"How do we best engage with young people?" he was asked.

"For me the key word is testimony," Francis responded.

"Without testimony, without witnessing, nothing can be done.

"You end up like that beautiful song by Mina: 'parole, parole, parole…' (words, words, words). Without testimony nothing happens. And testimony means consistency of life."

It isn't relevant whether a young person is in formation to become a Jesuit or if they're looking for other vocations, Francis said. He offered the following advice.

"Speak clearly!"

Francis commented that it used to be said a good Jesuit had to think clearly and speak obscurely.

"But with young people that does not work: you have to speak clearly, show them consistency. Young people have a nose for when there is no consistency.

"With young people in formation you have to speak as to adults, as you speak to grown ups, not children. And introduce them to spiritual experience; prepare them for the great spiritual experience that is the Exercises.

"Young people do not tolerate double-speak, that is clear to me. But being clear does not mean being aggressive. Clarity must always be combined with amiability, fraternity, fatherhood."

Francis went on to say: "The key word is 'authenticity'. Let young people say what they feel.

"For me, dialogue between a young person and an older person is important: talking, discussing.

"I expect authenticity, that people speak of things as they are: difficulties, sins.

"As a formation facilitator you have to teach young people consistency.

"And it is important for the young to dialogue with the old. The old people cannot be in the infirmary alone; they have to be in community, so that exchanges between them and young people are possible."

Francis then turned to the Old Testament, reminding his audience of the prophet Joel.

Joel said "...the old will have dreams and the young will be prophets. The prophecy of a young person is one that comes from a tender relationship with the old.'

Francis continued: "Tenderness is one of God's key words: closeness, compassion and tenderness. On this path we will never go wrong. This is God's style."

Source

• La Civitta Cattollica

I was asked these questions after introducing myself and my major at a Bible Study my sophomore year in college. I sat there confused for a few minutes before answering.

I am currently at the South Pole Station in Antarctica with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which is looking for tiny particles called neutrinos that hit Earth from distant cosmic events.

IceCube is trying to find out more about these tiny particles, as well as where they come from, in an effort to learn more about our universe! I am so excited and honored and grateful to be here.

Religious people are the minority here at the station, and whenever my Catholic faith comes up, I am again asked those same questions I was asked years ago at Bible Study, but in reverse.

How can you be religious? Don't you believe in science?

I grew up Roman Catholic, attended 13 years of Catholic School, and still actively practice my faith as a scientist and a science educator.

I had never seen a conflict between my faith and my scientific endeavours until I was posed with these well-intentioned questions in college.

Through my interfaith work, I have been able to learn and experience more about tensions between spiritual and scientific pursuits.

Many religious people, especially within Christianity, believe in God as a Creator.

According to the Book of Genesis, God said let there be light…and there was light. Over the course of six days, God created water, the atmosphere, plants, animals, and humans.

Some see this tenant of God creating the universe in conflict with scientific theories of how the world came to be, such as the Big Bang Theory.

The Big Bang Theory suggests that the universe was created by an explosion from one singular point - and that over time - a long time, 13.4 billion years - particles came together to form light and stars and galaxies and planets and eventually molecules and cells and living things.

Some people will say, the Big Bang could not have happened because God created the universe.

Others will say we have evidence of the Big Bang, so there's no way God created the universe.

I do not see the two as mutually exclusive.

And I have found that the conflict between these stances comes from a misunderstanding of the other.

There is room for science in the Genesis creation story.

God said let there be light, but it doesn't say how.

To me, God could have commanded the particles of the Big Bang to form the light. Or maybe He created the natural laws that allowed stars to come into being.

Likewise, there is room for a Creator in the Big Bang Theory.

There are a lot of questions still to be answered like - how did something come from nothing?

What actually "set off" the Big Bang?

Maybe one day we will have more answers, but for me, this is where God fits in.

My position on integrating God and science comes under attack constantly from scientists and religious people.

I take solace in Fr Georges Lemaître, a Jesuit priest who is credited with theorizing the Big Bang Theory.

He is quoted as saying "there are two paths to truth - I chose to follow both of them."

After over ten years of studying both faith and science, I am ready with a response to all those questions: "I believe in God, and I believe in science. God created the universe. Science tells me how."

