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Jesuit History, Tiruvadanai (2024)

31/10/2024

01 NOVEMBER
OUR MOTHER OF THE PALM (SPAIN)
The Church of Our Mother of the Palm preceded by the miracle during an earthquake and a tidal wave
on the first of Nov. 1755. There had been an extremely strong earthquake on that day that was reported to have been felt throughout all of Europe. Cadiz is a seaport of Spain exposed to the Atlantic Ocean and
was directly in the path of the tidal wave said to be more than 90 feet high. Lisbon was said to have lost
90,000 people and had 85% of its buildings destroyed from the wave. The water penetrated as much as
8 kilometres inland striking Portugal, Spain and Africa. The townspeople of Cadiz were in terror and were on the point of abandoning the town when two unidentified men closed the water gates and urged the people to go to the Capuchin Church of Our Mother of the Palm. Here a Mass was in progress.
The Priest calmly finished the Mass, seized a banner with a picture of Our Mother on it, and went out into the street where the wall of water was already advancing upon them. He planted the banner in
the street almost in the shadow of the great wave and called out in a loud voice, “Thus far, my Mother.”
The water advanced as far as the banner, and then miraculously stopped its forward progression, even though up until that point it had destroyed everything in its path. Then, as the Priest walked boldly forward toward the wall of water with the banner in his upraised hand, that gigantic wave receded from him and turned away from the face of Mary to return placidly to the ocean.

31/10/2024

01 NOV
ALL SAINTS
During the year, the Church celebrates one by one the feasts of the Saints. Today she joins them all in one festival. In addition to those whose names she knows, she recalls in a magnificent vision
all the others "of all nations and tribes standing before the throne and in sight of the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands, proclaiming Him who redeemed them in His Blood."
The feast of All Saints inspires us with tremendous hope. Among the Saints in heaven are some whom we have known. All lived on earth lives like our own. They were baptized, marked with the sign of faith, they were faithful to Christ's teaching and they have gone before us to the heavenly home from where they call on us to follow them. The Beatitudes, shows the road that they followed; there is no other that will lead us where they have gone. The commemoration of All Saints was first celebrated in the East. The feast is found in the West on different dates in the eighth century. The Roman Martyrology mentions that this date is a claim of fame for Gregory IV (827-844) and that he extended this observance to the whole of Christianity.

31/10/2024

TODAY IN SJ HISTORY
01 NOV 1956
The Society of Jesus was allowed into Norway.
In 1814, Norway had received its own constitution, which contained a ban on the Jesuit order, Jesuits would not be tolerated in the country, the Government made a move to abolish the paragraph, but failed. The liberal and social democratic representatives in the Parliament considered the paragraph to be against freedom of religion. The political authorities could not ignore the Anti-Catholic sentiments in the population, especially among the clergy and the practicing members of the Lutheran state Church. After World War II, when Norway signed the European Declaration of Human Rights, the paragraph had to be repealed. In 1956 the Norwegian Parliament removed from the constitution the last remnant of an anti-liberal and anti-democratic tradition, inherited from the Reformation of the 17th century.

30/10/2024

OCTOBER 31
OUR MOTHER’S MIRACLE AT ST FORT (FRANCE)
The Cathedral of Chartres is built entirely upon a large subterranean crypt which dates from the 11th century. Few people who visit the Cathedral ever think to enter the crypt that one can see the foundation of the great pillars that uphold the soaring heights of the nave, and also where the well of St. Fort is located. In the year 1116, a chorister having fallen into the well of Saint Fort was saved
by Our Mother. All the time that he was in the well, he heard the Angels answering the public prayers which were chanted in the Church; If one continues, and passes the well, they will come upon something that the very first Christians had witnessed when they came to Chartres. They found there
a statue of a woman seated upon a throne with a child on her knee, a statue that had been venerated by the Druids. It is interesting to note that the eyes of the Divine Child were open, while the Madonna’s eyes were closed. According to Cecil Headlam, the Druids to signify that faith was still in darkness and that she whom they worshipped was not yet born. But the eyes of the Child, whom she in the fullness of time should supernaturally conceive and bear, were open; for He was without beginning and without end, the Spectator of all time and all existence.

