A stirring look at community service work by students at Loyola High School in Los Angeles. (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

Everyone with an interest in Ignatian social ministries in the U.S. should spend some time with “Iggy”–a fascinating database of information about Ignatian-inspired direct service ministries, research projects, and social outreach programs.  The number of projects and their scope is astounding.  Hundreds of ministries and people are listed.  Users can search by type of project, issues, and location.  Want to volunteer?  Click on your state for a list of programs.  Looking for other people with similar interests?  Search by issue and interest group.

Iggy is maintained by the Jesuit Conference of the US, which wants the database to cover everything.

I’m a fan of Fr. Greg Boyle, the Jesuit who has done remarkable work rehabilitating members of gangs in Los Angeles. I’ve written about him here.  (More here and here.)   Last week he spoke at my alma mater, St. Peter’s College in Jersey City. Here is an interview he did with a local newspaper. He’s pretty blunt:

If our outreach to gang members does not involve concrete help, Jesus is not interested. Jesus stood with those on the margins, with those whose burdens were more than they can bear, with the easily despised and the readily left-out; with the poor and powerless and the voiceless. And so it is a privilege to stand with the demonized, so that the demonizing will stop. To stand with the disposable, so that the day will come when we stop throwing people away.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated 30 years ago today, gunned down while saying Mass.  Romero denounced human rights violations during the Salvadoran civil war, and strongly supported the poor.  He is a martyr in the struggle for justice.  Days before his death he said to a friend “You can tell the people that if they succeed in killing me, that I forgive and bless those who do it. Hopefully, they will realize they are wasting their time. A bishop will die, but the church of God, which is the people, will never perish.”

Go to U. S. Catholic’s Romero page for links to information about him.  He’s been memorialized in a movie, and you can find many videos about him.  I’m stirred by this archival footage.  If you can’t see the video, click here.

Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, SJ, Superior General of the Jesuits, reflects on Jesuit institutions and lay people. This is from a summary of a talk he gave recently to Jesuits working in the social apostolate:

Mobility is essential to our charism; thus we need to learn a new way of discernment, to let go and move on. For example, when starting a school, we should immediately prepare our lay successors so that we can hand the work over to them after no more than 15 to 30 years. He also stressed the fact that the shrinking number of Jesuits is being compensated for by the growing number of competent lay people who wish to work in our institutions. This gives us the freedom to dream again, to be creative, flexible and mobile. He encouraged us to see our institutions as our children: let them go off, get married and go their own ways.

Read the whole summary.

I would like to be like Gary Smith, SJ.  He does heroic and humble work with refugees in Africa.  I have written about him here before.   To feel the spirit of the Jesuit Refugee Service, read this letter that Gary recently wrote about his work in South Africa.  It’s harrowing, but also extraordinarily moving:

But however difficult the refugee situation is for us, it is one of the bleeding breaches in the wall of humankind into which Jesuits are called to stand. There, in the breach, in the confrontation with this evil inflicted upon the world, we are seized by the indignation that empowers us to effect change. . . .  Our JRS mission is to be with and cherish refugee women, holding them in their vulnerability. We anoint their wounds with the oil of respect and tenderness, wounds inflicted by poverty, violence, abandonment, second class human status, and—often—male stupidity. Each day our goal is to bring them the best of our compassion and the best of our skills. Each day we prayerfully ask God to give us the wisdom to realize that goal.

In early November, Santa Clara University held a three-day conference on the legacy of the six Jesuit martyrs nurdered in El Salvador in 1989.  Papers from the conference have been published on the web.

In one of these papers, the theologian Jon Sobrino, SJ, reflects on Ignatius Loyola’s struggle with the challenge of living in poverty.

In the meditation on two standards, St. Ignatius is very clear that poverty and powerlessness are not only ways to perfection but also paths to life, to becoming more human.  He insists that they exist in dialectical opposition to wealth and power.  This was the St. Ignatius of Manresa.  Later, when he was the General of the Society, he had to contextualize this—and it wasn’t easy.  To carry out their apostolate, the Jesuits needed resources, so of necessity they began relationships with benefactors.  This brought them in contact with the world of riches, honors and power:  kings, noblewomen, cardinals. . . .  This was a serious problem for St. Ignatius, and he sought solutions for it.  A well known example is his recommendation to Laínez and Salmerón, theologians who went to the Council of Trent.  Going there meant entering the world of church power and, indirectly, civil power.  He ordered them to live and to spend their nights at hospitals for the poor.  It was a way of living out the two standards in what was, objectively speaking, a situation of wealth and power.

Sobrino goes on:

Today, trying to live in poverty means living in austerity, rejecting luxuries in buildings and churches, and avoiding excessive solemnities, even when this is accepted and even expected socially.; and certainly avoiding—in comparison with poor and low middle classes—huge inequalities.

Read the whole thing.

Every year some 100,000 undocumented minors are picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol as they try to enter the United States. Posada is a 55-minute documentary film that tells the story of three who stayed. The film was written, produced, and directed by Mark McGregor, SJ, who teaches film at Gonzaga University. He connects the journeys of the three youths to the annual Mexican “Posada” Christmas procession which depicts Mary and Joseph’s search for shelter before Jesus’ birth.

The film is part of the Posada Project which is promoting local posadas this Christmas to support immigration reform. Here is the trailer for the film.

Yesterday the US House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the six Jesuit priests and two women murdered in El Salvador in 1989. The dead are Jesuit Fathers Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Segundo Montes, Amando Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, and housekeeper Julia Elba Ramos and her daughter Celina Mariset Ramos. The occasion of the resolution is the 20th anniversary of the murders on November 16. Read the resolution here.

A recent website JesuitSocialMinistry.org is a comprehensive listing of Jesuit programs in the social apostolate.  Programs are classified into three categories:  Direct Service, Justice Research and Education, and Advocacy/Social Change/Empowerment.  A nifty feature displays all these programs on a map.  The site includes a page of links to documents underlying the Jesuit social apostolate, including Pedro Arrupe’s famous 1973 speech Men for Others.”