Posted: March 31

After the travel comes the hard part

I gave my first “scambio” yesterday in the Curia. Someone from the community speaks on a theme he has been working on; sometimes we invite someone from outside the community. The scambio is always Wednesday mornings at 8:30 and they always run for half an hour. And they are in Italian.

It is probably the Italian requirement that has kept me from offering a scambio before this. In any case I gave myself some technological help by using my computer to give what amounted to a slide presentation about my January-February trip to the East Asia and Oceana assistancy. My secretary, Silvia Barbieri, translated the spare text into good Italian; so even if I had to scramble for vocabulary, the people watching had some clue of what I wanted to say. The title of the show was, “The commmunication works of the East Asia Assistancy: a treasure to discover.” That sums up my appreciation of what I saw during the six weeks I was visiting everywhere from East Timor to Melbourne, Australia. I was eager for the Jesuits who work in the Curia to see the variety and vigor of the communication apostolate and have a sense of the appreciation I felt after meeting so many good people. (I also wanted to show off the Macintosh computer a bit. The new Keynote software is terrific; it is Mac’s answer to Power Point. Easier to use and richer in its feature set. The transitions you can do are especially nice, and the photographs told a lot of the story without my being more fluent in Italian.)

The past two weeks have been quiet but very productive. The treasurer of the Society asked for my help in making the second revision of a major document available online in digital form. He only wanted Jesuits to be able to download the document so that pushed me to use something that I have been working on anyway: a new Jesuits-only section of sjweb that is modeled on the Jescom Forum. So I have been planted in front of a computer, doing the coding, working on the design and thinking through the logic of how visitors would use this part of the site. It is working well, but there is still more to do. A visiting American scholastic, Seán O’Mannion, is helping translate the pages into French and Spanish. Then we will need to do some beta testing before announcing the new section. I also want to make Jescom Forum available in Spanish as well as English.

Speaking of Spanish, I met a Jesuit from Venezuela two days ago. Father Numa Molina is in Rome doing doctoral studies in spirituality, after many years of experience with radio stations in Venezuela. He is developing a “spirituality of communication” based on Annotation 20 of the Spiritual Exercises; he explained that some people have done a theology of communication but no one has developed a spirituality of communication. I look forward to the finished thesis because I am becoming more and more convinced that Jesuits in communication need to work much more closely with Jesuits in spirituality and pastoral work. This is another project that will take time to develop.