The day after the 2013 conclave elected him the Vicar of Christ, Pope Francis called the Jesuit Curia in Rome and asked to speak with Father Adolfo Nicolás, then-superior general of the Society of Jesus.

Reportedly, it took some time for the receptionist who answered the telephone to accept that the caller was actually Pope Francis, but once that hurdle was overcome, the two men spoke together and quickly agreed to meet in person.

A few months later, on July 31, 2013, Francis joined 200 of his fellow Jesuits to celebrate Mass on the feast day of St. Ignatius of Loyola at Il Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuit order, before visiting the tomb of the order’s former superior general Father Pedro Arrupe, who died 1991. 

The following month, Francis shared the vision and initiatives that would define his early pontificate during an exclusive six-hour interview with Jesuit Father Antonio Spadaro.

Published simultaneously in several Jesuit journals around the world, the interview fueled expectations that radical change was afoot, with The New York Times headlining that Francis believed the Church was too “obsessed” with “gays, abortion and birth control,” and U.S. Jesuit Father James Martin applauding this insight in subsequent media interviews.  

Thus began the unprecedented and unanticipated collaboration between the Church’s first Jesuit pope and the Society of Jesus, repairing the long-standing rift between Francis’ immediate predecessors and the order, but also between Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his fellow Jesuits. 

The most concrete and striking example of the shift that was afoot is the fact that there were no Jesuits in senior curial positions when Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was elected pope, but at the time of his death three Jesuits had served as prefects of key dicasteries during his pontificate, while other members of the Society of Jesus, such as Fathers Spadaro and Martin, became trusted advisers. 

Jorge Mario Bergoglio entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1958, was ordained a priest in 1969, and made his final profession ­with the Jesuits in 1973. That same year, at age 36, he was named provincial superior of the Jesuits in Argentina. 

His six-year tenure as provincial overlapped with the turbulent aftermath of the Second Vatican Council that rocked the Society of Jesus and with the explosion of civil violence in Argentina that ended with a 1976 military coup and the start of the infamous Dirty War (1976-1983), during which the military junta ruling the country tortured and “disappeared” tens of thousands of dissidents. 

As provincial, Father Bergoglio reportedly helped shelter several people from the military and even assisted some to escape the country. However, he was also suspected of handing over two Jesuit priests to the authorities. 

The two Jesuits were found alive, but drugged. One of the priests, Father Franz Jalics, publicly absolved the Pope in 2013, while the other, Father Orlando Yorio, died in 2002 still suspicious of Father Bergoglio’s role, though Francis’ biographers have investigated and dismissed Father Yorio’s charges. 

While navigating the treacherous political landscape of that time, the young provincial stirred enormous controversy as he undertook a reform of the polarized Jesuit province.

“That was crazy. I had to deal with difficult situations, and I made my decisions abruptly and by myself,” Francis told Father Spadaro during their 2013 interview. 

But while he acknowledged that his “authoritarian and quick manner of making decisions led me to have serious problems and to be accused of being ultraconservative,” Francis made clear that he had “never been a right-winger.”

Post-Conciliar Confusion

Local Jesuits had lost their bearings in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, and the community also was buffeted by the rise of liberation theology, with some members adopting Marxist elements of class struggle in their critique of the social and economic status quo and of Catholicism itself. 

One faction of local Jesuits interpreted the Council as a decisive and welcome break from Church tradition and from the order’s historic understanding of its charism, while another sought to protect time-tested models for formation and educational apostolates.  

As Francis’ biographer, Austen Ivereigh, explained in The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, the previous Jesuit provincial, Father Ricardo O’Farrell, had permitted members to sweep aside traditional practices of Jesuit formation and “bourgeois” academic studies and create an egalitarian living environment. Some Jesuit professors and students had moved to an experimental “base community,” where priestly celibacy was rumored to be conditional and close bonds with leftist guerillas were formed. 

Rejecting a “false reform” of the province that tapped ideological currents on the right or the left, factions he described as “restorationists or idealists,” Father Bergoglio offered a new framework designed to “vaccinate” local Jesuits against “the lure of ideology,” reported Ivereigh.

