Amen, my brother in Christ!
What has happened to the Jesuit order? I blame the lavender mafia. Ugh
What happened to the Jesuit order? Well, the same thing that happened to a lot of things in the 1960s: the 1960s happened.
The incredible social and moral upheaval that took place from about 1964 to 1974, with all of its appended evils (drugs, illicit sex, abortion, rejection of anything and everything that held any moral or ethical principle for centuries) unfortunately happened right about the same time that the Second Vatical Council ended.....and what we now call "The Spirit of Vatican II" spread like an evil cancer and for all practical intents and purposes, displaced the actual teachings of the council with a lot of pseudo-Catholic balderdash.
In no place did this nonsense take a stronger hold than it did inside the Jesuit order. The Jesuits used to be stalwarts of orthodoxy, but thanks the cockeyed interpretation of Vatican II by the order's leadership, the Jesuits became radicalized. They worried more about "social justice" issues than they did about fidelity to the Church, which resulted in the Jesuits becoming a sort of religious version of the Students for a Democratic Society, if not the Weathermen (look those up on Google if you're unfamiliar with them).
In Latin America, this stance evolved into the "liberation theology" hogwash, which can best be summed up as "Marxist revolution is a
good thing, if you're doing it for the right reasons", i.e., to lift up the poor and fight capitalist injustice. Which, as we all know, led to decades of horrific trends in places like El Salvador, and to religiously-veneered radicals like Fr. Leonardo Boff, Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, Fr. Jon Sobrino, and Fr. Juan Luis Segundo (of these four, only the last two were Jesuits; Boff was a Franciscan and Gutierrez was a Dominican---again, look them up if you're unfamiliar with them).
In this country, probably the most well-known Jesuit radical was Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who went off the deep end around 1963 and became an anti-Vietnam War activist, a role which got him arrested numerous times and landed him on the FBI's "most wanted" list. He and his brother, Fr. Philip Berrigan, a Josephite, are both associated with dramatic stunts such as the "Baltimore Four" stunt in 1967, where Philip Berrigan and three others broke into a selective service office in Maryland and poured chicken blood all over the draft files stored there, and the "Catonsville Nine" stunt in 1968, when Daniel Berrigan and eight others broke into a different Maryland selective service office and burned the draft files in the parking lot outside with homemade napalm.
Truly, a shining Christian witness.
It's not hard to see why most reasonable American Catholics viewed the Berrigan brothers as a couple of leftist nutbars. Look up their bios on Wikipedia: they both have rap sheets longer than your left arm, including everything from B&E and malicious destruction to conspiracy in hare-brained ideas like kidnapping Henry Kissinger and blowing up military facilities. Total whackjobs.
Anyway, that's what happened to the Jesuit order. Sad, really; it's tragic when one considers what they used to be, compared to what they are now.
roddreher.substack.com
