Retreat Houses Research Articles

Działalność Zgromadzenia Sióstr Karmelitanek Dzieciątka Jezus w ostatnim okresie życia m. Teresy Kierocińskiej (1945–1946)

The last period of Mother Teresa Kierocińska’s life was a difficult time for Poland, marked by chaos and instability. The years 1945–1946 were at the same time a period of intensive ministry of the Foundress of the Congregation as Superior General. After the end of hostilities, Mother Teresa and her sisters immediately joined the new tasks of the Church and responded to the needs of their surroundings.The congregation had to take urgent care of the premises for its activities. The sisters in Wolbrom were in a particularly difficult situation, being deprived of their own dwelling. In a short time, the Carmelite Sisters renovated the building assigned to them, at the same time carrying out care and educational activities. They ran two kindergartens and courses for girls. The work of the sisters in Polanka Wielka also required new organisation. There, within a few months, a semi-public chapel and rooms for a kindergarten were erected using the planks of a former German barrack. Between 1945 and 1946, work was carried out to adapt the building in Sosnowiec, where the various sectors of the educational establishment were located. In addition, care was taken to allocate an abandoned building in Wiejska Street to the state authorities for the purposes of an orphanage.Since 1945, in all Carmelite institutions of the Child Jesus, a wide range of apostolic activities have been resumed, including kindergartens, tailoring and embroidery courses, religious instruction, charitable services, and nursing. A retreat house in Czerna was resumed. The development of activities was accompanied by Mother Kierocińska’s concern for the spiritual development of the congregation. Mother Teresa took care of the formation of the professed sisters, as well as of the numerous group of candidates she accepted into the religious community. She was keen to deepen Carmelite spirituality and to ensure that the sisters were guided by the Discalced Carmelites. The new situation allowed for regular visits from the Carmelite fathers with the ministry of retreatants and confessors.At the beginning of July 1946, m. Teresa fell ill with peritonitis and, after suffering for several days, passed to eternity on 12 July 1946 in the presence of the sisters. This was shortly before the scheduled General Chapter at which she was to resign as Superior General. The funeral ceremony took place on 15 July and was presided over by Bishop Stanisław Czajka. After the Holy Mass celebrated in the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Sosnowiec, a numerous funeral procession with the body of the deceased went to the cemetery in Józef Mirecki Avenue. The funeral became a real manifestation of the population who wanted to honor the “Mother of Workers and Zagłębie”.

The early years of Jesuit Fathers' Retreat House in Czechowice-Dziedzice

The article discusses the foundation of Jesuit fathers' retreat house Czechowice-Dziedzice, which started in 1903.

„Dom Księży Polskich” w Truskawcu jako główny ośrodek wypoczynkowy duchowieństwa polskiego w latach 1923-1939

When Poland regained independence in 1918, there was a need to start a battle for the health of its citizens, mainly for the elimination of the ubiquitous tuberculosis. The reborn state could not afford large-scale activities aimed at creating a health prophylaxis system by building treatment infrastructure. Under such circumstances, many rest homes, health centres and even sanatoriums were created and maintained under the voluntary taxation of citizens. One of the first centres of this type was founded in 1922 by Roman Catholic clergy in Truskavets. The three “Księżówka” retreat houses, opened before the outbreak of World War I, on the territory of the Austrian partition, were a kind of role model for them. The first Tarnów diocese was launched in 1897, in Szkolna street in Zakopane. The second one was established in 1901 in Worochcie. The Association for Mutual Help of Priests, established in 1891 in Lviv, played the role of the initiator and “investor”. In 1910 a similar facility was opened in Zakopane. It was the work of the Association of the Health House for Priests, established in Krakow in 1891. The “Księżówka” in Truskavets, organized in the villas “Hospice” and “Maria Helena”, functioned until the end of the interwar period.

SEMINARI TINGGI MAZMUR 21 KALIMANTAN BARAT

Seminary is a place for Christian religious education to form and educate prospective Christian clergy. The seminary is equipped with various educational support facilities, because it is a special education that focuses on theological/religious education. Seminary facilities in the Pontianak City area are currently considered to be less than optimal, both in terms of quantity/quantity, and quality of facilities. The purpose of this design is to produce the design of educational facilities and religious tourism that is able to accommodate the needs of users and visitors in the form of facilities and infrastructure. The design object focuses on the Bukit Doa Psalm 21 area, Anjongan, Mempawah. The method used in this design is observation, comparison, and analysis. The author will conduct field observations at seminaries and retreat houses in Pontianak, as well as interviews with related parties. The design focus is on identifying seminary facilities and the need for infrastructure. The theme that will be focused on this design is contextual architecture which focuses on linking new buildings with the environment. References to contextual architecture and similar buildings are taken from various sources. The collected case studies will later become a design guide, ideas and solutions to design problems. The seminary design concept is in the form of a spatial program schematic and site analysis which results in the identification of the required facilities and a schematic design of the seminary area and building. The final result of the design of the West Kalimantan Psalm 21 High Seminary is the the seminary area and building that has complete infrastructure that is able to accommodate educational activities and religious tourism, but also has a connection with the surrounding environment.

