Fr Adolfo Nicolas, whom we called Nico, very rarely spoke about himself. Even when he was sick, his interest was in others. When I last met him in October 2018, in the Japanese Province infirmary in Kamishakujii, along with the Major Superiors of Asia Pacific, he was overjoyed to see old friends. He was laughing, smiling, trying, despite the impediments of his degenerative disease, to talk. When I asked him how he was, he answered briefly, but then steered the conversation to me and my new assignment, to what was happening in the Conference and the Society, to other people in the Curia, especially Fr. General Arturo Sosa.
He was the living embodiment to me of something the philosopher Kierkegaard once said: the door to happiness only opens outward.
I wonder, then, whether he would be happy with a tribute that focuses on him. I hope he might be more accepting of this effort, though, when he understands that I write, not so much to praise him, but to take stock of and to thank God for the gifts he brought and the lessons he taught to the Society, to so many whose lives he touched, and to me. I would like to limit myself to his leadership style, his understanding of mission, and his spiritual wisdom and witness.
A leadership style
I must confess that, in the eight years I served him as Assistant, his administrative style would sometimes frustrate me, particularly because of what I rightly or wrongly perceived as his resistance to certain more “corporate” ways of organizational leadership. (He once told CLC members that his “most American” councilor was Danny Huang, and I suspect that may have been because of my over-insistence on strategy and process.)
However, looking back, I now particularly appreciate two things that he practiced and taught me about leadership. First was his refusal to be submerged by day to day business, and his constant insistence on regular deeper reflection and analysis on the context and challenges of mission. The Curia was and is a well-oiled machine designed to respond to the numerous governance decisions that have to be made in the life and mission of the international Society of Jesus. No one worked harder than Nico in dealing with the voluminous correspondence that flooded into the Curia, seeking the General’s guidance and decisions on leadership, finances, institutions, communities, persons.
But Nico was always searching for ways to rise above, as it were, the quotidian; to find time and space for himself and for his collaborators to reflect more deeply on what was happening in the Church and in the world. Whether it was through his reflection group with professors at the Gregorian University, with his committee of experts in inter-religious dialogue, or with a small committee on mission, Nico wanted to identify and understand present problems and possibilities, in order to imagine fresh responses. One of his favorite images was the armor of Saul: David could not go out to meet Goliath weighed down by armor designed for someone else. Whether the Society was being weighed down by the armor of Saul in facing a new world and its challenges was one of the questions he struggled with and invited us to face.
The second aspect of Nico’s leadership, borne of his own humility and complete absence of ego, was his creation of a culture of participation and teamwork in the Curia. When we had all arrived in Rome, Nico decided that we begin our work as a Council with an eight-day retreat together in January of 2009, marked by daily faith sharing, and after that, three days of sharing with one another about our vocation stories and our lives—as though we were tertians! That beginning (and the continuing practice of annual retreats together) changed everything: we were no longer strangers or mere work colleagues; we began to grow as an apostolic community of friends in the Lord. Under Nico, the Curia saw a blossoming of numerous small committees, in which issues facing the universal Society were dealt with collegially. Through those committees—for formation, for restructuring of Provinces and Regions, for secondary and higher education, for social justice and ecology, for financial solidarity, to name but a few—we learned to collaborate with one another, and regional assistants functioned as General Councilors as well, with an eye to the concerns of the universal Society, and not just their assistancies. Today, under Fr General Arturo Sosa, the Curia continues to function through these and other new committees. I think this was Nico’s most enduring contribution to the General Curia.
