This afternoon, at 6:30pm, the Holy Father went to the Generalate of the Company of Jesus for the presentation of the complete works (in five volumes) dedicated to the writings of Father Miguel Ángel Fiorito (1916-2005), a Jesuit and spiritual father of Pope Francis. The compilation has been assembled by Father José Luis Narvaja, SJ and has been published in La Civilità Cattolica.
When Father Spadaro presented me with five volumes with Maestro Fiorito's Escritos - this is what we called him, familiarly, we Argentinian and Uruguayan Jesuits -, he told me about a possible presentation. In fact, Civiltà Cattolica published the books by Father José Luis Narvaja. Then I had the desire to be here in person. I immediately told him: And why not have one of his disciples make the presentation? He asked me, Who, for example? Then I replied: Me! And here I am.
In the introduction, José Luis delves into the figure of Father Fiorito as a master of dialogue. I like that title because it describes the Master well, highlighting a paradox: In fact, Fiorito spoke little, but he had a great capacity for listening, listening that was capable of discernment, which is one of the columns of dialogue.
Therefore, I refer to that preliminary study, which treats all aspects of dialogue as Father Fiorito practiced and taught it: the dialogue between master and disciples in the common spirit of the School, dialogue between authors and texts, dialogue with history and dialogue with God. I will outline two points that helped me to structure this presentation, broadening some reflections that I make in the Prologue contained in the first volume.
I start with an expression that Fiorito uses in his article entitled Plato's Academy as an Ideal School. The expression is Magister dixerit - the Master would say (M. A. Fiorito, Escritos I, 1952-1959, Roma, La Civiltà Cattolica, 2019, 188, Citerò Escritos, n. del volume e n. di pagina). If a difficulty arises that is not specifically foreseen by what the Master said, the good disciple, feeling responsible for the value of the doctrine he received and wanting to defend it, gets by saying: The Master would say (cf J. L. Narvaja, Introducción, Escritos I, 16).
While I reread various articles, I thought about what the Master would say in a circumstance like this. Not so much what he would say, in fact, but how he would say it. Another thing that Narvaja emphasizes has inspired me about this, namely that Fiorito liked to consider himself a commentator, in the precise sense of the word: one who comments by co-thinking (com-mentum); that is, thinking together with the (other) author (Ivi, 20-21).
What I want to do today, therefore, is a comment: thinking together with Fiorito, together with Narvaja, about some things that have done me a lot of good and can help others. I will use the texts freely, facilitated by the excellent work that led to publishing them all together and with the appropriate critical apparatus.
What would Fiorito ask himself about an edition of his Escritos like this? Perhaps in the first place it was worth it, given that he is not a known author, except perhaps in the restricted sphere of the scholars of Saint Ignatius. But I believe he would agree that his writings can interest those who accompany him spiritually and give the Exercises, all people desiring practical help to guide others and to propose the Exercises with more fruit.
Fiorito did not do much to make himself known, but as a good teacher he introduced many good authors to his disciples. I would even say that he helped us to taste the best of the best, selecting the texts and commenting on them in the Boletín de espiritualidad of the Jesuit province of Argentina, which he published every month. He was a man always looking for the signs of the times, attentive to what the Spirit says to the Church for the good of men, through the voice of a great variety of authors, current and classic. And the texts he commented on responded to concerns - not just those of the moment, but also to the deepest concerns - and awakened new, creative proposals. In this sense it seemed fruitful to him to continue to make known those whom he made known.
I believe I heard his name for the first time in a meeting with the Jesuits of Myanmar and Bangladesh. One of them, a trainer, had asked me what model I had to propose to a young Jesuit. Two images came to mind. The first concerned a not very positive person, while the other one was that of Fiorito. He was an engineer, then he joined the Company. A Professor of philosophy, Dean of the Faculty, but he loved spirituality. He taught us the spirituality of Saint Ignatius. It was he who taught us the way of discernment (cf Francis, Being at the Crossroads of History, Conversations with the Jesuits of Myanmar and Bangladesh, La Civiltà Cattolica, 2017 IV, 525). I remember adding that I liked naming him there, in Myanmar, because I think he never imagined his name would be mentioned in those places so far away. And imagine yourself in an event like today.
Yet he would be glad, I am sure, that his Escritos were published by one of his disciples. And that today they are presented by another one of them. The true teacher in the evangelical sense is happy that his disciples also become teachers, and in his turn he always preserves his condition as a disciple.
As Narvaja shows, Fiorito was the one to convey to us the spirit of school in which intellectual property has a communitarian meaning, in fact no disciple feels himself the absolute master of his teacher's heritage, to the point of excluding the others. On the contrary, he wants to communicate it, multiplying the happy owners of the same spiritual treasure. And, even more, he wants to communicate precisely that same communicability. Here Fiorito cited the luminous expression of Augustine in this regard, in De doctrina christiana: Everything, that does not end when it is given, if it is possessed without distributing it, is not possessed as it would be necessary to possess it (I, 1) (Escritos I, 18).
The very fact of presenting the Writings in this hall of the General Curia is a way for me to express my gratitude for all that the Society of Jesus has given me and has done for me. In the person of Master Fiorito are included many Jesuits who were my formators, and here I want to make a special mention of so many lay brothers, Masters with the joyful example of remaining simple servants throughout their lives.
At the same time it is also a way to give thanks and to encourage many men and women who, faithful to the charism of spiritual accompaniment, guide and support their brothers in that task which in the recent Letter to priests I described as the road that involves "Having the experience of knowing we are disciples. Not only that of being so, that it is already so much, but also of knowing it (often reflecting on this grace to derive its fruit, as Ignatius says in the Exercises). In fact the Lord does not teach alone or even from a distant chair, but he conducts his school and teaches surrounded by his disciples who in turn are teachers of others, and in us this awareness makes his Word fruitful and multiplies it.
In the Prologue I wrote: This edition of the Escritos of Father Miguel Ángel Fiorito is a source of consolation for us who have been and are his disciples and we feed on his teachings. They are writings that will do great good to the whole Church. I am sure of it.
A little bit of history
For us Argentine Jesuits, re-reading the texts of these volumes means retracing our history: they include seventy years of our family life and the chronological order in which they appear allows us to evoke the context. Not only the immediate and particular context, but also the broader one, the context of the universal Church, which Fiorito, following Hugo Rahner, calls "the meta-history of a spirituality (Escritos I, cit., 165-170). This is a key concept, in Fiorito: that of the meta-history.
