COLUMN ONE : Jesuits Have Will, but Seek Way : Beset by dwindling membership, the 450-year-old order is struggling with how to pursue its mission in an ever more secular world.

Michael Marsh calls it “the longest hazing in the world.” At the age of 25, he entered the Jesuit order. Now, at 34, he is three years away from being ordained.

Just maybe, this enthusiastic young man will make it all the way. For him, it is a calling to spirituality and service. But it is also a commitment to a rigorous training process of study, self-examination and scrutiny by other Jesuits, while always bound by his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

For Marsh--who once dated women, who assumed he would get married, and who earned an MBA--all this is an extraordinary test. And even today, after nine years of study, he is still examining the strength of his call.

Whether he hangs in or drops out, Marsh is one of a rare breed. For the last six years, an average of only 61 men a year throughout the United States have entered the order, the intellectual vanguard of the Roman Catholic Church. By no means will all of them continue in it.

About 2,000 men have left the order in the United States in the last 20 years, including former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., and John McLaughlin, host of “The McLaughlin Group,” a contentious television show of political commentary. There were 8,377 American Jesuits in 1965, the peak year in modern times for membership in the United States and around the world, but only 4,487 as of last January.

That mirrors the decline in the number of priests and candidates for priesthood and other religious orders of men and women in the American Catholic Church as a whole. In 1965, there were 36,038 Jesuits worldwide. As of last January, there were 23,771.

After more than 450 years as an order that is deeply involved in education and intellectual pursuits, the Jesuits do not require divine revelation to understand their current challenge: how best to work “for the greater glory of God,” their motto, with drastically declining numbers in a rapidly modernizing and secularizing world.

But they are asking for divine guidance on just how to go about it.

The question is most crucial in North America and Western Europe because Jesuit vocations are rising in South Asia, Africa and parts of Central and South America. Should Jesuits somehow continue their historical labors in education and intellectual endeavors or should they devote more of their manpower and effort to direct social service for the poor? With their drop in numbers, they cannot do both as they once aspired, certainly not in the United States.

Father Thomas H. Smolich, a lean 37-year-old, believes in social and pastoral work. Sitting on a stoop at Mission Dolores on Los Angeles’ Eastside, he talks with passion about “building the Kingdom of God” on Earth.

Smolich has chosen--and has been chosen by his superiors--to perform his mission by following the church’s contemporary commitment to “the preferential option for the poor.”

He lives with three other Jesuits in the poorest parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the well-worn neighborhood between the Los Angeles River and the Santa Ana and Hollywood freeways. It is the home of the Aliso Village and Pico Gardens housing projects; 90% of the people are Latino, mostly Mexican; gangs and gang murders abound.

Smolich is executive director of Mission Dolores’ associated community action center, Proyecto Pastoral, which encourages the poor parishioners to take as much charge as they can of their lives.

Proyecto Pastoral’s current programs include: the Dolores Mission Women’s Cooperative, in which local women provide child care and encourage one another to take leadership roles and promote education; Casa Miguel Pro, which provides shelter for homeless families; the Guadalupe Homeless Project, which does the same for homeless single men; the Comite Pro Paz, a group of women organized to oppose gang violence, and Dolores Mission Alternative, which provides education, counseling and job placement for the young “throwaways,” gang members, dropouts and the expelled who no longer attend junior high or high school.

Proyecto Pastoral is working to open a tortilleria on Broadway in downtown’s Grand Central Market and a bakery in East Los Angeles so young men can learn skills and make money.

Like many Jesuits, Smolich is intense, but he’s also quick to laugh. He says with conviction as freeway traffic whizzes by:

“If Jesus isn’t resurrected in the community, it’s all gossip!”--meaning that if the living Christ isn’t present in his parish, and in every community around the world, then the Catholic Christian Gospel has no meaning.

Father Timothy S. Healy, 66, sees the role of Jesuits somewhat differently. Now president of the New York Public Library, he was president of Georgetown, the order’s premier American university, from 1976 to 1989. A charming, overweight, heavy-smoking, story-telling New York Irishman, Healy might have been a politician had he not become a priest.

With his expressive, bushy eyebrows constantly in motion, he argues that “all of us who are experienced feel that an institutional presence doubles, triples, quadruples the individual Jesuit.”

“In other words I was able to do more, let us say, for black education at Georgetown as president of Georgetown than I could have had I spent my whole life working in a black community for black education,” he said. “I didn’t have the hands-on satisfaction. I couldn’t touch it or feel it.

“But I took Georgetown from 150 black kids to roughly 500 or 600 at the end of my time there--roughly 10% of the undergraduates.”

But Healy and other Jesuit leaders acknowledge they are going to have to devise new ways to preserve a Jesuit presence in their 28 American colleges and 47 high schools as the number of Jesuits dwindles.

“The declining number of Jesuit vocations hasn’t bottomed out, as far as I can see,” said Father Walter J. Burghardt, 78, a theologian at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown and a noted preacher. “We’re going to have fewer people in almost every area that we work in.”

