The Annuary of the Jesuits for 2003
At the four corners of the world
The Annuary of the Jesuits for 2003
by Gianni Valente
The Annuary of the Jesuits for 2003
Leafing through the 160 illustrated pages, one comes across an anthological sequence of the variety of stories, enterprises and initiatives that flourish at the four corners of the world, resulting from that «group of friends in the Lord», as Ignatius and Francis Xavier described the Society. One goes from the publication of the Gran Ricci Chinese-French dictionary, the largest in a western language, printed in 2002, to the Frontier House between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where the Jesuits have set up the “Solidaridad Fronteriza” center to help Haitian clandestine immigrants. One comes across Father Federico, who once a week gathers children from the parish of Onoda in Japan «to listen to the story of Jesus», or Doctor Dominique Peccoud, who spends his Jesuit vocation working in Geneva as special counselor in the direction of the International Office for Labor, the United Nations body that deals with the international norms for labor and that adopted the principles of the encyclical Rerum novarum from its foundation.
Numerous articles dwell on the urban vocation in the Jesuit tradition. Ignatius of Loyola himself ordained that Jesuits’ houses be sited in the heart of the city, where life-styles and cultural patterns are born and change and where today, as Father de Vera remarks in his introduction, «the sound of the bells calling people to prayer has died away». To give an example, the City Service Team that works in Camden, the second poorest city in the United States, still follows Ignatius’s indication with creative fidelity. In the decay of the Hispanic and Afro-American ghettos, real fourth-world islands in the heart of opulence, the group of Jesuits centered on the Holy Name parish provides imaginative alternatives to the devastating social deprivation, from medical care and legal aid for the unprotected to computer courses for youngsters at risk. As has so often happened in the history of the Jesuits, there too witness to Jesus Christ takes the form of speaking and doing quite other things.
In the final pages, the section called “Testimonies” tells the story of Father Luis Ruiz Suárez, volcanic “deus ex machina” of the Casa Ricci in Macao, who, after decades working to help Chinese and Vietnamese refugees, since 1985 has been co-ordinating the opening of aid centers for lepers that have rapidly multiplied throughout continental China (see interview with Father Kolvenbach). And has only one worry about the near future: he’s soon going to be ninety and the traffic police have told him he’s going to have to leave in the garage the scooter he’s been using to go up and down the steep slopes of Macao.