Pokamedulski zespół klasztorny Pustelnia Złotego Lasu w Rytwianach – innowacyjny ośrodek w sektorze usług turystycznych województwa świętokrzyskiego

Jednym z nowych trendów w turystyce religijnej na świecie są pobyty urlopowe i wakacyjne w klasztorach, pustelniach oraz domach rekolekcyjnych. Tak zwane wakacje i urlopy w klasztorach przeznaczone są dla osób uwikłanych w uzależnienia cywilizacyjne, które poszukują wyciszenia oraz odpoczynku od codziennych obowiązków. W Polsce do takich miejsc należy m.in. pokamedulski zespół klasztorny Pustelnia Złotego Lasu w Rytwianach, nazywany sanktuarium ciszy.Przeprowadzone badania pozwoliły na wskazanie głównych czynników, które stały się kluczem do sukcesu, czyli stałego rozwoju Pustelni i wzrastającej liczby podróżnych. Są to przede wszystkim:* walory historyczne, kulturowe i architektoniczne Pustelni,* dziedzictwo religijne ośrodka i duchowość monastyczna, odziedziczona tu po pustelnikach kamedułach,* postawa duszpasterska i przedsiębiorcza dyrektora Pustelni, ks. kan. Wiesława Kowalewskiego – efektywnego i skutecznego lidera, jego cechy osobowe oraz umiejętność i rzetelność współpracy ze środowiskiem wewnętrznym i otoczeniem,* bogata i unikatowa oferta terapii Relaksacyjno-Kontemplacyjnego Centrum Terapeutycznego „Pustelnia Złotego Lasu” SpeS (Salus per silentium),* profesjonalna kadra do obsługi ruchu pielgrzymkowego i turystycznego,* promocja ośrodka w środkach masowego przekazu,* poszukiwanie i wprowadzanie nowych pomysłów, rozwiązań i projektów – innowacyjność oraz ekspansywność,* rosnąca popularność urlopów i wakacji w klasztorach.

Las Casas de Ejercicios de los jesuitas en la antigua Provincia del Paraguay

Las Casas de Ejercicios fueron los ámbitos donde se practicaba el ministerio que ideó San Ignacio de Loyola, constituyéndose en uno de los pilares de la Compañía de Jesús. Desde un principio se necesitó de edificios especiales, aunque los mismos co-legios suplieron lo que con el tiempo dieron lugar a una tipología particular en el con-texto de la arquitectura colonial y específicamente de los domicilios jesuitas. Lamenta-blemente, en el amplio espacio geográfico propuesto, desaparecieron la mayoría de ellos. Se analiza aquí el origen y desarrollo de estos edificios en la otrora Provincia del Paraguay.

