As summer is approaching, there are more and more details revealed about this year’s Ignatian youth festival held in Hungary, Austria, Romania, and Slovakia. In January, we sent reports about the launch of the event’s website (magis.jesuits.eu) and that the registration process has begun; February saw the revealing of the various experiments the gathering will offer; and now the latest news is the opening of the application from 1 March to 15 May.
We ask your help to support a group of 10 young Christians from Syria, to partake in spiritual programs and recreational activities in Europe this summer. To draw from Christian spiritual wellsprings, experience religious community and solidarity, build new connections, get some rest and refreshment. They will affect their home communities when they return to daily life and service with renewed strength and hope.
Are you between 18 and 35 years of age? Would you spend a week in August, 2020, among youths, Jesuits and their friends from various countries? Are you ready to try yourself in practical experiments? Are you into pilgrimage, the spirituality of Saint Ignatius and charity, or arts and ecology? If your answers are yes, there is nothing else to do then to check out the details of Magis Europe 2020, held in Hungary.
What are two months in a person’s life? What is less than two months’ time if you wish to become familiar with a culture so marvelously rich as the Indian? In two months, one can merely gather impressions about a country, nothing more than that. However, one can meet and befriend new people – and that is something, something wonderful!
Take a dozen Jesuits. Make them stand at seven stations on a route between a shrine near Budapest and their community house in the capital of Hungary. Ask them to describe each step of the Jesuit formation at the consecutive stops. Add them a hundred friends, and get the whole lot of people run or walk the 9 kilometre distance amidst the woods.
This September saw a unique occasion in the history of their main church, a double jubilee and a final vow, thus altogether four reasons to celebrate for the Hungarian Jesuits. It was on the 7th day of the month that the province became independent 110 years ago. On the mass celebrated by Elemér Vízi for the occasion, the provincial recalled the ancestors of the present day Jesuits and praised them for their persistence throughout the hard times.
“We are in the most beautiful cathedral possible”, these were the words that Szabolcs Sajgó, the Jesuit director of the House of Dialogue in Budapest, began his unprecedented holy mass with over River Danube on 28 July. The liturgy took place on Liberty Bridge, a scheduled monument of the city, interconnecting the two banks of the Hungarian capital. The site is closed off from traffic on four weekends each summer.
This July saw a unique technical innovation in Hungarian Jesuit church dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was the first time in the country that a Paypass terminal was installed in a church for an alternative to the traditional way of offerings. The stand, set up in one of the corners of the building, is meant to serve those who do not carry cash on them, but would like to support their community by way of this digital “collection box”.
