Posted: August 22

El despertador do San Antonio

(Salvador do Bahia, Brazil) A cool breeze off the Atlantic ocean continued to pass through my bedroom window as I slowly came awake with the strengthening daylight. Suddenly the “San Antonio alarm clock” (or “el despertador do San Antonio” as it would be in Portuguese) kicked into gear. The first riffs of the samba beat of the amplified guitar for the morning Mass cut right through the pleasures of being lazy. Today is Tuesday, which means the church dedicated to San Antonio de Padua was kicking into full gear with its weekly high Mass in honor of the saint that the church honors. It might seem strange that the Jesuits staff a church dedicated to a Franciscan saint, but the original Jesuit church in this city on the northern coast of Brazil was taken away centuries ago when the Jesuits were expelled from Brazil. That church is now the cathedral and the Jesuits were given this small church which had been abandoned. Now however, it is full of life, especially on Tuesdays. I could not complain about the sound of Mass beginning so I just got up and walked down the hall to peek into the church. The Jesuit community lives in rooms surrounding the church. Right across the hall from my room is a door that opens right into the middle of the church. So living here is like having a front row seat for the liturgy. One must, however, get out of bed to make it count.

The view makes up for everything. The church and its surrounding community rooms sit on a rocky bluff overlooking the beach where Manual de Nóbrega became the first Jesuit to land here in 1549, while St. Ignatius was still alive. From that small beginning has come an amazingingly active and wide-spread Jesuit presence. Although the original Jesuit college was never given back to the Society (and now serves as a university faculty of medicine), the current Jesuit “collegio” has over 5,000 students who attend the grade-school-through-high-school institution in three shifts each day. The collegio is a few miles away, and it is much quieter here by the ocean. People fill a small beach directly below us, but the noise is not loud and the waves crashing on the rocks directly below us provide a soothing murmur. The locals consider this their “winter” since it is only in the 80s during the day. Compared to the heat of Rome right now, this is paradise. I love to sit by the edge of the property and look out over the ocean. We are right at the entrance to a large bay. Look to the right and you see an island on the horizon; look to the left and you just see horizon.

I came up here after the communication coordinators’ meeting in Rio finished. There are no communication works here per se, but I did have a few interesting conversations with Jesuits at the collegio about using videos to promote the training of the large number of lay teachers at the school. One of the themes that came out clearly during our meeting was the importance of looking at communication as a dimension of all Jesuit works. Since the collegio has its own video production department, they could start creating materials that would help their own apostolic efforts. And with those conversations, I think I am ready to quit working for awhile and just pray as I make my annual retreat. If I end up with a good sun tan as well as being spiritually reinvigorated, all the better.