The Faith That Does Justice in Partnership: Creative Fidelity in Company

Kevin Hargaden

Introduction: Setting the stage

In this paper, I seek to address how today the faith that does justice is one approached in partnership. That revolutionary claim within Decree 4 – that the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement¹ of the service of the Christian faith – demands to be interpreted today in terms of cooperative action.

I am going to make three mini arguments in this paper. First, I am going to show how Decree 4 already envisioned partnership as intrinsic to mission. Secondly, I am going to suggest that partnership must be open to going beyond the Christian Churches towards all people of goodwill, even towards the state. And finally, I want to suggest that authentic partnership requires discernment because not everyone who invokes the name of Jesus will turn out to be a partner in justice.

But undergirding this theologically, I want to suggest that the Jesuit turn to justice was an act of what might be called creative fidelity: an achievement in faithfulness to the historic proclamation of the Church that nonetheless articulated in a new way, for changed circumstances, what it means to ‘become more open toward God and more willing to live according to the demands of the Gospel’.²

Partnership in Decree 4

Paragraph 37 of the fourth decree contains a quiet revolution:

The involvement we desire will be apostolic to the extent that it leads us to a closer collaboration with other members of the local Churches, Christians of other denominations, believers of other religions, and all who hunger and thirst after justice; in short, with all who strive to make a world fit for men and women to live in, a world where brotherhood opens the way for the recognition and acceptance of Christ our Brother and God our Father. Ecumenism will then become not just a particular ministry but an attitude of mind and a way of life.

We must notice how this paragraph widens the circle. In the Society’s founding charism, it always understood itself as being at the service of the Church. But here, in an ever-expanding reach, the decree calls in Christians of other denominations, believers in other religions, and ultimately all who hunger and thirst after justice. The Jesuit mission is shared.

Missio Dei implications in paragraph 37

There are voices in the Church who malign this kind of movement. They fear that this kind of expansive invitation involves watering down the mission and identity of the Church. There is a sense in which this could be the case. But it is important to recognise that the missional impulse that marks the beginning of Decree 4 – remember it starts with a description of ‘the mission of the Society today’³ – is still firmly on display in paragraph 37. What is being sought here is deeper ‘recognition and acceptance of Christ our Brother and God our Father’.⁴

What we have here is not the dilution of our mission but the reminder that is has never really been our mission. In an act of ecumenical partnership, we can remember that this point was articulated with particular clarity by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth. In 1932, he reminded a conference at Brandenburg that when we talk about mission, we are talking about the missio Dei:

Should it not give even the most faithful missionary, even the most convinced friend of missions, pause for thought that the term missio in the early Church was a term from the doctrine of the Trinity, namely the designation for the divine self-missions, the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the world? Is it self- evident that we are allowed to do things differently?⁵

Properly speaking, we don’t have a mission of our own. We participate in the mission of God. It follows – and Decree 4 makes this very clear – that since partnership is the source of our activity, it is fitting for it to also be the method.⁶ Since God is someone whose mission stretches into the streets to gather all the people who can be found (Mt 22:10), his missioners should have the same mind.

The fearful response that wants to domesticate God’s mission and settle for merely an institutional project ends up doing exactly what it accuses others of doing. That kind of retreat is the true dilution. To try to protect our traditions and institutions by limiting the Spirit’s freedom to rove beyond the movements he has given us is seditious to the kingdom.

The faith that does justice must be explorative and collaborative by nature.

Creative fidelity

At base, suspicions about this kind of radical commitment to partnership are sourced in the fear that some kind of ill-considered innovation is coming down the line. Partnership has not been the first instinct of the Church for much of recent memory, and so we worry that by engaging in it, we might be forsaking the very tradition that keeps us on the right path.

But when we read Decree 4, we find a very clear concern to locate this new articulation of the mission within the context of the much older understandings of what the Jesuits exist to do.⁷ This is how tradition actually works. To be traditionalist does not mean enshrining one moment in time as decisive, covering it in an epoxy, and insisting that no change can ever occur. In the words of the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, that is traditionalism: ‘the dead faith of the living’. What we need instead is the ‘living faith of the dead’.⁸ In this light, Decree 4 is an outstanding example of what we might call creative fidelity – the ability to find the treasures that have been neglected so that we can keep on focusing on the main thing, even when the contexts in which the main thing gets done are radically changed.

