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.

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:

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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.

Very commonly, retreatants report a mild depression. They know that they are getting nowhere, sunk in consumerism. People find the same help that Ignatius found in feeling a sense of moving along, of getting somewhere. Ignatius organized the Exercises for that purpose, “to make progress.”

Before all else, Ignatius found that he needed Jesus Christ. He needed to know Jesus of Nazareth more clearly, love Him more dearly and follow Him more nearly. So the Spiritual Exercises begin, continue and end in Christ Jesus. The Principle and Foundation, we are learning, tell us to “praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord Jesus Christ.” Think what it means that the first colloquy in the whole thirty day retreat has us stand beneath the Cross and ask Jesus how He came to be there instead of us. We ask ourselves what we have done for Him, are doing, and will do, for Him.

Listening to people, you find out that we need that focus today. Our fussing about conservative and liberal, about liturgy and others’ sins, fades into hot air and fog when we stand under His Cross. That is what I had to learn and that is what the Exercises free us to feel.

We struggled with this for a while after Vatican II. We got serious about studying the text of the Spiritual Exercises and had to sort out what was authentic and what was not. We forgot that, at the beginning, there was no text. Ignatius and his companions, and a lot of lay people whom they helped, were giving Exercises for two decades before Ignatius ever published his text. And all this while, wave after wave of retreatants passed on the Exercises with nothing but their own guided experiences and whatever notes they had kept.

We had to learn this: the Spiritual Exercises are first of all an orderly, disciplined way of coming to know what God intends in and through us. They are a specific kind of experience of God in Christ. They are the living spirit of every Jesuit and now of many, many lay colleagues as well. They are the way we follow and pass on – a way to Jesus Christ, to know Him more clearly, love Him more dearly and follow Him more nearly – and each person to whom we pass that on makes the Reign of Christ stronger and deeper in this secular world.

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.

For years at The Lord’s Ranch, crops were grown and livestock were raised to provide food for the poor of Juarez, but eventually it was discerned in prayer by its resident volunteers that such was not as practical as accepting contributions from local wholesalers and purchasing whatever else was needed at the markets in Juarez for weekly distribution. In this way the volunteers living at the ranch are available for ministries that were developing in both El Paso and Juarez.

Over the years, four centers have developed for the weekly food distribution and other services to meet the spiritual and material needs in different areas of Juarez. The first began at the garbage dump itself. When the dump was moved to another site, the people of the neighborhood began to build on the old site, concrete block by concrete block, a center for the services provided: not just food distribution, but volunteer medical and dental care, a pharmacy, nursery for the children, and religious and spiritual formation for those of all ages. Volunteers now come from both Juarez and El Paso, and no service is rendered or received without prayer and the desire to fulfill God’s will. Misión Espíritu Santo is the fitting name of the old dump, with true new life abundantly available. As the Misión matured with its own volunteers and patrons, a new center called The Lord’s Food Bank was opened in the expanding western periphery of Juarez. A large vacant area was made available, and the now-experienced community of volunteers shifted their time and energies to this new challenge, where storehouse, clinic, pharmacy, chapel, classroom, nursery and prayer now provide for the spiritual and urgent needs of the poorest. Another newer center, Las Alitas, has recently been initiated on the southeastern extension of Juarez in an area where electricity has arrived, but not yet water – only the Living Water of the Word, with Love. And, the fourth location for prayer and food distribution has been established at a parish church, Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles.

Las Alas – still officially OLYC – is a prayer center with its own weekly schedule of spiritual training, prayer for healing, occasional workshops, seminars and conferences. It also serves as home base for the volunteers’ almost daily visit to Juarez, the storage area for supplies, and the offices coordinating the ever-expanding number of ministries.

My own work as a member of this faith community is saying Mass weekly with all the Juarez communities served, hearing confessions before and after Mass, visiting the sick and incarcerated prisoners with the volunteers and doing all I can to encourage, strengthen and console the volunteers themselves. The most enriching part of my experience is being immersed in the goodness and faith of simple, poor people who draw their strength purely from their love of God and His for them. All they have is their faith, and because the Word of God congregates people around it, we don’t “give out” to the poor. We share with them. And, it is good to think that, God willing, I will spend the rest of my priestly ministry among them.

