Posted: April 7

Guesting and hosting

(Rome) I have not had to travel much lately because so many people are coming here. This is a novel twist, which is probably the payoff for do so many visits my first years in the job. First the webmasters of the European province websites came to the Curia, 18 of them from Portugal and Great Britain on the west to Ukraine on the east. Then new provincials came to the English-language program, followed by the executive assistants (socii) from the U.S. provinces. And in between the last two groups, two of my sisters spent over a week visiting Rome.

In between all the time spent in meetings and touring the city, I have had a few chances to work on the long-term project of creating a unified database for our offices here. Of course, we have had lots of databases for some time, and therein lies the problem. It is really difficult to integrate multiple databases without losing information that we need, but having one trustworthy set of data rather than lots of more, and probably less, trustworthy data. Long after modern computer hardware arrived at the Curia we are finally polishing the modern ways to take advantage of the equipment. And I think that is the harder challenge. Besides this public web site, I am working on another reserved page just for the executive assistants for each province so that they can log on and see the information we have about their provinces. This will make it much easier for them to update it and catch mistakes.

At the end of this month, I will do some travel myself, going to a workshop for young Jesuit artists in India and then visiting the Gujarat province in northwest India, home for a big publishing operation as well as a major video production center. I will get a chance to do some painting in exotic places (and I hope you, gentle reader, are less skeptical about my motives for participating in the workshop than my two sisters were when I explained the trip to them.) It is fun to be the host and show off your city to guests, but it is also good to be the guest. Meanwhile, Easter approaches, with its invitation to pause and reflect on the most profound visit we have ever known by one who became not a guest.