JESUIT B U L L E T I N Fall 2012
A Journey to the Jesuit Reductions Called to the Frontiers • Vocation Promotion • Jubilarians
vocations
Ciszek Fr. Walter A Jesuit at the Frontiers Pope Benedict XVI told the General Congregation that Jesuits are to go to “frontiers� where others have difficulty going, working to break through the barriers that have been built between faith and human knowledge, faith and modern science, faith and the fight for justice. Fr. Walter Ciszek, a Polish-American Jesuit missionary who survived 23 years as a prisoner in the former Soviet Union, exemplifies this mission to the frontiers and is now a candidate for canonization. Last March, the Vatican Congregation for the Causes of Saints accepted the evidence about Ciszek’s holiness and began the formal process leading to declaring him a saint. Born in 1904 in Shenandoah, Penn., to Polish immigrants, Ciszek was assigned to Poland in 1938, but was forced to close his mission when the Soviet Army invaded eastern Poland in World War II. He entered Russia under
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an assumed identity, and for a year, worked as an unskilled laborer while discreetly providing ministry in the Russian rite he had been trained for. He was arrested in 1941, accused of being a spy for the Vatican. His 23 years in prison included 15 in hard labor in Siberia and five in solitary confinement. Through it all, he served as a priest to his fellow prisoners, risking his life to offer counseling, hear confessions, and celebrate Mass in primitive conditions. Ciszek was presumed dead until he was allowed to write his family in 1955. He returned to the U.S. in 1963 as part of a prisoner exchange. His story is told in his memoir, With God in Russia, and in He Leadeth Me.
contents
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feature stories 8 | Called to the Frontiers Breaking through barriers 12 | Growing the Society of Jesus New vocation approach 14 | Jesuit Reductions A journey to Paraguay 20 | The Examen A way to hear God’s call
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22 | Jubilarians Milestones of service
Editor Thomas M. Rochford SJ Associate Editor Cheryl Wittenauer Designer Tracy Gramm Advancement Director Thom Digman
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Cover photo: Mission JesĂşs de Tavarangue (By Jorge Taracido)
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24 | Formation Profiles Jason Brauninger Penn Dawson 26 | Benefactor Profile Dick Campbell 29 | In Memoriam
jesuit news
Seven Men Enter, Three Profess First Vows
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he Jesuit Novitiate at St. Charles College was abuzz with great excitement on Aug. 10 as Jesuits welcomed seven men into the new class of first-year novices. Welcome turned to celebration as the second-year novices pronounced first vows of poverty, chastity and obedience that constitute formal acceptance to live their lives as Jesuits. James Page moved on to studies at Regis College in Toronto, Canada; Alex Placke left for Fordham University in the Bronx, N.Y.; and JohnPaul Witt headed to St. Louis for studies at Saint Louis University.
Sometimes traveling alone, but more often arriving with family, new arrivals are welcomed by novice director, Fr. Mark Thibodeaux (left); his assistant, Fr. James Goeke (top left); and the second-year novices or “guardian angels” who show new men to their rooms.
Tr a n s i t i o n s
New Orleans and Missouri Jesuits on the Move in Grand Coteau, La. White succeeds Fr. Rich Buhler, who will continue on as rector of the Jesuit Hall community at Saint Louis University.
Dan White
Fr. Daniel White began Oct. 1 as pastor of St. Francis Xavier College Church in St. Louis, after leaving his post as socius to the novice director at the Jesuit novitiate
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Fr. Joe Laramie has begun duties as director of pastoral ministry at Rockhurst High School in Kansas City, Mo. The job entails organizing and leading retreats, presiding at school Masses and helping with service opportunities.
He also teaches a section of sophomore theology. Fr. Thomas Cwik, parochial vicar at St. Ignatius Loyola Parish in Denver, will profess final vows Nov. 4 in Denver.
New Orleans scholastics Raul Navarro and Jeremy Zipple recently were ordained deacons.
Fr. R. V. Baylon pronounced his final vows Sept. 8 at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., before New Orleans Provincial Mark Lewis. Born in Manila, Philippines, Baylon teaches bioethics in Spring Hill’s department of philosophy.
Tom Cwik R.V. Baylon
first year novices Sean Ferguson of Englewood, Colo., recently graduated from Regis Jesuit High School in Denver, where he was captain of the rugby team, a Rowdy Spirit Leader at athletic games and a member of the freshmen and Kairos retreat staffs. His interests include eastern religions and all types of sports, especially snow skiing.
Michael Killeen of suburban St. Louis, was the art editor for his high school newspaper and led retreats with his parish youth group. He completed sophomore year at the University of Missouri where he majored in Spanish and was active in the university’s Catholic Newman Center. He recently returned from a mission trip to Peru. He enjoys biking, camping, backpacking, painting and playing music.
Don Paul Landry of Luling, La., earned his undergraduate degree in history from Louisiana State University and his law degree from Tulane University. He practiced law as a sole practitioner, as head of AIDSLaw of Louisiana and as an assistant Louisiana state attorney general. He has been an active parishioner at Immaculate Conception Jesuit Church in New Orleans and sings in the Cathedral choir. He enjoys reading history.
Brendan Love of Denver graduated from Regis Jesuit High School, where he ran cross country and track, played in the jazz band and led Kairos retreats. He earned a degree in aviation management from Metro State University in Denver, is a licensed pilot and worked for Jeppeson Aviation. He enjoys playing team sports and is an avid sports fan. John Paul Miles of Germantown, Tenn., graduated from Christian Brothers High School in Memphis where he was a wrestler and a member of the Lasallian Youth Group. While earning his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Memphis, he was active in the Catholic Student Association and led diocesan Search Retreats. He enjoys physical fitness and lifting weights.
Gregory Overbeek of Huntsville, Ala., attended Blessed John Paul II High School where he was active in campus ministry and senior retreats and was honored at graduation for exemplifying the ideals of the school. During his sophomore year at Spring Hill College, he participated in campus ministry, the discernment group “Holy Grounds,”
the Pro-Life Club and the Knights of Columbus. His hobbies include jogging and lifting weights.
Aric Serrano of Pecos, Texas, has studied euphonium, piano and guitar and performed live with jazz and rock bands. He recently graduated from Eastern New Mexico University with a bachelor’s degree in music education. During his senior year, he sponsored one of his friends in RCIA. He relaxes by reading, camping and building model airplanes.
Men who wish to discern a Jesuit vocation in the Missouri or New Orleans province should contact Fr. Andrew Kirschman, coordinator of vocation promotion, at vocation@jesuits-mis.org or 1-800-325-9924. To learn more, visit www.beajesuit.org To support the Jesuit Formation Fund, donate online at www.jesuitsmissouri.org or contact Thom M. Digman at 1-800-325-9924.
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jesuit news
Wisdom Figures: Two Provinces Share Stories
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early 60 Jesuits, aged 65 or older, convened in June at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala., for a Wisdom Figures gathering of men from both the New Orleans
and Missouri provinces. Participants got to know each other and learn about each other’s province. They also got to hear from four much younger men about their novitiate
New Regis U. President
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esuit John P. Fitzgibbons has been installed as Regis University’s 24th president and only the third in nearly 40 years. Fitzgibbons was named president of the Denver institution on June 1 and succeeds Jesuit Michael Sheeran. Fitzgibbons is the former associate provost for faculty development at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He joined the Jesuits in1973 and was ordained 12 years later.
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experience and experiments as well as their hopes for the future of the merged provinces. Left to right: Frs. Robert Weiss, Gene Martens and Douglas Hypolite
The celebration began with a Mass in the university’s Field House on Sept. 24. The outdoor inauguration ceremony the next day was followed by a reception and private dinner. Guests at the festivities included Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila, Colorado Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, 12 university and college presidents and Regis faculty. Highlights of the celebration included an invocation by Aquila; a keynote address by Fr. Stephen A. Privett, president of the University of San Francisco; missioning by Missouri Provincial Douglas Marcouiller; an inaugural address by Fitzgibbons; and a benediction by Sr. Barbara Quinn, RSCJ, from Boston College. Fitzgibbons has a doctorate in English from Loyola University Chicago, a master of sacred theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, a master of divinity from the Weston School of Theology, a master of arts in English from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor of arts in philosophy and English from Saint Louis University.
NEWS BRIEFS Gates Millennium Scholar
Regis Jesuit Service Day
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ore than 600 students, alumni, parents, faculty and friends participated in the largest service event in Regis Jesuit High School history. Participants in the “RJ Day for Others” on Sept. 8 restored trails, offered horse therapy, and worked in nursing homes among other jobs at various sites throughout the Denver area. Volunteers from throughout the school community signed up to serve in the event’s inaugural year, far exceeding organizers’ expectations.
Kristen Kraus, the Girls Division service director, said the event would have been considered a success with 50 to 100 participants but that interest and energy for the project was much more widespread. The day began at Regis Jesuit with a commissioning service for volunteers, who then spent most of the day at their service sites. The group reconvened at the school in the late afternoon for Mass and sharing of their service experiences and a community meal.
Largest Freshman Class Ever at Rockhurst University
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ockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo., welcomed its largest-ever freshmen class this fall. This year’s 450 freshmen come from 17 states and one foreign country; nearly 19 percent are from minority groups. Last year’s freshman class was 326 students. The previous record was set in 2009 with 417 freshmen. The university attributes the increase to a number of changes over the last year. They include spending more time communicating with students and their parents about what Rockhurst has to offer, said Lane Ramey, associate vice president for enrollment management. The school also increased academic scholarship levels to make education more affordable.
Arrupe Jesuit High School in Denver announced its first Gates Millennium Scholar, Patty Olivas, who has begun her freshman year at Regis University. The scholarship pays tuition, room and board through a student’s doctoral studies. Olivas, valedictorian of her senior class, was a straight-A student throughout her four years at Arrupe as well as a student ambassador, leader and “great kid,” Joanne Augustine, director of college counseling, said. She wants to pursue a career in education. Olivas is the oldest of three children and the first in her family to attend college. Her parents are from Mexico.
First Lay Principal Carissa Cantrell is the first lay principal of century-old St. Mary School in Albuquerque, N.M. Sr. Marianella Domenici, S.C., the sister of longtime, former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, retired at age 82 after serving for 23 years. The Sisters of Charity administered and taught at St. Mary for decades
Ministry of Management In June, Mary Baudouin, assistant for social ministries of the New Orleans Province, and Fr. Fred Kammer, director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute, led about 40 Jesuits and colleagues in the eighth session of the weeklong Ministry of Management workshop at Loyola University New Orleans. The seminar is designed for Jesuits and lay colleagues working in or considering jobs in management.
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Photo: Ron Mamot
vocations
Called to the Frontiers Wherever Jesuits Find Them
By Cheryl Wittenauer
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r. Joe Damhorst, at 25, was only a few years out of the novitiate when he was assigned to teach Native American high school students at St. Stephens Indian Mission, an experience that would cast his future ministry. Now 75, he looks back on two decades of working with Arrapaho, Shoshone and Lakota Indians as perhaps the sweetest and deepest of his Jesuit years. Frs. Joe Damhorst (left) and Carl Starkloff celebrate liturgy adapted to the culture of Native Americans in the 1960s at St. Stephens.
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“That’s where my heart is,” he said, admitting a love left his post as Missouri vocation director in August for a for Native American history and culture and “the very parish assignment in Belize. poor and very misunderstood” native people. “Jesuits teach, they go to missions, work in parishes His Jesuit work has been a mix of exotic and munand retreat houses, they do science and technology,” dane that included pastoral ministry on the Wind River he said. “It’s finding God in all things. It’s not a limited and Pine Ridge reservations in Wyoming and South vision of how to serve or where we serve. The world is Dakota, as well as in Belize, and dreaded, but necessary our apple. We can go anywhere.” office jobs. In August, he became the first Jesuit assigned He knows from his time with men considering the to Loyola Academy, a college-prep middle school for Jesuit life that the prospect of going to foreign places at-risk boys in St. Louis. “is attractive to young guys,” he said. “Some specifically “I have a frontier personality,” he said. “I am willing want to serve in foreign countries.” to try new things.” Four years ago, Pope Benedict XVI challenged Jesuits to go to the frontiers, “geographical and spiritual places where others do not reach or find it difficult to reach.” In response, the Jesuits reasserted their mission to build bridges and break through barriers, and “be ourselves bridges in a fragmented world,” a General Congregation document says. Since then, the “frontier” has become something of a buzzword in the Society of Jesus, and the prospect of working in it still attracts men to Jesuit life. Robert Van Alstyne, a third-year philosophy student at Saint Louis University, said when he first considered Robert Van Alstyne, a third-year philosophy student at Saint Louis University, with youth he met this sumJesuit life as a Boston College undermer in Kohima, India. The 26-year-old Jesuit says he is inspired by Jesuits who work in foreign missions. graduate, he was most inspired by Jesuits who worked in foreign missions. Foreign mission is a lure for second-year novice “Letting go of home for the sake of serving God, Brian Strassburger, 28, of Denver, who advocated for letting go of everything they loved to invest themselves, AIDS patients in South Africa and raised money for that was really inspiring,” he said. clean-water projects in Nicaragua as an Augustinian The 26-year-old San Carlos, Calif., native spent Volunteer before he entered the Jesuits. six weeks this summer in Kohima, India — half of the “International ability and mobility was a big part time with orphaned children — at the invitation of the of my attraction,” Strassburger said. Wisconsin province, which sends scholastics there for “My only discernment was with the Jesuits, who a summer experience. were calling me back after eight years of Jesuit education” “Who knows if I’ll be a missionary in a geographical at Regis High School and Saint Louis University, and sense?” he said. But the Jesuits he met in Kohima, he where he said he learned about Ignatian spirituality and added, “are a real inspiring witness to the love of God charism, and great Jesuit missionaries like Matteo Ricci and the joy that came with the gift to the people they and Roberto de Nobili. were serving.” Ricci, a founding figure of the Jesuits’ China Mission, Despite Benedict’s recent call, working in the frontier mastered Chinese language, customs and traditions, and isn’t new to Jesuits, said Fr. Louis McCabe, who, at 71, adapted the Catholic faith to Chinese thinking. FALL 2012
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De Nobili learned the language and culture of India, and even became a Hindu holy man as a way to teach about Christianity. “The frontier could be nuclear physics, or interreligious dialogue or a rigorous intellectual analysis of Taoism, Hinduism and Islam,” McCabe said. “The Jesuits try to understand from the inside. Jesuits are good at inculturation.” When Damhorst arrived in 1962 to teach high school at St. Stephens, the Second Vatican Council had not yet assembled for its now-famous sweeping changes in church practices and thinking.
Jesuit Martyr and Native American Canonized Like his predecessors, Paul VI and John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI marked World Mission Sunday in October by announcing new saints. On Oct. 21, Benedict canonized Blessed Jacques Berthieu, a Jesuit martyr, and Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint. Tekakwitha, daughter of a Christian Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father in present-day upstate New York, was baptized by a Jesuit missionary in 1676 when she was 20. She died in what is now Kahnawake, Quebec four years later. Berthieu, a native of France, was killed in Madagascar in 1896 after refusing to renounce his faith following his capture with refugees he was accompanying as they fled civil upheaval. A former diocesan priest who entered the Jesuits at age 35, Berthieu was sent to the Madagascar mission before he finished novitiate. He enjoyed five peaceful years of missionary work before independence movements and tribal rebellions forced him to move from place to place. Tekakwitha, the “Lily of the Mohawks,” survived a smallpox epidemic that killed both of her parents and left her with scars and poor eyesight. After her baptism, she worked with the sick for four years until her death in 1680 at the age of 24. Her spiritual director, Jesuit Fr. Pierre Cholonec, documented her life in annual reports to the order’s superior general in Rome. After her death, other Jesuits who had known her wrote of her faith and intercession. The correspondence was used by Italian Jesuit Fr. Paolo Molinari in his promotion of her cause for beatification in 1980, and eventual sainthood.
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“I’d like to help people encounter Jesus, but one frontier is the culture in which they were raised, a numbness to the Gospel. Those are challenges for Jesuits.” ~Robert Van Alstyne
“Then, Vatican II happened and it opened up an opportunity for Jesuits and any missionaries to get involved in Native American culture and to translate the Mass into the native language,” he said. Damhorst began to see that used textbooks from Jesuit high schools in St. Louis and Denver weren’t relevant to native people. When he returned 15 years later as pastor, he and other Jesuits were permitted to participate in native practices and spiritual rituals such as the sweat lodge, sun dance, and vision quest, a type of desert experience of getting in touch with the Spirit, while spending three days and nights in the hills without food or water. The experience shaped him, he said. “Our church has not done a good service” to people of other cultures, he said. “Our tendency is to impose our evangelical truth and wisdom on them rather than to sit with them to see where their own truths lead them.” Three seasoned Jesuits of the New Orleans Province haven’t tired of the frontier they crossed into long ago.
Donald Bahlinger, 84, resumed ministry this summer in El Salvador, after years of service dating from the 1970s in Guatemala, Paraguay, El Salvador, Arizona and Texas. In El Paso, 87-year-old Jack Vessels regularly enters neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to perform sacraments, unfazed by the city’s violence. His Jesuit community at Sacred Heart Church said he is perhaps its most resilient and courageous member. Gerard Fineran, 92, currently under a doctor’s care in New Orleans, spent half a century in Brazil helping the people he loves “deepen and enrich their faith. “Though I occasionally like to come back to the States for a brief visit and change,” he said, “I am now at home and happiest there.” Meanwhile, a younger generation of Jesuits will find its own frontiers.
Van Alstyne thinks he may have found one: a U.S. culture that blocks the spiritual journey. He was struck by how happy, peaceful, disciplined and close to each other his orphan charges in Kohima were, and said the experience got him excited to work in the schools someday. “There wasn’t much cynicism about the faith,” he said. “You could see in the children a real desire to learn, a gratitude to their teachers.” But in the U.S., even at Catholic educational institutions he’s attended, American culture can get in the way of young people knowing the Gospel, finding it relevant, or catching their hearts, he said. “I’d like to help people encounter Jesus,” he said, “but one frontier is the culture in which they were raised, a numbness to the Gospel. Those are challenges for Jesuits.”
Brian Strassburger and “Gogo” Cynthia enjoy a beach day in 2008 on the North Beach Pier on the Indian Ocean in Durban, South Africa, about 20 miles from an AIDS center where she lived. Strassburger advocated for “Gogo,” the Zulu term for an elder woman, and other HIV-positive individuals. Strassburger, a second-year novice, was an Augustinian Volunteer before entering the Jesuits. FALL 2012
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vocations
Vocation Promotion Takes a Bigger Role By Cheryl Wittenauer
Fr. Andrew Kirschman at his first Mass
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U
ntil fairly recently, the job of attracting and recruiting good candidates to the Society of Jesus fell to the vocation director, or men entered the order after being inspired by a Jesuit they encountered in academia. But fewer Jesuits in the high schools and universities have meant less exposure to Jesuit life. Ninety percent of inquiries about a Jesuit vocation now come through Internet searches, said Fr. Paul Deutsch, vocation director for the New Orleans and Missouri provinces.
“The advantage for us is that we are larger and easier to find,” Deutsch said. “We have an active presence on the Internet. Once they get to us, they can begin to read what they can do.” Fifteen years ago, Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach called for prioritizing vocation promotion (in tandem with vocation direction). He also made it clear that promoting vocations is not the responsibility of one man in a province office, but rather, the task of every Jesuit. His successor, Superior General Adolfo Nicolás would ask in 2008, on the eve of General Congregation 35, a meeting of Jesuit representatives from around the world, “How come we elicit so much admiration and so little following?” The way in which Jesuit vocations are promoted has begun to shift in New Orleans and Missouri provinces as they start to collaborate in an approach recommended four years ago for all provinces. It’s part of a greater worldwide push to increase vocations. On Aug. 1, Deutsch’s vocation direction job was expanded from New Orleans province alone to also include the Missouri province. Deutsch, who moved his office from Texas to St. Louis, was relieved of the responsibility of promoting vocations, which now falls to Fr. Andrew Kirschman in Denver for both provinces. Deutsch’s former
Fr. Paul Deutsch
Fr. Andrew Kirschman
counterpart in Missouri, Fr. Louis McCabe, left the vocation director job on July 31 for a parish assignment in Belize. “We’re thinking about vocations differently since (General Congregation) 35,” said Kirschman, who also works part-time at Arrupe Jesuit High School in Denver. “There’s an acute awareness that our numbers are dropping, our average age is high and how do we attract young people? “It’s not simply because we want Jesuits at high schools. There’s a bigger issue at hand. . . . We need people to continue who we are.” Vocation promotion is becoming more intentional, and invitations to consider the Jesuits are more explicit. Where the vocation director was the face of the Jesuits at all promotion events, Kirschman said it’s now his job to animate local Jesuit communities to be aware of prospective candidates, be intentional about spending time with them and ask them to consider becoming a Jesuit. Once a man indicates a desire to learn more about the Jesuits, Kirschman accompanies him, to a point. Once he appears to be serious
about applying, Kirschman refers him to Deutsch. Deutsch then accompanies the candidate through a two-month application process that includes a 10-page autobiography, interviews with four Jesuits, letters of reference,
“It’s not simply because we want Jesuits at high schools. There’s a bigger issue at hand. . . . We need people to continue who we are.” ~Fr. Andrew Kirschman
background checks, transcripts and a psychological assessment. Deutsch presents the candidate’s application to an admissions committee for consideration. Deutsch said he has found that initial inquirers have a limited understanding of religious life beyond what they know of their parish priest or have seen in movies or television. Many express
a desire to teach, yet they pursue the path to diocesan priesthood in order to be ordained more quickly; it takes seven years of preparation in the diocese and 11 years with the Jesuits. Others see the ministry of being a pastor as too limiting. “To me, (the length of formation is) the gnawing difference,” he said. “They think, ‘if I stay in the diocesan seminary, I’ll become a parish pastor. Do I think that’s going to satisfy me for 50 years?’ They have a nagging sense that there are a limited set of options.” Of course, vocation promoters and directors are weighing the candidates as well. Deutsch said he wants to know about the candidate’s prayer life, his relationship with God, and dreams for his future as a Jesuit. He says he also wants to see an openness to travel and assignments that may not fit the canidate’s own vision of what he’d like to do. For Kirschman, a Jesuit candidate must know himself, or at least be open to learning. “A guy out of high school has limited self-knowledge,” he said. “But if there isn’t an openness to discovering himself, he’s not going to make it.” A candidate also must be willing to have his ideological views challenged, and adapt to his surroundings, he said. “Ignatian charism is big on adaptation.”
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For more information go to:
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Paraguay
A Journey to the
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A religious artifact that survived the ravages of time
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Story by Cheryl Wittenauer Photographs by Jorge Taracido
ockhurst High School honors-teacher Rick Staihr was making plans last year to visit Paraguay when he told a colleague he’d like to learn more about the South American country’s culture and history. A world traveler, Staihr nonetheless knew little about the Jesuit “reductions,” a significant but not widely known undertaking by 17th- and 18th-century Jesuit missionaries in present-day Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Staihr knew only what he’d seen in “The Mission,” a 1986 film about the period. “My ears perked up immediately,” said Jorge Taracido, his friend and fellow Rockhurst teacher. “I adore history. The reductions were one of the most amazing things that took place in the history of the world. It was all an experiment. No one had done anything like this in the Spanish empire.” Taracido’s enthusiasm intrigued Staihr, who invited his colleague to travel with him to Paraguay last November to visit what remains of some of the former mission settlements near Encarnación, a city founded by Paraguayan Jesuit and saint Roque Gonzalez de Santa Cruz, about whose life the “The Mission” is loosely based. He also founded several of the reductions.
Mission San Ignacio Guazú
Jesuit Reductions Staihr said it takes a lot to impress him, but that the adventure, including a side trip to the magnificent Iguazú Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil, had plenty of “wow moments.” Taracido’s passion for the place made the journey “immensely enriching,” he said. Rockhurst Principal Greg Harkness found grant money to cover most of their travel expenses. In turn, Staihr, 58, and Taracido, 60, who together have taught at Rockhurst for 63 years, shared their trip in a presentation to other faculty, and incorporate what they learned in their Spanish and world history classes. There’s also talk of Rockhurst forming a partnership with an indigenous Guarani community in Paraguay. “I believe, once I told Rick about the missions, it became a partnership with the Jesuits,” Taracido said. “I told the principal, when we return, I want to provide something for the school. People needed to know. Not much is known. It’s a fantastic opportunity to learn more, show more of what the Jesuits have been throughout history, from the beginning, education and helping, giving to the community.” Taracido, the trip chronicler, took 3,000 digital photographs, reserving some of the best for a DVD set to
music that shows images of haunting silhouettes of brick structures and stone-sculpted and wood-carved angels, saints and other religious icons. He also created a compact disc of a composition for oboe, cello and strings by Domenico Zipoli, an Italian
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composer who joined the Jesuits out of a desire to be sent to the reductions in Spanish Colonial America. But Zipoli died in 1726 in Argentina before he could be ordained or missioned to that work. Today, traces of farm fields, churches, dwellings, architecture and statuary are all that remain of a period and place Voltaire described as “the triumph of humanity” and “a new spectacle to the world.” Voltaire wrote in 1733 that in the vast country of Paraguay, the Spaniards were having a tough time conquering the “swarms of natives that dwelt in the midst of the forests” and whom they needed to subject in order to open a passage from Buenos Aires to Peru. “In this conquest, the Jesuits assisted them much more effectually than their soldiers could have done,” Voltaire wrote. “These missionaries penetrated by 16 JESUIT
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degrees into the heart of the country in the 17th century. Some of the natives, who had been taken when young, and bred up in Buenos Aires, served them as guides and interpreters.” Jesuit missioners, working for the Spanish crown and under the direction of their provincial, gathered up the semi-nomadic indigenous Guarani Indians into fixed mission settlements where they were civilized by European standards of the day and converted to Christianity over time. From the first modest villages of San Ignacio and Nuestra Senora de Loreto in 1610 would grow a network of more than 30 mission settlements in what was then the vast Jesuit province of Paraquaria. The mission settlements were known as the “reductions,” taken from the Latin verb “reducere,”
to lead back, as in drawing the native people from the vast forests into smaller communities. Under Jesuit tutelage, the Guarani farmed and raised animals on communal land; learned trades; made goods; became artisans, painters and sculptors; attended school; and learned to create and play musical instruments in what was seen as an experimental utopian society. The Jesuits, for the most part, kept Spaniards out of the missions for fear they would corrupt the Guarani. Each Indian family had its own simple dwelling, and the infirm, widowed and orphaned were provided for separately. The entire community attended the required daily Mass and received religious instruction. Local leaders approved by the Jesuits governed the communities.
Rockhurst High School teachers Jorge Taracido (left) and Rick Staihr visit Jesuit missions in Paraguay including Mission Jesús de Tavarangue, La Santísima Trinidad del Paraná and San Ignacio Guazú, and Iguazú Falls.
