How Important and Necessary It Is to Deal Openly with Our Superiors

CASSIAN tells of the ancient Fathers that to newcomers, who entered among them to serve God, they proposed it as the first letter of the A B C’s, that all their temptations and evil thoughts, and all that passed in their soul, they should lay bare at once to their elders and masters, and this ranked as a first principle among them. The blessed St. Anthony used to say: “So far as is possible, a religious should not take a step, or turn from side to side, without giving an account thereof to the superior, even to the extent of declaring how many cups of water he drinks a day, that all may be reduced to the level of obedience.” St. John Climacus says that he found in a monastery of great holiness many monks who carried a little book hanging from their girdle, in which they wrote every day all their thoughts to give an account of them to their pastor, and he says that such was the command of their superior. The same instruction is set down expressly by Saints Basil, Jerome, Ambrose, and Bernard.

This, then, which was the common teaching of the saints, and a first principle among those ancient Fathers, is enjoined upon us by our Father, as a thing most important and necessary, in very grave words, which are found in his Constitutions. “Having thought and considered and commended the matter earnestly to God, it has seemed to us, in reverent waiting upon His Divine Majesty, highly proper for subjects to make themselves entirely known to their superiors.” Our Father is not wont to speak in this manner of other things, even though they be of great importance; and not content with this manner of speaking, he sets to work to prove it by very efficacious reasons.

The first reason for this importance and necessity of openness with superiors is that so they may be better able to govern and direct their subjects. The superior is bound to guide and direct them; that is his office, that is the meaning of being Rector or superior. But if he does not know you, and you do not declare yourself to him, it is plain that he cannot do so. He that hideth his crimes, shall not be set right, says the Wise Man (Prov. xxviii. 13). If the sick man does not discover to the physician his ailment, the physician cannot cure him; for as St. Jerome says: “Medicine cures not what it knows not”—Quod ignorat medicina non sanat. You needs must declare your infirmity to the physician if you want him to cure you. And if you have many weaknesses and infirmities, you must declare them all. If you hide any, it may be that he will give you a remedy that will do more harm to the ailment that you have said nothing about than good to the ailment that you have declared. What is good for the liver, is bad for the spleen. So you must needs declare everything, that he may so temper the medicine in one respect as not to do harm in the other. In the same manner and for the same reason you must declare to the spiritual physician, that is, to the superior, all your ailments and weaknesses. When the physician knows his patient well, knows all his weak points and understands well his constitution, then he has gone a long way toward curing him. He lights at once on the radical cause of the illness, diagnoses the peccant humor, can tell what may do the patient good or harm, and so easily applies the proper remedy. For this reason princes and great lords carry physicians in their train, who go with them and stand by at their meals; not that the physician is to keep saying to them every moment: “Don’t eat that,” “Don’t drink so much,” for that would be to worry them and make himself a nuisance; but that, seeing them eat and seeing their exercises and what they like most, and what usually does them harm or good, their medical adviser may thoroughly understand their constitution, and when they do get ill, may know how to treat them and apply remedies to better effect. This, then, is the comfort which our Father wishes us to have, physicians ever at our side, well acquainted with our constitution and inclinations, our weakness or strength, that so they may better know how to treat and govern us. The government of the Society is spiritual and interior. It does not take the road of punishment, and therefore it does not ordinarily proceed by the juridical method of informations and denunciations; its sole aim is the due treatment and improvement of your soul. To that end it is necessary that you should manifest and discover yourself to your superior as to a physician and father holding the place of God. If you do not do that, it will be putting yourself in danger and tempting God, Whose purpose it is to rule and govern you through men; and they cannot well govern you if you do not declare yourself to them, since they do not know you.

The second reason, which is an enlargement of the preceding, is this, that the more superiors are conversant with all the facts, interior and exterior, regarding their subjects, with so much the greater care and love will they be able to help their souls, and keep them out of sundry untoward situations and dangers into which they might fall by their being appointed to this or that post or put in this or that occasion of sin, all through their superior’s not knowing their temptations and evil inclinations, and their small and insufficient stock of virtue. In the Society especially we must be ever ready, according to our profession and institute, to range about different quarters of the world every time we receive orders to that effect from the sovereign pontiff or our immediate superior. And that such missions may be ordered on a sure footing, sending some and not others, sending some on one errand and others on another, our Father says: “It is not only very, but extremely, important” for the superior to have entire knowledge of the inclinations and temptations of his subjects and of the defects and sins to which they are most inclined, that thereby he may better guide and direct them, not putting on anyone a burden beyond his strength, nor exposing them to greater dangers and hardships than what they are severally able well to bear.” One of the things that renders the government of the Society easy, sweet, and well assured, is this openness on the part of subjects and the knowledge that superiors have of each individual, his talents, parts, and capacities for good and evil, what he is made for and for what not, since in this way they know what to make of everyone and what they can put him to. Thus they will not order you anything beyond your spiritual or corporal strength, nor put you in danger, but dispose of everyone according to his strength and talents—to everyone according to his proper ability, as the Gospel says (Matt. xxv. 15).

Thirdly, says our Father, this is very important as a means to enabie the superior better to order and promote what is fitting for the whole body of the Society, to the good and honor of which, along with yours, he is bound to look. When you manifest yourself to him and give him an entire account of your soul, then the superior, while having entire regard to your honor and without inflicting any stigma upon you, may at the same time look to the general good of the whole body of the Society. But if you do not declare yourself clearly to him, possibly you may endanger your honor and your soul, as well as the honor of your order, which depends on yours.

