Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options

Most relevant
The sister was wrong, I thought. Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., a theologian and professor at Fordham University in New York, was talking to Catholic school teachers about ways to integrate environmental concerns into classroom lessons. Personally, I considered environmental concern a white privilege. I
For 20 years, West Philadelphia’s St. Francis de Sales School was on the diocesan dole. Like many inner-city schools, it could not support itself with tuition and parish funds. Its principal, Sister Constance Marie Touey, I.H.M., feared a decade ago that St. Francis de Sales would suffer the f
I open the gray metal box. Where others keep grandma’s opal from Australia or silver certificates, I keep one hand-written letter. In my father’s unique penmanship, the long “y” of sorry reaches down and captures a memory: My dear daughter, ...what happened long ago.... It i

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.

Robert P. Imbelli
Many consider Karl Rahner one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past century Indeed he has been deemed a contemporary father of the church Now Rahner has the honor of a volume in the prestigious Cambridge Companion series The Rahner volume has been edited most capably by Declan Marmion
Until the appearance on Jan. 25 of Pope Benedict’s XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Est Caritas, observers had been searching with little success for hints of the new pope’s mind. Some conservatives have felt particularly stymied by the lack of red-meat decrees and denunciations. Wary
Pope Calls for Deeper Understanding of LoveIn his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI called for a deeper understanding of love as a gift from God to be shared in a self-sacrificial way, at both a personal and a social level.The pope said "love between couples, often reduced today to selfish se
Five years ago last October, the superior general of the Jesuits, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, delivered a historic address at Santa Clara University in California, urging that the promotion of justice should have a central place in Jesuit higher education. Father Kolvenbach was not simply innovating. Ten
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq on March 20, 2003, Americans have encountered Shiite Islam in the media more frequently than at any time since the taking of the hostages in Tehran, when the American Embassy in Iran was occupied on Nov. 4, 1979, and Americans were held hostage for 444 days. As
Visiting Rome in early 1959, while still an Anglican priest, I asked a learned Benedictine from Belgium who was prior of the monastery where I was staying, whether he had attended the funeral of Pope Pius XII six months earlier. His reply, an apt comment on the style of papal liturgies of that era: