Social Apostolate

I entered the Novitiate in Manila in 2003 and at that time I don’t have any other inclination on what particular ministry I will be in except that I was hoping to become a priest someday and might end up in a parish. But little did I know that the apostolate assignments I was given as a novice and as a scholastic would eventually shape my interest and desire to engage in Social Apostolate for the most part of my Jesuit life.

I write this piece on the tenth anniversary of my ordination. Such milestones punctuate our lives. They help us to pause and look back over the paths we’ve trodden. I entered the Jesuit novitiate when I was 31 years old and so brought with me a fair amount of lived experience.

This first plenary meeting of social apostolate Jesuits and collaborators of the Japan and Korea Provinces took place in conjunction with the 2015 Gangjeong Peace Conference. This setting was chosen because 14 Jesuits and collaborators of the Japan Province attended the Peace Conference, and 13 of them stayed for the social apostolate meeting.

Father José Ignacio Arrieta is presently living in the province infirmary of the Jesuits of Venezuela. Now 81 years old, he recalls for us the process by which the social sector took shape in Venezuela around the work of Centro Gumilla:

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.

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.

In the social justice nest I am a cuckoo that leaves its egg and flies away. My ministry has been to teach theology, and more lately to write for Jesuit publications and for Jesuit Social Services.

It is Saturday night, a night for PEACE PRAYER OUTREACH. We are on a prayerful night-walk through the lanes where migrants and trafficked women await customers at Geylang, Singapore. This is an initiative of the Franciscan Missionary of Mary, endorsed by the Association of Major Superiors of Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, to respond to the burning issues of migration and illegal human trafficking, a modern form of slavery.

For last two years I have worked in Centre Avec, the research and social action centre in the South Belgium-Luxembourg province. Our mission is to raise the public's awareness of social issues of a local and global nature, giving people the means of working towards a more just society.