Charity, Mortal Sin, and Parish Life

1. Classical Teaching on Sin (1) Mortal sin, looked at as an act, is a deliberate transgression of one of the grave precepts of God, which completely turns us from Him as our last end; because sinful man knows full well that on that transgression depend the loss of sanctifying and exclusion from everlasting (2) This arresting text comes from the pen of the nineteenth-century Swiss Jesuit Maurice Meschler (1830-1912), whose book, The Gift of Pentecost: Meditations on the Holy Ghost, was first published in German in 1882. (3) A French translation appeared in 1895, while the English one followed in 1903. (4) The book originally appeared in Germany a year after the launch of Bismarck's Kulturkampf, and it remained in print for more than half a century. (5) Herder produced a new edition in 1932! (6) That is what we call a good press run. If one's devout Catholic ancestors of the early twentieth century spoke German, French, or English, they likely would have come under the influence of this book, especially if they enjoyed contact with Jesuits. If, on the other hand, they spoke other European languages such as Italian or Spanish, they would have encountered similar expositions by other authors. (7) Before the post conciliar period, most even-barely-catechized Catholics had learned that mortal sin spells the loss of sanctifying and exclusion from everlasting happiness. All in all, our co-religionists of yesteryear understood what one's being in or--heaven forfend--out of the of grace meant. Unless they had benefitted from occasional contact with theologians, our forebears probably were not familiar with classical accounts of damnation. Few everyday Catholics in the United States became agitated over the intricacies of predestination. Common religious instruction avoided this theological minefield and, instead, instilled in Catholics both young and old the importance of dying in the state of grace. Intellectually curious Catholics, on the other hand, may have been exposed to popularizations of predestination themes, such as explorations into the freedom of the damned. For example, None of the damned will arise at the last day to say, 'Lord you did not help me enough.' They will all say, 'That is what I willed.' And they will go on maintaining that their choice was an excellent one. If a single one of the damned could say he was damned by God's fault, God would not be God. (8) The diocesan priest, later Cardinal, Charles Journet, delivered these remarks in the mid-1950s at a retreat house outside of Geneva, Switzerland. (9) The regular Churchgoing parishioner, however, would have been content to save his soul and to avoid going to hell. Speculations about the psychology of the damned would have escaped him. Priests instead told their parishioners about the importance of receiving the last sacraments or the last rites, as they then were known. Today, this salutary and religious concern for dying in the state of no longer informs the spiritual sensibilities of the majority of Catholics. By and large, most people think that God will take care of them in the end. sin and its wage, on the other hand, apply only to the perpetrators of the Holocaust and of other large-scale misadventures, like marathon bombers and those who cover up child abuse. One could even appeal (wrongly) to Spe Salvi, no. 45, in order to support this outlook. (10) For folks who dream of quasi-universal salvation, the thought that someone who is damned would have something to opine at the last judgment about human freedom sounds like a charming literary device lifted right out of Dante's Inferno. In brief, people remain blase about their moral conduct and its outcomes. When their choices concern the hot-button moral issues that the secular press announces daily will soon undergo reevaluation by the Church, Catholics grow emboldened in their moral indifferentism. Generalizations rarely do justice to complex circumstances such as the theological opinions of Catholics. …

Shaping the Spiritual Exercises: the Maisons des retraites in Brittany during the Seventeenth Century as a Gendered Pastoral Tool

In the second half of the seventeenth century, on the periphery of Catholic Europe, Brittany was the site of intensive missionary activity aimed at both men and women. Based on a heterogeneous corpus of manuscripts, printed books, and iconographic sources, this article shows how, far from Rome, Jesuits and devout laywomen adopted a gendered perspective in reconceptualizing mission. In the city of Vannes, the Jesuit Vincent Huby and the aristocrat Catherine de Francheville instructed large groups of men and women in the Spiritual Exercises. They supervised two retreat houses to welcome them and created a “missionary kit” of moral images adapted to their gendered pastoral field. The Breton context presents a particularly good example of the importance of gender to missionary interactions. Here, the Jesuit “way of proceeding” allowed for the integration of local communitarian perspectives, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the mission.

Le cinéma pourrait-il tuer ?

The purpose of this paper is to show 20 films likely to disturb some sensitive, anxious, depressive, or prepsychotic subjects. We classified those films into eight groups: films with a self-justified violence, films produced through a subjective camera, horror films, apocalyptic films, films describing the life of old people retired in a retreat house, films describing calmly decided suicides by subjects facing fatal issues, films showing teachers with right-minded ideas generating disastrous consequences among students, films showing actors stepping across the screen. Fragile people may be prompted to an acting out toward themselves or others.

Pie XI et les exercices spirituels

Pius XI is the first pope, and, to date, the only one to have devoted a complete encyclical, Mens nostra (1929), to the Spiritual Exercises. He is also the pope who introduced an annual retreat, for the Pope and the Curia, at the Vatican ; a practice that all of his successors have continued. If, he was such an ardent promoter of the Spiritual Exercises as pope, this is due to his having earlier been, as a priest, a regular practitioner for more than thirty years : in Rho, as an oblate of Saint Ambroise and Saint Charles, and then in a large spiritual retreat house directed by the Jesuits, Exerzitienhaus in Tisis, close to Feldkirch in Austria. Archives show the regularity of these stays. Once become pope, Achille Ratti worked hard to spread the spiritual practice belonging to a religious order from where, moreover, he recruited many of his close collaborators.

Beauty and the Little Stories of Holiness: What Alejandro García-Rivera Taught Me

Beauty and the Little Stories of Holiness: What Alejandro García-Rivera Taught Me Peter J. Casarella (bio) I found out about the passing of Alejandro García-Rivera through an email I received from Roberto Goizueta while undertaking a pilgrimage from a conference I was attending in Oxford (United Kingdom) to the village of Littlemore. Besides the shock of grief, I felt immediately at a loss and needed to make sense of the place in which I found myself. As a result, my memories of this trip are sharply etched. Littlemore was a small retreat house on the outskirts of Oxford that the theologian and convert, John Henry Newman, used as a refuge for himself and other members of the Oxford Movement as they prayed, read the Church Fathers, and contemplated entering into communion with the Church of Rome. I discovered on this bus ride that Littlemore stands in the vicinity of a community that is almost entirely Muslim. Newman’s retreat in 1842 from the din of Oxford to the quiet country parish is today a journey from the Victorian classicism of the Christ Church (the college of young Newman) to an exurb of fully globalized hybridity. At Littlemore, I prayed for Alex in a baroque interior chapel where the young John Henry Newman had also prayed. The room had the size and feel of a photographer’s darkroom. In 1863, a sensitive young Englishman with an interest in the classics visited Newman’s chapel at Littlemore, describing afterward with great pleasure, in a letter to his mother, the “exquisite” nature of its “altar and reredos.”1 That year, this man—the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins—entered Oxford to nurture his interest in literature. Three years later, he sought out an elderly Fr. Newman (now at the Oratory in Birmingham) in order to ask to be received into communion with the Catholic Church. The mature theological aesthetics of this poet, particularly the finely tuned vision of the unity of difference in his remarkable poem “Pied Beauty,” lie at the very center of Alejandro García-Rivera’s work.2 We live through our collective memories, especially of the dead and of those whom we admire. These recollections help me to see more clearly something of Alejandro García-Rivera’s legacy for theologians today. He was no ordinary thinker. He would have taken delight in each one of the stories I narrated to myself. He would discern a mosaic from these fragmented vignettes, expandable to the size of a Sistine Chapel. My vision is probably less wholistic. The three protagonists dwell in communion in many ways. Like Newman and Hopkins, García-Rivera possessed a deep, humble, and personal sense of conversion/metanoia, and thought deeply about the existential significance of ecclesial belonging. Like them, he was a thinker who could move easily through complex philosophical and scientific discourses and focus on what needed to be said in order to articulate the sense of the faithful. His own Littlemore was, I suspect, more Californian—namely, that of the Camaldolese monks at Incarnation Monastery in Berkeley and at New Calmaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur (a huge improvement over British weather, I must say). His reverence for the contemplation of beauty and his deep sense of tradition were in this sense still very much in the spirit of the men who retreated from the individualistic, Anglo-Saxon culture of Oxford. Unlike his British counterparts from the nineteenth century, however, he was even better equipped to think about the problem of cultural difference in the world in which we find ourselves today. García-Rivera and I met in 1997 on the occasion of a conference that Raúl Gómez, S.D.S., and I organized at The Catholic University of America on the Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church.3 We bonded out of a mutual admiration for Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and this bond led shortly afterwards to my being invited to serve as a reader of the dissertation of Michelle González at the Graduate Theological Union—a work that undertook a comparison of von Balthasar and Sor Juana Inés de...

About This Issue

About This Issue Rodger Van Allen, Co-editor Katharine E. Harmon, who recently completed her dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, contributes our lead article which examines the work of artist Ade Bethune (1914–2002) during the first decades of the liturgical movement in the United States. Harmon shows how Bethune sought to draw the holy in the ordinary and through her work gave visual and tactile realization to the deepest desires of the liturgical movement in the United States. Patrick J. Hayes, the Archivist for the Redemptorists of the Baltimore Province, located in Brooklyn, New York, writes of Father John Christopher Drumgoole, himself a product of an urban slum, whose work in nineteenth-century New York saved thousands of children from the unsavory influences of New York’s streets. Cardinal Edward Egan, during the two-hundredth anniversary celebration of the Archdiocese of New York in 2008, extolled Drumgoole and proudly states that he died a true priest’s death. He “died of exhaustion.” James Silas Rogers, the editor of New Hibernia Review contributes “Someone Watching Your Back: Guardian Angels in Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls.” MacDonald’s 1996 memoir All Souls: A Family Story from Southie has been highly praised for its portrayal of a white urban underclass in South Boston. Rogers’ article carefully considers the Catholic sensibilities that inform MacDonald’s narrative. Our cover essay by Thomas F. Rzeznik (Seton Hall University) tells the story of the Laymen’s Week-End Retreat League of Philadelphia on the occasion of its centennial. Now known as the Malvern Retreat House, it continues with vigor. Rzeznik notes that the League in many ways pioneered the work of lay ecclesial ministry before the term was ever conceived. Both the pictures and the narrative are worth your attention. Finally we recall that only a dozen years ago, Monsignor Timothy M. Dolan of the North American College in Rome graciously joined the Committee on Publication of American Catholic Studies. We are grateful for his continuing presence with us as we join in celebrating him as the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. [End Page 1] Copyright © 2012 American Catholic Historical Society

Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism : An Appreciation

Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: An Appreciation Lawrence Cunningham (bio) Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) published her best-known work Mysticism in 1911. It has never gone out of print.1 In fact, Bernard McGinn has judged that it is one of the best-known books on Christian mysticism ever to be published in the English language.2 The year 2011 marked the one hundredth anniversary of its publication; so it seems like an opportune moment for making a critical reassessment of her work. Such a reassessment will also serve, I believe, to help us judge the actual state of scholarship on the tangled topic of Christian mysticism. That the title of this essay uses the word “appreciation” should not be taken to mean that the book is without deficiencies. Still, I think Underhill’s book deserves appreciation both because it accomplished as much as it did, given the limitations of scholarship at the time, and because it has found an appreciative audience for a century. The very word “mysticism” only entered the English lexicon in the mid-eighteenth century. Nor has it been used uniformly in a positive sense. Indeed, Underhill herself, as if she were summarizing the popular use of the term, tells her readers in her preface that she does not intend the word to mean: “an excuse for every kind of occultism, for dilute transcendentalism, vapid symbolism, religious or aesthetic sentimentality, and bad metaphysics. On the other hand, it has been freely employed as a term of contempt by those who have criticized those things.”3 What Underhill describes in this passage is how the term was vulgarly used in her day. Underhill’s work was not a single flower blooming in an indifferent desert. There was already an increasing interest in Christian mysticism during the Edwardian period. Dean William Ralph Inge delivered the Bampton Lectures on Christian mysticism in 1899. Three years before Underhill’s work was published, Baron Von Hugel published, in two-volumes, The Mystical Element in Religion, which, despite its somewhat idiosyncratic nature, was a highly influential work. Von Hugel, in fact, would later become Underhill’s spiritual director, a few years after the publication of Mysticism, orienting her more firmly into relationship with the person of Christ and encouraging her active participation into the life of the church.4 Underhill admired Rufus Jones, the American Quaker, whose book, Studies in Mystical Religion, was published a [End Page 106] few years before her own, and she was also familiar with the classic work of William James (Varieties of Religious Experience), though she found his analysis of mysticism wanting.5 Click for larger view View full resolution Evelyn Underhill, Courtesy of Retreat House, Pleshey Mysticism is divided into two large sections. The first, entitled, “The Mystic Fact” argues that there is a form of consciousness that we can rightly call “mystical.” Underhill roughly categorizes mystics as falling under three broad categories: those who are seekers or pilgrims; those who cultivate an interiority of the heart; and, finally, those who follow the ascetic path.6 The second half of the book develops under the rubric “The Mystic Way.” The former section takes as its point of departure an exposition of vitalism. Influenced by her reading of Henri Bergson, she traces this mystical consciousness in psychology and investigates its relationship to theology and symbolics while, at the same time, carefully distinguishing it from “magic” (the term that was then used in anthropology). The latter part of the book is a kind of synthesis of her capacious reading in the literature of the mystics themselves. This literature was mostly Christian, but some was also from non-Christian traditions (e.g. The Upanishads, Sufi poetry). [End Page 107] When one consults letters from the period she was doing research for Mysticism, it is astounding to find how much she read when such literature was not easily obtainable in critical translations.7 She read the work of Saint Teresa of Avila in French and engaged a friend to translate some of the German texts on mysticism, including the work of Meister Eckhart. She relied on anthologies for some sources and used Paul Sabatier for analysis of Franciscan sources. She knew...

Rereading Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism

Rereading Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism Kathleen Henderson Staudt (bio) For the past twenty years, an annual Quiet Day retreat has been held at Washington National Cathedral in honor of Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), best known to scholars of Christian Spirituality as the author of Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s [sic] Spiritual Consciousness.1 Underhill is on the calendar of saints in the Episcopal Church, and the event is traditionally held near June 15, the date of her death in 1941. The gathering always draws some people for whom Underhill is a new discovery, along with long-time devotees. Usually one or two have read Mysticism, but more have come to Underhill’s work through the retreat addresses she gave in the 1920’s and 30’s or through a number of popular anthologies of her work. People comment especially on Underhill’s capacity to convey a profound conviction about the reality of the spiritual/mystical life, in a voice that validates the religious experience of “ordinary people.” For someone familiar with the scholarship of Christian mysticism, the participants’ responses to Underhill’s work might seem to blur and blend categories that scholars have wanted to keep distinct. Some at the Quiet Days have admired Underhill’s account of mysticism as a universal human experience, transcending theology and religious traditions; but they share the day of prayer with others who celebrate the distinctively Anglican and “catholic” cultural and theological context that frames Underhill’s most vivid accounts of the mystics of the Church. The complementary views expressed by these readers point to the richness and complexity of Underhill’s engagement with the mystics, an engagement that has much to offer contemporary scholars of mysticism and the spiritual life. What can the mystics teach us, she asks—and we are still asking—about the spiritual life and the experience of ordinary people? More particularly, should we view mysticism as a universal human experience of the Absolute, beyond religious traditions, as a Romantic or a modern psychological approach might suggest? Or should mysticism be understood as a particular, textually mediated experience shaped by religious and cultural context and language—a view more congenial to our postmodern age? And what is the theology, the understanding of God that underlies the mystics’ “reports”? Underhill navigates these kinds of questions for an audience of seekers and [End Page 113] scholars alike, and this may be what has kept Mysticism one of the most widely read works on Christian mysticism in the twentieth century, continuously in print since its first publication in 1911.2 I would like to suggest that Mysticism as well as Underhill’s work as a whole invites a rereading in our time, one that takes into account and considers specificity of the original context in which she wrote and also considers questions important to recent scholarship on Christian mysticism and spirituality. I believe scholars and practitioners in these fields are uniquely positioned to appreciate the surprising contemporaneity of this voice from the Edwardian era, and to discover in Underhill’s work a lively, complex and creative framing of questions that continue to engage serious students of Christian mysticism and the spiritual life. Click for larger view View full resolution Evelyn Underhill, Courtesy of Retreat House, Pleshey [End Page 114] Scholars have often expressed ambivalence toward Underhill’s work in Mysticism, expressing both an appreciation for the breadth of her account of the mystics, but also noting a lack of rigor in the scholarly analysis she offers. She is usually classified with her contemporary William James among twentieth-century scholars focused primarily on religious experience, and particularly among those who see the mystical experience as expressing a “common core” in human religious experience, transcending particular religious and cultural expressions. Underhill’s orientation to this discussion can be seen in her preface to the first edition of Mysticism, where she writes: “All mystics . . . . speak the same language and come from the same country. As against that fact, the place which they happen to occupy in the kingdom of this world matters little.”3 A statement like this—and one could cite many others—would indeed seem to put her...

To Whom the Abbey Appeals: A Study in Psychological Type

This study employs psychological type theory to profile those individuals drawn to the Grange retreat house at Ampleforth Abbey in the heart of rural Yorkshire. Data provided by 361 men and women who completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales demonstrated that, compared with the profile of the United Kingdom population as a whole, the Abbey appeals more strongly to introverts than to extraverts, more strongly to intuitives than to sensers, more strongly to feelers than to thinkers, and more strongly to judgers than to perceivers. These findings are interpreted in light of the strengths of Benedictine spirituality, and challenges and opportunities are highlighted for Christian leaders and educators.

Charles Plater and the Practice of Retreat in the Church of England

While still a novice, the English Jesuit Charles Plater (1875–1921), through his energy, brilliance, enthusiasm and attractive personality was influential in the foundation of the Catholic Social Guild and other social projects. In particular, he motivated the establishment of retreat houses for working men within the Catholic Church in England, work which he described in his book Retreats for the People. This volume attracted the attention of many within the Church of England, encouraging a number of initiatives which, among other things, led to a significant growth in the numbers of Anglicans who made a retreat and to the establishment of diocesan retreat houses.

