Exemplary Lives: Pedro Arrupe

The Man Who Ran Toward the Fire

Smoke from the Hiroshima firestorm, August 6, 1945

Pope Francis at the tomb of Arrupe

Fr Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, was the Provincial Superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina from 1979 to 1979. As such, he was subordinate to Fr Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the Jesuits’ 28th Superior General from 1965 until 1983. On March 13, 2013, the then Cardinal Bergoglio was elected pope–the first Jesuit pope–and took the name Francis.

Francis reveres Arrupe; he visited the latter’s tomb at the Church of the Gésu in Rome during the first summer of his papacy and several times since. The Pope has initiated a cause for Arrupe’s canonization; should Francis live long enough, Arrupe will become a saint.

Pope Francis paying homage at Arrupe’s tomb at the Church of the Gésu, Rome.

I’m all in with Francis; Arrupe was exemplary in how he lived and died.

Beginnings

Pedro Arrupe was born on November 14, 1907, in Bilbao, Spain, an industrial city in Northern Spain that is the de facto capital of the Basques. He was raised in a devout Catholic family and trained in medicine at the University of Madrid, with plans to become a missionary doctor in Africa.

While grieving the death of his mother in 1927, Arrupe experienced a calling to join the Jesuit order. You don’t just become a Jesuit; there is a process of spiritual formation that includes both service, often as a schoolteacher, and studies in philosophy and theology. It can take a dozen years.

Pedro Arrupe as Superior General of the Society of Jesus

Arrupe began this journey amid political crises in Spain and the Catholic Church. So far as I can discern, he had no interest in politics. But because he had a mission to care for people, his life was shaped by the surrounding struggles.

The 19th- and early 20^th-century Catholic Church was led by popes who opposed ‘modernism,’ the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, including liberalism, democracy, feminism, socialism, and Communism. Some bishops were openly antisemitic and sympathized with the fascist movements that emerged following World War I.

Conversely, Republican groups in traditionally Catholic monarchies such as Italy, Spain, or France were often violently anti-clerical.

The Second Spanish Republic replaced the monarchy in April 1931, suppressed the Society of Jesus in Spain, and seized the order’s property. Arrupe left the country to pursue his Jesuit training in Belgium. An attempted coup by fascist military officers in July 1936 led to a vicious civil war, with atrocities on both sides, including church desecrations and murders of clergy.

Republican soldiers in 1936.

Missionary to Japan

The Jesuits sent Arrupe to Japan in 1938. He had worked hard to get this assignment and was wholeheartedly committed to it.

Jesuit training focuses on mission. St Ignatius, the first Superior General, had a mystical experience of being asked to help Jesus carry his cross. Ignatius, Arrupe wrote, believed that:

the key to the Gospel is to be found in the person of Christ and in his [Christ’s] condition as that of being sent from the Father in mission to humanity.

It was a difficult mission. Jesuit missionaries entered Japan in the 16th century. Tragically, later persecutions nearly extinguished the Church (read Shusaku Endo’s harrowing novel Silence about the Japanese Christian martyrs).

Arrupe taught school, celebrated daily Mass, and catechized the few Japanese converts. He deeply respected Japanese culture and studied Buddhism and its meditation practices.

Arrupe lived in Yokohama, mostly alone and in poverty. Japan was poor, with a 1935 GDP per capita of about $1,700 in 1990 dollars, about one-third of GDP in 1935 America, and comparable to 2023 Sudan.

Japanese farmers planting rice.

However, Arrupe valued poverty; like every member of a Catholic religious order, he had taken a vow of poverty. The point was not that people should needlessly suffer but rather that voluntary poverty can advance spiritual development.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20).

Arrupe wrote that:

Poverty means total detachment, at least in attitude; it means withdrawing trust from all things created and placing all our trust and hope in God.

The goal is self-emptying, to make room in your life for God.

Solitary Confinement

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese secret police arrested Arrupe as a suspected American spy. They held him in solitary confinement for 33 days in a 2-metre x 2-metre cell. At one point, the police interrogated Arrupe for 32 hours straight. No one visited him; it would have been dangerous to do so. Then, without explanation or apology, the police released him.

Arrupe returned to his small Christian community and resumed his work as a teacher and pastor. To my knowledge, he never complained about his treatment.

How do you maintain your mission or sanity following such treatment? How do you return to serve a population whose authorities might, at any moment, take your life?

You do it strengthened by prayer and motivated by love. Arrupe believed that God was present with him—and in him—in the mission written on his heart.

Years later, Arrupe quoted St Paul to his Jesuit brothers:

You are as a letter from Christ written by us. You are not written as other letters are written with ink, or on pieces of stone. You are written in human hearts by the Spirit of the living God. (2 Cor 3:3).

He had not been alone during solitary confinement but with Christ in his heart.

Arrupe at prayer.

