Articles

On Saturday March 12th, 1977, Rutilio Grande, was on his way to celebrate mass in the town of El Paisnal. An old man, Manuel Solorzano, and a young man, Nelson Rutilio Lemus, accompanied him. While driving through the sugarcane fields, Rutilio and his companions were assassinated by machine gun fire. Rutilio Grande’s death foreshadowed the Salvadoran Civil War, in which many Catholic priests, nuns, and laypeople were martyred. Rutilio Grande was killed before the civil war began, twelve years before the deaths of the martyrs at the Universidad Centroamericana. While he is considered the first Catholic martyr of El Salvador, Rutilio Grande was also a member of the Jesuit order and a native son of El Salvador.

What good is God? That’s a question SCU’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education explored as part of its 2013–14 Bannan Institute, a yearlong thematic program addressing matters of significance within the Jesuit, Catholic intellectual tradition. In an age when religion is associated as much with violence as benevolence, when propositions of faith are often framed as oppositional to modern science, and one-fifth of all Americans self-identify as “none of the above” with regard to religion, the question is one of the most significant of our time.

At the age of 19 I left college at Stanford to become a Jesuit. It’s not that I didn’t love being a student there; I did. But somehow it wasn’t enough. By contrast, the Jesuit high school I attended in San Francisco stressed a very clear educational objective: to form men and women for others. We learned, among other things, that an education not oriented toward justice for others was a farce. Despite Stanford’s extraordinary resources and possibilities, I missed the clarity of purpose. I left to enter the Jesuit order. Never have I regretted the decision.

When the president of a university is dragged from his bed in the middle of the night and shot point-blank in his garden by an elite squad of the national military, we must pause to ask why.

On July 23, 2014, Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., Executive Director of the Ignatian Center, gave a talk to the San Jose Rotary Club titled, "What Difference can (does) a Jesuit Pope make?"

In 2009 it is not surprising that the word “holy” in the Nicene Creed--“We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church”—might stick in the throats of some Catholics. Unhappy revelations of recent years of clergy abuse and episcopal cover-up, a growing body of evidence of the Church’s cooperation with evil over the course of its entire history, and even official requests for forgiveness by Church leaders for “faults of the past” make some people ask what it means to say the Church is holy, which has been, after all, an article of faith since ancient times. Should we be talking instead about ecclesial sinfulness?

What if the clashes over conscience between the American Catholic bishops and the Obama Administration are driven in great measure not by anti-Catholicism nor by creeping totalitarianism but by the very model of conscience used by the bishops themselves?