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The Jesuit reductions to some extent protected the Guarani from Portugese slave traders although raids in the early years forced the Jesuits to relocate them to safer places. By mid-century, the Jesuits persuaded the Spanish crown to allow Guarani to arm themselves and form militias. The Jesuits also arranged for Guarani to be exempt from Spain’s servicio personal, a forced labor system that required native people in the Rio de la Plata region to perform four months of free labor for Spanish settlers. “Living in the missions was the best possible option for Guarani at the time,” said historian and colonial Latin America expert Kristin Huffine of Northern Illinois University, whose forthcoming book examines the Jesuits’ Guarani experiment. “…The Jesuits very definitely fought hard to keep (the Guarani) from servicio personal, but they had their own project, to transform the indigenous population Mission Jesús de Tavarangue into thinking, acting Christians…The Jesuits were rigorously transforming the way Guarani envisioned themselves.” The Guarani initially resisted Jesuit efforts, and some were persuaded by shamans to return to the forests or build shrines outside the reductions and pay homage to their gods, she said. Those who did were forced to dismantle the shrines and were brought into the mission plaza for a public display of shame and corporal punishment, according to Jesuit letters to Rome that Huffine researched. “It’s complicated, taking a population and trans– forming them into something different,” she said. “It’s the colonial period of Latin America and that’s what’s going 18 JESUIT
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on. After a few generations, Guarani identified as Christians.” The Jesuits oversaw the villages for 160 years until the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Americas in 1767 by Spain’s Charles III as part of a larger suppression in much of the world. The Paraquaria reductions ultimately disintegrated, and Guarani dispersed throughout the region. “Everything they worked for, the scientific instruments, the great libraries, there’s nothing left,” Taracido said. “Some statuary was left by the grace of God. But other things have been looted and (Paraguay’s) government has made an appeal to return them.” Besides lootings, the reductions suffered from fire, revolutions and wars. Two of the best preserved reductions, Santísima Trinidad del Paraná and Jesús de Tavarangue, are World Heritage sites. Legend has it that a German Jesuit was allowed to remain for a time for health reasons after others had been expelled, and that he was the last to leave. German Jesuits today are helping to restore the reductions with German backing, Taracido said. Staihr said the trip had a spiritual component that he hadn’t expected, and that he can reimagine the place by listening to indigenous music or seeing a woodcarved Holy Spirit image he keeps as a souvenir. “We saw so much,” he said. “I’m still processing it. You have to experience it to get the full wow factor.”
M O R E we b ON THE
www.jesuitsmissouri.org
Jesuit Presence in Paraguay Endures By Brooke Iglesias
Fr. Charles Thibodeaux knows well the history of the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay, a region he has called home for more than 30 years, 25 of them in the Santa Rosa Mission and the last seven in the San Ignacio Mission. “San Ignacio Parish has 50,000 people and covers a large area,” he said. He works in town and in the countryside with farmers or campesinos. Thibodeaux said he celebrates Mass once a month in the 30 villages that make up the parish. He described a “very varied” work week consisting of visiting the sick, serving as chaplain of St. Vincent de Paul, hearing confessions, celebrating Mass and counseling people. At 83, he admits to benefitting from an afternoon nap to help him re-energize from daily travels on dusty trails and dirt roads to the different villages, some as far as 20 miles. “My big challenge in my work,” he said, “is to help the poor and the well grow in faith, hope and love of God and for each other, to form basic Christian communities with the Word of God and Jesus Christ as the center of the Christian community.” He is particularly touched by the poor, who he says minister to him in the way they live their faith and trust in God.
He cited the example of a family of 16 children in the village of St. Joseph that prays the rosary every day. “During a prolonged drought, that family had nothing to eat one day,” he said. “So that night at prayer, they asked for food. The next day, somebody brought food for them, and the children exclaimed, ‘God has heard our prayers!’ How true that was! How beautiful their faith and trust in God.” He said he is inspired by the closeness and goodness of the people in the missions, just as he was of parishioners in the tiny Cajun town of Grand Coteau, La., very near his hometown of Carencro, where he ministered for nearly 20 years. “My desire to serve in the missions originated from a desire to bring the Word of God, Jesus Christ, wherever God wanted me to go, to do the will of God the Father of us all,” he said. “The help of God through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, Our Blessed Mother, made it possible.” Thibodeaux also expressed gratitude for the prayers and generous support of friends and benefactors who help sustain his ministry in Paraguay. “How can I ever thank you enough?” he asked. “Only the Lord will be able to reward you sufficiently.”
A New Orleans Jesuit who won an award for his documentary on the Jesuits’ 17th- and 18th-century Paraguay missions has died. Robert McCown, 86, died on June 29, 2012 in New Orleans after nearly 58 years in the Society of Jesus. He received an award for his documentary film, “The Jesuit Republic of Paraguay.” McCown, a native of Mobile, Ala., was an artist, writer and filmmaker, producing documentaries for PBS in the 1970s and teaching filmmaking in Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles.
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spirituality
The Examen:
Illustration by Thomas Rochford SJ
Reflecting on the Movements of Our Hearts By Fr. Mark Thibodeaux
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O
ne of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s most radical insights is this: God often communicates his will through the movements and desires of our hearts. Why is that so radical? Because desires get us into all kinds of trouble, right? Aren’t our desires responsible for the second piece of cake? Don’t our desires lead us into sin? To these questions, Ignatius would respond that it is our inordinate desires that get us into trouble. The problem is not that we have desires, but that some of them are inordinate, or out of order. We haven’t sorted out our superficial desires, the ones that merely bring us pleasure, from our deepest desires, the ones that lead us to greater faith, hope and love and to greater praise, reverence and service of God. Most of the time, we are far more aware of our superficial desires than of our deepest desires. It is within our deepest desires that God communicates his will to us.
But how do we sort out the deepest desires from What was God trying to tell me? What was God calling the superficial ones? We ponder them; that’s how. Many me to? How did I respond? Again, I pause and give people mistakenly think that Ignatius would love the thanks, beg for mercy, ask for healing. advice we hear so often in our society today: Follow your And then the most important question of all in my heart. Ignatius would think that this is a terrible idea! Examen: Given what I’ve discovered about God moving Ignatius knew all too well from his own experience that my heart this morning, how might I respond to God’s our hearts are often (always?) fickle, fragile, vulnerable call this afternoon? What are my deepest desires for and unstable. Unreflectively following our hearts would responding to God’s call? indeed get us into all kinds of trouble. We need to use I do not let myself be satisfied with a vague and our heads when reflecting on the movements of our lofty answer such as “I desire to be more loving this hearts. Prayerfully, we must afternoon.” No, I’ll ask think about how we feel. the Holy Spirit to push How I Pray the Mid-day Examen We need to ponder the me to come up with a • I settle into my favorite place to pray. I quiet myself movements of our hearts. We concrete response to my and begin to sense God’s presence all around and must discern them. heart’s stirrings. Given inside me, too. I ask God to give me the grace to But how in the heck God’s heart-nudgings look at my morning through God’s eyes. do we do that? How do this morning, what we prayerfully examine • I prayerfully look through the hours since I awoke concretely will I do this the deeper stirrings of our this morning, and take note of the important afternoon? Once I name hearts? That was the ques moments: the moments when my heart was filled the way I desire to act tion St. Ignatius grappled with joy and peace, but also the moments when my in the afternoon, I ask with as he began to develop heart was troubled about something. myself what grace from a unique prayer that he God might I need in • Pondering these more important moments, I give wisely called the “Examen.” order to pull this off: thanks, beg for forgiveness and ask for healing. He believed so strongly in Courage? Fortitude? • I ask myself: Was there a moment in my day that this type of prayer that he Joy? Patience? Trust? God was tugging at my heartstrings? What was exhorted everyone to pray I close this brief con God trying to say and call me to? I try and it twice a day and felt that it versation with God by remember as I’m praying my Examen that God is may well be the most imporasking for the grace most present in my deepest desires, the desires that tant moment of