To some degree, his position reflected elements of Peronism — the “third way” nationalist platform of the late Argentine strongman Juan Perón, who celebrated the country’s Catholic roots and ramped up social spending, while eschewing both Marxist and capitalist policies.

Father Bergoglio rejected top-down “elitist” initiatives that distained the popular religiosity and practical needs of the poor. 

He offered four governing “Christian principles” — such as “unity comes before conflict” and “reality before the idea” — as the basis for Ignatian discernment and for reconciliation within the fractured province. 

“He was not, as some have accused him of being, a conservative who wanted to take them to the pre-conciliar era, but a renewalist, like Benedict XVI, who resisted attempts to conform the Church to the world in the name of modernity,” Ivereigh told the Register in a 2014 interview. 

Period of ‘Humiliation’

After completing his service as provincial, Father Bergoglio was named rector of the Jesuits’ burgeoning seminary in Buenos Aires. There, he directed his students to embrace teachings and practices that had been adopted from the Jesuits’ early missions in Latin America: an “option for the poor” expressed in manual labor, hands-on pastoral care, and a deep respect for popular culture and values, such as Marian pilgrimages and devotions.

As a Jesuit leader, his no-frills austerity, closeness to the poor, and prodigious capacity for rough, hands-on service inspired a cadre of young Jesuit disciples to emulate his priestly gifts. And the Jesuit provincial who succeeded Father Bergoglio supported his visionary leadership. Vocations and collaborative work with the needy boomed. 

But many older Jesuits —  traditionalists and progressives alike — began to challenge his authoritarian, hands-on approach, dismissing it as out of step with the Society of Jesus’ charism and priorities. 

“He drove people really crazy with his insistence that only he knew the right way to do things. Finally, the other Jesuits said: ‘Enough,’” one Jesuit from the province told Paul Vallely, author of Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism.

The growing chorus of criticism reached the ears of the Jesuit superior general, Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach, in Rome. Father Bergoglio was ultimately removed as seminary rector in 1986. 

By 1990, he was banished to a Jesuit residence in Córdoba, Argentina, where he was barred from saying Mass publicly in the Jesuit church or using the telephone without permission. His disciples were ordered not to contact him.

Father Bergoglio’s fall from grace marked a period of introspection and profound “humiliation,” as he later put it, when reflecting back on the “hundreds of errors” he had made while in the grip of his authoritarian personality. But his predicament also drew him to the notice of Cardinal Antonio Quarracino of Buenos Aires. 

Within two years of his exile, the Jesuit priest unexpectedly was named an auxiliary bishop, then archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998, and received the cardinal’s zucchetto in 2001. 

During his routine trips to Rome on Church business as the ordinary of a major archdiocese, Cardinal Bergoglio stayed at the Vatican guesthouse where he would later take up permanent residence following his election as pope. But he kept his distance from the Jesuit curia until he became pope in March 2013. 

Opportunity for Reconciliation

According to Ivereigh, the Jesuit superior general, Father Nicolás, was the first to reach out after Francis’ election, eager to repair the personal damage wrought by decades of painful separation. At the same time, Father Nicolás acted on an unexpected opportunity to strengthen the Society of Jesus’ frayed relationship with the Vatican. 

Back in 1981, the order’s tolerance of theological dissent, chaotic formation practices, and hemorrhaging members led Pope John Paul II to initiate a papal intervention that suspended the ordinary governance of the society and deputized a papal delegate to take charge until the time was ripe for a general congregation and election of a new superior. 

“It was the greatest blow to the Jesuits since the order was suppressed in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV,” noted Father Raymond J. de Souza, in a 2021 Register retrospective that recounted John Paul’s bold but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to force the Jesuit leadership to undertake a serious reform of the struggling order. 

More than three decades after John Paul’s intervention, the Jesuit superior general and Pope Francis both embraced the opportunity for reconciliation, with the Pope publicly celebrating his Jesuit identity despite his preceding decades of estrangement from the order.

During his lengthy 2013 interview with Father Spadaro, Francis explained how St. Ignatius’ practice of spiritual discernment guided his own understanding of the Lord’s will in situations great and small. 

The “wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong,” he told Father Spadaro in comments that sought to make his distinctive style of governance more comprehensible.

