Jesuit Growth

Looking back at 25 years of expanding missionary work by U.S. Jesuits, the Roman Catholic magazine, Jesuit Missions, gave its readers some striking statistics.

Twenty-five years ago, there were only 175 American Jesuits in the mission field; today there are 1,022. Twenty-five years ago, the mission territory of the American Jesuits was largely restricted to Alaska, Central America and U.S. Indian reservations. Today their territory includes Japan, the Philippines, the Caroline and Marshall Islands, Ceylon, Nepal, India, China and Iraq.

American Jesuits have inherited such fields as the Philippines and Ceylon from European provinces. Other U.S. Jesuit activities, e.g., the newly opened high school in Nepal, are in areas which have not been visited by any other Roman Catholic missionaries in modern times.

Today's 1,022 missionaries include an archbishop, seven bishops, 610 priests, 300 scholastics, 100 lay brothers. In their mission territories, the Jesuits run 15 colleges and universities, 23 high schools and vocational schools, supervise 66 other high schools and 249 elementary schools. Five seminaries have been set up for what the missionaries regard as their most important job: training a native clergy.

They have also busied themselves with the "social apostolate" of the Church. In Jamaica, for example, Father John P. Sullivan and Father Francis G. Kempel organized fishermen's and small farmers' cooperatives to pull their parishioners out of economic trouble. Father Walter Hogan's Institute of Social Order in Manila --one of five Jesuit labor-relations schools in India and the Philippines--has bucked Filipino industrialists on behalf of striking dock and airline workers (TIME, Mar. 12).

Jesuit Missions has grown pretty remarkably itself, from a circulation of 3,000 in 1927 to 136,000 today. Under Father Calvert Alexander, its editor since 1938, the magazine aims at an audience of Catholic laymen, sees to it that its articles (mostly on missions and missionaries) are short, informative and liberally illustrated.

But the magazine had almost nothing to say of its own growth. "This issue," it said, "is not the story of Jesuit Missions . . . It is the necessarily thin sketch of men who have labored in the greatest undertaking on earth . . ."

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