Jesuit Father Jboy Gonzales (right) passes a plate at KBI's Aid Center for Deported Migrants.

The Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a Jesuit, binational ministry in Nogales, Ariz., and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, was recently honored for its work with migrants. “There’s a lot of negative press about the U.S.-Mexico border, and I think these awards draw attention to positive programs and efforts that are happening on the border and to the people who live and work there,” says Jesuit Father Sean Carroll, executive director of KBI. “It’s a real affirmation of our staff and the work we’re doing.”

The KBI was one of four organizations to receive an award for binational cooperation and innovation along the U.S.-Mexico border from the Border Research Partnership, comprised of Arizona State University’s North American Center for Transborder Studies, the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center and Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana.

At the awards ceremony: from left to right are Jesuit Father Sean Carroll, Alma Delia Isais, M.E., Rosalba Avalos, M.E., Marla Conrad, Luis Parra and Jesuit Father Pete Neeley. All are KBI staff members, except for Parra, who is chair of the KBI Board of Directors.

The awards program honors “success stories” in local and state collaboration between the United States and Mexico. KBI, the only religious work among those honored, was founded in 2009 by six organizations: the California Province of the Society of Jesus, the Mexican Province of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, the Diocese of Tucson and the Archdiocese of Hermosillo.

Currently, there are four Jesuits working at KBI — two from the California Province and two from the Mexican Province. Jesuits are involved in other ways as well. For instance, this summer, a group of seven Jesuits spent five weeks traveling along the Migration Corridor in Central America to experience the route typically traveled by migrants seeking a better life in the United States. KBI was the last stop on their journey. Fr. Carroll says visiting KBI and meeting the migrants can be the most effective type of education.

“We can show photos, we can talk about it, we engage people on the issues — all that’s very helpful. At the same time, when a person or a group is able to dialogue with a group of migrants, that has the biggest impact,” says Fr. Carroll. “The group no longer has just a theoretical idea of the issue, but they think about it in terms of this person or this group of people that has been so affected by the current immigration policy, and I think it has a very significant impact.”

A meal at KBI's Aid Center for Deported Migrants.

In addition to education and advocacy, KBI also focuses on humanitarian assistance. Since its founding the group has provided thousands of migrants food, shelter, first aid and pastoral support. From the beginning of the year to the end of July, KBI served nearly 36,000 meals to migrants. Last year KBI provided over 450 women and children temporary shelter, and KBI’s clinic treats about 12 to 15 people a day.

“It’s a great blessing for us to offer those services,” Fr. Carroll says. “Our work is very transformative for us individually and as an organization because we serve them and we hear their stories and accompany them at a very difficult time.”

Visit the Kino Border Initiative website, where you can learn more about volunteer and educational opportunities. For more from Fr. Carroll, watch this Ignatian News Network video.

“La Jornada,” or the Journey, began in Honduras and ended in Nogales, Ariz. Along the way, participants learned about the realities of the lives of migrant workers.

Matthew Kunkel, a Jesuit scholastic said, “When people make this journey, they’re desperate. They’re not doing it because they want to break the law. They’re doing it because they’re trying to survive.”

The group traveled by bus and stayed in shelters, visiting human rights organizations and parishes that assist migrants along the way.

“If the experience was extremely demanding for us, I can only imagine what it would be for the migrants themselves,” said Jesuit Father J. Alejandro Olayo-Méndez.

Learn more about their journey in the Ignatian News Network video below and visit their blog: http://themigrantjourney.wordpress.com.

Fr. McChesney said, “We have to prepare our students for the changing face of the church, and that means attention to the devotional life of the Mexicans and the Latins in general. There is much more of a devotional faith than many of our students are familiar with. It takes me back to the church of the ’50s. We have to prepare our students to be part of a more devotional church.”

One devotional he’s become familiar with is practicing posadas during Advent. “The Latino Catholics will process around the neighborhood knocking on the door. It goes back to no room at the inn. … I’m an Irish-American Caucasian, but I’ve had to learn that because it’s certainly the religious practice,” said Fr. McChesney, who is also director of the Intercultural Initiatives and the New Directions Sabbatical programs at the JST.

“I have been taken back to my youthful practice of devotion, if you will, because it’s a way of prayer I needed to cultivate to serve the Latin community because it’s so central to them,” he said.

Fr. McChesney also said Hispanic leaders are influencing the U.S. church. “I think the Hispanic bishops have had a huge impact on immigration reform,” he said.

