‘SEE, JUDGE, ACT’ AND

IGNATIAN SPIRITUALITY

Jim Sheppard

T HE ‘SEE, JUDGE, ACT’ method of discernment is as old as the Bible

itself. Whenever anyone noticed a problem and then asked the Lord
for help, he or she was following this method, one way or another. We
are hardly ever told that there was a process of discernment going on,
yet something along these lines must have been happening, no matter how
crude and primitive it might have been. I believe it is safe to assume that
whenever we encounter the expression ‘The Lord said to … [whoever
it was]’ there must have been discernment—about which we are told
nothing—but in this process of discernment the individual concerned
came to understand that it really was the Lord speaking, and that the
message could be trusted.
The story of Gideon is perhaps one of the more colourful episodes of
this sort of discernment (Judges 6:11–24). The Midianites have overrun
the territory of Israel, and Gideon is threshing his wheat secretly when an
angel accosts him. It takes him a while to realise who the angel really is,
but then, slowly and reluctantly, Gideon sees that he is the one who is
called to do something about the situation. He then reinforces his original
discernment by laying a sheep’s fleece on the ground and leaving it out
overnight, saying to God ‘if there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is
dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will deliver Israel by
my hand, as you have said’ (Judges 6:37). All this is what today we would
call discernment. And, specifically, it is a public response to a public
problem.

The ‘See, Judge, Act’ Method

It was Mgr (later Cardinal) Cardijn who gave the ‘see, judge, act’ method
its current name. This is always, without exception, an objective response
to a public situation, such as Gideon’s. It is never ‘dreamed up’ by anyone’s
private consciousness. There always has to be something objective for

The Way, 56/1 (January 2017), 102–111

‘See, Judge, Act’ and Ignatian Spirituality 103

someone to observe. And usually what is observed is problematic, and

what we search for is a practical and workable response. We see a
problem in the world, discern what to do about it, and go into action.
This was what Cardijn used for his workers’ Catholic Action groups
(especially Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne), using Catholic social teaching
as the fundamental hermeneutic for decision-making. But he was also
extremely apodictic. He told his people what they should observe, he
told them how to evaluate the situation, and he told them what to do
about it. His discernment was from the top downwards. Today we are
much more cautious about this sort of authoritarianism.
The method and its name have survived the collapse of Catholic
Action, principally through Basic Ecclesial Communities, who still use
this method today,1 as much of the rest of the Church in Latin America
does. ‘See, judge, act’ also underlies several of Pope Francis’s encyclicals.
So it is still a popular and widely
used method of discernment. I
intend to compare it to the
principles of Ignatian discernment
and also to show how the two
methods can complement each
other.
In Basic Communities the
discernment using this method
is always communal: the whole
community has to be involved.
Indeed most situations where
this method is used involve a
communal process, whether in
a bishops’ conference, a pastoral
team or, in the case of a papal
encyclical, the entire Church.
Always, however, we must have
the facts of the situation before
us, and those facts have to be
correct. Joseph Cardijn in 1934

1
See my book The Word for Us: Spirituality and Community (North Charleston: CreateSpace, 2013)
for a history of this development.
104 Jim Sheppard

