Pedro Arrupe SJ

Mystic with Open Eyes

Brian Grogan

• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781788124218
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

With an Introduction by Peter McVerry SJ Why might this man be declared a saint? Pedro Arrupe, twenty-eighth Superior General of the Society of Jesus, re-founded the Jesuits and re-cast Ignatian spirituality for our times. He was a prisoner of Imperial Japan, a first responder when the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima, a pioneer of Catholic social justice and a founder of the Jesuit Refugee Service. His mind and heart were shaped by the Second Vatican Council. Few people—outside religious life—know his story. But now that the process for his beatification is underway, he will become known across the Catholic world and beyond. Best-selling author Brian Grogan SJ, whose life has been deeply influenced by Arrupe, has written Pedro Arrupe SJ: Mystic With Open Eyes. With a foreword by Peter McVerry SJ, this booklet is a guide to the extraordinary life of a great-souled human being. Arrupe belongs to the world because he had a profound love for everyone, especially the neediest. This succinct account of his life, 1907–1991, highlights his dynamic influence on the Church of today as it labours to build a civilisation of justice and love.

CHAPTER 1

‘GO!’

I was invited in late 1981 to go to Somalia. My poor knowledge of geography forced me to search for Somalia on the map: it is not exactly a holiday resort. The communist authorities had expelled nearly all priests in 1974 and seven years on someone was needed, I was told, to find out how they would react to an incoming priest. It would be an opportunity too, I was told, to do some field-work for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) which had been inaugurated by Pedro Arrupe (1907-1991), Superior General of the Jesuits, in 1980. Since the plane for Mogadishu was to leave from Rome, I went there and was invited to visit Pedro: it was to be my sixth and final meeting with him, because some months earlier he had suffered a devastating stroke that was to render him ever more incapacitated for the final decade of his life.

In the darkened room in which he was convalescing I explained where and why I was going. His eyes lit up: he half raised himself from the couch, stuck out a trembling arm at me and shouted ‘Go!’ Go I did, and his command carried me through some scary times. His single word ‘Go!’ still energises me: I think of him, with his tiny frail body and broad smile, as a man in whom the Holy Spirit had unrestricted freedom to operate, and sometimes I pray to him to give me a little share of his limitless freedom and availability to God. I have asked his help in writing these pages.

His speech of acceptance when he was elected in 1965 began with the words of Jeremiah, who in about 600BC was called to be a prophet of God: ‘“Ah, ah, ah, Lord, I do not know how to speak … But God said, “You shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you”’ (Jer 1:6–7). ‘You shall go’: it seems to me that he himself was always trying to listen to the Spirit and coaxing others, like myself, to do likewise. No one shaped my life more than he, because he radically reshaped and reenergised the Society of Jesus that I had joined eleven years before he became General.

Pedro was a tiny man with a great heart. Never threatening or dominating, he was always welcoming, and when he looked at you with his big eyes you knew there was space in his heart for you. He was transparent; the good Spirit shone out through him. In referring to Jesus, Pedro uses the term ‘luminous transcendence’ and the same could be applied to him. He radiated an inner glow, and as I begin to write I think of him, not simply as a fascinating figure in the past, but as glowing within the body of humanity. If, as contemporary science assures us, all things are interconnected, surely those who have gone ahead of us and who have become fully themselves, energise the rest of us and exercise a hidden influence on our development. My use of the term ‘Pedro’ is to be taken to indicate the affectionate respect which so many people had for him. He was often called ‘Don Pedro’.

Heart to Heart

It is important from the outset to emphasise what made him tick, lest we get lost in his struggles and achievements and miss the ‘secret scripture’ of his long life. From early on he seems to have had a strong and intimate relationship with God.

This is revealed in his writings, for instance when he was commending devotion to the Sacred Heart. Picking up on the word ‘heart’, he describes it as a primary word, packed with meaning and sentiment. For him it expressed the fundamental reality of being in love with the Person of Christ who was already fully in love with him. ‘It could be said that every line of the Gospel, every word of it, is throbbing with the boundless love of Christ, who is burning with love for every human being.’