There is a meta-history, which is sometimes not discovered directly in documents, but which is based on the identity of a mystical intelligence and is due to the continuous action of the same Holy Spirit, invisibly present in his visible Church, and that is the reason, though transcendent, for this spiritual homogeneity which is given between different Christians of different ages. Fiorito takes the perspective from which a saint I recently canonized, John Henry Newman, contemplated the Church: The Catholic Church never loses what it once owned ... Rather than going from one phase to another in life, she carries her youth and her maturity in her old age. The Church has not changed what it possessed, but has accumulated it and, depending on the circumstances, extracts new things or ancient things from its treasure (J. H. Newman, La mission de saint Benoît, Paris, 1909, 10). The beautiful phrase of Gustav Mahler comes to mind: Tradition is the guarantee of the future and not the custody of the ashes.
In this dynamic, I will illustrate here some examples and significant publications.
I met Fiorito in 1961, returning from my juniorate in Chile. He was a professor of Metaphysics in the Major College of Saint Joseph, our formation house in San Miguel, in the province of Buenos Aires. Since then I began to confide in him, he became my spiritual director. He went through a profound process that led him to leave the teaching of philosophy and to devote himself totally to writing about spirituality and giving Exercises. Volume II, in the year 1961-62, reports the article: The Christocentricity of the 'Principle and Foundation' of Saint Ignatius (Escritos II, 27-51). He inspired me a lot. It was there that I began to become familiar with some authors who have accompanied me since then: Guardini, Hugo Rahner, with his book on the historical genesis of the spirituality of Saint Ignatius (Escritos I, 164), Fessard and his Dialectic of Exercises.
In that context, Fiorito pointed out: the coincidence between the image of the Lord, especially in Saint Paul, as explained by Guardini, and the image of the Lord as we in our opinion believe we find him in the Exercises of Saint Ignatius (Escritos I, 51, note 88). Fiorito maintained that the Principle and foundation contains not only a christocentrism, but a real Christology in germ. And he showed that when Saint Ignatius uses the expression God our Lord, he is speaking concretely of Christ, of the Word made flesh, Lord not only of history but also of our practical life.
I also want to emphasize the figure of Hugo Rahner. I cannot help but transcribe a passage in which that Master, who was a man of few words and even more in speaking about himself, narrated his conversion to spirituality. I tell you this because it marked a stage in the life of our Province and marks what in my pontificate concerns discernment and spiritual accompaniment.
Fiorito wrote in 1956: For my part, I confess that for a long time I have been reflecting on Ignatian spirituality. At least since I took my first Spiritual Exercises seriously, feeling an alternation of opposing spirits, which little by little were being personalized in the two terms of a personal choice. That reflection went on Until the reading of a book, which arrived in my hands in the most banal and prosaic way - as a reading book to learn German - it was for me not so much the luminous revelation of a possibility of expression, but the 'complete expression of that ideal long intuited'. Fiorito adds: What should have been my work for many years was the instant acceptance of the results of another's work, that of Hugo Rahner.
In the master's soul, and then in that of many others, Hugo Rahner made sure that three graces took their place: that of the Ignatian magis, which was the seal and the reach of the soul of Ignatius and the border without limits of his aspirations ; that of the discernment of spirits, which allowed the saint to channel so much power without useless experiments and without stumbling. And that of discreet charitas, which thus surfaced in Ignatius' soul as a personal contribution to the ongoing struggle between Christ and Satan; and that battle front was not external to the saint, but passed in the middle of his soul, therefore divided into two I's which were the only two possible alternatives for his fundamental option (Escritos I, 163-164). From here Fiorito will draw not only the content, but also the style of his comments, as we said at the beginning.
Another date: 1983. It was the year of the XXXIII General Congregation, in which we listened to the last homilies of Father Arrupe. Fiorito wrote of Paternity and spiritual discretion (Escritos V, 176-189). I take up that article because it gives you a definition of what it means when it uses the term spiritual. I used it talking about his conversion to spirituality and it seems to me useful to recover its definition, since today we often hear this word being interpreted in a reductive way. Fiorito took it from Origen, for whom the spiritual man is the one in which theory and practice "are united, care for others and spiritual charisma for the good of others. And among these charisms, Fiorito showed, Origen emphasizes above all that charism which he calls diakrisis, or the gift of discerning the variety of spirits ... (Escritos V, 177). In the article, Fiorito deepens what is spiritual fatherhood and motherhood and what it entails. What do you need to make it your own? He asks and answers: Having two charisms: discernment of spirits, or discretion, and being able to communicate it with words in spiritual conversation (Escritos V, 179). Discernment is not enough, we need to be able to express just and discrete ideas; otherwise I am not at the service of others (Escritos V, 181). This is the charisma of prophecy, understood not as a knowledge of the future but as a communication of a personal spiritual experience.
The last time I saw him - this I can't forget - it was just before his death on August 9, 2005. I remember it was a Sunday morning and his birthday had just passed. His birthday was on Saint Mary Magdalene's day, 22 July. He was hospitalized at the Hospital Alemán. He had not spoken for several years now. He had lost the ability to speak. He only looked. Intensely. And he was crying. With quiet tears that communicated the intensity with which he lived every single meeting. Fiorito had the gift of tears, which is an expression of spiritual consolation (By consolation, I mean the experience of the soul that swells with love for her Creator and Lord ... and also when one spills tears that lead that person to an experience of the love of the Lord, ES 316).
Speaking of the Lord's gaze in the first week of the Exercises, Fiorito commented on the importance that Saint Benedict gave to tears and said that tears are a small tangible sign of the sweetness of God that barely manifests on the outside, but does not cease to imbue the heart with interior recollection (M. A. Fiorito, Buscar y hallar la voluntad de Dios, Buenos Aires, Paulinas, 2000, 209).
I keep in my heart something that I wrote in Gaudete et exsultate: The person who sees things as they really are, lets themselves be pierced by pain and cries in his heart, is able to reach the depths of life and be truly happy. That person is consoled, but with the consolation of Jesus and not with that of the world (GE, 76).
This is a nice story. He also had the gift of a yawn. As you opened your conscience, sometimes the Master began to yawn. He did it openly, without hiding it. But it's not that he was getting bored, he just came and he said that sometimes it was used to get you out of the bad spirit. Expanding the soul contagiously - as the physical yawn does - also had that effect on the spiritual level.
Master of dialogue
I freely comment some things that the title of Master of dialogue suggests to me. In the Company, that of Master is a particular name, we reserve it for the Master of Novices and the Third Probation Instructor. Father General had named him a third probationary instructor, a task he held for many years. He was never a Master of novices, but as Provincial I assigned him to live in the novitiate; he was a good advisor to the Master and a reference for the novices.
Being a master, exercising the munus docendi, does not consist only in transmitting the content of the teachings of the Lord, in their purity and integrity, but in ensuring that these teachings, inculcated with the same Spirit with which they are received, making disciples, that is, they transform those who listen to them into followers of Jesus, into missionary disciples, free, not proselytes, passionate about receiving, practicing and going out to proclaim the teachings of the one Master as he commanded us: to the men and women of all peoples.