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.”

Miguel Pro’s mischievous character and funny bone were among his greatest gifts – gifts that enabled his ministry inMexicoeven when it was outlawed. As a scholastic, he was forced out of his homeland during government-imposed religious suppression, returning 12 years later as a priest during the Cristiada, the rebellion of Catholics against Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles. The Cristiada escalated to such dangerous heights that priests were exiled and Catholic bishops elected to halt public worship in Mexico, a decision approved by Pope Pius XI, who himself condemned, in two encyclicals, the Mexican government’s persecution and murder of Catholics.

Through all this, Pro considered his re-admittance into the country a miracle. No one examined his passport or searched his bags. Upon arrival inMexico City, he realized that Catholics were starved for communion, leading him to create “Eucharistic Stations” throughout the city where he distributed daily communion to as many as 300 people and on First Fridays to well over 1,000 faithful souls.

He administered the sacraments in secrecy and in disguise, donning the clothes of a cab driver or a mechanic to share the Spiritual Exercises or to perform baptisms and wearing a business suit to solicit donations from wealthy Catholics or to celebrate marriages. Under the long nose of local government, he impersonated a prison guard to hear confessions and pray with prisoners. He was always on the move, and though he received messages and donations in a variety of locations, the police were never far behind.

Pro’s own writing tells of an occasion when police entered a private home as he celebrated Mass; after rushing everyone into other rooms of the house, he hid the Blessed Sacrament in his suit pocket. He accompanied police on their search for a priest and when none was found, a guard was posted at the door of the residence. Upon his exit, a jovial Pro informed the guard that he would have remained behind to catch the priest were it not for a date with his girlfriend. Jesting about the near snare, he later wrote, “…I returned to the place, but, somehow or other, the priest had not yet appeared…”

On another occasion, Pro approached a house to celebrate Mass but was met by two policemen standing guard at its entrance. “It’s all up this time,” he wrote in recollection of the confrontation. He knew entering the house was dangerous, but he would not submit to fear. “With as much coolness as I could summon up,” he wrote, “I advanced until I stood in front

of the policemen, took down the number of the house, opened my vest as if I were showing them a badge, and said significantly, ‘There’s a cat bagged here,’” insinuating that he was on the case of busting up the Mass. His clever ruse earned a military salute from the policemen and entrance into the guarded house. Once inside, he tried to ease the fears of his Mass participants, informing them that, “We couldn’t be any safer than we are now, for the police themselves are guarding the door for us.” It did not relieve their fears, and they urged him to leave. “I left by the way I entered,” he wrote, but “not without receiving two magnificent military salutes from the police.”

They caught him on several occasions, however, and Pro was imprisoned for short stints which had the unintended consequence of greatly aiding his prison ministry. By his own account he witnessed the conversion of many hearts, which inspired him to continue his work despite great peril, and he pressed on to promote the faith. As “chief of the lecturers” for the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth, Pro organized over 100 men to give religious instruction in the absence of the many exiled priests and to help combat anti-Catholic sentiment. His brother Humberto Pro was a member of the group, as was Louis Segura Vilchis, an engineer who was among the association’s best speakers. “The first to suffer will be those who have put their hands into the religious question, and I have put mine in up to the elbows,” Pro wrote. “God grant that I may be among the first, or, for that matter, among the last; but at least one of the number. If that happens, get ready to make your petitions to me in Heaven.”

The three men were arrested on November 17, 1927, and charged with the attempted assassination of former president General Álvaro Obregón, who days earlier was injured when a bomb was tossed into his vehicle. The attempt was linked to a car formerly owned by the Pros. Obregón himself suspected someone else in the assassination attempt, and at his request an appeal was made to the chief of police to begin the judicial process immediately. He was assured by the chief’s secretary that a trial would be held the following day.

The next morning in the courtyard of police headquarters, however, a firing squad awaited the Pro brothers and Vilchis. The deception was carefully orchestrated at the request of President Calles who had made the execution request to the chief of police six months prior. Professional photographers were on hand to document the executions. No time was spared for the men to see their families, and Fr. Miguel Pro was summoned first. He forgave and blessed his prison guard and once in the courtyard, he knelt for a brief prayer and blessed his executioners. Without a blindfold and with a crucifix in one hand and his rosary in the other, he outstretched his arms and exclaimed, “Viva Cristo Rey!” (Long Live Christ the King!) He was 36 years old.

