Santa Clara University

Convocation Speech 1999

Justice in Jesuit Education Today:
Integrating the Hunger for Truth and Bread
September 17, 1999
Paul Locatelli, S.J.

Introduction

Artists, poets and novelists try to pierce the cloud of unknowing, giving us light to see the truth about our world. They can jar our hearts, minds and imaginations.

Denise Levertov saw the presence of God in a simple gesture when she wrote:

Again before thy altar, silent
Lord Thy presence is made known
by untraced interventions
like those legendary baskets filled with bread and wine, discovered
at the door by someone at wit’s end
returning home empty-handed
after a day of looking for work.¹

In the “untraced intervention” Levertov saw a glimpse of divinity, a presence that shined out from the simple gift. She invites us to see something gracious and mysterious in our work as we begin this academic year.

The pursuit of knowledge, the restlessness of creative thinking, the struggle to teach the full truth of our human condition can have a surprising depth. The poet’s perspective can help us see that all this is a gift, as we invite our students to greater competence, more discerning conscience, and more responsive compassion.

Building on her poem, I want to use as the theme for this talk: integrating the hunger for truth with the hunger for bread. The hunger for truth we can live by is bound up with the hunger for bread, for the justice that makes it possible to live with human dignity. That hunger for justice relies upon finding the truth about the world we live in and how it can be transformed.

On the edge of the 21st century, this integration gives Jesuit education a distinctive purpose. It demands that we expand our intellectual inquiry to include the full range of human experience: from technological progress and a global economy to the hunger and frustration that plague an ever increasing number of poor.

Now that we live in a world where over a billion people survive on a dollar a day or less, addressing the hunger for truth must also include satisfying the hunger for bread. But the drive for a more humane and just world seeks more than bread. It also seeks to know the truth that will liberate us from illusion and ideology.

In an age marked by rapid, constant change, the tradition of Jesuit education remains anchored in the fundamental question of humanistic education: “How ought I to live?”² Martha Nussbaum reminds us that this question is as old as Socrates. This question is not confined to the humanities because every discipline in the university has a humanizing aim. Every field of study can help free us to live a richer and more profoundly human life. An education inspired by Christian humanism goes further when it seeks coherence between the sacredness of life and a moral vision for a humane society.

Today, humanistic education³ necessarily includes the questions of social justice because the personal question, “How should I live?” has exploded into the global question: “How should all of us live?”

Our faith commitment as a Jesuit and Catholic university calls us to address these questions as integral to our search for truth. As early as 1975, a world-wide meeting of Jesuits, called a General Congregation, sought to identify one integrating principle for every Jesuit ministry. They declared the comprehensive mission for all the works of the Society of Jesus to be “the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.” That historic document went on to say that “reconciliation with God demands the reconciliation of people with one another.”⁴ Jesuits had been having these meetings for four hundred years. This time voices from Latin America, Asia and Africa were more strongly represented. They articulated what Jesuit scholar Jon Sobrino calls “the irruption of the poor into history.”⁵

A generation later, in 1995, Jesuits at the most recent Congregation affirmed and expanded the understanding of “the promotion of justice.” They cautioned that the vision linking faith with justice “transcends notions of justice derived from ideology, philosophy, or particular political movements.”⁶ While reaffirming what had been said 20 years earlier about socio-economic and political structures,⁷ they went on to include new dimensions of justice in our world.⁸

Justice arising from a faith commitment now includes ecological concerns, global interdependence, human rights of the marginalized, and a special concern for the social situation of women. They asserted that international human rights are grounded in a biblical vision, because “respect for the dignity of the human person created in the image of God underlies the growing international consciousness of the full range of human rights.”

The hunger for bread, for the very means of survival, should inspire us to hunger for a truthful response to the question “How should all of us live?” We can learn something from Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote in As kingfishers catch fire: “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: . . . Crying What I do is one: for that I came. I say more: The just man justices . . .”⁹

As a university, we must say more and do more. Justice seeks to understand the complex causes of human misery. Justice is not a partisan or ideological issue but the working out of the truth about our human condition. No university can pretend to be preparing its students for life in the 21st century global society unless it educates them for conscience and compassion as well as for scholarly competence. Our challenge is to foster dialogue as a community of scholars, to understand and act on truth. To flesh this out, I want to consider three sets of questions.

I: The historical location of justice in Jesuit education

The first question then is, Does the pursuit of justice have a historical location in Jesuit education? This tradition’s concern for justice arises from two historical sources: Renaissance humanism and the spirituality of Ignatius of Loyola.

