Community Life

Trust, openness, vision and communication are practiced in daily community life. While Jesuits live together for the sake of their apostolic work, they also live together for mutual support, challenge and inspiration. These two sets of values have to be kept in balance: community for service and community for mutual growth and development. In the final analysis, Jesuits have to be willing to move on, to leave one community to help another.

This type of communal living demands a special kind of person. A man who joins the Society of Jesus has to have a social personality and be capable of living peacefully with a variety of temperaments, personal histories and styles. Jesuit communities incorporate men of all ages, forged into a union of minds and hearts intent on finding where God wants us to be more effective in the work of the Kingdom.

Jesuit community life also requires a healthy, mature independence different from the kind found in a monastic order. Prayer, study and the demands of our apostolic work may lead Jesuits to experience solitude in their lives.  This solitude is not withdrawal, but mature self-direction, whose ultimate goal is greater service of the Lord.

It is all of these qualities that make Jesuit community life fraternal, personal and ecclesial. In their communal life, Jesuits share a common bond stronger than their differences and learn together how to be men for others within the wider reality of the Church.