#rakhat

IT WAS PREDICTABLE, in hindsight. Everything about the history of the Society of Jesus bespoke deft and efficient action, exploration and research. During what Europeans were pleased to call the Age of Discovery, Jesuit priests were never more than a year or two behind the men who made initial contact with previously unknown peoples; indeed, Jesuits were often the vanguard of exploration.

The United Nations required years to come to a decision that the Society of Jesus reached in ten days. In New York, diplomats debated long and hard, with many recesses and tablings of the issue, whether and why human resources should be expended in an attempt to contact the world that would become known as Rakhat when there were so many pressing needs on Earth. In Rome, the questions were not whether or why but how soon the mission could be attempted and whom to send.

The Society asked leave of no temporal government. It acted on its own principles, with its own assets, on Papal authority. The mission to Rakhat was undertaken not so much secretly as privately -- a fine distinction but one that the Society felt no compulsion to explain or justify when the news broke several years later.

The Jesuit scientists went to learn, not to proselytize. They went so that they might come to know and love God's other children. They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration. They went ad majorem Dei glortam: for the greater glory of God.

They meant no harm.

Fourteen sentences, five paragraphs, only 259 words. No proper names (except for Rakhat), no dates; that first paragraph could come out of a history paper or a magazine article.

And yet, man, what a dozy. It all comes down to that last sentence, of course.

"They meant no harm."

"They," being presumably, the Jesuit scientists. We aren't given the full details yet, no mention of Emilio or Jimmy or Anne or any of the others. But the implication is that these are educated men, mature men, methodical men.

"Meant"-- intentions. They went for God's glory, same as all the Jesuits before them, the text tells us. And the mentions in the first paragraph of the Age of Exploration gives us our first hint as to the outcome. We know the outcomes of the Age of Exploration; increased scientific knowledge, technologies, etc. But also slavery and pandemics and cruelty.

"No Harm." The Hippocratic Oath for doctors is often phrased as "First, do no harm." It doesn't specify what kind of harm, or what scale, but it's a flat statement.

"They meant no harm."

That is a sentence pregnant with possibilities. They meant no harm... but good intentions are not always enough. They meant no harm....but harm was done.

And the damage wasn't limited to just Rakhat, as we learn.

There's so much more there, of course, such as the distinction between secrecy and privacy, along with the foreknowledge that the mission didn't remain secret for long. We are not told what, precisely, was predictable in hindsight, but those words are often associated with disasters.