The true master, in the evangelical sense, is always a disciple: he never ends up being one. The Lord, in Luke, speaking of the blind man who want to lead other blind man, thus giving an image of the anti-teacher, says: A disciple is no longer of the master; but each one who is well prepared will be like his teacher (Lk 6,40).
I like to read this passage in this way: not putting ourselves above the teacher is not just not putting ourselves above Jesus - our only Master -, but not even putting ourselves above our human masters. The good disciple honours the teacher, even when as disciples it happens to us to go beyond him in some teaching, or rather precisely in that: progress in knowledge is indeed possible because the good teacher has sown the seed, with his personal style, just counting on the fact that that seed lives, grows and exceeds it. And when we discern well what the Spirit says by applying the Gospel in the right moment and in the right way for someone's salvation, we are like the master. The Lord brings this affirmation to that kind of teaching that is not made only of words, but of works of mercy. It was at the time of the washing of the feet that the Master said: if, knowing these things, we work like Him, we will be like Him (cf John 13:14-15).
Speaking of mercy, the writings of Fiorito distil spiritual mercy: teachings for those who do not know, good advice for those in need, correction for those who make mistakes, consolation for those who are sad and help to preserve patience in desolation without ever making changes, as Saint Ignatius says. All these graces are aggregated and summarized in the great work of spiritual mercy which is discernment. It heals us from the most sad disease, the most worthy of compassion: spiritual blindness, which prevents us from recognizing God's time, the time of his visitation.
Some of Mater Fiorito's particular characteristics
I would describe a very evident characteristic of Fiorito with this expression: in spiritual direction, when you told him your things, he kept himself out. He reflected what happened to you and then gave you freedom, without urging and without making judgments. He respected you. He believed in freedom.
When I say that he kept himself out I do not mean that he was not interested or that he was not moved by your things, but that he remained outside in the first place, to be able to listen well. Fiorito was the master of dialogue, beginning with listening. Keeping yourself out of the problem was his way of giving space for listening, so that you could say everything you had inside, without interruptions, without questions ... He let you talk. And he didn't look at the clock.
He listened by putting his heart at your disposal, so that the other could hear, in the peace that the Master had, what disturbed his heart. And in this way you felt like going to confer with Fiorito, as we said, about going to speak with him, whenever you felt spiritual struggle within, conflicting movements of spirits regarding some decision you had to make. We knew that by listening to these things he became as passionate as or even more passionate than ordinary people are passionate about hearing the latest news. At Collegio Massimo, speaking about conferring with Fiorito was a recurring phrase. We said it to superiors, we told each other and recommended it to those who were in formation.
His keeping out, as well as a question of listening, was also an attitude of mastery of conflicts, a way of distancing oneself from you so as not to be involved, as often happens, with the result that those who should listen and help instead become part of the problem, taking a stand or mixing their feelings and losing objectivity.
n this sense, without theoretical claims, but in a practical way, Fiorito was the great "de-ideologizer" of the Province in a very ideological age.
He de-idologized awakening the passion to dialogue well, with oneself, with others and with the Lord. And to not dialogue with temptation, not to dialogue with evil spirits, with the Evil One. This has remained so much imprinted in me: the evil one does not dialogue. Jesus never conversed with the devil. He replied with three verses from the Bible, and then chased him away. Never. There is no dialogue with the devil.
Ideology is always a monologue with only one idea and Fiorito helped his interlocutor to distinguish within himself the voices of good and evil versus his own voice, and this opened the mind because it opened the heart to God and to others.
In dialogue with others he had, among other things, the ability to fish and to show the temptation of the evil spirit in one word or gesture to the other, of those who slip into very reasonable and apparently well intentioned speech. Fiorito asked you about that expression you used (which generally denoted contempt for others) and told you: You are tempted! And, showing the evidence, he laughed frankly and without being scandalized. He exhibited the objectivity of the expression that you yourself had used, without judging yourself.
It can be said that the Master cultivated community dialogue in his personal conversation with each one. He was not very inclined to intervene in public. In community meetings in which he participated he devoted himself to taking notes, listening in silence. And then he answered - and we were all waiting for the theme of the next Boletín de espiritualidad or some leaflet concerning Study, prayer and action. Somehow this was known and transmitted, and we went to read in the Boletín what the Master thought of it, about the issues that worried us or were in vogue, reading between the lines.
On the other hand, the Boletín was not always necessarily tied to the circumstances. There are writings, such as the article by Fiorito on Plato's Academy from which Narvaja drew inspiration for his analysis, which today are current and allow us to read our whole age in the key to the relationship between master and disciples according to spirit of the School.
Fiorito worried that there was good spirit in the Province and in the community. If there was good spirit, then not only did he let go, but he wrote about something that invited us to go further. Open horizons.
Furthermore, this keeping out can also be described by showing how it can be done: keeping oneself in peace so that the Lord himself moves the other, moves him in the good sense, and even pacifies him in doing good.
It is a matter of an active person keeping himself in peace, rejecting his own temptations against peace to help the other to pacify his own concerns: those of his guilt and remorse for the past, that of anxiety for the future and those of restlessness and distraction in the present. Fiorito pacified you by disregarding immediate circumstances. First he pacified you with his silence, so that you would not be frightened of anything, with his wide-ranging listening, until you said what you had in the bottom of your soul and he decided what inspired him: the good spirit. Then the Master confirmed you, sometimes with a simple Okay. He left you free.
To the one who gives the Exercises and has to lead another, Ignatius advises that "he does not approach or lean towards one or the other part, but remains in balance like the weight on the arm of a steelyard, and let the Creator act directly with the creature and the creature with his Creator and Lord (Spiritual Exercises, 15). Although outside the Exercises moving the other is legitimate, Fiorito privileged the attitude of not inclining to one side or the other, so that "the Creator and Lord himself may communicate himself to the person, embracing her in his love and to his praise, and disposing him to the way in which he will best serve him in the future. Thanks to this, staying out was a point of reference for everyone without the slightest hint of partiality. And certainly, at the right time, when you were doing Exercises with him and you needed his advice - whether because you was blocked by temptation or because you were in a good position to do your election - the Master intervened with force and decision to have his say and then, again, kept out, letting God work in those who did the Exercises.
In this sense I can say that he knew how to place accents. He has burned some in the Province, imprinted us as with a brand. For example: explaining that the spiritual struggle, the movement of spirits, is a good sign; that proposing something more moves the spirits, when in the situation there is a suspicious calm; that one must always seek peace in the depths of the soul in order to be able to discern these movements of spirits without the water being too moved ... That not letting oneself be reduced by the great things, and yet allowing oneself to be contained in the smaller ones, this is divine, which characterizes Ignatius, was always present in his reflections.