Throughout his life, Arrupe prayed for 2-3 hours daily, even when, decades later, he was the Superior General. Monks routinely pray this much, but an administrator running an organization spread across 100 countries?

When Arrupe was the Superior General, there was a tiny chapel behind a door in his office. It was a consecrated closet with a Zen meditation cushion on a tatami. Arrupe said that all his critical decisions as Superior General were made in that chapel, during prayer to discern God’s will.

Hiroshima

The Jesuits transferred Arrupe to direct the Jesuit house in Hiroshima. He was present on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the US Army Air Force dropped the atomic bomb. Arrupe survived because the Jesuit retreat house was sheltered from the blast behind a hill.

After the shockwave and the firestorm had swept by, Arrupe led his staff into the city to find survivors. He may have been the first first-responder at Hiroshima.

Hiroshima, before and after.

Thousands were killed instantly by blast effects, fire, or suffocation. But Arrupe also found survivors, some of whom could walk. However, many survivors soon developed life-threatening burn symptoms from heat and radiation.

Arrupe converted the Jesuit house into a hospital. With his medical training and working carefully but with almost no supplies, he developed a systematic care protocol for these patients. This saved hundreds of lives.

In a later recollection, Arrupe noted that the blast stopped a clock at 8:10 AM.

The pendulum stopped and Hiroshima has remained engraved on my mind. It has no relation with time. It belongs to motionless eternity… Hiroshima has become a fixed satellite in the stratosphere, accompanying the Earth in its course around the sun.

Each of us has a moral cosmology that maps the universe onto dimensions of good and evil. For Arrupe, Hiroshima was a pole star by which he oriented his map. Marcus Aurelius’s moral cosmology was a map of the Roman Empire, with dimensions of social order and, as he saw it, civilization versus barbarity. Marcus’s pole stars were his stoic teachers.

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But suppose that, like Arrupe—and me—you have turned aside from the Empires of your day. You cease to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of an imperium. Then, you need different stars to steer by.

Like Arrupe, my moral cosmology map has fixed stars, some in constellations of horror: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo; the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, Cambodia, and Rwanda; Tulsa 1921, New York City 2001, and, well, like the stars, the horrors are endless.

Deo gratias: There are other stars, individuals who transmit light. To name only recent Christian martyrs: St Teresa Benedicta (formerly Edith Stein), Dietrich Bonhoeffer, St Maximillian Kolbe, Martin Luther King, Jr., St Óscar Romero, and Fr Ignacio Ellacuria, SJ.

Superior General

Arrupe became the Provincial of Japan in 1958 and was elected Superior General of the Jesuits in 1965. He led the Society in implementing the Second Vatican Council’s reforms. This was a difficult task because the Catholic Church was under great tension. Vatican II was concerned with many issues, but I will focus on justice.

At the end of World War II, the Catholic Church needed an unambiguous commitment to human dignity and rights. Large Catholic populations were oppressed by Communist regimes that denied them human rights, including religious freedom.

Unfortunately, the Church lacked a clear commitment to human rights because the reactionaries who had led it had opposed not just Communism but also liberalism and democracy, among other Enlightenment ideas.

In addition, Europeans ran the Church. But the 20th century saw a massive shift in Catholicism from Europe to the ‘Global South.’ In 2010, only 32% of Catholics lived in Europe or North America, compared to 70% in 1910. The South had been exploited for centuries by European empires. It was now in a rapid and sometimes violent process of decolonization. A newly emerging indigenous clergy often took the side of the global poor, sometimes against the resistance of European Church leaders.

The Second Vatican Council, St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City.

Vatican II (1963-1965) was led by Popes St John XXIII and St Paul VI. They were influenced by a movement of Catholic intellectuals, clergy, and laity who had actively resisted fascism and embraced democracy and human rights. Vatican II’s document Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom) emphasized the importance of human dignity and individual conscience. Vatican II profoundly changed the Church but did not resolve the conflicts within.

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The Church’s centre of gravity, led by Paul VI and St John Paul II, embraced Vatican II’s reforms. Under the banner of human rights and religious liberty, John Paul II led the Church in resistance to the communist government of Poland. He helped precipitate the collapse of European Communism in 1989.

However, these popes were in tension with two groups. On the one hand, Vatican II was resisted by a diminished and sometimes schismatic extreme reactionary wing.

On the other hand, a group of Latin American bishops and theologians emerged concerned about the oppression of the poor and the concentration of immense wealth in small elites. This school of thought became known as Liberation Theology, and many Jesuits working in the region were sympathetic to its views.

The Bible is replete with concern for the poor, including, for example, Jesus’s declaration of the beginning of his ministry:

The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour. (Luke 4:18-19)

Some Liberation Theologians were influenced by reading Marx, and a few joined guerilla movements.

These Church divisions placed Arrupe in a difficult position. He was firmly committed to what the Latin American bishops called “the preferential option for the poor.” He was working on this view in parallel with the Liberation Theologians. He addressed the seminal 1968 meeting of the bishops in Medellin, Colombia. Perhaps because Arrupe had been in Hiroshima, he rejected any form of violence and criticized Marxism.