one’s day. to make a generous lead me to greater faith, hope and love and to The Examen is Ignatius’ response to His call. greater praise, reverence and service of God. way of prayerfully examining That’s it! That’s the the feelings we have about • I ask myself: How, concretely, do I want to respond entire prayer. our day, ourselves, our loved to God’s calling? What grace do I need from God This little silver ones and coworkers, and our in order to respond according to my great desires? bullet of a prayer time I beg God for that particular grace. I ask for very lives. One of the prayer’s engages my whole self. whatever I need to respond generously to God’s greatest characteristics is its It ponders the move heart-nudgings. refreshing simplicity. ments of my heart. It Calling on the Holy allows me to take the Spirit to guide me, I simply pause right smack in the feelings — especially the desires — that I find there and middle of my busy day and spend 10 minutes pondering prayerfully think through the proper order of them so the movements of my heart. What are the things in my that I might discover the divinely inspired ones. It then life about which my heart is filled with joy? What are the begs the Spirit to charge my will to respond with great things about which my heart is troubled? generosity and love in some concrete, nitty-gritty way. As the relevant moments of my morning prayerfully In the Examen, my heart, mind, and will come together pop into my imagination, I give thanks, beg for forgiveto do God’s bidding. ness and ask for healing. Was there a moment that God, Fr. Mark Thibodeaux is novice director at the Jesuit novitiate unbeknownst to me, was tugging at my heartstrings? in Grand Coteau, La. FALL 2012
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Fr. Tim McMahon
Fr. Curtis Van Del Frs. Tim McMahon, Steve Schoenig and Ron Mercier
Frs. Jeff Harrison, Chris PinnĂŠ, Tim McMahon and Josef Venker, ordained in 1987 Fr. Josef Venker
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jubiliarians
Fr. Dirk Dunfee
Provincial Douglas Marcouiller
Fr. John Foley Fr. Dick Hadel
Milestones of Service
Fr. Don Reck
Jesuits of the Missouri Province celebrated milestones of service in Jubilee Masses on Sept. 9 in Kansas City, Sept. 16 in St. Louis and Oct. 21 in Denver. Family and friends recognized the contributions that these priests and brothers have made over the years. Eleven men celebrated 60 years in the Society of Jesus while others marked 70, 50 and 25 years as Jesuits. Others celebrated priesthood anniversaries of 50 and 25 years. FALL 2012
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profile
Jason Brauninger: Drawn to Being in the World By Cheryl Wittenauer
J
ason Brauninger was on track to become a firefighter, but wound up as an emergency room nurse. Both offered adrenalin rush, high-intensity team work and fast-on-your-feet decision-making, things that appealed to the 30-year-old Louisiana native. Along the way, he also joined the Jesuits after promising to try religious life if God would only quit the nagging and leave him alone. “Now I’m saying, ‘please come back, I can’t do it without you,’” he said. Brauninger said that in his last year of college, he felt a renewed call to the priesthood that had been on the back burner. He began researching religious orders on the Internet when he stumbled upon the Jesuits. “I was struck by the Jesuits saying ‘we use our gifts and talents in the world,’” he said. “Being in the world appealed to me. I didn’t want to be in a monastery or diocesan parish.” Brauninger had studied fire science and trained as an investigator at Eastern Kentucky University after spending his early teens hanging out in a firehouse and fighting his first fire at 18. After graduation in December 2004, he traveled and soul-searched in Europe for two months, worked with a U.S. group that repairs homes for people in need, and entered the Jesuit novitiate in August 2005. After first vows, he studied philosophy and theology at Saint Louis University, then did SLU’s one-year accelerated nursing program. Typically, that’s the point at which young Jesuits return to their province to begin working in a ministry and join a community. But Brauninger accepted a regency assignment in the Missouri province, becoming the first New Orleans Jesuit to cross the province line, a move that anticipates the New Orleans-Missouri merger in a few years. And while most Jesuit regents teach high school, Brauninger is spending his regency as an ER nurse at 24 JESUIT
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a Level I urban trauma center in Denver. He’s also an affiliate faculty member in the nursing school at Regis University, and chaplain to students in the health care professions. “I love the ER, the knowledge, the pace, the autonomy,” he said. “You have to think on your feet.” Brauninger said he doesn’t advertise that he’s a Jesuit so that no one mistakes him for a hospital chaplain. “Mostly I’m a Jesuit with co-workers … and I’m a Jesuit in my care for my patients,” he said. He occasionally shares his hospital experiences as a contributor to The Jesuit Post blog, writing about finding God in the death of a 2-year-old girl, or his struggles with what he calls his “judgmental heart” about uninsured American poor versus people he’s encountered during medical mission trips to Haiti and Nepal. He said he finds Christ more easily in the foreign poor than in America’s disadvantaged people, but that “sick is sick” regardless of nationality. In Nepal last November, Brauninger was part of a medical team that assessed and treated 2,000 patients in five days, a breakneck speed enabled by the lack of requirement for documenting medical care. He went to Haiti in February as part of a team trying to establish a partnership with a hospital four hours north of the capital, Port-au-Prince. He’ll return in November to learn more about what type of care works best in Haiti. Both medical mission trips were organized by a global health initiative of Centura Health of Colorado. Eventually, Brauninger would like to earn master’s and doctoral degrees and teach nursing, but he said he’d miss the special time to be with people in crisis that bedside nursing affords. Being able to “fix things” provides instant gratification, he said, but he also knows he can’t fix everything. “If God wants people dead, I can’t fix what God wants,” he said.
Penn Dawson: Chaplaincy’s Comforting Gift By Brooke Iglesias
P
enn Dawson is living proof that life, and God, are full of surprises. The former practicing attorney entered the Jesuits in 2009 at the age of 48. Now a Jesuit scholastic in his second year of philosophy studies at Loyola University Chicago, he serves as a hospital chaplain at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, whose predecessor, the Beaux-Arts-styled Cook County Hospital, was the model for the television series, ER. The 140-plus-year institution is Chicago’s only public hospital for the poor and uninsured, which Jesuits served as chaplains for 109 years before ending their formal affiliation in July. As a Jesuit novice, he worked as a chaplain at University Medical Center in Lafayette, La., the closest city to the novitiate. “Hospital work on the patient’s behalf was new to me,” he said. “As an attorney for many years in Tampa before entering the Society, I had represented healthcare providers and medical facilities and provided legal counseling in medical malpractice claims and risk-management matters. It seldom required patient interaction, and when I did interact with patients, my role was almost always adversarial.” Dawson and another novice assigned to the hospital ran through an exercise of how they would respond to a variety of “worst-case scenarios” they might encounter. Only a few minutes into the job, they encountered a young man who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, an elderly man who felt lonely, isolated and a burden to his family, and a young girl who had tried to commit suicide. Their introduction to hospital chaplaincy felt overwhelming, but it taught Dawson that ministers are just as dependent on God as the patients. A few months later, during a novice experiment in McAllen, Texas, Dawson again worked at a local hospital, where his supervising chaplain dispatched him to a woman who almost immediately began revealing her pained life story. During their more than hour-long visit, Dawson said he asked God to help him respond to the woman’s
suffering. As he left, he promised her his prayers, but felt like he had let her down. The next day, he again visited the woman, who surprised him by saying he had comforted her. “Comfort?” he remembered thinking. “I hadn’t said or done anything.” He said he learned from that encounter that a simple visit to the sick tells the patient that he or she is not alone. “By expressing concern for another person, we are imitating Christ,” he said. In the summer of his first year in the novitiate, Dawson was diagnosed with cancer, and was told after surgery that the cancer probably had not spread. He said the chaplains visited him often during his hospital stay, and while they couldn’t ease his anxiety, their presence assured him of Christ’s promise to always be with us, he said. “My experiences that summer not only made me appreciate the health I had taken for granted, but invigorated my call to this ministry,” he said. “I appreciate on a deeper level Henri Nouwen’s view that our own wounds can serve as a starting point for our service to others.” Dawson said he hopes to continue his “privileged journey with patients and their families.” He said the work of a chaplain “lends deeper meaning and purpose to his academic studies and serves as a reminder that a call to the priesthood is a call to labor with Christ on behalf of those whom society sees as the least. “I pray for the grace to grow more open to others who are suffering, and in so doing, to serve Christ in them.”
