection. In one of the most promising expressions in the encyclical, the pope, far from advocating a continuing flight from the modern world, argues that Catholics should be "present and active in the centres where culture is formed."

But the church is in a different position now than it was in the time of the Counterreformation. Rome is no longer the centre of the world. Although not without power to influence some international discussions, the church has not yet completed the synthesis of faith and modern culture begun in the Second Vatican Council's document The Church and the Modern World. I believe that if such a synthesis were better developed, many people would see it as a credible and attractive alternative to the modern status quo with its inadequate comprehensions of human life and its terrifying shadows.