When Pedro Arrupe, S.J. (1907–91), the superior general who shepherded the Society of Jesus through the close of the Second Vatican Council and beyond, spoke of the Sacred Heart, he often used an analogy certain to get listeners’ attention. He compared the Sacred Heart to atomic power.
A homily Arrupe delivered in 1970 offers an example of how he used explosive imagery to describe the source of Christian peace. At that time, many influential Catholics, both within and outside the Society, were claiming that the reforms of Vatican II required that Sacred Heart devotion and other expressions of popular piety be consigned to the past. Arrupe, acutely aware of such arguments, aimed with his homily to show that the present time—marked, in his words, “by chaotic confusion and at the same time by a cultural evolution”—desperately needed the love of Christ that is symbolized by his heart.
“Today,” Arrupe said, “when so many new sources of energy are being discovered, when we stand amazed at all the triumphs of scientific research in atomic physics and in the energy of the atom that may transform the whole universe, we do not sufficiently realize that all human power and natural energy is nothing when compared with the super-atomic energy of this love of Christ, who by giving his life vivifies the world.”
No doubt, Arrupe’s Jesuit listeners found his comparison of the Sacred Heart to atomic energy far more intriguing than they would have if they heard it from another homilist. They knew that their superior general, nearly a quarter-century earlier, had personally witnessed the destruction caused by the atomic bomb that the United States detonated over Hiroshima.
Union of the Heart
It was Father Arrupe’s intense desire for union with the heart of Christ that gave him strength as he ministered to victims of the Hiroshima attack. That desire began during his time in the Jesuit novitiate in Loyola, Spain, on the ancestral estate of the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius, which he entered in 1927 at the age of 19. Arrupe had originally intended to become a doctor and had been a topflight medical student before he shocked his professors by quitting school to enter the Society of Jesus.
During the two-year novitiate, a new Jesuit becomes immersed in the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. In addition to learning Ignatian practices of prayer and self-examination, each novice makes a 30-day retreat according to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, meditating deeply upon sacred Scripture and salvation history according to Ignatius’ guidelines. He will also read certain letters of Ignatius and study the Society’s Constitutions.
The spirituality that Ignatius pioneered—particularly the Spiritual Exercises, with their focus on opening one’s heart to God’s love conveyed through Christ’s humanity—lent itself naturally to the devotion to the Sacred Heart that began to take shape in the late 1600s. The Jesuits, moreover, felt a special responsibility to promote the Sacred Heart, given the pivotal role that one of their members, St. Claude La Colombière, had played in helping St. Margaret Mary Alacoque share her visions of Jesus and his Sacred Heart with the world. In the words of an 1883 decree by one of the general congregations of the Jesuits, they saw their role in spreading the devotion as a divinely given munussuavissismum—a “duty most sweet.”
Arrupe became so attached to the Sacred Heart that, while still in the novitiate, he composed a booklet on the devotion. A small number of copies of the booklet, typed and bound in simple gray cardboard under the title El Disco de Arrupe—“Arrupe’s Record”—came to be passed around among his fellow Jesuits. In it, Arrupe summarized authoritative sources concerning the origins of the devotion and its “tremendous importance.” After examining the difficulties that some people encountered in practicing it, he concluded by showing how to attain and experience the devotion’s true spirit. Although his own devotion to the Sacred Heart would grow deeper over the course of his life (as would his understanding of it), he never lost his concern to help others overcome their obstacles to embracing it.
In 1929 Arrupe made his first vows and entered the next stage of formation, known as the juniorate. Soon after, while making the required annual eight-day Spiritual Exercises retreat, he experienced what he would later call “the first sparks of my missionary vocation.” He felt certain that the Lord wished him to follow in the footsteps of the great Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier to win souls for Christ in Japan.
Although both the priest who directed him in his Spiritual Exercises and the rector of the juniorate believed his call was authentic, the decision to send Arrupe to the Japanese missions lay with the Jesuit superior general in Rome—and he did not feel the time was right. In fact, nearly 10 years, and many more requests from the earnest young Jesuit, would pass before the leader of the Society of Jesus would finally grant Arrupe his heart’s desire.
