The Word That Clamors Jesuit Poetry That Reflects the Spiritual Exercises

As examples of the more unusual, consider the following three missives from recent weeks.The first is a serious advertisement for a book that uses eight biblical texts and midrash to retell stories of several women in the Bible.The idea and the subtitle of the book, Biblical Women, Irreverent Laughter, and Righteous Rage, are arresting; but what surely attracts the most attention is the title itself, Spiritual Lemons.In the second example, a person at a state correctional facility writes to offer to become "an asset to the Jesuit/Catholic faith by being a spy/decoy/undercover worker to further the cause of same , to use the means ... to fact-gather on religious, political, etc.dissidents and so-forth, and report via various subversive means."The writer also offers to give speeches in Catholic churches and other institutions "about how the Virgin Mary via her faithful, obedient servants 'on the streets' helped me to receive my freedom."The third piece of mail, several printed pages, brought the news that besides being "the mother of God and the mother of Christ," the Blessed Virgin Mary is also the "Spouse of Christ" and the "Spouse of the Holy Ghost" and the latter "conforms also to the natural law."On a completely different note, I have regularly called attention in these com- ments to various Jesuit anniversaries.This year, 1998, and this month of May bring such an anniversary, one especially important for the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus and through it for the American Assistancy.On May 31, 1823, one hundred and seventy-five years ago, what became the Missouri Province came into existence when seven Belgian novices, two priests, and three brothers stepped ashore at St. Louis on the Mission Bank of the Mississippi River.They had started their journey on April 11, walked the "National Pike," the old Cumberland Road from Maryland to the Ohio River at Wheeling, traveled down the Ohio by flatboat to Shawnee- town in Illinois, and then tramped across southern Illinois, covering an average of twenty-five miles a day, until they reached St. Louis.From there began what came to be a province that at one time stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border and from the Appalachian Mountains to beyond the Rockies.At one time the province included territory that is now part of seven of the ten United States prov- inces.From the original Missouri Province, in the course of successive divisions through the years came the Chicago, the Wisconsin, and the Detroit Provinces.To- day those four provinces have a membership of 1,171 Jesuits, almost one third of all the United States Jesuits, with nine colleges and universities, ten retreat houses and spiritual centers, twenty-two parishes, eighteen high schools or middle schools, sev- eral domestic missions, and formal province institutional commitments in many other lands, not to mention numerous other corporate and individual apostolic works.Ad multos annos!Another anniversary, this one international.Exactly four hundred and fifty years ago this year, the Society of Jesus began its apostolic work in Africa.Simao Rodri- gues, one of the first companions and at the time provincial of Portugal, sent four Portuguese Jesuits to what was then called the Kingdom of Kongo.They landed in Africa on March 18, 1548.Among their earliest works were the first catechisms in the indigenous languages and, within a generation, a college at Luanda, today the in capital of Angola.Father General has written a letter to the members of the Portu- guese Province and the African Assistancy to commemorate the occasion.

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