Posted: March 6

The end of winter

I saw the sun rise this morning, or at least the lightening of the cloud cover as day broke on another dull day in this long Roman winter. It is rare that I am up before five a.m., but I had to take Rafael Mamaril to the airport so he could return to his home in Ottowa, Canada. He spent a week here in the Curia doing the final stages of fine-tuning the computer code behind our new database. It might not seem like something to get excited over, unless you need to send out lots of mail or do statistics on Jesuit activity in communication around the world—then it starts to seem pretty darn amazing. Rafael is a whiz at this; his day job involves designing the database for the next census report in Canada, which is a project many times more complex than ours, but it is great to have someone at his level helping us. Fortunately for us, a week was not long enough for him to get over jet lag and adapt to Roman time; when he would wake up in the middle of the night there was nothing he could do but turn the computer on and tweak some more code.

I dropped him off at the airport, then turned around and went back to bed myself (I am, after all, well adapted to Rome’s time and had no trouble getting back to sleep.) Then after pranzo Tom Roach, the secretary for education, joined me in a walk through the center of Rome. We were wandering down a side street when he caught the sound of music coming out of a small church whose doors are rarely open. (Which could be any one of hundreds in Rome, I mean the part about the doors never being open.) We popped inside and found that this church is now the home for the Catholic community of people from the Democratic Republic of Congo. A four-person choir was practicing their music: a male and a female vocalist, base player and keyboardist. Very lively, rhythmic music that somehow fit in with the dusty Baroque interior of the small church. We were joined by several other people drawn in by the music. Everyone was smiling, despite the chill in the air and the clouds outside. New life in the heart of Rome. It is always interesting here.

Tomorrow I take off for three weeks in Latin America. Jesus María Aguirre wrote and said that it gets up towards 30 degrees centrigade during the day and then cools off at night; the dry season has started and the sun is shining. Isn’t it wonderful that Father General wants me to visit the Jesuits in the provinces and support them in their work. And isn’t it wonderful that some of them have the good sense to do their apostolic work in places that are very attractive to visit in the middle of a Roman winter?