In Memoriam: Kieran McCarty (1925–2008)

In Memoriam: Kieran McCarty (1925–2008) Bernard L. Fontana [Eulogy delivered by Bernard L. Fontana at Mission San Xavier del Bac on Saturday, January 3, 2009, on the occasion of the funeral Mass for the Reverend Father Kieran McCarty, O.F.M.] “Then the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fall from the sky to the earth” (Rev 9:1). With Father Kieran’s passing, a star has fallen from the sky, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. In thinking about our friend, I’m reminded of what a friar once told me. “If you’ve met one Franciscan ... you’ve met one Franciscan.” If ever there were an examplar of that verity, it was Kieran Robert McCarty, a man known to his fellow friars and to his legion of friends as “Kiro.” It was when he became a Franciscan that he assumed the name “Kieran” after a pair of sixth century Irish saints, monastics who, appropriately enough, strove to preserve religion and learning in some of the darkest of the Dark Ages. Kiro was a person who compartmentalized his adult life. He was, above all, a Franciscan priest who felt deeply his fraternal calling. So was he an airplane pilot. A motorcycle driver. An accomplished musician who could fill a space with the sound of beautiful organ music. A back country adventurer who was completely at home in the seaside, foothill, and mountain villages of Sonora and Sinaloa where he sought out precious 17th, 18th, and 19th-century documents in churches both big and small, documents that he microfilmed and many of which he personally transcribed with a typewriter. Kiro was a scholar’s scholar and the peoples’ scholar. Generous to a fault, he stood ever ready to share his hard-won knowledge with anyone who asked, laymen, students, and professors alike. Father Kieran was a man hale, hearty, and well met. He liked good cigars. He smoked a pipe. He liked Sonoran bacanora and good martinis. Bernard L. Fontana is retired field historian at the University of Arizona and editorial advisor for Journal of the Southwest. Journal of the Southwest 50, 4 (Winter 2008) : 459–462 He liked good food, especially estilo sonorense, and he liked the camraderie of being surrounded by like-minded friends. His friends included his fellow friars, his fellow scholars, and people from virtually every walk and station in life: vaqueros, lawyers, tire salesmen, automobile mechanics, students, academics, airplane pilots, motorcyclists, masons, carpenters, and, perhaps above all, the O’odham people and the Mexican people who were in his parishes when he was a pastor here at San Xavier and in Altar in Sonora. Father Kieran, who grew up in Santa Barbara and where he was ordained as a priest in 1949, spent the first three years of his religious vocation as an assistant in St. Francis parish in Sacramento. In 1954 he was pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Winlock, Washington, and the next three plus years found him in Scottsdale where he became field manager for the Casa de Paz y Bien, the Franciscans’ retreat house. Someone in the Order of Friars Minor recognized one of Kiro’s major strengths, and from 1958 to August of 1963 he was assigned as a research historian at the Academy of American Franciscan History in Washington, D.C. He earned his Master’s degree in Latin American history at Catholic University in 1960 and in 1963 was the editor of the prestigious history journal, The Americas. It was about then, some time in the early 1960s, that Father Kieran and I met and became friends from that day forward. We were carrying out archaeological excavations just to the west of this church when he showed up at the site wearing the uniform of a captain in the Air National Guard, a post as chaplain he held until his honorable discharge in 1964. We talked about research he was doing in Mexico at the time. This involved microfilming documentary sources related to Northwest Mexico, a project carried out under auspices of the Organization of American States, the Republic of Mexico, and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and which...

Divine Therapy: Teaching Reflective and Meditative Practices

Abstract. Reflective and meditative practices, whether Eastern or Western, are being taught in multiple places – retreat houses, hospitals, Zen centers – but are rarely included in the theology classroom. What would be the rationale for inclusion of reflective/meditative practices in a theology curriculum that does not include such a theory/praxis course? What might a mystical tradition/reflective practice course look like? The author first explores the implications of a three-semester pilot program – using guided imagery, spiritual journaling, iconography, and centering prayer – that was conducted with volunteers outside the classroom. Then, based on the experimental project, the author describes a course that blends global traditions with the best of the practices. The author concludes with an evaluation of the reflective/meditative practices and the praxis-inclusive course in terms of possible long-term effects on the personal development of the participants and the ministry of teaching and learning itself.

