Posted: June 25

Off to Sicily

The last few weeks have been busy here at the Curia, busy enough that I am very ready to take two weeks off for a holiday in Sicily. After the trip to Madrid, Spain, for the annual meeting of European cultural journals, I returned just in time for three days of staff meetings with Father General and the full council (some 22 of us altogether). Part of the agenda for the meeting was to discuss plans for the upcoming celebration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of St. Francis Xavier which will be combined with celebrations of St. Ignatius and Blessed Peter Faber, all three members of the original group of companions from the University of Paris who founded the Society.

My concentration has been more on the future than the past, however: the very near future of helping to give a week-long workshop on communication to 61 Jesuit scholastics at Arrupe College in Harare, Zimbabwe. I will be working with Frs. Nigel Johnson and Otieno Ndonga. So I have been planning classes, as it were, something I have not done for awhile. But it is like riding a bicycle—you remember how to do it without much effort. I am working on an Ignatian model of communication based on an analysis of the Spiritual Exercises and its effect on Jesuit artists and communicators. I have enjoyed developing the idea; we will see whether the scholastics respond, but I think they will. It is good stuff, and I have been looking at different examples of Jesuit artists, such as Brother Mario Vencel, an Italian Jesuit who was a peer with De Cirico and other Italian expatriates in Paris before World War II. He entered the Jesuits and left aside his brushes for a few years, but took them up again—fortunately because he is a wonderful artist and deserves to be better known.

I will take the material with me and might work on it in Sicily, and then again, I might not because the Greek ruins are supposed to be spectacular, even better than the ones at Paestum just south of Naples which amazed me when I saw them one year ago. Some rest will be welcome, but it is hard not to get caught up in grandeur the Lord created, and that we sometimes echo.