Jesuit Identity

Ours is a service of faith and of the radical implications of faith in a world where it is becoming easier to settle for something less than faith and less than justice.  We recognize, along with many of our contemporaries, that without faith, without the eye of love, the human world seems too evil for God to be good, for a good God to exist.  But faith recognizes that God is acting, through Christ’s love and the power of the Holy Spirit, to destroy the structures of sin which afflict the bodies and hearts of his children.  Our Jesuit mission touches something fundamental in the human heart:  the desire to find God in a world scarred by sin, and then to live by his Gospel in all its implications.  This, the instinct to live fully in God’s love and thereby to promote a shared, lasting human good, is what we address by our vocation to serve faith and to promote the justice of God’s Kingdom.  Jesus Christ invites us, and through us the people we serve, to move, in conversation of heart, “from solidarity with sin to solidarity with him for humanity,” and to promote the Kingdom in all its aspects.

-- Fr. Peter Hans Kolvenbach, “Our Mission Today and Tomorrow,” Faith Doing Justice:  Promoting Solidarity in Jesuit Ministries (1991), pp. 48f.