By Joe Mancini
Published March 2025
The Jesuit Disruptor offers a guide to embracing the animating spirit of the Gospels. Michael Higgins does this by documenting the changes percolating below the surface of Catholicism, rethinking democracy and reciprocity. Of course, the changes Francis has developed could all fall apart. Yet, Higgins produces evidence that the reforms themselves are the learning process.
This book is about an alternative path of positive cultural change. A model in utter contrast to the one presently playing out in Washington. Francis is disrupting patterns, expectations, and the standard way of doing things, but not as a negative-malignant way of overturning old structures, rather with a focus on constructive goals through useful actions.
A passage from Francis’ Fratelli Tutti describes the method of his model of change: “The image of the polyhedron can represent a society where differences coexist, complementing, enriching and reciprocally illuminating one another, even amid disagreements and reservations. Each of us can learn something from others.”
The core story of The Jesuit Disruptor is a commentary on the Synod on Synodality, which was designed as an experiment with a new kind of democracy.
This approach is important because cultures change. Back in the 1980s, the Ontario Community Development Association held conferences with workshops where everything was scripted. With so many creative people at the conference, it seemed a wasted opportunity to not allow people to gather in groups of interest and learn from each other. This is often true of many conferences and so-called democratic processes. Higgins documents how the most important work Francis has accomplished is to create a Synod model where participants talk through issues without conclusions already decided. At press conferences, participants at the Synod on Synodality have all stated “their genuine pleasure in arriving at the synod without the outcomes determined in advance.”
Higgins describes Francis’ core method to bring about change, stating that “Francis’ belief that synodality could only be experienced in an atmosphere of mutual trust, with all participants in the round-table discussions feeling free to share their hesitations and vulnerabilities in an environment enveloped in prayer, is entirely consonant with the Jesuit emphasis on deep listening as an integral part of any spiritual encounter.”
Francis’ goals are clear with this approach. The signs of the times call for change in this age of upheaval as institutions withdraw from people. They call for a deepening of spirituality, a call to come out of ourselves, a call to dialogue, a call to reach out to the peripheries, to reject self-referential behaviour, to let go of status, to reflect the light of the Gospel. This is not a time to lock our doors, but to open the windows and to learn more. People have to reach deeper to find the opening of the spirit and to nurture it in community. Francis calls this the church as field hospital, accepting and bandaging up those who have been left on the outside without resources. Developing the habits and virtues of community.
Higgins draws on University of Toronto Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan, who identified the coming epoch shift in the 1980s, that Francis is currently embracing. The way forward in Lonergan’s thinking is to take time to find prudence, trust, and meaningful encounters. Higgins shows how similar Francis’ synodal approach is through a focus on listening deeply, walking together slowly with real people in mind, and a pastoral attentiveness to the issues that are real.
The book presents this as a vision of the church in the afternoon of Christianity, an uncertain time when different virtues are needed such as humility, dialogue, and discernment. The goal is to enlarge the tent, accompany the seekers, build radical inclusion, and see dialogue as the mechanism for traveling together in the midst of tensions.
While the new dialogue is what stands out the most, this is just a portion of the book’s focus. There is a full chapter on the drama behind the election of a Jesuit Pope and the role the Pope plays in the Catholic world. As usual, Higgins does this with humour and energy, following fascinating rabbit holes of knowledge that only a Vaticanologist could explore. Using the polyhedron model, the book honestly covers the clerical sex abuse scandal, the groundbreaking encyclical On Care for Our Common Home, the wider social issues of LGBTQ+, how women gain a seat at the Vatican table, clericalism, immigration, and economic inequality.
Michael Higgins has had a major influence on Catholic thinking in Waterloo Region since he first turned up at St. Jerome’s University some 40 years ago. While engaged in Catholic university governance, he has been watching and documenting the changes at the Vatican and shares them generously in this engaging book about hope and change.
