Search Results for: van der Ven

Pedro Arrupe delivered the following homily on the Feast of the Sacred Heart in June 1975. Months before, Pope Paul VI published an apostolic exhortation, Gaudete in Domino (Christian Joy). Here, Arrupe responds to false devotion to the Sacred Heart. He asks if the feast day was one of sorrow and sadness or one of […]

“The Apostleship of Prayer can and ought to be a great force for transforming the world,” declares Pedro Arrupe in the following address. His remarks closed the 1978 International Congress of National Secretaries of the Apostoleship of Prayer in Rome. It was the organization’s first meeting since new statutes were approved after the Second Vatican

Pedro Arrupe delivered the following homily, in Rome, in 1979. The remarks foreshadow much of what Pope John Paul II articulated the following year in his encyclical “Dives in misericorida,” which examined God’s mercy and man’s need for mercy. For Arrupe, the heart “is the abode of the Trinity,” and the Sacred Heart of Jesus

The following are notes, rather incomplete yet intimate ones, written by Pedro Arrupe before his stroke in August 1981. The Jesuits’ Superior General describes celebrating Mass, alone, in his private chapel reserved at the Curia in Rome. He provides glimpses of his passionate intimacy with the Eucharist and of his burdens of his office: “the

Appearing below are the concluding paragraphs of the letter Pedro Arrupe sent to all the members of the Society of Jesus following his debilitating stroke in 1981. The letter emerged from an address he had given earlier that February at the end of a program hosted by the Ignatian Center of Spirituality at the Jesuit

In 1540, Francis Xavier joined Simão Rodrigues in accepting the offer of the Portuguese king to serve as a missionary in Asia. Xavier took the place of Nicolás Alonso de Bobadilla, the man originally selected to travel with the Portuguese ambassador to Portugal. On March 15, before leaving Rome, Xavier wrote and signed the following

In December 1551, Ignatius had his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco write to Antonio Araoz, the provincial of Spain, about the Society’s rapidly developing educational apostolate. What resulted was a concentrated epitome of the early Society’s thinking about this enterprise. Polanco swiftly covers issues of “method” (founding, administration, faculty, structure, content), and “advantages,” both for

In the 1740s, Feodosii Smorzhevskii, a Russian hieromonk in Beijing, reported to his superiors on the work of Jesuit missionaries in China. Both the Russian Orthodox and Catholic missionaries attempted to navigate the labyrinthine world of the Qing imperial court. In the selection below, the Russian hieromonk reveals—in vivid detail—the precarious position of Christians in

The official Directory of the Spiritual Exercises was published in 1599. The directory was the culmination of study and experimentation through commissions over the course of four generalates. A committee appointed by the Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus (1593-94) appointed the committee that ultimately produced the official directory. To mark the occasion,