Walking With My Brother

Excellent reflection today from Fr. Paul Nicholson through the Jesuit Restoration 1814 – Blog.

Those who were members of the Society of Jesus when the Jesuits were suppressed in 1773 were challenged to see God working through the destruction or confiscation of all the institutions that they had created. Those who joined (or re-joined) the Society after its Restoration had to, in Kipling’s phrase, “stoop, and build ‘em up with worn-out tools”. The records we have don’t reveal a group of men who spent those decades railing at the injustices done to them, or plotting against those responsible. Many, perhaps most, simply got on with lives of service within the Church, and gratefully seized the opportunities offered them in the restored Society. In our day, when divisions of opinion within and between parts of the Christian church are often as deep as ever, the thinking behind the Ignatian guidelines for thinking with(in) the church has lost none of its relevance.