Watch St.Louis University's live web-cam perched atop the clock tower (here)

The Buddhist purchased the Jesuit retreat house at the Auriesville Shrine a few years ago. (here)

The Catholic Marquette University "Pays Off" The Non-Catholic, Non-Employee For Not Being Catholic

Throughout my tenure as president, I have vigorously defended the academic freedom of various faculty members – in the face of statements from bishops, in support of the breadth of intellectual inquiry that makes a university strong, and in making promotion and tenure decisions. And I will continue to do so. I certainly respect the rights of our faculty to pursue any research in their own fields of expertise, including scholarly investigation of gender, sexuality and identity. While the events of the past few weeks have raised questions about Marquette’s commitment to the LGB/T community on campus, s@xual orientation was not a factor in my decision. I remain firmly and fully committed to and supportive of the university’s efforts to improve faculty and student diversity. Throughout my administration, and with my active support, openly gay faculty and staff.

Link (here) to the latest in the "Jesuit g@y wars" by Marquette University President Fr. Robert A. Wild, S.J.

Read (here) the official release on the unspecified financial settlement with Dr. Jodi O'Brien 

Jesuit On Holy Orders, Transubstantiation And The Year Of The Priest

The Year of the Priest ends this week. Suitably enough, it ends in the week that began with the Feast of Corpus Christi which is one where the Eucharist gets focus. One of the heresies common among Catholics - I've even heard it from priests - is that the supreme significance of priesthood is that from Ordination on, the priest has the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord. It was put that starkly by one commentator responding to my recent blog on the Real Presence of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist.

Link (here) to CathNews, the post entitled, The Destructiveness of Clericalism written by an Australian Jesuit Priest, Fr. Micheal Kelly.

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church

1336 The first announcement of the Eucharist divided the disciples, just as the announcement of the Passion scandalized them: "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" The Eucharist and the Cross are stumbling blocks. It is the same mystery and it never ceases to be an occasion of division. "Will you also go away?": the Lord's question echoes through the ages, as a loving invitation to discover that only he has "the words of eternal life" and that to receive in faith the gift of his Eucharist is to receive the Lord himself.

The institution of the Eucharist

1337 The Lord, having loved those who were his own, loved them to the end. Knowing that the hour had come to leave this world and return to the Father, in the course of a meal he washed their feet and gave them the commandment of love. In order to leave them a pledge of this love, in order never to depart from his own and to make them sharers in his Passover, he instituted the Eucharist as the memorial of his death and Resurrection, and commanded his apostles to celebrate it until his return; "thereby he constituted them priests of the New Testament."

Link (here)

 

Jesuit On St. Thomas Aquinas And The Feast Of The Corpus Christi

I would like to invite your prayerful reflection on one of the most important liturgical texts of the day,

the sequence Lauda Sion, which St. Thomas Aquinas composed for Corpus Christi shortly after Pope Urban IV prescribed the celebration of the feast throughout the Latin Church. 

Meant to be intoned immediately before the proclamation of the Gospel, this sequence has remained a part of the liturgy to this very day, though I suspect that relatively few contemporary Roman Catholics have the opportunity to hear it sung during Mass.

Link (here) to the post Corpus Christi at the blog entitled City and the World by Jesuit Scholastic Joseph Koczera.

Fr. Gerald E. LeClaire, S.J. "Rest In Peace"

Father Gerald E LeClaire, S.J., former principal of Sherubtse College in Kanglung, passed away at the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering, Ontario, on Sunday May 23. He was 82. A selfless and dedicated educator, Father LeClaire, from Montreal, Quebec, served as principal of St Joseph’s college in Darjeeling, before taking over as principal of Sherubtse college in the late ‘70s, when Father Mackey moved to Khaling to establish Jigme Sherubling higher secondary school. Although stern sometimes, he always lent an attentive ear to the students’ various grievances. He had many old Sherubtse history students enthralled with his lively and fascinating classes.

