Quotations about Jesuits!
"En todo amar y servir." [In all things, to love and serve.]
St. Ignatius Loyola
"The world is our house."
Fr. Jeronimo Nadal, S.J.
"I really must plume myself for having been the first to attack the Jesuits. Once France is purged of the Jesuits, we can hope that people will realize how shameful it is to be subject to that stupid power, the Church, that set them up."
François-Marie Arouet Voltaire (philosopher, writer, playwright, French Enlightenment, 17th/18th century)
“I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits...Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gypsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited eternal damnation on earth and in hell, it is this Society of Loyola’s. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum....”
President Thomas Jefferson (3rd President of the United States, 1801-1809)
"The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth."
Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (priest, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher)
"Wherever in the church, even in the most difficult and exposed fields, in the crossroads of ideologies, in the social trenches, there has been or is confrontation between the burning exigencies of humanity and the perennial message of the gospel, there have been and are the Jesuits."
Pope Paul VI
"As my predecessors have often told you, the Church needs you, counts on you, and continues to turn to you with confidence, particularly to reach the geographical and spiritual places where others do not reach or find it difficult to reach."
Pope Benedict XVI
"It is not our spirituality to abandon the people just because the situation becomes difficult or even dangerous."
Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.; 29th General of the Society of Jesus