May, 2008

Dear Friends,

Over the past several years Holy Trinity has deepened our Jesuit identity and our experience of Ignatian spirituality. I am grateful that so many have grown in prayer through our guided prayer and retreat experiences. In March, Pope Benedict XVI addressed the Jesuits gathered in Rome for our Thirty-Fifth General Congregation. The Holy Father and his staff had just completed an Ignatian retreat. He spoke of the importance of the Spiritual Exercises in Jesuit ministry and the life of the whole church. The following is an excerpt of the Holy Father's address to the Jesuits. The complete text is at ww.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/GC35.

. . . I invite you to reserve a specific attention to the ministry of the Spiritual Exercises that has been characteristic of your Society from its origins. The Exercises are the fountain of your spirituality and the matrix of your Constitutions, but they are also a gift that the Spirit of the Lord has made to the entire Church: it is for you to continue to make it a precious and efficacious instrument for the spiritual growth of souls, for their initiation to prayer, to meditation, in this secularised world in which God seems to be absent. Just in the last week I have myself profited of the Spiritual Exercises together with my closest collaborators of the Roman Curia under the guidance of your outstanding confrere Cardinal Albert Vanhoye. In a time such as today's, in which the confusion and multiplicity of messages, the speed of changes and situations, make particularly difficult for our contemporaries to put their lives in order and respond with joy to the call that the Lord makes to everyone of us, the Spiritual Exercises represent a particularly precious method to seek and find God in us, around us and in everything, to know his will and put it into practice.

I pray that, through the ministry of the Spiritual Exercises, Holy Trinity Church will continue to "seek and find God in us, around us and in everything, to know his will and put it into practice."

God bless you,

James M. Shea, S.J.
Pastor