A second characteristic: he did not exhort. He listened to you in silence and then, instead of speaking, he gave you a slip of paper that he took from his library. The Fiorito library had this peculiarity: in addition to the usual part, so to speak, with shelves and books, he had another library that occupied a whole wall of almost six meters by four in height, formed of small drawers in each of which he put his leaflets, study cards, prayer and action, each dedicated to a single theme of the Exercises or Constitutions of the Society, for example. He would get up to look for them, sometimes climbing dangerously on a ladder, to provide them without many words to those who did the Exercises in response to some anxiety that the latter had shown to him or on which he himself had discerned while listening to him talk about his concerns.
In those little drawers, each with its leaflets, there was something ... It was as if that advice you needed, or the remedy for some illness of the soul, had already been foreseen for ever ... That library reminded me of a pharmacy. And Fiorito looked like a wise pharmacist. But it was more than that, because Fiorito was not a confessor. Of course, he confessed, but he had another charisma besides that of being a minister of the Lord's mercy which is common to every priest. His was that charism of the spiritual man that I spoke of at the beginning, citing Origen: the charism of discernment and prophecy, in the sense of communicating well the graces of the Lord that are experienced in one's life. In fact from those little drawers not only remedies came out but above all new things, things of the Spirit that had been waiting for the right question, for someone's fervent desire, who found there the treasure of a discreet formulation that addressed him and that he could put into practice with fruit for the future.
A third characteristic I remember is that Maestro Fiorito was not jealous. He was not a jealous man: he wrote and signed with others, published and highlighted the thoughts of others, very often limiting his contributions to simple notes, which in reality, as can now be seen better thanks to this edition of his Escritos, were in summary importance, because they showed the essential and the actuality of the thoughts of others.
The most complete example of the fruitfulness of this way of working intellectually in the school is, in my opinion, the annotated and commented edition of the spiritual memoirs of Pierre Favre that Fiorito edited with Jaime Amadeo. A real classic. Without traits of ideology or of that erudition that is only for scholars, it is a work that puts us in touch with the soul of Favre, with its clarity and sweetness, with its dialogic capacity towards all, the fruit of his spiritual direction, and with his mastery in giving the Exercises. The Master shared much of Favre's sensitivity, in polar tension with a mind in fact rather cold and objective, as if he were an engineer.
The fourth characteristic that I think it is necessary to comment on, in this attempt to present his figure, is that he gave no judgment. Only rarely. With me, I remember, he did it twice. And in that way I was engraved. Here's how he judged. He said to you: Look, what you say is the same as what the Bible says, this temptation in the Bible. And then he let you pray and draw the consequences.
Here I want to emphasize that Fiorito had a particular nose to smell out the bad spirit; he knew how to recognize its action, to distinguish its tics, to unmask it from the bad fruits, from the bitter aftertaste and from the trail of desolation that is left behind. In this sense, we can say that he was a man in arms against a single enemy: the bad spirit, Satan, the devil, the tempter, the accuser, the enemy of our human nature. Between the flag of Christ and that of Satan, he made his personal choice for our Lord. In everything else he tried to discern so much ... how much and with each person he was a lovable father, a patient master and - when it happened - a steadfast adversary, but always respectful and loyal. Never an enemy.
Finally, something that was very noticeable in him. Even with his hard head, he was patient. In front of those cases, which made others impatient, he used to remember that Ignatius had been very patient with Simón Rodríguez. If you were stubborn and insisted on your own way, he let you do your job, gave you time. He was a Master in not rushing the times, waiting for the other to realize things for himself. He respected the processes.
And since I mentioned Simón Rodríguez, it may come to the point that I recall the story. Simón Rodríguez was always an agitated person. He did not spend the whole month in solitude with the others, he was late in making the profession. He was destined to go to India but in the end he remained in Portugal, where he did everything he could to stop forever despite the fact that Ignatius, for his sake and that of the Jesuits there, wanted to transfer him. Fiorito recounts that Ribadeneyra, in an unpublished manuscript entitled Treatise on persecutions suffered by the Society of Jesus, considers that one of the most terrible and dangerous torments experienced by the Company since its foundation, while our blessed Father Ignatius still lived, was that he had been moved not by enemies, but by his own children, not by external winds, but by the intrinsic disturbance of the sea itself, which happened in this way ... While the Company was sailing with such favorable winds, the enemy of every good waved it, tempting Father Simón himself and obfuscating him with that fruit that God had worked for him, and making him want for himself what he wanted of his blessed Father Ignatius and the whole Company. He then began to look at the things of Portugal not as a work of this body, but as a creation and his work and wanted to govern it without obedience and dependence on his boss, seeming to have so much favour in the kings of Portugal that he could easily do it without resorting to Rome; and since almost all the religious of the Company who lived in that kingdom were sons and his subjects and he had welcomed them and raised them, they did not know any other Father and Superior except Master Simón, and they loved him and respected him as if he were the principal founder of the Company; and to this also contributed the fact that he was of gentle and loving ways and not usually to press his very much; these are effective things to win the souls and the wills of the subjects, who, by common human weakness, usually wish that they be granted what they want, and be led with love (Escritos V, 157, note 85).
Ignatius was very patient. And Fiorito imitated him. Even in these stories he was able to see some good in Simón Rodríguez. He emphasized his frankness towards Ignatius, to whom he said things to his face. Certainly, in the long run, that patience bore fruit, because in fact the rebellions of Simón Rodríguez remained anecdotal, and were not consolidated, nor did they take hold beyond himself, and they yielded letters like that of Saint Ignatius to the Jesuits of Coimbra. This great patience is the fundamental virtue of the true Master, who counts on the action of the Holy Spirit in time, and not on his own actions.
Conclusion
As Provincial, I had to receive the annual account of the conscience of Father Fiorito. He was a novice. A mature novice. He was the disciple of the father who was in turn his own disciple. I can't understand it, but it was the testimony of his greatness of soul. As a Jesuit, the image of Psalm 1, that of the tree planted along streams of water, which gives flowers and fruit at the time, is drawn to the Master Miguel Ángel Fiorito. Like this tree in Scripture, Fiorito knew how to let himself be contained in the minimum space of his role at the Collegio Massimo of San Giuseppe, in San Miguel, Argentina, and there he took root and bore flowers and fruit, as his name well expresses - Flowered -, in the hearts of us disciples of the School of Exercises. I hope that now, thanks to this magnificent edition of his Escritos, which have the height of a great dream, it will take root and bear flowers and fruit in the lives of so many people who nourish themselves with the same grace that he received and was able to communicate discreetly giving and commenting on the Spiritual Exercises.
