FOR THE past six years Father David Smolira has had a lot on his plate. It has not been an easy time to be the leader of Britain’s Jesuits. He has had to face the serious problem of declining numbers.
The Society of Jesus, of course, is used to crises. It was founded by St Ignatius of Loyola, a Basque nobleman turned mystic, in the 1530s, the decade in which Henry VIII declared himself in charge of the Church of England. The Jesuits first arrived on British soil during the reign of Elizabeth I and paid for it with their blood. They came to be demonised in English folklore but were also the pride of a Church grateful to them for keeping the faith alive in the midst of persecution.
The Jesuits today are controversial only in their enthusiasm for what their conservative critics regard as ideological and theological fads. Whether or not this is justified, they have gone from being the country’s biggest, most powerful, most confident and most prosperous Roman Catholic religious order, with 900 members in 1939, to little more than a sideshow. There are now 230 Jesuits in the British province, yet within five years there will be no more than 75 under the age of 75, and a high proportion of these will be over the age of 60. Just one British novice is in training for the British province.
It is against this background that Father Smolira is searching for a successor. He began on January 7 when he sent each Jesuit a letter outlining ten qualities required of the new provincial superior, and asked them to name a candidate. Father Smolira is looking for a priest who will “continue to withdraw from some works . . . so that we are able to respond to new apostolic needs”. He also wants an “internationalist” who will seek to make the province “ more strongly integrated into the European Jesuit mission” — a hint that the British Jesuits may eventually merge with neighbouring provinces, such as the Dutch, which are witnessing similar patterns of decline.
A “consult” of February 21 will consider the replies and a “terna”, a shortlist of three, will be drawn up four days later with Father Smolira’s preferred candidate (the priest most likely to succeed him) at the top. This will go to Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach, the Jesuit Father General in Rome, who will make a final decision.
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Although the matter is far from decided, three clear candidates for the position are emerging. They are Father Michael Holman, former Headmaster of Wimbledon College, London; Father Paul Hamill, superior of the Jesuit community in West Hampstead, London; and Father Brendan Callaghan, superior of the community of the Sacred Heart, Wimbledon.
Whoever is nominated will be handed a rather poisoned chalice, though hardly any less bitter than that from which Father Smolira himself had to drink. His appointment as Provincial in 1999 coincided with a police investigation into abuse allegations at Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit public school in Lancashire. He has since laboured over the rationalisation of the society in the light of its evaporating manpower. The latest casualty of this was Corpus Christi, a flourishing parish in Brixton Hill, South London. Father Smolira turned up at each Mass on January 23 to announce that the Jesuits will hand over the church to the Archdiocese of Southwark this summer. The next provincial may have to consider the possible closure of St Beuno’s in North Wales, one of three Jesuit retreat centres.
Father Holman is rumoured by some to be Smolira’s choice. At 50, he is just one year older than the Provincial and was his contemporary at Wimbledon College. A left-leaning but thoroughly orthodox priest who preaches well, he is spoken of as a gentleman who was a “brilliant” headmaster of his alma mater. However, he has never been a superior, therefore failing to meet a key criterion stipulated by Father Smolira.
If Father Smolira has groomed any Jesuit as his successor, it is Father Hamill, the son of a Chief Constable of Glasgow. It was Smolira who made Hamill, 47, a superior then appointed him first as vocations promoter and then assistant for development. Father Hamill was part of Father Smolira’s inner circle when it was decided to close Campion House College, the seminary in Osterley, Middlesex; to withdraw priests from all but a few schools; to hand over parishes in Lancashire and Wiltshire to their respective dioceses; and to close down The Month, the magazine that first published Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius. Alongside such pruning has been a major investment into a home for the elderly in Boscombe, near Bournemouth, to look after the growing number of Jesuit priests who need geriatric care. It was under Father Hamill, however, that vocations to the Jesuit novitiate dried up.
The most eminently qualified of the three favourites is Father Callaghan, the Stonyhurst-educated son of a Liverpool doctor. He was principal of Heythrop College, London, for 12 years and, as a chartered clinical psychologist, he remains the course co-ordinator for the MA in psychology of religion there. Callaghan, 56, is admired as a first-class “man manager”, a caring pastor who would be sensitive to the needs of an ageing province. His judgment has been questioned in some quarters, however, over his role in the appointment in 2002 of a self-proclaimed Wiccan “high priestess” to lecture at Heythrop on the psychology of religion, a move which attracted criticism as having perhaps stretched interfaith dialogue a little too far.
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Father Smolira told the faithful in Brixton that the Jesuit vocation could be understood only in terms of “mission”. They were the pioneering missionaries who ushered in the Church of the Counter-Reformation. They go, Father Smolira said, where need is greatest, where the work is not being done by others and where God can best be served. The new provincial, however, must discern how this can be achieved without the order dying out.