Elucidation

Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham’s vignette on St. John of the Cross presented a streetwise poet-mystic-reformer (1/30). John’s friendship with St. Teresa of vila and her influence on him were also nicely presented. But St. John’s connections to the Society of Jesus and its influence on him were conspicuously absent.

Before entering religion, John of the Cross was Juan de Yepes, son of Gonzalo de Yepes and Catalina lvarez. Catalina was widowed and in 1551 had to move the family from Toledo in New Castile to the commercial town of Medina del Campo in Old Castile. She hoped that Gonzalo’s wealthy relatives would be of assistance and that her silkweaving trade would make enough money to support the family. The widow Catalina’s family did not receive all the assistance she might have hoped from the Yepes family, and they were often on the verge of starvation.

In the early 1550’s, a number of prominent merchants of Medina del Campo heard Peter Faber, one of the first Jesuits, preach at the court of Philip II in Valladolid. So impressed were they with his erudition and spirituality that they petitioned him to bring the Jesuits to Medina. In 1553 St. Francis Borgia, then comisario, or superprovincial, for the Spanish provinces of the Jesuits, laid the cornerstone of the new school. As with many Jesuit schools of that time, the philosophy of instruction was the modus parisiensis, or the pedagogical style of the University of Paris, which under the influence of humanism stressed, among other things, eloquentia perfecta in the spoken and written word through frequent and varied rhetorical and oratorical exercises.

Juan de Yepes, the future St. John of the Cross, was a scholarship student at that school from 1559 to 1563. The Jesuit school at Medina also stressed, following the pedagogy of the Fourth Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, that gifts freely received should be freely shared with others, that its students accompany their Jesuit teachers in catechizing the town’s poor children and helping at the local hospitals, where the town’s sick poor were housed. These were all beneficent institutions that the young Juan knew all too well from having spent time in them as a destitute boy.

It is curious how the influence of the three great Spanish mystics of the 16th century, Ignatius, Teresa and John, cross-fertilized one another’s lives and spiritualities and how the suffering that the child of an impoverished widow, Juan de Yepes, a scholarship student at a Jesuit school where he learned eloquentia perfecta in the written and spoken word, would one day blossom into that streetwise poet-mystic-reformer. As St. Teresa would say, God does indeed write straight with crooked lines.

Claudio M. Burgaleta, S.J.

Imperial Presence

I write to commend the effort of Peter J. Donaldson (A Century Behind, 1/16) to present the situation of poverty and illiteracy in Burkina Faso, the former Upper Volta. His account gives urgency to the concerted effort to make poverty history in Africa. Africans are grateful for such efforts undertaken to alleviate their travails. The account, however, cuts both ways. Let me explain.

From an African point of view this account perpetuates the impression well described in Stan Nussbaum’s recent book, American Cultural Baggage (2005)namely, everyone should adopt our values. It is unfortunate that Africans now tend to read Western reports about their continent with a hermeneutic of suspicion. The writer failed to mention, for example, that Burkina Faso is part of the historic pre-colonial kingdom of Songhai, with a bustling commercial and educational center at Timbuctu. This area controlled the famed trans-Saharan trade and was able to enrich ancient North African potentates, until the combined predatory imperialism of France and the encroachment of the Sahara desert reduced it to penury. A self-confident civilization was certainly developing in this region before historic and natural disasters intervened. There were no Great Walls erected, as was the case in China and on the Mexican borders of the United States to hold off the incursions of European fortune hunters during the scramble for Africa. More than summoning the compassion of America, the author should have brought French colonialism to judgment. The situation of the Africans of this region is not very much different from the situation recently uncovered by Katrina in the Gulf region of the United States.

The author gets credit for mentioning the initiative taken by the natives in changing the colonial name Upper Volta to Burkina Faso. That is a clear indication that they have, after political independence from France, taken their future into their hands. The effects of imperial presence cannot be expected to be wiped out overnight. It would have been interesting to readers to have been told the meaning of this new name given the country by its leaders, just as it would have sated their curiosity if they knew the source of the optimism he discovered among the Burkinabes in the midst of their present misery. Without this balanced treatment, Africans will see such accounts as Donaldson’s as a continuation of the colonial policy of the white man’s burden.

Luke Mbefo, C.S.Sp.