Posted: September 11

Feeling good after the retreat

My retreat at Varese, a small city in the foothills of the Alps in northern Italy was both a welcome respite from the heat of Rome and a fruitful moment to reflect on immediate past and future. I took the Eurostar train back to Rome with a renewed sense of steady progress in what I am trying to do here. A number of ongoing projects are starting to mature (like the web sites and the development of information technology in the Curia itself) and some new projects are picking up energy. I got a surprise phone call from a Jesuit in the United States who knows how to get programs and institutions started; now he is interested in sharing our Jesuit know-how and resources world-wide. That fits in nicely with the conversations I have been having about distance education. It is too soon to report a definite result, but people in Denver, Nairobi, Washington, Milwaukee, Santo Domingo and Taiwan are all moving in this direction.

Back in the office I have been working on a new feature for the sjweb site: brief biographies of all Jesuit saints and blesseds. A biography will appear on the home page each day when a saint or blessed's memorial is recalled; visitors will also be able to search for a person by name or browse the list. And we have images of about 90% of them. I decided not to include Venerables or Servants of God, at least for now, because of the amount of work it is taking just to do saints and blesseds.

More people are visiting the web site, even without our doing a lot of publicity, which we plan to do soon. We look at successful page requests per day as the key figure, since we don't have away of counting individual users within a domain name. We don't count hits because that includes images, but page requests offers a good indication of traffic. In May we got 3,264 page requests perday. July peaked at 12,747 and then August was 6,227. And I know from email that people are using the site (and letting me know of any inaccurate information they find- however that slipped in.)