You seem to be answering someone else's post that I haven't even seen on here, Rhamiel ! I haven't felt the need to gainsay, never mind lash out, at any post praising the Jesuits. In fact, I specifically made the point that my personal experience of Jesuits via the community attached to the Sacred Hart Church in Edinburgh has been very positive. I also mentioned that being a very cerebral order, it would be impossible for them and the Dominicans not to have at least their share of wrong uns. But that's the nature of humanity anyway. No group is going to be comprised solely of the virtuous : the wheat and the tares - the eschatological aspect. Having an exceptional analytical intelligence, characteristically worldly, does mean a characteristic deficit in a connatural propensity for faith in comparison with the manual worker.
So, the innumerable truly pious, intellectuals in the hierarchy and the laity are a very precious gift to mankind, having evidently lost little opportunity to grow in love throughout their life, maximizing their ability to promote the physical survival of the more innately spiritual and unworldly manual worker.
With the intellect, I believe there is always a trade-off, and the impression I have is that the optimal balance would tend to be that of the worker at the top of the manual-working hierarchy. Nevertheless, what a debt we all owe to the ultra pious 'brain-boxes', such as Augustine, Ambrose, Chrysostom, as well as, closer to home, physicians, for example, and very occasionally, even government (the greatest of the latter have often tended to have little or no formal faith, though would have subliminally absorbed Christian values in that earlier age, which some of us can still remember. Nevertheless, it was a Methodist lay-preacher, Keir Hardie who founded the British Labour Party, the genesis of the welfare-state, after WWII. That, of course, was before the Labour Party in the UK became became the political wing of Stonewall ! I fear the siege filter has fall over your eyes, Rhamiel.
