Q. You speak about unity and communion. In the Society of Jesus, though, and also in the Church itself there is more and more diversity. We can see it as a richness but also as a fragility. How can communion be preserved in spite of such great diversity?

A. I see this as a tremendous wealth and the way to overcome the obvious difficulties is to contact and communicate. Keep contact and communicate! I see this is what young people do. Young people have a sense of what is happening. They travel, they contact others, and they want to keep in contact. They use blogs and emails. Because if you lose the contact, you also lose the experience. Experiences are very important, but they don’t last, and we easily forget them. For instance, people with their inevitable prejudices go to the developing world; they change; but if they don’t cultivate their new insights afterwards they go back to their prejudices. I have seen non-Christian young people going with the Peace Corps to South-East Asia, Africa or Latin America. When they come back to Japan, immediately they look for other people who have had the same experience because they want to maintain it.

So, it is important for us to keep in touch. We have experienced a great thing in the General Congregation. My question has been: how to expand this experience to the rest of the Society of Jesus? I think we have to produce contacts, particularly for our young people. And this is happening: scholastics having their meetings, European meetings for instance, and some of them are going to the Third World for regency. This is wonderful. This is a way to move to a new age. Everywhere there are borders, but people are going to laugh at them, because borders were made in that particular time to mark us as a sovereign state. But now young people realize it is better to live outside the limits of a sovereign state, in contact with others.

Q. The Pope insists on fidelity to Catholic doctrine, to the right expression of Christian faith. Isn’t there a tension between doctrinal teaching and the experience you are talking about, of going deeply into a process of transformation?

A. There is a tension, and precisely that is where I think the challenge for the Jesuits is. The challenge that we have now, if we take the relationship with the whole Church through the Pope seriously is to present without rigidity what the Holy Father says – not changing it, no, we respect it. But we need to explain to people: what the Holy Father is saying is the end point of a long process, the distillation of Christian experience. If you are interested in knowing in its totality what he means, you have to come to the starting point and enter the process. Don’t start and end with the doctrine because if we start with the conclusion we risk going nowhere. We have to explain: the Pope wants to keep alive something that is going to maintain the tradition of the Church that has lived through thousands of experiences, millions of experiences. If you want to come here you have to start there. Don’t jump to the conclusion. But we jump very often, and we rely on catechisms that are often difficult to digest, that don’t have the texture of all the individual experiences of the members of the community of believers. We Jesuits have to help the Holy Father by making what he says understandable and attractive to the people, we have to build bridges so that people can go through the process. “Don’t fixate on the conclusion, but see that it is true for you, based on your own experiences.

We can dialogue with everybody because God is living in them. And then, at the end, you will see how a Christian community comes and says: well, all these experiences, we summarize them like this. This creed is a formulation that summarizes our experience. It doesn’t take away all of your experience. It doesn’t suppress your experience. On the contrary it is like an arrow that tells you where to start. The Chinese say nicely (as a matter of fact, it is hard to know if it is a Chinese or an Indian saying because they are equally quoted): “the wise man points to the moon, but the fool looks at the finger”. So, when the Holy Father says ‘look at the moon’ we should not look at his finger. We should keep looking at the moon. Some people get upset because his finger is German; okay, fine, but it’s too bad to limit him that way. But you don’t look at the finger, you look at the moon. I think this is a very good image for what we have to do with the people. People get distracted with fingers all the time. Doctrines help us experience God or help us understand our experiences of God; they are not the experience of God and we should not confuse that.