Apatheistic Speaks At Jesuit Intitution

All human beings are born with the seed for compassion, the Dalai Lama reminded more than 4,000 people“inner peace and mental comfort.” The Dalai Lama, the 78-year-old spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, was speaking for the first time at the Jesuit university, where the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics partnered with the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University to bring the Dalai Lama to the heart of Silicon Valley. Jesuit Fr. Michael Engh, Santa Clara University president, said he was “profoundly honored” to welcome the Dalai Lama to the campus known for its education in ethics.
gathered at Santa Clara University Feb. 24 for a public dialogue on business, ethics and compassion. But that seed must be nourished by parental love, fostered by teachers, and incorporated into the fabric of the workplace to have a society whose members are compassionate, he said. Only when people can approach life with genuine concern for others will they experience

Link (here) to The Fishwrap

Exclusively For Students Of The Jesuit University

The event was created in 2010 after a high school student was not allowed to attend a prom with a same-sex date. The Santa Clara Community Action Program website describes it as “the hottest, freshest, most inclusive party of the year!” “This year's theme is weddings! Say I do to Marriage Equality,” the group states. “Put on your fancy pants, your dancing shoes, ask that special someone to be your date, and maybe you'll be the one to catch the bouquet! ” The event is exclusively for students of the Jesuit University. Santa Clara’s Activities Programming Board (APB) advertised a “speed dating” event on Tuesday night on its Facebook site by urging students to use the event to “find yourself a date for Rainbow Prom or for Valentine's Day!”

Link (here) to Lifesite

Santa Clara Hosts Bourgeois

Then a Maryknoll, Roy Bourgeois

A talk by Roy Bourgeois, laicized Catholic priest and founder, School of the Americas Watch. Bourgeois has been a prominent voice of conscience within Catholicism for decades. He was profoundly affected by the Vietnam War. In 1972, he was ordained a Maryknoll priest. He then worked among the poor of Bolivia until he was kicked out of the country by its then dictator. Bourgeois was instrumental in founding the School of Americas Watch, an organization dedicated to shutting down the United States Army's School of the Americas because of the school's alleged training in techniques of repression of many officers of foreign military services. In 2012, he was dismissed by the Vatican from the Maryknoll order because of his support for the ordination of women as priests in the Roman Catholic Church.

Link (here) to Santa Clara University's website

More on the excommunication of Roy Bourgeois (here)

The University of Santa Clara’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics is scheduled to host laicized priest Roy Bourgeois later this month, according to the Jesuit university’s website.
Former Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois was expelled from the Maryknoll order by a decree from the Vatican in 2012.  Bourgeois had been active in the movement to get the Church to change her age-old doctrine on a male-only priesthood.  That activity culminated in August 2008, when he participated in a ceremony to “ordain” a woman as a Catholic priest. He continued to express public support for this position after the “ordination,” and was repeatedly warned of the consequences of doing so.  He was excommunicated in November of that same year, and laicized and expelled from the order on October 4, 2012.
- See more at: http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/CatholicEducationDaily/DetailsPage/tabid/102/ArticleID/2871/Santa-Clara-Univ-Presents-Laicized-Priest-Who-Helped-Ordain-Woman.aspx#sthash.6rw67Q7O.dpuf

Fr. Francis Duggan, A Degreed Jesuit

I graduated high school, went away to have some life experiences (the usual: marriage, deaths, Vietnam, drugs, divorce, etc.), and finally made it back into school. On the G.I.Bill, I enrolled at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit liberal arts school, and among other classes, I had to take "bonehead" English. Our class was taught by Fr. Francis Duggan, a degreed Jesuit who, I'm certain, had survived the Holy Inquisition and, depending on your point of view, may have even participated.

To open the class, he read John Keats' "Ode ona Grecian Urn" to us. He read it with us. We read it independently. Then he told us to write a paragraph describing the scene on the urn that Keats had described so poetically. My paragraph got an F! It had mechanical mistakes, of course, but Fr. Duggan noted that I rambled. He suggested that I hadn't said anything new, that I wasn't descriptive, and that I needed to hone and polish my phrases. 

I felt terrible. This was my first quarter in college, and I was tempted to chuck it all. Instead, I made an appointment to discuss my grade with him. Fr. Duggan had me rewrite the paragraph. He corrected it again. It earned a D. He told me to focus, refine, and rewrite it again. I did, and again he corrected it. This time, I earned a C-. And so on and on until—and this will sound like an exaggeration—I had rewritten that paragraph seven times. The paragraph finally received a B+, but what I had gained, besides an excellent grade, was some inkling of what it means to be a writer. Writing, like reading, is a process not a product, and it is a process of constant revision and refinement. Fr. Duggan didn't tell me not to rewrite the paragraph again (I probably could have gone on indefinitely); what he did say was that at some point a writer lets go and allows the piece to be "finished." I guess I still haven't let go of "We were twelve days out of Auckland, New Zealand, when it struck" but somewhere along the way, along with the detritus of failed marriages and career redirections, the manuscript of that story has been discarded. Interestingly, the final revision of "A Paragraph on `Ode on a Grecian Urn,'" is still among my papers. 