30/10/2024

31 OCT SAINT OF THE DAY
S ALPHONSUS RODRIGUEZ, SJ (1533-1617)
Alphonsus was born in Segovia, Spain, the son of a wealthy merchant. Aged 12, he was sent to the Jesuit school in Alcala but had to return home abruptly when his father died unexpectedly and he was needed to run the family textile business, eventually taking over its management altogether. He married and had three children, but family life ended when his wife, children and mother died within four years of each other. Excessive taxes took a heavy toll on his business which crumbled. He regarded himself as an utter failure. Recognizing a late vocation to religious life, he applied for admission to the Jesuits at Segovia, but was refused because he was not educated. Undaunted, Alphonsus returned to Latin school, humbly bearing the ridicule of his adolescent classmates. Finally, at the age of 39, the Jesuit Provincial accepted him as a lay brother. He was sent to Montesione College on Majorca, where he served as doorkeeper for 45 years. His post allowed him to minister to many visitors. And he became the spiritual adviser to many students. He exerted wide-reaching influence, most notably in guiding St. Peter Claver into his mission to the slaves. Alphonsus adhered to a few simple spiritual guidelines that navigated him through his troubles and trials. In his old age, Alphonsus experienced no relief from his trials. The more he mortified himself, the more he seemed to be subject to spiritual dryness, vigorous temptations, and even diabolical assaults. His body was ravaged with disease and he died. He was beatified by Pope Leo XII in 1825 and canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1888. This year is the commemoration of 407th death anniversary of the saint.
Alphonsus is the patron saint of Jesuit brothers. Today Jesuit brothers serve alongside Jesuit priests in a variety of ministries in over 112 countries on six continents. The brothers offer who they are and what they have for the “Greater Glory of God”. Many work as craftsmen, administrators, teachers, university lecturers and spiritual guides. Pope Francis in his address to the GC 36 when speaking about his experience of the brothers in the Society of Jesus said, “My experience has always been positive. The brothers with whom I lived during my time as a student were wise men, very wise. They had a wisdom different from that of scholastics or that of the priests. Today, even brothers who have studied a great deal and who have leadership positions in the institutions still have an ‘I do not know what’ that is different from the priests. And I think this has to be preserved, the wisdom, that special sapiential quality that comes from being a brother.”

30/10/2024

TODAY IN SJ HISTORY
31 OCT 1617
Today is the Memorial of S Alphonsus Rodriguez, SJ.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ was so impressed by his years
of humble witness that he wrote this poem in his honour:
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and, on the martyr, may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.

30/10/2024

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29/10/2024

OCTOBER 30
OUR MOTHER OF MONDEVI (FRANCE)
The image of this Piedmontese shrine had been depicted on a pillar by a charcoal burner of Vicoforte in 1540. The image of Our Mother of Mondevi was drawn on a pillar during the days of great devotion to Our Mother. It contains so much art that painters try to emulate it. Our Mother of Mondevi is located at Vic, in Piedmont, Italy. This pillar has since been enclosed in a Church which was built in 1645 at the request of Maria Cristina of France, in memory of the miraculous rescue of a child from the river, which took place in 1644 through the invocation of the image of the Blessed Virgin of the Annunciation. Since that time there have been many miracles which have been wrought and continue to attract a great concourse of people. The peasant folk especially venerated Our Mother at this shrine, and obtained numerous favours from her.

29/10/2024

TODAY IN SJ HISTORY
30 OCT
B DOMINIC COLLINS, SJ (1566-1602)
Collins was born in the seaport town of Youghal, Ireland. His family was well established and respected and both his father and brother were mayors of Youghal. It was in the time of Queen Elizabeth and Anglicanism was the official religion and Irish Catholics were subjected to persecution from time to time. He decided to leave Ireland and make a better life in Europe. So at the age of 20, Collins arrived in France. He had dreams of joining the cavalry and he was enlisted in the army of the Duke of Mercoeus, who was a member of the Catholic League fighting against the Protestant Huguenots in Brittany. Dominic had a distinguished military career lasting nine years. In 1598, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Santiago and took his first vows in 1601. Seven months later, Collins was assigned as companion and assistant to Fr James Archer, an Irish Jesuit who was being sent by the king as chaplain to a Spanish expedition to assist Catholics in Ireland. With the exception of Collins and two others, all the remaining 77 defenders were executed in the castle yard. Dominic was later imprisoned in Cork and rejected the offer of an honorable position in the English army and Protestant offers of ecclesiastical preferment if he would renounce his Catholic faith. Even his own relatives tried persuading him to renounce the faith
publicly while inwardly remaining faithful to Catholicism. But this he would not do. He was finally
condemned to death and hanged. Before climbing the scaffold, he spoke to the crowd in Irish and English, saying he was happy to die for his faith. Collins, together with sixteen other martyrs of Ireland,
was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1992. Blessed Dominic is remembered for his constancy in the faith.