Testo originale nella lingua italiana
Greetings of the Holy Father, Pope Francis
along with some un-scripted comments
When Father Spadaro presented me with five volumes with Maestro Fiorito's Escritos - this is what we called him, familiarly, we Argentinian and Uruguayan Jesuits -, he told me about a possible presentation. In fact, Civiltà Cattolica published the books by Father José Luis Narvaja. Then I had the desire to be here in person. I immediately told him: And why not have one of his disciples make the presentation? He asked me, Who, for example? Then I replied: Me! And here I am.
In the introduction, José Luis delves into the figure of Father Fiorito as a master of dialogue. I like that title because it describes the Master well, highlighting a paradox: In fact, Fiorito spoke little, but he had a great capacity for listening, listening that was capable of discernment, which is one of the columns of dialogue.
Therefore, I refer to that preliminary study, which treats all aspects of dialogue as Father Fiorito practiced and taught it: the dialogue between master and disciples in the common spirit of the School, dialogue between authors and texts, dialogue with history and dialogue with God. I will outline two points that helped me to structure this presentation, broadening some reflections that I make in the Prologue contained in the first volume.
I start with an expression that Fiorito uses in his article entitled Plato's Academy as an Ideal School. The expression is Magister dixerit - the Master would say (M. A. Fiorito, Escritos I, 1952-1959, Roma, La Civiltà Cattolica, 2019, 188, Citerò Escritos, n. del volume e n. di pagina). If a difficulty arises that is not specifically foreseen by what the Master said, the good disciple, feeling responsible for the value of the doctrine he received and wanting to defend it, gets by saying: The Master would say (cf J. L. Narvaja, Introducción, Escritos I, 16).
While I reread various articles, I thought about what the Master would say in a circumstance like this. Not so much what he would say, in fact, but how he would say it. Another thing that Narvaja emphasizes has inspired me about this, namely that Fiorito liked to consider himself a commentator, in the precise sense of the word: one who comments by co-thinking (com-mentum); that is, thinking together with the (other) author (Ivi, 20-21).
What I want to do today, therefore, is a comment: thinking together with Fiorito, together with Narvaja, about some things that have done me a lot of good and can help others. I will use the texts freely, facilitated by the excellent work that led to publishing them all together and with the appropriate critical apparatus.
What would Fiorito ask himself about an edition of his Escritos like this? Perhaps in the first place it was worth it, given that he is not a known author, except perhaps in the restricted sphere of the scholars of Saint Ignatius. But I believe he would agree that his writings can interest those who accompany him spiritually and give the Exercises, all people desiring practical help to guide others and to propose the Exercises with more fruit.
Fiorito did not do much to make himself known, but as a good teacher he introduced many good authors to his disciples. I would even say that he helped us to taste the best of the best, selecting the texts and commenting on them in the Boletín de espiritualidad of the Jesuit province of Argentina, which he published every month. He was a man always looking for the signs of the times, attentive to what the Spirit says to the Church for the good of men, through the voice of a great variety of authors, current and classic. And the texts he commented on responded to concerns - not just those of the moment, but also to the deepest concerns - and awakened new, creative proposals. In this sense it seemed fruitful to him to continue to make known those whom he made known.
I believe I heard his name for the first time in a meeting with the Jesuits of Myanmar and Bangladesh. One of them, a trainer, had asked me what model I had to propose to a young Jesuit. Two images came to mind. The first concerned a not very positive person, while the other one was that of Fiorito. He was an engineer, then he joined the Company. A Professor of philosophy, Dean of the Faculty, but he loved spirituality. He taught us the spirituality of Saint Ignatius. It was he who taught us the way of discernment (cf Francis, Being at the Crossroads of History, Conversations with the Jesuits of Myanmar and Bangladesh, La Civiltà Cattolica, 2017 IV, 525). I remember adding that I liked naming him there, in Myanmar, because I think he never imagined his name would be mentioned in those places so far away. And imagine yourself in an event like today.
Yet he would be glad, I am sure, that his Escritos were published by one of his disciples. And that today they are presented by another one of them. The true teacher in the evangelical sense is happy that his disciples also become teachers, and in his turn he always preserves his condition as a disciple.
As Narvaja shows, Fiorito was the one to convey to us the spirit of school in which intellectual property has a communitarian meaning, in fact no disciple feels himself the absolute master of his teacher's heritage, to the point of excluding the others. On the contrary, he wants to communicate it, multiplying the happy owners of the same spiritual treasure. And, even more, he wants to communicate precisely that same communicability. Here Fiorito cited the luminous expression of Augustine in this regard, in De doctrina christiana: Everything, that does not end when it is given, if it is possessed without distributing it, is not possessed as it would be necessary to possess it (I, 1) (Escritos I, 18).
The very fact of presenting the Writings in this hall of the General Curia is a way for me to express my gratitude for all that the Society of Jesus has given me and has done for me. In the person of Master Fiorito are included many Jesuits who were my formators, and here I want to make a special mention of so many lay brothers, Masters with the joyful example of remaining simple servants throughout their lives.
At the same time it is also a way to give thanks and to encourage many men and women who, faithful to the charism of spiritual accompaniment, guide and support their brothers in that task which in the recent Letter to priests I described as the road that involves "Having the experience of knowing we are disciples. Not only that of being so, that it is already so much, but also of knowing it (often reflecting on this grace to derive its fruit, as Ignatius says in the Exercises). In fact the Lord does not teach alone or even from a distant chair, but he conducts his school and teaches surrounded by his disciples who in turn are teachers of others, and in us this awareness makes his Word fruitful and multiplies it.
In the Prologue I wrote: This edition of the Escritos of Father Miguel Ángel Fiorito is a source of consolation for us who have been and are his disciples and we feed on his teachings. They are writings that will do great good to the whole Church. I am sure of it.
A little bit of history
For us Argentine Jesuits, re-reading the texts of these volumes means retracing our history: they include seventy years of our family life and the chronological order in which they appear allows us to evoke the context. Not only the immediate and particular context, but also the broader one, the context of the universal Church, which Fiorito, following Hugo Rahner, calls "the meta-history of a spirituality (Escritos I, cit., 165-170). This is a key concept, in Fiorito: that of the meta-history.
