When people think about the Society of Jesus, they often assume that all Jesuits are priests or men studying to become priests. However, the Society also includes permanent brothers—vowed religious who remain non-ordained and play an important role in the life of the Society. In the Missouri Province today brothers serve as university professors and high school teachers, pastoral ministers in parishes and hospitals, and administrators and maintenance supervisors.

Around the world Jesuit Brothers proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ by working in such fields as drama, technology, engineering, manual labor and social ministries. They staff retreat houses, mission centers and parishes. Brothers work as administrators, carpenters, computer technicians, chaplains, food managers, fundraisers, gardeners, printers, and retreat directors. In schools, they serve as teachers, infirmarians, librarians and coaches. These are only a few of the many ministries of the Jesuit Brother. What determines the choice of ministry? The changing needs of the Society of Jesus and the Church of the 21st Century.

St. Ignatius saw the need for brothers soon after the Society was founded, and recent general superiors of the Society have insisted that the brother’s vocation is essential to the Society’s apostolic mission of defending and spreading the faith--and so bringing Christ to the world.

How do brothers specifically contribute to that mission? And why might a man who wants to give his life to Christ as a Jesuit be attracted to the brother’s vocation?

In the first three centuries of the Society's life, brothers worked at a tremendously diverse set of jobs. Most brothers supported the Society by undertaking the daily domestic chores and craft trades necessary for maintaining the Society’s communities and institutions: receptionist, cook, sacristan, carpenter, painter, bricklayer, and so on. Others brought with them into the Society sophisticated skills in such areas as engineering, architecture, watchmaking, and surgery. And some achieved prominence in the fine arts—such as Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709), renowned for his illusionistic church ceilings and writings on perspective theory. Brothers even worked at teaching and catechizing, in particular in the foreign mission territories. They all put their lay talents at the service of the Society. And all were expected to spread the faith through their contact with people and by spiritual conversation. Open to both unlettered peasant and skilled craftsman, the brother’s vocation made room in the Society’s mission for all those who otherwise would have been excluded by a strict ordination requirement.

After the Society was restored in the United State in 1804, brothers largely worked at domestic support roles and craft trades inside the large institutions and agricultural operations associated with the Society’s houses of formation and schools. Brothers played an especially important role at the Indian missions, where they not only worked the farms but also taught in the Jesuit schools for Native Americans. And some maintained the tradition of brothers in the fine arts. In any case, the labor of brothers proved instrumental to the Society’s institutional growth through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in some provinces brothers accounted for more than forty percent of the membership.

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965), the work open to Jesuit brothers has significantly expanded. Brothers today are eligible for any assignment that does not directly require holy orders: high school and college teacher, artist, scientist, engineer, doctor or nurse, administrator, social worker, counselor, spiritual director, even hospital chaplain. Many brothers continue to work at blue-collar trades, but all are now expected to acquire some theological education as Jesuits.

Behind this expansion of roles lay the idea of a complementary equality between Jesuit priests and brothers. As various documents and general superiors have insisted since Vatican II, brothers are in no way second-class Jesuits. Rather, they fully share in “one and the same” apostolic vocation (GC 31, Decree 7, nos. 1, 2).

But then how does the brother’s vocation complement that of ordained Jesuits? Former General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., put his finger on something the brother accomplishes precisely because he foregoes ordination: “In some ways the religious brother embodies religious life in its essence, and so is able to illustrate that life with particular clarity.” Religious communities originally arose in the early Church primarily as radical Christian lay movements. Precisely because the brother opts out of the clerical state, he can witness to the original value of communal religious life as such, without admixture.

So we might think of complementary equality this way: Jesuit brothers and priests are equals, both as members of a religious community and as available for the apostolic mission of the Society. But they exercise their common vocation in complementary ways. Within the Church, ordained Jesuits carry out the sacramental dimension so essential to the Society’s mission, leading people to Christ through the sacraments, while brothers always remain on a par with their lay colleagues. Within the Society, brothers remind all Jesuits of the value of religious life on its own terms.  

To learn more about the Jesuit Brothers, read The Value of the Brother's Vocation, by Br. Bill Rehg SJ.