Jesuit Retreat Center In India

Gaurav Shroff

Gaurav Shroff. Gaurav, who was raised as a westernized upper caste Hindu in India, first encountered the Catholic faith through hearing Gregorian chant at his high school in Mumbai: “The sublime music of the Mass undoubtedly assured me of God's presence; the Gregorian chants elevated my spirits, creating in me a sense of awe for the Sacred. I was instinctively drawn by the aesthetic beauty of the Eucharist and this experience filled my heart with immense joy.” A year later, he attended a Good Friday service and participated in the veneration of the cross: “As I knelt down and kissed the Cross, I vividly remember the clear voice in my heart saying to me: ‘I died for you,’ and I began to weep unashamedly, and though I did not understand what it meant, I was certain, that the Crucified Christ loved me. Then it wasn’t about music anymore, I wanted to learn more about this Jesus. Either Jesus was completely crazy or he was God.” Remarkably, Gaurav sensed a call to the priesthood before he was baptized: He began reading everything about the Catholic faith, the Bible and regularly went for Sunday Mass. 

In 1993, Gaurav went to a Jesuit retreat praying alone at night before the Blessed Sacrament. “I strongly felt the presence of the Divine, the deep love of God for me, and in the darkness, I was illuminated: My life belonged to Jesus, to know him, to love him and to serve him. This was my mission and vocation. I felt called to be a priest.” On the feast of the Assumption, 1994, Gaurav was baptized (with the blessing of his father) and then moved to the US where he earned a Master’s Degree in Religious Studies and worked in campus ministry at the University of South Carolina. 

After exploring a possible call to religious priesthood with the Paulists in Washington DC (where I originally met him) Gaurav discerned a specific call to diocesan priesthood and was accepted as a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Atlanta in 2007. They keep Gaurav incredibly busy at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg these days but he still manages to squeeze in Called & Gifted workshops for us in English and Spanish from time to time. If all goes well, he’ll be ordained a priest for Atlanta in 2013.

Link (here) to Siena.org

Jesuits Were An Easy Prey To Cholera In India

"In 1841 the Jesuits in Madura never tasted meat or wine, but lived entirely on rice and fish; and often so little of these, that some now living can remember repeatedly fainting from exhaustion as they said mass in the morning.

Even bread was a luxury almost unknown, for in every respect they lived as the poorer class of natives. This, joined to the excessive toil which they often underwent, spending hours in the confessional, and in giving instructions, riding long journeys from one Christian village to another, and having no better resting-place on their arrival than the wretched hut

which has been described, was too much for the strength of men accustomed to better food, and in sufficient quantity, and made them an easy prey to cholera, or any other disease by which they might be attacked"

Link (here)

Engraving is of St John de Brito, S.J.

Father de Brito worked in Madura, in the regions of Kolei and Tattuvanchery. When he studied the India caste system, he discovered that most Christians belonged to the lowest and most despised caste.

He thought that members of the higher caste would also have to be converted for Christianity to have a future.

He became an Indian ascetic, a pandaraswami since they were permitted to approach individuals of all castes. He changed his life style, eating just a bit of rice each day and sleeping on a mat, dressing in a red cloak and turban. He established a small retreat in the wilderness and was in time accepted as a pandaraswami.

As he became well-known, the number of conversions greatly increased. His success in converting Prince Tadaya Theva indirectly led to his death. The prince was interested in Christianity even before the prayers of a catechist helped him recover from a serious interest.

De Brito insisted that the prince could keep only one of his several wives after his baptism; he agreed to this condition, but one of the rejected wives complained to her uncle, the raja of Marava who sent soldiers to arrest the missionary on January 28, 1690. Twenty days later the raja exiled de Brito to Oriyur, a neighboring province his brother governed. The raja instructed his brother to execute the troublesome Jesuit who was taken from prison on February 4 and led to a knoll overlooking a river where an executioner decapitated him with a schimitar.

Link (here)

Fr. Louis Richeome, S.J. And The Counter Reformation

Fr. Louis Richeome, S.J. (1544-1625) French humanist and Jesuit. In his time, he was called the "French Cicero" played a crucial role in overcoming prohibitions, if not deep-seated prejudices, against the Jesuit order in 17th century France.

Along with fellow-Jesuit Pierre Cotton and Cardinal Jacques-Davy Du Perron, Louis Richeome completed the trio of leading French Catholic controversialists of his age. All three writers drew heavily on Roberto Bellarmino's exhaustive compendium of arguments against Protestant doctrine,

Disputationes de controversiis christianæ fidei (Iglostadt, 1586; numerous Parisian re-editions), yet each developed a distinctive style through which to rehearse these points. Richeome's specialty lay in his appeal to visual media, a strategy he laid out in the 1601 Tableaux sacrez des figures mystiques du tres-auguste sacrifice et sacrement de l'Eucharistie printed by Laurent Sonnius, a well known publisher and founding member of the powerful counter-reformation editing cartel, the Compagnie du navire. Further editions in 1602, 1604, 1609, 1611, and 1613 attest to its success despite what must have been a fairly steep price, given its expensive illustration.

