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.
The UN refugee agency and the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), through its partner Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins initiative (JC:HEM), signed in April an agreement to enhance higher education opportunities for refugees and other forcibly displaced people through online and on-site courses.
The Jesuits in Dili celebrate the Holy Eucharist at the prison in Becora, Dili on the second Sunday of every month. Prompted by Pope Francis’ celebration of the Mass of the Lord’s Supper at a prison in Rome, Brother Noel Oliver SJ shares his impressions of the Jesuits’ prison ministry in Dili.
From his very first words as Bishop of Rome, our new Pope Francis revealed a gracious respect for the religious belief, freedom of conscience and dignity of each person – values and behaviour so essential for Christians in Asia Pacific. His first blessing was a simple, modest acknowledgement of the conscience of each person: “Since many of you are not members of the Catholic Church, and others are not believers, I cordially give this blessing silently, to each of you, respecting the conscience of each, but in the knowledge that each of you is a child of God.
Many may have thought the battle won when Aung San Suu Kyi was free to appear in public, when hundreds of political prisoners were released, when dissidents were free to return home from exile abroad, when censorship and sanctions were lifted, when elections were held, and as parliament sits to draft a new constitution. In reality the work of rebuilding Myanmar is just beginning.
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.
On January 27, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims, both foreigners and Khmer, gathered together at Choeung Ek, otherwise known as the Killing Fields of Cambodia, to remember and pray for the thousands of innocent Cambodians who were executed there under the Khmer Rouge regime. The remembrance of the genocide victims that afternoon was part of the commemoration of World Interfaith Harmony Week, which concluded with the planting of several trees within Choeung Ek.