• Elaine Krebs is a Roman Catholic Christian currently living in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a Master's Degree in Marine and Environmental Biology, and now works as both a science teacher at a local museum, as well as Confirmation Coordinator at her local parish.
• First published in Interfaith America. Republished with permission.

In a flourish of juvenile, blind confidence, we three founding hosts of "Jesuitical" (our former cohost, Olga Segura, now an editor at The National Catholic Reporter, is someone to whom we remain deeply indebted for making the first three years of the show with us) assumed that we could just turn on the microphones during our normal, daily conversations, and other people would clamour to hear what we had to say.

Dear readers and listeners: We were wrong. Those first pilot episodes were unfocused, uninteresting and, frankly, painful to listen to. You might still think the show comes across that way, but we promise you, we used to be so much worse.

To mark our five-year anniversary, we are looking back on what we have learned from our guests to help us and our listeners navigate the modern world as people of faith.

Yet we had an inkling that something was missing from the Catholic podcasting space.

We imagined there must be thousands of young people out there who were involved in campus ministry or did Jesuit Volunteer Corps or always went to the same last-chance Sunday Mass with their college friends and who now found themselves in a new city with a perhaps lacklustre parish and hungry for the Catholic community and spiritual nourishment.

Taking a page from our Jesuit colleagues, we sought to meet these theoretical young people where they were: on their smartphones.

So, to mark our five-year anniversary, we are looking back on what we have learned from our guests—Catholics and non-Catholics vastly smarter and more interesting than we are—to help us and our listeners navigate the modern world as people of faith.

Lessons About Young Catholics

Young Catholics need formal and financial support from the institutional church.
Molly Burhans, the founder of GoodLands—an organization that helps the Catholic Church leverage its landholdings to further its mission—was recently profiled in The New Yorker for her heroic efforts to fight climate change.

Ms. Burhans is a devout Catholic whose ecology is rooted in her faith. And Pope Francis has clearly made caring for our common home a priority for the church with his encyclical "Laudato Si'."

And yet, most of the support Ms. Burhans has received in her ministry has been from the secular world.

After Ms. Burhans created the first global map of the Catholic Church's landholdings, Pope Francis approved a plan for her to move to Rome and establish and run a Vatican cartography institute on a trial basis.

There was just one problem: It came with no staff and a very modest budget.

So Molly declined the offer.

She has since submitted a new proposal.

All the while, Molly continues to receive awards and offers from some of the most prestigious environmental groups in the world.

Career paths for lay vocations are not obvious.

The default view tends to include only a) academia, b) youth and young adult ministry, or, c) uh, I don't know, here's the password to our social media account. Go crazy, kid.

Unless we figure out how to incorporate young, lay Catholics and their talents and passions more fully into the formal structures of the church, the church is going to experience "brain drain" of people like Molly Burhans and so many others.

"I would have no self-respect, honestly, if I had stayed working for the Catholic Church as long as I had with the amount of resources I've had."

Young people are leaving the church—but it is not for the reasons you think.
A bunch of people with gray hair sit in the parish hall listening to a speaker.

Inevitably, someone raises their hand during the Q. and A. session and bemoans the fact that young people just are not interested in church anymore, that their adult child has drifted away, and they do not know what to do about it.

Luckily, the Springtide Research Institute, whose executive director, Josh Packard, spoke with us, is looking for the answers.

The institute is devoted to studying young people's feelings toward religion.

They found that a young adult who had five adults who cared about them was far less likely to engage in high-risk behaviour.

The same principal could help to connect young people to the church.

"[Millennials are] not leaving the church.

They were not raised in it to begin with.

They don't have anything to leave, but instead, they're going to be building things. And they're going to be doing that with the bits and pieces and fragments of the institutional lives that have been left behind for them." - Josh Packard, Episode 172, March 12, 2021

Stop putting young adult Catholics at the "kids table."
In 2018, over 300 young people from all over the world went to the Vatican to help prepare the meeting of the Synod of Bishops on young people.

One of those delegates, Katie Prejean McGrady, had spent a lot of time working with young people in the church as a speaker, writer, youth minister and high school theology teacher. (Katie now hosts a daily radio show on Sirius XM).