Meanwhile, the Society of Jesus “was basking in his reflected glory,” Ivereigh observed in The Great Reformer. “In less than a year, Francis had brought the Society back into the fold, modeling a whole new papal relationship with the Jesuits that was almost the exact reverse of John Paul II’s.”

Jesuit Appointments

During his pontificate, Francis would appoint three Jesuits to top curial posts: Spanish Cardinal Luis Ladaria, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Spanish Father Juan Guerrero Alves, as prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy; and Czech Cardinal Michael Czerny, as prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

And while Francis did not appoint any Jesuits as cardinals prior to 2018, in the six consistories since then, the Pope gave the red hat to eight Jesuits: Ladaria, Czerny, Peruvian Archbishop Pedro Barreto, Luxembourg Archbishop Jean-Claude Hollerich, retired Lithuanian Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevičius, Argentinian Archbishop Ángel Sixto Rossi, Hong Kong Archbishop Stephen Chow, and Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda, the former rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University.

Cardinal Hollerich, who is a former president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union, was also appointed relator general for the 2021-2023 Synod of Bishops. Cardinal Czerny, who was previously appointed under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Integral Human Development Dicastery, also served as secretary of the Synod on the Pan-Amazon Region. 

Further, Francis’ regular meetings with individual Jesuit provinces offered a window into the ideas and initiatives that defined his pontificate.

During an Oct. 21, 2021, meeting with Slovak Jesuits, a priest asked Francis about the tendency of some Catholics to “seek certainties in the past.” 

“We are suffering this today in the Church: the ideology of going backward. It is an ideology that colonizes minds,” Francis replied. “Life scares us … freedom scares us.”

“I think of the work that was done … at the Synod on the Family to make it understood that couples in second unions are not already condemned to hell. It frightens us to accompany people with sexual diversity.” 

Reflecting on the Jesuits’ own mission, he suggested that the “Lord is asking the Society to be free in the areas of prayer and discernment. … My intention is not to praise imprudence, but I want to point out to you that turning back is not the right way. Instead, we should go forward in discernment and obedience.”

‘A Song to Hope’

The Society of Jesus remains the Church’s largest male religious order, but its membership has dropped by more than half since its peak in the 1960s, with just 15,842 Jesuits in 2017, CARA (the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) reported; 2022 numbers from the Society of Jesuits indicate just under 15,000 members. At present, 61% of the Society of Jesus is based in South Asia, Latin America, Africa and Asia Pacific and only 39% in Europe and North America.

“We will continue to diminish in number,” Pope Francis told another group of Jesuits during a December 2021 meeting.

But he did not offer specific solutions, nor did he cite practices within the order that contributed to the problem. Rather, he noted that many religious orders have suffered similar setbacks, while observing that the Lord had given the Society of Jesus a much-needed lesson in “humiliation.” 

“In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius always points to this: to humiliation,” he said, echoing the personal conclusion he had drawn from his internal exile from the order.

Francis was somewhat more programmatic in a meeting last year in Jakarta, Indonesia, with Jesuits serving in Indonesia, East Timor and Singapore.

“I want the Jesuits to make a noise,” he advised them. “Read the Acts of the Apostles to see what they did at the beginning of Christianity! The Spirit leads to ‘uproar,’ not to leaving everything standing still. This, in short, is the way to deal with important issues.”

“Remember that Jesuits must be in the most difficult places, where it is least easy to act,” he continued. “It is our way of ‘going above and beyond’ for the greater glory of God.” 

The exchange underscored the bond between the pope and members of his religious order. And after his death, experts debated whether his style of governance was primarily a function of his Jesuit identity. The answer to that question could decide whether another Jesuit might be elected pope in the future. But Francis, nearing the close of his life, appeared to be at peace with the religious order that defined his priesthood. 

During his earlier December 2021 meeting, Francis turned to the final years of a Jesuit vocation and his own impending death. 

“A Jesuit who reaches our age and continues to work, to suffer the contradictions and not lose his smile, then he becomes a song to hope,” said the 84-year-old Pope.

“As in life, so in death, the Jesuit must give witness to the following of Jesus Christ,” he concluded. “A life with sins, yes, but full of the joy of God’s service.”