There is a meta-history, which is sometimes not discovered directly in documents, but which is based on the identity of a mystical intelligence and is due to the continuous action of the same Holy Spirit, invisibly present in his visible Church, and that is the reason, though transcendent, for this spiritual homogeneity which is given between different Christians of different ages. Fiorito takes the perspective from which a saint I recently canonized, John Henry Newman, contemplated the Church: The Catholic Church never loses what it once owned ... Rather than going from one phase to another in life, she carries her youth and her maturity in her old age. The Church has not changed what it possessed, but has accumulated it and, depending on the circumstances, extracts new things or ancient things from its treasure (J. H. Newman, La mission de saint Benoît, Paris, 1909, 10). The beautiful phrase of Gustav Mahler comes to mind: Tradition is the guarantee of the future and not the custody of the ashes.
In this dynamic, I will illustrate here some examples and significant publications.
I met Fiorito in 1961, returning from my juniorate in Chile. He was a professor of Metaphysics in the Major College of Saint Joseph, our formation house in San Miguel, in the province of Buenos Aires. Since then I began to confide in him, he became my spiritual director. He went through a profound process that led him to leave the teaching of philosophy and to devote himself totally to writing about spirituality and giving Exercises. Volume II, in the year 1961-62, reports the article: The Christocentricity of the 'Principle and Foundation' of Saint Ignatius (Escritos II, 27-51). He inspired me a lot. It was there that I began to become familiar with some authors who have accompanied me since then: Guardini, Hugo Rahner, with his book on the historical genesis of the spirituality of Saint Ignatius (Escritos I, 164), Fessard and his Dialectic of Exercises.
In that context, Fiorito pointed out: the coincidence between the image of the Lord, especially in Saint Paul, as explained by Guardini, and the image of the Lord as we in our opinion believe we find him in the Exercises of Saint Ignatius (Escritos I, 51, note 88). Fiorito maintained that the Principle and foundation contains not only a christocentrism, but a real Christology in germ. And he showed that when Saint Ignatius uses the expression God our Lord, he is speaking concretely of Christ, of the Word made flesh, Lord not only of history but also of our practical life.
I also want to emphasize the figure of Hugo Rahner. I cannot help but transcribe a passage in which that Master, who was a man of few words and even more in speaking about himself, narrated his conversion to spirituality. I tell you this because it marked a stage in the life of our Province and marks what in my pontificate concerns discernment and spiritual accompaniment.
Fiorito wrote in 1956: For my part, I confess that for a long time I have been reflecting on Ignatian spirituality. At least since I took my first Spiritual Exercises seriously, feeling an alternation of opposing spirits, which little by little were being personalized in the two terms of a personal choice. That reflection went on Until the reading of a book, which arrived in my hands in the most banal and prosaic way - as a reading book to learn German - it was for me not so much the luminous revelation of a possibility of expression, but the 'complete expression of that ideal long intuited'. Fiorito adds: What should have been my work for many years was the instant acceptance of the results of another's work, that of Hugo Rahner.
In the master's soul, and then in that of many others, Hugo Rahner made sure that three graces took their place: that of the Ignatian magis, which was the seal and the reach of the soul of Ignatius and the border without limits of his aspirations ; that of the discernment of spirits, which allowed the saint to channel so much power without useless experiments and without stumbling. And that of discreet charitas, which thus surfaced in Ignatius' soul as a personal contribution to the ongoing struggle between Christ and Satan; and that battle front was not external to the saint, but passed in the middle of his soul, therefore divided into two I's which were the only two possible alternatives for his fundamental option (Escritos I, 163-164). From here Fiorito will draw not only the content, but also the style of his comments, as we said at the beginning.
Another date: 1983. It was the year of the XXXIII General Congregation, in which we listened to the last homilies of Father Arrupe. Fiorito wrote of Paternity and spiritual discretion (Escritos V, 176-189). I take up that article because it gives you a definition of what it means when it uses the term spiritual. I used it talking about his conversion to spirituality and it seems to me useful to recover its definition, since today we often hear this word being interpreted in a reductive way. Fiorito took it from Origen, for whom the spiritual man is the one in which theory and practice "are united, care for others and spiritual charisma for the good of others. And among these charisms, Fiorito showed, Origen emphasizes above all that charism which he calls diakrisis, or the gift of discerning the variety of spirits ... (Escritos V, 177). In the article, Fiorito deepens what is spiritual fatherhood and motherhood and what it entails. What do you need to make it your own? He asks and answers: Having two charisms: discernment of spirits, or discretion, and being able to communicate it with words in spiritual conversation (Escritos V, 179). Discernment is not enough, we need to be able to express just and discrete ideas; otherwise I am not at the service of others (Escritos V, 181). This is the charisma of prophecy, understood not as a knowledge of the future but as a communication of a personal spiritual experience.
The last time I saw him - this I can't forget - it was just before his death on August 9, 2005. I remember it was a Sunday morning and his birthday had just passed. His birthday was on Saint Mary Magdalene's day, 22 July. He was hospitalized at the Hospital Alemán. He had not spoken for several years now. He had lost the ability to speak. He only looked. Intensely. And he was crying. With quiet tears that communicated the intensity with which he lived every single meeting. Fiorito had the gift of tears, which is an expression of spiritual consolation (By consolation, I mean the experience of the soul that swells with love for her Creator and Lord ... and also when one spills tears that lead that person to an experience of the love of the Lord, ES 316).
Speaking of the Lord's gaze in the first week of the Exercises, Fiorito commented on the importance that Saint Benedict gave to tears and said that tears are a small tangible sign of the sweetness of God that barely manifests on the outside, but does not cease to imbue the heart with interior recollection (M. A. Fiorito, Buscar y hallar la voluntad de Dios, Buenos Aires, Paulinas, 2000, 209).
I keep in my heart something that I wrote in Gaudete et exsultate: The person who sees things as they really are, lets themselves be pierced by pain and cries in his heart, is able to reach the depths of life and be truly happy. That person is consoled, but with the consolation of Jesus and not with that of the world (GE, 76).
This is a nice story. He also had the gift of a yawn. As you opened your conscience, sometimes the Master began to yawn. He did it openly, without hiding it. But it's not that he was getting bored, he just came and he said that sometimes it was used to get you out of the bad spirit. Expanding the soul contagiously - as the physical yawn does - also had that effect on the spiritual level.
Master of dialogue
I freely comment some things that the title of Master of dialogue suggests to me. In the Company, that of Master is a particular name, we reserve it for the Master of Novices and the Third Probation Instructor. Father General had named him a third probationary instructor, a task he held for many years. He was never a Master of novices, but as Provincial I assigned him to live in the novitiate; he was a good advisor to the Master and a reference for the novices.
Being a master, exercising the munus docendi, does not consist only in transmitting the content of the teachings of the Lord, in their purity and integrity, but in ensuring that these teachings, inculcated with the same Spirit with which they are received, making disciples, that is, they transform those who listen to them into followers of Jesus, into missionary disciples, free, not proselytes, passionate about receiving, practicing and going out to proclaim the teachings of the one Master as he commanded us: to the men and women of all peoples.
The true master, in the evangelical sense, is always a disciple: he never ends up being one. The Lord, in Luke, speaking of the blind man who want to lead other blind man, thus giving an image of the anti-teacher, says: A disciple is no longer of the master; but each one who is well prepared will be like his teacher (Lk 6,40).
I like to read this passage in this way: not putting ourselves above the teacher is not just not putting ourselves above Jesus - our only Master -, but not even putting ourselves above our human masters. The good disciple honours the teacher, even when as disciples it happens to us to go beyond him in some teaching, or rather precisely in that: progress in knowledge is indeed possible because the good teacher has sown the seed, with his personal style, just counting on the fact that that seed lives, grows and exceeds it. And when we discern well what the Spirit says by applying the Gospel in the right moment and in the right way for someone's salvation, we are like the master. The Lord brings this affirmation to that kind of teaching that is not made only of words, but of works of mercy. It was at the time of the washing of the feet that the Master said: if, knowing these things, we work like Him, we will be like Him (cf John 13:14-15).
Speaking of mercy, the writings of Fiorito distil spiritual mercy: teachings for those who do not know, good advice for those in need, correction for those who make mistakes, consolation for those who are sad and help to preserve patience in desolation without ever making changes, as Saint Ignatius says. All these graces are aggregated and summarized in the great work of spiritual mercy which is discernment. It heals us from the most sad disease, the most worthy of compassion: spiritual blindness, which prevents us from recognizing God's time, the time of his visitation.
Some of Mater Fiorito's particular characteristics
I would describe a very evident characteristic of Fiorito with this expression: in spiritual direction, when you told him your things, he kept himself out. He reflected what happened to you and then gave you freedom, without urging and without making judgments. He respected you. He believed in freedom.
When I say that he kept himself out I do not mean that he was not interested or that he was not moved by your things, but that he remained outside in the first place, to be able to listen well. Fiorito was the master of dialogue, beginning with listening. Keeping yourself out of the problem was his way of giving space for listening, so that you could say everything you had inside, without interruptions, without questions ... He let you talk. And he didn't look at the clock.
He listened by putting his heart at your disposal, so that the other could hear, in the peace that the Master had, what disturbed his heart. And in this way you felt like going to confer with Fiorito, as we said, about going to speak with him, whenever you felt spiritual struggle within, conflicting movements of spirits regarding some decision you had to make. We knew that by listening to these things he became as passionate as or even more passionate than ordinary people are passionate about hearing the latest news. At Collegio Massimo, speaking about conferring with Fiorito was a recurring phrase. We said it to superiors, we told each other and recommended it to those who were in formation.
His keeping out, as well as a question of listening, was also an attitude of mastery of conflicts, a way of distancing oneself from you so as not to be involved, as often happens, with the result that those who should listen and help instead become part of the problem, taking a stand or mixing their feelings and losing objectivity.
n this sense, without theoretical claims, but in a practical way, Fiorito was the great "de-ideologizer" of the Province in a very ideological age.
He de-idologized awakening the passion to dialogue well, with oneself, with others and with the Lord. And to not dialogue with temptation, not to dialogue with evil spirits, with the Evil One. This has remained so much imprinted in me: the evil one does not dialogue. Jesus never conversed with the devil. He replied with three verses from the Bible, and then chased him away. Never. There is no dialogue with the devil.
Ideology is always a monologue with only one idea and Fiorito helped his interlocutor to distinguish within himself the voices of good and evil versus his own voice, and this opened the mind because it opened the heart to God and to others.
In dialogue with others he had, among other things, the ability to fish and to show the temptation of the evil spirit in one word or gesture to the other, of those who slip into very reasonable and apparently well intentioned speech. Fiorito asked you about that expression you used (which generally denoted contempt for others) and told you: You are tempted! And, showing the evidence, he laughed frankly and without being scandalized. He exhibited the objectivity of the expression that you yourself had used, without judging yourself.
It can be said that the Master cultivated community dialogue in his personal conversation with each one. He was not very inclined to intervene in public. In community meetings in which he participated he devoted himself to taking notes, listening in silence. And then he answered - and we were all waiting for the theme of the next Boletín de espiritualidad or some leaflet concerning Study, prayer and action. Somehow this was known and transmitted, and we went to read in the Boletín what the Master thought of it, about the issues that worried us or were in vogue, reading between the lines.
On the other hand, the Boletín was not always necessarily tied to the circumstances. There are writings, such as the article by Fiorito on Plato's Academy from which Narvaja drew inspiration for his analysis, which today are current and allow us to read our whole age in the key to the relationship between master and disciples according to spirit of the School.
Fiorito worried that there was good spirit in the Province and in the community. If there was good spirit, then not only did he let go, but he wrote about something that invited us to go further. Open horizons.
Furthermore, this keeping out can also be described by showing how it can be done: keeping oneself in peace so that the Lord himself moves the other, moves him in the good sense, and even pacifies him in doing good.
It is a matter of an active person keeping himself in peace, rejecting his own temptations against peace to help the other to pacify his own concerns: those of his guilt and remorse for the past, that of anxiety for the future and those of restlessness and distraction in the present. Fiorito pacified you by disregarding immediate circumstances. First he pacified you with his silence, so that you would not be frightened of anything, with his wide-ranging listening, until you said what you had in the bottom of your soul and he decided what inspired him: the good spirit. Then the Master confirmed you, sometimes with a simple Okay. He left you free.
To the one who gives the Exercises and has to lead another, Ignatius advises that "he does not approach or lean towards one or the other part, but remains in balance like the weight on the arm of a steelyard, and let the Creator act directly with the creature and the creature with his Creator and Lord (Spiritual Exercises, 15). Although outside the Exercises moving the other is legitimate, Fiorito privileged the attitude of not inclining to one side or the other, so that "the Creator and Lord himself may communicate himself to the person, embracing her in his love and to his praise, and disposing him to the way in which he will best serve him in the future. Thanks to this, staying out was a point of reference for everyone without the slightest hint of partiality. And certainly, at the right time, when you were doing Exercises with him and you needed his advice - whether because you was blocked by temptation or because you were in a good position to do your election - the Master intervened with force and decision to have his say and then, again, kept out, letting God work in those who did the Exercises.
In this sense I can say that he knew how to place accents. He has burned some in the Province, imprinted us as with a brand. For example: explaining that the spiritual struggle, the movement of spirits, is a good sign; that proposing something more moves the spirits, when in the situation there is a suspicious calm; that one must always seek peace in the depths of the soul in order to be able to discern these movements of spirits without the water being too moved ... That not letting oneself be reduced by the great things, and yet allowing oneself to be contained in the smaller ones, this is divine, which characterizes Ignatius, was always present in his reflections.
