It doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving. 2020 feels more like “no, thanks.” It has been a year of bad things happening, not just to good people and not just in Philadelphia, but to everyone, all over the world.
During the night of November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests and two women were murdered by the Salvadoran army on the campus of the Central American University in San Salvador.
If you’ve ever seen news photos of the scene of the deaths of Ignacio Ellacuría, Ignacio Martin-Baró, Segundo Montes, Juan Ramón Moreno, Joaquin López y López, Amando López, Elba Ramos and Celina Ramos it is hard not to look away quickly. Yet we must remember them, even if doing so requires facing some difficult truths.
You may never have heard the name Pedro Arrupe, or maybe you just have a vague memory of someone mentioning him. But among Jesuits and their followers, Pedro Arrupe is as familiar as any household name. So I’d like to tell you something about him because he was born on this day, November 14th, in 1907.
If you Google his name, Wikipedia provides a good synopsis of his fascinating life. He was of Basque lineage. That’s the fiercely independent region in northern Spain where St. Ignatius Loyola was born at the end of the fifteenth century, a connection to the founder of the Jesuits of which Pedro was quite proud.
When I volunteered to write a reflection on the North American Martyrs, I didn’t realize how difficult an assignment I had undertaken. Because of their close identification with the Jesuits, I’ve known about these martyrs almost all my life. But still there is so much to understand about them.
World Food Day is not a holy day of obligation or even on the church’s calendar. It is an ordinary day of ordinary time. But what if it was—or, even if not designated as a holy day by the church, then one of those days like Thanksgiving, that don’t appear on the liturgical calendar, but on which we feel drawn to come together in prayer and worship? How would we celebrate?
Today’s readings are: Job 42:1-3, 5-6, 12-17; Psalm 119; Luke 10:17-24.