Jesus is already what Pedro wishes to become; not just a historical figure ‘out there’ to be imitated and admired; nor to be found only in the Church and the Eucharist. ‘He dwells in the innermost depths of our heart.’ This presence is ‘something of our own intimate being – within us, close to us, our heart’s treasure. So we can speak with Jesus heart to heart: we can listen to one another, feel for one another’. This gives a hint of his lived prayerful experience. He prays: ‘Give me that grace, that sense of you, your very heartbeat.’

Elsewhere he comments: ‘Nowadays the world does not need words, but lives which cannot be explained except through faith and love for Christ poor’. This is the heart of the man.

God’s world

Pedro Arrupe is becoming recognised as one of the towering figures of the twentieth century. His life touched all of its decades: he was seven when the First World War broke out, was expelled from Spain with his fellow Jesuits in 1931, reached Japan in 1938, lived through the Second World War, including Pearl Harbour, and played his part in alleviating the savage torture that the first atomic bomb wreaked on Hiroshima. He knew of the Holocaust, the Cold War and the MAD era – the time of Mutually Assured Destruction. He lived through the endless regional conflicts and periodic genocides that littered the last century. None of this was lost on him but instead shaped his perspectives. The range of his concerns was limitless, because he saw our world as God’s world. He had a prophetic gift to offer in response to the tragedies of humankind, and he shaped the lives of many, both Jesuit and other, with an optimism and vision that was in no way naïve but based on the belief that the Lord still cares for his people and welcomes generous hearts to help them in their deepest needs. He accepted the risk of intimacy with God.

Mystic with open eyes

He has been referred to as the second founder of the Jesuits because he donned the mantle of Ignatius and reclaimed the original charism of the Jesuits in the light of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). More profoundly he has been described as ‘a mystic with open eyes’ because he gazed on our messy world as God does, on the world of the atom bomb, of expulsions, refugees, imprisonments, tortures, world wars, poverty, clashes of ideologies. He would say: ‘See with the eyes of Christ, go wherever the need is greatest, serve the faith and promote justice as best you can, and you will find God!’ In Ignatian terminology, he was truly a contemplative in action: he looked at the world in all its joys and sorrows and tried to discern how God might want him and his Order to respond to its needs.

I met him in our house in Dublin in 1977 and opened the conversation by asking how things were moving along. His face lit up, and he said, ‘On the one hand everything is wonderful … On the other hand, things are not so good!’ There is the mystic with open eyes, neither lost in an otherworldly spirituality nor cynical about the state of the world. With one of his aides he would sing the spiritual, ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’ – which he jokingly referred to as his theme song – but he had an unquestioning conviction that God is everywhere at work, orchestrating the chaos of human affairs. While he never referred to himself as a mystic, he prayed to have the eyes of a mystic: ‘Grant me, O Lord, to see everything now with new eyes. Give me the clarity of understanding that you gave St Ignatius.’

He has left behind him a small library of writings and addresses and influenced many religious congregations, whose members in turn have touched the hearts of innumerable lay persons. Who can say how many have inherited his legacy and are generously living out his dream? His vision and enthusiasm for humankind have become embedded in Catholic thinking.

Now that his cause for beatification has been introduced, a vast project is underway to gather all that is known about him. This booklet is being written while that project is still in germination: the sketch given here will be filled out in years to come. At the end of each chapter I offer a reflection to help you to bring the richness of Pedro’s story to bear on the shaping of yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• FOREWORD
• CHAPTER 1 ‘GO!’
• CHAPTER 2 ON A GIANT’S SHOULDERS
• CHAPTER 3 FORMATIVE YEARS, 1907–38
• CHAPTER 4 HIROSHIMA, 1945
• CHAPTER 5 SUPERIOR GENERAL, 1965
• CHAPTER 6 SEA-CHANGES, 1965–1981
• CHAPTER 7 A MAN OF PRAYER
• CHAPTER 8 PEDRO IN IRELAND
• CHAPTER 9 THE STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE, 1975
• CHAPTER 10 THE JESUIT REFUGEE SERVICE 1980
• CHAPTER 11 A LIFE WITHOUT EVENT, 1981–91
• CHAPTER 12 A DEMANDING LEGACY