To preserve the tradition does not mean to polish an artefact otherwise kept behind glass in a museum. It is more like tending to the ecosystem of a grand river, home to many overlapping biomes. The Spirit is like the current. Each generation makes their home by the same water and navigates towards the same goal, but differences abound, as change is characteristic of anything that is alive.

Attending to the synodal valences

Synodality is the most direct expression of partnership as a mode of mission that we have today. A helpful guide here is the work of Massimo Faggioli on how the synodal Church is one where the partnership between the episcopate and the faithful is articulated, in part ‘in terms of the legitimisation and “ecclesialization” of prophecy’.⁹ It is worth considering whether Decree 4 is an example of this in history – a new emphasis on an older, trusted word, discerned by a collegial gathering who sought to embed the momentum present in the Churches in the institutional structures of the Church.

If this basic claim bears scrutiny, then we have a firm foundation to step forward in confidence, establishing new pathways of partnership between the episcopate and the faithful and to widen the circle further still.

Partnership as mission: Working with others for justice

So, what does partnership look like in practice?

Let me begin with a scene from Pedro Arrupe’s life. He was a young missionary in Hiroshima when America dropped the first atomic bomb on 6 August 1945. He turned his novitiate house – protected from the blast by a hill – into a field hospital. Decades later, recalling Mass that morning in a room full of the scarred, he wrote:

I began the Mass as best I could in the midst of that mass of humanity. I can never forget the terrible feeling I experienced when I turned toward them at the Dominus vobiscum (we said Mass at that time with our back toward the congregation) and saw this sight from the altar. I could not move, I stayed there as if I were paralyzed, my arms outstretched, contemplating this human tragedy – human science and technological progress used to destroy the human race. They were all looking at me, eyes full of agony and despair as if they were waiting for some consolation to come from the altar.¹⁰

That experience forged in him a conviction that the Gospel must be embodied in the struggle for justice. When he guided the thirty-second general congregation, he was, in effect, proposing partnership with suffering humanity as the Jesuit’s form of obedience to God in this time. Today that partnership continues in a vast array of ministries. We can think of the millions of young people educated in Jesuit institutions, or the Refugee Service, which is accompanying displaced families in more than fifty countries, or the network of social centres like the one I work at. Each is a response to the same call: to serve the faith that does justice. But now we need to add two words explicitly: with others.

Three levels for partnership

Briefly, I can unpack that claim on three different levels. In gearing our ministry towards partnership, the first factor at play is pragmatic. We must face up to the consequences of our reduced resources. It is not just that the numbers of clergy are decreasing, but whatever strength that remains within the lay faithful is tilted towards the right-hand side of the demographic map. While institutions maybe once had the strength to pursue their own agenda in solitude, such a path looks increasingly like a journey into alienation and emaciation.

The second factor is only slightly less tawdry. Partnership improves impact. We can testify to this in our recent work at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice. In 2020, we published a sort of manifesto essay about the relevance of Pope Francis’ concept of ‘integral ecology’ entitled Towards a Green New Deal that garnered some attention from a single political party but, as you can see from the briefest investigation of our current ecological policies, had very little impact.¹¹ In 2022, we published an intellectually precise account of the current housing crisis called A Tenant State of Mind that was recognised by some of the leading scholars of the Irish housing scene but did not meaningfully inform the new housing plan announced this week.¹² Yet in the winter of 2025, we finished a report on the role of faith-based communities in the north-east inner city of Dublin, looking particularly at the role such groups play in building up the common good around integration.¹³ We wrote this in partnership with a local charity, ACET (AIDS Care Education Training), and it arrived to a remarkable reception. The lord mayor of Dublin sought to initiate roundtables. The major news outlets – online, newspapers, radio, television – all wanted to cover it. And ultimately, we hope to have a clear say in the national strategies going forward, pushing back against the ways in which our society is sleepwalking into a destructive secularism.

The partnership was coherent – ACET is a Christian charity, we have pre-existing relationships with them, they have a similar commitment to intellectual rigor – and the result was significant. But pragmatics and effectiveness – as inescapable as they are – should not be the basis upon which a Christian movement makes a decision. Lots of things make pragmatic sense that are entirely unjust. There is a kind of brazen inefficiency to letting effectiveness guide every call.