By the way, it will be well for us to consider and reflect upon the means which the Society affords us for our own improvement, how excellently well they fit in with the end of the Society. If by our institute we were shut up in our cells, going only to choir and refectory, there would be no need for such openness with superiors, nor for so many accounts of conscience. But in the Society, where subjects. are and have to be thrown into such strange situations, and. so much confidence has to be reposed in them, sending them.

throughout the world among believers and unbelievers, and sometimes alone, and that for a considerable time, the superior needs to know well each man’s interior, that he may not endanger him and the Society in his person. And for the individual himself it is of much importance to make a clean breast of everything to his superior for the discharge and security of his conscience, otherwise all these dangers will come upon him; whereas, if he will but declare to the superior his weakness and the smallness of his spiritual strength, they will not expose him to these dangerous occasions.

Plutarch alleges a similitude which well illustrates this. The poor who wish to appear rich impoverish themselves the more and in the end come to ruin, wanting to appear richer, wishing as rich men to spend more than their purses will allow. In the same way if a religious is poor in virtue, but for want of humility is anxious to disguise his poverty and appear rich and fraught with what he has not, he will impoverish himself the more and possibly will end in ruin, because they will deal with him as with one rich and advanced in the virtue and put him in dangerous occasions which he has not the funds nor the virtue to meet; all this will come upon him because he has not declared himself. Thus, though it were only for our own satisfaction and security and the freedom of our own conscience, and the avoidance of scruples, and a happy deliverance from dangers coming upon us—as also to have God more bound to us, to help us and bring us safe out of those dangerous occasions—we should give this clear account of our conscience to our superior. Oh, the content and satisfaction that a religious enjoys who has been thoroughly open with his superior, and manifested all his miseries and imperfections, when afterwards they send him on a mission or put him in office! Oh, the confidence he has in God, that He will stand by him and deliver him from shame in the dangerous occasions that he meets withal! “Lord, I did not put myself in this office, nor in this post; rather I exposed my insufficiency and the little spiritual strength I had to qualify me for it. It is Thou, O Lord, Who hast put me here and commanded me; do Thou supply what is wanting to me.” With what confidence does he repeat the saying of St. Augustine: “Lord, give me what Thou commandest, and command what Thou pleasest”—Da quod iubes, et iube quod vis! It seems to him as though he had God thereby pledged to give him what He commands.

But as for that other man, who has not given a clear account of himself, but for fear lest they might put him in this place or move him from that other place which he likes, has failed to manifest some temptation, or passion, or imperfection, or weakness of his, what comfort can he find? God has not sent him to that station, nor has obedience put him there, for ignorance, as philosophers say, causes involuntariness. It is not the will of the superior, but he of his own self-will intrudes and pushes himself into office; he is an intruder, not one called or sent. Of such that may well be said which God says by Jeremy (xxiii. 21): I did not send them, they thrust themselves in: I never spoke to them, and they gave themselves out for prophets. With such persons as these, is it wonderful that much is wanting to them and that they do not succeed well? They have reason to fear and lead unhappy lives. Let such folk take good notice that they will not satisfy their conscience by begging the superior not to put them in such an occupation or occasion because they do not feel the virtue or strength required for it, but the reason why must be declared more in particular, as we shall say afterwards; as for all the rest, the superior puts it down to humility, and the greatest saints are wont to speak in that strain.

For these reasons, then, our Father so much commends this practice to us, and speaks of it again and again in his Constitutions, as of a thing that has a great bearing on the welfare of the whole Society. So full is our Father of this sentiment that in the Fourth Part of the Constitutions, dealing with the injunction that no one is to keep anything, door or box, locked, he adds “nor his own conscience either,” though this remark does not seem to be to the purpose there; such is the deep feeling of regard that he has of it. And he does the same in the Sixth Part, where he says: “Let them hide nothing from the superior either of their outward action or their inward thought.” He takes this to be so necessary in the Society that at all times, in season and out of season, as the Apostle says (II Tim. iv. 2), he seems to remind us of it.

In the Fifth General Congregation, the question being raised: “What are the substantial points of our institute?” it was said that they are those which are set forth in the formula or rule of our institute given by Julius III and approved and confirmed by his successors, as also all those provisions without which the former could not stand, or could only hardly stand, and one of these they said is that of rendering an account of conscience. Thus it is a substantial point, so much so that without it the Society could not be maintained; in saying this we say all that can be said. Even in other religious orders this practice has been observed; and some historians have remarked that so long as there existed in them this holy custom of having recourse with all their troubles to their superiors and spiritual fathers, and discovering their whole soul to them, they persevered in great fervor. And, contrariwise, experience shows that this is apt to be the common way whereby a religious comes to ruin and fall from his vocation. He begins little by little to allow tepidity and passion and evil inclination to arise, and to fail in his spiritual duties, and to fall into one fault after another. Meanwhile he takes care to cover up his imperfection, and give no account of his infirmity; and in this way he goes on inflaming his wound and making it a running sore. So what was a little thing becomes great, and in the end almost incurable, till his whole spiritual edifice comes crashing down necause there was much silent decay going on in it without any remedy’s being applied. St. Dorotheus notes this well in these words: “Some say that this or that was the reason why this man fell, and this other left religion. Sickness, they say, threw him out, or his parents induced him to leave the order; but I say, neither this nor that was the cause, but it was because he had barred his breast from the beginning, and would not give an account of the things that were happening in his soul.”