Book of Serenity, Case 9; Gateless Barrier, Case 14; Blue Cliff Record, Cases 63 & 64
May 13th, 2026.
When I entered the Jesuits in 1966, the Second Vatican Council had just ended. The Catholic world was experiencing the exuberance of John the 23rd’s throwing the windows open. A General Congregation of the Jesuits had just elected a Basque priest, Father Pedro Arrupe, as our new Father General. He was charismatic. We younger Jesuits felt he could lead the largest and most educated religious order in the post-Council era. He’d been less than 10 kilometers from the epicenter of the Atomic blast in Hiroshima, a horrific event that weighed heavily on my generation of Americans, including most of the men who entered the Jesuits with me.
Arrupe’s predecessor, Father Jean-Baptiste Janssens, had been elected two years after the defeat of the Nazis. We’d heard his reputation as a strict disciplinarian. We also knew that he’d worked with the clandestine Benedyk Grynpas network during the occupation of Belgium, but for some reason, that was rarely acknowledged. He forged baptismal certificates for Jewish children, but never required that they be baptized. He taught them to say the Hail Mary but only so they could pass a Nazi interrogation if caught. He hid a large group of Jewish children in his own residence. He quietly encouraged other Jesuit houses, monasteries, and convents across Belgium to hide Jews. He undoubtedly knew the 43 Jesuits who died in the camps and the more than 100 other priests who were murdered resisting the Nazi regime. He’d been their superior. He knew that if he were caught by the Gestapo, he would be executed, but he did the right thing. He was honored with the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Knesset of the new State of Israel in 1954.
I didn’t have to go back to 15th-century England to find examples of heroic men of conscience. Most of my superiors, teachers, mentors, and spiritual guides had been trained by this very courageous man. Many had worked with him directly, but he never wore his resistance like a badge. If he ever spoke about it, we never heard it. The job of piecing together the Jesuit order after the war, coupled with managing the largest influx of “vocations” in the order's 500-year history, was enormous, equal to responding to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust. It was another task of matching actions with words and sacred promises, but without the real threat of execution
The stain of antisemitism in the Catholic church is extremely troubling; the record of the institutional Church during the Third Reich has become the topic of a heated debate. There is one group that claims that Pope Pius XII did his duty and maintained absolute neutrality, but to others, he appears cowardly, even sympathetic towards the aims of national socialism. The role of Father Włodzimierz Ledóchowski, the head of the Jesuits during the war, is equally mixed. He certainly saw reports about the extent of the mass murders. Claims that the Nazis were skillful at hiding their atrocity feel like an excuse. Both Pacelli (Pius XII) and Ledóchowski have been described as “benignly” antisemitic. Many old noble European families were. It was part of an ancient class stratification that Americans don’t understand. How could priests, bishops, and popes keep silent unless they were hedging their bets, or even being sympathetic to the Nazis?
After months of wrestling with a vague, undefined flight between Nanquan’s monks of the eastern and western halls, it was no longer speculative. A question whose answer determined life or death was right in my face; it was a question that cut so deeply there was only silence, or an answer whose horrific consequences were impossible to escape.
In my mind, I convened a Board of Examiners—three professed senior priests—to interview the monks of the western and eastern halls—a typical Jesuit tactic. I asked if the English Reformation had been a power grab among 16th-century monarchies, was the Jesuit mission doomed from its conception. Was the sacrifice of the English martyrs even justified? When I extended that hypothesis into the ambiguity of the Catholic response to Hitler, I was told that I was being revisionist in my reading of history. It reeked of the same equivocation that Father Garnet was accused ot. I couldn’t recall the sainthood of the English Jesuit martyrs, though opposing the cause of Eugenio Pacelli might be justified depending on a more careful review of the history. The hard fact that both the Jesuits and the College of Cardinals, right after the War, elected men, Janssens and Roncalli, who were named Righteous Among the Nations, tells me that they wanted to land on the right side of history.
However, my questions missed the point of the koan. I wasn’t being asked to speculate: if a group of Jewish kids showed up at my door, and I knew that helping them would put me in the same grave danger they faced, would I rise to the moment? Right now is not five centuries ago.
The tone is correct. It didn’t have the urgency and the immediacy required, but at least I had managed to put breath and blood into the argument between the eastern and western halls, one that carried the weight of life and death. The koan ends with Zhaozhou taking off his shoes and putting them on his head. We are told, in a scholarly tone, that this was an expression of grief in ancient China.
Could I go through a painful experience of dealing with questions about my entire religious life and end with a funeral joke? I’d caught a few laughing Zen students take off their shoes and prance around, with no sense of how profoundly their world has been turned upside down. But there it was, a note about an ancient Chinese funeral ritual in the marginalia, handed down through at least a dozen roshis, and brought into the dokusan room where we dealt with the question.
I’ve never seen convincing evidence to support the ancient Chinese funeral rite story. I searched Google. Did this practice, display, or joke exist in China during any dynasty? I did find some customs that stretch Western norms. In Taiwan, the bereaved family hires strippers and pole dancers if the obsequies go beyond three days. The motivation is not otherworldly. If the attendees are entertained, they don’t go home, and the priests maintain their minyan, or quorum, for the ceremonies. But we were being asked to believe that it was normal for Chinese mourners to dance with their shoes on their heads. This is at least suspect.
There is a more straightforward answer: Up is down. Down is up.
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References:
Rebellion of the Righteous: Jesuit Partisanship for Jews. In: Journal of Jesuit Studies, James Bernauer S.J.
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, John Cornwell
The Jesuits and the Third Reich, Vincent A. Lapomarda.
The American Jesuits, Schroth, Raymond A. Published by NYU Press
The American Jesuits: A History. NYU Press, 2007. Project MUSE.
I’ve written three sections that will appear separately. Here’s the first. https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2026/07/nanquan-cuts-cat.html
