Fela is an extraordinary woman who lives in Cutupú, a small village in the heart of the Dominican Republic. She is involved in several aspects of Jesuit ministry there, teaching catechism classes with a very lively style, cooking for the Jesuit community, and helping children save up to buy farm animals and teaching them to care for them. She radiates joy and generosity!

She is also a good friend of eight university students from Montreal who spent time in Cutupú during the summer of 1994. The students spent two months working with the Dominicans, and it was Fela who helped them build relationships with her fellow Dominicans and to open their hearts and minds to the realities of life in her poor homeland.

The students were there taking part in Project RD (República Dominicana), organized at Le Centre Paul-Le Jeune. This student center in Montreal, named after a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary to Canada, is near the University of Montreal; it is home for two Jesuits and six young men and women: a special kind of community! Among the residents are Marina, a junior studying math at McGill University; Anne, in her third year of biology at the University of Montreal; Mathieu, a freshman in environmental sciences at the University of Montreal; and Jesuits Fr. Roger Marcotte and Fr. Jean-Marc Biron, the director.

Le Centre Paul-Le Jeune is a type of Newman Center for university students in Montreal. Founded by Jesuits of the French Canada Province, its goal is to help students answer personal questions of identity, faith, vocations, and careers.

Le Centre Paul-Le Jeune was created about ten years ago by the French Canada Jesuits. It was at a time when Jesuit involvement in higher education in French Canada was moving away from large institutional settings. This created uncertainty, of course, but it also opened new ways for creativity and freed the province's human resources for new forms of ministry, including Paul-Le Jeune.

It is a congenial place; it is a home for friendship. It offers support for students wanting to strike a balance between the demands of academia and their desire to find time for personal reflection, spiritual growth, and getting involved in building a better tomorrow. During the school year, Paul-Le Jeune's residents, Jesuit and lay alike, team up with a number of nonresident partners, also Jesuit and lay, to organize activities that promote social and spiritual values and to reflect on their experiences.

This spirit of sharing between Jesuits and younger people has been the driving force behind many of our province's other works in recent years, including Salut, le Monde!, made up of youth who come together for retreats and to discuss social issues; La Maison Dauphine pour les Jeunes (the Dauphine House for Youth), a drop-in center for street youth in Quebec City staffed by over fifteen Jesuits and lay volunteers; and other Jesuit initiatives such as Sentiers de Foi (Pathways of Faith), founded by Fr. Irénée Beaubien, SJ_his way of offering an open door to fallen-away Catholics, in particular the youth.

All of these efforts have been a way for the Jesuits of French Canada to be partners with laypeople, especially the young, who are attracted by Gospel values and are looking to do something concrete about their society. It has also been a way for Jesuits to put into practice the decisions of our recent general congregation that encouraged making partnership with the laity an essential element of the Society's ministries. This contact with young people especially, in a Jesuit province with a high percentage of elderly Jesuits, helps keep a focus on the future. Jesuits can offer good things to the youth, but they also realize how much the youth can do for them.

It was in this spirit that Paul-Le Jeune was created. This student residence was to be more than just a warm place to live; it was to be a place for discernment and involvement in the Ignatian spirit, a place that creates a community atmosphere that inspires students who live there to bring home others and share with them on many levels.

Jesuits wanted to make clear right from the start that the center was not just a new way to attract vocations to the Society of Jesus; rather, it was to be a way they could help young people think about their Christian vocation, whatever form that took. That the center was not a Jesuit "factory" was made clear when, after a few years, the residence opened its doors to women as well as men.

Quebec's society and culture do not make it easy for people in their twenties to consider entering a religious order, but the opportunity to meet with and even to live with members of a religious order helps them open their eyes to this way of life and to think seriously about their own commitments. Important events in the religious lives of the Jesuits at Paul-Le Jeune have afforded excellent opportunities for students to reflect, ask questions, and discuss Christian vocations and the many forms they take.

It is within this broad context that the center developed Project RD as a program of contact with the Third World for students. It involved their preparing for a year and a half before they spent about ten weeks in Mexico or in the Dominican Republic. In both cases, a number of post-travel activities were also part of the game, giving participants a chance to reflect on and talk about what they had learned in a country and society so different from theirs.

These trips emphasize meeting people and not "helping" poor people of the Third World. After having met Fela and her kids, after having spent time with other Dominicans, the students come home transformed, ready to face their future with courage and creativity, with sensitivity to the needs of the marginalized, with openness of mind and an inquisitive spirit, and with a new comprehension of the Gospel.

Paul-Le Jeune is just one way for Jesuits to share what we are and what we believe in with young people who care, who look for opportunities to be involved in society, who sense that Companions of Jesus can offer spirited perspectives on a life rooted in the Gospel. It's a small work compared with other endeavors of our past, but it is a timely response to real needs of young people and the reality of what the Society of Jesus in French Canada is today.

Fr. Pierre Bélanger, SJ, former director of Le Centre Paul-Le Jeune, produces and directs audiovisuals for the French Canada Province.