Link (here) to the National Writing Project

“Same Sex Tax Law” Brought To You By The University Of Santa Clara

The University of Santa Clara, a Jesuit University, hosts a blog called “Same Sex Tax Law” that not only offers analysis of the tax ramifications of the changing institution of marriage for the gay, lesbian, and transgendered but it’s written by a law professor who publicly roots for same-sex “marriage” right on the university’s website. Professor Patricia Cain, whose areas of expertise include federal taxation, feminist legal theory, and gay and lesbian issues, recently thanked Minnesota voters on the Jesuit university’s website for their vote against upholding traditional marriage and called repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) ”a step in the right direction.” Immediately following the election, Cain wrote a blog post which included a word of thanks to Minnesota voters.

Link (here) to the Cardinal Newman Society

Santa Clara Profesor Promoting Homosexual Marriage

Lisa Fullam

Magisterial teaching against same-sex CIVIL marriage hinges on the category of procreation, seemingly asserting that the institution only has social value because children might result.

But our own teaching on marriage is richer than that–marriage has value that includes procreation (or not), but also reaches beyond that important but ultimately merely biological category to encompass all the richness of living in committed relationships. 

Perhaps this is a moment when Catholics voting for marriage equality are showing that they have indeed learned the lessons of Catholic teaching, both the social teaching of the equal dignity of all people and our own rich heritage on marriage.

Link (here) to dotcommonwheel to the full piece by University of Santa Clara professor Lisa Fullam

Mismanagement

Fr. Thomas Reese, S.J.

“The Vatican also needs to do its job. It appears to have no problem investigating nuns and theologians, but investigating mismanagement by a bishop is not a priority,” the Rev. Thomas Reese, a well-known Jesuit commentator, told a symposium last month at Jesuit-run Santa Clara University to mark the 10th anniversary of the Dallas charter. “Even when a bishop is indicted, no one has the sense to tell him to take a leave of absence until the case is over,” Reese said. Priests themselves also remain upset at the focus on their ranks to the exclusion of their bosses: “In the Dallas Charter, all consequences fall on priests. Nothing is in there for bishops. Diocesan priests are on their own,” one priest said in a recent survey of clergy attitudes. Even 10 years later, concerns remain that a lack of bishops’ accountability undermines the church’s credibility with the public or, worse, leaves children at risk:

Link (here) to The Washington Post to read the full article

Jesuit On His Marxist And Atheistic Professors

In the spring of 1982 I graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep in San Francisco. A few months later I matriculated into Stanford University. As the product of 12 years of Catholic schooling, I was eager to attend one of the world’s finest universities and had the good fortune to be admitted into a program called Structured Liberal Education (or SLE, which folks on The Farm pronounced “slee“). 

It was a big, residence-based program build around the “Great Books.” As a freshman SLE was pretty much my only course, and it was presided over by a Marxist scholar of whom I (and all my classmates) were in awe. As I recall, many of the professors who taught in SLE wore their atheism as proudly as the fraternity guys wore their Greek letters. 

My professors, if not openly hostile to religion, often communicated a felt undercurrent of skepticism toward faith – it’s a tone and attitude that I have seen amongst some of my colleagues at the various universities I have attended and taught at as well. While I cannot say that it was easy to have my beliefs questioned, debated, dissected before my eyes like a cadaver, I can say that the experience was purifying. It’s also impossible for me to say that attending Stanford induced the first faith crisis of my life. I had had many doubts, even radical ones, during my years of Catholic education. I had questions, deep questions, that neither catechisms nor priests were able to answer. I remember feeling at times that many good, pious people seemed unwilling to countenance my doubts, even downright frightened when I raised them as questions. At Stanford, however, my teachers often seemed only too willing to help me demythologize what I believed.

Link (here) to The Jesuit Post to read full piece by Fr. Michael C. McCarthy, S.J.

Conflicted

Suicide’s legalization has been advocated by prominent professors in Catholic universities including Georgetown, Marquette, Santa Clara, and Boston College. It is a particular irony that the bishops’ statement comes this year, even as the bishops are quietly reviewing the implementation of Vatican guidelines for Catholic higher education in the 1990 constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

The professors’ efforts came to light during a Cardinal Newman Society investigation in 2005, following news reports of a legal brief filed by 55 bioethicists in opposition to “Terri’s Law,” a Florida measure that empowered Gov. Jeb Bush to ensure that the comatose Terri Schiavo received water and nutrition. 

As reported in “Teaching Euthanasia,” an exclusive report in the June 2005 issue of Crisis, multiple professors at Catholic universities had taken positions on end-of-life issues that seemed to conflict with Vatican teaching.

Link (here) to the full article at Crisis Magazine

A New Chancellor For Santa Clara University.

Fr. William Rewak, S.J.

A priest blocked by the Vatican from becoming president of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley in 1997 over doctrinal concerns has been named chancellor of Santa Clara University.  

The Jesuit-run university announced in an April 26 news release that Fr. William Rewak, S.J., a previous president at SCU, had been named chancellor by university president Fr. Michael E. Engh, S.J.  In 1997, Fr. Rewak had been tapped as president of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, 

but the Holy See blocked his appointment, citing writings by Fr. Rewak that had appeared in SCU publications in the 1970s and 1980s on dissent from Church teaching, women’s ordination and clerical celibacy, among others. 

Link (here) to the full article at California Catholic Daily 

Fr. Edward Glynn, provincial superior for the Society of Jesus in Maryland, was barred from becoming president of the Jesuit-owned Weston School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass, despite strong support from the school's faculty and boards. Other Jesuits barred in recent years from serving as administrators or members of pontifical faculties at Weston or Berkeley were Frs. Michael Buckley and David Hollenbach, both former theological advisers to U.S. bishops, and Fr. John Baldovin, a professor at Berkeley. 

Link (here)

Some Jesuit Universities "Expanding The Circle"

From March 3 through 6, an Expanding the Circle conference was held at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. Expanding the Circle is an initiative of the California Institute of Integral Studies, and its stated purpose is “Creating an inclusive environment in higher education for LGBT/Q students and studies.” Catholic universities were well represented.

Fr. Donal Godfrey, S.J.

Titles of some of the workshops at the conference indicated the bias common to post-modern social science, that reality is a human construction: “Reimagining S@xual Desire and Spiritual Longing in Sacred Texts”; “Does G-d Really Hate Me: Reconstructing and Reinterpreting Challenging Religious Texts”; “(Re)vamping the Que@riculum: Issues in the Teaching of Language and S@xuality”; “Imagining Qu@er Selves: LGBTQ Literature, Libraries, and the Coming Out Process”; and the near-parodic “Fostering Multivariate Inclusion: Multiple Marginalized Identities and the Interplay of Sexuality.” Others, while more crudely titled, were quite clear: “That’s SO G@y: Queering the Curriculum in High Schools through Community Collaboration”; “Ripe for the Picking: Queer-Themed FIGs (First-Year Interest Groups)”, and “Building a Successful LGBTQ Program at Catholic Institutions.” The following Catholic schools participated: College of the Holy Cross, DePaul University, Dominican University, Georgetown University, Loyola Marymount University, Marian University, Marquette University, Santa Clara University, St. Anselm College, St. Edward’s University, St. Joseph’s University, St. Louis University, and the University of San Francisco. 

Link (here) to read the full article at California Catholic Daily

Influence And Training

Fordham University 1958

......the schools of the Jesuits can not be appreciated, without drawing attention to the important part which the confessional and the ethics of the Order, occupy in the internal police and moral training of these institutions. 

It should be remembered that these schools are avowedly catholic— that their teachers are an influential Order of the Catholic Church devoted to the maintenance and propagation of the Faith as held by that Church, and that the acknowledgment of sins, conjoined with sincere contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment, to an authorized priest, is obligatory upon all, old and young, 

who are in communion with that Church. When parents send their children to these schools, they know, or can know, that they will be subjected to the influence and training which the Catholic Church recognizes as favorable to its purposes. 

The superiority of the schools of the Jesuits, considered as schools, and apart from their ecclesiastical relations, is to be found in the fact that the director and all the subordinate teachers are selected for their several positions, after a long and careful training, under able and experienced masters, in a system of organization, instruction, and discipline, devised and matured after years of trial by many minds, and embodied in books composed by masters in the several studies. 

No thoughtful educator can study the educational policy of the Jesuits without gathering lessons of great value in determining his views as to the best methods of conducting the education of the young.

Link (here)  to  the original article in The American Journal of Education published in 1859

A Jesuit Of Nearly Two Centuries Aso

Many priests belonging to religious orders had their own unique habits. 

Seen here is Father John Pinasco (1837-1897),

an Italian-born Jesuit who served as President of both the University of Santa Clara 

and the University of San Francisco. 