Unfortunately, Paul VI and John Paul II distrusted the Liberation Theologians, the Jesuits, and Arrupe himself. As a Jesuit, Arrupe was committed to papal obedience and never criticized either Pope.

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Arrupe’s most important justice initiative was the founding of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS). Today, the JRS works in 59 countries across six continents to accompany, serve and advocate for those who have been forcibly displaced from their homes.

However, his most significant contribution was to help commit the Church to social justice. In 1975, Arrupe convened the 32nd General Congregation of the Jesuits. Under his leadership, the Congregation passed the document “Our Mission Today.” Point 2 states that:

The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement. For reconciliation with God demands the reconciliation of people with one another.

In 2023, it is difficult to grasp how anyone would find this language controversial. Was someone in 1968 arguing against justice?

Of course not. The problem was that before John XXIII, the Church leadership believed that the ancien regime—the monarchical, colonialist world—had been just. Conservatives judged the world to have been better because human nature required aristocratic hierarchy and authority. They saw no virtue in human rights, democracy, or social equality.

In 2023, social justice is a settled Catholic teaching. See the Catechism, Paragraph 1938:

There exist also sinful inequalities that affect millions of men and women. These are in open contradiction of the Gospel: Their equal dignity as persons demands that we strive for fairer and more humane conditions. Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.

Hence Pope Francis’s reverence for Arrupe. Francis’s encyclicals on environmental justice–Laudato Si (Praise to you)–and social justice–Fratelli Tutti (Siblings All)–owe much to Pedro Arrupe.

An Exemplary Life and Death

Returning to Rome from Asia in 1981, Arrupe suffered a debilitating stroke. He lost the ability to speak and resigned as Superior General. When he was wheeled into the hall of the Jesuits’ 33rd General Congregation in 1983, the delegates greeted him with a prolonged standing ovation. His speech to the delegates was read for him. Arrupe told them that,

More than ever, I find myself in the hands of God. This is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands.

He lived eight more years, primarily alone and in intense suffering.

I discovered Arrupe through this quote. It overwhelmed me. Four years into my life with cancer, I was astounded by Arrupe’s fortitude, his remaining present in suffering and accepting divine providence.

The quote made no sense until I learned about his solitary confinement in 1941. Arrupe’s love of God sustained him through his imprisonments, first by the secret police and later by the stroke. His singular life goal was union with God. He endured his suffering because it placed him in God’s hands.

Arrupe was an executive managing a global organization who maintained a wholehearted and unwavering love of God and his neighbour regardless of his circumstances or suffering. The US Marines are said to be the people who run toward the gunfire. Arrupe ran toward the fire in Hiroshima because he was courageous, but above all, because he loved his neighbour.

Love and Union with God

St John wrote, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). Many Christians quote this verse, but is this how they understand God?

A friend recently told me that his family and parish had raised him to be terrified of God. They taught him that God hates sin, where sin is a transgression against divine law. Divine law comprises a thick book of moral prohibitions (‘you shall not do X’) and obligations (‘you must do Y’). My friend knew he would burn in hell, and justly so, because it was impossible not to transgress at least one of these laws. Yes, they promised God loved him, but who were they fooling? The take-home message was that God was strict, angry, punitive, and hateful.

Surely, Arrupe knew that morality includes prohibitions and obligations. But what he wrote about was love. There’s a prayer attributed to him that begins:

Nothing is more practical than

finding God, than

falling in Love

in a quite absolute, final way.

The poem coheres with Ignatian spirituality. David Fleming’s modern translation of Ignatius’s ‘First Principle and Foundation’ in his Spiritual Exercises reads:

The goal of our life is to live with God forever. God, who loves us, gave us life. Our own response of love allows God’s life to flow into us without limit. All the things in this world are gifts of God, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.

Andrea Pozzo, The Apotheosis of St Ignatius (1694), ceiling of Church of St Ignazio di Loyola, (the Gésu), Rome

This is not a heterodox view. St Paul wrote,

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. (Romans 13:8-10)

Arrupe obeyed divine law not because God coerced him but because he loved God and his neighbour. Sin may be a transgression, but more importantly, it is a failure or refusal to love.

Conversely, spiritual growth is growth in love. Arrupe wrote that “the motive force of our lives is the personal love for Christ. This personal love of Christ expresses itself in a total commitment ‘under the standard of the cross’ where one chooses poverty, suffering, and humiliation rather than riches and glory.”

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Arrupe’s endurance of his suffering was redemptive. Many Jesuits believe that Arrupe’s teachings—and the example of his life—renewed the charism of Ignatius. A charism is an ability the Holy Spirit gives a person or collective to represent Christ and be a channel of God’s goodness for people.

Decades after Arrupe’s death, the message written on his heart reached a non-Catholic. Me.