Pedro Arrupe: A Heart Larger than the World
In its history of almost five centuries, the Jesuit order has had two natives of the Basque country, that territory on the borders of France and Spain, as its Superior General. The first was the founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola. The second was Pedro Arrupe, the subject of Brian Grogan’s biography, A Heart Larger than the World.
Arrupe lived an action-packed life. Born in Bilbao in 1907, he was studying to be a doctor until a trip to Lourdes awakened a religious vocation. When the Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1932, his formation continued in Belgium, Holland and the United States. He longed to be a missionary and was eventually sent to Japan just before World War II started. He was novice-master in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped on that city, and ministered to the injured and dying. In 1965 he was chosen to be the Superior General, charged with leading the Jesuits’ response to the changes of the Second Vatican Council, travelling tirelessly for the next fifteen years to do this. Then, soon after founding the Jesuit Refugee Service in response to the plight of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, he had a stroke, which left him largely incapacitated for the last decade of his life. An often-controversial figure in his time, the cause for his canonisation was officially opened in 2019.
Grogan tells this story briskly, acknowledging his debt to a more detailed 2001 biography by Pedro Miguel Lamet, translated as Pedro Arrupe: Witness of the Twentieth Century, Prophet of the Twenty-First. While much of Grogan’s book offers a chronological narrative of Arrupe’s life and times, he is clear that this can only be properly understood and appreciated by recognising the central role that a spirituality of a particular kind played in his subject’s experience. He is keen to let Arrupe explain this for himself, both in his own writings and by noting the reactions of those who encountered him. Grogan views this spirituality as profoundly trinitarian, and also notes the infectious enthusiasm with which it manifested itself. A quotation from a reflection by Arrupe on his seventieth birthday captures something of this. Looking back at the ‘typhoon’ that swept through the Roman Catholic Church in the aftermath of Vatican II, he wrote: ‘The Church has been aired out … invigorated, and we can look to the future with great joy and breadth of spirit’.
Ten years after his election as leader of the Jesuits, Arrupe called a worldwide meeting of representatives of the Society’s provinces. These ‘General Congregations’ are rare events (there have only been 36 in five hundred years), usually called after a general has died in order to select his replacement. This one was intended in large part to review the order’s aggiornamento (updating) that the council had asked of all in the religious life. It proved challenging, even revolutionary. ‘The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement’, it authoritatively declared. Arrupe was very aware that such a stance would lead to persecution, perhaps even martyrdom, for some, and so it proved. The outlook was attacked as Marxist, many Jesuits left the order, and Arrupe was held personally responsible. In the years immediately before his stroke, the new pope, John Paul II, seemed to have viewed the Jesuit general with deep suspicion, and while he refused his attempts to retire (the general, like the pope, is traditionally elected for life), he replaced Arrupe’s chosen successor with his own delegate when the general was incapacitated. As someone who lived through these tumultuous times, Grogan shares something of the shock and even grief that they occasioned. But he does not let them cloud his appreciation of the Superior Geneal who continued to witness to Christ even in the silent years of his incapacity.
A final chapter tries to assess something of Arrupe’s legacy, more than three decades after his death. Grogan presents this in a series of categories: the importance of intimacy with God, the need for creative fidelity within the Church, the ‘mysticism of history’ and others. He notes the influence of Arrupe on Francis, the first Jesuit pope. And he returns at the end to ‘his radiant and infectious joy, with its divine origin’. This is in some ways a partisan account of Arrupe’s life – the reader is never left in any doubt that Grogan both likes and admires a man who was in many ways his mentor. But what it may lack in critical bite it gains in its explanation of why anyone should still be interested in this religious leader from the last millennium. One of the appendices to the book presents material for a reflective retreat sketched by Arrupe himself soon after he was elected general. It uses his words to draw the one praying into an ever-deepening relationship with God, a goal of which the infectiously joyful Arrupe would surely have approved.