We talked to Katie about what it was like to dialogue with bishops about youth and young adult ministry, and what changes she wanted to see in how the church welcomes young people.

"A lot of times young people are relegated to the cheap seats, when it comes to Catholicism.

"They're either the problem to be solved, they're the kids that made a mess in the parish hall or they're the ones that can clean up after the adult gathering….

"They're just kind of put into this separate category rather than [being recognized as] an active part of the life of the church.

"I hate the term ‘youth Mass.'

"It's Mass—and young people just happen to be engaged more in the work of the liturgy. But why can't that happen at the 9 a.m. Mass?" - Katie Prejean McGrady, Episode 75, Sept. 14, 2018 Continue reading

• Ashley McKinless and Zac Davis

"I've felt a calling to dedicate my life in a more direct and personal way to serving the marginalized, empowering the vulnerable, healing those suffering from spiritual wounds, and accompanying those discerning their own futures," Mr. Habib wrote in an essay published in America, explaining his announcement. Read more

People love yoga.

People love the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola.

Mash the two together, and you have created a nice, marketable concept that can sweep a bundle of folks into the arms of the Lord and/or the Society of Jesus.

A Jesuit yoga teacher in a cobalt blue T-shirt ("IHS" nestled in the middle of a lotus flower) guides students through Christian spirituality and then mesmerizes them with yoga poses.

They do this in a church sanctuary, rubber mats spread on marble floors.

It seems perfect for a world in which anything can become anything, in which all spiritualities and traditions are completely fluid and can bleed into each other with little self-awareness or sense of fundamental boundaries.

It seems perfect because the Catholic faith is spiritual and yoga is spiritual.

Both have to do with people and people are good and they have souls and a corner of a good person's soul touches Jesus and another corner of the soul brushes against yoga because yoga exists, and thus Jesus and Patanjali, Francis Xavier and Swami Vivekananda, Rome and Delhi, the empty tomb and the emptying of desire are essentially in some broader cosmic sense part of, if not the same thing.

Why make distinctions between the two when to distinguish is to deny, to exclude, to create harsh boundaries?

And so yoga and Christian spirituality can be in some ways two co-equal wings of the same Creator and his entire recommended path of living, and so it all works out.

It all works out. Time for final savasana.

The practice of Ignatian yoga in the United States began in 2013 at Fordham University with a Jesuit scholastic named Bobby Karle.

Karle, a certified yoga instructor, Karle began offering sessions in yoga framed by Jesuit principles before weeknight liturgies at the campus church.

By 2017, Ignatian yoga had taken shape as an established organization.

Karle and his teaching partner, Alan Haras, have held workshops and retreats in Hollywood, Detroit, Milford, Ohio, Worcester, Mass., Boston, New York, Cleveland and even Australia.

Last year, I gave a talk and led a chapel meditation at one of these Ignatian yoga retreats.

It took place at a retreat center about an hour north of Manhattan.

I had never attended an Ignatian yoga event, and I admit, even though I was one of the speakers, I was a bit skeptical of the whole thing.

In contradistinction to the above litany of modern spirituality, it seemed that with "Ignatian yoga" you could end up with either a corruption of yoga or a corruption of Catholic spirituality. Continue reading

Mick Kelly remembers the phone call from his friend in Pakistan as if it was yesterday.

"He asked me to help out this one guy who was fleeing Pakistan, and on his way to Bangkok. That was more than five years ago," Kelly recalls.

That friend - like Mick, a Jesuit priest - was asking for the Sydney-born Kelly to give a Pakistani Christian and would-be refugee help when he arrived in Thailand's sprawling, unfamiliar capital.

"It all started by accident and has grown from there."

Kelly, a journalist by training and founder of the Melbourne-based Eureka Street magazine, had moved to Bangkok in 2009 to run UCAN, the Union of Catholic Asian News.

Ten years later, he is still in Bangkok and at the helm of UCAN, which has about 45 journalists in countries throughout the region.

But it's his "accidental" job, helping the small community of Pakistani Christian and Achmadi refugees ("it's about 400 families") trapped in a legal limbo in Bangkok, that he wants to talk about.

