APOSTOLIC AVAILABILITY IN THE Anglican Society of Jesus

A Synthesis of Ignatian Mission in the Anglican Context

Among the charisms proper to the Anglican Society of Jesus, none has required more patient and communal discernment, nor yielded more distinctive fruit, than its understanding of Apostolic Availability. The term is inherited directly from the Society of Jesus in the Roman Communion, where it names one of the oldest and most characteristic features of the Ignatian vocation: the readiness of a Jesuit to be sent, at the Society's discernment, to whatever place and work the mission of the Church requires. The Anglican Society of Jesusreceives this charism gladly as its own inheritance.

But it receives that inheritance into a body of Companions who are, for the greater part, neither celibate nor members of a common household, and who live their vowed life embedded within the parochial and diocesan structure proper to Anglican polity. A charism forged for men bound by no parish, no spouse, and no fixed cure of souls cannot simply be transplanted, unexamined, into a community of married priests, lay professionals, and settled families. It must be thought through again, from its own root, in its new soil. This essay is the record of that thinking.

The governing texts of the Society state the fruit of this discernment concisely: the Constitutions in Article 22, the Rule of Life in Article 12, and the Directory of Formation in Article 11. Each gives, in the register proper to it — theological, practical, and formational, respectively — the same understanding. What follows expounds that shared teaching at greater length than any legislative document can properly hold: it sets ApostolicAvailability within its Ignatian sources, distinguishes it from a plausible but mistaken reading current in parts of the wider Church, states the Society's own constructive synthesis, and traces its implications across the different states of life its Companions hold.

I. The Ignatian Inheritance

Apostolic Availability in the Society of Jesus

St. Ignatius Loyola founded a Society whose members would not be bound, as monks are bound, to a single cloister, a fixed round of choral office, or a rule of stability in one house. He founded instead a body of men held together by nothing more visible than a common obedience and a common readiness to be sent. The Formula of the Institute, approved by Pope Paul III in 1540 and confirmed in expanded form a decade later, describes members of the Society holding themselves in readiness to journey to whatever province the Roman Pontiff should judge expedient for the greater service of God and the good of souls, among the faithful or among those who do not yet know Christ, without excuse or delay. This readiness — expressed for Jesuits of solemn profession in a fourth vow of special obedience to the Pope concerning missions — is the historical root of what the whole Society of Jesus has come to call Apostolic Availability.

It is essential to see what this availability rested upon. It was not, in the first place, a matter of geography. It rested upon the interior disposition Ignatius calls indifference in the First Principle and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises: the freedom of a soul that has ordered its desire so completely toward the praise, reverence, and service of God that health or sickness, riches or poverty, honor or dishonor, a long life or a short one, have become, in themselves, matters of equal weight — desired or avoided only insofar as each serves the end for which the soul was made. Readiness to travel to Rome, to the Indies, or to the parish next door is simply what such indifference looks like when a mission is proposed and confirmed. The geography is the visible surface; the freedom is the substance beneath it.

Nor did this readiness dissolve obedience into caprice. The Jesuit's availability was always exercised within a structure of communal discernment: a mission was proposed by a superior, weighed in prayer, and only then confirmed and undertaken. Ignatius's own correspondence shows him deliberating for months over particular missions, gathering information, consulting, before ever giving the word to send a man to Germany, to India, or to the courts of princes. Availability, rightly understood in its own house of origin, was never a demand for instant uprooting; it was a standing readiness, formed by discernment and exercised through obedience, to have one's whole apostolic life ordered to the greater glory of God rather than to one's own preference of place.

Parish, Diocese, and the Rootedness of Place

The Anglican tradition into which this Society is born knows no comparable structure of universal, uprootable readiness. Its polity is built, almost without remainder, on the territorial cure of souls: a priest is instituted to a particular parish, a bishop to a particular diocese, and the whole discipline of Anglican ministry assumes that the pastor will be known, over years, by the families, the streets, and the particular griefs and hopes of one place. George Herbert's Country Parson, the classic Caroline portrait of the pastoral office, is not a man ready to be sent elsewhere; he is a man whose sanctity is inseparable from his patient, decades-long knowledge of this parish, these fields, these souls. The rootedness the Ignatian tradition treats as one possible expression of indifference, Anglican polity treats as the ordinary and expected condition of ministry itself.

This difference is compounded by the plain fact of the Society's own membership. The historic Society of Jesus was, and remains, a community of celibate men living, for the most part, in common houses, without the ties of spouse, children, or a civil profession pursued alongside ordained ministry. The Anglican Society of Jesus is not that community. Its Companions are drawn from both the lay and ordained state, single and married; many hold, alongside their ecclesial vocation, a settled family, a mortgage, a career in medicine, law, education, or civil service, and children whose schooling, friendships, and roots are themselves bound to one particular place. To ask of such a membership what the Ignatian Formula asked of a sixteenth-century Jesuit — an unconditional readiness to relocate at word of a superior — would not be an act of fidelity to the Ignatian charism. It would be a category error, mistaking the outward form the charism once took for the interior freedom the form existed to serve.

The Society does not regard this difference as a diminishment of the Ignatian inheritance, but as the very reason a genuine synthesis is called for. Anglicanism's own theological instincts — its incarnational sense that grace is mediated through particular, named, embodied places and communities rather than abstracted from them — supply exactly the resource needed to receive Apostolic Availability without either discarding it as impracticable or imposing it as an ill-fitting burden. What follows in Sections III and IV sets out, first, a mistaken way of resolving this tension that the Society has considered and rejected, and then the Society's own constructive account.

II. The Anglican Difference

III. A Word Mistaken

What Apostolic Availability Is Not

There is a pattern of thought, not uncommon in the contemporary structures of clergy deployment, that would resolve the tension of Sections I and II by a simple substitution: Apostolic Availability, translated into Anglican terms, becomes a readiness to leave one's present cure for a larger congregation, a more prominent pulpit, or a diocese offering greater compensation and institutional advancement, whenever such an opportunity is discerned to be open. On this reading, a priest's willingness to relocate toward greater responsibility or resource is treated as more or less equivalent to a Jesuit's willingness to be sent to Naples or to Goa.

The Society judges this reading to be a genuine, if understandable, mistake — understandable because ecclesial structures of transition and deployment are themselves often shaped by categories borrowed from institutional and corporate life: advancement, market, opportunity, career trajectory. A conversation conducted in those categories can come to resemble, in substance if not in intention, the offering of a franchise opportunity more than the discernment of a vocation. Such conversations, however well meant, can leave a priest who senses a settled call to remain and to deepen a particular ministry with the impression that fidelity to a present place is a failure of ambition, or even a failure of the availability the Gospel itself requires.

Against this, the Society insists on a simple but consequential distinction. Ignatian indifference was never a metric of mobility. It was, and remains, a disposition of the will toward God, tested by whether a soul can hold any particular outcome — including the outcome of staying exactly where one is — without disordered attachment either way. A reading of Apostolic Availability that quietly equates spiritual freedom with a readiness to relocate for greater institutional reward does not recover the Ignatian charism; it launders a career logic in Ignatian vocabulary. It also places a burden that the historic Society of Jesus never placed on its own members in comparable circumstances: for a married priest with children in school, a spouse with an established profession, and aging parents nearby, an expectation of relocation-on-demand is not a counsel of perfection but a structural cruelty, indifferent in the ordinary, un-Ignatian sense of the word.

IV. The Society's Synthesis

Interior Freedom Within a Given Place

The Anglican Society of Jesus therefore articulates Apostolic Availability, not as a readiness to relocate, but as the indifference of the First Principle and Foundation lived out within, rather than apart from, the particular place, ministry, and household a Companion already holds. This is not a weakened or merely metaphorical Apostolic Availability. It is what the same Ignatian freedom concretely looks like for a Companion whose vocation, unlike the historic Jesuit's, is itself a vocation to a particular cure — a vocation not despite Ignatian indifference but through it, since indifference includes the readiness to be exactly where one is asked to be, and to remain there as fully and as freely as one would go elsewhere.

A Companion is apostolically available, on this understanding, who holds their present parish, ministry, household, and daily work without the disordered attachment that would prevent them from recognizing and serving Christ precisely there; who remains, in spirit, a pilgrim even while stable in body; and who does not allow the good and proper rootedness Anglican polity asks of them to harden into the possession of that place, that ministry, or that congregation as something owned for its own sake rather than received as a gift held freely for God. Such a Companion finds God in all things — the Society's oldest and most constant teaching — precisely by finding the mission already given in the community where they stand, rather than by treating that mission as a waystation on the road to a different or larger field in which to be found.

This disposition does not confine itself to the visibly sacerdotal dimensions of a Companion's life. It is exercised as fully in the sacraments, in preaching, and in spiritual direction as in the ordinary, civic, and communal work undertaken in the very same place: teaching in a local school, organizing neighbors around a shared civic concern, sitting on a hospital board, keeping a food pantry, or simply being known, over years, as a trustworthy presence to people who may never enter the Companion's own congregation and who need not be pursued toward membership to be served in the name of Christ. F. D. Maurice's insight that the Kingdom of Christ is already present within the structures of society, awaiting recognition and articulation rather than importation from outside, gives Anglican theological voice to the same Ignatian conviction: the whole world is a mirror for the knowledge of God, and the Companion's daily, unremarkable work in one place is itself a principal field of apostolic labor, not a distraction from it.

The Society therefore regards the articulation of ministry rooted in a particular place, oriented toward the Kingdom already being built there, as a legitimate and needed form of the Ignatian charism in an Anglican key — not a diminished substitute for the historic Society's readiness to travel the world, but its proper analogue for a body of Companions whose mission field is, providentially, the very place in which each already stands.