The same fate awaited Pro’s brother Humberto and their brother in Christ Louis Segura Vilchis. Later, at the vigil held in the Pro home, countless people paid respects to their courageous friends. The following afternoon, thousands flooded the streets in anticipation of Pro’s funeral, and when the remains of the Pro brothers were carried out of their father’s house toDeloresCemetery, it was to tremendous shouts of “Viva Cristo Rey!”

Shortly after Pro’s death, relics were reported to have worked miracles, and his intercession has been credited with curing terminal illnesses and conquering

addictions. But his ministry itself was a miracle – a single year of priestly ministry that encouraged countless Mexican Catholics to persevere in their faith.

Fr. Pro’s ministry and martyrdom occurred at the height of the Cristiada, and the effects of Calles’ ruthless pursuit of Catholics were devastating to the Church. It is estimated that as many as 4,000 priests were exiled or killed during his term. And after a so-called truce with countrymen, the Calles regime is alleged to have executed thousands more for their defense and practice of the faith.

Fr. Miguel Pro was beatified on September 25, 1988, by Pope John Paul II who said, “Neither suffering nor serious illness, neither the exhausting ministerial activity, frequently carried out in difficult and dangerous circumstances, could stifle the radiating and contagious joy which he brought to his life for Christ and which nothing could take away. Indeed, the deepest root of self-sacrificing surrender for the lowly was his passionate love for Jesus Christ and his ardent desire to be conformed to him, even unto death.”

Blessed Miguel Pro is most remembered as a martyr, but his inspiring life was that of an amiable man for others, a Jesuit confirmed in his vocation, armed only with his gift of humor and a courageous heart. Ending his reflection on Fr. Pro’s admirable life and death, Fr. Druhan penned, “And if in the course of this article undue stress appears to have been placed on the purely human and natural traits of the man and the priest, it is because we have wished to show that a heroic life is not infrequently hidden behind a smiling countenance.”

Today, O’Connell finds himself ministering to a congregation that is largely compromised of Filipinos who live in Jordan as domestic workers. He recognizes the challenge of being foreigners working in a land very different from their own, as he is doing the same, and he helps provide spiritual support to them while they are far away from their families and homeland. “Suddenly, I found myself, with my Asian population, as a missionary here,” explains O’Connell. “I’ve had to develop this more welcoming attitude and I think it’s been good for me as a person. And that’s a Jesuit thing – we have to learn to adapt to the needs of the local community.”

In the video piece below, Fr. O’Connell discusses his ministry in Jordan:

Today, O’Connell finds himself ministering to a congregation that is largely compromised of Filipinos who live in Jordan as domestic workers. He recognizes the challenge of being foreigners working in a land very different from their own, as he is doing the same, and he helps provide spiritual support to them while they are far away from their families and homeland. “Suddenly, I found myself, with my Asian population, as a missionary here,” explains O’Connell. “I’ve had to develop this more welcoming attitude and I think it’s been good for me as a person. And that’s a Jesuit thing – we have to learn to adapt to the needs of the local community.”

In the video piece below, Fr. O’Connell discusses his ministry in Jordan:

You can watch it here:

You can watch it here:

Jesuit Brother Jim Boynton stands amid the remains of the Eglise Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart Church) in Downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Jesuit Brother Jim Boynton was missioned in late 2009 to Haiti to serve refugees through the Jesuit-founded Foi et Joie (Faith and Joy) school system. When the devastating earthquake hit the small Caribbean island nation on January 12, 2010, Br. Boyton answered the call to lead an emergency medical response team in the weeks following in Port-au-Prince.  Today, Jesuits continue to provide support in the dire situation that is Haiti a year after the natural disaster struck and continue to stand in solidarity with the people of Haiti during their time of need.

National Jesuit News spoke with Boynton about his experiences in Haiti during its monthly podcast series. You can listen to the interview with Boynton below: