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Last week, a group of young Jesuits launched a new website called The Jesuit Post.  Content will range range widely, with hopes of covering  ”Jesus, politics, and pop-culture…the Catholic Church, sports, and Socrates.”

The first set of articles include pieces on Dr. Who, the New Translation of the Romal Missal, Tim Tebow, yoga, Paula Deen, and health care reform.

“It’s about making the case for God (better: letting God make the case for Himself) in our secular age,” says editor-in-chief (and Jesuit) Patrick Gilger.

To check out the Jesuit Post, they can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Loyola Productions, a Jesuit-sponsored film production house in Los Angeles, has recently launched a YouTube channel dedicated to promoting the works and mission of the Society of Jesus.

Ignatian News Network (INN) will tell the stories that inspire, inform and spread the word about the people in and around Jesuit ministries and institutions. These short videos, many featuring biographical profiles of Jesuits, will give a distinctive Ignatian lens to news and happenings across the U.S.

National Jesuit News will be featuring upcoming INN videos right here. You can also subscribe to the INN YouTube channel and check out this promo piece below:

Jesuit Father Joseph Tetlow is the director of Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House in Lake Dallas, Texas where he gives retreats, workshops and writes. Before his came to Montserrat, Fr. Tetlow spent several years in Rome as head of the Jesuit General’s Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality, guiding the efforts of 250 Jesuit retreat houses.

Widely considered one of the Jesuits’ leading authorities on spiritual direction, Tetlow recently wrote this piece for the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus’ magazine Southern Jesuit. You can read more article about the work of the Jesuits of the New Orleans Province by visiting Southern Jesuit‘s online magazine.

I really began listening to what people need when I was ordained in 1960. I was sent to the Cenacle Retreat House in New Orleans to give a weekend retreat. When I got there, Sr. Margaret Byrne, R.C., asked me what I wanted to do. Actually, she knew what needed to be done a lot better than I did, and she patiently helped me learn.

What I learned is this: my need of grace and yearning for God are gifts to be shared; they are not for me, alone. The prayers and desires given to me are not just for me. They are also for all to whom God sends me.

Realizing that gave me an insight into the Spiritual Exercises. They were created by St. Ignatius because he needed them. During his recovery from a battle wound, he began to experience “spirits” – joy when he thought about God, misery when he thought about being famous and powerful. How was he to understand these “spirits?” He needed order and method in his praying and desiring that would give him a sense of making progress. His needs, in God’s design, are also felt by all of Christ’s followers. We all feel, in a vague sort of way, the need for order and progress, and we are helped as Ignatius was by learning about discernment.

Guided by the Holy Spirit, he organized the prayers and desires into Spiritual Exercises, and as the Holy Spirit brought him clarity of mind and heart, the Spirit also opened his eyes to other people’s need for the same things. So Ignatius began sharing his spiritual experiences. At first, he went too far: the illiterate people of Manresa were not helped by tales of mystical experiences of the Trinity.

So Ignatius had to listen. And like him, I had to learn about others’ needs. Some need solid instruction. Some need a way to reform a life that has gone bad. Some need to hear what God wants with their whole lives. You find, when you listen to enough men and women today, that we all feel this same broad range of needs.

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St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, always envisioned Jesuits and their partners as being “contemplatives in action.” He asked his first companions to reflect and pray in order to detect the presence of God in their lives. Then, through discerning Christ’s call, to carry out His mission through action.

Jesuit Father Jack Vessels has been called to the border of Texas and Mexico as the chaplain of the Sacred Heart Parish in El Paso. Before coming there, he was missioned to Brazil for over 20 years then headed to Rome to become the international leader of the Apostleship of Prayer, whose mission it is to encourage people to pray daily for the Church and for the pope’s intentions.

Today, Fr. Vessels says Mass daily at the parish, and many times at the parish’s food banks in Juarez, Mexico, the Our Lady’s Youth Center (OLYC) community, and at the Lord’s Ranch in New Mexico. He hears confessions for many hours each week and goes to the homes of the sick and elderly to give them the sacrament of the sick.

Vessels recently wrote this piece for the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus’ magazine Southern Jesuit on the work of the Our Lady’s Youth Center with the poor  who live along the border of Texas and Mexico — both in El Paso and across the Rio Grande river in Juarez, Mexico. You can read more article about the work of the Jesuits of the New Orleans Province by visiting Southern Jesuit’s online magazine.

Two years ago, because of my fluency in Spanish and my experience in the formation of ecclesial communities in Brazil, I was assigned to Sacred Heart Parish in El Paso to assist in the work of Our Lady’s Youth Center and at The Lord’s Ranch which is in Vado, New Mexico, just across the state line from El Paso. It serves as residence for several volunteers who have dedicated their lives to feeding and serving the poor on the border. It also serves as a guest house for volunteers who occasionally return to assist in the community’s ministries or to spend time in restful reflection.

Truly ecclesial and international, the Our Lady’s Youth Center (OLYC) community – now known as Las Alas or “The Wings” – is a community of contemplatives in action: by faith, united in prayer and action; no prayer without action, and no action without prayer! Through service to the poor, both volunteer residents and visitors contribute to the life of the universal Church in the three particular churches where it serves: El Paso, Texas; Juarez, Mexico; and Las Cruces, New Mexico.

“Go to the poor,” Christ told the OLYC community in its group discernment of scripture. It was across the Rio Grande in Juarez that the cry of the poor was most demanding, where well over a million people lived in poverty worse than any experienced in El Paso. Many of the members of the community were bilingual, with friends and relatives living in Juarez. They went “to see,” confident the Holy Spirit would enlighten their vision. Visiting the city’s municipal garbage dump, they found the poorest of the poor, feeding themselves and their children, sleeping in shelters made from trash, collecting whatever might be usable and sellable on the streets. Praying and discerning Christ’s words, “…when you have a banquet, invite the poor…,” (Luke 14:13) the community did just that at the dump on Christmas Day of 1972, often remembered as “the miracle of Juarez” because of the inexplicable multiplication of food that day, and they have been going back weekly ever since.

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“A joyful heart is a good medicine,” reads Proverbs, and Blessed Miguel Pro would know. For years, the Jesuit martyr grappled with debilitating stomach problems that not even a series of surgeries could remedy. And during his convalescence in December 1925, he celebrated Christmas with Jesuit Father John J. Druhan, then a New Orleans Province scholastic, in a Belgian hospital. Pro was just 34 years old at the time, Druhan 32.

The two Jesuits, having met the previous year in the Belgian house of studies, had an easy rapport, and Fr. Druhan wrote that “…Pro’s quips and pranks and infectious good humor spoke all languages with equal fluency.” Pro spoke American slang in his Mexican accent, Druhan said, and he liked to sing popular songs, particularly “random bars of a song which was quite popular during the war and in which a doughboy pledged a tryst with a certain Katherine while the moon was shining over the cowshed.”

Though their Christmas celebration was hampered by illness, Druhan and the newly ordained young Jesuit entertained themselves with a camera; Druhan captured a pensive Pro reading a commentary on Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. “The exposure was so long that the subject confessed he nearly ruptured his inner sutures,” Druhan wrote, “A month later the developed picture and print proved that the foolhardy virtue of amateur photographers sometimes brings its own reward.”

The invaluable discoveries of this rare photograph of Pro and Druhan’s account of their time together are credited to Joan Gaulene, volunteer for the New Orleans Province Archive at Loyola University New Orleans.

“I picked up a negative in Druhan’s box and put it aside thinking it was him, but the last item in his box was this writing about his time with Miguel Pro,” she recounts. Druhan’s reflection, Side Lights on Father Miguel Pro, S.J., is five pages in length, typed with proof marks and signed by its author. It reveals their storytelling and the “tricks and jokes” by which Pro entertained and eventually convinced the sisters of the hospital that he was “well enough to resume the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice.”

Realizing the subject of the negative was Blessed Miguel Pro, Gaulene contacted the province archivist, Jesuit Father William Huete, who says of these newfound treasures, “Druhan’s account shows us Pro was a modern person. He was disarming.” It was because of this, Gaulene adds, that “he was able to pull off all sorts of things.”

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