FOREIGN POLICY_Through The Eyes Of A Sceptic: Walt Benson explains why the Iranian attack's timing is curious

Dr John Campbell_2 Physicians discuss population control: "The abolition of proper medicine"

Trans Activism: Learn Who They Are_An expert explains the roots of their dark perversion

Jesuits_Who They Are: AP dives "deep" on the Society Of Jesus

 

By GIOVANNA DELL’ORTO
Updated 9:12 AM EDT, April 23, 2025



Pope Francis was the first pontiff elected from the Society of Jesus — also known as the Jesuits.

It’s one of the most prominent religious orders in the Catholic Church, with approximately 15,000 priests, brothers and novices from more than 110 countries.

Their reach extends from prestigious universities in world capitals to humble migrant shelters in sweltering jungle hamlets, all in pursuit of the mission encapsulated in their motto — “ad majorem Dei gloriam” (“for the greater glory of God”).

“As if answering an implicit question about who a Jesuit is, Pope Francis … affirmed that ‘the Jesuit is a servant of the joy of the Gospel’ in whatever mission he is engaging,” the order’s superior general, the Rev. Arturo Sosa, wrote in his message to fellow Jesuits upon Francis’ death.

Here are some essential facts about the Jesuits.

The history and global presence of the Jesuits

The order was founded in the 16th century by Spanish St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose “Spiritual Exercises” are still a classic of Catholic contemplative practices. From the beginning, he emphasized the missionary, international reach of the order.

Over the subsequent centuries, the Jesuits have built a reputation in scholarship and education, founding schools and universities around the globe, including Georgetown University in Washington and the Pontifical Gregorian University, which serves mostly clergy, nuns and seminarians in Rome.

Far from the halls of academia, the Jesuits have also often led frontline efforts to help those on the margins, ministering at many border flashpoints in the Americas and to refugees from conflict and humanitarian crises worldwide.

That ability to move from socio-political elites to the most marginalized has been a hallmark of the Jesuits from their founding, said the Rev. Bruce Morrill, a Jesuit priest and theology professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

“God is glorified where human beings are saved,” Morrill said, summarizing the thread between the Jesuits’ educational, spiritual, social justice and humanitarian missions.

The Jesuit ministry to refugees and migrants, a priority for Francis

Jesuit Refugee Service was founded in 1980 to respond to the growing needs of those escaping the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Since then, it has become one of the most active organizations globally in helping refugees, asylum seekers and migrants around the world, regardless of their faith. Advocating for migrants was one of Francis’ top priorities.

There are also Jesuit Migrant Network and Jesuit Migrant Service groups active in many countries, providing humanitarian, legal, psycho-social and pastoral care to those displaced by violence or hunger.

They also minister to the families migrants leave behind. Nearly two dozen migrants left from the area around a small town in Guatemala’s largely Indigenous highlands, only to die en route in Mexico and the United States in recent mass tragedies. The parents and siblings of the dead said the Jesuits were the only constant support.

The Rev. Michael Gallagher, a Jesuit priest and attorney, ministered to 13,000 migrants last year in El Paso, Texas, where his church used to operate a shelter a few blocks north of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is now closed, due to the enormous drop in border crossings.


“We all felt greatly supported by his keeping saying that migrants are important,” Gallagher said of Francis. “His continued focus on the humanity and human dignity of all people, especially those often demonized, is one of his lasting contributions.”

Also in Texas, the Rev. Brian Strassburger, another Jesuit priest, directs Del Camino Border Ministries in the Rio Grande Valley and has often visited nearby shelters in Mexico. He called Francis a “great pastor and pilgrim” who put “the defense of migrants at the center of his papacy” from the beginning through his final Easter message.

“He constantly reminded us that we are all migrants on a journey in this life, and our final destination is eternal rest with the Lord,” Strassburger said.

Political struggles and controversies through the centuries

At one point in history the Jesuits were refugees of sorts themselves — Pope Clement XIV, bowing to pressure from European political interests in 1773, ordered the society to be disbanded. In 1814, a different pope restored the Jesuits, who got right back into their educational vocation.

Just two years ago, Nicaragua’s government confiscated the Jesuit-run University of Central America, which had been a hub of massive protests against President Daniel Ortega. His crackdown on religious freedom has been widely condemned.

During El Salvador’s civil war, the church tried to mediate peace between the government and those rising against it when, in 1989, soldiers killed six Jesuits on the campus of the Central American University in the country’s capital.

Many communities in Mexico are still grieving the 2022 murder of two elderly Jesuit priests in the remote Tarahumara mountains by a leader of one of Mexico’s crime gangs.