To read more of the interview with Fr. McChesney, visit Catholic San Francisco.

Sometimes, the journey is anything but. On June 14, 2012, a group of Jesuits began a five-week journey along the “migration corridor” from Central America to the United States. Along the way, they have been visiting shelters, human rights organizations and parishes that assist migrants as they move through the migration corridor.

On a blog site they’ve established to chronicle their journey, http://themigrantjourney.wordpress.com/, the Jesuits say they hope to attain “a better understanding of the reality of migration and the difficulties encountered by migrants on their journey to the U.S.”  The blog, called Journey Moments: The Migrant Corridor, includes photos and a map of the journey and is presented in English and Spanish.

In Honduras, the Jesuits met up with a group of deportees recently returned to their country.

“With little governmental support, the human mobility ministry of the Catholic Church, along with other initiatives, has established an attention center to receive these migrants. Here, the migrants are given some food, medical attention (if needed), and a personal care kit. As we ourselves saw, this return contrasted wildly with the festive ambiance of more familiar airport reunions. Thursday, in the back of San Pedro Sula´s airport, there were no hugs, no smiles, no balloons, no joy. Instead, the travel-weary migrants exuded only sadness, disappointment, and apprehension.”

Several days later in Honduras, the group visited a community in the countryside, about 30 minutes outside of El Progreso, where they spent time visiting with families whose lives have been tragically affected by migration.

“Victoria told us her story through grief and tears. Her husband is counted among the ‘desaparecidos’, those migrants who are never heard from again after beginning the long, dangerous journey to the States. Victoria recounted how her husband left their home in order to provide a better life for their daughters. She has not heard from him in eight years and clings desperately to the hope that she will find out what happened to him.”

At another stop in Honduras, the Jesuits visited those who have suffered devastating injuries attempting to migrate to the United States.

“Many hoping to migrate to the United States ride on top of cargo trains.  The train reaches high speeds, with occasional sudden stops, easily causing people to fall. Sometimes, these falls are fatal. Other times, they injure people so badly that it takes years to recover. Meanwhile, their dreams of providing a better life for their families disappear. This is the case of Jose Luis Hernandez.  On the train up North, he suffered a terrible accident, losing one leg, one arm, and four of the fingers from his remaining arm. It has taken him years to recover, not only from the physical wounds, but also from the emotional wounds: the stigma of now being disabled, the shame of returning home with nothing, the sense of being a burden for his family.”

We invite and encourage you to follow this blog during the coming weeks as the Jesuits travel through El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico before entering the United States and stopping in El Paso, Texas and Nogales, Ariz.

In addition, thanks to the magic of Skype, internet cafes and file-sharing, The Jesuit Post, www.thejesuitpost.org  will also be following the journey.   Founded in February of this year, The Jesuit Post was launched by a group of young Jesuits who hope to draw the connection between contemporary culture and spirituality using a language and tone to which young adults can relate.

Fr. Doll, a renowned photographer whose work was featured in National Geographic magazine in 1984 and 1990, has traveled the globe “to tell the stories of people who have no voice.” His ministry began on the plains of South Dakota in the early 1960s while working with the Lakota people on the Rosebud Reservation. He had joined the Jesuit order after graduating from high school in 1955.

“The first week I was there they said, ‘Would you like to learn photography?’

“I said, ‘Sounds like fun.’”

After two years of training and experience in photography, he questioned that choice.

“I went for a walk on the prairie (wondering) ‘What the heck am I going to do as a Jesuit?” the 75-year-old priest reminisced. “I’m not brilliant like some of these guys.”

Feeling he hadn’t taken “a single decent picture after two-and-a-half years,” he suddenly heard a voice inside him say: ‘Stay with the photography, it’s the first thing you love doing, don’t worry if it takes 10 years.’

“It did!” he added with a laugh.

“I see how the Holy Spirit speaks to us in the depths of our hearts and I trust that,” he said. “I don’t hear voices a lot (but) when I have a hunch, I really trust that’s how the Holy Spirit speaks to me. It’s true of every project I’ve taken on.”

Since 1969, Father Doll has worked at Creighton University in Omaha, where he is a professor of journalism. For the last 20 years, he has documented the work of the Jesuit Refugee Service in some 50 countries including India, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Sudan and Rwanda. These assignments, he said, working with “the poorest of the poor” have been close to his heart.