Under the guidance of the Rev. Pedro Arrupe, father general of the order from 1965 to 1981--and with a concerted push from Vatican II (1962-65), the council that modernized the church with the force of a hurricane--the Jesuits re-examined their roots, the life and works and spiritual teaching of their Spanish Basque founder St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) and the handful of his companions, the best-remembered among them the missionary St. Francis Xavier, who took Christianity to Asia. They looked again at what is called “Jesuit spirituality”--the conviction that God is wonderfully present in all things.

From that re-examination of how to serve Jesus and the Roman Catholic Church “where the need is greatest,” as Ignatius put it, comes the current tension in the order between “the faith that does justice,” as Jesuits call their social mission, and their more traditional educational role.

That duality about creating the Kingdom of God on Earth goes back to the beginnings, when Pope Paul III recognized the Jesuits in 1540 as an order prepared to do the Pope’s bidding.

Ignatius and his companions built a home for prostitutes and fed the poor in famine-ravaged Rome, then a siege-racked town of 45,000. They founded schools and colleges, and were quickly in demand as teachers throughout Catholic Counter-Reformation Europe in the struggle against the rise of Protestantism.

One of many Jesuit jokes turns on the order’s devotion to education: A Jesuit, a Franciscan and a Dominican come to adore the baby Jesus in the manger. The Franciscan falls to his knees in prayer. The Dominican declaims on the mystery of the Incarnation. The Jesuit approaches Joseph and Mary and says to them: “It’s not too early to think about the kid’s education.”

In America, Jesuits served as the elite educators of the huge Catholic immigration that came from Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries when Catholics were not so welcome in the dominant Protestant society.

Their leading schools--among them Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham University in New York, Loyola in Chicago, and Santa Clara in California--provided strong education in a traditional Roman Catholic context. Usually based in those institutions, individual Jesuits pursued careers as theologians, philosophers, historians, scientists and writers active in the intellectual and even the artistic worlds.

After World War II, when the G.I. Bill of Rights promoted a surge in college attendance, those and other Jesuit colleges moved to enlarge their educational reach, striving to compete in excellence with the best private and public colleges.

By the early 1970s, the changing face of American education, along with a decline in the number of Jesuits, prompted the order to loosen its hold on its colleges and universities. Ownership was transferred from the order to boards dominated by laymen and laywomen. In their schools, Jesuits were no longer the controlling influence but remained the moral force.

In Los Angeles, Loyola University merged in 1973 with Marymount College of the sisters of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Before the merger the board was all-Jesuit. Now the board has seven Jesuits, four sisters and 22 lay people, with four vacancies. At the time of the merger, the university had 32 teaching Jesuits in a faculty of 229; now there are 18 full-time and four part-time teaching Jesuits in a faculty of 245.

Father Healy hopes to see a religious component kept even as lay faculty increase and even lay presidents are installed.

“We can no longer provide 28 college presidents at all times, at least not 28 competent ones,” he said.

“I think the Holy Ghost is trying to tell us something,” he said. “I think what he’s saying is you have to make institutions that keep a profound religious orientation and base.

“If the best candidate is Rabbi Mazel Tov we get a rabbi. If the best candidate’s a Jesuit, we get a Jesuit.

“It should be an institution that will absolutely deny secularity; it will not say science is all and knowledge is enough. And that seems to me to be doable.”

Most of the 47 Jesuit high schools are doing well financially. They continue to attract students and have a clear vision of what they are about.

“We are trying to educate men--and women--in service to others, with a solid academic preparation,” said Father Carl Meirose of the Jesuit Secondary School Assn.

“We would have no reason to exist if we were just duplicates of a good college prep school. Service to others is the key.”

Indeed, “A Man for Others” is the title of the brochure of Loyola High School in Los Angeles, which is not among the 10 Jesuit high schools in the country that, either for financial reasons or from philosophical conviction, have gone co-ed.

Loyola has 1,153 students--90% Catholic--and a faculty of 15 Jesuits and 62 lay people. Twenty years ago, there were twice as many Jesuits on a faculty of the same size.

“It lights one’s heart on fire!”

So says Ted Gabrielli, a 28-year-old Jesuit not yet ordained, of his experiences performing social service at Casa de los Pobres (House of the Poor) in Tijuana. Gabrielli is working with gang members at Proyecto Pastoral but every six weeks or so goes to the Casa, which is run by Franciscan nuns with American Jesuit help.

The Casa serves 2,000 meals a day, some of them in jails; it operates a clinic and has been building houses for the poor.

Novices from California often spend some of their first two years at the Casa. It introduces them to the work with the poor that is sought by many younger Jesuits.

The Jesuit concept of “the faith that does justice” leads them to “empower” the poor to take charge of their own lives. It also implies supporting basic changes in the structure of society.

Here the key is the set of beliefs, which was developed in Latin America, partly by Jesuits, called “liberation theology.” It sees God as continually acting in history and in the church and, therefore, in today’s world on the side of the poor and the powerless.

