Loyola University Chicago
Opens New Art Museum

This traveling version of Caravaggio's Bacchus will beckon to Michigan Avenue crowds at Loyola University Chicago's new art museum while the original remains safe and sound in its permanent home, Florence's Uffizi Gallery.

The 27,000 square-foot museum opens in October with this Caravaggio exhibit that utilizes the latest digital technology to reproduce all of the artist's works, full-size, on illuminated glass panels as large as 9' by 12'. The exhibition, which opened in Naples in 2003, has traveled throughout Europe and drawn record visitor attendance.

Loyola University Museum of Art houses the Martin D'Arcy Collection of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Art, founded by Fr. Donald Rowe, SJ, in 1969 and includes a lecture hall, a gallery for students, and additional space for programs and exhibitions. Go to www.luc.edu/luma for more information.

Fairfield University Students Help
Bring a Well to Afghan Village

Water is running today for a village in Afghanistan thanks to the efforts of Fairfield University students Mikaela Conley and Aamina Awan, who raised $3,000 for a pump to supply this badly needed resource.

Lt. Col. Christopher Conley, working with the Afghan National Army Central Corp, inspired the project after Mikaela, his daughter, told him that Fairfield's Students for Social Justice group was starting the Afghan Children's Fund. He contacted the village of Aloudine, home to 200 families. "The elders told me there is a serious shortage of drinking water, and families spend many hours every week bringing water to their homes," Conley said.

A plaque on the pump, dedicated this past summer, reads: "A gift to Afghan Children from Fairfield University, United States of America. Peace Brings All Good Things." According to village elder Mullah Gulam Mohudin, "Peace Brings All Good Things" is an Islamic proverb about God's plan for mankind and a fitting expression about the well.

Through the Afghan Children's Fund, Conley and Awan also sent 30 boxes of clothing to Lt. Col. Conley that were distributed at a high school.

Good Memory

"I'm not a very smart person. I have to work very hard at remembering things," said Andrew Card, President Bush's chief of staff in a Washington Post story. Card can nonetheless recite where the president is supposed to be any one day, say, three months from now, or where he was on any day three months ago, according to the story, without palm pilot or post-it note. It's a feat of memory he owes to a Jesuit.

Since his teen years, Card has used a memory system developed by Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who "wrote quite casually in 1595 of running through a list of four to five hundred random Chinese ideograms and then repeating the list in reverse order" (Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci).

Ricci would remember a fact, a name-anything-by imagining a palace into which he would walk, turn into this or that room and "place" it on an imaginary shelf or table. The trick is to load up whatever is to be remembered with visual and auditory clues. A med student, in Spence's mind, might conjure up an "anatomy" room in a memory palace containing a mountie and a handcuffed criminal, a trigger for the sentence Some Criminals Have Underestimated the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a mnemonic for the bones of the upper limbs: Scapula, Clavicle, Humerus, Ulna, Radius, Carpals, Metacarpals, and Phalanges. It's the piano student's Every Good Boy Does Fine on a truly massive scale.

According to the Washington Post, Card's "palace" is a kitchen in which the stove's front burners handle what the president has "cooking" any one morning, while on the back burners are the afternoon's events. Stored in cupboards are yesterday's and tomorrow's concerns; a deep freeze is the place for matters way in the future or in the past.

Loyola College in Maryland Names New President

Fr. Brian Linnane, SJ, assistant dean and associate professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, has been elected the 24th president of Loyola College in Maryland. He succeeds Fr. Harold Ridley, SJ, who died in January after serving as Loyola's president since 1994.

Linnane has served as vice president of Jesuit honor society Alpha Sigma Nu, as a member of the Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education, and as chair of the Catholic Theological Society of America's Committee on Admissions.

Web site of interest

JUBILEE 2006
www.sjweb.info/jubilee2006/index.cfm

Next year marks the 450th anniversary of the death of Ignatius (1491-1556) and the 500th anniversary of the births of Francis Xavier (1506-1552) and Peter Faber (1506-1546). These three visionaries formed the nucleus of the new Society of Jesus when, as students in Paris, they took vows on Montmartre.

Special events are being planned around the world as part of this celebration, and information can be found at the above website.