The humanism of that day believed that education should have a moral as well as an intellectual impact on students. Jesuit colleges thrived because they related the secular learning of western civilization to the intellectual and spiritual traditions of Christianity.¹⁰ What evolved was a Christian humanism in which an intimate relationship existed between good literature and virtuous living.¹¹ The belief was that education would leaven society as yeast leavens bread.

The first Jesuit educators believed that art and especially literature would have an abiding impact on students’ moral character because it extended their sympathies and raised their aspirations.¹² Rhetoric would train students to be eloquent and active in civic life. They would be equipped to hear the arguments of others in civic dialogue. This interchange would support the common good of society and forge the coalitions to achieve it.

Ignatian spirituality believed that the path to God leads through serious engagement in the world. Humans cooperate with a God who enters the world to rescue it from slavery and who labors constantly in the world to bring all things to completion. God is radically and pervasively engaged in human affairs, drawing us to a fuller life through the lure of natural beauty and human aspiration and healing the divisions that fragment us.¹³

By linking the humanism of the Renaissance with the liberating message of Christianity, God is seen as working in everything, and God can be encountered everywhere. Ignatius’ vision of the world as teeming with grace inspired the early Jesuits and their lay colleagues to teach in universities, to minister to prisoners and public leaders alike, to write plays and scholarly articles, to work with the marginalized of society. No human activity was excluded because they believed as Terrence did: “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Today, humanism in Jesuit education encounters a radically different world. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor captures a pivotal difference between learning in the time of the Renaissance and learning today. The sixteenth century humanist saw truth more as a transcendent relationship with God and less as an imperative to change social institutions and public policy. It’s Jesus who cites the Hebrew scriptures: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Dostoevsky, who personally experienced extreme poverty, saw that the hunger for bread can itself be a path to truth. The Inquisitor sees that the hungry long for more than bread, they want “bread from heaven and human freedom.” Even under the burden of poverty and deprivation, the human spirit strives to claim its radical right to be human, to be free to hope and live in dignity.¹⁴

While the goal of Jesuit education remains humanistic, it must be interpreted for the 21st century. A truly humane education today continues to advance the best of human expression and achievement but it also addresses the darker side of human history. It acknowledges that our remarkable advances in knowledge and communication, in science and technology have not solved illiteracy and hunger, oppression and the digital divide. This growing divide reminds us of Chesterton’s warning that while “the honest poor can sometimes forget poverty...The honest rich can never forget it.”¹⁵

It will take every discipline in the university to address what our world needs. Dostoevsky’s homeland is a case in point. Russia, like all cultures, needs to retain its reflective spirit and poetry, but it also needs stable economic policies, environmental restoration, public health and psychological services, sound business practices, nutritional sciences, the rule of law, democratic parliamentary procedures, respect for individual freedom, and above all, a sense of the common good. The basic question, “How should all of us live?’ can only be answered by listening to the truths of political science, economics, engineering, natural sciences, and every area of study.

The deepest quest for learning comes out of a hunger for bread and for truth. Let me now turn to the way we address that hunger in the university, which is primarily through deep and sustained dialogue with one another.

II: Dialogue as a path integrating the truth of justice

The second question then is, What is the path to bring together the hunger for truth and bread? A genuine university dialogue must represent the whole spectrum of ideas about justice and about our deepest convictions. There can be no single answer to such a complex question.

Justice is not the property of the left or of the right. Justice will appropriately mean different things to different people. It is imperative, however, that a Jesuit and Catholic university bring those different voices into conversation in its most basic sense. We should not let our diverse views of justice obscure what should be our driving common concern: How can we educate our students to engage their world with human compassion and professional competence?

The path to this more comprehensive learning is, as I said in my convocation last year, dialogue that ultimately moves us to act justly. We need dialogue, characterized by both candor and scholarly inquiry, to discover the truth of justice. Unfortunately, genuine dialogue has become increasingly difficult in universities world-wide where disciplines speak different languages and departmental boundaries have become increasingly rigid. Faculty research agendas are often set more by the interests of the guild and grantsmanship than by the needs of students or society. Socrates might be concerned about character development, but regrettably, Socrates would not publish enough to get tenure.

Let us be frank. Academic specialization is not the sole obstacle to dialogue. Speaking about faith and justice raises the specter of indoctrination and ideology among many faculty of good will at Jesuit universities. Any talk about integrating “faith” and “justice” raises the awkward questions, “Whose faith?” and “Whose justice?” What looks like justice to Milton Friedman looks like injustice to Amartya Sen. The world according to sociobiologist Edward Osborne Wilson is different from that of Maya Angelou.

