Archive for the ‘Pastoral Ministry’ Category

When Jesuit Father Mike Kennedy was pastor of Dolores Mission, located in the barrio of East Los Angeles, he witnessed firsthand the impact to the community of having so many of its youth facing life without parole. After serving as pastor from 1994 to 2007, Fr. Kennedy left Dolores Mission to start the Jesuit Restorative Justice Initiative (JRJI) to provide support and hope to juveniles with life sentences.

Through the Spiritual Exercise of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a series of meditative prayers helping people find God in their everyday experiences, the Jesuit Restorative Justice Initiative provides tools that allow prisoners to find healing and forgiveness and to recognize their lives have meaning and purpose. As JRJI’s Executive Director, Fr. Kennedy also reaches out to victims and their families to provide support and healing. The group’s advocacy outreach from its headquarters in Culver City, Calif., includes mobilizing communities to transform the justice system from one that is solely punitive to one that is restorative.  Fr. Kennedy has been recognized for JRJI’s efforts to transform the lives of incarcerated youth, their families and communities by the California Chief of Probation Officers and the City of Los Angeles.

In this Ignatian News Network video piece below, you can find out more about Fr. Kennedy and the work of the Jesuit Restorative Justice Initiative to bring hope to Los Angeles’ incarcerated juveniles:

Jesuit Father Harold Rahm learned long ago the value of staying close to the people.

In El Paso, his first assignment in his native Texas, Fr. Rahm celebrated Mass in people’s backyards. He prayed the rosary on street corners and ministered to those on bread lines. He got his foot in the door of residents’ homes by asking to use the phone. And, he rode a bicycle to talk and play with street kids in his battle to eliminate youth gangs.

During his 14 years in El Paso, Fr. Rahm was fondly known as the “Bicycle Padre,” and says he learned to work with the people and the laity. South El Paso was ruled by gangs in those days, so he and his team worked with schools, founded clubs, and built a youth center. They engaged adolescents in sports, music, bands and theater, offering free lunches and daily ice cream. As the teens grew up, he said, they did not join the gangs.

Over the last nearly 50 years, Father Rahm used similar techniques to reach out to the abandoned, the poor, the addicted and the desperate of Brazil, where he lives and works today.

Fr. Rahm, now 93, spends his days directing “Christian Yoga” retreats aimed at helping people use their senses and meditation to form a union with God.

“I endeavor to do my little part to serve the poor and those especially in need, both financially and spiritually,” he said.

When Fr. Rahm arrived in Brazil, he set out to find priests and scholastics to staff the Centro Kennedy mission in São Paulo, which worked to improve lives through education and human development.  He and his team worked with alcoholics and drug addicts and founded Amor-Exigente or Tough Love, which now has 10,000 volunteers serving 200,000 people each month throughout Latin America.

Today, a center in his name in Campinas, Brazil, Instituçào Padre Haroldo, offers several programs for the therapeutic treatment of alcoholics and drug addicts. He said the treatment involves learning new values, behaviors, skills, habits and responsibilities in order to integrate back into society.

He also started the Pastoral Sobriety, the search for sobriety as a way of life, and has ministered to prostitutes and street children.

“I would like to stress that I only founded these movements,” Fr. Rahm said. “It is evident that the wonderful Brazilian people and leaders direct and work in them. I personally should not receive the credit. “

Fr. Rahm has written books on spirituality, addiction and his experience with gangs. For more information on the Instituçào Padre Haroldo, visit www.padreharoldo.org.br.

This article by Brooke Iglesias originally appeared in Southern Jesuit Magazine. To download the full magazine, please click here.

Jesuit priests and brothers work with deacons, religious women and laity in more than 70 parishes throughout the United States. These churches are located in a variety of diverse locations; from inner-city neighborhoods, in business districts and suburbs, to the country and rural areas, and on Native American reservations.

For the Jesuits who minister at the nine parishes in California, their diverse experiences of providing pastoral counseling and spiritual guidance to their parishioners is no less striking. From the palm tree lined Sunset Boulevard location of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Hollywood to Most Holy Trinity’s placement in Silicon Valley to Dolores Mission Parish’s impact on its East L.A. neighborhood, three California parish priests, Jesuit Fathers Mike Mandala, Eduardo Samaniego and Scott Santarosa, find themselves in very different locations but share a commonality of helping parishioners experience their faith and reverence to God.

In the video below, they express what makes these Jesuit parishes unique and how they serve their communities and enrich their parishioners’ faith lives.

Interested in joining a Jesuit parish yourself? View a list of Jesuit parishes in the U.S.

A native of Sacramento, Jesuit Father Scott Santarosa, experienced the Jesuits at an early age, first as a high school student at Jesuit High School in Sacramento. Fr. Santarosa credits the care and attention of the Jesuits and lay faculty of Jesuit High in moving him to continue his Jesuit education at Santa Clara University, where he graduated in Civil Engineering in 1988.

Still not having enough of the “Jesuit thing,” he decided to do a year of volunteer work with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where he ran an after-school program for youth in Newark, New Jersey. Following his year as a Jesuit volunteer, he went one step further, and joined the Jesuits in the summer of 1989.

His Jesuit life has taken him to the Bronx, New York for philosophy studies; Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose for three years of teaching; Berkeley and Mexico City for theology studies and pastoral ministry. Currently, Santarosa is the pastor at Dolores Mission parish, a small but vibrant Jesuit parish in the lowest income section of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. He served there as a newly ordained priest back in 2000 where the good parishioners there taught him how to be a priest. His time there planted the seed of desire to do parish work, so he is happy to be there now full-time, doing pastoral work, much of it in Spanish. He feels humbled and grateful to see God in the people of that community.

Ignatian News Network met up with Fr. Santarosa to learn more about the man behind the collar.

Jesuit Father Chris Rupert brings a systematic mind to prayer. // Photo by Michael Swan

Believers in every religion and through every century of human history have done something they can’t quite describe, justify or do without. They pray.

They may meditate, contemplate, recite, babble or immerse themselves in silence. They may seek solitude or seek company to pray with others. They may follow the rules of a liturgy, improvise or seek a simple, direct encounter with God.