28/10/2024

OCTOBER 29
OUR MOTHER OF OROPA (ITALY)
St. Eusebius who had been exiled into Syria because of his differences with the Arians, died in the year 370. While in exile, the emperor Constantine permitted him some freedom. Eusebius discovered among some ruins in Jerusalem three statues of Our Mother. On his triumphant return after the Arians had been temporarily overthrown, he gave two of the statues away. The third he kept for himself, placing it in a little hermitage at Oropa. In the 5th and 6th centuries when Arianism again reared its ugly head, the faithful Catholics took refuge at the shrine of Our Mother of Oropa. At one time, it was decided to transport the statue to another place. As the procession marched along, the statue became so heavy that the men who carried it could not move on. Only when they decided to take Our Mother back to her original shrine at Oropa were they able to move. The Chapel of Our Mother of Oropa is a beautiful one and thousands of pilgrims today make their way there as they have done over the centuries.

28/10/2024

29 OCT SAINT OF THE DAY
S NARCISSUS (99-215)
Narcissus was born towards the close of the 1st century, and he was placed at the head of the church of Jerusalem. One year, on Easter-eve, the deacons were no provided with oil for the lamps in the church. Narcissus ordered those who had care of the lamps to bring him some water from the neighbouring wells and he pronounced a devout prayer over the water; then bade them pour it into the lamps, which they did, and it was immediately converted into oil, to the great surprise of the faithful. The veneration
of all good men for this holy bishop could not shelter him from the malice of the wicked. Three incorrigible sinners, confirmed their atrocious calumny by dreadful oaths and imprecations; one wishing he might perish by fire, another that he might be struck with a leprosy, and the third that he might lose his sight, if what they alleged was not the truth. Notwithstanding these protestations, their accusation did not find credit; and sometime after the divine vengeance pursued the calumniators. The first was burnt in his house, with his whole family, by an accidental fire in the night; the second was struck with leprosy; and the third, terrified by these examples, confessed the conspiracy and slander, and by the abundance of tears which he continually shed for his sins, lost his sight before his death. Narcissus continued to serve his flock, and even other churches, by his assiduous prayers and his earnest exhortations to unity and concord and live about 116 years old.

28/10/2024

TODAY IN SJ HISTORY
29 OCT 1996
Mgr. Christophe Munzihirwa Mwene Ngabo, S.J., (1926-1996), Archbishop of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic was murdered. He had denounced the political and economic exploitation of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees who sought refuge in Kivu.
Munzihirwa was born in Lukumbo a small village in Kivu, in present-time Democratic Republic of Congo. In 1960s, he was a parish priest in the cathedral of Bukavu and in 1963 he joined the Jesuits and moved to Belgium in order to study Social science and economy at the University of Leuven. He came back to Congo in 1969 and his ministry soon becomes that of “the man for difficult situations”. From 1980 to 1986 he was the Provincial of the Jesuits in Central Africa. In 1986, he was consecrated as Bishop and sent to Kosongo as Coadjutor to Mgr. Timothee Pirigisha. From the early 90s he was the Apostolic Vicar of Bukavu, becoming the Archbishop in 1994. In those difficult years for Congo, he participated with compassion to the tragedy of the people in the region of the Great Lakes, as a person who really loved his neighbor. After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Mgr. Munzihiwa became a true advocate of the thousands of Hutu refugees who flooded his Diocese. He firmly believed that only few had committed atrocities against the Tutsis and that most of them were, instead, innocent victims. He spoke with an evangelic voice, asking for reconciliation beyond ethnicity. The perpetrators were members of the Rwandan Tutsi minority, who accused the Archbishop of giving shelter to several thousand militiamen among the hutu refugees and savagely murdered him. His body was found in a small squared named Nyawera. The soldiers had killed all those who were passing by, both on foot and in their car.
The beatification process opened under Pope Francis in 2016 after the Congregation for the Causes of Saints issued him as a Servant of God. The diocesan process was opened in Bukvau on 16 January 2017 and it continues at present.

27/10/2024

OCTOBER 28
OUR MOTHER OF VIVONNE (FRANCE)
Vivonne is a village in France situated on a rocky height looking down upon the three rivers that flow through the region. There are apparently two Churches in the village, the Church of St. George and the other Church is Our Mother of Sais-les-Vivonne. A farmer was ploughing his field when he overturned something peculiar in the sod. To his great surprise, the man found the object was a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The good farmer took the statue now known as Our Mother of Vivonne that he had found back to his home. After lovingly cleaning the debris from the statue, the farmer took the statue to the local Church and gave it to the Priest of the parish. The Priest immediately placed the statue in the Church later that same day. The next morning when the Priest returned to the Church, he found that the statue was missing. After much inquiry and searching for the statue, the farmer found the statue was once again in his field. The man returned the statue
to the Church, but once again it disappeared from its place, only to be found again in the field. This occurred a total of three times before it was decided to build a shrine in the field where the statue had first been found. The strange phenomenon brought people from near and far to the shrine. Soon the image proved to be miraculous and pilgrimages were formed. The Church which was built to honour Our Mother was given to the Carmelite Order.

