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From 5th to 8th December over 100 people from 70 countries gathered at the Jesuit General Curia in Rome for a Conference called “Apostolic Planing for Renewal and transformation”.
Nearly half a millennium has passed since its foundation, but passion, vitality and a sense of renewal beat strongly in the heart of the Society of Jesus, and flow into all aspects of its life and mission, as new energy is injected into the formulation of Provincial apostolic plans throughout the world.
“How much the Society will accomplish if only we unite our forces, and in a spirit of oneness, gird ourselves humbly and resolutely for the work before us!” Fr. General Jean-Baptiste Janssens 1949
Advantere School of Management was born and exists as a collaborative project promoted by Pontifical University Comillas and University of Deusto, with the collaboration of Georgetown University as a strategic academic partner.
Our schools must respond simultaneously to different levels of responsibility and agency. Jesuit schools are locally rooted and enculturated within the local reality that surrounds them. But our schools also need to respond to their national/provincial and broader regional context and more recently to the broadest global context. I will concentrate my reflection on this latter aspect: the global dimension and responsibility of Jesuit schools.
GC35 in 2008 made clear that the current global context also had consequences for the way we should understand our mission within it:
Remaining faithful to our Ignatian pedagogy, with its profoundly humanistic narrative, is far from easy in today’s world that is inclined to see education as merely ‘training for employability’. That is why, when in November last year the Education Delegates from Jesuit Provinces across Europe (JECSE) gathered for their annual meeting, they focused on strengthening a true culture of collaboration to as a Jesuit network better promote our Jesuit vision, which educates for compassion and solidarity.
In the last two decades, the Jesuits in Asia Pacific have been working with Indigenous Peoples in Australia and Oceania, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam. The first meeting was held in 1999: a small group gathered in northern Taiwan, in an Aboriginal village called Chingchuan, which means “Clear Springs”. Fr Michael Czerny SJ, who was then Fr General Peter-Hans Kovlenbach’s delegate for the Social Apostolate, was the facilitator, while Fr Jojo Fung SJ was the first coordinator for the group.
A small group of Jesuit scholastics, composed of two Indonesians, two Filipinos and one Korean, and a lay woman travelled to Southern Philippines for a lived experience of the contextual realities of indigenous peoples, known as Lumad, and Muslims in Mindanao.
