Fr. Peter Bisson, provincial superior of the Jesuits in English Canada, spoke about the plans at the annual Jesuit Provincial’s Dinner in Thornhill April 9. The merger, to be realized over the next several years, first needs approval from the Father General of the Jesuits in Rome, Fr. Adolfo Nicolas.
The new shape of the Canadian Jesuits will challenge English-speaking Jesuits to work across one of Canada’s most enduring cultural divides and in one of the most secularized societies in the world, said Bisson.
“We will be changed. We will be affected,” he said. “We will be transformed in ways we cannot predict.”
With 149 Jesuit priests and brothers and a generally younger profile, the anglophone Jesuits will become the dominant partner in the new entity. There are 129 French Canadian Jesuits.
Over the past decade the two provinces have shared a common, bilingual novitiate which requires anglophones aspiring to take first vows to learn French and francophones to learn English. There are currently five English-speaking and one French-speaking novices enrolled in the two-year program.
The two provinces have operated their archives in common since 2009. The collections, which date all the way back to 1611, are housed in Montreal.
A merger would return Canada’s Jesuits to the single province structure they had in 1907 when the Canadian Independent Mission of the Society of Jesus became a full-fledged province. It wasn’t until 1924 that the French-dominated Canadian province had enough anglophone members — 137 — to justify breaking it into two provinces, though the English-speaking Jesuits remained a vice-province until 1939.
The English province was known as the Upper Canada Province until 2006 when it officially changed its name to the Jesuits in English Canada. At that point the Quebec province became the Gallo Canadensis Societatis Jesu.
The future headquarters for the order in Canada, elections for a common provincial superior and his assistants and the status of various Jesuit ministries in the two provinces have not been decided.
Jesuits in Canada before Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order in 1773 were missionaries sent out from France. This year the Jesuits are celebrating the 200th anniversary of their restoration by Pope Pius VII at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Jesuit historians Fr. Jacques Monet, Fr. John Meehan and Fr. Michael Knox will present a panel discussion on the restoration at Regis College in Toronto on May 22.