27/10/2024

28 OCT SAINT OF THE DAY
SS SIMON & JUDE, APOSTLES
Simon was surnamed the Zealot for his rigid adherence to the Jewish law and to the Canaanite law. He was one of the original followers of Christ. He preached in Egypt and then went to Persia with Jude, where both suffered martyrdom. Jude, known as Thaddaeus, was a brother of James the Less, and a relative of Our Saviour. Jude preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Libya. He returned to Jerusalem in the year 62, and assisted at the election of his brother, Simeon, as Bishop of Jerusalem. He is an author of an epistle directed against the heresies of the Simonians, Nicolaites, and Gnostics. He suffered martyrdom along with Simon in Armenia. Jude is invoked in desperate situations because his New Testament letter stresses that the faithful should persevere in the environment of harsh, difficult circumstances, just as their forefathers had done before them. Therefore, he is the patron saint of desperate cases.

27/10/2024

TODAY IN SJ HISTORY
28 OCT 1584
Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585) dedicated the Roman College. He was received by Fr. General Claudio Acquaviva, SJ (1543-1615) and the professors, including Frs. Bellarmine, Suarez, and Clavius.
It was founded in 1551 as the Collegium Romanum (College of Rome) by Ignatius Loyola and Francis Borgia. Fr. Acquaviva, at the age of 37 and a first-time delegate, was elected the Superior General in 1581. Pope Gregory in astonishment told the members of the congregation, "Good heavens, you have chosen for your ruler a young man who isn't even forty years old!" For the international Jesuit college, he built in 1582, the large edifice known as the Collegio Romano which was occupied by the faculty and students of the Gregorian University. It received its present name as the result of the efforts of Pope Gregory. The university’s Rector is appointed by the Pope, and the majority of its professors, who come from all over the world, are Jesuits. The Pontifical Gregorian University functions primarily as an institution of higher learning for the Roman Catholic clergy, though others are not excluded. Among the university’s graduates are 24 canonized Saints, 16 Popes, and 50 persons who have been beatified.

26/10/2024

OCTOBER 27
OUR MOTHER, HELP OF CHRISTIANS (ITALY)
The magnificent Basilica of Our Mother in Turin, Italy, built by St. John Bosco between 1863 and 1868, was inspired by a dream-vision which he had in 1844. The Blessed Virgin showed Don Bosco a lofty Church and said, “This is my house; from it my glory shines forth. You will understand everything when you will see in fact what you now see with the eyes of your mind.” Every stone, every ornament, represented one of her graces. Among the monuments of the Church, the most splendid is the painting above the main Altar. Our Blessed Mother Help of Christians occupies the central position, and is surrounded by symbols: God the Father, the Holy Spirit, the Apostles and Evangelists. Don Bosco won out, and the vast Church was consecrated and dedicated in 1868. By the turn of the 19th century, the Church of Our Mother, Help of Christians in Turin had become famous and in 1911, Pope Saint Pius X gave it the crowning glory by raising it to the rank of a Basilica of Our Mother Help of Christians!

26/10/2024

27 OCT SAINT OF THE DAY
B GIOVANNI ANTONIO SOLINAS, S.J. (1643-1683)
Solinas was born in Italy and was baptized in the local parish church just hours after he was born. His parents entrusted his education to the Society of Jesus and he began to feel an attraction to the priesthood with an emphasis on the Jesuit Mission. At the age of 20, he formally entered the Society of Jesus and expressed his desires to enter the missions. He was ordained to the priesthood at the age of 30 and left for Latin America. He commenced his apostolate in Paraguay, distinguishing himself amongst the native populations teaching the doctrine to children. In 1683, he was assigned to the Chaco mission and the dangerous journey saw them reach the ethnic groups to begin their apostolate amongst them. However, the two priests and eighteen others, including some of the natives, were brutally slain and both the priests, Pedro Ortiz de Zárate and Solinas were buried under the altar at the Jesuit church at Calle Caseros y Miter in Salta. They were beatified in July 2022 in Argentina.

26/10/2024

TODAY IN SJ HISTORY
27 OCT 1610
The first entrance of the Jesuits into Canada. This mission was recommended to the Society by King Henry IV of France.
During the French colonization of New France in the 17th century, Jesuits played an active role in North America. When Samuel de Champlain established the foundations of the French colony at Quebec, he was aware of native tribes who possessed their own languages, customs, and traditions. The Frenchmen Pierre Biard and Ennemond Massé, set foot at Port Royal, in Canada these "Blackrobes," as they soon came to be called, immediately began to reach out to the indigenous peoples in the vast new land. They went first to the Micmacs, next to the Montagnais, then to the Algonquins. They followed the wanderers. They made their way into the forests, along the waterways, across the portages and through the woods.

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