The most pressing reason why we should turn to partnership is theological – it is a response to the prompting of the Spirit. The ecclesiologist Ormond Rush talks about the ‘traditioning’ work of the Holy Spirit. We receive the tradition as a gift from those in the past, but we have to enact the tradition to pass on the gift to those in the future and ‘the Spirit is the bridge to both.’¹⁴ Where do we find this mediating work of the Holy Spirit between the generations but in the community of the faithful itself? Fidelity is never solitary. Partnership is the place we get to practise faithfulness.

Pedro Arrupe intuited this long before the language of synodality became so prevalent. In that shattered novitiate in Hiroshima, he glimpsed the Spirit moving where life seemed extinguished. The insight that leads to ‘the faith that does justice’ is a product of the Spirit before it is a call to service. For Arrupe, partnership with suffering humanity was obedience to the Spirit already labouring the world’s pain. His account is almost mystical, as he recalls that he ‘was the only one who knew’ that the Saviour of the World was present to them.¹⁵ But six months later, as the last patient left that place, ‘many among them had been baptised and all had learned that Christian charity knows how to understand, help, and give a consolation that surpasses all human comforting.’¹⁶

The Spirit builds partnerships if only we have eyes to see it. Justice is what love looks like in public, and to be the Church that does justice with others is to break with that same Spirit – the Spirit who, even among the ruins, whispers that death will not have the last word.

Widening the circle of partnership

Decree 4 is not a romantic or utopian document. It is assumed that solidarity with the poor and the oppressed demands engagement with the structural forces in our society. The Church that seeks to follow after it must also ‘verse ourselves in the complex problems’ facing us.¹⁷ We should be eager to pursue ‘the most rigorous possible political and social analysis of our situation’.¹⁸ There is no way for us to bear witness to the need for justice and to remain politically disengaged or neutral. That myth of the privatised faith dies the moment we remember that whatever else it is, the proclamation that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ inextricably implies that no one else is – not lawyers or politicians, not the market, not the Zeitgeist, not the budget.

But a funny thing happens when you develop these analyses. At least in Irish society, suddenly people want to talk to you. One of the partnerships we should actively anticipate and cultivate is dialogue with the state.

To refer back to that report the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice recently published on the role of faith communities in Dublin’s north-east inner city: what became obvious in the course of that research is that the state and its institutions have a real blind-spot on practically all matters relating to religious practice. A discovery from our research is that faith may be a greater integrative force than ethnicity. And it is encouraging that the bodies of the state are clearly receptive to our findings. Had we not raised the issue, it would remain unconsidered. But there is an openness for constructive dialogue. We shouldn’t assume that doors are shut on us when we haven’t even knocked.

Keen students of history will necessarily be uneasy with this suggestion. What is the long twentieth century of Irish Christianity except an object lesson in not getting too closely aligned with the ruling powers? But Jesuit spirituality always counsels discernment instead of retreat. In seeking to work with the state, in formal and informal ways, we do not intend to baptise the reigning political order. Instead, we recognise that the primary mode of change in the structural forces that oppress those who are poor and marginalised is through policy. We cannot aspire to integral human development if we are not present at the tables where the state’s plan of action is developed.

Partnering in ‘polyhedronic social friendship’

Decree 4 provides the mandate for partnership. The synodal turn offers a structural articulation for partnership. And in Pope Francis’ concept of social friendship, expounded upon in Fratelli Tutti, we encounter the theological grammar for partnership. Social friendship is ‘a love capable of building a new world’ as it enacts the claim Christians make about a universal fraternity between all humans.¹⁹ Decree 4 challenges us to seek ‘a closer collaboration… with all who hunger and thirst after justice’, and Fratelli Tutti deepens this by offering the image of the polyhedron where ‘the value of each individual is respected, where “the whole is greater than the part, but it is also greater than the sum of its parts”’.²⁰ Instead of aligning our political imagination to a spectrum from Left to Right, the polyhedron makes it possible to conceive of a complex space where those who meet at acute angles may still find common cause. Groups that oppose each other at one point may find themselves tightly aligned at another. A reconciled diversity can be conceived without erasing specific identities.

