What Every Century Taught the Jesuits to Discover Anew — and Why AI and Gen Z Are the Next Frontier
By Fr. Sebastian James SJ –
A Charism That Survives Only by Changing
When Pope Paul III promulgated Regimini militantis Ecclesiae on 27th September 1540, he set the date the Society of Jesus would come to treat as its birthday. Jesuit provinces worldwide — from Rome to India’s own Jesuit provinces — mark 27th September each year as the anniversary of the Society’s founding, the day the Formula of the Institute passed from a petition under review to a canonically approved way of life. There is a paradox at the center of Jesuit history that is worth stating plainly before tracing it century by century. The Society of Jesus has kept exactly the same founding charism for nearly five hundred years — finding God in all things, discerning the magis, going wherever there is greater need. The Formula of 1540 did not mention schools. It did not mention China, or Paraguay, or refugee camps, or universities, or the internet. And yet every century came with its own mandate for the Jesuits to tune to the signs of the time and respond. Each Jesuit had the nerve to go there rather than stay where the last generation had left off.
Pope Francis reminded the delegates of General Congregation 36 in 2016 that other religious families tend to occupy fixed spaces like the monastery, the enclosure, while the Society’s distinguishing nature is to initiate processes and then let them go. It is a useful frame, not because the Jesuits set out to reinvent themselves on schedule, but because “finding God in all things” is a way of life for a Jesuit who keeps listening to the silence of the voiceless and the need of the desperate.
The Sixteenth Century: The School and the Frontier of Inculturation
St. Ignatius of Loyola and the first companions did not set out to become educators. The Formula of the Institute speaks of preaching, hearing confessions, and works of mercy, but not education. The decision to run a school for lay boys at Messina in 1548 was closer to an experiment than a plan. It worked so well, and so obviously served “the greater good,” that within a generation the Society became, almost by surprise, the largest teaching order the Church had ever produced. It was systematized by 1599 in the Ratio Studiorum. The first great Jesuit discovery, in other words, was that the classroom can become a mission frontier in its own right.
The same century produced a second yet riskier discovery on the actual geographic frontier- Inculturation. Evangelization could mean entering a culture on its own terms rather than imposing an external one or what one may call “Inculturation”. Fr. Matteo Ricci, arriving in China in 1583, learned Mandarin, dressed as a Confucian scholar, and learned the classics of Chinese philosophy as a genuine conversation partner. Fr. Roberto de Nobili did something similar in Madurai, adopting the dress and disciplines of a Brahmin ascetic to make the Gospel palatable rather than against Tamil culture. Both approaches were bold enough to generate real controversy within the Church, foreshadowing the Chinese and Malabar Rites disputes that would trouble the Society for the next two centuries, a reminder that Jesuit “newness” has rarely been risk-free.
The Seventeenth Century: The Frontier of the Sciences
If the sixteenth century discovered the knowledge of classroom and the way of culture, the seventeenth Century discovered the laboratory and the observatory. Fr. Christoph Clavius’s mathematical work underpinned the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582. The Jesuit mathematicians and astronomers like ( – Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666): – Giacomo Rho (1593-1638) & Johannes Schreck (1576-1630):- Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-1688): Jean-François Gerbillon, Joachim Bouvet) went on to serve as court scientists in Beijing under the Ming and Qing emperors, continuing the legacy Fr. Ricci had begun. However, they also extended it to astronomy, cartography, and engineering. Athanasius Kircher’s sprawling museum of curiosities in Rome captured the same instinct in miniature: for the Jesuits of this century, “finding God in all things” began to mean taking the era’s dominant intellectual project — the new natural philosophy — seriously as a place to look for God, rather than treating it as a rival to faith.
The Eighteenth Century: The Paraguay Reduction- Social Justice ?
The Reductions of Paraguay were the boldest social discovery of the era. The Jesuits’ initiative for self-governing mission towns in which Guaraní communities were organized, educated, and protected from the slave raids of Portuguese and Spanish colonists was a bold feat by itself. It was an attempt to build a genuinely different kind of society within the colonial order, challenging the world Powers of that time. And it worked well enough to become a serious political threat to the very colonial powers the Society depended on for protection elsewhere. What a predicament ! The century’s harshest lesson followed directly from the Society’s boldest path to the Jubilee Year of the Lord. In 1773, under sustained pressure from the Bourbon courts, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus worldwide. Jesuit innovation has a historical track record of provoking an institutional cost, and the Reductions are the clearest eighteenth-century case of that pattern.
