French Jesuit Thierry Meynard SJ takes over as the International Director of The Beijing Center (TBC) from August 1, 2012. He will succeed Fr Roberto Ribeiro SJ, who is stepping down after completing his three-year term as international director.
The Society marks 450 years in Macau in 2012. On August 24, 1562, Frs Luís Fróis SJ and Giovanni Battista Del Monte SJ arrived in Macau to take up residence and embark on apostolic work. The two Portuguese Jesuits helped the two diocesan priests who were ministering to the 5,000 inhabitants of Macau, among whom were 600 Portuguese.
How do we promote reconciliation with creation to our fellow Jesuits in Asia Pacific? With imaginative and powerful images as the members of the Scholastics and Brothers Circle showed in the innovative campaign materials they developed during a workshop on Effective Communications held from December 19 to 30, 2011.
The Chinese Province is now taking applications for the fifth Chinese International Regency Programme, which begins on August 15, 2012.
The Chinese International Regency Programme aims to make a concrete contribution to the formation of Jesuits with a more global perspective, for future wide-ranging missions. The international regents are also a concrete response from other Jesuit provinces to one of the five apostolic preferences of the whole Society: China.
Videos from The Ricci Legacy Symposium held in Hong Kong in December 2010 are now available online.
The four-day symposium on inculturation was collaboration between Xavier House Spiritual Formation Centre in Hong Kong and Georgetown University in the United States. The 300 participants – about 100 from mainland China – heard 10 international experts, including Georgetown’s Fr Howard Gray, SJ, reflect on cultural adaptation of the Gospel and Ignatian Spirituality.
Fr Daniel Ross SJ, Director of the International Center for the Promotion of Partner Based Learning in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China, shares with us their work and a local student’s account of her experience. Fr Ross has been teaching at Fu Jen University in Taiwan for the past 39 years and teaches seminars in Zhuhai and Fu Jen.
Renowned Jesuit missionary Fr Luis Ruiz Suarez SJ passed away at the age of 97 in Macau on 26 July 2011. Fr Louis Gendron SJ, Provincial of the Chinese Province, remembers his privileged encounters with Fr Ruiz, who he says enriched the name of “Ricci”.
The Vatican has put a Chinese Catholic scholar who lived nearly five centuries ago on track for beatification. In an Associated Press story dated April 20, Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi SJ, is quoted saying the go-ahead for the beatification cause for Paul Xu Guangqi, who lived from 1562 to 1633, was a “beautiful light of hope for China today and tomorrow.”
Fr John Lee Hua SJ has been named Provincial of the Chinese Province. He takes over from Fr Louis Gendron SJ. He was born in 1966, entered the Society of Jesus in 1992 and ordained a priest in 2002.
Fr. John will begin his new mission on January 1, 2012. He will take a sabbatical from August 1 to the end of the year to rest and to prepare himself for his new mission.
Australian Jesuit Fr Jeremy Clarke SJ sees his role as a Jesuit, a teacher and an advocate of culture as the bridge between different communities. In his two years at Boston College, he has worked to build that bridge – between East and West, between faculty and students.