awareness-16

Awareness - 16

They’ve got an idea in their heads that they must die, that death is a great thing.They feel nothing, they go right in. But not all of them, so listen to me properly. I didn’t say all of them, but I wouldn’t exclude the possibility. Lots of communists get brainwashed (you’re ready to believe that). They’re so brainwashed they’re ready to die. I sometimes say to myself that the process that we use for making, for example, a St. Francis Xavier could be exactly the same process used for producing terrorists. You can have a man go on a thirty-day retreat and come out all aflame with the love of Christ, yet without the slightest bit of self-awareness. None. He could be a big pain. He thinks he’s a great saint. I don’t mean to slander Francis Xavier, who probably was a great saint, but he was a difficult man to live with. You know he was a lousy superior, he really was! Do a historical investigation. Ignatius always had to step in to undo the harm that this good man was doing by his intolerance. You need to be pretty intolerant to achieve what he achieved. Go, go, go, go—no matter how many corpses fall by the wayside. Some critics of Francis Xavier claim exactly that. He used to dismiss men from our Society and they’d appeal to Ignatius, who would say, “Come to Rome and we’ll talk about it.” And Ignatius surreptitiously got them in again. How much self-awareness was there in this situation? Who are we to judge, we don’t know.