Many faculty fear that behind the humane rhetoric of Jesuit General Congregations and administrators there is really only one acceptable meaning of faith and only one acceptable notion of justice. They suspect that any non-Christian or non-religious framework of meaning will not be taken seriously. Some suspect that justice has been narrowed down to a progressive, even socialist, program of radical reform. No wonder they are reluctant to enter this discussion. Why sit down at the table if you think that the deck is stacked against you?

The usual way that Jesuit universities respond to this reluctance about discussing faith and justice is to bracket the question of faith and try for consensus on justice. I do not believe that genuine dialogue about justice can occur by bracketing the question of faith. Our views of justice are inevitably shaped by our fundamental convictions about reality, that is, by the various “faiths” that we have.

For secular persons, these convictions about reality serve the same intellectual function that religious faith does for theists. Whether we call them faith or not, these convictions set the framework within which we operate in our lives and academic disciplines. Every one of us makes basic assumptions about the nature of the world and human beings, about how we can find coherence, about what is worth living and working for. These assumptions usually stay in the background, but they influence everything we do.

Dialogue works when all parties are assured that their basic assumptions are acknowledged and respected -- not necessarily agreed with, but respected. The parties to genuine dialogue need to admit the limitations of their own positions. The recent General Congregation urged candor about the limits of religious perspectives. It recognized the need to cooperate with those who have no connection with organized religion and yet share a concern for the future of humanity.¹⁶ They must be a welcomed part of the dialogue.

We must realize that those who profess the same religious creed, even Jesuits, may have very different assumptions about reality. Some find “faith and justice” an unwelcome intrusion into the academy. To others it sounds like a call to politicize the university by advocating left-wing ideology. Others are frankly embarrassed that enough is not being done. Because of the seeming lack of commitment to the integrating principle of faith doing justice, some charge that Jesuit universities have out-lived their purpose. And a few even propose a more otherworldly notion of justice¹⁷ which is minimally responsible for promoting social justice. So even those who share a common faith need to dialogue openly and respectfully.

The pursuit of truth for justice gains an added urgency in Jesuit-Catholic universities where the pursuit takes on a transcendent, ultimate dimension. Faith tells us that these hungers are rooted in God’s desire that all should live fully and that God labors through us in the world to bring this about. In this sort of university we should be free to pursue questions that usually cannot be raised in the academy: what are our basic convictions about reality? What are the different faith-stances that shape our positions on justice?

We have a better chance to hear truth when the dialogue includes a diversity of voices. Conversation among people from a variety of religions, cultures, classes and experiences will enhance our understanding of truth. That inclusive conversation would expand our teaching and research so that we not only learn about the neglected of the earth but also begin to learn from them.

E. M. Forster, in Howards End, criticizes an aloof approach when he writes, “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”¹⁸ In fact, the poor are people, not statistics.

We must be open to learn from people typically without voice in society. Imagine how much we would learn if our academic dialogue included those of whom W.E.B. Du Bois wrote: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”¹⁹

To hear the voices of the poor is part of educating the whole person. “Faith and justice” cannot be understood as a curricular tack-on, not as something left to Campus Ministry or co-curricular education, not an obligatory rhetorical flourish, nor a mode of volunteerism. These concerns must be a fundamental reality to be probed and understood and lived out.

In an Integrated Education, justice linked to faith must be the horizon, the basic framework for every pursuit. It is not limited to dialogue in philosophy and religious studies classes. Rather, the hunger for truth and for bread can become systemic to all that we do as a university.

Every discipline can make its unique contribution to the overriding question of how all of us should live. This university administration will support our commitment by repeatedly raising the question and by allocating the university’s resources to enhance the full search for truth and address these concerns. Student life and alumni programs must be part of this educational effort.

Santa Clara ought to be one place to search for congruence between what we know and believe, between what we know and say, and between what we believe and do. We will not find a single answer to the question, “How should all of us live?” But through this question, we will draw our diverse pursuits together in our teaching and research.

III: Integrating justice into teaching and research?

My third question is, Can universities legitimately integrate the concern for justice into teaching and research? This is a major question we face. Clearly, Santa Clara must address the hunger for bread as a university -- not as a bakery, social agency, community service organization, meditation center, or parish.

At our Commencement in 1982, Ignacio Ellacuria, S. J., the martyred President of the Jesuit University of Central America, spoke eloquently about how a university should connect the hungers for truth and bread. He said:

We, as an intellectual community, must analyze causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover remedies; communicate to our public a consciousness that inspires the freedom of self-determination; educate professionals with a conscience who will be the immediate instruments of transformation; and continually hone an educational institution that is academically excellent and ethically oriented.²⁰

Ellacuria’s vision was prophetic and practical. As we seek to enhance Santa Clara’s distinctive excellence, we have a number of general areas for dialogue where we need to make sure that the commitment to truth and justice and faith converge.