The families come to Xavier Hall - just a short walk from Bangkok's Victory Monument that commemorates Thailand's defeat of France in a series of skirmishes in 1941 - for food, for money, for education, for informal legal advice and - not least - spiritual counsel.

The operation runs on the smell of an oily rag, funded by donations.

The UN refugee agency officially estimates there are around 97,000 recognised refugee living in Thailand. Most are ethnic minorities from Myanmar. But there are tens of thousands more undocumented people.

The tiny cohort of Pakistani Christians and Achmadis, most of whom fled between 2012 and 2014 when tourist visas were readily available, is just one drop in a vast ocean.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age spent a day with Kelly, meeting some of the families at Xavier Hall and travelling to their tiny flats on the outskirts of the capital.

Unable to work legally, they live jammed into one room flats that cost between 3000 and 5000 Thai Baht per month (NZ$140-$240), fretting away their days inside, afraid to go out lest they be arrested and sent to Bangkok's notorious Immigration Detention Centre.

One man shared a harrowing story of how his wife had been raped, five days earlier, by Thai police. They did not want their names published, and were afraid that if they went to authorities they would invite further legal problems upon themselves. The wife sobbed, shoulders shaking.

Another woman, Soniazahid Younis, spoke though she was afraid of Thai authorities, who have held her husband Zahid in the IDC for more than a year.

She came to Xavier Hall with her four sons, Shahzaib, 16, Shahwaiz, 14, Sharaiz, 10 and Zohaib, 8, to share her story.

One day, Soniazahid says, her eldest son translating, some men came to their house, in a small village outside Lahore, and demanded that they be allowed to pray inside the house. The men were Muslims, and the Younis family is Christian.

"After that, the trouble started. They said we had converted. They said my husband's name was now Mohammed. But we are Christians. So they submitted a report of blasphemy. We were accused of desecrating the Koran" she says.
One day 40 or 50 men surrounded their home.

"They tried to choke me. They cut my husband's hand. They threatened to cut off his head," she says.

"First my husband went to Dubai, but we didn't have money for Dubai visas. So a pastor helped us, he said he had friends in Thailand. So we came here."

That was nearly six years ago. Since then, the family has lived in hiding and been unable to work. They get by on donations from Kelly and his community, and on remittances from Soniazahid's elderly father.

In January 2018, the older members of the family were thrown into the IDC, Soniazahid in the women's section of the prison, her husband and two older boys in the men's section. Her 10- and eight-year-old boys were cared for by friends.

It was only in December 2018 that a mystery benefactor paid their fines and Soniazahid and her older boys were allowed out. Her husband remains in detention.

"All we want is a better place to live, where my kids can study, where we can get a job and a house. We can never go back to Pakistan," she says.

Where does she want her family to go? Perhaps Australia, or Canada?

"The country which God has blessed for us," Soniazahid replies.

Later, Simon Sultan, a 12 year old boy from Pakistan, invites us in to his home. He is sitting on the double bed he shares with his mother, 11-year-old sister and four-year-old younger brother. Their flat is perhaps 20 metres square, ancient, the yellow paint on the walls fading, but everything is neatly arranged in the tiny space.

It's 3 o'clock on a hot January afternoon and the fan is shuddering and squeaking overhead.

Simon's mother, Rifaffat, doesn't want to be photographed but she wants the world to know her story.

"It was August 17, 2013, at around 10.30 am. That's when my husband would open his shop. He fixed motorbikes. Another man, Amjad Ali, he was jealous. So he came to the shop and he took the Koran and he ripped it. And then he told other Muslims that my husband had ripped it," she explains, her son Simon helping with the translation.

"After 10 or 15 minutes he came back with other men and that's when they tried to kill my husband. So we fled to Thailand."
"They hit him with screwdrivers and other mechanical parts, they threw food at him and spat on him. When my father ran, they tried to shoot him. But he jumped over a wall behind our shop, so the bullets hit the wall," Simon adds.

Rifaffat's husband, Justin, has been in the IDC for more than a year. One day, he went out to buy milk for their youngest son and was picked up by Thai police. Rifaffat makes money by baking naan bread for a rich Indian family, which helps them scrape by, and sends food to her husband in the prison each day via a neighbour.

"When we came from Pakistan we thought we would go to a third country after one year. But we can't go anywhere," she says.

