Our Mission

Ignatians West transforms lives by supporting nonprofit agencies that assist people who are poor or marginalized through the service and companionship of mature adults 50+ who are available to share their experience and talent in meaningful part time volunteer positions and reflect on their encounters in the Ignatian tradition.

Dear friends,

Yesterday we celebrated the life of an Ignatians West Board of Directors member, Tony Fadale.

I knew of Tony before I got to know him. His reputation proceeded him.

He was an educator and social justice advocate. After teaching high school for 36 years he worked as a Project Manager at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Museum of Tolerance for 6 years. His volunteer service included Just Faith, Catholic Worker Kitchen, Life, Justice and Peace Commission for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, Fair Trade Los Angeles, St. Lawrence Brindisi School Board, and Global Solidarity Action Team of Los Angeles CRS (Catholic Relief Services). He was a member of the American Martyrs parish in Manhattan Beach, serving on the Matthew 25 Committee and in Beautiful and Wonderfully Made (LBGTQ).

Tony brought all of his years of experience serving others to our Board and with it his kindness, compassion and gift of giving all things a positive outlook. He had a wonderful smile and an overall generous spirit.

Monsignor John Berry, Pastor of American Martyrs, praised Tony as a doer, a man who put his faith into action, a man who wore a mantle of service and love for people who were poor or in need.

Tony and his wife Lynn have two children and four grandchildren. Board members remember his great joy when he talked about his family. His face lit up. He was a proud and loving husband, dad and grandfather.

We are grateful for the time we had with Tony and ask that you keep him and his family in your prayers.

Please scroll through our newsletter to read the thoughts of our Board chairperson, Fr. Randy Roche, SJ, and those of Fr. James Martin, SJ.

There is still time to register for the June retreat day with Fr. Tom O'Neill, SJ, and if the spirit is moving you to think about deepening your knowledge I highly recommend considering the LMU graduate program in theology.

Finally, do not miss our new video and stay tuned for our Spring into Summer campaign coming soon.

Peace,

Anne

Antifreeze

In places where the temperature can become zero Fahrenheit and below, antifreeze is necessary for liquid-cooled engines. Modern cars use antifreeze coolant in their systems year-round, rather than only in cold weather. In the compound word, “antifreeze,” the “anti” part provides the basic meaning that the liquid is essentially against or contrary to the possibility of freezing. However, most of us think of antifreeze as a preventative of the various problems that frozen liquid would cause within an engine’s cooling system. At least for purposes of a coolant, being “against” freezing does not imply hostility, but rather the prevention of harm.

A great many “anti” movements and expressions that we see continually reported in the media would be much more helpful for society if they were aimed at preventing harm instead of exercising force against other persons or practices and thereby causing more harm. For ourselves, we continually face situations every day when we decide whether to focus our energies on being against whatever we consider as in need of correction or on being for whatever can be done to heal disorder or prevent greater harm.

At the sight of perceived injustice, wrong-doing, or erroneous thinking, anger is often aroused within us. The easiest response might seem to be that of immediate “anti” thinking or action, but it might very well be the lesser good as to how we make use of the energy of our anger. Anger is a feeling, not a reason nor a causal force, but it energizes us for whatever action we decide upon as correct for the present situation. If we insist with ourselves that we are in control, not our immediate feelings, we might decide that we need more information before acting, having learned from previous experiences that there could well be more going on than we at first perceived.

Most of us can recall some incidents when we were angry but held back long enough before speaking or acting to become aware whether our intent was to be helpful to others or to satisfy our sense of being “right.” We are humans, and prone to believe that whatever we think is true should be understood and accepted by everyone else. A bit of honest reflection on our own past is a wonderful corrective for such thinking, for we have modified and gained deeper, broader, and more inclusive understanding of the positions we now see as appropriate. We did not jump from one sense of truth to an opposite, but we, and therefore we can assume everyone else, learn from our personal experiences and change or modify our beliefs according to the new information, insights, and inspirations we have received.