Link (here) to McNamara's Blog

The Words Of St. Paul The Apostle

The Conversion of St. Paul

Fr. Michael Zampelli, S.J. ....suggested that h@mos@xuality must be celebrated, not just tolerated. “In this case, tolerance is unacceptable,” he said. “Why? Because, I believe deeply (along with Paul in Corinthians) that ‘I am what I am by the grace of God.’ And I believe that I have particular gifts deriving precisely from this blessed but marginalized way of being in the world. What I see clearly now is my own desire: I want to be a subject sought out and valued.” 

Link (here) to the full story at the California Catholic Daily
.

A little context 
1 Corinthians 15: 9-13

For I am the least of the apostles, not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God (that is) with me. Therefore, whether it be I or they, so we preach and so you believed. But if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some among you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then neither has Christ been raised.

Link (here) to the USCCB Bible

Were Still Trying To Figure Out .......Environmental Justice

A solar power project at Santa Clara University

Santa Clara University, a private Jesuit school in California’s Silicon Valley, is using solar to get it closer to its net-zero carbon goal. The University installed a new 1-megawatt system on the roofs of its event center, a recreation center and a parking garage late last month. The school just received its first bill since the system went in, said Joe Sugg, who heads up the University’s energy program. “So we’re still figuring out how much this will save us,” he said. The University has made a pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2016, just five years off, Sugg said.“It’s not so much an investment in solar,” Sugg said. “It’s an investment in environmental justice, and it’s an investment in our core values as a Jesuit institution.” Sugg said the university is aggressively going after its goal to reduce its carbon emissions in order to meet its goal.

Link (here) to read the full story

Controversial Jesuit Moved Out At The University Of San Francisco

After three years at the post, Fr. Donal Godfrey, a priest well known for challenging Church teaching on hom@sexuality, is no longer serving as executive director of University Ministry at the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco. Godfrey’s departure comes on the heels of the revelation that his long-time associate, Patrick Mulcahey, has been teaching and moderating workshops on the master/sl@ve and s@do-mas@chistic lifestyle. As recently as August 30, according to a cached webpage from the ministry’s site, Fr. Godfrey was still serving as executive director. Sometime between August 30 and September 15, Fr. Godfrey was replaced by Julia Dowd, a layperson. Fr. Godfrey is now listed as one of the ministry’s five associate directors. 

Link (here) to read the full article at Spero News

Funny Pictures

At Santa Clara University, Dan Dion was the comedy director. He had an annual budget of $10,000 but always spent $15,000 flying in the likes of P.J. O'Rourke and Second City to perform on the Jesuit campus.

Link (here) to read the full story then you will get the title.

Santa Clara University is under scrutiny (here) , (here) , (here) and (here)

One Smart Jesuit

Father Jerome Sixtus Ricard, S.J., of the University of Santa Clara in California, had been supplying Pacific coast farmers with daily weather reports for more than 25 years. What is even more remarkable is that his weather reports were 99.07 per cent accurate.

Father Ricard Develops a Passion for Sunspots

The only one of his family ever to settle in America, Jerome Sixtus Ricard spent his early years in France. Born in Plaisians, France, on January 21, 1850, he attended public schools in Plaisians and the Jesuit Colleges at Avignon, France and Turin, Italy. In 1871, he joined the Society of Jesus in Monaco, and later became a member of the Turin Province of the Society of Jesus. In 1873, Jerome came to America and studied philosophy at Santa Clara College in California for several years. He was ordained in 1886, and completed his Jesuit training at Florissant, Missouri, in 1891. Then he returned to Santa Clara to teach ethics, mathematics, political economy, and history. About 1890, Father Ricard enrolled in a summer astronomy course at Creighton University and discovered that he had a passion for sunspots. In 1900, he began a systematic study of sunspots with an 8-inch telescope mounted in the Mission Gardens. The American Association for the Advancement of Science elected him a member in 1907. By then he had perfected his controversial theory, the ideal that sunspot activity affects the weather on earth.

Link (here)

Appointed To His Role By Fr. General Adolfo Nicolás, S.J.

Fr. Michael Zampelli, S.J., a faculty member since 1998 and currently the Paul Locatelli University Professor in the department of theatre and dance, has been named rector to the Jesuit community at Santa Clara University.

As rector of the second-largest Jesuit community in the California province of Jesuits, Zampelli will serve as the religious superior for his 40 fellow Jesuits on campus. His role is to support and serve them in living their personal, communal, and apostolic lives as Jesuits. Jesuits are members of the Catholic order of priests, the Society of Jesus.

Appointed to his role by Fr. General Adolfo Nicolás, S.J., the superior general of the Society of Jesus in Rome, Zampelli will work closely with University President Michael Engh, S.J., in cultivating the Jesuit and Catholic mission of SCU. 

Link (here)