They have to converge when the university community speaks and acts justly, for example, in its investment policies. They have to guide community service programs that seek to alleviate the culture of poverty. And they converge at the heart of the university: in academic programs including community-based learning like the Eastside Project and in teaching and research.

This latter area is the most important arena for us, as a university, to examine questions of justice, faith and truth. Let me suggest an issue for dialogue that could engage all these concerns. Consider the issue of “Economic Realities and California Life.” We are living in one of the world’s great economies in a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity. This booming economy has an enormous impact on how we live and in many ways dictates how we are to live. It is a fertile topic for probing interdisciplinary inquiry.

On the micro level, individuals and families are feeling the strain of increasing work loads and commute times. Silicon Valley demands long hours of work from its engineers and entrepreneurs, and often from service employees as well. It is easy to believe recent reports that Americans work more hours than any other nationality.²¹ What impact is this having on children, marriage, and life-beyond-work?

On the macro level, economic realities are driving the way we live in California. White collar immigrants come to the corporations while others cross the border to work in our fields. Manufacturing goes off-shore and capital flows through global channels as some local corporations get bought up. Young people are concerned about direct community service, but lose interest in voting and public affairs, convinced that they make little or no difference. All these dimensions of the problem have serious moral consequences both for those who are prospering from this economy and those who have been left out of the current boom.

Imagine bringing scholars from a variety of disciplines together with leaders from business and the community, from politics and the professions. Imagine beginning a dialogue on these issues not from assumptions about markets or economic methodologies that drive the conclusions, but with the experience of people who are directly affected. Imagine including around the table working parents and migrant families who are hungry because the strawberries and grapes are not ready for picking. These voices would give an urgency and reality to achieving a resolution that would otherwise be missing.

Listen to Francisco Jiménez writing about what it meant to his family when his father was out of work in the Central Valley a few decades ago:

“Sometimes, in the evenings, we went into town... to look for food in the trash behind grocery stores. We picked up fruits and vegetables that had been thrown away because they were partly spoiled. Mamá sliced off the rotten parts and made soup with the good vegetable pieces, mixing them with bones she bought at the butcher shop. She made up a story and told the butcher the bones were for the dog. The butcher must have known the bones were for us and not a dog because he left more and more pieces of meat on the bones each time Mamá went back.”²²

A dialogue that included all those voices would point to different policies than a conversation limited to academic theorists and business forecasters and policy makers.

Of course, this complex issue needs sophisticated economic and ethical analysis and debate. Assumptions about markets, human dignity, a living wage, and the distribution of wealth in a global economy would also have to be put on the table. In a university like Santa Clara, the dialogue would require an understanding of the different assumptions about justice. It would unearth different models of justice that are buried in diverse economic theories and practices. People of good will would come to see that some understandings of justice may not be compatible.

Neo-liberal economic policies would be hard to reconcile with a philosophy that saw human beings as profoundly social and interdependent. Some might see economic forces as inexorable laws that cannot be tampered with, while others might argue that such a conviction is as much an act of faith as any religious assertion. Nevertheless, the conversation could still seek some common ground. In the end, choices would have to be made that reflected the diverse reality of California, choices based on evidence and looking toward social consequences.²³

Other topics lend themselves to dialogue and will be opportunities for substantive, on-going dialogue about critical issues we face as a university and society. Our Sesquicentennial is a real opportunity for dialogue, for example, on the themes of our three major conferences.

In Fall 2000 there will be a conference on justice in higher education. In Winter 2001 one on ethics in the contemporary world, focusing especially on justice in the workplace and the moral development of young people. And in Spring 2001 a conference on the interplay of technology and society, especially how that relationship impacts the quality of life.

And, imagine how your department or area of service would enter into this dialogue in the university? What contribution could you make to this pressing question that is affecting all of our students? There are courses and research occurring on campus that address these questions. How can we make them more visible and interconnected? How can the individuals involved in such classes and scholarship become more connected to others to foster our dialogue?

Conclusion

I want to conclude with a comment about the end of Isak Dinesen’s story that you saw: “Babette’s Feast.” Babette was a famous French chef who has become a humble cook to two pious and elderly sisters in Denmark. When she wins ten thousand francs in a lottery, Babette chooses to spend it all on a lavish feast for the sisters and their small circle of devout Christians. Observing the huge amount of foods and wines arriving from Paris, one sister goes to each of the invited guests, urging them to pay no attention to the expensive fare. She feared that this radical departure from their simple way of life would offend God.

