Dear brothers,

The parable we have just heard, coming at the close of the meeting of Major Superiors, makes me think of the Meditation on the Two Standards and the first paragraphs of Decree 2 of General Congregation 32 (GC 32). Reminding us of our identity, Decree 2 asks:

1. What is it to be a Jesuit? It is to know that one is a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus as Ignatius was: Ignatius, who begged the Blessed Virgin to “place him with her Son,” and who then saw the Father himself ask Jesus, carrying his Cross, to take this pilgrim into his company.

Approaching who we truly are requires the humility of the tax collector in today’s Parable. He enters the temple and humbles himself before the Lord, acknowledging his sinfulness. The Pharisee, in contrast, stands proud, considering himself not only faithful to the law, but better than others. Each of them embodies the third moment of following one of the two Standards. The Pharisee, ensnared by the pride that comes from the prestige of his social position, builds his identity upon the false wealth of status and possessions. In contrast, the tax collector bows down in humility. Aware of his spiritual poverty – born of his selfishness and distance from God – he feels humiliated and he is despised by the Pharisee and many of his contemporaries.

As we come to end of the journey we have shared this week, we too are invited to look with complete honesty at our own lives as Jesuits – our personal faithfulness, our responsibility for cura apostolica, and our care of our companions in mission. By acknowledging our sinfulness, we experience the closeness of the Lord who, the responsorial psalm tells us, is not far from his faithful and who is not impressed by outward appearances, as the book of Sirach (1^st Reading) reminds us.

Humbling ourselves before the Lord, we find forgiveness and reconciliation. This opens our ears and our hearts to the call to be companions of Jesus, to share in his mission and to carry the cross with him. The experience of God’s mercy leads us, as it did St Ignatius, to ask tirelessly to be placed with the Son. By accepting this call and choosing to serve under the banner of the cross, we become true companions of Jesus, the source of our identity.

CG 32 goes a step further and asks, What is it to be a companion of Jesus today? The answer returns to the image of the two Standards.

2. (...) It is to engage, under the standard of the Cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes.

The banner of Jesus – the Crucified and Risen One – is the cross where our faith discovers the path of liberation, the path to the God of Life. Our struggle is for justice: to overcome every relationship of oppression and to seek reconciliation – with God, with one another, and with the created world in which we live. As forgiven sinners, we are called to take part in the reconciliation of all things in Christ, the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise of redemption.

St Ignatius felt a deep attraction to the Apostle Paul. In Paul’s letter to Timothy, we find the qualities that so inspired him: I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Paul embodies the ideal of life that St Ignatius proposes in the Meditation on the Two Standards: Consider how the Lord of all the world chooses so many persons, apostles, disciples, and the like. He sends them throughout the whole world, to spread his doctrine among people of every state and condition. We are forgiven sinners, called to be companions of Jesus and sent forth to proclaim his Good News to all peoples. Let us then drink anew from our foundational sources and renew our identity.

In these days, we have looked honestly at the challenges and difficulties that come with our shared responsibility of seeking and finding God’s will – for the universal body of the Society and for each of its members – in collaboration with those who accompany us in the same apostolic mission. The experience we have lived leads us, in the spirit of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, to renew our trust in the Lord himself: “The Society was not instituted by human means; and it is not through them that it can be preserved and increased, but through the grace of the omnipotent hand of Christ our God and Lord. Therefore in him alone must be placed the hope that he will preserve and carry forward what he deigned to begin for his service and praise and for the aid of souls.” [812]

With hearts grateful for all the good we have received during this fruitful encounter and united in prayer, we continue to ask Our Lady of the Way to accompany us on our pilgrimage and bring us to her Son so that, despite our sinful condition, we may respond to the call to contribute to the complex and urgent work of reconciliation and justice, as friends in the Lord, companions who follow Jesus, poor and humble.