A second characteristic: he did not exhort. He listened to you in silence and then, instead of speaking, he gave you a slip of paper that he took from his library. The Fiorito library had this peculiarity: in addition to the usual part, so to speak, with shelves and books, he had another library that occupied a whole wall of almost six meters by four in height, formed of small drawers in each of which he put his leaflets, study cards, prayer and action, each dedicated to a single theme of the Exercises or Constitutions of the Society, for example. He would get up to look for them, sometimes climbing dangerously on a ladder, to provide them without many words to those who did the Exercises in response to some anxiety that the latter had shown to him or on which he himself had discerned while listening to him talk about his concerns.
In those little drawers, each with its leaflets, there was something ... It was as if that advice you needed, or the remedy for some illness of the soul, had already been foreseen for ever ... That library reminded me of a pharmacy. And Fiorito looked like a wise pharmacist. But it was more than that, because Fiorito was not a confessor. Of course, he confessed, but he had another charisma besides that of being a minister of the Lord's mercy which is common to every priest. His was that charism of the spiritual man that I spoke of at the beginning, citing Origen: the charism of discernment and prophecy, in the sense of communicating well the graces of the Lord that are experienced in one's life. In fact from those little drawers not only remedies came out but above all new things, things of the Spirit that had been waiting for the right question, for someone's fervent desire, who found there the treasure of a discreet formulation that addressed him and that he could put into practice with fruit for the future.
A third characteristic I remember is that Maestro Fiorito was not jealous. He was not a jealous man: he wrote and signed with others, published and highlighted the thoughts of others, very often limiting his contributions to simple notes, which in reality, as can now be seen better thanks to this edition of his Escritos, were in summary importance, because they showed the essential and the actuality of the thoughts of others.
The most complete example of the fruitfulness of this way of working intellectually in the school is, in my opinion, the annotated and commented edition of the spiritual memoirs of Pierre Favre that Fiorito edited with Jaime Amadeo. A real classic. Without traits of ideology or of that erudition that is only for scholars, it is a work that puts us in touch with the soul of Favre, with its clarity and sweetness, with its dialogic capacity towards all, the fruit of his spiritual direction, and with his mastery in giving the Exercises. The Master shared much of Favre's sensitivity, in polar tension with a mind in fact rather cold and objective, as if he were an engineer.
The fourth characteristic that I think it is necessary to comment on, in this attempt to present his figure, is that he gave no judgment. Only rarely. With me, I remember, he did it twice. And in that way I was engraved. Here's how he judged. He said to you: Look, what you say is the same as what the Bible says, this temptation in the Bible. And then he let you pray and draw the consequences.
Here I want to emphasize that Fiorito had a particular nose to smell out the bad spirit; he knew how to recognize its action, to distinguish its tics, to unmask it from the bad fruits, from the bitter aftertaste and from the trail of desolation that is left behind. In this sense, we can say that he was a man in arms against a single enemy: the bad spirit, Satan, the devil, the tempter, the accuser, the enemy of our human nature. Between the flag of Christ and that of Satan, he made his personal choice for our Lord. In everything else he tried to discern so much ... how much and with each person he was a lovable father, a patient master and - when it happened - a steadfast adversary, but always respectful and loyal. Never an enemy.
Finally, something that was very noticeable in him. Even with his hard head, he was patient. In front of those cases, which made others impatient, he used to remember that Ignatius had been very patient with Simón Rodríguez. If you were stubborn and insisted on your own way, he let you do your job, gave you time. He was a Master in not rushing the times, waiting for the other to realize things for himself. He respected the processes.
And since I mentioned Simón Rodríguez, it may come to the point that I recall the story. Simón Rodríguez was always an agitated person. He did not spend the whole month in solitude with the others, he was late in making the profession. He was destined to go to India but in the end he remained in Portugal, where he did everything he could to stop forever despite the fact that Ignatius, for his sake and that of the Jesuits there, wanted to transfer him. Fiorito recounts that Ribadeneyra, in an unpublished manuscript entitled Treatise on persecutions suffered by the Society of Jesus, considers that one of the most terrible and dangerous torments experienced by the Company since its foundation, while our blessed Father Ignatius still lived, was that he had been moved not by enemies, but by his own children, not by external winds, but by the intrinsic disturbance of the sea itself, which happened in this way ... While the Company was sailing with such favorable winds, the enemy of every good waved it, tempting Father Simón himself and obfuscating him with that fruit that God had worked for him, and making him want for himself what he wanted of his blessed Father Ignatius and the whole Company. He then began to look at the things of Portugal not as a work of this body, but as a creation and his work and wanted to govern it without obedience and dependence on his boss, seeming to have so much favour in the kings of Portugal that he could easily do it without resorting to Rome; and since almost all the religious of the Company who lived in that kingdom were sons and his subjects and he had welcomed them and raised them, they did not know any other Father and Superior except Master Simón, and they loved him and respected him as if he were the principal founder of the Company; and to this also contributed the fact that he was of gentle and loving ways and not usually to press his very much; these are effective things to win the souls and the wills of the subjects, who, by common human weakness, usually wish that they be granted what they want, and be led with love (Escritos V, 157, note 85).
Ignatius was very patient. And Fiorito imitated him. Even in these stories he was able to see some good in Simón Rodríguez. He emphasized his frankness towards Ignatius, to whom he said things to his face. Certainly, in the long run, that patience bore fruit, because in fact the rebellions of Simón Rodríguez remained anecdotal, and were not consolidated, nor did they take hold beyond himself, and they yielded letters like that of Saint Ignatius to the Jesuits of Coimbra. This great patience is the fundamental virtue of the true Master, who counts on the action of the Holy Spirit in time, and not on his own actions.
Conclusion
As Provincial, I had to receive the annual account of the conscience of Father Fiorito. He was a novice. A mature novice. He was the disciple of the father who was in turn his own disciple. I can't understand it, but it was the testimony of his greatness of soul. As a Jesuit, the image of Psalm 1, that of the tree planted along streams of water, which gives flowers and fruit at the time, is drawn to the Master Miguel Ángel Fiorito. Like this tree in Scripture, Fiorito knew how to let himself be contained in the minimum space of his role at the Collegio Massimo of San Giuseppe, in San Miguel, Argentina, and there he took root and bore flowers and fruit, as his name well expresses - Flowered -, in the hearts of us disciples of the School of Exercises. I hope that now, thanks to this magnificent edition of his Escritos, which have the height of a great dream, it will take root and bear flowers and fruit in the lives of so many people who nourish themselves with the same grace that he received and was able to communicate discreetly giving and commenting on the Spiritual Exercises.
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