SJES ROME

Prayer at the Summit takes place 13 kilometers from Santa María Chiquimula, on Guatemala’s high plateau. It is a sign that it is still possible to keep hope alive for peace in Guatemala.

Her childhood dream was to become a medical doctor. However, like the dreams of many Cambodian children of her generation, it was cut short by the brutality of the civil war which devastated much of the country.

Martin Luther King’s speeches gave release to the yearnings of a people for freedom from a tortuous history of oppression in the United States. The martyrdom of the poor and their church leaders in Latin America helped to bring down structures that kept the rich, rich and the poor, poor.

My arrival in Paraguay in 1986, shortly after my ordination in Dublin, coincided with the release of ‘The Mission’, a film about the Jesuit Reductions, in which Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons heroically confront the injustices inflicted on the indigenous Guaraní people.

I am deeply concerned about the way the International Criminal Court (ICC) has so far handled the Kenya case in which the President, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his Deputy, William Ruto, together with a journalist Joseph Sang, stand accused of bearing the greatest responsibility for the Kenya 2007-08 post-election violence.

My work with refugees has led me back to a personal experience of loss. When I was a child, my family had a farm in Saguenay region (East Quebec), and later on we had to move to the city.

From the moment I was assigned to study theology in Brazil, I knew that it was going to be a challenge: a new culture, a new language, a new way of being Jesuit. And I wasn’t wrong. The first months were difficult and unsettling.

As an earnest young scholastic, and later, as a young priest in Gujarat Province, India, I was reflecting on how to make my commitment more meaningful, in keeping with the magis, 'the fire' of a Jesuit. Finding meaning in my call and articulating it in my own way has been a long struggle.

I have been involved in the broadly defined social apostolate from the time I studied philosophy during formation. I worked in a shelter for homeless women in Krakow, and later did my regency at the Jesuit Refugee Service in Berlin.

In April, as part of a three-week seminar on Catholic social teaching, my Jesuit novitiate visited the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola Prison. Though in the past I worked for a program that assists recently released prisoners, until this day, I had not interacted with the permanently incarcerated.