Heidelberg Jesuitenkirrche

The first Jesuit movement started in Heidelberg, and the magnificent Jesuit Catholic Church still stands in the city. However, the oldest church in Heidelberg is the St. Peter’s Church, now Lutheran, built sometime in the early 12th century by early Catholic missions.

Link (here) 

Jesuit On Pro-Life Catholic Woman Christine O'Donnell

Christine O'Donnell

There's a story circulating on the internet today about an comment newly-minted Republican candidate for the Senate, Sarah Pal..er, sorry, Christine O'Donnell made in 1998 on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher.

Now, before I talk about the story, a moment on the soap box. Seriously, media/online blogger people, I know she's freaking you out. Ventriloquist's dummies are always scary.

But this was 13 years ago, people, and frankly, is it really that nutty? She didn't say she would tell the Nazis there were Jews there (although that's how you're spinning it). She said God would help her find a way out. You want to call that naive, great, although you ask me, Nazis or the like come to your door, tell me you're not hoping God, however you imagine God, would help you find a way out.

Link (here) to blog post entitled, Nazi's in Delaware by Fr. Jim McDermott, S.J. at America Magazines, In All Things.

The Feast Of St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J. Doctor Of The Church

The Catholic Church remembers the life and times of St. Robert Bellarmine (San Roberto Belarmino), the patron of canonists and a Doctor of the Universal Church. Masses and novenas will be held in commemoration of the feast of the well-venerated Italian Jesuit priest in several Catholic churches in many parts of the world, particularly at the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome, Italy where his sacred relics are kept. Devotees and pilgrims traditionally gather at the church to pray in thanksgiving, ask for favors, and venerate his relics on his feast day. Known as a great theologian, teacher, scholar, charity worker, and writer, his masterpiece, the Disputations on the Controversies, is considered as the most complete defense of the Catholic faith ever published, showing a deep understanding of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church. One of his hymns on St. Mary Magdalene has been included in the Roman Catholic breviary. He also wrote inspiring catechisms and later became the spiritual father of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the patron of the youth. Born on Oct. 4, 1542 in Montepulciano, Italy, St. Robert was appointed cardinal in 1598 and bishop in 1602. He also served as the head of the Vatican library. He died in 1621 and was canonized by Pope Pius XI on June 29, 1930. He was declared Doctor of the Church in 1931. (Christina I. Hermoso)

Symbolic Compensation

A spokesman for Germany's Jesuits says they plan to pay the victims of sexual abuse in the order's schools a "symbolic compensation" of at least €5,000 ($6,500). Jesuit spokesman Thomas Busch said Thursday the order has not yet made a final decision on the amount that will be offered to about 200 victims who were abused decades ago.

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Link (here) to the full story

Fr. Josef A Jungmann, S.J. On "Et Cum Spiritu Tuo"

As the great Jesuit liturgist Fr. Josef Andreas Jungmann wrote:

"We can best understand the (excellent link>) 'Et cum spiritu tuo' as a popular consensus in the work of the priest, not that the congregation here gives the priest authority or power to act in its stead, but that the congregation once more acknowledges him as the speaker under whose leadership the united group will approach almighty God. Thus in the greeting and its response we have the same double note that reappears at the end of the oration [opening prayer]; the 'Dominus vobiscum' seems to anticipate the 'per Christum' of the close of the oration, and the 'et cum spiritu tuo' is a forerunner of the people's agreement expressed in the Amen" (The Mass of the Roman Rite, Volume 1, Page 365).

Link (here) to catholic.net

"I Think I'm Still In A State Of Shock,"

St. Joseph Catholic Church, Yakima Washington

After 140 years serving Catholics in Central Washington, Jesuit priests are departing from St. Joseph's Parish in Yakima. The announcement came during Masses at the downtown church on Sunday. It means that the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province (the Jesuits) will no longer assign parish priests to St. Joseph's Church in Yakima beginning July 31, 2011. It also means that the four Jesuit priests who currently serve there will leave July 31. The Rev. Michael Pope, who is pastor, and the Revs. Eugene Delmore, Neill Meany and Alan Yost, associate pastors, will begin new assignments in other Oregon Province ministries. St. Joseph's will become a diocesan parish, similar to the three other Catholic churches in Yakima. The church has always been owned by the Catholic Diocese of Yakima but has always been staffed by Jesuits.  

"I think I'm still in a state of shock," said Marcella Mulcahy, who said she may be the longest-attending member of St. Joseph's. She's been a parishioner there for all of her 82 years. "It's very sad. It's hard to believe," she lamented about losing the priests. 

The Rev. Patrick Lee, the provincial of the Jesuits' Oregon Province, attended a meeting at St. Joseph Monday night to explain changes to parishioners. He told the gathering of about 50 people that he doesn't know yet if the Jesuits will be withdrawing from other parishes in the Northwest. The Jesuits first came here in 1871 to serve at the St. Joseph Mission on Ahtanum Road in what is now West Valley.
Link (here)

Turkish Speaking Jesuit

Fr. Felix Koerner, S.J.

the theology department at the University of Ankara, which Newsweek in 2008 hailed as "the new face of Islam". A new edition of the Hadith (narrations concerning the words and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed) and a desultory gesture towards modernization made the Ankara group celebrities for a moment - before Turkey turned towards a more fundamentalist reading of Islam under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

At the time, Sunni fundamentalist websites denounced the Ankara theologians as agents of the Vatican, citing the presence in the department of a Turkish-speaking Jesuit  Fr. Felix Koerner [2]. That is ludicrous; perhaps more than any Catholic order, the Jesuits go to extreme lengths respect other cultures and religions. Although this particular accusation was the product of paranoia, paranoids still have enemies. If Turkish intelligence decided to employ its university theology departments to manufacture designer heresies for use in Iran, for example, the capability is in place.

Link (here) to the complete story at Asia Times Online.

St. Teresa Of Avila On Fr. Paul Hernadez, S.J.

St. Teresa of Avila

A father of the Society of Jesus, Paul Hernandez, to whom I used to go for confession when I was there making arrangements for the foundation in Malagon,1 and who was very desirous to see a monastery of out order built there, when he heard of his illness went to speak to him, and showed him that it would be a very great service rendered to our Lord if he founded the monastery, that he could establish in it the chaplains and chapelries, and that the solemnities and other observances which he was resolved to institute in one of the parishes of the city could be kept in the monastery. He was now so ill that he saw he had not time enough to arrange the matter, so he left it all in the hands of his brother, Alonzo Alvarez Ramirez; that done, God took him to Himself. He did very right, for Alonso Alvarez is a most discreet man, fearing God, given to almsdeeds, and accessible to reason; of him, for I have had much to do with him, I can say this as an eyewitness in all truth.

Link (here) to the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila

Link (here) to all of her mentions of the Society of Jesus 

An Indonesian Jesuit Bishop

Bishop Julianus Sunkara, S.J.

Bishops and Catholic laypeople in Indonesia have reached out in celebration to help their Muslim brothers and sisters enjoy a happy Id al-Fitr. 

In central Java, Jesuit Bishop Julianus Sunarka of Purwokerto visited three Islamic boarding schools in Banyumas district on Sept. 10. The first was Biroyatul Huda in Batuanten village which has 300 students. 

Here he toured a mosque in the school’s grounds. About 10 years ago, he helped locate a well at the school. He later visited Al Hidayah School in Purwanegara, where he also helped find a well 10 years ago.

Link (here) to the full article including a picture at UCANEWS

Bandra Fair

The Shrine of Mount Mary

The tradition of the Bandra Fair has been associated with the Shrine of Mount Mary. 

A Jesuit document of 1669, speaks of a popular celebration at Bandra emphasising the fact that the origin of the Bandra Fair has been associated with the Shrine of Mount Mary. 

Before the transport was developed, people from all over the island of Salsette and Mumbai used to journey to the Mount Mary with bullock carts and ferry-boats.  It is said that the Bandra fair started out of necessity in a sporadic and natural way. The simple fair, gradually became complex and commercialised. Over the years, there has been a quantitative and qualitative increase in the magnitude and complexity of the fair.

Read the whole story (here) with lots of great pictures!

Jesuit On Conscience

Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J.

John F. Kennedy was very much a child of post-Enlightenment 20th-century America in an age where progress was often marked by extensions of the presumed right of the individual to be free in his or her private life from institutional coercion or control. 

But Clark had become a convert to Catholicism long after the Catholic Church had concluded the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which had produced, among other things, a Declaration on Religious Liberty. Father John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit priest who led the way in the adoption of that document, would later say the idea that  

"I have a right to do what my conscience tells me to do, simply because my conscience tells me to do it" is a "perilous theory" leading to subjectivism, and is not at all what the Council taught.

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Link (here) to The New American to read the full piece.

Jesuit Father Necton

Foretelling the fall of France and England, the famous Jesuit Father Necton, said in 1772, “When England shall wane in power, the destruction of Paris will be near at hand”  Source (here)

Link (here)

The Reformation Verses The Counter Reformation

The Stonor Mansion

The Stonors were among those described as respectable "recusants," people who refused to attend Church of England services; respectable because they did not join in any plots to overthrow the monarchy. It was possible, even in the turbulent times of Queen Elizabeth I, to be openly Catholic and still enjoy royal favor. A notable case was the composer William Byrd, who wrote music for the Chapel Royal and for the Catholic Mass. 

The Stonor family sheltered another famous martyr, the Jesuit priest Edmund Campion. Campion's printing press was discovered at the Stonor house after Campion was arrested in 1581. Dame Cecily Stonor, who had already been paying yearly fines equivalent to 50,000 pounds ($77,000) in today's money, and her son John were arrested as well. 

She stoutly refused to renounce her faith in which, she declared, she found "nothing taught in it but great virtue and sanctity, and so by the grace of God I will live and die in it." The heavy fines and confiscation of Catholic lands depleted the wealth of the Stonors, who by the 14th century had owned 22 manors in eight counties plus 60 acres (24 hectares) of land in the center of London.

Link (here) 

Jesuit Father Samir Kahlil Samir "Radical Muslims Are True Muslims"

What are your views on the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque, or as it’s also been described, the Islamic cultural centre in New York? 

 

I don’t have all the facts here, but the plan is to build a 15-storey centre and this is a Muslim project, even if it’s called a Cordoba centre and it’s for everyone and not only for Muslims. It is two blocks from Ground Zero with a mosque for 2,000 people and so on. Even if you say this project aims to build a greater understanding and a new dialogue with American Christians and so on, it is evident that any normal person will fear it. Ninety percent of the population will fear this project more than be attracted by it, even if Feisal Abdul Rauf – the imam responsible for the project – says it’s not aggressive. But humanly and sociologically speaking, you are putting up something where you destroyed something; you are putting up a Muslim tower and pretending that this will be a tower of peace and so on. It is psychologically wrong.

Some would argue that the 9/11 bombers were not real Muslims, but fundamentalist ideologues and terrorists?

Yes but this is the wrong position because radical Muslims are true Muslims. I’m not saying that the true Islam is bin Laden, this is not my opinion. But I would contend that bin Laden is a true Muslim – a true Muslim. Pastor Terry Jones [the evangelical pastor who has threatened to burn the Koran] cannot say he’s truly representing Christianity because you cannot find anything in the Gospel that says that. 

But all the positions of radical Muslims you’ll find in the Koran and in the tradition. You’ll find other positions, but this is one, and one that is very strongly presented in the Koran and in the Sunnah. Nine-eleven was a Muslim action even if for apologetic reasons, it’s said that this was a terrorist action and terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, that Islam means peace and so on. 