The Nineteenth Century: The Frontier of Rebuilding at Moral Cost
Pope Pius VII restored the Society universally on 7th August 1814, by the bull Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum. Catherine the Great, for reasons of her own statecraft rather than any sympathy for Rome, refused to promulgate the suppression brief in the Russian territories. Pius VII himself formally recognized Jesuits’ survival in Russia in 1801. The 1814 bull, in that sense, did not create the Society anew so much as it extended a jurisdiction that had never actually lapsed — Fr. Tadeusz Brzozowski, already the Russian superior since 1805, simply became the first Superior General of the fully restored, worldwide Society.
Even that surviving thread worn out almost immediately. Within six years of the restoration, in 1820, Tsar Alexander I, the same government that had sheltered the Jesuits for four decades expelled them from Russia outright. It is a historical irony that the one place the eighteenth century’s suppression could not reach became, within a single generation, one of the nineteenth century’s first sites of renewed hostility.
It was hard for the nineteenth-century Jesuits to discover how to relearn a charism with almost no living continuity to teach it. Most men entering the restored Society after 1814 had never known a functioning Jesuit house, a trained novice master, or an unbroken community life. That task fell largely to Fr Roothaan. Under his governance membership grew from roughly two thousand men to more than five thousand. In 1850, at the direct urging of Pope Pius IX, he reluctantly agreed to found the journal La Civiltà Cattolica, giving the Society a standing voice in the ideological battles of the age. Fr. Roothaan’s own tenure was itself interrupted by the century’s instability. During the revolutions of 1848 he was forced to flee Rome in disguise, a fittingly concrete image of a Superior General relearning, in his own person, the itinerancy the Formula of 1540 had first demanded.
European governments’ repeated waves of hostility pushed Belgian, Italian, and German Jesuits into exile at exactly the moment the United States and Latin America needed teachers and missionaries the most. Exiled European Jesuits then increased the American footprint rapidly. Belgian Jesuits were invited into the Louisiana and Missouri missions and founded schools that grew into Saint Louis University, Xavier University in Cincinnati, Loyola University Chicago, Marquette in Milwaukee, and Creighton in Omaha. Whereas Neapolitan Jesuits, driven out of a newly unified and anticlerical Italy, built Woodstock College in Maryland into the Society’s premier American house of theological formation.
That expansion carried a genuine moral cost that cannot be sidelined to mere footnote. The Maryland Jesuits who ran Georgetown had slaves on their Southern Maryland plantations. On 19th June 1838 two of the province’s own priests, Fr. Thomas Mulledy and Fr. William McSherry, arranged the sale of 272 enslaved men, women, and children to two Louisiana planters for $115,000 to settle Georgetown’s debts. This sale is the largest and best-documented such transactions in American history. Obviously it provoked immediate protest from other Jesuits, and Fr. Roothaan removed Fr. Mulledy from office and sent him into a period of exile in Nice. Georgetown University publicly apologized for the sale in 2017 and has since worked with descendants’ organizations on reconciliation efforts. The nineteenth-century account of Jesuit “resilience” in America has to hold that expansion and this failure together, not one without the other.
The Twentieth Century: The Frontier of Justice
The defining twentieth-century came from Superior General Pedro Arrupe and the 32nd General Congregation of 1974–75, which stated in its now-famous Decree 4 that the mission of the Society is “the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.” Fr. Arrupe had already previewed the shift a year earlier at Valencia, in his 1973 address to Jesuit alumni later remembered as “Men and Women for Others,”. He argued that Jesuit education had to form people who understood service to others as constitutive of faith, not optional to it. It cost lives. Jesuits and their collaborators who took the preferential option for the poor into Central America’s civil conflicts paid for it with their lives, most visibly in the 1989 murder of six Jesuits and two laywomen at the Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador. In 1980, in direct response to the plight of Vietnamese refugees fleeing by boat, Fr. Arrupe founded the Jesuit Refugee Service. This perhaps the century’s clearest institutional expression of “faith that does justice” applied to people the world had decided to stop looking at. General Congregation 34 (1995) extended the same logic outward again, formally naming interreligious and intercultural dialogue as integral to Jesuit mission rather than a peripheral courtesy toward other faiths.
