The Jesuit Journey of Adolfo Nicolás
Fr Adolfo Nicolás SJ has served as superior general of the Society of Jesus since 2008. He will formally step down next month as Jesuit electors gather in Rome to choose a new leader and deliberate on the future of the order.
Eight years is not a long run for a Jesuit Superior General but 80-year-old Fr Nicolás is leaving a lasting imprint on the global community of Jesuits and lay collaborators, according to Jesuits and many observers. He has done so in ways strikingly similar to his fellow Jesuit who arrived in Rome five years after he did – Pope Francis.
“That’s what he’s been doing and saying for the last eight years. ‘Get out there, get out to the people who need you.’ It’s exactly what Pope Francis is saying now,” said Fr Joseph Daoust SJ, who served for six years as a top adviser to Fr Nicolás in Rome before returning to the United States.
Pope Francis and Fr Nicolás share what Jesuits call “a way of proceeding” rooted in the lively spirituality of St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, said Fr Daoust SJ.
Fr Timothy P Kesicki, SJ, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, said that Fr Nicolás has been the right Jesuit to deliver this message. “He always asks Jesuits, ‘Are you free and available?’ In other words, will you go anywhere, do anything?”
“For Fr Nicolás, the more free and available you are, the more you come into your own as a Jesuit. And he’s lived out the message. He never went back home,” he added.
Fr Nicolás left Spain in 1960, while he was still in formation. He went to Japan where he was ordained seven years later and spent many years serving in varied roles including teaching theology in Tokyo, serving as provincial of the Japan Jesuit Province and ministering to poor immigrants in a Tokyo parish. He later moved to Manila where he served first as director of the East Asian Pastoral Institute and later as president of what was then called the Jesuit Conference of East Asia and Oceania.
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Filipino Jesuit Fr Daniel Patrick Huang, who is Fr Nicolás’ regional assistant for Asia Pacific said that the superior general has helped Jesuits “recover a sense of being Jesuits first”.
“It’s a recovery of our universal mission, our universal identity, and the prioritisation of our Jesuit mission over national identities,” said Fr Huang, who shared that a word Fr Nicolás’ uses frequently is “depth”.
“He’s always challenging people to go deeper, to a greater depth of reflection and spiritual life, and it’s a reflection of his own search. He insists that our language should be the language of wisdom. People are looking for wisdom, for a sense of what makes life important, what makes life joyful. He’s a wise man who helps people in their search for wisdom.” [Jesuits in Canada and the United States]
Main photo: Fr Adolfo Nicolás SJ with students of Colégio de Santo Inácio de Loiola, the Jesuit secondary school in Timor-Leste, on his arrival in the country for the inauguration of the Jesuit education project in January 2014
During his visit to Timor-Leste in January 2014, Fr Nicolás spoke with Timorese scholastic Rui Muakandala SJ about Timor-Leste and the Jesuit mission. When asked about his message to Timorese scholastics and young Jesuits, he told them to have big dreams and big desires. But these big dreams should be for the world. “We are not for ourselves; we are for others,” he stressed. “So continue to think big, to think of a new world, of new structures, of new possibilities, of new alternatives…to put ourselves in the service of humanity”.
Watch the full interview: