Watt soll dä janze Käu?

I. The Fool’s Question

In the Rhineland there is a question one puts to every kind of theatre, whether it happens on stage, in the town hall or in church: “Watt soll dä janze Käu?” What is all this fuss for? The question sounds disrespectful, but it is not. Whoever asks it assumes that the whole thing is meant to be good for something. He only wants to know what for, and whether it lives up to that purpose.

At the king’s court one person was allowed to ask this question: the fool. He did not possess the truth. He asked the uncomfortable and unwelcome questions nobody else dared to ask, and so forced others to think for themselves. That is what Socrates did in Athens. He called himself a gadfly that keeps the sluggish horse of the city awake, and insisted that he knew only that he knew nothing. Athens condemned him to death for it, as Rome did Giordano Bruno two thousand years later. And in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes it is a child who says aloud what everyone sees and nobody dares to say. Neither the fool nor the child is an enemy. They are the only ones who hold up a mirror to the powerful without asking anything in return.

This speech is addressed to the Society of Jesus, the order of the Jesuits. It is addressed to them because of all parts of the Church they have achieved the most and dared the most, and are therefore also the most obliged. Nobody puts questions to those who can do nothing.

II. Their Own Standard

The fool needs no outside standard. The order has set its own. Its motto is “For the greater glory of God”. In 1973 its Superior General Pedro Arrupe gave it the formula “men for others”. And Pope Paul VI impressed on the Jesuits what he told the whole world for the World Day of Peace in 1972: “If you want peace, work for justice.” He turned the old saying around, according to which whoever wants peace must prepare for war. And he said work, not pray.

In a letter the order itself has published, it commits itself to praying for the conversion of people, to proclaiming the Gospel where it is needed most, and to strengthening peace work and engagement for social justice “by all possible means” in every province. The fool takes the order at its word. He asks only three things: Does conversion apply to you too? Where is the Gospel needed most today? And what belongs to the possible means?

III. Where They Lived Up to It

Measured by this standard, the Jesuits achieved astonishing things over the centuries. Matteo Ricci reached the imperial court in Beijing around 1600 because he learned Chinese, dressed like a Confucian scholar and accepted the veneration of ancestors as a civil custom. In Paraguay the Jesuits ran the reductions from 1609 for more than a century and a half, settlements of the Guaraní with common property, their own workshops, their own music and their own production. They founded schools and universities on every continent.

This side exists today too. In the Comparte network, Jesuit social centres in Latin America work with more than four hundred producer organisations and some fifty thousand families on an economy that grows from below: cooperatives, direct marketing, community funds. In Colombia’s Valle del Cauca, the Instituto Mayor Campesino, founded by a Jesuit in 1962 and now a cooperative, runs a hotel as a social enterprise. And when abuse at German Catholic schools became public in 2010, it was a Jesuit, Klaus Mertes, rector of the Canisius-Kolleg in Berlin, who broke the silence. In his own house first.

What all these successes have in common: they came when the Jesuits engaged with others instead of instructing them.

IV. Where They Were Stopped

They mostly failed not because of their cleverness but because of their principal. Rome decided the dispute over Ricci’s adaptation to China against the Jesuits in 1742, and the China mission was effectively finished. The reductions ended in 1767 when the Spanish crown expelled the Jesuits from its territories. In 1773 Pope Clement XIV suppressed the entire order under pressure from the Catholic royal houses. Only in 1814 was it allowed to exist again.

And patriarchy limited what was possible. In the early seventeenth century the Englishwoman Mary Ward wanted to found an order of women on the Jesuit model: without enclosure, mobile, with education for girls. Rome suppressed her community in 1631 and had her locked up in Munich. Only in 1909 was she recognised as founder, and only since 2004 has her community borne the name she had wanted: Congregatio Jesu. Three hundred and seventy years for a name.

V. The Case of Bruno

On 17 February 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome after eight years of imprisonment. On the four-hundredth anniversary, Cardinal Secretary of State Angelo Sodano declared that the execution was a sad episode, but that the inquisitors had wanted to serve freedom. In the same year Cardinal Paul Poupard said at a symposium which, according to our research, was organised by Jesuits, that rehabilitation was out of the question because Bruno’s thought was incompatible with Christian thought.

John Paul II rehabilitated Galileo Galilei in 1992. Not Bruno. In “The Case of Giordano Bruno and the Credibility of the Catholic Church” we described what this means: the Church regrets the method, but not the verdict. Galileo had recanted, and his teaching could be reconciled with today’s doctrine. Bruno did not recant. Rehabilitation goes to those who bowed, or whose teaching has meanwhile become useful.

The fool does not demand that the Church adopt Bruno’s teachings. He demands something simpler: the confession that it was wrong to burn a man for his thoughts, and that this wrong does not become smaller if one still considers the thoughts false. Whoever cannot say this has learned nothing from four hundred years except caution.

VI. The Claim and Its Price

Behind Bruno stands a larger question: the claim to possess the truth. It is not an invention of the Church. Plato wanted the knowing to rule, as we described in “The Helmsman Nobody Elects”. Hegel believed history had a goal, and his heirs have stood on the “right side of history” ever since. The nation, the market, the class, the race, today the machine: all have produced people who thought they knew and therefore needed to listen to no one. The Church is only the institution that has made this claim longest and most explicitly.

The objection is obvious: whoever demands that all claims to absoluteness be given up is making one himself. The answer comes from the Church itself. Nicholas of Cusa, cardinal from the Moselle, wrote in 1440 of “learned ignorance”: the human mind approaches the truth as a polygon approaches a circle. One can keep increasing the number of corners, but the polygon never becomes a circle. In our “Outlines of a Rhenish Philosophy” we turned this into an attitude: take no doctrine entirely seriously, including one’s own. That is not a doctrine but a method, and it applies to the fool as much as to the pope.

One must distinguish claim from commitment. The claim says: I know, so I need not listen to you. The commitment says: I do not know it all, but here I stand. One can be unconditionally committed not to kill and to respect the dignity of every person without asserting that one knows the whole truth. Bruno died for a commitment. The court judged from a claim.

The Church can move. With its Declaration on Religious Freedom in 1965, the Second Vatican Council gave up the claim to enforce faith by coercion. That was a step hardly anyone had thought possible. The fool only says: you have done it once. Take the next step.

VII. Fathers and Children

The claim to absoluteness has a price that concerns not only the dead. Whoever possesses the truth can help, but not share. In the reductions of Paraguay the Jesuits were the fathers and the Guaraní the children, well provided for, well taught, but never masters of their own settlements. When the fathers were expelled the work collapsed, because nobody had learned to run it without them.

That it can be done differently was shown by a priest of the same Church, not a Jesuit but a simple curate. José María Arizmendiarrieta came to the small Basque town of Mondragón in February 1941, into the poverty after the Civil War. In 1943 he founded a vocational school. In 1956 he encouraged five of his former pupils to found the first industrial cooperative; in 1959 a cooperative bank followed. Out of this grew the largest group of cooperatives in the world. His principle was: “To create cooperatives you have to train cooperative members.” But what mattered most was what he refrained from. He wrote statutes and gave advice, yet he never held an office in any of the cooperatives and never received anything from them. He was not a father who stays but a teacher who makes himself unnecessary. His half-brother was a Jesuit, and he had sharpened his thinking on property on the writings of the Jesuit Joaquín Azpiazu. So the idea also came from the order’s house. It was put into practice by a curate who belonged to no order. In “From Experiment to Model” and “The Experiment That Did Not Want to Become a Model” we described what became of it, and where Mondragón too reached its limits.

One of the two authors of this text lived in Medellín for twelve years and for four of them worked there and in other towns and villages of Antioquia with women who wanted to produce food together. There were already projects with state funding. The pattern was always the same: the women who led a group received some money, and the group stewed in its own juice. The groups never got into real production. Nor was it wanted, for then the women would have competed with established firms. It was occupational therapy.

Individual women made it anyway. One of them started in 2009 in a garage, with an oven, a table, a shelf and a counter. Today she runs a restaurant, a bakery, a market and her own garden. He tried to use the infrastructure, the houses and networks of churches and orders for the projects, and succeeded only in rare exceptions and only for a time. The women’s cohesion broke down again and again because the means were insufficient, and there too it was always only individual women who made it.

That is the difference at stake. Whoever possesses the truth gives alms. Whoever seeks it gives tools. Alms keep the recipient dependent; tools make him free, free even of the giver. In “The Helping Industry” we showed how much aid there is that mainly benefits the helpers. The question to the order is which side it wants to be on.

VIII. Cali, October 2026

On 10 August 2026 an earthquake of magnitude 7.4 shook western Colombia. Cali was hit hardest: about one hundred and fifty dead, more than five thousand buildings damaged or destroyed, a university hospital partly collapsed. The city expects up to three years of reconstruction.

The Colombian Jesuits responded quickly. After emergency aid and a phase of assessment, their plan provides from the third month onwards for “comprehensive accompaniment” in Cali and Buenaventura, with housing repair, psychosocial support and vocational training. The third month is now. In this phase it will be decided whether aid turns into occupational therapy again or into something else: workshops and kitchens where women who have lost their income produce, and whose proceeds belong to them.

The order has the means. It has houses, kitchens, schools, universities, a network like Comparte that knows exactly this work, and the trust of people who trust nobody else. In Germany it has jesuitenweltweit in Nuremberg, an organisation that supports education and emergency aid around the world. Economic self-reliance does not appear on its website as a field of work of its own, nor does Colombia. That is not a reproach. It is a gap, and gaps can be closed.

IX. The Fool’s Hints

The fool gives no orders; he gives hints. There are three.

Confess. Say that it was wrong to burn Giordano Bruno, and wrong to lock up Mary Ward. It was not the method that was wrong but the verdict on people who thought differently. Such a confession costs nothing but the claim, and it would create more trust than any campaign.

Renounce. Give up the claim to possess the truth, and keep the commitment to seek it. You have the best tool the Church ever produced for this: the discernment of spirits, with which Ignatius of Loyola taught people to test what leads to life and what leads away from it. Apply it for once not to the individual soul but to your own institution.

Commit. Take your own word seriously: justice “by all possible means”. Your houses, your kitchens and your networks belong to the possible means. Put them at the disposal of women who want to produce together, and leave them the ownership of what they make. You have the model in your own Church: in 2015 Pope Francis recognised Arizmendiarrieta’s heroic virtue. Do not only venerate him, imitate him. Start where it is needed most right now, in Cali. And measure yourselves by a single figure: what share of your means flows into income the poor earn themselves, and what share into aid that keeps them dependent?

If you hear only an attack in this speech, so be it. The fool gave it because he believes all this is meant to be good for something.

Watt soll dä janze Käu? If the answer is justice, it must be measured by what the poor finally hold in their own hands.