JESUITS ARE URBAN FOLKS. We live in, work in, and do our training in the big cities. If you go to Rome and you look for the places where the earliest Jesuits worked, you find them right in the heart of the city. But from the very beginning we also did a lot of missionary work in places like Latin America, India and the Far East.

You might ask, why work in India and establish schools where almost every student is Hindu or Muslim and will almost certainly stay Hindu or Muslim? It has to do with trying to make people’s lives better. God cares about our life in this world, and not simply about life in the next. Like all Catholics, we Jesuits believe this world is a fundamentally good place, and if we can teach the right values, then people can become real forces for good within their societies. Does God love Hindus, Muslims and others outside the Christian faith? Yes. The answer, of course, is yes.

We Jesuits did not start out in 1540 running schools, but we were from the very beginning founded “to help souls” or, in more contemporary terms, “to help people” in the various aspects most central to their lives. However, it didn’t take us long to conclude that a powerful vehicle for doing that was the work of education and the advancement of human knowledge. People are often surprised to learn that the best science in the world of the 17th century was being done in Jesuit schools. That is why you have a whole raft of features on the moon named after Jesuits, because Jesuits were the folks discovering them back at that time. If God created our world “and saw that it was good,” why, we Jesuits say, should we be threatened by new ideas and new discoveries?

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