What we see (or choose to observe) is not quite as obvious as we

might think. Ideology plays a major role in what we allow ourselves to
notice and what we choose to ignore Take the case of climate change:
in spite of overwhelming evidence to the effect that we are confronted
with a major crisis of epic proportions, there are still ‘climate-change
deniers’ in our midst, most of them heavily invested, one way or another,
in the fossil-fuel business.2 Other current examples could include how
concepts such as terrorism or political legitimacy are defined. Self-interest
often has a blinding effect on our ability to engage with facts objectively,
as do culture and tradition.
The hermeneutic involved, by which we judge (discern) what we
have observed, again presents us with some interesting questions. Basic
Communities take their time over this. Their hermeneutic is based on
the Bible, as presented in the Sunday readings. And over a process of
many sessions, in which the objective reality of their everyday lives is
continually confronted by the ideals of the gospel, they gradually
formulate a common response to the world around them. The way a
method of interpretation develops in this sort of context is very similar
to Newman’s theory of ‘illative sense’ (what he calls the mind’s ‘power
of judging about truth and error in concrete matters’), which also has a
heavy emphasis on practical wisdom.3 But I have said more about this
in my book on Basic Communities,4 so there is no need to repeat it all
here. It must be mentioned, however, that for this method to succeed
in Basic Communities, there has to be consensus in the group.
It is interesting that in ecclesial documents such as the Latin American
bishops’ Aparecida document, the hermeneutic used depends very much
on what has been observed. After a survey of Latin American social
problems, the rights and wrongs of the situation are pretty well obvious,
and so is the subsequent action. In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s outline of
contemporary environmental difficulties again dictates how his judgment
of the situation will be developed. His principal interest, in the section
where he sees what is going on, is in the difficulties that poor people will
experience through climate change: that concern influences everything
else that follows.

2
See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2014), chapter 1.
3
John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Cambridge: CUP, 2010 [1870]), 346.
4
Sheppard, Word for Us, chapter 14.
‘See, Judge, Act’ and Ignatian Spirituality 105

The action that we need to undertake is conditioned by several factors.

One of these is the concerns of the group. In Basic Communities,
where a communal response is called for, the action has to be something
of which everyone approves, and usually this is something close to home
and right around the corner: setting up a food bank or a soup kitchen
or something similar. Episcopal documents can call for response in more
general terms. But action there has to be, otherwise the whole process
is a waste of time. Interestingly, as we react with our environment, we
also change it. This leads to a continuing cycle of reflection and
response that has profound and far-reaching effects in many Basic
Communities.5

Feeding the Five Thousand

The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had
done and taught. He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place
all by yourselves and rest a while’. For many were coming and going,
and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the
boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going
and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the
towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a
great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were
like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many
things. When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, ‘This
is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away
so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and
buy something for themselves to eat’. But he answered them, ‘You
give them something to eat’. They said to him, ‘Are we to go and
buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to
eat?’ And he said to them, ‘How many loaves have you? Go and
see.’ When they had found out, they said, ‘Five, and two fish’.
Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups
on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of
fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to
heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his
disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish
among them all. And all ate and were filled; and they took up
twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had
eaten the loaves numbered five thousand men. (Mark 6:30–44)

5
See Sheppard, Word For Us, chapter 8, on the ‘Prayer Spiral’.
106 Jim Sheppard

The Feeding of the Five Thousand is a discernment story. The disciples

go to Jesus to ask him what to do, and he tells them news they are very
unwilling to accept. First of all, they see the problem: a huge crowd
with nothing to eat, and no easy solution in sight. So the disciples ask
Jesus to make the problem go away: ‘Send them away to … buy
something for themselves to eat’. Today, we are just the same. We would
rather the poor were moved somewhere out of sight rather than be
confronted with their suffering. We call our projects ‘Neighbourhood
Improvement’ or ‘Urban Renewal’, but it always involves the same thing.
Jesus is blunt. ‘You give them something to eat’! And the panic
begins. The disciples begin by worrying about money: just as we do today,
they think money is the solution to everything. But Jesus then asks them
to take stock of what they do have. ‘How many loaves have you? Go
and see.’ In other words, he challenges them to look at what resources
they do have at their disposal. Then he tells them to organize the crowd
into groups of fifty and a hundred. Then the miracle takes place. And
we have to ask ourselves how many wonderful apostolates have started
up in the history of the Church in exactly the same manner. We begin
with fear and panic over the sheer size of the problem, but as we pray
(discern) over this we discover a few little loaves and fishes that we do
actually have, and so we begin a little organizing. Everything else follows
from there.
This passage also reminds me powerfully of the discernment sessions
I have lived through with so many Basic Communities. Almost always,
we begin with panic and denial. The problem is just too big for us—it
is global—or it is altogether beyond our capacity to solve, and so on.
But of course the problem does not go away. So we begin with some
humble measures, and are amazed at how they grow into something we
never imagined we were capable of producing.
Anawim House in Victoria, British Columbia, is a good example of
this. The original Basic Community flourished some forty years ago,
and was involved right from the beginning with helping street people.
Overwhelmed by the problems of alcoholism, drug abuse and mental
illness, the people they wanted to help also had to struggle with
unemployment and homelessness. It was hard to know where to begin,
and their sense of helplessness, the community told me, was a major
problem. So they did a survey of those who needed help, and were told
that what would be most valuable was some sort of facility for homeless
‘See, Judge, Act’ and Ignatian Spirituality 107

