The Word That Clamors Jesuit Poetry That Reflects the Spiritual Exercises

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.Just a year ago, in the May 1997 issue of STUDIES I had mentioned the Review of Ignatian Spirituality, edited from Rome by Joseph Tetlow, S.J., as "an international forum on the spirituality rooted in the Spiritual Exercises."The most recent issue has a special article that fully lives up to that concern for the Exercises and to the inter- nationality of the enterprise as well.Its rather commonplace title, "Notes for the One Giving Exercises," conceals a very informative and perceptive series of findings on four central questions about the Exercises that a panel of experienced directors and consultants from around the world arrived at during their meeting in Rome lastFebruary.The four questions read as follows: "Whom are we inviting to make Exer- cises?What are we offering them?What do we expect to happen?What actually happens?"The participants came from Brazil, Germany, Canada, the United States, Poland, the Philippines, Italy, India, and the Congo.You may be surprised at and you will surely be enlightened by this brief, eleven-page article.The Review can be reached at the Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality / CP 6139/ 00195 Rome Prati/ Italy.The telephone number is 39-6-689-77-384 and the fax 39-6-687-92-83.(No, I have not omitted a last digit on the fax number; it is just one of the idiosyncrasies of the Italian telephone system.)Also last year, in an earlier STUDIES I had referred to a particular book as one that "every once in a while . . .comes along that opens up a whole new line of thought and interpretation."Here is another such book, Landmarking: City, Churchand Jesuit Urban Strategy by

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