Arrupe in Japan
Father Arrupe had been ordained for two years when, in June 1938, the letter from Rome arrived calling him to undertake a missionary assignment in Japan. At the time, he was in Cleveland, Ohio, completing the final stage of Jesuit formation—the year of spiritual renewal known as tertianship. He arrived in the island nation in October 1938 and went to the Jesuit house of theology studies in Nagatsuka, where he entered into an intensive study of Japanese language and culture. Nagatsuka was on the outskirts of Hiroshima; a mountain separated it from the city.
After six months, Arrupe felt confident enough in the local language to travel to Tokyo, where, as he would later write in his memoir, he hoped to enter into pastoral ministry. “I didn’t know where to make a start,” he recalled, “when Divine Providence put me on a path that I had only to follow.”
The path opened up while Father Arrupe was visiting a community of religious sisters who told him they were having trouble finding a priest willing to take the time to consecrate their house to the Sacred Heart. Arrupe replied that if they could wait, he would gladly fulfill their request, for he would first need to prepare a consecration ceremony in Japanese.
True to his word, Arrupe wrote the act of consecration and some words of inspiration, and returned to lead the ceremony. It was then that he had an epiphany: “As long as I was stationed in Tokyo, I could dedicate myself to consecrate families to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” The apostolate both suited his linguistic limitations and gave him a means of helping the small community of local Catholics, who had been evangelized by previous missionaries, to go deeper into their faith.
“I never regretted that step,” Arrupe wrote. He began by consecrating the homes of leading members of the community, and then word began to spread. Ultimately he consecrated more than 100 homes to the Sacred Heart. Through such consecrations, he won many converts, including a Catholic woman’s husband who was an adamant unbeliever and had resisted having any display of faith in the home.
After the Bomb
At the moment that the United States dropped the first of its atomic bombs upon Japan, 8:15 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 6, 1945, Arrupe was meeting with another Jesuit in his office in Nagatsuka, where he was master of novices and vice rector at the house of studies. In his memoir, Arrupe described the shock they experienced: “That terrible force, which we thought would rip the building from its foundation, threw us to the ground.” They covered their heads with their hands as the walls and ceiling of the residence collapsed around them.
Once the dust began to clear, Arrupe and his friend arose, relieved to see that neither was injured. They then searched the rest of the building and found to their amazement that although the structure was severely damaged, none of the three dozen Jesuits there were wounded.
Arrupe’s next thought was to check on the Jesuits who lived in the Society’s residence in downtown Hiroshima, but he realized that was impossible, given the fire and black smoke rising from the city. So he carefully walked into what remained of the novitiate’s chapel and took a few moments to call upon the Lord.
“I left the chapel,” Arrupe recalled afterward, “and my decision was immediate. We would turn the house into a hospital.”
Arrupe sent the Jesuit scholastics in search of food and other supplies that they would need to treat survivors. Injured people fleeing the city soon began to arrive; within four and a half hours of the bomb blast, some 150 wounded filled what was left of the house.
For many months, Father Arrupe devoted himself to treating the sick and injured. So great was his compassion—as well as the knowledge he retained from medical school—that he gained a reputation as a healer. At the same time, he did all he could under the circumstances to maintain the ordinary life of the novitiate and house of studies. A novice who entered in early 1946 later recalled how “Father Arrupe worked at a truly exhausting pace.... He hardly had time to sleep. Despite that, he directed [the novices in] the monthlong [Spiritual] Exercises of St. Ignatius without leaving out a thing.”
By 1947, the remaining injured at the Jesuit house were moved to other places where they could receive care. But although Arrupe no longer had to care for visitors’ physical needs, he continued to seek to address the spiritual wounds that the faithful retained in the wake of the bombing.
Father Arrupe later spoke of a conversation he had with some young Japanese students. Cynicism gripped the youths as they discussed the force of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and the extent of the loss of life it had caused, and might yet cause. Then an idea came to Arrupe that made a great impression upon the students. He said:
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And after all, my dear friends, in spite of this powerful weapon and any other that may still come, you must know that we have a power much greater than the atomic energy: We have the Heart of Christ…. While the atomic energy is destined to destroy and atomize everything, in the Heart of Christ we have an invincible weapon whose power will destroy every evil and unite the minds and hearts of the whole of mankind in one central bond, his love and the love of the Father.
