Social Ministries
Our experience has shown us that our promotion of justice both flows from faith and brings us back to an ever deeper faith. So we intend to journey on towards ever fuller integration of the promotion of justice into our lives of faith, in the company of the poor and many others who live and work for the coming of God's Kingdom
--GC 34, Decree 3: Our Mission and Justice, #3.
In a way, all Jesuit ministries are "social ministries," especially since the 32nd General Congregation and its pledge to make the integration of the service of faith and the promotion of social justice the overarching principle of our mission in today’s world.
 This promotion of justice includes but is not limited to providing needed goods and services to poor and oppressed people. It aims especially at a learned, critical, and creative work with cultures that might result in the establishment of alternative social structures and institutions that more fully respect human dignity and freedom; ensure the goods of a decent life for all people; encourage the cultivation of learning and the love of wisdom; and work imaginatively and steadfastly for peace and the preservation of a healthy environment.
All the work done in and through our schools and parishes to feed people, reconcile conflicts, provide hospitality for visitors, provide shelter for the homeless, teach people coping skills, visit the sick, and care for the dying, is an expression of the Society's social ministry in collaboration with countless lay men and women and other religious in the American Northwest.
But the Society of Jesus also undertakes specific “social ministries,” like the establishment of interdisciplinary “institutes” or “centers” for research, criticism, discernment, and public advocacy, and specific initiatives aimed at defending human rights, struggling for economic justice, alleviating need, protecting the environment, and building peace. In the United States, the Woodstock Theological Center and the Center for Concern in Washington, D.C., arose from Jesuit initiatives in social ministry and adult religious education and from the need for new kinds of institutions to carry on this kind of work with greater continuity and assured standards of excellence.
A work of political education that takes the form of a public conversation about citizenship where positions must be advocated with reason and persuasion, open to question by others in a manner appropriate to a democratic society, that aims at understanding Catholic social principles and pays close attention to good research about local situations could be one of the Society’s strongest contributions to the promotion of justice in the United States. The promotion of justice in a democratic society should always be first of all and primarily an exercise of conscientious citizenship.
In the Northwest most of our present social ministry is embedded in our parishes, high schools, and universities. In addition, the Province participates with several other religious communities— Adrian Dominican Sisters, Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary Washington Province, Sisters of Providence Mother Joseph Province, Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace Western Province, and Tacoma Dominicans— in sponsoring the Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center in Seattle which promotes justice in the structures of the church and the wider society, with a particular focus on the Pacific Northwest.
 Our work with Native Americans in the Northwest is always social, pastoral, and spiritual ministry simultaneously. Our efforts to be of help to these gallant people who endure poverty, the shattered condition of their cultures, the racism and ridicule of other Americans, and deadly cycles of alcoholism, recklessness, violence and despair, have changed a great deal in the last forty years. During these years we have tried to be of help especially to the many Native Americans who are Roman Catholics and are attempting to separate their basic Catholic faith from a "colonializing" kind of Catholicism that imposed elements of European American culture, under sacred authority, and sometimes in brutalizing ways. Since Vatican II, we've made efforts to form a more apostolic laity, educated about their rights and the rights of their communities, to work out among themselves a Catholicism that is authentically Native American, with its own distinctive features, in conversation with their own spiritual traditions, and through their own deep fidelity to the gospel.
We have also provided a formation program, the KATERI Northwest Ministry Training Institute, for lay ministry by and among Native Americans, giving support to those lay pastoral workers who in the coming years will carry much of the responsibility for leadership in the local communities. During the last few years, we have emphasized a basic education in Catholic social teaching and its possible local applications to reservation life and to Native American urban life, the most familiar geographies.
In recent years, Northwest Jesuits have opened a new Nativity School, a middle school for African American and Latino youth in Portland. We have also recently entered into a new partnership with the Jesuits of Colombia; sharing manpower and resources to advance new models of social, economic, and environmental sustainability. .
We are trying to learn how to cross the borders of social classes, ethnic backgrounds, current nationalities, distinct ecclesial communities, to cross even the borders of the other world religions, and of genders and sexual-orientations as well, and always to do so respectfully, with a sincere reverence in our hearts for the freedom of the other person, in a truth-seeking dialogue undertaken with humility, and to carry on a public conversation about good citizenship in the meantime. And about what constitutes the “good life” for human beings in our age, within our possibilities, and in our part of the world.
Individual Jesuits may today, as they always have, discern a personal calling to minister among a particular people or subculture. Here Jesuits with friends and colleagues may feel impelled at times to pour their hopes into more prophetic responses to injustice and oppression: that might better break through the dull habits of over-familiarity, the cultivation of cynical attitudes, and a lazy-minded fatalism.
There are also, presently, individual Jesuits in the Northwest working with migrants, refugees, disabled persons, the homeless, prisoners, and hospital patients.
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