Heart speaks to hearts – reading Arrupe

One of the books studied this year (2025) by the Belfast Jesuit Centre’s book club was Pedro Arrupe: A Heart Larger than the World » published by Messenger Publications. The author was Brian Grogan SJ, and this was his second book on Arrupe for the publisher. His first wa booklet entitled Pedro Arrupe SJ – A Mystic with Open Eyes ». Journalist Joanne Savage is a member of the Belfast Jesuit bookclub and below is her own considered reflection on the award winning book.

Belfast Jesuit Book Group rediscovers the life and times of Pedro Arrupe SJ

“His focus was on God, not himself. He was, in the best sense, ‘lost in God’. So writes Dr Brian Grogan SJ, about the former head of the Jesuit Order Fr Pedro Arrupe SJ, in his sensitive and detailed biography. The 28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus, who has recently been the focal point of discussion for the Belfast Jesuit Society Book Group. Dr Grogan joined the debate to talk in more depth about his understanding of Arrupe, whom he was lucky enough to personally meet, a man who eloquently described the necessity of ‘having a heart larger than the world’ if one wants to fully serve Christ, and to consider the life of the exemplary Pedro is to contemplate a missionary who was always convinced that his destiny had unfolded ‘according to the will of God’.

Arrupe, who famously spent four hours each day in prayer in tandem with a life of furious practical, faith-driven activity, never deviated from his conviction that the most important thing in life is communicating with God. “For Arrupe, only the dynamics of divine relationships give meaning to what goes on in the world,” observes Grogan. “Given that God is community, he accepted that the divine project is to gather everyone and all things into loving relationships.”

The secret scripture of Pedro Arrupe’s extraordinary life remains a luminous source of inspiration for Jesuits and for all who choose to follow Christ, and his insistent concentration on being-for-others, of God as community, and of true Christianity as being instantiated by deeds rather than words, and by service, which is the highest expression of true love, reminds us that in tandem with the profession of faith, we must always be committed to the practice of active virtue.

This moves in tandem with self-transcendence and self-abnegation, since to live as Christ lived is to prioritise love of one’s neighbour and of even the very least among us –hence Arrupe’s repeated emphasis on the preferential option for the poor. This is a point that deserves emphasis: to live as Christ lived is to stand up for the least and the last, the marginalised, the outcast, those who possess little, and under Pedro’s leadership the Society of Jesus aimed to find ever new ways to live out the Gospel by assisting the most vulnerable.

This was in tandem with the 1971 synod and its second attendant ‘ground-breaking’ document Justice in the World, which Grogan quotes at length and which Arrupe, by the example of his life’s work, clearly pondered with reverence: “Action on behalf of justice, and participation in the transformation of the world, fully appear…as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel; or in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.”

This 1971 document was greeted by silence in Vatican circles, and as Grogan observes, 50 years on it is absent from the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Many wedded to power, status, security and a staunchly hierarchical church, opponents of Vatican II, felt that it went too far in its insistence on the interrelationship between the Gospel and social justice – but Arrupe, who was clearly wedded to the concept of men and women of faith who were wedded to social change and egalitarianism, was clearly a sympathetic recipient of the message.

As Dr Grogan makes clear, for Pedro faith is in one hand and justice in the other, and we do our most constructive work when we use both. This was a new and disruptive imperative that placed some tension between the Society and the papacy, but it was clear that for Arrupe, ever galvanized in his loyalty to the poor by his experiences disseminating the faith in the slums of Latin America in the 1970s, that the Jesuit mission saw the promotion of justice as an absolute requirement of Christ-centred living.

In 1971 Gustavo Guiterrez had published ATheology of Liberation in response to the unjust economic structures that produced crushing poverty in Latin America and elsewhere, and the attendant movement would draw on Marxist and socialist analysis. Liberation theology was very much in tandem with the conclusions of the 1971 synod, demanding an active response to poverty; proponents of the movement felt that Christians ought to act to stamp out the inequality resulting from capitalist markets. His guiding question was simple: ‘How do we convey to the poor that God loves them?’