Some officials at the Vatican have frowned on liberation theology as being unorthodox. But the views of Pope John Paul II on the theology have been less disapproving. Though stormy after he was elected in 1978, his relations with the Jesuits can best be described as cool or correct. The Jesuits as a whole are more intellectually venturesome than he; he is more traditional on matters of authority.

Liberation theology has led to the creation in Latin America of “base communities” in which lay people do much of their own worship where priests are scarce.

It has also led, in countries where for centuries the church had been allied with the powerful, to strong clashes with governments and upper classes. In 1989, six prominent Jesuits and two women were murdered at their University of Central America in San Salvador by men in army uniforms.

All over the world, Jesuits are moving their training institutions from their sometimes splendid monastic isolation into cities to be closer to the work they do.

The novitiate for the California Province (California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah), Ignatius House, is a modest group of one-story buildings on a dead-end street in Culver City backed up against the wall of a shopping center. Its short, strong-willed novice master, Father Gordon Bennett, 45, notes that the novitiate has just moved here from its 136-acre grounds in Montecito between the Santa Lucia Mountains and the Pacific.

“It was very difficult not to find God there,” Bennett said with a wistful smile. The place is on the market for $22 million. (Years of donations and investment are reliably reported to have left Americans Jesuits generally financially secure. Their finances are not disclosed publicly.)

The novitiate’s new home is more in keeping with the attitude expressed by Father Robert Manning, rector of the Jesuit community at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley: “When a Jesuit lives in today’s society he can do nothing publicly or privately that would insult the poor.”

This novitiate has six novices in their second year (down from 11 who entered) and 10 in the second. The youngest is 22; the oldest, 37.

Joseph Dube, 32, of Orange County was a personal computer coordinator at a savings and loan. Christopher Nguyen, 28, also of Orange County, was a lab technician at UC Berkeley. Joaquin Martinez, 26, was a teacher for four years. Mark Torres, 37, has been a teacher, librarian and draftsman. Jorge Mora, 25, from Managua, Nicaragua, was a tailor. All are college graduates.

Most of these novices talk readily about finding God’s will and doing it. Most have some idea of how they would like to spend their lives: Nguyen is interested in pastoral counseling and retreat work; Martinez in pastoral education and Eastern Rite Catholics and Orthodox Christians; Dube in the Latino ministry.

Their current interests may or may not have anything to do with how they spend their lives. Decisions will be made for them, after they are consulted. And if they stay in the order, they will do as they are told.

Traditionally, American Jesuits came from pious families of Irish and German immigrants. Sweeping changes in the church and American society have changed that, and this group of novices is the most ethnically diverse in the country.

The young Americans who enter the order tend to be older, better educated and more experienced in the ways of the world than the Jesuits of a generation ago, most of whom joined right out of high school and moved in lock-step with their brothers through their regimented training.

The formation of Jesuits has changed somewhat. Jesuits in school used to converse in Latin. Now they are not even required to learn it, though they must learn at least one other language; English and Spanish are the two principal languages of the order.

Praying, as all Jesuits do, for an hour a day, examining their consciences for two 15-minute periods a day, the novices have classes in the Bible and concentrated spiritual study and meditation, culminating in the first year with a monthlong retreat “doing,” as they say, the “Spiritual Exercises”--meditating and praying according to St. Ignatius’ little guidebook.

The second year has study and three breaks away from the novitiate, working with Jesuits in hospitals, care centers and social work. They have two weeks of vacation, together, and one week a year of leave to visit their families.

They are still required to study philosophy for two years and theology at a Jesuit school for four years before they are ordained. They often do these in conjunction with other studies and their studies are usually interrupted by some kind of practical work. In all, formation takes about 15 years before the final vows.

The intellectual rigor of the training is one deterrent to men who might think about becoming a Jesuit priest. Another, of course, is the vows, the purpose of which is to make Jesuits mobile and flexible so they can take up the work to be done wherever and whenever they are sent. “Trying to sell poverty, chastity and obedience isn’t the easiest thing in the world,” said Father Thomas Lucas, 40, a historian who is secretary of communication for the Jesuit Conference, their American association.

Though Michael Marsh had assumed he would get married, the church pulled at him--he was raised in a Catholic family, has an aunt who is a nun and went to a Catholic high school. What also pulled at Marsh was the ideal of service, not just the Bible and the church, he says, but also the power of singers for peace and justice such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie.

Then there was Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, who was jailed in 1968 for burning draft records in Catonsville, Md. He heard Berrigan speak, and “I thought, if there was room for Father Dan Berrigan to be a part of the Jesuits, I knew there was room for me, and I still hope that there is.”

He says he knew that if he had married, and then wished to go into the priesthood, he couldn’t; but if he started for the priesthood and changed his mind, he could.

Marsh feels called to work with the poor, as he had done as a Vista volunteer in Ohio, then with refugees in Southeast Asia. For the Jesuits of the future, Marsh hopes that the institution will be flexible enough to allow its members to follow their callings and not force them into other tasks.

“We shouldn’t limit the Spirit,” he said, but “we should allow the Spirit of Jesus to blow winds back into our sails.”