A missionary reflecting on mission
Although the phrase has been in use by missiologists for decades, I think it is safe to say that it was Nico who decisively introduced the expression and the idea of the Missio Dei to Jesuit circles. Just yesterday, a Jesuit friend from Peru sent me his tribute to Nico and mentioned what Nico has taught him about the Missio Dei. Nico reminded us that mission is not, first of all, the mission of the Society or even of the Church. It is the mission of God, what God is doing in the world to heal and save, a great work in which he calls for collaborators, such as Jesuits, lay people, even those belonging to other religions or with no religion. Nico used this idea to promote collaboration, not just as a tactical move by a Society with diminishing numbers, but as a reverent recognition of God’s work and universal call. I suspect it also gave him the generally hopeful outlook he had in facing new developments in the world. I remember being profoundly struck by a talk he gave (perhaps to a Magis gathering) on youth ministry, in which, refreshingly, he did not approach the youth as a problem Jesuits and the Church had to solve. Rather, he insisted that the first thing for us to do is to be sensitive to and to discern what God is doing in the young people of today, and to begin from there.
Several times and in different venues, Nico spoke about his experience of being a missionary in Japan. It was probably the most decisive experience of his life. When he arrived in Japan as a young man, he found everything that he knew about life, about people, about God, questioned and challenged; and he had to relativize and rethink many of his cultural and even theological assumptions as he entered this completely different culture. Yet, he always saw this painful process as a gift. In 2012, during the Congregation of Procurators in Nairobi, he gave a brilliant final intervention on creativity in the Society (which unfortunately has never been published), in which he insisted that “creativity has to do with the ability to move intellectually and operationally from one mental or cultural frame to another.” He often said that that those who only know one mental or cultural frame remain prisoners of that frame, and cannot imagine or respect possibilities outside that frame. I know that he knew Jesuits, even those who had gone to foreign countries as missionaries, who remained “single-frame persons.” Perhaps he so stressed exposure to provinces outside that of one’s origin for young Jesuits precisely in order to liberate our brothers from the prison of the single-frame, and to form creativity, openness, and respect.
I recall that during one Synod on evangelization that he participated in, his greatest frustration was the lack of an honest and sustained attempt to confront the mistakes of the Church in its history of evangelization. When I last met him in Tokyo in 2018, he was delighted to know that I had been assigned to the Faculty of Missiology of the Gregorian University, and when I asked him whether there was something I needed to pay attention to, his answer was clear. Two things, he said: “First, learn from the mistakes of the Church (even Francis Xavier was wrong in some things!), and second, begin with a healthy respect for other religions.” It is only now that I am ending my first semester teaching a course in missiology (which was not my own field of training) that I see how absolutely correct Nico was. Not only were serious mistakes made by the Church in its praiseworthy zeal to bring the Gospel to Asia, Africa, Latin America, but there has been a breathtaking absence of a culture of self-critique in the Church, no sustained practice of what the Germans call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (“working off the past”). This has allowed some of those unhelpful mindsets of the past to mutate into new forms today.
Nico was aware of a growing secularism in our contemporary world, but I find his response encouraging. In a speech he gave at the Gregorian University in 2014, at a joint event sponsored with Sophia University in Tokyo, Nico pointed to a video on YouTube in which he watched someone teach the appreciation of classical music to a group of business executives. The lecture ended with those with absolutely no previous exposure to or capacity to appreciate classical music enthusiastically applauding a Chopin etude! He concluded, if it is possible to teach a capacity to “listen” to classical music, then we too, in this secularized world, must begin by helping people of today rediscover a sensitivity to the Transcendent, help them “listen” to the deeper dimensions of life beyond the material and the instrumental, where they might encounter God.
A teacher and witness of wisdom
From one point of view, there is no great mystery to Nico. He always taught people to be themselves, and he practiced what he preached. With Nico, what you saw was what you got. There was no pretense to him at all, nothing political or calculating, and the remarkable thing was he was always the same Nico whether he was relating with cardinals or with cooks. He was always himself: humble, happy, free, caring. Yet, isn’t that—this humility, joy, freedom, compassion, this utter consistency–precisely the mystery?
