Posted: June 9

In the footsteps of St. Ignatius

(Spain) I have been talking to many people about the great potential for online learning and distance education, but until last week I had not actually worked on a course. Now I know more about the process, and am even more enthusiastic about the potential of this new way of offering Jesuit education. Michael Carey, a professor from Gonzaga University in Spokane, and Cindy Bonfini-Hotlosz, a producer from JesuitNet, met me in Barcelona to start a very full week of traveling across northern Spain to film segments for the introduction that Mike had written for a course for Gonzaga’s leadership master’s degree program. We were focused on just part of the life of St. Ignatius, from his injury at Pamplona to his departure from Barcelona for the Holy Land.

Mike talked about the transformation that he underwent as a model for the process of transformation necessary to form leaders. This is a slightly different twist to a story very familiar to me. Part of my job was to provide my Jesuit-specific knowledge to Mike’s psychological and developmental theory approach. The added value was that Mike described what Ignatius went through almost 500 years ago as Mike stood in the exact places where the story took place. This method provide students with a context for what they are studying and makes the material more concrete. It gives the story body and emotion which help students connect Ignatius’ experience to their own.

We started off in Barcelona and went backwards towards Loyola, his place of birth. The itinerary included the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, the old town of Manresa, Pamplona where he was wounded, and Loyola. The weather cooperated and my Spanish helped open doors as necessary. Cindy shot the high-definition videotape and I took still photographs, lots of them. Now I just have to identify and log them in. It’s more fun to get in a car with friends and drive across Spain, but you have to do the homework to finish everything as well. No wonder Ignatius always liked to call himself “the Pilgrim.”