“Jesuits have a mission: Faith doing justice,” he shared, quoting his personal artist statement. “I photograph to tell the stories of people who have no voice. Hopefully, I can help others understand and work to change unjust social structures.”

He often finds himself praying that he can look at people and photograph them “with something of the empathy and understanding that God has for them.”

“Often I’m asked if being a priest affects my photography,” he shared, reflecting on nearly 44 years in the priesthood. “My answer is always: ‘Yes, it has everything to do with it.’”

“For me, it’s hard to separate the creative process of ‘seeing’ from prayer. Both can be contemplative acts.”

To commemorate a half-century in photography, Fr. Doll is working on a book and considering an art exhibit to be on display at the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. For more about Father Doll and to view his work, visit magis.creighton.edu. You can read more about him in this Denver Catholic Register, the newspaper of the Denver diocese, article.

Jesuit Father Tri Dinh was among the thousands fleeing Vietnam at that time. Fearing religious persecution for their Catholic beliefs, Fr. Dinh and his family left Vietnam and resettled in Kansas.

Today, Fr. Dinh is an ecclesial assistant for the Christian Life Community (CLC) at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Christian Life Communities are rooted in Ignatian Spirituality, the guiding principles the Society of Jesus was founded upon, and help students deepen and enrich their faith life. The CLC young adults know Fr. Dinh as “Cha,” which means “Father” in Vietnamese.

In this Ignatian News Network video, Fr. Dinh discusses his work with young adults and how he’s learned to embrace social media and other tools to reach his flock. Showing that he’s conversant with the Millennial generation’s “digital natives” with whom he works, Fr. Dinh can also be found on Twitter at his handle @tdinhsj.

His golden wings gleam. His ruby robe glitters. He looks more like a doll than a dragon slayer.

But the saint is tougher than he seems.

He defeats evil. He grants prayers. With the raised sword fastened to his hand by a rubber band, San Miguel will protect a small remnant of an ancient tribe: a people who have lived here, unseen, for 12 years.

The long-lashed, fiberglass saint is a perfect copy of the one standing in a small church 2,400 miles away. San Miguel is the patron saint of Metlatónoc, a remote mountain town in southwestern Mexico where Richmond’s Mixteco people were born. They may never go home again, so they have brought their saint here, to Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Manchester.

In preparation for the saint’s arrival on this Saturday morning in late July, musicians strike up a song. Women arrive bearing bouquets of roses. A father makes the sign of the cross on his young daughter’s face with a white devotional candle, a veladora. He carries it to the front of the church, sets it in a metal stand and lights it. Other men join him, carrying candles, until the corner glows bright as a bonfire.

Around 10:30, nearly 200 people stand in the shade of a lop-limbed oak. The temperature’s already climbing toward 90 degrees. The Mixtecos sweat in their jeans and their suits and their skirts. The smell of incense mingles with perfume.

And then, it is time.

“Vamos aqui,” Jesuit Father Shay Auerbach says. Come here. Everyone crosses the street to stand outside the Sacred Heart Center, a former school that’s a nonprofit community center. Four men hoist a green canopy on poles to shade the saint. San Miguel appears in the doorway, wobbling on a white litter. Cell phone cameras are held aloft.

Auerbach asks God’s blessing on the saint. “The scripture teaches us that angels always accompany us,” he says first in Spanish, then in English. The statue will remind us, he says, that “the invisible angels guard us and protect us in our daily lives.”

The Mixtecos know what it feels like to be invisible.

There are more than 1,000 of them living in Richmond, clustered in houses off Jefferson Davis Highway. You’ve probably never noticed them. And that’s exactly the way they want it.

“They’re a world unto themselves,” Auerbach says.

The Mixteco are an ancient people. Their true name is the nuu maalsavi: the people of the rain. They bowed, but did not break, under Aztec and then Spanish rule, finding sanctuary in the mountainous regions of what is now south-central Mexico.

Approximately 500,000 Mixtecos live in Mexico and the United States, mostly in California. They speak more than 25 variants of their language, which is many thousands of years old. (Almost impossible to describe, the Mixtec language sounds nothing like Spanish. Subtle changes in tone, or the addition of an accented letter, can alter entirely the meaning of a word.) They make up the third largest native population in Mexico, where there are more than 10 million indigenous people.

The Mixtecos are one of several indigenous Hispanic groups in Richmond, says R. McKenna Brown, executive director of the Global Education Office at Virginia Commonwealth University. There are the Purepecha from the Michoacán region of Mexico, and multiple groups of Mayans. Just the other day, Brown found himself speaking Kaqchikel with a surprised Guatemalan Mayan in a CVS on Midlothian Turnpike. “We are more global and cosmopolitan here than some might imagine,” he says.

