At the heart of Ignatius's vision for the Society of Jesus is the mandate that its members "travel throughout the world" and "live in any part of it" to help those in need. The first Jesuits located their works in urban locations so they could preach, teach, and minister to the greatest number.

Four and a half centuries later, Ignatius's vision is alive and well in Rome at the Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuits that houses Ignatius's tomb, located where the Corso Vittorio Emanuele meets the Piazza del Gesù. The Gesù is a magnificent baroque church; locals, tourists, and pilgrims flock here, climb a handful of white stone stairs, and pass through enormous wooden doors into the splendor of the interior.

Some come to feed the spirit, to pray and attend mass; others to reach into the history of Jesuit origins. Some come for art and architecture; others pray and light candles, visit the shrines and tombs, linger a while with their Blue Guides and emerge back into the busy streets of Rome.

The Gesù honors Ignatius's urban vision in a special but hidden away in a basement behind and below the adjacent rooms in which he penned the Constitutions and the letters that implemented them. There, down a flight of stairs, Centro Astalli, a work of the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), has been welcoming refugees from countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Kosovo, Iraq, and Turkey for eighteen years. Unlike most of those who journey to the Gesù as pilgrims, these refugees are fleeing inhuman conditions in their homelands.

The work done at Centro Astalli gives a special luster to the Gesù and to the Jesuits' commitment to serving those most in need in the heart of the city.

Fr. Francesco de Luccia, SJ, directs Centro Astalli, a JRS center in Rome.

Fr. Francesco de Luccia, SJ, director of Centro Astalli since 1994, pauses for a moment in his cluttered office amid the chaotic energy of staff and volunteers helping refugees and answering phones. He gathers his thoughts and recounts his journey to the center. "I was appointed by the provincial to work here," he says with a smile. "After a month at a refugee study program, I worked with Fr. Raper and visited JRS sites in Africa and Europe. Then I came here."

Centro Astalli opened in 1981, when Pedro Arrupe, the superior general, called upon Jesuits to help an enormous flow of Ethiopian refugees seeking safety and shelter in Italy. The center's first director was Fr. Michael Campbell- Johnston, SJ, succeeded in 1984 by an Ethiopian Jesuit and refugee, Fr. Groum Tesfaye, who ran it until 1986. Ethiopians remained the primary group of refugees served there until 1989. "During those years the center was basically a soup kitchen that offered assistance," explains de Luccia. "This was a really beautiful period for the center because we had a piece of Ethiopia in Rome. When volunteers from that era recount their experiences, their faces light up."

After 1989 the center began assisting refugees from Yugoslavia, Albania, and other areas of Africa. When de Luccia became director, the refugees were mostly from Kosovo. In 1995 the center witnessed an influx of Sudanese Muslims who had been studying or working in Libya until they were expelled by the government. Toward the end of 1995 Kurds from Iraq began passing through Italy en route to France and Germany, where many other Kurds had sought refuge.

"Especially since January 1998, after the Geneva Convention and the Dublin Agreement established new rules for the European Union countries stating that refugees are to be taken care of by the first country in which they set foot," says de Luccia, "we have seen an enormous number of Kurdish people come through here. In the past three years over 9,000 Kurds have passed through this center."

Centro Astalli, in a basement behind the Jesuits' Gesù Church in Rome, offers meals, showers, language classes, social services, even medical help and overnight accommodations for thousands of refugees who have found their way to the Eternal City.

The center does not advertise--refugees learn of it by word of mouth. People arrive often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the address scrawled on a scrap of paper. Families and friends help each other reach the center out of love, but there are some who charge refugees fortunes for information about the center and directions or transportation to it. "The situation in Iraq," de Luccia says, "is awful. Kurds really have no way out of their country except by paying the Kurdish mafia to help them."

A typical day for de Luccia and his staff--seven full-time employees, five conscientious objectors who do this work rather than serve in the military, and over 100 volunteers--is punctuated by desperate knocks on the door, emergencies, phone calls, faxes, crying children, and pleading parents.

The first order of business each morning is counseling sessions during which social workers address the refugees' needs, everything from finding lodging to obtaining legal documentation.

In the afternoon, from 3:00 until 5:00, the center conducts Italian language classes. "Unlike other groups of refugees we have had, by and large highly educated, the Kurds represent all levels of training. But the needs of refugees are basic to all humans, de Luccia explains, "and the language classes help them communicate those needs."

At 5:00 those who sleep outside come in to take showers. In the evening a clinic staffed by volunteer doctors opens for business: they tend to refugees, often women and children just arrived from long journeys.

"These doctors," says de Luccia, "along with lawyers, architects, and other volunteers, serve here to regain a sense of their job. Let's say a doctor works in a hospital in administration. He comes here to rediscover his deep motivation for his job. They need to do work here for free, to give their professional skills for free."

Around 6:00 the center serves meals to all who come. The kitchen, equipped with an enormous pasta kettle, is large enough to prepare and serve many plates of food, some of which is donated, the rest bought from a food bank.

After dinner, around 9:00, two dorms--one inside the city, the other on the outskirts--open to house 100 people. The center itself is often used to host families overnight, though this is against the law. "The police themselves send people here!" de Luccia says. "It is awful when families have to sleep outside. We have had three families who were sent back to us from France and Germany sleeping here for a month. We haven't been able to find places for them."

Holding up a letter, de Luccia explains, "I'm writing to the mayor saying that we need to sit with him, the chief of police, and a representative of the government to solve this problem. I cannot take responsibility for housing these people when I am not allowed." According to de Luccia, the government usually gets involved in problems like refugees only after places like Centro Astalli reach the breaking point.

Despite the constant red tape and day-to-day demands of his life as a servant to the refugees, de Luccia's commitment grows every day. "Working with the poor, hearing their stories always affects you. Two Sudanese brothers who had come from Libya thirteen years ago told me that they could not find family members who had fled their homeland. Then, during the beatification ceremony held at St. Peter's for a Sudanese nun, the brothers found their relatives! There was a big feast after that. There are many similar stories of people finding lost relatives here at the center."

Jeremy Langford, editor-in-chief of publisher Sheed & Ward, is pursuing a master's in theology at Catholic Theological Union. The editor of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's The Gift of Peace (Loyola, 1997), Langford writes and talks on contemporary faith issues affecting young adults.

Before excusing himself to get back to his busy day, de Luccia summarizes his work: "I feel absolutely in the right place for many reasons. First of all, this is a place where none of those we serve are Christians, and so this is a typical Jesuit ministry. Second, half of my co-workers are not regular church-goers; within the Church it is necessary to have places where these people can come and work and contribute.

"Third, we are doing something that says crucial things to institutions and private citizens and conveys core values. One of my hopes is that the pilgrims who come to the Gesù will hear the cry of the refugees for justice and peace. We need for the two floors, the church above and the center below, to meet a little more."