The site has a list of events that will commemorate the anniversaries and a letter from Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ, on the Jubilee. The site also has resources, including a downloadable version of the logo and links to other provinces' Jubilee web sites.

In the United States, there is an array of projects being planned. Loyola Productions in California is working on a video on the three Jubilarians, and Fairfield University is producing a film on Xavier. Several provinces are hosting lecture series, and a collection of icons, images, and artwork is being gathered.

Happy Birthdays

With a Mass at the historic St. Ignatius Church in Port Tobacco, Maryland (below), and a reception following, the Jesuits' Maryland Province celebrated its birthday this August.

Well, one of its birthdays. The first is March 25, the day that Fr. Andrew White, SJ, and two other Jesuits landed at St. Clement Island in what is now Maryland in 1634. Accompanying them were English Catholics and Protestants bent on escaping religious persecution in England.

When Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773, the act "stranded" the roughly twenty Jesuits in the colonies, including John Carroll, founder of Georgetown University who was also the first Catholic bishop in the United States.

But the Society managed to stay alive in Russia; Catherine the Great had refused to promulgate the papal decree there. In 1800 she received papal recognition for the Jesuits in Russia from Pius VII (who brought the Society of Jesus back into worldwide existence fourteen years later). On August 18, 1805, at St. Thomas Manor in Maryland, three former Jesuits, having become members in name of the Society in Russia, took vows once again as Jesuits, marking the return of the Society of Jesus to the United States and the second birthday of the Maryland Province.

"These men repaired the broken strand of Jesuit history that reached back to Andrew White," wrote William Bangert, SJ, in The History of the Society of Jesus (Institute of Jesuit Sources 1972).

Today's Maryland Province, headquartered in Baltimore, comprises Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and part of New Jersey. Its 400-plus Jesuits staff many rural and urban parishes, retreat houses, universities, and high schools.

Asteroid Named after Jesuit Astronomer

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has given the name of "Badillo" to Minor Planet No. 4866, an asteroid that measures about 15 miles across, in honor of Philippine astronomer Fr. Victor Badillo, SJ, who earned a PhD in physics from Saint Louis University in '63.

According to the IAU citation, Badillo "has popularized astronomy in the Philippines for more than three decades, inspiring countless Filipino astronomers. Ordained in 1965, he directed the Jesuit-run Manila Observatory in Quezon City and served as president of the Philippine Astronomical Society from 1972 to 1990."

The asteroid, discovered in 1988 from an observatory in Japan, orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter, taking about five years to complete the trip. It is currently about 350 million miles from Earth, shining very dimly in the constellation Gemini.
-The Manila Bulletin Online

Journey to Uganda

Creighton Prep (Omaha) students visited Uganda last summer, meeting with AIDS patients, Jesuit Refugee Services staff, and a Rwandan survivor of genocide. They also played soccer with students and even helped build a goatery in the village of Kalungu. Villagers will maintain the goatery, profits going toward the care of many orphans in the village. As the goats reproduce, the offspring will be given to other villagers.
-Phil Nero

New Appointments

Thomas Smolich, SJ

James Grummer, SJ

Fr. James Grummer, SJ, provincial of the Wisconsin Province, will be moving from Milwaukee to the Jesuit Curia in Rome to become the regional assistant for the United States. There he will assist Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the Jesuits' superior general, in matters dealing specifically with the Jesuits in the States.

Francis Case, SJ

Fr. Francis Case, SJ, the regional assistant for the United States for the last fifteen years, has been appointed by Kolvenbach as the secretary of the Society, the secretary of the group of about twelve general counselors or advisors to the superior general.

Business "Boot Camp"

They were hosted by Santa Clara's Global Social Benefit Incubator, which puts foundations, technology pros, and business executives in touch with innovators working on technology training programs in Guatemala, microloan corporations in Paraguay, and low-cost day care in Bangladesh.

Participant Kristine Pearson works to fill the need for education in Sub-Saharan Africa by distributing wind-up solar-powered radios, ideal receivers for areas lacking electricity, even batteries. She wanted help for her Freeplay Foundation's latest program: getting 10,000 such radios to organizations in Kenya.
-Santa Clara University