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profile
Dick Campbell: Paying a Good Deed Forward By Cheryl Wittenauer
ick Campbell has done things the hard way, which might explain why the Missouri Province founder has tried to make things easier for others. He did four years of night law school so he could work by day to support his family. What the nightschool law degree lacked in prestige gave him the legal chops to launch his own successful firm in Denver. He’d already had an FBI career in intelligence and espionage tracking Russians and Chinese during the Cold War as well as New Left activists, educators and agitators in the 1960s and ‘70s. It was an unlikely destination for a poor kid in Denver whose father, he said, had abandoned his mother, “never gave her a dime and showed up in seven- to 11-year intervals.” His mother wanted Dick and his older brother Dan to attend Regis Jesuit High School, but her income from a job with the phone company barely covered household expenses. “I still remember sitting in his office,” he said of his and Dan’s meeting with their mother and the then-president of Regis High School and College, Fr. Raphael McCarthy. “Tuition was probably $45 or $90 a year then. My mom said, ‘I don’t have it.’ Fr. McCarthy said, ‘Merial, pay what you can.’ 26 JESUIT
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Photos: Thomas Rochford SJ
D
“There were no forms to fill out, no financial aid. She probably paid the Jesuits $10 a year in tuition. The Jesuits have been very good to us.” The brothers tried to quit school every year, but their mother, Campbell said, kept encouraging them to “do it one more year.” “As I grew older, I appreciated what impact (the Jesuits) were
having on my life,” Campbell said. He’s been making it up to them ever since. In the late 1980s, Richard Campbell was the managing partner of a development company that owned vacant land in the fastgrowing Denver suburb of Aurora that now is Colorado’s third mostpopulous city.
At the time, Regis Jesuit High School shared a campus and identity with Regis College (now university) in Denver. But some, including thenPresident Fr. Ralph Houlihan, felt the high school needed to break from its big brother and establish itself as an independent entity, just as 25 other Jesuit high schools in the U.S. had done before Regis. “We were on 90 acres with the college and the college’s plans were encroaching on the high school,” Houlihan said. “We needed to establish our own identity . . . It just wasn’t a healthy situation.” The idea for a new high school campus became more possible when Regis College offered to buy the Regis high school building on their joint campus. Metropolitan Denver was growing east and south of the city, and Campbell and his partners just happened to have 30 acres that he knew would blossom with commercial development and housing. Campbell, chairman of the Regis Board of Trustees at the time, talked to his partners who agreed the partnership would donate the land to Regis for a new high school in Aurora. The new Regis Jesuit High School opened in September 1990, and seven years later, Regis bought an adjoining 35-acre parcel. By 2004, Regis Jesuit had a boys and girls division, side-byside on what became the Campbell Campus. For his generosity in donating land, and for his business advice, Campbell was named a “founder” of the Missouri Province in 1991, a rare designation Houlihan had pushed for, and that Father General Peter Hans Kolvenbach approved. Campbell is the province’s only living founder. Five preceded him.
“I don’t take credit. You do what you do. Christ was there before you got there. You wouldn’t have done it otherwise. It’s really the hand of God.” ~Richard Campbell
The Jesuits’ Missouri Province archives in St. Louis are bereft of anything about Campbell except for a letter Houlihan wrote to then-Provincial Robert Costello on Dec. 19, 1988. It says in part that Campbell “. . . has steadfastly refused any recognition for himself or his family for his gift of the land, but I know
he would be touched and deeply appreciative of our prayers should Father General decide to make him a founder of the province.” Campbell is grateful for the prayers to this day and said it’s been “a great grace” and a gift to collaborate in ministries with the Jesuits. Regis Jesuit’s move to the suburbs was controversial and very upsetting to alumni and others loyal to the century-old fixture in north Denver. But enrollment was declining, and many believed the area couldn’t support the school as alumni families migrated out of the city. Today, Regis Jesuit is thriving, and that “never would have happened if it had stayed in its former location,” Campbell said. Still, Regis Jesuit’s move from the city, and the Archdiocese of Denver’s closure and relocation of its urban schools, left a hole that Campbell felt obligated to fill. He believed the church owed Catholic educational opportunities to continued on next page
Dick Campbell meets with Richard Garcia, an Arrupe student who works in his law firm. FALL 2012
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PROFILE: DICK CAMPBELL the urban poor, as he and his brother once had been, and said that lay people have an obligation “to keep programs for the poor running.” In the late 1980s, Campbell approached Houlihan about whether it was feasible to establish a Catholic high school of some kind in Denver’s inner city. Over the next several months, Houlihan, who was then teaching at St. Louis University High School, traveled to Denver on his non-teaching days to work with Campbell on a feasibility study. When complete, the study was inconclusive, and the effort stalled. Campbell called then-Jesuit Provincial Frank Reale to thank him for making Houlihan available and to say he had tabled the idea of an inner-city Catholic high school. But Reale surprised him by saying the Jesuits remained interested. Campbell arranged for Reale to meet with then-Archbishop Charles Chaput, and the seed for a Catholic high school was planted. Two archbishops, a mountain of hurdles, and a second feasibility study later, Campbell had amassed enough momentum that a “breakfast club” of Jesuits and committed lay people met at 7:30 a.m. in his office at frequent intervals for three to four years to launch what would become Arrupe Jesuit, a college-preparatory high school for Denver’s economically disadvantaged kids. The school takes its name from the Jesuits’ late superior general, Pedro Arrupe, who led them to more deeply commit to justice and the poor. The Jesuits of the Missouri Province sponsor Arrupe, which 28 JESUIT
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turns 10 next year, but Campbell founded it, put together its board and got the Jesuits to run it, Houlihan said. Arrupe, part of a network of similarly structured Cristo Rey schools across the country, allows students to help meet the cost of their tuition by working at local businesses that partner with the school. “He was absolutely passionate about getting the school opened, his faith and commitment, and being a man for others,” Arrupe president Fr. Timothy McMahon said. Fr. Philip Steele, president of Regis Jesuit High School, said Campbell is an unassuming man of deep faith who has felt a genuine partnership with the Jesuits. “He’s very comfortable in Jesuit circles and in synch” with Jesuit ideals of promoting justice and working with the poor, he said. Today, Campbell sits on the board of many charitable organizations in Denver
and has helped raise money for programs that benefit the inner city and the poorest areas of the world. A school like Arrupe might never have opened in Denver if it wasn’t for Campbell’s persistence. But try to convince him of that. “I don’t take credit,” he said. “You do what you do. Christ was there before you got there. You wouldn’t have done it otherwise. It’s really the hand of God.”