The Twenty-First Century: The AI Frontier Gen Z and Alpha
What earlier centuries discovered case by case, the twenty-first century has named as a category. General Congregation 35 (2008), in its Decree 3, “Challenges to Our Mission Today,” speaks explicitly of being “sent to the frontiers” — intellectual, cultural, and, unmistakably now, digital. General Congregation 36 (2016) pushed the logic further inward, emphasizing discernment in common and a working distinction between the Society’s “religious body” (vowed Jesuits) and its far larger “apostolic body” (the lay colleagues, alumni, and partners who actually deliver most of the mission day to day). It is precisely because of this that the Universal Apostolic Preferences announced by Superior General Arturo Sosa in 2019 were developed through sixteen months of dialogue with Jesuits and collaborators worldwide, not decided in isolation. Of the four preferences that resulted journeying with youth is the most directly relevant to Gen Z, since it commits the Society to accompanying young people in building a hope-filled future rather than simply instructing them from a position of settled authority.
This August 2026, addressing the World Union of Jesuit Alumni in Yogyakarta, Fr. General Sosa identified artificial intelligence as one of today’s defining frontiers. He urged Jesuit alumni worldwide to “protect what machines cannot replace: love, friendship, and conscience.” He was, by his own account, echoing an appeal Pope Leo XIV had made a few months earlier. Pope Leo XIV has openly admitted that artificial intelligence influenced his choice of name. He took the name of Leo XIII, who wrote the famous 1891 letter Rerum Novarum to address the massive changes of the Industrial Revolution. Pope Leo XIV believes the Church now faces a similar crisis with AI. Hence, in May 2026, he published his own letter called Magnifica Humanitas. This document addresses how AI affects human dignity, work, and justice, using the same style as his predecessor.
The underlying Principals Beneath All Five Centuries’ Change
Reading across the five centuries, the pattern is consistent enough to name. Every genuine Jesuit “discovery” involved:
(1) noticing where the culture’s own most serious energy is currently concentrated: the Renaissance classroom, the Confucian court and the Satya Vedam, the astronomical observatory, the colonial frontier, the labor movement, the refugee camp, the algorithm — rather than retreating from it;
(2) entering the space of the people on their terms and recognize, the way Fr. Ricci entered wearing Confucian dress rather than insisting China come to him; and
(3) willing to absorb real cost — controversy, suppression, martyrdom — when the discovery threatened entrenched interests.
None of this is done just for show. This is what it truly means to “find God in all things”—a principle practiced consistently, not just repeated as a slogan. Applying this same pattern to Gen Z and artificial intelligence does not require the Society to become something new. It simply asks the Jesuits to do what they have already done, successfully and repeatedly, throughout their history.
Reaching Gen Z in the Age of AI: What the Pattern Suggests
Treat discernment itself as the countercultural offering.
Today’s media feeds are engineered to capture our attention rather than reward deep reflection or critical thinking. As a result, this generation is starved for the exact skills provided by the “Examen” and the “discernment of spirits.” These 500-year-old practices create a disciplined, daily habit of paying attention to your inner self. They help you notice where true comfort and despair actually come from, rather than just letting an internet algorithm dictate where your attention goes. Instead of being treated as a mere religious routine, Ignatian discernment should be recognized as an urgently needed skill for our distracted age. Ultimately, it is highly valuable for Jesuits in training, leaders building youth programs, and any everyday citizen simply trying to think clearly online.
Go where they already are, on terms they recognize.
Fr. Ricci did not wait for Ming scholars to come to a European seminary. The digital equivalent of Confucian dress is not slicker branding on existing content; it is meeting young people inside the actual lannguage of their platforms — short-form video, collaborative and gaming spaces, creator-style formats made with Gen Z rather than merely aimed at them — the same instinct that made Jesuit school theatre, centuries earlier, put students at the center of the production rather than in rows facing a lecturer.