Let’s take the small example of this week. The pastor said burn the Koran. I said to a Palestinian imam friend of mine in northern Italy that in my opinion he [Jones] is a stupid person. But what’s the reaction in Pakistan? They destroyed three churches yesterday and say they will destroy more. Why do they not respond differently? Why did they not respond to Ratzinger’s speech with a speech? If someone is saying burn the Koran, this is stupid, this is wrong. But to show you it’s wrong, why not say: ‘OK, I will not burn the Gospel’ or ‘I will burn the Gospel.’ These are two legitimate positions. That’s all. But the reaction is we will kill, destroy, and you hear this is everyday. Almost every week you have an attack from the Sunni against the Shia, especially against the Shia, or the Shia against the Amadiah. Where do they take this from? They take it from the Muslim tradition. Saudi Arabia is doing the same… This reaction is in Islam, it’s not the best of Islam, but it is there. So I think the reaction of Obama was a political one, and not a reasonable, humanist answer even if he tries to present it as that. The answer of the mayor of New York is also a political one to gain for himself Muslim votes but probably it’s bad politics because he will lose maybe more votes among Jews and non-Muslims. Why? Because it’s unreasonable…That’s why I say I understand the fear of many people, not only Americans, in saying it’s not reasonable. If you go to the site of a European Arab centre in Paris, you’ll see comments from Muslims from all over Europe. Six out of seven say it’s wrong. One comment from an American Muslim was very clear. It’s not a very important site, it’s official but not many people go there, but I read all the answers and they were very clear.

Link (here) to the National Catholic Reporter

More on Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, S.J. (here) , (here) and (here)

'We're Not On Duty Here For That"

Fresh Kills Landfill

Mount Manresa Retreat House on Staten Island recently dedicated this cross made from World Trade Center steel to memorialize the efforts of its staff and volunteers in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The retreat house became a temporary home for many rescue workers as they labored at the nearby Fresh Kills landfill, where debris from the World Trade Center was sent. The retreat house was also a center to help families of the victims, and the Red Cross set up headquarters there for six months after the attack. A memorial collage of photos of Ground Zero, Fresh Kills landfill, and rescue workers at Mt. Manresa was mounted opposite the cross. Manresa retreat directors Fr. John King, SJ, and Fr. Tom Quinn, SJ, spent some time at the landfill for four months, talking and listening to the detectives who were raking the debris. "Our role was not that of counselor or spiritual director," says King. "We were there just to listen to them and chat with them along the lines of their interests. "Once in a while, one of the men would point to another and say: 'Father, he needs a conversion.' We'd smile and reply 'We're not on duty here for that. We just want to sit around and chat with you.' They'd all nod their heads in agreement," remembers King. 

Link (here) to Minims and Maxims

Cristo Rey Financials

Cristo Rey Baltimore

Upgrades made during a $7.4 million renovation were on display Tuesday night at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, in Fells Point, where students have a new library, suites for college counseling sessions, updated classrooms and high-tech laboratory space. 

The school, a coed college-prep academy for low-income Baltimore students sponsored by the Maryland Jesuits, has an enrollment of 320; families pay tuition of $550 to $2,500, based on income. 

The upgrades were paid for by private donations, including a $1.2 million gift from the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation and $500,000 each from Mary Catherine Bunting and the Charles T. Bauer Foundation.

Link (here)

Smallpox Carrying Jesuits?

Drew Hayden Taylor

Before crucifying me for saying so, understand I make this supposition on the sheer logic of history. Look at how native people have been treated in the more than 500 years of Christian colonization. 

I am, of course, speaking of the physical, sexual and emotional abuse perpetrated by church-run residential schools, smallpox-carrying Jesuit missionaries,

the banning of sun dances and potlatches because they lured aboriginal peoples away from Christianity, and so on. 

Link (here) to the anti-Christian, anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit op-ed piece at The Globe and Mail written by Drew Hayden Taylor.