Link (here) to the full article at Buhtan's Kuensel Newspaper.

The Jesuit Of The "Pre-Embryo"

The Sacred Choices tome is nothing new for those who refuse to accept the fact that a human being begins at his biological beginning. Dan Maguire  of Marquette University was merely following in the footsteps of others in his category, including Richard McCormick, S.J,, the infamous theologian/priest who suggested that there were such things as nuanced positions, not only on abortion per se, but regarding the actual beginning of the life of a preborn person. It was he, among others, who coined the term (pictured) "pre-embryo", which is simply a meaningless term designed to dehumanize the person prior to implantation.

Link (here) to read Judi Brown's article entitled Agony, Mercy and Murder at Renew America

Jesuit Archbishop To Be A Part Of Irish Apostalic Visitation

THE FORMER Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, is to take part in a special inquiry into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland. The Vatican announced earlier this week that the Apostolic Visitation, as it is known, will be made up of five senior prelates.

They include Cardinal Murphy O’Connor, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley, Boston, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, New York, Archbishop Thomas Collins, Toronto, and Archbishop Terence Prendergast SJ, Ottawa.

The clergymen, all of Irish descent, have played leading roles in investigating and responding to allegations of sexual abuse and Church mishandling of abuse in their own countries.

Link (here) to the full article.

Five New Jesuit Priests From Ranchi Province India

(Top, L-R) 

Fr. Anuranjan Hassa Purty, Sarwada; Fr. Sanjay Dilip Ekka, Patrachauli;
(Below, L-R) 

Fr. Rajenius Barla, Lachragarh; Fr. Bruno Toppo, Noadih; Fr. Vijay Kumar Minj, Mandar.

Link (here)

From Chef To Ordination As A Jesuit Priest

The Rev. Robert Pecoraro will be one of two Jesuit priests ordained by Archbishop Timothy Dolan at Fordham University Church (pictured) ordon June 12, 10:30 a.m. Father Pecoraro, 43, was born on Staten Island and is the older of the two sons of Geraldine and the late Robert Pecoraro. He grew up in Rosebank, graduated from Monsignor Farrell High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in food systems management from New York College at Buffalo. For years, he worked as a private-sector chef, culinary instructor and restaurant consultant. He taught at the New York School for Food and Hotel Management in Manhattan. But it was a job running the food service department at Mount Manresa in Fort Wadsworth at age 31 that deepened his spiritual journey. “I helped with the retreats and it became more and more evident that I wasn’t just supposed to help out with the Jesuits, but be a Jesuit,”

Link (here) to the full article.

Jesuits On Immigration Politics

The Jesuits are asking for legislation based on five core principals shared by the USCCB's Justice for Immigrants Campaign.

1. A path to legalization that ensures undocumented immigrants have access to full rights.

2. A legal employment structure for future workers that protects both migrants and United States workers.

3. Expedited family reunification and emphasis on family unity.

4. The need for due process and humane enforcement of our immigration laws.

5. Economic development assistance and fair market access for developing countries.

For the complete text of the letter, go (here)

Link (here) to the full article at Oregon on Faith

Link (here) to a very interesting article from 1891 with heavy Jesuit influence in Philippino immigration.

Boldino Monastery Was Once Administered By The Jesuits For 40 Years

Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill consecrated the Trinity Cathedral at the Boldino Monastery in the central Russian Smolensk Region on Sunday, the Russian All Saints’ Day. About a 2,000 people attended the ceremony, including Smolensk Region governor Sergei Antufyev. The monastery was founded in 1528 by Reverend Herasim. No war that ravaged on the lands of Smolensk Region passed it by.

In the second half of the 17th century during the Polish-Swedish invasion it was held by Jesuits for more than 40 years. 

It was ruined by Napoleonic troops in 1812. The monastery was shut in 1929 and turned into a museum and then into a grain warehouse. Then, in 1943, the retreating German troops blew up its churches and belfry. Finally, in 1990, the Boldino monastery was returned to the church. By now, all its edifices, including the 30-metre-high seven-dome Trinity Cathedral, have been fully restored. The Patriarch awarded the Order of St Seraphim of Sarov of third degree to the monastery’s superior, Archimandrite Antony, and handed over the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God.

