Archive for the ‘History’ Category

At the start of the 20th century, Italian immigrants were arriving at Ellis Island at the rate of 100,000 a year. Many stayed in New York City, settling in an area that came to be known as “Little Italy.” Life was rough: large families were crowded into tenement apartments, men eked out a living on subsistence wages and they faced prejudice from their neighbors. There were few places they could look for help.

One of them was the Catholic Church. Michael A. Corrigan, the Archbishop of New York, made outreach a priority of his administration, founding Italian parishes throughout the metropolitan area for their benefit. He also assigned some of the best priests in the archdiocese to this work. After asking the New York Jesuits to start a new parish on the Lower East Side, Jesuit Father Nicholas Russo (1845-1902) was picked to head it.

Born in Italy, Russo joined the Jesuits at 17 and studied in France and the United States. After his ordination, he was sent to Boston College as a philosophy professor. Over the next eleven years, he wrote two textbooks and served as acting president of the college. Between 1888 and 1890, he taught in New York and Washington before returning to a Manhattan parish, where he doubled as a speechwriter for Archbishop Corrigan.

Flexibility is a cornerstone of Jesuit life, the readiness to go anywhere and assume any task for what founder St. Ignatius Loyola called “God’s greater glory.” A respected professor and college president, Russo gave up a successful academic career to serve in the tenements. A biographer writes, “It must have been, humanly speaking, no small sacrifice . . . for he had held high positions in Boston and New York and his work had lain almost entirely among the better instructed and wealthy.”

To read more about Fr. Russo and his work with the Italian immigrants of New York City, go to the Patheos.com website.

Jesuit Father Anthony Kuzniewski will give a live online talk titled “Jesuits and the Development of Holy Cross” on Tuesday, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. Eastern.

Fr. Kuzniewski, a professor of history and a renowned Holy Cross historian, will speak about the establishment of the college in 1843 and discuss how the Jesuits and their lay associates built upon that foundation — within the context of promoting educational excellence and service to Church and state.

Kuzniewski will answer questions submitted online at the end of the 15-minute talk.

Click this link to tune into the talk at 7 p.m. on Feb. 8.

Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Jesuit Father General Pedro Arrupe. Fr. Arrupe led the Society of Jesus through the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s when both society and the Church were experiencing a tremendous period change.

Arrupe’s legacy of social justice and working for the disenfranchised has resonance today,  almost three decades after he resigned as superior general of the Jesuits when he was debilitated by a stroke.  Considered one of the most profound leaders of the Jesuits since St. Ignatius of Loyola, Arrupe has been called “The Second Founder” of the Society of Jesus.

In the spirit of St. Ignatius, who 450 years earlier rejected a monastic lifestyle to follow a spirituality engaged in the world, Arrupe leaves a legacy that enriches not only Jesuits, but the Church, at large. It is a legacy of “men and women for others,” comitted to human dignity, the common good and the Jesuit mission defined as the service of faith and the promotion of justice.

Jesuit Father Vincent O’Keefe served as one of Arrupe’s assistants in Rome for the entire 18 years that Arrupe served as superior general of the Jesuits. Now 92, Fr. O’Keefe reflects on the mark that Arrupe left on the Society of Jesus in the video piece below.

On August 29, 2005, New Orleans experienced one of the worse natural disasters in U.S. history. While the city escaped a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, the rising waters breached the levees that surround the city, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans under water. Five years later, New Orleans is a city rebuilding.

There has been a strong Jesuit presence in New Orleans from the days of the city’s founding over 300 years ago. The Jesuits have been in New Orleans in times of crisis like typhoid and yellow fever outbreaks at the turn of the 19th century and when the city flooded previously in the 1920s. Jesuit works like Good Shepherd Nativity School, which provides educational opportunities to disadvantaged children in the city, and Café Reconcile, a youth training program that provides on the job training in its restaurant, continue to help the city look toward a vibrant future. Schools like Loyola University and Jesuit High School continue to provide top notch education opportunities, while the Harry Thompson Center, a day shelter for the city’s homeless, reach out to the city’s most vulnerable. Today, the Jesuits continue to serve the spiritual needs of people of New Orleans and will continue be there for the city as it rebuilds and recovers.

National Jesuit News highlights the outreach and the dedication of the New Orleans Jesuits in the video piece below and provides a comprehensive overview of the Jesuit works in New Orleans five years after Katrina in the article following the video below.

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On July 31, Jesuits will celebrate the feast of their founder,  St. Ignatius of Loyola, who, with his early companions, founded the Society of Jesus in 1540.

St. Ignatius Loyola was born in 1491 to a family of minor nobility in northern Spain. As a young man, Ignatius Loyola was a soldier and dreamed of doing great deeds. But in 1521 Ignatius was gravely wounded in a battle with the French. While recuperating, he experienced a conversion while reading of the lives of Jesus and the saints.

St. Ignatius’ collection of insights, prayers and suggestions in his book the Spiritual Exercises is considered one of the most influential books on the spiritual life ever written. When Ignatius conceived the Jesuits, he wanted them to become  “contemplatives in action.” This is also an ideal for those  who are guided by Ignatian spirituality and who continually strive to follow St. Ignatius’ motivation to “find God in all things”.

Interested in finding out more about St. Ignatius of Loyola? Loyola Press has a collection of biographical materials, works of St. Ignatius, videos and reflections on their website.

Marquette University has also created this short video piece on the story behind the founder of the Jesuit order as told by  Stephanie Russell, executive director of Marquette University’s Office of Mission and Identity.