Philip Shano, SJ has many years of rich and varied experience working with Ignatian spirituality: teaching, writing and using it in his ministry. He resides in the Jesuit community in Pickering, Ontario.
581 posts
It is customary to abstain from something in Lent. Instead, this Lent I've decided that I'd like to grow in awareness of how my inclusion in the two percent is an invitation for me to act differently in the world. Over the past few months, I've taken to thinking of myself as being in the two percent club. I'm clearly not part of the infamous one percent who are the world's elite and powerful. But, I am among the two percent who have a fairly easy life....
Have you ever wondered about the source of the ashes that we receive on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday? Nowadays, most parishes probably order them from religious goods suppliers. But I'm sure there are still a few parishes and communities that produce them the old-fashioned way. When I was a Jesuit novice in Guelph, Ontario in the late 1970s, the community sacristan was an old Jesuit Brother named Brother Eugene McLaren....
At the end of his blog entry - "Surviving Catastrophe" - Kevin Burns wrote: "What Philip Shano's article on the Restoration of the Jesuits provoked in me, and why I waded through these details, was that in addition to wanting the get the history clear in my mind, I wanted answers to another question. After 41 years of invisibility, how was it that the Society of Jesus managed so quickly to re-establish itself around the world?" . . how did the Ignatian vision live on? Today, Phil Shano, SJ responds to those questions....
Facebook recently celebrated its tenth birthday, thus entering its tween years. Tools such as the networking site have been around long enough that we've started to make judgments about whether this whole new world is healthy or unhealthy. What's it doing to us? I tend to read articles and books about the trends in culture. I know that there's an increasing amount of thought out there on the pluses and minuses of social media. Let me add my two cents! Spoiler alert: I stand with Pope Francis!...
In December 2013, Pope Francis set aside the normal process for canonizing a saint and extended sainthood to Fr. Peter Faber, a Frenchman who was one of the founders of the Society of Jesus. Many people heard the news and probably wondered who he was talking about. Not Jesuits! I'd be willing to bet that if you surveyed every Jesuit and asked about favourite Jesuit saints and blessed, Peter Faber would make the short list. Oh yes! There's no question that we have to include Saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier. But they get enough attention. Peter, too, had an influential role in the origins of the Jesuits....
On February 3, the Church commemorates St. Blaise, a fourth century physician and bishop in Armenia. We know about him mostly because he is the saint invoked in the famous blessing of throats that takes place in many parish communities on February 3. We know more about the widespread devotion to St. Blaise by Christians around the world than we know about the saint himself. There are conflicting versions of stories about his powers to heal....
Most Jesuit provinces have an infirmary for Jesuit priests and brothers who require nursing care and cannot easily live in our more active communities. The Jesuits in English Canada have our infirmary in Pickering, just east of Toronto. René Goupil House is on the grounds of Manresa, a retreat centre, and the La Storta Jesuit Community. Before my present assignment as Superior of the Pickering Jesuits and Director of René Goupil House, I spent five years as novice director at the Jesuit Novitiate in St. Paul, Minnesota. In St. Paul, I was among the oldest members of the community. The novices were mostly young men in their 20s. Here in Pickering, at 57, I am easily the youngest member of the community....
On August 7 of this year, the Jesuits will commemorate the 200th anniversary of our restoration, having been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in July 1773. Clement caved in to pressure from European kings and shut down the Society of Jesus in its entirety. However, two regions of the world refused to be dictated to by Rome. Thus, the Society of Jesus remained alive in Prussia under Frederick the Great and Russia under Catherine the Great. The Jesuits in those regions remained active throughout the suppression....
Whenever I return to the house, I marvel that seven children and three adults could have managed to live there. For a start, it had just one bathroom. The boys shared a bedroom and the girls another. We were all getting ready for school or work at the same time. Perhaps I have a selective memory, but I don't recall any raging fights, just the usual squabbles. Needless to say, there was a lot of sharing and hand-me-downs. How is it that we still manage to get along and we are all healthy! Whenever I deal with the political and social realities of life in Jesuit community and in any ministry, I am grateful that I grew up in a large energetic family where I had to let go of my own ego, because I was just one of seven children....
The year 2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the papal document - Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum - issued by Pope Pius VII on August 7, 1814. This document officially restored the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) which had been supressed forty years earlier in 1773. In the first of a two part series, Philip Shano, SJ looks at the reasons behind the suppression....
