Feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. It is an important symbolic date for all those who are linked in one way or another with Jesuit works and the Ignatian spirit. On this occasion, we invite you to discover a brief reflection addressed to us by Father Bill Muller S.J., the new spiritual adviser of WUJA.  This gives us the opportunity to briefly introduce the latter.

William Muller is an American Jesuit. Since 2015, he is the executive director of the Jesuit Schools Network, the organization, headquartered in Washington, DC, charged with providing services and programming to the 80 Jesuit pre-secondary and secondary schools in the U.S. and Canada. He is a former president of Verbum Dei High School in Los Angeles and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California.

As we celebrate the Feast of St. Ignatius this year we can be grateful for Fr. General Arturo Sosa’s recent announcement, “We have formally begun the process of beatification for Father Pedro Arrupe.”

You remember it was at the Tenth International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe in Valencia, Spain, on the Feast of St. Ignatius in 1973 (45 years ago) that Fr. Arrupe called for Jesuit Alumni “to work with others toward the dismantling of unjust social structures so that the weak, the oppressed, the marginalized of this world may be set free.”

He challenged us to be Men and Women for Others.

On this Feast of St. Ignatius may we reflect on and pray with Fr. Arrupe’s concluding sentences from 1973,

“Men-and-women-for-others:  the paramount objective of Jesuit education – basic, advanced, and continuing – must now be to form such men and women.  For if there is any substance in our reflections, then this is the prolongation into the modern world of our humanist tradition as derived from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.  Only by being a man-or-woman-for-others does one become fully human, not only in the merely natural sense, but in the sense of being the “spiritual” person of Saint Paul.  The person filled with the Spirit; and we know whose Spirit that is:  the Spirit of Christ, who gave his life for the salvation of the world; the God who, by becoming a human person, became, beyond all others, a Man-for-others and Woman-for-others.”

Make this prayer ours – Heavenly Father, place me with your Son, Jesus, who, by becoming a human person, became, beyond all others, a Man-for-others.

Bill Muller S.J.

Spiritual Counselor
WUJA