Link (here) to the full article

Play Jesuit Hangman

 

Newly ordained Jesuit priest of the New Orleans Province 

Fr. Anthony Barrow, S.J.  

has a personal website he a game on the site called "Jesuit Hangman".

You can play it (here).

Bavarian Jesuit And Engineering Innovations

Christoph Scheiner was a Jesuit priest, physicist and astronomer in Ingolstadt, a city in Bavaria, Germany. From 1603 through 1605, he taught humanities at a Jesuit school in the district of Dillingen. Scheiner invented the Pantograph in 1603. Some 27 years later, in 1631, he wrote and published Pantographice, which explains his invention.Pantograph, from Book Pantographice seu ars delineandi, Page 29 The pantograph is used to make a copy of a figure at a reduced or enlarged scale. The Canadian Centre of Architecture’s collection of drawing instruments includes a pantograph, made in England in the early nineteenth century.

Link (here) to the post entitled Enduring Form and Tool in the Pantograph at the blog called Metal Miner.

Pro Abortion Former Priest Dan Maguire Stirring Up More Trouble At Marquette

So what does the administration at Marquette mean when they say Dr. Jodi O'Brien lacks "the ability to represent the Marquette mission and identity"? Is she unable to work for the greater glory of God because of Rev. Wild's estimation of her views on family? 

Dr. Daniel Maguire, a long-time theology professor at Marquette University, wrote a scathing open letter to Rev. Wild and the Marquette administration. I interviewed Dr. Maguire, whose disappointment was palpable. "I criticize the theology department; the administration made their case (against Dr. O'Brien) with Catholic teaching without consulting the theological experts on campus," said Maguire. 

He says these theological experts "have sat on their hands." Maguire explained that Marquette's administration has performed an "anti-Catholic action"

Link (here) to Tyler Mahoney's article at the lefty Huffington Post

An Interview Of Fr. Stephen Sundborg, S.J.

I think all of us realize that the Jesuit universities are sitting on a goldmine that no one else has an opportunity to mine, 

which is this international network of higher education institutions with a common mission. Who else has that? 

And what would it be like if faculty had the opportunity to do joint scholarship with faculty from Latin America and India on issues of poverty or the Millennial Goals or sustainability or peace issues?

Link (here) to the full interview of Fr. Stephen Sundborg, S.J. at Seattle Commons.

Three Jesuits To Be Ordained To The Priesthood

The Jesuits of the New Orleans Province celebrates its 2010 ordination class of three men who will be ordained to the priesthood on Saturday, June 5, 2010, at 10:00 a.m. Archbishop of Mobile, Thomas J. Rodi, will preside over Mass and the ordination in St. Joseph’s Chapel at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. 

Link (here) to find out who is being ordained

How Much Do You Know About St. Edmund Campion, S.J.?

1. When was St. Edmund Campion born?
a) 25 January 1540
b) 19 May 1536
c) 22 September 1527
d) 9 December 1529

2. Where was St. Edmund Campion born?
a) Bristol
b) London
c) Liverpool
d) Cambridge

3. At which university did St. Edmund Campion teach?
a) Yale
b) Harvard
c) Edinburgh
d) Oxford

4. Where was St. Edmund Campion received in the Catholic Church?
a) Cardiff
b) Belfast
c) Douai
d) Paris

5. Which order did Edmund Campion join?
a) Order of Preachers
b) Oblates of Mary Immaculate
c) Society of Jesus
d) Order of Friars Minor

6. When did St. Edmund Campion distribute the pamphlet Decem rationes?
a) 5 March 1574
b) 27 June 1581
c) 24 August 1577
d) 1 December 1571

7. What did St. Edmund Campion Decem rationes denounce?
a) Rationalism
b) Existentialism
c) Anglicanism
d) Calvinism


8. When did St. Edmund Campion die?
a) 5 March 1584
b) 6 April 1592
c) 12 July 1597
d) 1 December 1581

9. Who canonized St. Edmund Campion?
a) John XXIII
b) Paul VI
c) Pius VIII
d) Clement IX

10. When is the feast day of St. Edmund Campion?
a) 1 December
b) 6 April
c) 12 July
d) 25 October

Link (here) to read the answers.

Dedicated Jesuits Are Willing And Able

Santa Clara County in California has threatened to eliminate the Masses, which have been offered at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose for more than 25 years, as a cost-cutting measure and to downplay Catholicism in favor of a more ecumenical viewpoint. The county had planned to terminate the Masses in February.

“Valley Medical Center had intended to end the Mass and regular priestly visits for two reasons: to save the county an annual $30,000 it had contracted with the diocese, and to develop a program that better reflected the rainbow of religions in the county, and not just spend money on Catholic rituals,” the Mercury News reported May 26. “Thus far no other religious group has asked for regular services at the hospital, although clergy members from various faiths do visit when patients request them.”

But, when 76-year-old Theresa Asquith learned in late February only one more Mass was planned at the hospital, “she phoned up high-powered players to uphold the religious tradition,” the newspaper reported. Asquith, said the Mercury News, is “the retired co-founder of Mother's Milk Bank, who has attended Mass at the county hospital for more than 25 years.”

Among the leaders who became involved was Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese, a parishioner at St. Francis of Assisi Church in San Jose, who contacted all the parties involved, according to the newspaper. “Over the past three months, this agreement has been hammered out by Cortese, the California Province of the Society of Jesus, the vicar general at the Diocese of San Jose, and Sylvia Gallegos, acting director of the Santa Clara Valley Health & Hospital System,” said the Mercury News.

The details of the compromise, said the San Jose newspaper, include: “The two Jesuit priests, the Revs. Gene Corbett and William Stout, who are both semiretired and in their 70s, will continue to lead Saturday and Sunday Mass in the meditation room, for free, as long as they are willing and able."

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

Fr. James Martin, S.J. Is Depressed

Today’s front-page story in The New York Times, "Prospective Catholic Priests Face S@xuality Hurdles," by Paul Vitello, about the exclusion and weeding out of g@y men from seminaries and religious formation houses, made for depressing reading. Why depressing?  Several reasons.

Link (here) to read the full blog post entitled, Weeding Out G@ys From The Seminaries by Fr. James Martin, S.J.

A German Jesuit Priest Called Father Bertram

"From 1957 to 1990, I beat several hundred children and adolescents of both sexes on their exposed buttocks, in nearly painless symbolic acts of punishment," he wrote in a report in 1991. 

Link (here) to a detailed article at Cleveland.com
Watch a video news account from Rome Reports (here)

On Praying For The Society Of Jesus

The Golden Jubilee Committee for the 50th anniversary celebration of St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church in Selangor, Malaysia invites parishioners to pledge their presence before the Blessed Sacrament to pray for our beloved Jesuit priests

Link (here)

Your Darling Dr. Bert

Noreen Wood made her first suicide attempt in August of that year and was sent to the Melbourne Clinic - the first of 10 admissions over the next four years. Meanwhile, 

Fr. Herbert Balding, S.J.  (here) , (here) and (here) was moved to the Jesuit centre at Sevenhill in South Australia, where he wrote to her that the ''shrinks are not doing you any good. It's time to put yourself into the hands of your darling Dr Bert''. Somehow, he persuaded her husband and her psychiatrist that she needed a holiday, and he arranged for her to come to Sevenhill, where he would try to have sex with her while the other Jesuits said Mass next door. 

After Wood's husband, suspicious by now, complained to the police and the Melbourne vicar-general, Balding was sent to Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory in 1979. From there he rang her so often that the bishop queried the phone bill, Wood says, while she got sicker and sicker. In 1983, he returned to Melbourne as emergency chaplain at St Vincent's and wanted to resume his relationship with Wood, who had separated from her husband. She refused. In 1987, a friend suggested another Melbourne Jesuit priest as someone she could talk to. She met the priest - who she now calls an opportunistic predator - in his room at the Jesuits' house in Parkville. After a long conversation, she says he kissed her on her mouth. Wood says she threatened another suicide attempt, so the Jesuit arranged for her to stay with his mother. It was New Year's Eve, and the mother went out to visit friends, leaving the priest to look after her.

''All his talk was of a s@xual nature. He was using f--- and worse. I'm not stupid, I know when a guy's getting revved up. He's telling me about his e...@ulations and drinking. He pushes me against the wall and tells me in explicit language what he'd like to do to me. But when someone walks past the unit he jumps away. ''He told me the only reason he didn't do what he wanted was because 'it would look as if every f---ing Jesuit was f---ing me'.'' 

Later, when Wood asked him why he behaved like that, she says he told her he had to stop her ''coming on'' to him - he had to speak that way as a form of shock treatment.

Link (here) to the full article at the Australian national newspaper The Age. 

Photo is of St Aloysius Church, Sevenhill, in the Clare Valley, South Australia  
 
Background and further details can be found at
 Melbourne women in legal row over abuse claim at CathNews
Row over abuse claim settlement at The Age

Jesuit Threat Letter

From the teller window, the midday drop-box deposit looked mundane.

The mysterious reference to "Jesuits" on the note wasn't. Neither was the death threat against (pictured) Henry McMaster, the state's attorney general and a candidate for governor. 

The note has State Law Enforcement Division agents guarding McMaster around the clock and asking the public for help to identify the person who dropped the note. 

Link (here) to read the full piece at The Post and Courier

On Memorial Day. "Reduced To Community Organizers"

In the lead piece in the Jesuit published America, columnist Nancy Sherman writes the Memorial day piece entitled, What Good Soldiers Bear. When you read the full piece notice the words that are missing; Jesus, God, honor, courage, bravery, valor, freedom, liberty, fortitude and self-sacrifice. Nancy Sherman is university professor in the philosophy department of Georgetown University, is author of the recently published The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers.

An excerpt.

Some U.S. soldiers have complained, the new rules require them to fight “with one arm tied behind our backs.” It is even harder to accept the restrictions when

American lives are risked to win the hearts and minds of a population whose army may not itself be sharing adequately in the fight. 

But the rules are also in place to protect the hearts and minds of our own troops. U.S. marines and soldiers in Afghanistan are fighters, but also serve as police and community organizers, charged with building moral and civic order “in a box.”

Link (here) to the article entitled, What Good Soldiers Bear by Nancy Sherman a philosophy professor at Georgetown University and at the United States Naval Academy. 

Listen to a revealing 50 minute interview of Nancy Sherman at WHYY (here).

Notice the words and phrases the article does contains; "weak contract" , "They want to feel with moral insight" , "psychological anguish in war is also moral anguish" , "psychological trauma" , "sense of revenge" , ,"desensitizing warriors" , "soldiers getting used to killing", "inescapably agents of war’s carnage" , "guilt was the elephant in the room" , “accident guilt.” , "blowing off most of the face of a private" , "awful weight of self-indictment" , "undeserved luck", "betrayal of those who were injured", "accidental or unintended killing of innocents" , "Iraqi children were injured or killed" . "They could not shake what they had done or justify the killing" , "restrictive rules" "the face of a helpless child", "that child’s face haunts a soldier", "irrational guilt" , "soldiers guilt" , "reparations" , "numb the moral anguish of war", "hard to accept morally" , "moral insulation from war’s moral burdens" "feelings of guilt and shame" 

Photo "Raising of the Flag" during the Battle of Iwo Jima. 
Read the Doctor of the Church Saint Thomas Aquinas on "Just War Theory"contained in his Summa Theologica.