‘What’s in a name? Everything.’ Read an excerpt from Pope Francis book, The Jesuit Disruptor | Canada Voices

Michael W. Higgins is a Canadian academic and author who got bit by the pope bug early on in his life. He writes, “When popes die, the globe stands still. The protocols around election, the rites and ceremonies associated with the passing of one pope and the arrival of his successor dominate our screens for days (weeks, if the election is a particularly contentious one). The personalities of those who elect the next pope are the subject of popular press profiles and seasoned critical analyses by professional commentators, becoming in the process that most strange of media concoctions: cardinal celebrities. The world is simply agog with curiosity and fascination.” In his 2024 book, The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis, Higgins gave a fresh look at how Pope Francis disrupted church governance. Below is an excerpt from that book:

It isn’t easy being pope. You carry the weight of a tradition two millennia in the making, you trace your roots back to the apostle Peter, you have an institution that claims divine origin but is essentially human in its lived reality, you have a storied record of genius and sanctity mixed with a sordid record of venality and power lust. Thomas Hobbes once called the papacy “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” Not a great career choice.

So, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Francis, he became Peter. Or rather, when he became Peter, he took the name Francis. And what’s in a name? Everything.

Pope Francis: A lifetime serving the poor and challenging Catholic Church orthodoxy

Peter first. He is the Bishop of Rome; all the other titles and dignities that have accrued over the centuries – Supreme Pontiff, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Head of the Vatican City State, Vicar of Christ, Successor of Peter, et cetera – are secondary to that designation.

Like the Poor Man of Assisi, Jorge Bergoglio is on the road, consoling the marginalized, listening to the abandoned, serving the God of mercy over all else, creating “by virtue of his own personal sensibility” a new model of being Peter.

But he is also a Jesuit, and the greatest missionary of the first generation of Jesuits was also called Francis: in this case, Francis Xavier of noble Basque blood. This Companion of Jesus was prepared to go anywhere to bring the good news that is the Gospel, irrespective of distance, danger, and death.

His zeal brought him to India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the Malay Peninsula, the Molucca Islands, and Japan. He died before he could arrive on Chinese soil – one of the deepest of his many evangelizing passions – and he is buried in Goa.

Jorge Bergoglio was attracted to Xavier’s concept of the bold and brave missionary and was influenced by that other great Basque, Pedro Arrupe, the superior general of the Society of Jesus during the turbulent post-conciliar period.

Arrupe was trained in medicine, stationed in Hiroshima at the time of the perfidious nuclear detonation in 1945, and a model for respectful dialogue, witness, and enculturation – in sharp contrast to the predominant missiological thinking propelled for centuries by the belief that Extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the church there is no salvation”).

When commentators speculated on the reason for “Francis” as the new name to be added to the papal annals, it was not unreasonable to think of the second most famous of the original Jesuits after whom numberless churches, schools, universities, and institutes have been dedicated. So, it was a surprise – one of the first of many – that it was the other Francis he had in mind.

But both actually work as they shared evangelizing zeal; a capacity to think outside the geographical and cultural boundaries of the Christendom that shaped them; a radical commitment to the barest economy of means; a willingness to take daring personal risks. They were also embedded in the origins of their new religious orders and canonized shortly after their deaths.

But in the end, Pope Francis is not a Franciscan; he is a Jesuit, and it is that tradition that comprehensively, integrally, existentially shapes him. The training to be a Jesuit is notoriously long. Their mystique as educators, scientists, poets, communicators, et cetera, is still very much intact, their influence in the Catholic world unparalleled, and their influence outside Catholicism sturdy, controversial, and long-lasting.

But if we know them for their universities and their scholarship only, we miss what is at the heart of the Jesuit vocation: their spirituality. And that spirituality has been sifted through the rich, exquisitely complex, profoundly personal spiritual and psychological traumas – and trauma is the right word, and in the plural – that defined the early life of Ignatius of Loyola: soldier, courtier, ambitious young man on the make drawn from Spain’s lower nobility, refined in a military and worldly way. The consummate careerist.

And then a cannonball got him!

All changed forever.

Forced into a prolonged convalescence by his injuries, with numerous failed surgeries, Ignatius was confined to his bed and forced to reconsider at the most foundational level his ambitions, his values, the very meaning of his life.

Out of the depths of his personal anguish would come arresting insights into his emotional makeup, a deep appropriation of the faith that hitherto was a superficial cultural accretion, an understanding of the psychological dynamics involved in a personal relationship with Christ.

And this would all be distilled into a small handbook that has shaped the lives of millions – those who have read it and, more importantly, those who have lived it: The Spiritual Exercises.