While Arrupe was never fully behind the movement, his repeated emphasis on tending to those suffering economic deprivation shows that he was sympathetic, at least in part, to the spirit of its analysis. This would place him in tension with John Paul II, who, as someone exposed to the evils of communism, was wary of the proponents of liberation theology and its clearly socialist agenda.

It was in the spirit of tending to the most needy and vulnerable that Arrupe would go on to form the Jesuit Refugee Service in response to the plight of 20 million displaced Vietnamese in 1981. As Arrupe observes: “Nowadays the world does not need words, but lives which cannot be explained except through faith and love of Christ’s poor.”

Again, Arrupe’s conception of Jesuit education made the preferential option for the poor absolutely clear. He said: “[O]ur prime educational objective must be to form men-and women-for-others; men and women who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ—for the God-human who lived and died for all the world; men and women who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of their neighbours; men and women completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce.”

Time and again in his life and his writings he was instantiating the wisdom of St Ignatius. Reflecting on his Spiritual Exercises, Arrupe has written: “The Exercises are, in the last analysis, a method in the pedagogy of love—the pedagogy, that is, of the most pure charity toward God and toward one’s neighbour. They root out carnal and worldly love from the human heart, thus opening it to the beams of God’s love. A demanding love it is, calling forth in a person a response of love and of service. Service, which is itself love. This is the message of the very last paragraph of the book of the Exercises. ‘The zealous service of God our Lord out of pure love should be esteemed above all.’ In the Exercises we find terms and concepts which are logically reducible to one another: the ‘glory of God,’ for example, can be replaced by the ‘service of God.’ The same may be said of ‘praise’ and ‘reverence.’ Only one term is final and irreducible to another: love.”

Born in the Basque region of Spain in 1907, Arrupe entered the Jesuits in 1927, and after expulsion from Spain under the Republican government he continued his studies in Belgium, Holland and the US. After his ordination in 1938 he was sent to continue the dissemination of the faith in Japan and on December 7, 1941 he was arrested and consigned to 33 days of solitary confinement on charges of espionage. For most people this would be a trial too difficult to bear, but for Pedro Arrupe it was to become a period of profound intimacy with Christ.

This was the month when he learnt most in his life, alone in his cell, in communication with Jesus: “I experienced deep pain for lack of the Eucharist, but there was at the same time a feeling of the faithful and consoling presence of our Lord…It was beautiful, the solitude with Christ, a mystical experience.”

After his release Pedro would next bear witness to the horror of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, when with colleagues he used his medical training to help give aide to some of the 20,000 of those impacted by the hellish blast, a blast unlike anything the world had hitherto seen as the Japanese city was momentarily turned into a lake of fire.

At this seismic moment in history he like many others asked where God was in all of this. But he laboured on resolute in his conviction that God is good, and that tarrying to help others even in the midst of an oftentimes evil world would yet continue to bear fruit. It was while Superior of the Jesuits’ Japanese Province that he was elected Superior General of the Society of Jesus in 1965.

It is notable that Arrupe had faith in Jorge Maria Bergolio early in his career. He made Bergolio provincial for Argentina in 1974 when he was just 38. Arrupe chose him again as director of the Buenos Aires House of Studies in 1980. It is Grogan’s contention that Pope Francis was carrying through Pedro’s vision of the service of the world and the Church in light of Vatican II. The pontiff, while by no means an advocate of liberation theology in its traditional sense, had repeatedly denounced the evils of capitalism and consumerism that instantiate poverty for so many across the globe. Like Arrupe it is clear that for Pope Francis practice of the Christian faith should ideally involve action on poverty.

In 1981 Arrupe suffered a debilitating stroke. An appointee named by Pope John Paul II served as interim superior until 1983, when Pedro was forced to resign. He was wheeled in to the opening session of the 33rd General Congregation, and Arrupe’s final prayer was read to the community. It is a testament to his total faith that he bore his illness with such grace and equanimity. His statement was read to those gathered since Arrupe was by then too ill to read his thoughts aloud: “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.”

Father Pedro Arrupe died on February 5, 1991. Dr Brian Grogan has paid profound tribute to the life of a remarkable man in his sensitive biography, which has been thoroughly appreciated by members of the Belfast Jesuit Society Book Group. Pedro indeed had a heart larger than the world, and his legacy endures.

Jonanne Savage 2025