As the Sultans' share their story, Kelly nods, grim-faced. He's heard hundreds of stories like this.
Working with these families, he later says, "has been a continuous experience of helplessness as I share the life of people who have no options and who are struggling to find the best way out of a very dark corner".

"They are escaping persecution and when they get to Bangkok they are punished. They are routinely harassed by police," he says.

He's working on a plan to get some of the families asylum in a European country which he won't name but his frustration is plain.

"I want Australia to take some of these people and help them. They fulfil all the criteria. They are fluent in English, many are tertiary-educated and they have refugee status. But they can't get to Australia because for some reason Immigration has decided Pakistanis in Thailand are just not a priority."

• James Massola is The Sydney Morning Herald's south-east Asia correspondent, based in Jakarta. He was previously chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Canberra. He has been a Walkley and Quills finalist on three occasions.
• Photo: James Massola
• This article first appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Credible Catholic offers 20 downloadable "modules" that equip learners with evidence-based arguments for core Christian beliefs. Read more

He's helping fight a drought using methods a Swiss-born Jesuit pioneered. Read more

He's not saying - but in a new book based on 12 in-depth interviews with the French sociologist Dominique Wolton, he says the sessions helped him.

"In those six months [I visited the psychoanalyst], she really helped me," he told Wolton. "She was a wonderful person."

Francis has commented about psychiatry before. As an example, when he was asked why he lived in a modest guesthouse rather than the Apostolic Palace, he said it was for psychiatric reasons.

"I can't live alone, do you understand?" he explained.

The revelation that he sought psychiatric help is a first for the Vatican, Robert Mickens says.

Mickens is the editor of the English-language edition of La Croix, a Catholic newspaper.

"Bergoglio [Francis] is a person with his feet on the ground, but he realises that you can't pray away all your problems.

"That said, he would be the first to say that analysis is no substitute for spirituality."

Francis told Wolton about the role and influence of the "courageous" women in his life. They included his mother, his two grandmothers and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga.

De Careaga was the communist founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo movement in Buenos Aires. She was killed during the Argentinian military dictatorship.

As a Jesuit, Francis is part of a tradition is known to value psychoanalysis. Many of his confreres regard self-awareness and introspection as being complementary to spirituality.

Source

• The Guardian
• The Telegraph
• Stuff
• RNS
• Image: Daily Wire

Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart is declining to comment on remarks made by the schools last week that seemed to support gay marriage. The Australian Bishops Commission for Catholic Education is also choosing to keep silent.

While the schools have not definitely said they'd vote for gay marriage, they have noted Pope Francis' teachings on love, mercy and non-judgement in messages to staff, students and parents.

Father Chris Middleton, the rector of Xavier, says the Church should to look at the support among the youth for marriage equality.

'In my experience, there is almost total unanimity amongst the young in favour of same-sex marriage, and arguments against will have almost no impact on them,' he says.

He added that young people were driven by a 'strong emotional commitment to equality'. This is something to respect and admire, he says.

In the opinion of St Ignatius' rector Father Ross Jones, Catholic couples can 'in good conscience' have sexual relationships for reasons besides procreation under the 'order of reason' school of Natural Law.

Presumably, same-sex couples, who make such a commitment to each other in good conscience, do so by reflecting on experience and on what it is to be human, using their God-given reason, he says.

Pope Francis wrote in Amoris Laetitia that a person's "individual conscience needs to be incorporated into the Church's praxis in certain situations which do not objectively embody our understanding of marriage".

The Catholic Church teaches that sexual relations are reserved for married couples - consisting of one man and one woman - in the context of sacramental marriage.

"In forming a response to this issue, a properly formed and informed conscience would take into account both the teachings of the Church about the sacrament of marriage, as well as the teachings of the Church about human dignity, which of course includes LGBTI people," St Ignatius school said in a joint statement attributed to Fr Jones and school principal Paul Hine.

"A discerned response to these issues means holding all of these teachings together," they said.

Source

• Daily Mail
• The New Daily
• LifeSite
• The Herald
• Image: ABC

The movie, which its director says is a contemporary take on Ignatius's life, is important.