The Jesuits have also been targets of controversy, from abuses in former residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada and the United States affiliated with the order to a recent case involving a famous ex-Jesuit artist.

The order announced last month reparations to some 20 women who said they were sexually, psychologically and spiritually abused by the Rev. Marko Rupnik, who was expelled by the Jesuits in 2023. [SOURCE]

 

Jesuits_Vatican investigator says claims of Jesuit abuse true

 

By NICOLE WINFIELD
Published 2:58 PM EDT, December 19, 2022



ROME (AP) — A Vatican-appointed investigator who helped bring to light decades-old allegations of sexual and spiritual abuse against a famous Jesuit priest is calling for the hierarchs who hid his crimes to “humbly ask the world to forgive the scandal.”

In correspondence obtained Monday, Bishop Daniele Libanori also said the claims of the women about the Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik were true and that they had “seen their lives ruined by the evil suffered and by the complicit silence” of the church.

Libanori penned the letter Sunday to fellow priests after a remarkable week in which the Jesuit religious order of Pope Francis admitted that Rupnik, an artist whose mosaics grace churches and chapels around the world, had been excommunicated for having committed one of the most serious crimes in the church: using the confessional to absolve a woman with whom he had engaged in sexual activity.


The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse cases, declared the excommunication in May 2020 but lifted it that same month and then declined to prosecute him a year later when nine women came forward with other, related allegations. The Congregation, which is headed by Jesuits, said the cases were to old to prosecute.

Libanori, who is himself a Jesuit, uncovered the women’s stories when he was sent in 2019 by the Vatican to conduct an investigation into their troubled community in Slovenia amid complaints about their current leader.








Rupnik, who is Slovene, had helped found the Loyola Community of consecrated women in the 1980s, but was ordered to leave in 1993 for reasons that now appear related to allegations he sexually and spiritually abused the women under his spiritual care there.

Learning of the claims, Libanori urged the women to file formal complaints with the Vatican, resulting in the 2021 case that was ultimately shelved because it was deemed too old to prosecute.


Despite the early exile from Slovenia, Rupnik retained some supporters and a group of women followed him to Rome where he founded a hugely successful art and cultural study center — the Aletti Center, which has its own publishing imprint, Lipa Editions. Rupnik still enjoys a strong web of supporters, some of whom have sought to discredit the Slovene accusers by questioning their mental health, according to another piece of Libanori correspondence.

“It’s ignoble to think of reducing responsibility and diminishing the evil by dismissing those who complain with summary judgments about their mental health or, worse, their seriousness,” Libanori wrote in a Dec. 4 letter to the Slovene community members. “If anything, this makes the responsibility of those who took advantage of them more serious.”

The Rupnik scandal has underscored the weaknesses in the Vatican’s abuse policies concerning spiritual and sexual abuse of adult women, and how powerful priests can often count on high-ranking support even after credible allegations against them are lodged.

Libanori’s correspondence evidences the same playbook used by other accused priests — the Rev. Marcial Maciel and ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for example -- who managed to discredit their accusers for decades by claiming they were unstable, out to hurt them or the church, or were merely spreading slanderous “calumnies.”


Libanori, who is also an auxiliary bishop of Rome, sought to set the record straight in the letter to Italian priests. While saying Rupnik deserves God’s love and mercy, Libanori said his victims deserve to be believed, that the full truth must still come out and that those who protected Rupnik must step up.

“Wounded and offended people, who have seen their lives ruined by the evil suffered and by complicit silence, have the right to have their dignity even publicly restored now that everything has come to light,” Libanori wrote. “We the church have a duty to seriously examine our conscience, and those who are responsible must acknowledge it and humbly ask the world to forgive the scandal.”

The Jesuits, for their part, are asking any other potential victims to come forward with claims.


The Rupnik case appears to be another instance of a charismatic religious leader who helped found a new religious community, only to later be accused of abusing those under his spiritual sway. Pope Francis has been cracking down on the unregulated explosion of such communities that blossomed after the Second Vatican Council and found favor under St. John Paul II.


