The Australian Jesuits

FACING CHANGE

You can understand best where Jesuits are in Australia now if you compare them with the situation forty years ago. There are now less Jesuits, and their average age is much higher. We are also now proud that a number of Jesuits in our province were born in Vietnam, a gift to Australia out of the hard time they endured in their own land.

You will also notice some changes in the works which Jesuits undertake. Then, Australian Jesuits worked for the most part in seminaries, schools, university colleges and parishes. But they were also to be found as migrant chaplains and writers, while a considerable number had left Australia to staff the Australian Jesuit Mission in India. Now a few works have disappeared, and the Mission has become an independent Province. In addition, however, Jesuits now work with the homeless, in aboriginal ministry, in the Jesuit Refugee Service and in advocacy and administration of works for the marginalised.

Perhaps the changes in works are less notable than the way in which Jesuits are engaged in them. In the schools of forty years ago, for example, the large communities of Jesuits provided the majority of the staff. Now, there are fewer Jesuits, and they work increasingly with the teachers to help develop and maintain the spiritual centre of the school. Parishes, too, have lay and religious parish workers. Where Jesuits are involved with the poor, it is often through secular organisations. Their work, too, is often international in character, and takes them outside Australia for conversation with their peers and for temporary placements.

Global perspective

These changes are a natural consequence of smaller numbers of Australian Jesuits. But they also reflect the huge changes we have seen in the world and in the church. It is difficult to think today of the challenges to faith and to human dignity without thinking on a global scale. So, you can understand, for example, that Jesuit work with refugees and theological study should cross national boundaries.

The unequal development of the world and particularly the growing division between the educated rich and the uneducated poor have also been significant for Jesuits. It has been important that our privilege does not cut us off from the marginalised in Australia.

Challenges

Many of the changes in the way in which Jesuits live and work in Australia have also come out of the Second Vatican Council. It asked Catholics to share and attend to the struggles of the modern world. This call was echoed by documents from Jesuit General Congregations. But the call has also been taken up in less spectacular ways in Australia in works which go beyond the boundaries of the Catholic world.

This call has been repeated by the recent 34th General Congregation. It identifies a number of key areas in which Jesuits are to go beyond the Catholic world to bring the Good News of the Gospel to our world. These include the world of non-Christian religions, the world of a culture which is not Christian, and the world of the poor and oppressed.

As we look back on the Vatican Council, we can see that it was a Council that gave a proper place to the laity. The consequences of this are still being worked out, at times painfully. The call has been reflected in the increasingly important place which lay people have in leading and inspiring Jesuit works. Cooperation with the laity is no longer an option. It is a necessity for effective Jesuit work.

The recent General Congregation put this challenge at its sharpest. Instead of speaking of lay people who cooperate with Jesuits in our work, it spoke of the need for Jesuits to cooperate with the laity. The need which the Congregation felt to include a document on women, the acceptance of whose equality in the church has often been grudging, sharpened the challenge. This will surely be worked out over coming years in Australia.

Andrew Hamilton SJ

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Last modified: 16 Dec 1998.