V. A Word to the Wider Church

Prophetic Witness

The Society does not offer this synthesis only for its own internal discipline. It regards the articulation set out here as one of its genuine contributions to the wider Church — a contribution made not by criticism from outside but by the patient, communal, and specifically Ignatian discernment this Society exists to practice and to teach. Where the ordinary structures of clergy transition and deployment in the wider Church are, at times, shaped more by an institutional logic of advancement than by a Spirit-led discernment of the mission already given to a person in their present place, the Society understands part of its own charism as offering the vocabulary, the method, and the companionship by which such conversations might be renewed.

This is a modest but real form of prophetic witness: not a condemnation of the structures in question, many of which serve the Church faithfully in the great majority of cases, but a standing alternative model, offered in a spirit of service rather than of judgment. The Society finds itself, in this respect, navigating a passage between two older and more familiar models of religious life — the fully monastic, which withdraws from ordinary civic and familial life altogether, and the purely missional or itinerant, which holds itself ready for constant relocation. The Anglican Society of Jesus proposes a third way: apostolic religious life exercised in the midst of ordinary civic, familial, and parochial life, without either withdrawal or perpetual uprooting, sustained by the same interior freedom that has always animated the Ignatian charism.

The Society's own ministry of discernment — offered, as the Constitutions describe, to individuals, vestries, standing committees, and diocesan bodies of The Episcopal Church — is a principal means by which this contribution is made concrete. A Companion trained in Ignatian discernment brings to a diocesan conversation about clergy transition, or to a vestry's discernment of its next rector, precisely the vocabulary this essay has set out: the distinction between geographic mobility and spiritual freedom, and the recognition that a mission already given in a particular place deserves the same rigor of discernment as any proposal to leave it.

VI. Apostolic Availability Across States of Life

Because the Society's membership spans the full range of states of life the Constitutions recognize, Apostolic Availability takes a distinct shape for each, while remaining, in every case, the same underlying freedom.

The Single Companion

For a Companion vowed to Fidelity as the traditional Chastity — a free gift of the whole self to God for the sake of the Kingdom — Apostolic Availability is most nearly continuous with its historic Ignatian form. Yet even here, the Society does not presume that singleness implies mobility: a single Companion may be bound as fully to a particular place by aging parents, a settled career, or a specific and sustained ministry as any married Companion, and the same freedom-within-place applies without qualification.

The Married Companion

For a Companion vowed to Fidelity as faithfulness to spouse and family, that fidelity is itself, as the Constitutions state, a primary vocation within the apostolic life, and not a competitor to Apostolic Availability but one of its proper objects. A married Companion's interior freedom is tested and expressed precisely in the integrity with which household, marriage, and children are honored as the first place in which Christ is to be found and served, even as the same Companion remains inwardly free of possessive attachment to the particular shape that household life takes.

The Lay Companion

For a lay Companion, secular vocation — a civil profession, a trade, a civic office, the raising of a family — is not a field secondary to some more properly religious activity, but a principal site of Apostolic Availability in its own right. The Society regards the disciplines of Ignatian discernment brought to a classroom, a clinic, a courtroom, or a city council as no less an exercise of the charism than the same discernment brought to a pulpit.

The Ordained Companion: Priests and Vocational Deacons

For an ordained Companion, Apostolic Availability is lived within the order of Obedience the Constitutions prescribe — to Christ, to the Diocesan Bishop, and to the Superior General — and finds its ordinary expression in a settled and faithful cure of souls, exercised with the interior freedom this essay has described. Because this understanding resonates so closely with the historic ministry of the Vocational Diaconate — a ministry defined, in the wider Church's own theology, by service exercised in the world and at its margins rather than by withdrawal from it — the Society welcomes Vocational Deacons among its Companions without reservation, regarding the diaconal vocation as an especially apt and complementary embodiment of the very charism this essay expounds, rather than a vocation in competition with it.

Associates

Those affiliated with the Society as Associates, without seeking the Novitiate or vowed membership, are invited to explore this same disposition — the finding of God's mission already present in their own place and work — as a fruit of their friendship with the Society, even where they make no formal profession of its vows.

Conclusion

Apostolic Availability, understood as this essay has set it out, is neither a diminishment of the Ignatian charism nor a merely defensive accommodation to the circumstances of a married and place-rooted membership. It is, the Society believes, a genuine development of the charism — the same indifference St. Ignatius taught at Manresa, brought to bear on a form of ecclesial life he did not himself envisage, and finding there a coherence he would, the Society trusts, recognize as his own.

To be a Companion of the Anglican Society of Jesus is to hold one's parish, one's household, one's daily and often unremarkable work, as the very place where the standard of the Cross is to be served — not as a lesser calling awaiting relocation to a truer one, but as the field already given, already ripe, already the site of the greater glory of God. This is what the Society means when it says, as it says of every Companion at every stage of formation, that a soul is being taught to find God in all things, in all places, and in all persons — most of all in the one place each Companion is given to stand.