Fr. James Torrens, SJ, ordained 40 years ago this summer, writes about what he has seen and done during those years. Most recently an editor at America magazine, Fr. Torrens is teaching this year at the Jesuit high school and college in Tijuana. Fr. Torrens's reflections serve as an introduction to the photos and the biographies of the U.S. Jesuits ordained to the priesthood this summer.

Not long ago, after a Eucharist celebrated around a table in our university chapel, one of our faculty members, obviously moved, said to me: "What a privilege, how special to be able to offer Mass every day." I thought to myself, yes, and how crucial, what a challenge, to make sure it is prepared, not rushed into or rote, and that I myself am truly present. The specialness can rub off all too easily.

Of course, everyone at the Eucharist should experience the same awe and love of God. The holy sacrifice is nobody's private devotion; quite the contrary. Yet to preside -- what a grace, after all.

Forty years after my theology studies and ordination in Brussels, I am just beginning to appreciate the priestly ministry. I feel as if I am standing with one foot in a land of promise and the other in a moral morass. This is my take not just on Tijuana, where I teach with Mexican Jesuits, but on our world today -- that interlaced and tension-ridden Family of Man and Woman.

I help out in a state penitentiary of Baja California Norte called El Pueblito, The Village. Village indeed, massive and congested, built (heaped together) for 1,800 but housing triple that number. Hearing confessions there, I get some inkling of God's unquenchable mercy and how deeply it stirs men and women after years of their being way off the track. When they sing out during the liturgy, at a piercing volume, they remind me what worship really means and that the priest is only a small part of it.

Fr. Torrens at his ordination in 1961

The Society of Jesus has put me in company with some extraordinary servants of the Lord, to speak only of my own classmates. One of them, my bosom friend Edward Malatesta, was on fire to rekindle Christianity in a scholarly and pastoral way in China until the day of his death from an embolism and the effects of emphysema in Hong Kong.

Another, Gabriel Codina of Bolivia, has for decades been extending Jesuit education to the less privileged and changing the orientation of our schools. He is now the Society's International Secretary for Education. A third, Chrysologue Mahame, the first Rwandan Jesuit, labored to heal the bitter ethnic divisions between Tutsi and Hutu in his home. He paid with his life, a protomartyr, in the bloodbath of 1994. How could I not derive encouragement and pride from such compa-eros, "sharers in the bread" of the Eucharist?

My ministry has given me undreamed of opportunities. I spent five years of graduate study at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a campus humming with debate over literary theory and Vietnam.

I spent two years teaching Black students at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, toward the end of the civil rights era when their confidence was surging.

I spent twenty years in Jesuit college classrooms in California, thirteen of them in a dorm (which made me an expert on the age 18).

I spent the nineties to my heart's content on the staff of America magazine in ever-astonishing New York.(This permitted me frequent travel and reporting from Latin America.)

I would have loved to have been as unselfconscious and upbeat as some Jesuits I have known -- Frank Silva, Joe Fitzpatrick, Gene O'Brien, Tom O'Malley, C. J. McNaspy. Still, despite all my divots littering the course, what a blessing to have played it.

The truly great adventure and watershed of the last 50 years, one for which my theology professors in Belgium did as well as they could to prepare us, was the Second Vatican Council. What if the great-hearted Pope John XXIII had not convoked the Council or it had not taken the form it did? Fruitless speculation, of course, but I do tremble to think of struggling still in the bound-up spirituality and constrictions of conscience that affected me in a more parochial time. " And yet," said the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov, "did you really want all that much personal responsibility?" The kind that the Council introduced? A bucketful of issues have been putting our priestly liberty to an almost daily test. How to adapt the liturgy to very different congregations and pieties without crossing the line into innovation? How to respond as the Good Shepherd would to the widespread cohabitation of university students and young alumni before marriage? How to satisfy the spiritual devotion and pastoral hunger of those divorced and in second marriages? What to think of the annulment process, of women as priests, of the aspirations of gays to full Catholic recognition? How to counteract the desertion or drift of young adults from the Church? And, on a personal level, how to show others an affection and warmth that is still consonant with celibacy? How to keep praying? Some of this gets easier over the years, but not much!

So I heave a sigh of relief at being this far down the trail in a half century of what Shakespeare designated as "alarums and excursions." The world and ourselves and God get ever more mysterious. The afflictions of millions, the cruelty of power, a spectrum of menaces to the planet darken the mind's horizon. They have to. Still, I have that priestly consolation -- those I have been graced to accompany through baptism, marriage, and burial. I draw strength from the spectacle of so much Christian commitment, even heroism, in our days. On my wall hangs a poster of the Jesuit martyrs in El Salvador. There's apostolic courage, and I was privileged to know them.

I am full of thanks for enfolding grace, for a commitment to Jesus Christ, for the invitation to entrust myself to the heart of God. Whatever lies down the road for this one-horse shay, Adelante, onwards.

Photos and Biographies of the U.S. Jesuits ordained to the priesthood during the summer, 2001.