The more I think of Nico, the more I realize that this was his greatest gift to me and to the Society: a profound spiritual wisdom, incarnate in his person that, in the final analysis, is perhaps his most lasting legacy. He himself was the lesson. In him, one saw the ideal, the process, and the fruit.
The ideal. Perhaps Nico’s favorite words, both deeply evangelical and Ignatian, were “service” and “servant.” “I have always liked (Gospel) texts that invite us to serve others,” he wrote in one of his last writings before going back to the Province Infirmary in Japan. “How can we help, and how can we help in a deep way?” were the questions he always brought up in his conferences and talks.
I think being a servant, being devoted to service, meant two things for Nico. First, it meant giving everything, being totally for the other. I will never forget the homily he preached in Manila in 2009, when he visited the Province for the 150th anniversary of the return of the Jesuits to the Philippines. It was a rare personal glimpse into his heart. “When I was elected General,“ he confided, “I felt this was the last chance the Lord was giving me to finally ‘Give it all.’ I never contemplated the possibility. As the day approached and I began to see that things could get complicated, I was convinced I could easily decline and withdraw. But when the hour came, I could not flee. Even now I am not sure I did the right thing accepting. But I felt deep down in my heart that this was the last call. You take it, or miss the flight of your life. It was time to give, time to love and serve, time to be grateful for everything received, time to give back, or rather, to let the Lord take back.”
It is no wonder that, in a very striking sentence, in Nairobi, in 2012, Nico insisted that the health of the Society of Jesus depended only on this: whether Jesuits continue to have the ability to give absolutely everything to the Lord, as Ignatius did.”
The second aspect of servanthood for Nico was humility, giving everything but humbly, without self-promotion or calling attention to oneself. In one of his unpublished letters which I will say more about later, Nico wrote: “The biggest and most central distraction of all is the self. . .. We can safely say that the Ego is the biggest source of distractions as we journey through life.” That is why Nico had what Fr Mark Raper insightfully described as an aversion to any sign of Jesuit triumphalism, any boasting about how good we are, or how much better we are than others in the Church. Again, Nico wrote, “We should be so convinced of our ‘undeservedness’ that we spontaneously choose the last places in the banquet and speak from the heart what I consider the central text of service: ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’ All the rest is superfluous.”
The process. Nico learned from his dialogue with Buddhism that words are cheap and having the right words or ideas is no guarantee of real enlightenment. More than once, I heard him say that one of the most common temptations of Jesuits, who are intelligent and articulate, is to falsely conclude that, just because we understand the words and the concepts and can even speak about them eloquently, we already possess the reality. He often repeated that in Asia, religion is above all, a way, a transformative practice, a path to follow towards enlightenment. Nico’s concern was the transformation of the heart, not just of the mind, for all that he prized intellect and thought intensely. In one of his most memorable sentences in an interview he gave early on in his generalate, Nico said: “If the heart is right, one can throw in into the dark, and it will find its way.”
Nico was convinced that Ignatian spirituality is precisely “a spirituality of change, growth and transformation in Christ.” He was concerned, however, about Jesuit over-work and over-extension, which blocked this process of transformation. Surprisingly, in his de Statu of 2012, Nico insisted that “one of the primary challenges” facing the Society today is the “recovery of the spirit of silence.” Not the imposed external silence that would make Jesuit houses monasteries, but rather silence in “the hearts of our men.” “In a very true sense,” he said, “we need the ability to become ourselves silence, emptiness, an open space that the Word of God can fill, and the Spirit of God can set on fire for the good of others and of the Church.”
In a wonderful video addressed to the scholastics and brothers of Arrupe International Residence, where he had his final apostolic assignment before retiring to the infirmary, Nico advised them to do two things. First, be yourself; second, let Christ in. Let Christ in to transform you, knowing that this will take time, much time, much prayer, much suffering. Another time, I heard him tell scholastics to accept even bad superiors! Referencing his own experience in Japan as a young Jesuit, he said, “We will try in Rome to get you good superiors. But don’t be afraid if once in a while you get a bad superior. Because that bad superior will cause you to suffer, and that suffering can make you go deeper into yourself, into your vocation, into God.”