In it, Richeome urges the reader to "cast his or her mind's eye on one or more of these venerable images…his contemplation will make the soul's eye more diligent and keen, and the heart more eager for heavenly sustenance,

" "jetter les yeux de son entendement, sur un ou plusieurs de ces anciens tableaux […] ceste contemplation luy aura rendu l'œil de l'ame plus attentif et pénetrant, et le cœur plus désireux de la viande celeste" (ẽ3r).

Published ten years before the better-known Peinture spirituelle, Richeome's Tableaux sacrés coincided in France with engraving's definitive replacement of the cheaper woodcut illustrations of the preceding century, and this work set a new standard for the engraver's craft thanks to Léonard Gaultier's consummate artistry. The entire project also owes much to the renewed interest in Philostratus' Images ou tableaux de la platte peinture, triggered by Blaise de Vigenère's translation and commentary in 1578, substantially expanded in a second, posthumous edition by Abel L'Angelier in 1597. L'Angelier collaborated with Sonnius, and with particular frequency around the time that Sonnius was embarking upon the Richeome-Gaultier Tableaux sacrés, producing joint editions in 1594, 1599, 1600 [three different titles], 1601, 1615.1 One copy of the Tableaux sacrés even survives in what appears to be a stylized binding associated with L'Angelier's shop, suggesting that L'Angelier might have acted as an outlet for Sonnius' edition

Link (here)

17th Century Jesuit Provincial Of Lyon And Aquitaine: Fr. Louis Richeome, S.J.

The Eucharist is a Sacrifice, as was the Oblation of Abel, and both a Sacrifice and Sacrament, as was the Paschal Lamb, and many other ancient mysteries: body of our Savior, as it is offered to God in the Mass, is sacrificed...

From page 50 (here) of the 17th Century Jesuit Provincial at Lyon (1586-1592), Aquitaine, and again in Lyon in 1605, and as French assistant in Rome from 1606 to 1616 Fr. Louis Richeome's (Richome) book entitled, Holy Pictures of the Mysticall Figures of the Most Holy Sacrifice and the Eucharist

Eucharistic Procession Marks Jesuit Feast Day

THOUSANDS of Catholics from all over Malaysia and Singapore as well as non-Christians and foreign tourists gathered at St Paul’s Hill in Malacca recently to commemorate the annual feast of St Francis Xavier.

This year’s celebration was special because of the revival of a tradition involving a candle-light procession to mark the feast of the Patron of Missionaries.

This tradition was last observed in 1985. The procession, preceded by two illuminated floats decked with flowers and garlands and carrying a large wooden cross and the statue of St Francis Xavier, started from the ruins of the 16th-century Portuguese church at the peak of St Paul's Hill.

Link (here) to the full article

17th Century Jesuit Exorcist And Possesed

This excerpt from a letter by Père Jacques Nau, S.J. shows:

Père Jean-Joseph Surin S.J., [ and (here) ]whom I myself knew for twenty years or more, led so deranged and shameful a life that one hardly dares speak of it. In the end it reached the point where the most wise attributed it all, quite correctly I believe, to madness … I have often seen [him] blaspheme the name of God and walk about naked in the College, soiled with excrement - I would then take him by the hand into the infirmary.

I have seen him lashing out with his fists and for years perform a hundred other insanities

, even to the point of trying to trample on the Sacrament of the Eucharist - I did not see this myself but learnt it the next day from witnesses. He lived like this for several years. For the rest of his life, he never fulfilled any function within the Society.

When he recovered self-control, he wrote books and letters, visited his neighbor and spoke very well about God, but he never said his prayers, or read his Breviary,

said Mass rarely and to his dying day mumped about and gesticulated in a ridiculous and absurd fashion. Link (here) More on exorcism (here)

The Angel Of The Blessed Sacrament,

Venerable Aloysius La Nuza, the Apostle of Sicily,

called for his innocence and devotion, the Angel of the Blessed Sacrament, was born in the year 1591, the same year in which St. Aloysius Gonzaga died, whom he resembled in virginal purity, love for the Blessed Virgin, and penitential life.

He preached throughout Sicily and the adjacent parts, and the concourse of people to hear him in the open air sometimes amounted to twenty-five thousand.

He wrought many miracles, and died at Palermo in 1654, with the same words in his mouth which were on the lips of St. Aloysius at his death — " Lsetantes ibimus." His soul was seen to enter heaven accompanied by St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier, and others of the Society, and an innumerable multitude of souls which by his means had been saved.

Read Fr. La Nuza, S.J.'s great work entitled, Twelve Considerations on Death