Statue of the Jesuits’ late superior general Pedro Arrupe in front of the school bearing his name
in memoriam
Fr. Gerald M. Fagin Gerald “Jerry” Matthew Fagin died of cancer June 14, 2012, in New Orleans after 56 years in the Society of Jesus. He was 74. Fagin, a native of Dallas, began teaching theology in 1973 at Loyola University of New Orleans, where he was a longtime faculty member and wrote extensively about spirituality. He also was associate professor of theology and spirituality at the Loyola Institute for Ministry, New Orleans provincial, socius to the master of novices, director of studies and superior of collegians. Fagin entered the Society in 1956 at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, La. He wrote “The Holy Spirit” and “Putting on the Heart of Christ,” and was in great demand as a spiritual director, devoting many years to developing spiritual formation programs at Loyola and at the Archdiocesan Spirituality Center in New Orleans.
Fr. William W. Williams William W. Williams died of cancer on July 12, 2012, in Denver after 57 years in the Society of Jesus. He was 74. He was born on Sept. 24, 1937, in Kansas City, Mo. His many ministries included serving as an Army chaplain in Heidelberg, West Germany, a campus minister at Regis College in Denver and Saint Louis University, socius to the director of novices in Denver, and assistant to the president of Rockhurst University. He later did retreat work and served as minister of the Xavier Jesuit Community in Denver where he was also engaged in pastoral and ecumenical work. Williams entered the Society at St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Mo., on Aug. 17, 1955. He was ordained on July 2, 1968, at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Innsbruck, Austria.
Fr. John R. Daly John R. Daly died of cancer on July 31, 2012, in Denver after nearly 62 years in the Society of Jesus. He was 82. He was born on March 15, 1930, in Seattle. Daly was a U.S. Navy chaplain for 27 years, serving on naval bases and the USS Kitty Hawk off the coast of North Vietnam during its deployment in Southeast Asia. There, he was charged with notifying families of sailors who had been killed in combat. Daly professed his final vows in Saigon, South Vietnam, in January 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. He did pastoral work in La Jolla, Calif., and at Xavier Jesuit Center in Denver. Daly entered the Society at St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Mo., on Aug. 8, 1950, and was ordained on June 12, 1963, at Blessed Sacrament Church in Hollywood, Calif.
Fr. Edward K. Burger Edward K. Burger died Sept. 17, 2012, in St. Louis after nearly 55 years in the Society of Jesus. He was 73. He was born on Feb. 1, 1939, in Carlinville, Ill. He taught history and provided a pastoral presence to students at Saint Louis University and Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Mo. His dissertation, “Erasmus and the Anabaptists,” was published in 1977. In the mid-1980s, he completed a critical edition of “Enchiridion super Apocalypsim” by Joachim of Fiore, a Cistercian theologian of the 12th century. After retiring, he provided pastoral care at nursing facilities in St. Louis. Burger entered the Society at St. Stanislaus Seminary in Florissant, Mo., on Aug.17, 1957. He was ordained on June 4, 1970, at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis.
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www.jesuitsmissouri.org • 1.800.325.9924 Jesuit Bulletin XCI • Number 3 • Fall 2012 The Jesuit Bulletin is published and distributed by the Jesuits of the Missouri Province. All communications about editorial matter should be addressed to the editor at: 4511 West Pine Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri 63108-2191. All communications about change of address, memberships, burses, and requests should be addressed to Thom M. Digman, Advancement Office of the Jesuits of the Missouri Province, 4511 West Pine Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri 63108-2191. Email: moprov@jesuits-mis.org
Deceased Louie Bader Glenda Bentz Kathryn Bollinger Greg Booth Richard Breitenstein Madeline Bruns Edward K. Burger SJ Luke J. Byrne SJ Fr. Francis X. Cleary SJ William W. Cody Joseph M. Coleman Naoma Cullen Michael H. Czerwinski Andrew Decker Dianne Deutsch Mal Domenico Margaret Domian Robert D. Donahue James Edward Doolan “Tommie” Durkin Francis J. Engbert Agnes M “Bonnie” Faber Vito Favazza Frank E. French Anne M. Gitto Kathy Goeke Bachmann Mike Gregoire Janet Guzman Joan Hanson Jim Harvey Sr. Joanne Hawkins Cathleen Heitmann Cande Hickle Matt Higgins James Hullverson, Sr. Frank S. & Elizabeth G. Jansen Doug Johnson Margaret Jones Helen Kassing Mrs. Mary R. Kelly Kathleen Lane Richard Lindemann Marion Lippi Mildred A. Lutz E.G. Manning Jeanne E.M. Marlman Charles Calvin Martin Janet Matt Vivian McAdams
Tom McCallin Donald Mehan Geoff Melchior Connie Mueller Rita Mugnolo John T. Murphy, Jr. Robert D. O’Byrne Mary Louise Pfeffer Tim O’Hallorhan Mr. Paul A.Oberbeck Rene O’Reilly Virginia R. Otten Bella Grace O’Toole Eugene Parker Frank Pedrotti SJ Daniel Phillips Donald Plank Walter Francis Podgorski Emily Quinn Anthony Quirarte Julius H. Re Louis W Riethmann, Jr. Marian Roberts Terry M Rose Nina Lee Russo Daniel Schmittgens Fr. Frederick Schuller SJ John F. Schweiss MD Salvatore Serra Bro.William Sigman SJ Regina Sleater Olive L Snider Casimir J. Stempora Joann Teahan J. Maurice Thro Fr. William Ulrich SJ Charles Vatterott Harris, Sr. Katie Vogler Lula Wilson Patricia Wolff Carol G. Wollan
We all desire to lead happy and fulfilled lives surrounded by family and friends. Many of us feel compelled to make a difference and leave a lasting impact on the people we love and the world we will leave behind. The search for significance and the desire to plan for the future lead many to ponder their legacy.
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The stained glass windows of St. Francis Xavier (College) Church narrate an extraordinary story of community created by the 12 Jesuit saints whose lives the windows celebrate. These Jesuit professors, pastors, missionaries, writers and administrators lived in different eras but pursued a single mission that the College Church and Saint Louis University continue. By reminding us of our ancestors, the windows provide the context for what happens inside the church, a context of Jesuit activity reaching out from Belgium in the Old World to a growing New World on the banks of the Mississippi River. The windows connect the 12 saints to the Society of Jesus worldwide and make that connection even more explicit for worship and work in St. Louis.
To order a copy of this beautiful full-color, hard-cover art book, go to the College Church website at
www.slu.edu/college-church/merchandise
The renovation of the church in the 1990s and the subsequent cleaning of the windows revealed details in the intricate stained glass that had been obscured for decades and are still difficult to interpret without the insight into the windows that this book provides.