A New "Black Pope"

In all its 431-year history, the Society of Jesus has never gone outside continental Europe to find a Father General. Meeting last week in Rome, Jesuit delegates kept the tradition intact, elected the Very Rev. Pedro Arrupe, 57, Spanish-born Jesuit provincial (area chief) of Japan, to be the order's 28th leader and the Roman Catholic Church's new "Black Pope."

The sixth Spaniard to head the Jesuits, Arrupe was born in Bilbao, studied medicine at the University of Madrid, and entered the Jesuit order in 1927. Five years later, despite the careful neutrality of men like Arrupe, the Spanish Republic banned Jesuits from the country. Arrupe went to Belgium to continue his schooling, then Holland, later came to the U.S., where he studied at St. Mary's College in Kansas and St. Stanislaus' in Cleveland.

On Aug. 6, 1945 he was master of novices at Japan's Jesuit novitiate six miles outside Hiroshima. At 8:15 a.m. novitiate windows were shattered by a violent blast. Soon after, refugees began streaming from the city, and Father Arrupe made some sort of history by organizing one of the first medical supply teams ever to aid an atom-bombed city. In 1954, he was named Jesuit vice provincial for Japan, and four years later, after Japan was elevated to a full Jesuit province, became provincial.

Slim, white-haired and scholarly, Arrupe fills a vacancy created last October by the death of the Very Rev. John Baptist Janssens of Belgium. He takes over the leadership of the 36,000-member order, the most influential in the Roman Catholic Church, at a time when the Jesuits are considering reform (TIME, May 21). Arrupe has some definite ideas on what that reform should be. Said an American Jesuit delegate after last week's election: "He wants to update the structure of the order. He sees the need for advanced studies. He's a man of big ideas in the right sense. He has a mystical slant and knows the meaning of prayer--without being stuffy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.