Take the era’s dominant intellectual project seriously, the way Clavius and Kircher did.
Jesuit universities are already doing this institutionally: the International Association of Jesuit Universities convened a dedicated plenary on artificial intelligence at its 2025 Bogotá Assembly and has stood up a standing AI Task Force to coordinate ethical, mission-aligned responses across the network. That is the twenty-first-century equivalent of a Jesuit mathematician taking a seat at the imperial observatory: not standing outside the technology issuing warnings, but sitting inside the discipline shaping how it develops.
Let “journeying with youth” mean accompaniment, not instruction.
The Jesuits’ main goal with youth is to help them create their own hopeful future, rather than handing them a pre-packaged version of life. When we apply this idea to Artificial Intelligence (AI), it means we should not just force young people to follow strict rules. We should not tell them to accept AI without thinking, nor should we teach them to distrust it completely. Instead, schools and youth programs should guide young people to deeply reflect on how they actually use these tools in their daily lives. Think of it as an “AI-literacy Examen.” By pausing to look at their own digital habits, young people can learn to navigate technology wisely and build a better future on their own terms.
Protect what Fr. Sosa named, deliberately, in public.
Think about how easily a computer program can mimic human emotions. Today’s advanced algorithms are incredibly good at faking love, friendship, and conscience, and alongside them, freedom. A smartphone app can make you feel like you have a million friends, an AI chatbot can text you like a loving partner, and social media can make you feel completely free while it quietly decides what you see. But there is a major catch: while technology is remarkably good at copying these deep human experiences, it cannot actually give them to you. A computer cannot truly love, it cannot be a real friend, it has no moral conscience, and it cannot make anyone free. Since these things are so easy for technology to fake, they are the very values we are most in danger of losing, and that is why we must protect them.
Fr. General Arturo Sosa named three of them in one powerful sentence: love, friendship, and conscience. For any Jesuit school, youth group, or community project designing programs for Generation Z in the age of AI, his words act as a clear design brief. To them we may add a fourth, freedom, which the Ignatian tradition has always placed at the heart of discernment. The mission is plain: stop focusing only on how to use technology, and start building programs that help young people protect real love, real friendship, real conscience, and real freedom from being replaced by an algorithm.
In conclusion, for nearly five centuries, Jesuit history has repeatedly demonstrated the same movement: discerning the frontier, entering it, learning its language, discovering God already at work there, and then serving where the greater good demands.
The Renaissance had its classrooms.
China and India had its scholars.
The seventeenth century had its observatories.
Paraguay had its Reductions.
The nineteenth century had the task of rebuilding.
The twentieth century had the struggle for faith and justice.
And, our century has the algorithm.
Before us stands a generation always connected, always scrolling, always locked in.
The question is no longer whether Jesuits should enter this frontier. History has already answered that. The real question is whether we will enter it deeply and courageously enough to help young people discover what no algorithm can replace: conscience, friendship, love, freedom, and God present in all things.
Perhaps this is what semper magis means today — not simply doing more, but discerning more deeply, accompanying more closely, and going where the greater need calls. The Jesuits once entered classrooms, imperial courts, observatories, missions, refugee camps, and struggles for justice. Now the frontier is digital. The mission remains the same: go where humanity is being shaped, find God there, and help the next generation choose the Magis.
References:
1. “Decree 4: Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice,” Documents of the Thirty-Second General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (Rome: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1975)
2. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., “Men for Others” (address to the 10th International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe, Valencia, 31 July 1973)
3. John W. Padberg, S.J., ed., Jesuit Life and Mission Today: The Decrees and Accompanying Documents of the 31st–35th General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2009)
4. Documents of the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (Rome, 2016),
5. Fr. Arturo Sosa, S.J., remarks to the 11th World Union of Jesuit Alumni Congress, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta,
6. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (25 May 2026),
7. International Association of Jesuit Universities (IAJU), 2025 Assembly proceedings, Bogotá, Colombia, plenary session “Artificial Intelligence: Benefits and Challenges,” and the IAJU AI Task Force
8. Jesuit Refugee Service, “Our History” (jrsusa.org)
9. ARSI Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu digitised index (arsi.jesuits.global)