Breakfast at Anawim House

people to wash their clothes, have a shower and get a cup of coffee when
it was wet and cold outside.
This was a very significant step in the community’s discernment.
Rather than treating the poor as merely the objects of the discernment,
they involved them in the process. The homeless people were also discerners
along with the Basic Community. In the words of the final document of
the Puebla conference, the people need ‘legitimate self-determination.
This will permit them to organize their lives according to their own
genius and history’.6 So the community rented a small apartment where
they could do what was required, and it was so popular they quickly
discovered that they needed to expand. Next they did some very successful
fund-raising with the local business community, and today Anawim
House is a splendid facility catering to large numbers of homeless people,
with an important healing programme for alcohol and drug abusers. It
is, of course, no longer run by the original Basic Community, but is
now an independent organization with its own board of directors. But it

6
Document of Puebla n. 505, available at http://www.cpalsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Puebla-
III-CELAM-ESP.pdf, accessed 13 November 2016. And see also the letter from Pope Francis to
Cardinal Marc Ouellet, president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, 19 March 2016:
‘We must do this by discerning with our people and never for our people or without our people. As St
Ignatius would say, “in line with the necessities of place, time and person”.’ (Available at https://w2.
vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-
latina.html.)
108 Jim Sheppard

was the original group who saw the problem, judged or discerned correctly,
and acted according to the Holy Spirit.

Ignatian Spirituality
True Ignatian discernment is always based on the cycles of consolation
and desolation that individuals experience: even if the object of our
discernment is a public question, we still need to make time for a shift
to interiority in which we listen to the intensely private and intimate
inner movements of the heart, to try and find the call of the Holy Spirit.7
This is at one and the same time the strength and the weakness of
Ignatian spirituality: strength, because of the depth and intimacy that
becomes possible when we discern the Divine Will, and weakness because
of the subtlety involved. Too many people either do not take the time
required, or have simply given up on—or never really accepted—the
practice of the discernment of spirits.
Teaching the Rules for Discernment in the Spiritual Exercises is
always challenging. In my experience, retreatants must first clearly
understand the difference between consolation and desolation (and not
everyone succeeds here), and must then come to see that this is actually
useful, that in fact it really is possible to discern the movements of
different spirits in their own life, and that this helps their decision-making.
Again, not everyone makes the grade here. There is yet a third step to be
made, when they come to trust their own reading of the movements of
the different spirits in their own experience, so that they can actually
make a decision based on that reading. And, once again, many people
never really do trust their own discernment. So is Ignatian discernment
only for a few? Certainly, to the extent that only a minority are really
interested.
Ignatius himself, of course, was well aware of the problem here, and
suggested what many refer to as the ‘four column’ method of making a
decision ‘when the soul is not being moved one way and the other by
various spirits’ (Exx 177):

I should consider and reason out how many advantages or benefits

accrue to myself from having the office or benefice proposed, all of
them solely for the praise of God our Lord and the salvation of my

