POPE CHIDES JESUITS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31221, 19 November 1966, Page 15

POPE CHIDES JESUITS

(.V .2.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) VATICAN CITY, Nov. 16.

Pope Paul today reproached the Jesuits, the Roman Catholic Church’s largest teaching and missionary order, saying he had heard “strange and sinister” reports about them involving spiritual slackness and worldliness. The Pope told the order’s superior general. Father Pedro Arrupe. and 220 priests at a mass in the Sistine Chapel that he was astonished and grieved at reports he had received about the order.

He did not specify what the reports were.

A resume of the Pope’s sermon issued by the Jesuit Information Service said he had spoken frankly of the fears some had been communicating to him about the future course of the Jesuits.

“These rumours suggested that the Jesuits intended to embark on revolutionary changes or were abandoning the traditions that had for centuries made them such a powerful force in the service of the church.”

The Pope said the strange and sinister reports would never have arisen if the order l ad continued to be what its founder (St. Ignatius of Loyola, in 1534) intended. The Pope did say today, however, that the decisions of the Jesuits’ General Congregation, or supreme legislative assembly, which will end in a few days, had for the most part dissipated his fears.

The full reason for the Pope’s criticism was not clear but observers recalled that the Pope has repeatedly warned Catholics, and in particular the clergy, against going too far with the gre- *°r freedom and more progressive teachings which resulted from the recent Vatican Council. Observers believed the Pope was referring to certain younger and more progressive Jesuits, who had been pressing for a relaxation of the

order’s strict discipline in such things as daily prayers, its rigid centralism in administration and its insistence on blind obedience. They were believed to be urging more local independence, flexibility, and stress on the spirit, rather than the letter, of their rules. The timing of the Pope’s warning was interpreted as a demonstration of his anxiety to influence the further discussions the Jesuits will hold after the congregation closes.