Posted: February 20

Too long away

When I first arrived in Rome three years ago, the building in the Curia seemed daunting and not too inviting a place to live. From one end of the corridor to the other is three hundred paces. But there is nothing like living out of a suitcase for six weeks and having to constantly repack and move every few days to make the Curia feel very welcoming. Mostly it is my friends, the Jesuits with whom I live and work, who give this huge building its welcoming face.

My itinerary for the long visit to the Jesuit communication apostolates in the East Asia assistancy sounds like the lyrics of a song: Singapore and East Timor: Indonesia and Malaysia, Australia, and Manila. The trip was very good, perhaps the best one I have done so far in this job, but six weeks is too long. Part of the problem is that I am now very involved in web sites and the communication technology that we use even for everyday work in the Curia. So it is difficult to be away so long. For example, the company that has hosted this web site suddenly decided to go out of the hosting business and we got moved to another place in a transition that has not been smooth. I was creating some new features of the site that I wanted to show off to people whom I visited on the trip, but all we kept getting was error messages. We have good technical people in Rome, but naturally a server decided to fail just when the web site needed work, but the technical people had to take care of other problems. So a number of things had to wait until I got back before I could deal with them. They weren’t hard to fix, but I could not handle them from afar. .

The good news is that I got a lot of great pictures on the trip and met people doing amazing things. The amount of Jesuit activity in the East Asia assistancy is very impressive. I will be writing up some stories as time goes along. For now I am putting up a presentation that I put tgogether for the Jesuits at the Curia to share some brief information about the people I saw. Take a look yourself, the link is on the Jescom home page. .

Meanwhile, I am enjoying the food here and the chance to get back in the garden which is just about to break out into spring. It was summer in Asia, and even hit 41 degrees Celsius in Melbourne, Australia, so Rome’s mild winter and early spring feels great.