The fruit. In Nico, we witnessed the fruits of his constant seeking to live as a generous, selfless servant, namely compassion and joy. Nico had a deep sensitivity for the little ones of the world, whom he called “the real experts in suffering.” I recall that in his first comments in the Aula of GC 35 after his election as General, Nico said very simply and sincerely that he was aware that this new mission as General would be difficult, but, that it would be nothing compared to the suffering of so many others in the world today. I recall being moved that at the very moment when the burden of the entire Society was being placed on his shoulders, he could relativize what he had to bear by immediately calling to mind the poor and suffering of our world. Just this morning, Sr Denise Coghlan, the head of JRS Cambodia, wrote of a member of their team who told her that “she had searched for years for someone who could touch her spirit wounded by the genocide in Pol Pot and she found the true one in Father Nicolas.”
Of course, everyone loved Nico for his joyfulness, his humor and playfulness. The students of EAPI in the ‘70s still speak of his classic Charlie Chaplin imitation. I have a collection of the cartoons he gathered on leadership which he used for seminars to train local superiors, seminars which he always began by giving his classic definition of an “expert,”: “An expert is any son of a bitch from out of town.”! I recall one meeting in East Timor when all the Major Superiors of Asia Pacific laughed, not so much at Nico’s jokes, but at the fact, that, even before he got to the punch line, he was already laughing so much that the tears ran from his eyes. He tended to repeat jokes, but he never ceased to find them funny.
His joy was, of course, deeper than jokes. I always marveled that, even amidst the many and complex problems Nico had to confront as General, he never lost his equanimity, his peace, his smile. Perhaps even more marvelously, when he was sadly diminished by his final sickness, he did not cease to be joyful. A couple from the Philippines who had befriended him in Manila visited him in Tokyo two years ago, and wrote to me about two things: first, how shocked they were by how weak and sick Nico had become; second, how joyful and peaceful he continued to be.
In conclusion
Nico was very concise and sober in his speech and writing, so all these words, tending toward the florid, would probably not be to his liking! It is best to end here then with Nico’s own unpublished words.
Around 2011, Nico sent me the draft of a 5-page letter that he was thinking of sending to the Society, for my comments. I don’t recall now why neither of us followed up on that draft; the letter was never sent to the Society. Which is a shame, because it is a wonderful text, not only spiritually deep, but also uncharacteristically personal, from the heart of Adolfo Nicolás. He gave it the tentative title, “From Distraction to Dedication.”
It begins this way. “From the time I entered my present office, I have been reading again some of the classics of religious life: Ignatius, Francis Xavier, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila… I can say that I found them most refreshing for the heart; it is like coming home again to the origins, to the first love, when I thought that there was something worth giving my whole life for. And I kept asking myself, what is it, that was so present in them and that we seem to have lost? And I think it is their Total Centering. They had been caught by the Spirit, the Fire, the Life and the Style of Christ, and they had stayed there, totally centered, probing its depths, rebuilding their whole lives around this new Center. They touched ground in this experience and lived everything else out of it, burning in it, sharing the fire and the light with others…. At their side, we look greatly and, if you allow me the expression, stupidly ‘distracted.’”
Dear Nico, allow me to disagree with you. It is we, your brothers and friends, who look “stupidly distracted” when we remember you, so joyful, so free, so given to God and to others, so centered. We thank God for the blessing of having known you. Although we are sad that you are no longer with us, we are glad that you, who showed us the face of a God who is joyful loving, are now healed of all your infirmities and have come home to your “origins, to your first love,” to the source of your joy. Pray for our suffering world, pray for the Church. And please pray for us, your brothers in the least Society and your friends in the Ignatian family. We will never forget you.
Daniel Patrick Huang SJ
22 May 2020