Mixteco immigrants have spread across California, Utah, the South and the Pacific Northwest, dispersed as widely as blown dandelions. But their family and town connections remain unbroken, says Arcenio J. Lopez, who is Mixteco and the associate director of the Mixteco/Indigena Community Organizing Project in Ventura County, Calif.

When they leave home, they go “hand by hand,” Lopez says. They tell their friends: “I know this place, let’s go over there. I know how to move, I know how to live over there.” And that’s how 1,000 Mixtecos from one tiny town in Guerrero end up in Richmond.

Rufino Leon was one of the very first to arrive. He came here with a handful of others in 1999, seeking the landscaping work he heard was available in Richmond. After that, “he talked with other people and they all began coming,” Auerbach says, translating for Leon.

Metlatonóc, the remote mountain home of Richmond’s Mixtecos, is one of the poorest places in Mexico. With his hand, Leon traces in the air a winding road, showing how difficult it is to get there. Everyone is devoutly Catholic. Many people speak only Mixteco, not Spanish, and can’t read or write. The houses are adobe and thatch, although in recent years, money sent home has allowed some to build with cinder blocks and concrete. Influenced by their American sisters, women have begun to wear pants.

Leon talks with his relatives by phone, but “no Facebook,” he says. There are no computers in Metlatonóc. “Es tranquilo, porque toda la gente son conocidos,” he says. It’s peaceful, because everyone knows each other.

Mixtecos are perceived by Americans and other Latinos as being secretive, even standoffish. But it’s not because the Mixtecos dislike outsiders.

“We’re coming from very specific rural communities,” Lopez explains. “The only thing we saw is our own people there, and our own life, closed there. So when we’re coming to big cities, and we’re coming to these new worlds for us, it makes us feel afraid. It’s a different culture.

“It makes us feel like, ‘How I’m going to say hello? How I’m going to saycómo estás in Spanish? If I don’t know how to say it, they’re going to start laughing at me.’”

These fears extend to their children. Translating for Leon, Auerbach says “they tell their kids really to stay among themselves, so that there won’t be problems. … You might play a little bit with [other kids], but that’s enough.”

The Mixtecos keep to their own small corner of Richmond. But on this Saturday, they’re stepping out.

To read the full feature, visit the Style Weekly’s website here: [Style Weekly]

Find out more about Fr. O’Sullivan and St. Procopius Parish in the Ignatian News Network video below:

The warlord and his ruthless guerrilla group are responsible for a 26-year campaign of terror in Uganda that has been marked by child abductions and widespread killings. Last year, President Obama dispatched 100 U.S. troops — mostly Army Special Forces — to Central Africa to advise regional forces in their hunt for Kony.

The group running the Kony 2012 campaign is holding a nationwide event today – Friday, April 20 —  titled “Cover the Night,” where supporters are encouraged to spread the word of Kony 2012 around their local communities.

The Society of Jesus, the largest religious order of Roman Catholic priests and brothers in the world, has worked in Uganda for more than 40 years.  The Society’s Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) has conducted peace-building workshops, run schools and economic development projects and ministered to refugees in Uganda. In 2005, the Jesuits of the Eastern Africa Province began planning for a secondary school in northern Uganda, the Ocer Campion Jesuit College in Gulu. The co-educational high school admitted its first students in early 2010 and is already having a tremendously positive impact in a region devastated by over 20 years of civil war. The school will grow to a capacity of 1,200 students and includes agricultural and vocational training as well as rigorous academic formation in the Jesuit tradition, religious formation and peace education.

In this podcast, Jesuit Father Agbonkhianmeghe E. Orobator, the Jesuit provincial of Eastern Africa, speaks with National Jesuit News about the Jesuit’s work in Uganda, the progress that’s been made, the work that still needs to be done and how young people can get involved.

“This is a very obvious frontier because we’re on a border. We’re in a place where there is great suffering and great need, so it makes total sense that the Society of Jesus is here,” said Fr. Carroll.

The work of the Kino Border Initiative is unlike any other; it is an innovative and cooperative effort between six major religious organizations that strives to serve migrants and communities affected by the consequences of deportation.

Check out the video below to learn more about the man behind the collar. You can find out more about Kino’s innovative program assisting migrants and displaced peoples by visiting their website.