Francis has launched countless investigations into individual communities, imposed outside leadership on them to implement reforms while making across-the-board term limits on governance positions in lay movements to try to prevent cults of personalities from forming.[SOURCE]

 

Bill Cooper_The Original Red Pill: Lansing, MI address, 1996_pt VI

 

Covid Tales_Dr John Campbell: China tries to flip the script on COVID origins

Bill Cooper_The Original Red Pill: Lansing, MI address, 1996_pt V

 

Covid Tales_Dr John Campbell: The NIH Confirms Our Worst Fears

 

Jesuits: You Know Them By Their Students: How Georgetown affected the truthfulness of Bill Clinton, back when he campaigned as a MAGA guy

 

Bill Clinton addresses a crowd in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992 © AP

Sam Leith

Published: Nov 8 2017

“Believe it or not,” Bill Clinton said in a speech at Georgetown University on Monday, “we thought it was pretty polarised” back in 1992: “we had income inequality, we had alienation, we had unequal opportunities, and we had a lot of social division”. But, as he reflected, America now looks even more polarised. 

It’s 25 years ago this month that the boy from Hope, Arkansas, was elected president of the US — an event that he celebrated from the steps of the Old State House in Little Rock with the resonant pay-off (made possible by his birth town): “I still believe in a place called Hope.” 

He has an enduring reputation as one of the most effective speakers in the modern history of the presidency. But there are two Bill Clintons that we tend to remember, oratorically. There’s the great empathiser who said, “I feel your pain”; and there’s the Jesuitical lawyer who could argue straight-facedly about “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” or redefine “sexual relations” in a hitherto unique way. 

At his most effective, he combined those two things: argument and passion; or logos and pathos, in Aristotelian terms. It’s seldom remembered, for instance, that “I feel your pain” was delivered not in gooey Oprah Winfrey mode but in great anger. On the 1992 campaign trail, the then governor Mr Clinton was heckled by an Aids activist called Bob Rafsky. The sound bite was delivered as part of an angry response to Mr Rafsky’s off-beam jibe that Mr Clinton was “dying of ambition”. 

“Let me tell you something. If I were dying of ambition, I wouldn’t have stood up here and put up with all this crap I’ve put up with for the last six months. I’m fighting to change this country. 

Mr Clinton has always been at his best as a speaker when combining intellectual sinew with well-pitched displays of emotion. 

“And let me tell you something else. Let me tell you something else. You do not have the right to treat any human being, including me, with no respect because of what you’re worried about. I did not cause it. I’m trying to do something about it. I have treated you and all the people who’ve interrupted my rally with a hell of a lot more respect than you’ve treated me, and it’s time you started thinking about that. 

“I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally you’re no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment. If you want something to be done, you ask me a question and you listen. If you don’t agree with me, go support somebody else for President but quit talking to me like that. This is not a matter of personal attack; it’s a matter of human wrong.” 

Here, rather than a passive surrender to empathy, was a venomously articulate call for courtesy, and for active pragmatism over yah-boo displays of feeling. 

And — though in softer and more sinuous mode — he combined a display of feeling with a lawyer’s precision when seeking to turn things around during the investigation into the Lewinsky affair. He chose the occasion of a White House prayer breakfast to mount a shamelessly political fightback, by turning a legal and political issue into a spiritual one. While noting that “I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defence”, he said: “But legal language must not obscure the fact I have done wrong.” 

In a speech at Georgetown university this week, Bill Clinton says America is even more polarised than it was when he became president in 1992 © Reuters

Casting himself as a humble repentant, he quoted scripture, apologised to those he had hurt, and (in a foxy shift of translative stasis) put his spiritual renewal into the hands of God — thus, by implication, raising it above and beyond the petty realm of impeachment proceedings. He even — as a notoriously fluent improviser — made the slightly hammy gesture of reading his remarks from a piece of paper and craving his audience’s indulgence in his wearing his glasses to do so. Here was an object show of human vulnerability, and a token of his seriousness. 

“I was up rather late last night thinking about and praying about what I ought to say today. And rather unusually for me, I actually tried to write it down. So if you will forgive me, I will do my best to say what it is I want to say to you. And I may have to take my glasses out to read my own writing.” 

To his opponents, that speech will have been enragingly brilliant. Mr Clinton, then, has always been at his best as a speaker when combining intellectual sinew with well-pitched displays of emotion. He’s an iron fist in a velvet glove; sentimental as a fox. 

And what of his comparison, in Georgetown, of then with now? Well. It’s curious, and salutary, to look back at the rhetoric of 25 years ago. Did you remember, for instance, that when he accepted the presidential nomination Mr Clinton gave a speech in which he railed against “Washington”, warned that we’re “losing the American dream”, approvingly described “citizens banding together to take their streets and neighbourhoods back” from “crime and drugs”, vowed to “rebuild America”, reform healthcare, “demand fair trade policies”, stick up for the “forgotten middle class” — and ended by promising to “make America great again”? Me neither. But he did. That shows, perhaps, how ideologically flexible the clichés of the political speech can be. [SOURCE]