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Posted: June 25
When the solution came, it was a surprise, but one that I hope will work out well. I visit many places and talk to many people- and eventually summarize some of all that input into carefully written reports for Father General. That leaves almost everyone else out of the loop. In the month or so that the Jescom site has been up, I have been able to post some reports—like the Medienkreis meeting in Slovakia or the Radio Chikuni profile from my February visit to Zambia—but that leaves much info unshared. And despite good intentions I have not been able to post more reports.
So the night before last I was reading a computer magazine and saw an article on "blogs" and a light came on. Perhaps I have been going about this all wrong. Instead of writing a few reports that take lots of time, I should be writing lots of smaller reports, or journal entries, that don't take up much time. It is certainly worth a try. And it was not hard to create the web mechanism for doing so. During the last two years I have worked hard at learning how to use Cold Fusion, a proprietary tag-based program for writing web applications that are data-based driven. It only took about an hour to convert some existing code and make a minor modification to the database: et voila- I have a web log.
We just finished "Tempo Forte" last week at the Curia. Each June the regional assistants, major and minor officials (including myself) and Father General have three full days two review the year and plan for upcoming events. This year the theme was obviously September's Congregation of Procurators. As part of the exercise, each of the "sectorial secretaries" wrote a report that will be sent out to all procurators as part of their preparation for the meeting. (A footnote: in the Curia we use the term "sectorial secretary" to refer to the men who oversee some apostolic sector of the Society, such as communication, education, spirituality, social apostolate or interreligious dialogue.) The weather was stifling and the meeting was difficult as the group tried to assess the state of the Society to help Father General prepare the speech he will present at the congregation. I won't know what his conclusions are until he gives the speech, but I can say that it is a challenge to grapple with a world-wide order that is growing in some areas and diminishing dramatically in others. Overall, we are steadily growing smaller. I noted that one of the historical notes that we publish each day on the main sjweb.info site said that when GC34 started only 10 years ago, the Society had 26,000 members. We have lost roughly 6,000 members in that period. Gulp. What to make of that? .
The week before Tempo Forte was brightened with a visit from Tom Lucas SJ whom many people know for his work restoring the rooms of St. Ignatius at the Gesù here in Rome. Tom is now chair of the fine arts department at the University of San Francisco in the United States. He initially worked out an alliance with the California College of Arts and Crafts which provided the studio courses while USF provided the academic and art history courses. The alliance fell apart after a few years, but USF decided to build up its own studio courses. Tom found space in what had been the Jesuit residence, and students have been taking courses now for a year on campus.
Tom came to Rome to do research for a book he is writing on the early Jesuit use of images in their evangelization efforts. The two of us took a day to drive up to the Marian shrine at Loreto to see the original image that Jesuit missionaries carried all over the world. St. Francis Borgia had many copies made of the image which he entrusted to Jesuits going to Latin America. The statue at Loreto is a black Madonna, similar to the one at Montserrat. Ignatius very much wanted to visit to Loreto but never did because of ill health; nevertheless, many other Jesuit saints visited there, and Jesuit confessors cared for pilgrims to the shrine. (Tom and I got there in just three hours because of Italy's modern highways, but the car had no air conditioning; with the temperature hovering near 100 degrees the trip felt like a pilgrimage even though it was not long.)
Along the way we had some creative thoughts, and discussed the possibility of having an international Jescom meeting in San Francisco in the future. With its rich tradition in the arts and a contemporary concentration of web activity and digital film production, the Bay Area would provide many opportunities for visiting Jesuits. Of course, the fact that summer fog keeps the city cool probably had no effect on how attractive San Francisco seemed as we drove through the Apennine Mountains on the way to Loreto.
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