This shift from ‘spectrum’ to ‘polyhedron’ opens us to the pneumatological possibility that our mission is not to pull everyone to the very same point on every single topic but to discover those spaces where the Spirit is already fostering ‘encounter capable of transcending our differences and divisions’.²¹ The metaphors that drive Francis’ vision here are aesthetic. The way we discern our path is to attends to the ‘music of the Gospel’, which, if lost, results in the evaporation of ‘the joy born of compassion, the tender love born of trust, the capacity for reconciliation that has its source in our knowledge that we have been forgiven and sent forth’.²²

This aesthetic of encounter is not an invitation to vague, sentimental togetherness. It is a summons to the rigorous work of structural conversion. For Francis, a ‘social love’ that inspires partnership is only authentic if it ‘spur[s] people to create more sound institutions, more just regulations, more supportive structures’.²³ Partnership has many pragmatic attractions, but ultimately it is the stage upon which we can enact ‘that “love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care”’ that is both ‘civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.’²⁴

However, this pneumatological openness cannot be a blind embrace, because the Spirit’s movement is always directed towards the missio Dei. Fratelli Tutti is an extended argument that in our present moment that mission is a movement towards ‘a love that transcends the barriers of geography and distance, and declares blessed all those who love their brother’.²⁵ This is a sharp diagnostic for discernment. The ‘music of the Gospel’ has a specific cadence – one of compassion and reconciliation (consider how the discussion of the parable of the Good Samaritan is so structurally central to the encyclical) – and where that music is replaced by the discordant notes of exclusion or the appropriation of sacred symbols for ethno-nationalistic ends, the ‘social friendship’ ends. Turning to this task – distinguishing between those who share the Spirit’s labour for justice and those who merely wear the livery of Christian symbols to dismantle the very fraternity the Spirit seeks to build – is the last step required to complete this argument.

The limits of partnership: Facing false allies

I have argued that the Church that embodies the faith that does justice will do it in partnership. The Jesuits have long recognised this necessary partnership between ‘the lay’ and ‘the J’, and between it and other bodies within the Church. Decree 4 gives voice to how the Spirit is drawing Christians from different traditions into dialogue together, and that will give rise to shared action. But we also can anticipate that in our increasingly post-secular context, Irish Christians will find surprising alliances forming with people of goodwill who may hold perspectives vastly removed from traditional Christianity. This is something we should be open to not in spite of the risk of the dilution of our mission but because we never had a mission in the first place – we are invited into participating with God in his mission and partnership is thus the source and the method and the goal of our evangelisation efforts. But if partnership is our method, we still require discernment to serve as a guardrail.

There are voices – increasingly loud – in our society (and elsewhere) who invoke the symbols and language of the Christian Church but direct them to ends diametrically opposed to the kingdom of God. Scholars have begun to refer to this as ‘Christian nationalism’ – a set of ideological movements that ‘idealises and advocates’ for a fusion of civic life and belonging with Christianity – where that last word has quite an elastic meaning.²⁶ Varieties of this religiously-tinted ethno-nationalism can be found in positions of considerable political influence in Hungary, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. There is a concerted effort to import it here.

Richard Carson, a community activist in the north-east inner city of Dublin, has noted the prevalence of religious imagery in the protests of the anti- immigrant far right. At the same time, our own research at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, into the faith communities in the area, has uncovered that the hostility that they receive tends to come from those who ‘have no religious practice’.²⁷ It seems clear that you can weaponise Christian imagery without being in any way bound to Christianity.

Christians through history and across the world would instinctively know that when you print ‘Jesus is King’ on an Irish tricolour, you are not honouring Christ but wildly reducing his domains. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, ‘the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him’ (Colossians 1:15–16).

I have suggested that we might end up in partnership with people who appear to have little in common with us. I must also suggest that we might end up refusing partnership – indeed actively opposing – people who superficially seem to agree with us. These are no longer alien movements. Anti-immigrant conspiracy theories about a ‘globalist agenda’ receive the passive and active endorsement of lay leaders in the Church.²⁸ The Irish Church has been a migrating Church for millennia, and much of the present vitality in our parishes relies in part on the commitment of our more newly arrived neighbours. There is very little that will sink whatever recovering credibility we might have faster than allowing racist fantasists to appropriate the Church’s language and symbols to pursue goals totally at odds with the mission to which we have been called.