"There is a need for this new material on St. Ignatius of Loyola, especially because the young people now are very visual." Read more

Father Adolfo Nicolás, SJ, wrote them while spending some weeks in his native country before heading for the Philippines capital, Manila, where he now lives.

Beyond whatever value for observers of the papacy his recollections contain, they have real historic importance, particularly for the Society of Jesus.

They are, of course, the first ever conversations between a Jesuit Superior General and a Jesuit pope.

Nicolás and Francis developed a close bond right from the start, as the new pope sought to re-establish a close working relationship with his order following decades of suspicion and coldness.

In an anecdote that quickly shot round Rome in those first days of the new papacy, Francis directly called Nicolás the day after his election, sending the receptionist at the Jesuit curia into a tailspin of confusion. ("If you're the pope, I'm Napoleon," Nicolás says the receptionist thought, but did not say).

After they spoke, Francis promised to call back to arrange a meeting.

In an interesting anecdote for historians of the papacy, when he did so, the Sunday after his election, Francis told Nicolás: "Come to the Santa Marta because tomorrow I'm moving to the Apostolic Palace and I've got more freedom here."

In other words, says Nicolás, "the decision to stay in the Santa Marta was taken at the last moment."

This confirms the stories that it was only when he went to the Apostolic Palace and saw it — an endless chain of rooms, each leading into the next — that Francis opted to stay in the more friendly and open guesthouse.

Nicolás was amazed in his conversations by how aware the pope was of how he was viewed, and the criticisms against him.

Francis told him on one occasion: "They criticize me, first, because I don't speak like a pope, and second, because I don't act like a king." Continue reading

Sources

• Crux article by Austin Ivereigh
• Image: Catholic Herald

Silence stars Andrew Garfield and Liam Neeson as the Jesuit monks.

In the movie, Garfield arrives in Japan to track down his mentor, Cristóvão Ferreira (Neeson). Ferreira has allegedly renounced his Jesuit beliefs.

As they set out to evangelise the Japanese, they face violence and persecution.

Silence will have a limited release from December 23 before going wide in January. Ciarán Hinds, Shinya Tsukamoto, and Issey Ogata also star in the movie. Read more

The 212 voting delegates to the Jesuit general congregation elected Sosa , who is 67. His election was held during the order's 36th general congregation early this month.

The delegates represent the more than 16,000 Jesuits around the world.

Sosa succeeds Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, 80, who had asked to resign because of his age.

The Society informed Pope Francis - who is a Jesuit - of Sosa's election before it was made public.

Sosa said delegates, who come from around the world, share a common culture linked to their experience of the Ignatian spiritual exercises and practices of discernment.

"We have a long tradition and a strong desire to listen to the same voice, that is the voice of the Holy Spirit," he said.

Sosa was born in Caracas, Nov. 12, 1948. He joined the Jesuits in 1966 and was ordained in 1977.

Before the election, he was Nicolas' delegate for the Society's international houses. He works in Rome.

Sosa has a doctorate in political science from the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

He also speaks Spanish, Italian, English and understands French.

After the election, the Jesuit gathering's focus moved to questions of Jesuit identity and governance, vocations, mission and collaboration with the laity.

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Latin American Herald Tribune

Father Graham Pugin had his hands up when he was shot at close range with rubber bullets.

Though there has not been an official report on his condition, a video shows Fr. Pugin, his mouth bloodied and dripping on his alb, walking with other students to receive care.

Pugin was a facilitator, along with other clergy and former student leaders, in working towards an agreement among students, management, and other stakeholders at South Africa's University of Witwatersrand.

The students have been protesting for four weeks about next year's proposed eight percent tuition fee increase. They are demanding free education.

They say the rate hikes are discriminatory against black students.

Black families' average income is much less than white families'.

Student protests have included disrupting classes, throwing stones and bottles at police and security guards and setting a bus on fire.

A South African bishops' conference statement extended their "sincere sympathy and prayers for a speedy recovery" for Pugin who was "offering refuge to frightened students."

They added that while they support the students' right to demand a good and affordable education, they do not condone the violence and looting associated with the protests.

The bishops said the best course forward is for students and educators to continue with the academic year while working out a compromise for the future.

"... The Government [must] ensure that this academic year is completed in peace ... A compromise must be considered as the huge financial demands of university free education cannot be found instantaneously."

