Prominent Jesuit Says Why the Jesuits Are Going Downhill

The Jesuits are in "deep decline", writes Father Julio Fernández Techera SJ, 57, rector of the Catholic University of Uruguay, in a eleven-page studydated 22 April and first circulated among Jesuits on 18 May. The main points.

- The decline in admissions to the Jesuits in the West is getting worse every year.

- Many members are leaving the order.

- A friend told Fernández that in his province there have been 72 novices in the last ten years, while in the same period 71 Jesuits have left the Society.

- 314 novices joined the Jesuits in 2023, while 319 Jesuits died.

- There are currently 13,995 Jesuits, but in a few years the Society of Jesus will have disappeared from several European countries and will be insignificant in others in Europe, America and Oceania.

- Africa is the only continent where the Jesuits are growing.

- Since 2013, the Jesuits have lost more than 3,000 members.

- "The problem is not only that many members of the order are dying and few are joining, but also that we don't know how to keep many of those who join."

- Father Fernández rejects the myth that "secularised society, changing times and a thousand other excuses" are the reason for the lack of vocations [the reason is the secularisation of the Jesuits].

- The vision of the Jesuits' General Report 2023 "could well be the worldview of a secular think tank with links to a left-wing political party".

- There is no supernatural or transcendent outlook in the General Report that one would expect from a religious, apostolic and priestly order.

- In the entire General Report of more than 24,000 words, the word 'priest' never appears, and 'priesthood' only twice, and then only to distinguish between the priesthood in the Society and the diocesan priesthood".

- "There are many signs in the current life of Jesuit ministries, in the documents that are published and the guidelines that are given, that give the impression that we are in an NGO and not in a religious order."

- The Society of Jesus "is in deep decline", but it doesn't want to know it: "It wants to believe that this is the situation of all the other realities of the Church that surround it, and that therefore it is as it should be."

- "Leaders prefer to maintain the fiction that things are going well, rather than risk recognising the religious and apostolic decline of society".

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