Partnership in the Spirit builds the common good; Christian nationalism seeks our own tribe’s victory. These are not reconcilable positions. Faith is easily collapsed into ideology. Justice can be warped into exclusion. Standing in solidarity with the poor and oppressed means we must fiercely oppose the false allies that may arise.

Conclusion: Partnership as creative fidelity

The faith that does justice cannot be solitary. It flourishes only in partnership – with other Christians, with people of good will, with institutions that seek the common good, and even with sceptics who push us to self-examination. Fifty years ago, the thirty-second general congregation heard the Spirit say that faith and justice are inseparable. Today, we have to consider how partnership is a part of this.

The Society of Jesus calls itself the Company of Jesus. It is a beautiful title: companions of Christ, but also companions of all those whom Christ befriends. To be the Company of Jesus is to care about the company we keep. When Barth framed our task in terms of mission Dei in 1932, he was addressing a group of Christians and church leaders who were struggling with the rise of a political movement that looked from some angles to be very concerned with religiosity. He discerned that this was not the case. He lost his job, his home, and many friends rather than make a partnership with the forces that opposed Jesus.

But remembering that the mission we share is not ours, but God’s, means that we are forever called to be open to the possibility that the stranger is not just our neighbour, but our brother or sister in Christ. Read through Acts again and what do we find from Pentecost on but an ever-widening circle of people that Jesus has befriended? As Pope Leo XIV teaches in his first apostolic exhortation, the God we know is the ‘friend and liberator of the poor, the one who hears the cry of the poor and intervenes to free them’.²⁹ Imitating Christ means partnering with those – and who work for those – who need liberation.

Kevin Hargaden is the Social Theologian at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice.

Notes

Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, General Congregation 32, 1975, https://jesuitportal.bc.edu/research/ documents/1975_decree4gc32/
Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, 18. It is important to remember Ormond Rush’s point here that, when the Spirit prompts like this, that ‘does not mean that the Spirit brings forth new revelation beyond that which is revealed in Jesus Christ, the Word’, but that ,what is new are the manifold ways in which the original reality, the Word, is received throughout human history.’ Ormond Rush, The Eyes of Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and the Church’s Reception of Revelation (Catholic University of America Press, 2009), p. 41. Emphasis original.
Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, 2.
Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, 37.
Karl Barth, Theologische Fragen Und Antworten (Evangelischer Verlag, 1957), p. 115. Author’s translation.
See, for example Philippians 1:1–11.
See, for example Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, 16.
The full quote reads: ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.’ Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (Yale University Press, 2018), p. 65.
Massimo Faggioli, ‘Notes on Prophecy and the Ecclesiology of Synodality from the Second Vatican Council to Today’, Irish Theological Quarterly, 88:4 (2023), p. 310.
Pedro Aruppe, One Jesuit’s Spiritual Journey: Autobiographical Conversations with Jean-Claude Dietsch SJ (The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1986), p. 33.
Keith Adams et al., ‘Do We Really Feel Fine?: Towards an Irish Green New Deal’, Working Notes, 34:87 (2020), pp. 24–48.
Keith Adams et al., Tenant State of Mind: How Cost Rental Public Housing Can Reverse the State’s Transformation to a Tenant (Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 2022).
Keith Adams et al., Faith in the North-East Inner City: How Faith-Based Communities Help Dublin to Flourish (Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 2025), https://www.jcfj.ie/wp-content/ uploads/2025/10/Faith-in-the-North-East-Inner-City.pdf
Rush, Eyes of Faith, p. 40.
Aruppe, Spiritual Journey, p. 33.
Aruppe, Spiritual Journey, p. 34.
Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, 42.
Society of Jesus, ‘Decree 4’, 44.
Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti (The Holy See, 2020), 183.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 145.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 215.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 277.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 186.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 181.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti, 1.
Samuel L. Perry et al., ‘Our Kind of American: Christian Nationalism, Race, and Contingent Views of Cultural Membership’, The Sociological Quarterly, 65:1 (2024), p. 129.
Adams et al, Faith in the North-East Inner City, p. 46.
See, for example, Mary Kenny, ‘Ireland’s Loss of Faith, Folklore and Identity – According to This Doctor’s Diagnosis’, Irish Catholic, 6 November 2025.
Pope Leo XIV, Dilexi Te (The Holy See, 2025), 17.