7
See Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: U. of Toronto P, 1971), 265–266.
‘See, Judge, Act’ and Ignatian Spirituality 109

soul; and on the contrary I should similarly consider the disadvantages

and dangers in having it. Then, acting in the same manner in the
second part, I should consider the advantages and benefits in not
having it, and contrarily the disadvantages and dangers in not having
it. (Exx 181)

Three other approaches are also proposed: one of imagining how we would
counsel another person in the same situation; a second of imagining
ourselves on our deathbed, looking back on the decision we are about
to make; and the third of considering how we will be judged on the Last
Day. Much prayer of different kinds is suggested in the text here, but
these methods do not require the discernment of spirits. However it is not
impossible (and may sometimes be advantageous) to combine them with
the usual cycle of consolation and desolation. It is noteworthy that
Ignatius clearly intended the last three methods for individual, rather
than communal, discernment.

Suggested Synthesis
To work with both Ignatian discernment and ‘see, judge, act’ together
we must have a public question that needs an active response. Preferably,
this should involve the whole community, of whatever kind. So, suppose
the question is: should we install solar panels on a house that we have to
renovate? The first steps will involve careful research into the availability,
price, performance and installation costs of these panels, along with
whatever related questions need to be explored (for example the possibility
of selling surplus electricity into the local grid, and what the related
legislation might be). The information gathered has to be correct: there
is no room for subjective opinion at this stage of things.
Then we would bring the community together and share the
information acquired. In communal discernment I believe it is helpful
to have some sort of ‘filter’ in place. Not everyone (even today) really
believes in communal discernment, and those who reject it do not help the
process along. So it is important that everyone concerned has accepted
the process and is willing to cooperate. Each person who has received the
information would then be asked to pray over it. This is where the whole
cycle of consolation and desolation comes into play, and where each
individual has to be very sensitive to the movements of the different spirits
in his or her soul. This is also the time at which personal attitudes,
prejudices and ideologies need to be prayed over to discern, yet again,
110 Jim Sheppard

which are inspired by the Lord and which by some other influence. We
should take whatever time is necessary for this, and not be rushed into
a hasty decision.
The final step consists in sharing the content of our prayer with the
rest of the discernment group. It is good to repeat this at least a couple
of times, so that each member has an opportunity to reflect on what
the others have said, and to get an idea of how the cycle of consolation
and desolation is working within the discerning group. After this, usually,
the group is ready to make a decision.
So the whole process begins with a dispassionate, objective examination
of a public reality or question. The relevant data are researched and
shared with the discerning group. The group, however, examines the data
from another perspective entirely, that of the intimate working of the
Holy Spirit in the depths of our souls. Ignatius spells out how all this
works so well in the Spiritual Exercises that it would be redundant to
do so here, except to remember that he lays such emphasis on our
desire and the importance of conforming this to the Divine Will.
In practice, this is how a great many decisions with public import
get made in communities anyway. So do we need formally to combine
‘see, judge, act’ with Ignatian spirituality? I believe it is always helpful
‘See, Judge, Act’ and Ignatian Spirituality 111

to spell our procedures out clearly, so we have a better idea of exactly

what we are doing. Discernment has to be informed, and all the data
have to be available to whoever is doing the discerning. And the ‘see,
judge, act’ spirituality has so much to offer us today. We live in a secular
world, where faith and religion are endlessly crowded out of the public
sphere and reduced to mere private phenomena. Even in the Church
there is a glut of private, individualistic spiritualities that have no social
dimension whatever. So it is vital to have an explicit method, such as
we have in ‘see, judge, act’, that confronts our faith with the world out
there and gets Christians involved, as Christians, in the issues of the
day. How can we be more Ignatian than that?

Jim Sheppard SJ is a member of the Anglo-Canadian Jesuit Province, who has

been directing the Spiritual Exercises for many years. He has a particular interest
in Basic Ecclesial Communities, on which he has recently published a book, The
Word for Us.