A Step On the Pilgrimage

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

            When a candidate for the priesthood in the Society of Jesus begins his formation, he spends two years in the novitiate.  At the conclusion of the novitiate, if the Jesuit provincial superior gives his approval, the individual pronounces perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience..  He is henceforward known as an “approved scholastic of the Society of Jesus”; he can then add “S.J.his signature.

            Twenty-seven-year-old James R. Page of Holy Name parish pronounced his vows as a scholastic morning at St. Charles Borromeo Church in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.  Very Reverend Mark A. Lewis, S.J., provincial of the New Orleans Province, presided at the Mass.

         James will now travel to Toronto, where he will be engaged in First Studies, a period that includes academic formation in philosophy, with a dash of theology.  After First Studies, James will likely teach in a Jesuit high school for several years before embarking on three years of theological studies.  Ordination usually follows these three years of study.  The last period of formation, tertianship, occurs several years after ordination and is a preparation for final vows as a Jesuit.

              Please pray for James at this time in his Jesuit life.  I ask that you also pray for all the men in formation in the New Orleans and Missouri Provinces.  Pray, too, for more vocations to the Society of Jesus and for all of us older Jesuits, asking that we may strive to do the Lord’s will and work for his kingdom.

           Let us not forget to pray for one another at the Sunday Eucharist.  James’s Jesuit pilgrimage is a mirror of the pilgrimage that all we all share on our way from the Lord to the Lord.

In the Risen Lord,

Fr. Donald Hawkins, S.J., Pastor