An epicurean Army general who once was in love with one of the sisters has also been invited to the feast. The general finds in the miracle of Babette’s culinary talents both ecstatic pleasure and the spirituality he long ago rejected. Elated by Babette’s artistry, the general offers a toast from Psalm 85. “Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together,”... “Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

Despite their initial reserve, the congregation of ascetical believers gradually discover in the feast a religious experience that brings them to quit judging others and reconcile their differences. And Babette is satisfied because, as she says, she is “a great artist,” and artists are never poor for this is what she does, regardless of what others think.

“Babette’s Feast” merges the seeming incongruities of food and faith, wine and reconciliation. It shows that our hunger for bread often signals a hunger for all that we need: human dignity, truth, and a just, reconciled world.

My hope is that our dialogue will integrate the hungers for truth and understanding, knowledge and faith, justice and bread. Then, we will be educating graduates who will fashion a society, more humane and more just.

Thank you and have a great year.

Endnotes:

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1. Denise Levertov, The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes, Altars, (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1997), p. 30.

2. See Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

3. See Michael J. Buckley, S.J., The Catholic University as Promise and Project: Reflections in a Jesuit Idiom. (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1999) especially Part III.

4. Documents of the 31st and 32th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995). [GC32, D4]

5. See Jon Sobrino, SJ, “Spirituality and the Following of Jesus” in Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology ed. By Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J., and Jon Sobrino, S.J. (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), pp. 677-701.

6. Documents of the 34th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995). [D3]

7. Ibid. There is a new challenge to our apostolic mission in a world increasingly interdependent but, for all that, divided by injustice: injustice not only personal but institutionalized: built into economic, social, and political structures that dominate the life of nations and the international.

8. Documents of the 34th General Congregation, D3 & 14. Complementary Norms, Part VII, 247 p. 271/2.
* human rights and the safeguarding of human life itself from the “culture of death,”
* new consequences of the interdependence of people in the global market economy,
* the quality of life and culture of poor people as well as a reaffirmation of the preferential option for the poor,
* the influence of the media in the service of justice,
* the ecological preservation of the environment and creation itself,
* the tragic marginalization of nations and the need for freedom, peace and security as well as the concern for refugees.

Concerned for the present and future generations, they saw the importance of “preserving the integrity of creation... Ecological equilibrium and a sustainable, equitable use of the world’s resources are important elements of justice towards all the communities in our present ‘global village.’” [GC34, D3, n58] And, solidarity with the poor was again confirmed for “full human liberation, for the poor and for us all... [Such liberation] lies in the development of communities of solidarity at the grass-roots and nongovernmental as well as the political level, where we can all work together towards total human development.” [GC34, D3, n59]

9. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie, (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), Fourth Edition, p. 90.

10. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 3. In Jesuit education we see the dual influence of the “spiritual experiences of Ignatius and the cultural, social and religious challenges of Renaissance and Reformation Europe.”

11. O’Malley, p. 208.

12. Very Rev. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J. “Ignatian Pedagogy Today.” p. 1.

13. This spirituality finds its most developed expression in the “Contemplation for Obtaining Love” in The Spiritual Exercises, Par 230-237.

14. Anne Freemantle, introduction to Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor (New York: Continuum, 1993), xi, xii.

15. Gilbert K. Chesterton, “Cockneys and their jokes,” in All Things Considered (London: Methuen and Company, 1908).

16. On the importance of inter-religious dialogue and justice, the members of 34th GC said: “Our involvement in the promotion of justice takes place in a world in which the problems of injustice, exploitation, and destruction of the environment have taken on global dimensions. Religions have also been responsible for these sinful elements. Hence our commitment to justice and peace, human rights, and the protection of the environment has to be made in collaboration with believers of other religions. We believe that religions contain a liberating potential which, through interreligious collaboration, could create a more humane world.” [GC34, D5, n8].

17. Martin Tripole, S.J., Promise Renewed: Jesuit Higher Education for a New Millennium (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999), p. 10.

18. E.M. Forster, Howards End, (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1921), ch. VI.

19. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) ch. 1.

20. Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J., Commencement Address as Santa Clara University (1982).

21. “Week in Review” New York Times, Sunday, September 5, 1999.

22. Francisco Jiménez, The Circuit: Stories from the life of a migrant child,(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), p. 51.

23. Karen Lebacqz, Six Theories of Justice: Perspectives from Philosophical and Theological Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1986). Lebacqz provides excellent philosophical and theological perspectives for six theories of justice.