The Jesuit Verses "Spider" Kelly

Peter Faulkner can still remember pulling on the gloves for the first time in an alleyway off the family home in the newly-built Creggan Estate. 

An uncle, a Jesuit priest, had sparred with the great Jimmy 'Spider ' Kelly but little could the six year old Rosemount Boys school pupil know then just how deeply the sport ran in the Faulkner blood. 

Across the alleyway stood twin brother Michael, also bedecked in gloves that had been given to him as a Christmas present.

Link (here) to full article at the Derry.

Maryknoll Liberation

Fr. Roy Bourgeois

In 1990, following the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador by graduates of the SOA in November 1989, Bourgeois and a small group of supporters founded SOA Watch. Fr. Roy Bourgeois has also been an outspoken advocate for the ordination of women into the Catholic priesthood. 

Because of his participation in the ordination of a woman as a priest in 2008, he is considered automatically excommunicated by the Vatican, which demanded, in an October 2008 letter to Maryknoll headquarters in Ossining, N.Y., that he recant his support of women’s ordination. 

However, Bourgeois considers the denial of priestly ordination of women part of the “sin of sexism” by the Catholic Church, and openly defied the Vatican.

Link (here) to the full article at the left tilting In These Times.

Regret Or Admire?

Fr. Karl Rahner, S.J.

Jesuit Karl Rahner used to speak of people in non-Western countries who somehow live Christ-like lives as “anonymous Christians.” Now we have explicitly Christian aid workers exercising their discipleship anonymously, rather than in the name of Christ. Should we regret this or admire it?

Link (here) to read a rather lengthy piece at Religion Dispatches. 

 

Rahner's theology dominated the seminaries. Moreover, through his chief theological disciple, Johannes Baptist Metz, Rahner was the grandfather (if not always the happy grandfather) of the theologies of liberation. Further, 20 years of mission theory bear the imprint of Rahner's argument that all people of good will and moral earnestness are, in some sense, "anonymous Christians."

Link (here) to a great article dissecting Fr. Rahner's theology at Catholic Culture. 

The Centre Of Dialogue And Prayer

Auschwitz

"My great-grandmother was killed in Auschwitz. And when I did go there for research in 2007, I visited the Centre of Dialogue and Prayer," which offers seminars and workshops on the Holocaust, and is "run by a Jesuit priest." 

Link (here) to the full article at The Jewish Exponent 

The first Jesuits put to death in the 20th century were the Frenchmen Modestus Andlauer, Remigius Isoré, Paulus Denn, and Leo Ignatius Mangin. They died in China between 1900 and 1901 in the so-called "Boxer Revolution." All of them were beatified in 1955. In the year 1915-1916, two Armenians died during an attack on members of their race mounted by the regime of young Turks.
Religious persecution claimed its most celebrated Jesuit victim in the Mexican Blessed Miguel Agustín Pro, executed by a firing squad in 1927. In the following decades, between 1932 and 1946, we are certain that between eleven and fifteen Jesuits were killed by the Chinese communist regime. In Spain, persecution took on tragic dimensions: 122 Jesuits died. Fifty-two of them are in process of beatification. When one remembers that the Society of Jesus was expelled from Spanish territory in 1932, one understands why there were not many more victims.

The Nazi regime murdered 82 Jesuits: Poles (79), Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slavs, Slovenians, Frenchmen and Dutchmen. Many of them died in Dachau or Auschwitz. The Nazis' Japanese allies killed another 23: three Canadians in China, three Dutchmen in Indonesia, seven Spaniards in Micronesia.

