| U.S. News

I wondered, “What is an M.F.O.?” As a teacher in a Jesuit high school, I take modest pride in my ability to decode teen vernacular. But I was stupefied. I inquired and learned that M.F.O. is shorthand for “man for others.” Oh no, I thought. What have we done?

Those familiar with Jesuit secondary education know the shared language often employed to describe its animating mission and distinct identity. The “Grad at Grad” (“Graduate at Graduation”) urges our graduates to be intellectually competent, open to growth, religious, loving and committed to doing justice. Catchphrases like “magis” (“the more”), “cura personalis” (“care for the person”), “finding God in all things” and “women and men for others” help make accessible the Jesuit tradition. Undoubtedly, this language galvanizes students and faculty to embody this identity and illuminate its mission to the world. It looks sharp on a Web site and tugs at the heartstrings of anxious and caring parents of eighth-grade students.

But its ready-made, packaged presentation can also undermine its prophetic character. When this common language is invoked apart from its context within the life story of Ignatius Loyola, a great miseducation can occur. In that case, the countercultural character of our Ignatian education is supplanted by an affirmation of the status quo plus academic excellence, and a Jesuit high school becomes indistinguishable from other elite college preparatory schools. Our unique language becomes a marketing device for glossy admission pamphlets that contribute to the name-branding of Jesuit secondary education.

The catechetical task of communicating the memory of St. Ignatius to students is a dangerous one. It is dangerous because the marketability and accessibility of Ignatian-speak makes it vulnerable to an uncritical appropriation that baptizes the privileges of an American middle-class lifestyle. Yet the catechetical task is dangerous in a positive way as well. When the language communicates the Jesuit identity of the school through the narrative of St. Ignatius, it teaches students to see the world in a radically new way. In this way, Jesuit education fulfills its fundamental mission of teaching students to discern by seeing with new eyes.

Metz’s notion of the bourgeois and messianic

Johann Baptist Metz, a prize pupil of Karl Rahner, defines theology as interruption, and introduces the categories of “bourgeois” and “messianic” religion. Bourgeois religion endorses the haves, the propertied, those whose seemingly guaranteed future allows them to take life for granted. Metz characterizes bourgeois religion as the adaptation of the gospel to society so that any tensions between discipleship and living in the world, particularly in the first world, are eliminated.

In place of a messianic future animated by the virtues of repentance, unconditional love for the “least brethren” and compassion, bourgeois religion affirms autonomy, competitive struggle, property, stability and success. A messianic religion takes sides, without hatred, by asserting a universality of love that reflects the partisan stance that Jesus took in privileging those on the margins of society.

In Faith and the Future, Metz asks, “Is there not a concept of universal Christian love in ‘bourgeois’ religion that is just sloppy, and one that hardly needs any longer to prove itself as love of enemies because the feeble and unpartisan way it bridges all the agonizing contradictions means that it has no opponents left at all?” Jesus was not nailed to a cross because he equated loving the world with getting along with everyone or being nice. Jesus interrupted the world by challenging people to see the world in a new way. Most profoundly, God interrupts the imagination of the world by revealing God’ s self most completely in the stripped, insulted, beaten-down and spat-upon Christ.

Metz’s theology of interruption resonates with the life story of Ignatius Loyola. Ignatius’ unceasing desire to “help souls” resulted in continuing conversations with others about their relationship with God, and these conversations often disrupted the expectations of his contemporaries.

Ignatius’ commitment to making faith a public matter inevitably created adversaries. Of course suspicion was heightened during the Spanish Inquisition, when an unschooled drifter dressed in sackcloth while engaging others in spiritual conversations would be certain to raise an eyebrow.

At Alcalá, he was arrested in connection with the disappearance of two noblewomen. It was later learned that they had merely responded to his conversations by traveling and serving the poor in one hospital and then another. Ignatius was released from prison on the condition that he refrain from speaking publicly about faith until he had studied for four more years.

At the University of Salamanca he found himself in prison ...