Jesuit magazine (4-11).indd - The New Orleans Province of the ...

Novices prepare to set off on their pilgrimage, one of the first-year
novitiate experiments.
f testing and discernment.
usually in the developing world. Novices have gone to distant locations
like Guyana in South America, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize
and St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud Reservation in South
Dakota. It is of utmost importance that novices experience the
various kinds of poverty that exist in the world and learn to identify
with those who are most vulnerable. This experiment provides
such exposure. Also, in the longer timeframe of this experiment, a
novice ideally can plug in to the life of a community better than in
the shorter experiments, and he can more deeply and more richly
experience the life and work of the Jesuits in that location.
After his many tests, the scientist can come to a conclusion
about his initial observations – the same holds true for the Jesuit
novice. After the successful conclusion of the experiments, much
prayer and discernment, and with the permission of the novice
master and provincial, the hopeful novice is approved to profess
the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in the Society
of Jesus. Even though he has no need for a lab coat, graduated
cylinders, or mass spectrometers, a man who enters the novitiate
readies himself for the testing that happens in this initial “laboratory”
of Jesuit life.
[*] José Ignacio Idigoras, Ignatius of Loyola, the Pilgrim
Saint, trans. C. Michael Buckley, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University
Press, 1994), 456.
Second-year novice Matthew Stewart with his host family in
Managua, Nicaragua, during a Spanish immersion experience
Second-year novice David Lugo at the gate of Santa Maria
Chiquimula in Guatamala
Second-year novice Penn Dawson trucks to the remote villages
around Karasabai in Guyana.
The Southern Jesuit Spring 2011 11