After the Second World War, the communist regimes of China, the Soviet Union, and its allies behind the Iron Curtain killed many priests and religious without leaving any trace. We can be certain that 44 Jesuits were killed, some in terribly cruel ways: thirteen in China, ten in Poland, five in Albania, seven in Yugoslavia.
Link (here) to the Jesuit Portal

Tekakwitha's Two Jesuits

Because Catherine Tekakwitha’s short life, thanks to two contemporary Jesuit biographers, was “more fully and richly documented than that of any other indigenous person of North or South America in the colonial period” (p. vii), he conceived the idea of reconstructing her biography and thus of personalizing one of the great events of world history: the contact between European and Native American cultures. As he necessarily came to grips with his Jesuit sources, however, he concluded that “it is much harder than we usually care to admit for scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first century to understand either Iroquois or European people of the seventeenth century”. The project therefore began to transform into a dual biography, 

examining not only Catherine Tekakwitha but also Father Claude Chauchetière, the first priest to become convinced of her holiness, and secondarily his senior colleague Father Pierre Cholenec. 

Yet Greer is never constrained by the biographical genre, and he moves beyond it at numerous points to ponder the broader themes of his subjects’ intersecting lives: “death, spiritual practices, the body, illness and healing, sexuality, and the boundaries of the self” from both Iroquois and French perspectives" . Greer’s narrative begins not with Catherine’s birth but with her death in 1680 at the age of 24. The result of extreme penitential practices, Catherine’s passing upended Father Chauchetière’s view of her, convincing him in retrospect of her spiritual superiority--indeed, her saintliness. 

Link (here) to the full article.

Jesuit On The Front Line In Dealing With Evil Paganism

A Catholic priest in Gujarat has appealed religious leaders to help people protect girl children following the news of a father scarifying his own newborn girl to propitiate family deity. “Religious leaders, be it Christian, Muslim, Hindu or others,” must provide their followers “with the necessary attitude and courage to save and celebrate the girl child,” says Jesuit right activist Father Cedric Prakash. His appeal came after news reports said police on Sept. 7 arrested a man in Gujarat for scarifying his newborn girl to propitiate his family deity. 

Reports said Narottam Devipujak, a vegetable vender in a slum near Gandhidham, had vowed that he would offer a male goat to his family deity if a son was born to him, but would sacrifice the child, if a girl was born. On Sept. 2, a day after the child was born, he took the sleeping child and threw her in a gutter close to the temple of the deity. 

“This is surely not a one-off incident to highlight the negative attitude that exists in society towards the girl child,” said the e-mail appeal of the priest based in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s commercial capital. He said child sex ratio in Gujarat is 883 for 1000 males against the national ratio of 920 for 1000 and the news “did raise alarm bells in the state.”

Link (here) to read the full article at Catholic News India.

In Connection

In connection with the Life of Christ by Catherine Emmerich we may mention here the Jesuit Fr. William Young's A Year with Christ. It is a homiletic exposition arranged to cover the Sundays of the ecclesiastical year, and is suitable alike for spiritual reading, meditation, and preaching.
Link (here) to The Ecclesiastical Review published by the Catholic University of America

The Lingering Effects Of The Problem

Xavier College - Burke Hall in Melbourne, Australia

High-profile members of the campaign group Protest the Pope, an umbrella group of organizations opposing the visit, will meet Smith on Wednesday. They have planned a march on 19 September to coincide with his visit to the capital, which will culminate in a vigil in Hyde Park. Organisers meeting Smith include the g@y rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, Andrew Copson, the chief executive of the British Humanist Association, and Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society. He said he would not be "lectured" by the archbishop. "There is a defensive tone in what [Smith] is saying," he said. "It is an indication of the church's fear that something will happen to bring the pope into disrepute. I think something should happen to embarrass the pope into, for example, confronting the child abuse scandal. We're not going to be kind to the Pope because he does not deserve to be respected." Although there is a rainbow coalition of groups opposing the papal visit, they have agreed a strategy that will focus on the stories of sexual abuse survivors. Organizers are planning to to fly abuse survivors into London from across the world for a press conference on 15 September, the eve of the visit. They include Mark Fabbro, an Australian who says he was s@distically r@ped by a priest at a Jesuit school (Xavier College-Burke Hall) in Melbourne in 1971, when he was 11.

Link (here) to the full article at The Guardian