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Renewing Devotion to the Sacred Heart
The trust that Arrupe held in the Sacred Heart carried him through more than 25 years of missionary service in Japan. In 1958, the Society of Jesus elevated Japan from a vice province (that is, a missionary territory) to an autonomous province and made Arrupe its provincial superior. He became an internationally known figure as he traveled to raise funds for the Japanese Province and convince Jesuits from other countries to assist in its work. A Jesuit who met Father Arrupe during a 1954 visit that Arrupe made to Mexico, Eduardo Briceño, S.J., remembered him as a powerful spiritual figure: “He was a visionary, a prophet, an apostle, a mixture of Paul, Xavier, and Ignatius. He was a man deeply convinced of his mission, and he felt viscerally obliged to carry it out without sparing a moment of his own life.”
In May 1965, during the Jesuits’ 31st General Congregation, Father Arrupe was elected superior general of the Society. It was a time of intense change in the church as the Second Vatican Council neared its conclusion. Pope Paul VI, aware that some theologians and liturgists were falsely claiming that certain traditional forms of popular piety contravened the spirit of the council, asked superiors of religious congregations, including the Jesuits, to actively promote devotion to the Sacred Heart. One of Father Arrupe’s first legislative acts as superior general was to draft a decree, which the General Congregation then passed, in which the Society of Jesus robustly affirmed its agreement with the pontiff’s desire that it “spread ever more widely a love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
However, as he continued in his role as superior general, Father Arrupe felt that a stronger statement was needed to counter claims that, given the council’s emphasis on communal liturgical prayer, devotion to the Sacred Heart was too individualistic. He therefore wrote a letter to the whole Society in 1972 to mark the centenary of the Society’s consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: “Facing a New Situation: Difficulties and Solutions” (later republished as“Renewing Devotion to the Sacred Heart”).
As its title suggests, Father Arrupe’s letter directly addressed and sought to resolve the “difficulties” associated with the Sacred Heart devotion. One reason for such difficulties, Arrupe wrote, was “the eclipse of sound theological understanding” of Christ’s humanity. “The Church is born of the Incarnation,” he explained. “Rather, it is a continuing incarnation; it is the mystical body of God made man. Hence there is nothing less individualistic than a genuine love of Christ: the very concept of reparation proceeds from an authentic communitarian demand, that of the Mystical Body.”
Throughout the years of his active leadership of the Society, until he suffered a stroke in August 1981 that impaired his ability to communicate, Father Arrupe would draw upon the theology of the Sacred Heart to encourage his brother Jesuits and, at times, gently correct them. In an address in February 1981 that came to be known as his spiritual testament, he emphasized that “love (service) for our brothers, for Christ, for the Father, is the single and indivisible object of our charity”—meaning that true and sacrificial love of neighbor could not be separated from love of God in Jesus Christ.
“Love resolves the dichotomies and tensions that can arise in an imperfectly understood Ignatian spirituality,” Arrupe added. He cited the perceived tension between faith and justice. “Faith has to be informed by charity,” he explained, “and so too must justice, which thus becomes a higher form of justice: it is charity that calls for justice.”
Toward the end of his speech, Father Arrupe spoke frankly about how each person could develop such charity: “There is a tremendous power latent in this devotion to the Heart of Christ. Each of us should discover it for himself—if he has not already done so—and then, entering deeply into it, apply it to his personal life in whatever way the Lord may suggest and grant.”
When Father Arrupe died on Feb. 5, 1991 (having resigned his leadership of the Society in 1983 because of infirmity), many believed that his own union with Jesus, which he had exhibited both in sickness and in health, demonstrated the “extraordinary grace” of which he spoke—so much so that a cause for his canonization was opened in 2019, naming him a Servant of God.
Visitors to the Church of the Gesù in Rome will find Father Arrupe’s tomb in the Chapel of the Passion—an appropriate place for one who sought to unite his heart to the beating heart of the Savior.
