Celebrate

This Mardi Gras season, Loyola University New Orleans has every reason to celebrate. This year’s freshman class, the school’s centennial class of ’12, numbers 695—the largest class to enter since Katrina.

Members of the class of ’09 were just three days into their careers as college students in the fall of ’05 when they and the rest of the university community were forced to evacuate due to Hurricane Katrina.

Those ’05 freshmen, whose first semester as college students were spent everywhere but New Orleans, begin their final semester this January, after another evacuation last fall because of Hurricane Gustav.

Jesuits Murdered in Russia

Jesuits Fr. Victor Betancourt-Ruiz and Fr. Otto Messmer, the provincial of the Jesuits’ Russian region, were found murdered in their Moscow apartment on October 28.

The police investigation remains inconclusive—there is no known motive, but it is thought that Messmer may have been killed a day or more after Betancourt-Ruiz.

A fellow Jesuit living elsewhere became concerned at not having heard from them and discovered their bodies at their apartment when he went to check up on them.

Betancourt-Ruiz, 42, taught theology at the St. Thomas Institute of Philosophy, Theology, and History in Mos-cow. He and Messmer, 47, served at Moscow’s Church of St. Louis de France.

The bodies of Betancourt-Ruiz and Messmer were returned to their home countries of Ecuador and Germany, respectively, for burial.

Jesuit Refugee Service Photo Exhibit Honors Pedro Arrupe

A photo exhibit honoring the work of the Jesuit Refugee Service and the vision of its founder, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ, graced the walls of the JRS offices in Rome in November. The exhibition, titledMan on Fire, closed the year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Arrupe’s birthday.

Photographs in the exhibition traced JRS’s nearly 30-year history and highlighted each aspect of the JRS mission—to accompany, to serve, and to advocate. Today, JRS serves over half a million refugees in 57 countries around the world.

More photos from the exhibit are at www.companymagazine.org/media.

Military Chaplains

Jesuit military chaplains take to the extreme the Jesuit mission of going where the need is great. As chaplain for the Marines’ Regimental Combat Team 5, Commander Fr. Paul Shaughnessy, SJ, travels across 32,000 square miles of Iraq’s Anbar Province by Osprey, helicopter, or land convoy to minister to soldiers. Sometimes his Masses attract over a hundred soldiers; at an outpost on the Syrian border, he once said Mass for just one Marine.

Shaughnessy, on his fourth deployment to Iraq, hopes to go to Afghanistan next. He is joined in Iraq by Fr. Timothy Meier, SJ, who serves with the 142nd Chaplains Detachment of the California Army National Guard in Baghdad. Meier, 52, was commissioned an officer at age 50 and is in his fourth month of active service.

A short Fox News clip that includes Shaughnessy is at www.companymagazine.org/media.

Red Mass

Students and faculty at the University of Detroit Mercy Law School celebrated an annual Red Mass in honor of judges, lawyers, law professors, and others in the legal profession this fall.

The Red Mass, with origins some date to the thirteenth century, is named for the red vestments worn to signify scarlet robes historically worn by judges and lawyers.

Seattle University, Creighton University in Omaha, Loyola University Chicago, and Gonzaga University in Spokane were among other Jesuit schools hosting Red Masses this year.

White House Honor for Jesuit

Fr. John Foley, SJ, received the Presidential Citizens Medal this December for his work in serving the “nation’s most vulnerable youth and [instilling] in them a love of learning,” according to the White House statement. “Through his spiritual leadership of a faith-based education system that partners with the community, he has provided opportunities for young people to achieve their dreams.”

Foley founded the Cristo Rey School in Chicago, whose students, largely from inner-city families, work one day a week with corporate sponsors, gaining work experience and helping make their Catholic high school education affordable.

Foley’s Cristo Rey Network has helped replicate the school in 22 locations across the country; four more Cristo Rey schools are slated to open by 2010.

Since the medals were first awarded in 1969, they have been given to about 100 recipients who have performed “exemplary deeds of service to the nation,” according to the White House.

Foley was waiting outside the Oval Office and was told that someone would let him in, according to a Chicago Tribune story. Foley was surprised when it was the president himself who swung open the door.

Beautiful Music at Loyola University Chicago

The Madonna della Strada Chapel at Loyola University Chicago celebrated the installation of a new pipe organ this fall. The festivities will continue through next October as Loyola celebrates the event with monthly concerts by renowned organists from across the country.

The organ, which features walnut casework and polished tin pipes, was designed to complement the chapel’s newly renovated interior.

You can also hear the organ online: visit www.companymagazine.org/media to listen to a selection from one of the organ’s first performances.

Nativity School in the Czech Republic

The first Nativity school outside the United States opened its doors to ten students this September. The new Jesuit school, located in Děčín, a city in the northern part of the Czech Republic, made national news in a country where only 1 percent of schools are religious.

The idea of Nativity schools is straightforward: to give middle schoolers the education and the discipline they will need to succeed in high school and then to set their sights on college.

The Jesuits’ Bohemian Province had long wanted to establish a ministry in the northern Czech Republic, but finding the right approach proved challenging. Only two Catholic churches serve the 65,000 residents of Děčín, and over 99 percent of the area’s population are not active church members. Czech Jesuits are hopeful that the school will open the way for the growth of new Jesuit ministries across the region.

Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Opera Revived at Boston College

Boston College’s Fr. T. Frank Kennedy, SJ (left), recently revived and produced the Jesuit opera Judicium Salomonis (the Judgment of Solomon), by eighteenth-century French composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, music master at a Jesuit church in Paris.

Kennedy, a music historian and expert on Jesuit music, has restaged several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit operas. Judicium Salomonis was performed in October by an early music group and its conductor, Boston College artist-in-residence John Finney.

Music and scenes from the opera’s rehearsals can be viewed online at www.companymagazine.org/media.

Sacred Music in a Sacred Space

Visitors to New York this winter and spring are in for a treat: the 20th season of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Sacred Music in a Sacred Space will be in full swing. From February through May about two concerts per month will be performed at the church, which features a 53-voice choir, a renowned orchestra, and the largest tracker organ in New York.

Performances will include the chorales from St. Matthew’s Passion and a concert by the Melodia Women’s Choir of New York. For a schedule, directions to St. Ignatius on East 83rd, and to purchase tickets, visit www.smssconcerts.org.

You can listen to a sample from last season’s concert series at www.companymagazine.org/media.

Cardinal Dulles

Jesuit cardinal Avery Dulles, 90, died December 12 in the Bronx. He was the son of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Raised a Presbyterian, Dulles converted to Catholicism while a student at Harvard Law and entered the Society of Jesus in 1946.

A theologian of note, he taught at Woodstock College in Maryland, the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Fordham University in the Bronx.

He was appointed a cardinal in 2001 by Pope John Paul II.

Year of Celebration for Vatican Observatory

This photo of the Helix Nebula is the work of the Jesuit-led Vatican Observatory, an organization with roots that stretch back to the sixteenth century and Pope Gregory XIII. He relied on Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christopher Clavius for the calculations that went into the development of the Gregorian Calendar.

Subsequent popes relied on other Jesuit astronomers, and it was in 1891 that Pope Leo XIII established the Vatican Observatory at the papal palace at Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer palace, and put Jesuits at its head.

The Vatican Observatory will celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, a global celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of a telescope for astronomical observation,

The celebration will include a telescope exhibit at the Vatican Museums featuring antique observational instruments from Galileo’s time to the largest telescopes used today, like the one used to photograph this nebula.

Other events include a study week on astrobiology at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an academic conference on Galileo, and participation in a public outreach project titled “400 years of the telescope.” The Vatican also plans to erect a statue of Galileo inside the city’s walls.

New Postulator General

Fr. Anton Witwer, SJ, of the Austrian Province was appointed the postulator general for the Society of Jesus by superior general Fr. Adolfo Nicolás this November.

Witwer’s primary duty as postulator general is preparing the presentation of Jesuit causes for canonization. He oversees each step of the canonization process, supervising the initial research of a candidate’s life, composing an account of his life, and, if the cause advances far enough, gathering evidence that a miracle can be attributed to intercession by the candidate.

Witwer succeeds Fr. Paolo Molinari, SJ, of Italy, the Jesuits’ postulator general for over 50 years.