As if beginning a school literally from ground up were not challenge enough, the team responsible for the Jesuit educational institute in Timor-Leste is having to race through its first year of school and begin its second academic year some two months earlier than anticipated.
The first Jesuit private university in India will open its doors next year. It will be named after St Francis Xavier, and will be built in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, where the Jesuits already run a business management institute, the Xavier Institute of Management. The Orissa state Legislative Assembly recently gave the go-ahead to the project, which was first proposed four years ago.
The Jesuit Conference of Asia Pacific has published its 2013 annual report, Jesuits in Asia Pacific 2013.
The document offers Jesuits, collaborators and friends a report by Conference President Fr Mark Raper SJ on 2012, articles on four key areas for the Conference that year – education, formation, spirituality and international works, and a brief look forward to 2013.
Redfern Jarjum College, a Jesuit primary school for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, was officially opened on April 13, with a number of dignitaries giving the school and its students their blessing.
Since 2011, we have held during Water Week the annual Lane Cove River Catchment Day, a combined project of the schools of the Lane Cove river catchment team where whole group and small group activities are held based around local catchment issues. The Lane Cove river catchment is 95.4 square kilometres and contains 12,600 megalitres of water.
In February, the Jesuits in Timor-Leste welcomed their latest collaborators in their education mission – the Religious of Jesus and Mary (RJM).
In conjunction with World Water Day on March 22, the Reconciliation with Creation taskforce in Asia Pacific conference has called for Jesuits and collaborators to be more aware of our responsibility to the world that God created. The need to focus on water is clear as 2013 has also been declared by the United Nations as the Year of Water Cooperation.
This year, 167 children, many from ethnic minority tribes in the hills of northern Thailand, will get help with their education costs from the Seven Fountains Scholarship Programme.
An academic in charge of a large-scale construction project? Australian Jesuit Fr Quyen Vu SJ doesn’t understand how it happened either. “Yes, I laugh about my new role sometimes. I am now immersed in building construction,” he says.
This eight-hectare site in the Kasait in Timor-Leste is being transformed into the new St Ignatius of Loyola Kasait under Fr Quyen’s watch as the vice-principal of the new Jesuit school.
Plans for a Jesuit Liberal Arts College (JLAC) in Hong Kong reached a new level in January with the convening of a two-day inaugural College Board of Trustees meeting. The trustees gathered in Hong Kong to discuss the academic and strategic planning of the JLAC and visit the Queen’s Hill site, where the Jesuits hope to locate the university.