Jack Costello, educator, philosopher, and past president of Regis College at the University of Toronto, nicely encapsulates the innovative and distinctive genius of the Exercises: The Spiritual Exercises is at the heart of Jesuit spirituality because it deals with life as a journey, as a journey of transformation in relation to the movement of history.

It is not simply an internal conversion, but an internal conversion in relation to what God is doing in the world. Essentially, it raises the question “Can you dig it?”

Can you put yourself on the side of this great thing that is happening in the world despite the horrors, despite the obvious sign that there is as much shadow as there is light? Can you be on the side of light and yet share in the experience of the shadow?

There is a big difference between the Enlightenment maxim that says that if we don’t do it, it won’t get done – and there is a great deal of Jesuit energy that goes into that kind of endeavour – and the more radical view of God, the view one finds in the Exercises, which argues that God is already doing it, that our first job is to be at God’s side helping to realize the divine intention with everything we have by way of tools, intelligence, and human spirit.

There is a strong pragmatic streak to Jesuit spirituality that emanates from its Christological core: what matters is engagement with the world, electing the light over the shadow, serving as God’s accomplice, not usurper, adopting a world-friendly rather than world-condemning approach, being part of a journey into the recesses of Creation, of matter, and not a flight into cloistered denial, for all that lives is holy, as the English poet and artist William Blake was wont to say.

This pragmatic strain in Jesuit spirituality speaks to the pragmatic strain in the pastor Jorge Bergoglio. The God of the Exercises is a God to be experienced, not conceptualized; a God to be touched, not etherealized. Finding God in every event, in all things, requires the operating conviction that God is willfully inserted into human history, that this vital, energetic, engaging God is not indifferent to struggling humanity.

The God of Ignatius, the God who can be found in all things, is at once the God of our hearts and our intimacies as well as the God of our history and the histories of other peoples … finding God in all things means caring for justice, and acting on behalf of those who are not being permitted to flourish as personal images and likenesses of God … finding God in all things sees that every effort to behave truly is cutting a new path: it is a walking on water, a giving over of ourselves in faith and a discovering of the implications only much later.

The God of Ignatius is, as the British Jesuit Gerard W. Hughes observed, the “God of Surprises,” and that is precisely the kind of God that the Pope of Surprises can understand. One of the necessary surprises is the uncovering and remaking of self that occurs as the result of an existential conversion.

The Spiritual Exercises define Jesuit identity. They bear the distinct stamp of Ignatius’s own personality: his acute introspectiveness; his preference for an orderly and programmed way of experiencing and understanding God (in that order); his creative and unrestricted use of all that is material, of all that is human, in his relentless pursuit of the Divine Majesty.

This is Bergoglio’s tradition, his spiritual framework: Ignatius and his spiritual manual, the Exercises – formidable forces that shape and direct the life and ministry of the first Jesuit pope. The Spiritual Exercises is “a slim book, with its hobbling syntax and almost total absence of literary grace,” yet it manages somehow to generate a transformative change in the life of those who are carefully guided to integrate its methodology into their own spiritual pilgrimage.

You don’t just read the Exercises; you do them, or they do you, working their wisdom into the pores, sinews, nerves, and viscera of the total human person – the imagination, the heart, the mind, the body: “For, just as taking a walk, travelling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given the Jesuit disruptor to any means of preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul.”

The Exercises are flexible and versatile. They were conceived as a malleable framework that allows for the one directing the Exercises – the director – and the one doing the Exercises – the exercitant – to find the best way of moving forward.

It is a dialogue, a momentum built on mature self-knowledge, deep interiority, refined discernment, lacerating self-honesty. It is not for those seeking easy spiritual nostrums, a spiritual therapy that is more chicken soup than a healthy broth with apungent aftertaste.

As the Jesuit spiritual master John English observed, the Exercises is not a compendium of ethereal maxims, a handbook for the gnostic or spiritually elite, but a rustic and unpolished product of “a simple lay person with very little education who had this great experience at Manresa.” English writes of the Exercises dynamic: “It brings me from my foundational experience of creaturehood, to that of my brokenness or sinfulness, to my transforming experience of forgiveness, of being forgiven unconditionally. Out of this triadic experience comes a sense of call: ‘I have to do something.’”

When the young Bergoglio did the Exercises for the first time – the Jesuits make the Exercises a minimum of two times in the course of their lives as Jesuits – he would have understood that the call he faced demanded nothing less than action on his part.

Excerpted with permission from The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis by Michael W Higgins ©2024. Published by House of Anansi Press. All rights reserved.