CALIFORNIA PROVINCE CENTENNIAL PROFILES

During the California Province Centennial, 1909-2009, Father Gerald L. McKevitt, S.J., profiles the province’s rich history in a series of vignettes illustrated with rare images from the archives of Jesuit institutions.

15. VATICAN II SPARKS JESUIT RENEWAL

By Gerald L. McKevitt, S.J.

Revolution is not too strong a term to describe what the Catholic Church experienced after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. In the wake of that international synod, Catholic institutions strove to adapt to the needs of the modern world. Under the leadership of Basque-born Pedro Arrupe, who was elected Superior General in 1965, the Jesuits convened a series of general congregations in Rome to globally update the Society of Jesus.



In the California Province, as elsewhere, renewal sparked both excitement and controversy. Many Jesuits, like lay Catholics, welcomed the reforms ushered in by Vatican II. Others were unhinged by the upheavals that shook American society on both the ecclesiastical and civic levels beginning in the late 1960s. “No one knew where he was going,” one Jesuit recalled. Liturgical innovations confounded some Catholics such as the parishioner at Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood who informed her Jesuit pastor that the novel practice of receiving Communion standing up left her “completely devastated.” “I am sure I would be damned,” she exclaimed, “were I not to kneel down.” In that turbulent period, many Jesuits left the order. Between 1967 and 1997, the number of Jesuits in the California Province shrank from nearly a thousand to 683.

The new directions decreed by Vatican II reoriented all California Province ministries. Diminished numbers of Jesuits, coupled with the council’s call for more cooperation with the laity, found Jesuits and laypersons working in closer tandem. The laity assumed more responsibility for the order’s high schools, universities, and parishes. In the universities, Jesuit communities and their functions were legally separated from the institutions and their functions so that governance shifted to lay boards of trustees. Secularization and an increased emphasis on professionalism stimulated unprecedented academic success to high schools and universities.

In response to the Vatican Council’s call for increased dialogue with the contemporary world, the province relocated its seminaries to urban and university settings. Alma College, a rural theological teaching center, was transferred in 1969 to Berkeley, California, where it became part of the Graduate Theological Union, an ecumenical consortium. The semi-cloistered lifestyle that had long typified Jesuit formation faded as members of the Society sought a more effective encounter with secular culture.

Some of the province’s greatest innovations in the late twentieth century stemmed from a fresh concern for social justice. “The service of faith and the promotion of justice cannot be for us simply one ministry among others,” declared the Society’s 32nd General Congregation. “It must be the integrating factor of all our ministries.” Every undertaking of the province was subsequently reexamined in light of the region’s ethnic and cultural diversity. Establishing connections with the poor emerged as a top priority. Community service activities and cultural immersion trips became de rigeur. High schools and universities revised their curricula in order to link faith with work on behalf of justice.

New projects sprang into being. In 1980, the Province began staffing Dolores Mission, a Los Angeles parish dedicated to Latino immigrant populations. In 2001, the province assumed administration of Verbum Dei High School in Watts, one of the poorest communities in the Los Angeles area. Reformation of province ministries was further evident at Most Holy Trinity Parish, an immigrant parish in San Jose; Homeboy Industries, an association in East Los Angeles providing job training for at-risk youth and former gang members; the Loyola Institute for Jesuit Spirituality in Orange; Proyecto Pastoral, a nonprofit group supplying education, training, and social services in East Los Angeles; and Sacred Heart Nativity Schools in a Latino neighborhood in San Jose.

By the turn of the century, the California Province had also enhanced its international outreach far beyond its early missionary work in Taiwan begun in the 1950s. With more Jesuits working in foreign lands, from the Philippines to Peru, and more of its resources directed abroad, including Africa and Central America, the province enlarged its traditional focus on local culture to a panoramic view of the universal human experience. Inaugurated during the Gold Rush as modest mission in the San Francisco Bay Area, the California Province now stood in a global relational context.

SOURCES: Kathy Tracy, Church of the Blessed Sacrament Parish History Centennial 2004 (Hollywood, 2004), 45-46; Gerald McKevitt, The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977 (Stanford University Press, 1979); Documents of the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1977).