Posted: April 13

Easter week

The Easter weekend was very quiet and cool here in Rome, with rain threatening and generally cloudy skies. The liturgical season is tied to the natural cycle in the northern hemisphere so the long spring this year in Rome fit in with Lent and the slow build up to celebrating new life in Christ. On Holy Saturday I went to a nursery with Joe Tetlow, the secretary for Ignatian spirituality; we bought some plants and then went into the garden in the afternoon to get them into the ground during a blessed dry spell. Then rains came gently during the night and soaked them into their new home. Most of the city’s visitors were probably muttering about the rain but I, safely tucked into bed and listening to the rain bounce off the tiles outside my window, was quite content.

On Sunday morning I went to Mass in English at the Oratory of St. Francis Xavier at Caravita—a name that makes the small chapel sound much fancier than it is. Several faculty members at the Gregorian University began a weekly liturgy in English a few years ago at a chapel just down the street from the big church of St. Ignatius. The chapel was originally built in the seventeenth century as the headquarters of an association of lay people founded to help the poor. In the late nineteenth century it was taken away from the church during the period when Italy was being unified; later it was returned to the Church and became the chapel of an association dedicated to the Holy Shroud. And now it offers very well-done liturgy, in English. Fr. Dan Madigan’s homily was well done (although he is an expert on Islam, he used film imagery to talk about Easter) and the small choir was excellent.

Now it is back to work. I fired up the computers this morning for the first time in several days. Even though I will pay a price for not answering email, it is worth while to take a break from communicating. Someone has already come by this morning to learn how to use the CuriaMail Wizard that we have created on our intranet to manage mail lists. And there are people to meet with to talk about the world of Jesuit communication. Last week my friend Cindy Bonfini-Hotlosz stopped in Rome on her way home to West Virginia from Florence where she had spent a week sharing her computing expertise with the local faculty of Gonzaga University’s study-in-Italy program. Cindy works for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities as part of its three-person team developing distance education. She is a photographer and videographer as well as computer wonk. We spoke about digital cameras (she opted for Nikon, myself for Canon) and how to bring an Ignatian pedagogy into college courses taught on the internet. Of course, I like her because she visit the Jescom website and has even contributed some of her photos to the Portfolio section. There is a lot going on in the Society’s large world of communication; that’s what makes it interesting to turn on the computers and see what others have done over the holy days.