Source

• Ignatian Solidarity Network
• Image: eNCA

This program was initiated by Fr. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit superior general, who had seen the devastating impact of war on people in Japan where he cared for the victims of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The initiative was even more remarkable because it occurred at a time when the Jesuits were being forced to cut back because of declining numbers.

It was 1980 and the victims of war this time were refugees fleeing Vietnam.

"He didn't have any great ideas beyond walking with them to see what would happen," explains Jesuit Fr. Thomas Smolich, international director of Jesuit Refugee Service. "Being Jesuits, we can't just stop with walking with people, so we began very quickly to train people, to prepare people for their relocation, often times in English-speaking countries like the States, Canada or Australia."

Today Jesuit Refugee Service works in 45 countries serving 724,000 people, 55 percent of whom are Muslim. It has a staff of 1,800 people and a budget of about $50 million.

It is quite small in comparison with Catholic Relief Services, Caritas International, Doctors without Borders, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which also work with refugees.

Jesuit Refugee Service's motto is to accompany, serve, and advocate for and with refugees.

"It's very Ignatian," explains Smolich. "It's very consistent with who we are. We listen to people's stories, we walk with people, we hear who they are, we hear what they want, and we do our best to provide services that meet those needs. More than anything, we help people find a voice, a voice to express what has happened to them, what they want, and what they can do in their future." Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter, article by Jesuit Fr. Thomas J. Reese, senior analyst for National Catholic Reporter.
• Image: Jesuits in Ireland

We like to call schools and parishes "Ignatius" or "Loyola" — or, if we're feeling wild, "Xavier."

We love to repeat phrases such as "men (and women) for others" or "finding God in all things." And if you have ever attended a Jesuit school, parish, or retreat house, chances are that you have heard us talk about the Examen. A lot.

St. Ignatius enshrined the Examen, a way of prayerfully reflecting on one's day, in the Spiritual Exercises.

Jesuits are still sharing it with anyone who will listen. But the story is not so simple or linear. Contexts change, as have our ways of praying it.

Last year, Loyola Press published Reimagining the Ignatian Examen by Mark Thibodeaux, SJ.

More recently, Loyola has translated Thibodeaux's insights into a mobile application that enables users to pray with 34 (!) different versions of the Examen.

One who does not have a clear idea of what to pray about can choose an examen at random; one who feels moved to pray with a particular theme can select an examen based on that topic.

Balancing "How I Treated Others Today" with "I'm Drained!", "Who Wore God's Face Today?", and 31 other examens makes no particular topic or theme feel like overkill.

The Examen is short and broken down into digestible steps, but limiting it to the same five steps each day greatly narrows the content to which one is exposed.

The variety of Reimagining the Examen enables the one praying to be exposed to diverse prompts for prayer over time. Even those who have been praying with the Examen for years can gain new perspectives on this familiar prayer.

Thibodeaux painstakingly uses language that is warm and inviting but also presents the one praying with questions that call for action. The one praying is asked to acknowledge and accept one's wounds in the presence of God, but also invited to allow such wounds to be transformed for service.

One examen, for example, invites the one praying to acknowledge difficult personal realities — "my ‘hand' of good personal qualities and not-so-good personal qualities that showed up today."

It also goes beyond such acknowledgment to ask, "How might I use my aces for the good of all, and how might I minimise the impact of my deuces?"

Not only is the content of Thibodeaux's examens significant, but the medium also matters.

St. Ignatius could never have imagined the number of ways we distract ourselves with a single device that fits in our pockets.

Just as technological changes have influenced other areas of our lives, they affect how we pray.

For those of us who spend most of our waking hours in front of a screen of some sort, it can often be difficult to unplug during prayer. I have often had the experience of wanting to "check something" online during prayer, only for that to lead to many other "somethings."

What makes the app based on Thibodeaux's work so helpful is that when I am praying with it on my phone, I am not using my phone for anything else, particularly because the app takes up the entire screen and hides notifications.

Thibodeaux takes what could be — and often is — a great distraction during prayer, and uses it to make some of us more likely to pray.

Using an app to pray is not for everyone.

