On March 25, Pope Francis received 80 parents of Spanish Jesuits and recalled that “although initially his mother did not share his vocational choice, she wanted to accompany him along with his father on the long journey made by bus,” the Vatican newspaper reported. The future Pontiff was an archdiocesan seminarian went he entered the Jesuit order in 1958.

In his talk, the Pope encouraged parents to welcome their children’s choices. The Pope also referred to three of the Society’s superiors-general—Father Wlodimir Ledóchowski (who governed the Society from 1915 to 1942), Father Jean-Baptiste Janssens (1946 to 1964), and Father Arrupe (1965 to 1983)—and said that Father Arrupe led “a renewal and a relaxation of the rigid discipline that characterized” the Jesuits, according to the newspaper’s summary of the Pope’s remarks.