Partly because I revere the history of that noble order of priests deliciously described by an unsympathetic observer as “Inflexible in nothing but in their fidelity to the Church … arguing, instructing, consoling, stealing away the hearts of the young, animating the courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying”, and partly because I know many young Jesuits who do not live up to the tediously familiar stereotypes, I almost never go in for jokes at the expense of the Society of Jesus. Still, it was hard to stifle a chuckle when Fr Arturo Sosa Abascal, the society’s superior general, seemed to write off the Devil as a symbol “meant to express evil” earlier this month in the course of a rambling discourse which touched on the possibility of women’s ordination.