Small Firms in Tourism – International Perspectives

International perspectives on small firms in tourism: a synthesis (R. Thomas). Tourism, small firm development and empowerment in post-apartheid South Africa (C.M. Rogerson). Factors affecting small firms in tourism: a Ghanaian perspective (W.C. Gartner). Government assistance for tourism SMEs from theory to practice (S. Wanhill). Short-run output and employment effects arising from assistance to tourism SMEs: evidence from Israel (A. Fleischer, D. Felsenstein). Risky lifestyles? Entrepreneurial characteristics of the New Zealand bed and breakfast sector (C.M. Hall, K. Rusher). From lifestyle consumption to lifestyle production: changing patterns of tourism entrepreneurship (G. Shaw, A.M. Williams). Success and growth in rural tourism micro-businesses in Finland: financial or life-style objectives? (R. Komppula). The interaction of community and small tourism businesses in rural New Zealand (D. Keen). Whale watching: the roles of small firms in the evolution of a new Australian niche market (N. Scott, E. Laws). Small firms and wine and food tourism in New Zealand: issues of collaboration, clusters and lifestyles (C.M Hall). Quality homes, quality people: the challenge of quality grading and assurance in small accommodation enterprises (P.A. Lynch, H. Tucker). Overcoming the green gap: improving the environmental performance of small tourism firms in Western Australia (M. Schaper, J. Carlsen). Small firms and the principles of sustainable tourism: the case of cycle tourism (N.D. Morpeth). Accommodating the spiritual tourist the case of religious retreat houses (M. Shackley). Small firm performance in the context of agent and structure: a cross-cultural comparison in the tourist accommodation sector (A. Morrison, R.M. Teixeira). Coping with resource scarcity: the experience of UK tourism SMEs (M.M. Augustyn). Strategic and structural variables in internationalisation: the case of Swiss tourism SMEs (A. Mungall, C. Johnson) Small tourism firms in e-Europe: definitional, conceptual and contextual considerations (H. Matlay).

Black, White, and Catholic: Southern Jesuits Confront the Race Question, 1952

In the summer of 1952, the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus rejected the practice of racial segregation. Basing their decision on Catholic philosophical and theological precepts, the Jesuits of the New Orleans Province examined the racial practices of post-World War II America and found them wanting. They decided that the time had come to end segregation within their order and its various ministries. By integrating Jesuit-run educational institutions, retreat houses, and parishes as well as the religious order itself, members of the Society of Jesus, however, ran the risk of alienating benefactors, hampering apostolic effectiveness, and decreasing vocations. Nevertheless, the Jesuits had concluded that racial segregation was incompatible with church teachings regarding Christian justice and charity—"Jim Crow" Catholicism was no longer welcomed at church.1 Jesuit action came two years before the Supreme Court rendered its decision in the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, case, and three years before the Montgomery bus boycott commenced. The process by which Southern Jesuits concluded that racial segregation was morally untenable is a hitherto unexamined aspect of the broader civil rights movement in the United States and is the focus of this work. The history of the Roman Catholic Church's response to American racial practices has been less than edifying. Beginning with slavery and continuing with racial segregation, the Church has equivocated and rationalized [End Page 484] the varied treatment of blacks in the United States.2 While the papacy regularly condemned the slave trade, Holy Scripture, Church Fathers, and church tradition never proscribed slavery. Within three decades following the end of slavery in the United States, American Southern Catholics adopted the practice of racial segregation as it was established and institutionalized by legal and extra-legal means.3 In post-World War II America, Southern Catholics still followed the practice of segregation as prescribed by law and custom. Southern parishes were established either for black or white Catholics as were parochial grammar and high schools, Catholic medical and social establishments, and Catholic institutions of higher learning. Notable exceptions were found in the border states of Kentucky and Missouri, where several Catholic institutions of higher learning were integrated. And while the Catholic University of America, in the still largely segregated District of Columbia, accepted black applicants, none of the institutions in the Deep South did. For Southern Jesuits, the situation changed with the promulgation of a policy statement regarding interracial affairs in 1952. The impetus for members of the New Orleans Province of the Society of Jesus to examine the race question came from a letter of John Baptist Janssens, S.J., the superior general of the order, entitled De Apostolatu Sociali (Concerning the Social Apostolate). Writing in October, 1949, to fellow Jesuits regarding the socio-economic and religious challenges presented by atheistic communism and liberal materialism, Janssens worried that Jesuits were not sufficiently aware of the plight of the working class and the threat this posed to an individual's material and spiritual welfare arising from "the inequitable condition, both temporal and spiritual, of by far the greater part of the human race."4 The Society of Jesus, he believed, needed to demonstrate solidarity with workers if Christianity was to have any impact on their lives; if not, the appeal of secular doctrines would draw them away from the Church and Christian values. [End Page 485] For Janssens, Christ's love was the motivating factor for examining and then changing society. "Christ, in an untold number of His members, still suffers hunger, nakedness, exile and contempt. Let us turn our eyes attentively to sights which daily meet our eyes and, in the light of truth, study conditions to which we have grown accustomed and even indifferent. They must not be tolerated; there must be a change." The superior general of the Jesuits rhetorically asked whether it was right that people all over the world should live in...