For many of us, however, it's just what we need, and Mark Thibodeaux's app-based diversity of examens can be a fruitful way to see how God has been active during my (screen-filled) day.

Check out the app on IOS/Apple or Android/Google Play

• Prayer: There's an App for that originally appeared on The Jesuit Post.
• Used with permission.

Br John May, winemaker emeritus at the Jesuits' Sevenhill Cellars in the Clare Valley, was admitted as a member in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AM) in recognition of his significant service to winemaking, through contributions to professional associations, to regional tourism and to the Catholic Church in Australia.

Br John, who came to Sevenhill and the Clare Valley in 1963, said he was "deeply honoured" by the award.

A teetotaller when the Jesuits first assigned him to Sevenhill, Br John developed a taste for fine wine that helped the winery produce a line of medal winners over the years.

Asked which wine he had to toast his Queen's Birthday honour, Br John said he "didn't do a great deal about" the announcement.

"We had some ‘bubbles' - a Jansz sparkling wine," he said. "We did have a drink of St Ignatius which is our flagship red wine - I planted the grapes to make it.

"The first release (of the wine) was in 1991, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of St Ignatius (founder of the Jesuits)."

Br John said "we are all given gifts by God" and, when he was sent to Sevenhill, his commitment was "to exercise all my talents for the greater glory of God".

"Being a Jesuit, our motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam (For the greater glory of God) has been my guiding light," he said.

"Having devoted my life to the Lord, I do not expect to be honoured for my work which, for me, has always had its own rewards."

The talents he was expecting to be using at Sevenhill included his skills in building, welding and construction work but a new talent blossomed.

Br John's first vintage at Sevenhill in 1963 came soon after he arrived from Melbourne as a young Jesuit Brother to work as an assistant to the then winemaker Br John Hanlon.

"I was sent there as understudy to my predecessor, and spent seven years learning from him," he said.

"In 1972, he died suddenly and I became winemaker overnight.

"It was bit of a shock (but) I had a good memory and had made a lot of notes (working with Br Hanlon)." Continue reading

• Source: Catholic Leader

The following day, at 9.30am, he will celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving at Our Lady Star of the Sea, Howick, where his parents live and where he sang in the choir for ten years.

Born in Windhoek, Namibia, Justin grew up in South Africa, where he lived in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg.

He comes from a family with a very diverse range of faith expressions, from devout Catholic to equally devout Anglican (an aunt is an Anglican priest) to agnostic and atheist. Continue reading

Born in 1896 as the Dreyfus Affair was tearing France apart, and dying while the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, SJ, participated in some of the most momentous events that shaped the Catholic Church between the pontificates of Leo XIII and Saint John Paul II.

Though well-known for his work in opening up the Church's rich intellectual patrimony and his influence upon key documents of Vatican II, de Lubac was far from being a reclusive scholar.

Coming from a fervently Catholic French aristocratic family, de Lubac could not help but be conscious of the deep fractures between the Church and the forces unleashed by the French Revolution.

Nor was he afraid to immerse himself in many of the epoch-making conflicts of his time. Indeed, de Lubac definitely had a mind for politics—but not of the type you might expect.

When much of the Church hierarchy, clergy, and laity rallied to the Vichy regime following France's humiliating defeat in 1940, de Lubac quickly became active in the French Resistance.

A consistent anti-Nazi before and during World War II, de Lubac was outspoken in his opposition to anti-Semitism at a time when anti-Jewish sentiments were widespread among many Catholics.

Likewise, de Lubac was critical of some French Catholics' infatuation with Marxism after World War II. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Communism was never something about which de Lubac entertained any illusions.

Beyond the specifics of particular movements, de Lubac was puzzled by the fact that secular ideologies—ranging from Marxism to socialism, fascism, nationalism, and particular expressions of liberalism—continued to exercise such a grip on the Western imagination.

Why, de Lubac asked, did so many people in the West continue cleaving to ideas that had led to the destruction and death unleashed throughout the 20th century in the name of the proletariat, der Volk, or "progress"?

And how, he wondered, could people of considerable intelligence actually believe that they were promoting man's well-being by supporting such ideologies? Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report, from an article by Dr. Samuel Gregg, Research Director at the Acton Institute.
• Image: Jesuits in Britain