3. In community or in dispersion, one body for mission

Threatened by the individualism of our time but challenged by the passionate desire of the Church for koinonia, our community life is being nourished by the Ignatian inspiration of its beginnings. The first companions felt drawn to establish one apostolic body – "nos reducere ad unum corpus" – because each had heard the Lord's call to live his mission in a common fraternal love. But from the start, they saw that this mission could not be carried out either in the confines of a cloister or in a community life conceived of as an end in itself. Because of this, it became necessary to create their apostolic body as a universal body that would be concretized in a local community, surely, but would never be confined to it.

It is being-on-mission that animates and governs both living in a local community and the need to work outside a house of the Society. As were the first companions, dispersed in many places because of their mission, present-day Jesuits are sometimes called to work alone in a mission of the Church. From the beginning, Master Ignatius envisioned creating a community life that would not be rooted in any particular house, but rather would be based on constant communication, ongoing correspondence, and above all on the "ratio conscientiae" through which each mission would be viewed and reviewed in the light of Christ's mission and as a share in the mission of the universal body of the Society. In today's world, which has become a "global village" with vast possibilities of communication, many members of the Society must live "in dispersion" because of their mission. The Society asks them to give themselves as much as possible to the prayerful discernment and apostolic dynamism of the universal Society by taking an active part in the life of a community already in existence or of one put together for the purpose. Major Superiors, whose first responsibility is the renewal of the mission given to each companion, have to be particularly attentive to those who work in a mission of the Society in dispersion (cf. NC 317).

If a local community does not exhaust all possible ways of being-on-mission, neither does it exist just for itself; rather, it exists as one opportunity for the universal body of the Society – which unites all its members without exception – to concretize our mission: helping people encounter their Creator and Redeemer, above all where the Lord is little known or scarcely acknowledged. What this mission means in the concrete for our times, General Congregations have discerned and then fixed in apostolic priorities. But their decrees will remain empty words until communities, both local and in dispersion, have translated them into a program or project for their community living (NC 324, 2).

A community must not think of itself as a lonely island. It must work in harmonious solidarity with the apostolic network of the Province or Assistancy and, to make the universal body present, adopt the apostolic priorities of the whole Society. So whatever forms our apostolate might take, and however different, we never have grounds for precluding the option for the poor or the concern for dialogue, the offer of ignatian spirituality or the yearning to keep close to the people in their culture, so that Christ can be proclaimed in a way that really touches their hearts (NC 323). Open and friendly spiritual communication (NC 324) will establish our common mission as a priority throughout the Society by adapting it to the conditions of the local community, which is a privileged realization in the here and now of our apostolic brotherhood dispersed across the world (NC 314, 2).

The Society is a universal body borne along by the apostolic dynamism of the Spiritual Exercises. Through this body, the Spirit continues the Son's mission among the men and women of our time – above all where that mission is unknown or disregarded – for the greater glory of God the Father. When held up against the apostolic demand to live and act in everything as servants of Christ's mission in which we are all united, our community life comes second, as a function of this mission. Certainly, this shared ideal of mission takes on flesh in a concrete apostolic work, steeped in one culture, serving one nation, responding to some definite need. But it draws its meaning and purpose, its dynamic energy, from a movement of love which begins and ends – to use Master Ignatius's own words – in the Holy Trinity (Const. 671). In this movement of love in the Trinity rises the union of the universal body of the Society. It is this movement that establishes each community in service of Christ's mission, all the while assuring that its life will remain open to union with the universal apostolic body of the Society to which each member belongs first of all (Cf NC 314-315).