Posted: May 5

Hop-scotching through Spring

(Syracuse) This blog is not actually a weather report, although it might seem that way at times. That thought occurred to me when I realized I wanted to write about experiencing my fourth spring time this year. Spring arrived in Rome over a month ago, and then I encountered it a second time when I flew to Stockholm for the communications workshop with the Jesuits of Sweden. Spring Number Three came in Washington, D.C. and now I am in upstate New York which is just now coming into Spring Number Four. Albeit a bit confusing, this north-south, east-west hop-scotching of seasons is pleasant. And the meetings in each place mirror the attraction of the season.

In Washington, D.C. we had a first planning session for what we are now calling the “Messina Commons” which is a new initiative flowing from last November’s meeting in Denver on adult and distance education in Jesuit universities worldwide. The Messina name refers back to the very first Jesuit school which St. Ignatius founded in Messina, Sicily. He hand picked an A-team group of Jesuits including St. Peter Canisius and sent them to develop what would become the model of Jesuit schools all over the world. They were to serve “rich and poor” and to promote the good of the community in which they were located. The Messina Commons wants to fulfill a similar mission but on a wider scale by providing a virtual “commons” where Jesuit schools and social works can come together and find ways to work together using the new communication technology to bring resources to people who would otherwise not have access to them.

I would say that the group of people gathered around the table to plan this new initiative was an “A-list” group of Jesuits and lay people who bring a great deal of expertise and savvy to the enterprise. I will start writing more reports about the Messina Commons, but it our first meeting of the group we decided would be the steering committee was dynamite.

Now I am in Syracuse where two Jesuits work at Le Moyne College who are also involved in the first stages of developing a Jesuit university in Africa. One advantage of getting into the game late is that you can skip many of the stages that the older Jesuit universities had to take to get into modern pedagogy using digital learning technology and the internet. Plus we can link existing universities to this new start up. We are still at search an early stage that it is not possible to talk about the details, but the possibilities are very, very intriguing. And the young Jesuit scholars-professors from Africa who have just finished or who are about to finish top-flight degrees gives a sound basis of hope that this new project could be a powerful instrument for development in Africa, both for the Church and for society in general. So springtime continues to be not just a season, but a metaphor.