Let the antifreeze in our hearts be for the sake of preventing wrong judgment rather than focusing on what we think is “wrong” with others.

Randy

Randall Roche, SJ

LMU University Chaplain

Retreat Leader – Fr. Tom O'Neill, SJ

Fr. Tom O'Neill, SJ is currently on sabbatical after serving as an Associate Pastor at St. Ignatius Parish in Sacramento, CA. He entered the Society of Jesus in September of 1976 and was ordained in June of 1990.

Fr. Tom taught for many years at Loyola High School in Los Angeles and after receiving an M.F.A. in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York, worked in the Fine Arts department at the University of San Francisco. Prior to moving to Sacramento, Fr. Tom served as the Superior of the Jesuit Community at St. Ignatius Prep in San Francisco.

Beginning in 2006, Fr. Tom developed a deep love for the ministry of the Jesuits among the Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. He worked at Our Lady of the Sioux church in Oglala, South Dakota and served on the Board of Directors of Red Cloud Indian School – the Jesuit mission on the Reservation. In recent years, Fr. Tom has become involved in Recovery work, finding a deep freedom and grace in 12-Step work. At the conclusion of his sabbatical, Fr. Tom looks forward to returning to Loyola High School as Campus Chaplain in August 2024.

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Our broken body, the church

For the last eight days, I’ve been on my annual retreat at Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Mass., one of my favorite places to pray. It’s right on the Atlantic Ocean and next to a beautiful freshwater pond. By the sea and pond, one sees all manner of birds—seagulls, egrets, cormorants, ducks, goldfinches, red-winged blackbirds and dozens of barn swallows that make their nests under the eaves of the retreat house. For almost 40 years, I’ve been coming to his lovely, quiet, secluded place to pray.

This week, however, it was less of that. Why? Well, unless you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, you will have seen the news that Pope Francis made comments to a meeting of Italian bishops (which was supposed to be private, though a few bishops leaked them) saying that he was against admitting gay men to seminaries.

During that meeting, while answering a question, it was reported that the Pope used a derogatory word that probably meant “campiness” (or far, far worse) to describe the atmosphere in Italian seminaries. It was extremely upsetting for many people, most especially LGBTQ Catholics and their families and friends. Later reports that Francis did not call for a complete ban on gay men from seminaries, and that he was repeating a word that someone asked in a question, came out the following day.

In the end, the Holy Father issued an apology, through Vatican News. The columnist Frank Bruni (himself a gay man) noted that perhaps the most important aspect of this affair was a pope apologizing to LGBTQ people.

During my retreat, in the middle of praying with Jesus’s counsel, “Don’t worry” (Lk. 12), I was deluged with requests for comments. It was not the most conducive day for quiet prayer.

What does this have to do with the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ? And what might this have to do with the Eucharistic Revival now taking place in the United States, a series of events sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, including eucharistic pilgrimages from the four corners of the country, set to culminate in a massive gathering in Indianapolis in July?

Simply that we must remember that one of the most important aspects of Jesus’s body is that it was, and is, broken.

Liturgical theologians often point out that in this Sunday’s Gospel, Mark shows Jesus performing four actions during the Last Supper: he takes the bread, blesses the bread, breaks the bread and gives the bread. The same four actions are recorded in Jesus’s feeding miracles and in the story of the Supper at Emmaus in Luke’s Gospel. Take, bless, break, give.

The most common way for Catholics to look at the body of Christ is, of course, the Eucharist. It is really and truly Jesus’s body, made present to us in the Mass. But another traditional way of seeing the body of Christ is as the church. And that church, as we saw this week, is broken. Wounded. Bleeding. Suffering. We might even remember that when the priest breaks the host during the Mass, it’s a visible symbol not only of Christ’s brokenness, but the church’s and our own.

The church has always been broken, in need of healing, in need of conversion. We are not whole on our own. We are a “pilgrim people,” as so many popes, including Pope Francis, have said. And the only one who can make us whole again, the one whom we follow, is the one who was broken for us.

—James Martin, S.J.