Servant of God Pedro Arrupe

Pedro Arrupe y Gondra, SJ (14 November 1907 – 5 February 1991) was a Spanish Catholic priest who served as the 28th superior general of the Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He has been called a second founder of the Society, which he led in the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, especially with regard to faith that does justice and preferential option for the poor. Born in 1907 in Bilbao, Arrupe joined the Jesuits in 1927 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1936. While serving as a novice master outside Hiroshima in 1945, Arrupe used his medical background as a first responder to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 1983, paralysis from a stroke caused Arrupe to resign from office. He lived on until 1991, when he died in the local Jesuit infirmary. His cause for sainthood was opened by the Jesuits and the Diocese of Rome in 2018. Arrupe attended school at the Santiago Apostol High School in Bilbao. In 1923, he moved to Madrid to attend the Medical School of the Universidad Complutense. There he met Severo Ochoa, who later won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. One of his teachers was Juan Negrín, a pioneer in physiology, who would become Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic during the Civil War (1936–1939). Arrupe received the top prize in the first year anatomy course. In 1926, Arrupe's father died. That summer he went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes with his four sisters. He later recounted his experience there in conversations with Jean-Claude Dietsch, S.J. Subsequent to these gathered findings, Arrupe decided not continue his medical studies. On 15 January 1927, he joined the Society of Jesus. He was unable to pursue his studies for the priesthood in Spain because the Jesuits had been expelled by the Spanish Republican government (1931–1939), so he pursued his studies in the Netherlands and Belgium and at Saint Louis University School of Divinity in St. Marys, Kansas, where he was ordained in 1936.