February 27, 2008

Networking is a fundamental aspect of any international organisation and the Society of Jesus has been no exception over the last 500 years.

As Nicolas Standaert SJ has pointed out in his article on these pages (14 February 2008), new technology has provided the tools, but Jesuits are “struggling with these changes, which we did not choose ourselves”. We have asked Mark Raper SJ, provincial of Australia, to share his experiences and insights with us.

In order to compare his experience of worldwide networking, Fr Raper went back to the time when he first joined the Jesuits: “Even then, in the 1960s, there were Jesuits who spoke of ‘the world’. So there was a view of the world at that time, but totally different from today’s view of the world, which is instantaneous information and instantaneous capacity to participate in events on the other side of the world.” Describing the initial phase of the Jesuit Refugee Service, he said: “We discovered that the Society has an amazing capacity to unite around a common issue. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, so the actions that were released by that focus on one particular problematic were quite extraordinarily successful.”

The great opportunities for the Jesuits, according to Fr Raper, arise from the fact that “we are deeply rooted in a lot of places. And taking advantage of being deeply inserted in so many places and acting commonly is something that we are just beginning to understand.” Consequently, the obvious challenge is to built up the capacity to act internationally: “We have a very strong tradition of provinces in the society. I don’t say the province is dead, we need it, we need the rootedness and the localness. Internationality implies nationality, universality implies the capacity to be somewhere, so we have a lot to learn, really a lot to learn. And that implies very big changes now for our Conferences, for our regional cooperation. If we can get that working well, we can operate better internationally.”

JRS is not only an example of international networking within the Society of Jesus, it also incorporates one of the most important principles of Catholic social teaching: the centrality of the human person in all our actions. “Interestingly, in the case of the refugees, our reality and the reality of the Church is that we are local communities, linked internationally. They are people driven from their communities, in search of communities internationally, and it’s a perfect match. The body of the Society is also a perfect match for so many problems of people marginalised locally: We can offer them community locally and we can connect internationally. We can know their roots, their origins, and we know where they have arrived. We can bring them in and we can bring them home.”

Asked to mention a concrete example, Fr Raper talked about a new programme through which refugees can gain degrees from Jesuit-run universities while in a camp. “You have no idea what this means to them! It gives people who are stuck in a place that they can’t move from a hope, a future, some orientation outside the place where they are caught. These are all possible by linking our institutions [Jesuit universities], but fundamentally, we have to have people on the ground, face to face with the refugees, people who understand their life and their needs. It’s not just solved through technology but by bringing technology in to support the activities of the people face to face, in their communities.

© 2008 Society of Jesus » www.sjweb.info/35