Jesuits Vow to Fight for Social Justice, Equality of Women

The Jesuits, the largest and most influential order of Catholic priests, pledged Wednesday to strengthen their commitment to social justice, reaching out to women and other lay Catholics.

A series of documents climaxing a three-month international congress outlined activist Jesuit missions in a gamut of social and educational areas, but was careful not to place the 23,000-member order at odds with Vatican dogma.

“A congress that can outline the ‘re-activization’ of our mission with such realism demonstrates that the Society of Jesus is healthy,” Jesuit Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach told reporters.

The 223 delegates to the 34th general congregation of the articulate and often outspoken order reaffirmed a Jesuit commitment to “a radical life of faith that finds expression in the promotion of justice for all.”

“We have recovered for our contemporary mission the centrality of working in solidarity with the poor,” says a statement of mission after the Jesuits’ first international congress since 1983.

Pope John Paul II has in the past chastised the Jesuits for their often political involvement in lay movements and parties fighting for social justice and human rights.

Wednesday’s document on women was one of the strongest to issue from the congress, in which Jesuits from Europe, the United States and Canada were outnumbered by brethren from Asia, Africa and Latin America for the first time since St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the order in 1540.

Denouncing the historic “unjust treatment and exploitation of women” in which Jesuits often were witting accomplices, the document pledges to fight to make “essential equality of women a lived reality.”

The document makes no claim for priesthood for women. It says the Jesuits “will listen carefully and courageously to the experience of women . . . to align themselves in solidarity” with them.