Fr. Jack Bentz, SJ, is a Jesuit priest who works in campus ministry at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He also has a new podcast called “Catholics in Ordinary Time,” which is just an awesome title. The podcast was inspired in large part by his work during the Synod on Synodality at Blessed Sacrament Parish in Hollywood, where he served before moving to Spokane. The parish conducted a whole bunch of listening sessions, just as thousands of parishes around the country did, and Fr. Jack liked that approach. So his new podcast is centered on conversations with all different sorts of Catholics, with him serving as the interviewer and listener as his guests share their stories of faith.

Host Mike Jordan Laskey really likes the idea behind his show, because while there are so many different Catholic podcasts out there hosted by members of the clergy, podcasting priests are usually in the position of explainer, apologist or teacher. There’s certainly a place for those types of shows, but in this flipped format, Fr. Jack models how a synodal church is a listening church.

Fr. Jack and Mike talked about the things Fr. Jack has learned about today’s young adults through his work at Gonzaga and at Blessed Sacrament, not to mention his decades of ministry in settings like theatre and other university campus ministry locations. Fr. Jack also shared a bit about his own vocation story, and how a kid growing up on a cattle ranch in rural Oregon came to be a Jesuit. You can find “Catholics in Ordinary Time” wherever you get podcasts and check out Fr. Jack’s Substack.

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

The post What Fr. Jack Bentz, SJ, Is Learning from Young Catholics appeared first on Jesuits.org.

The monarch butterfly was little more than a splash of orange across the yawning chasm of blacktop parking lot. It’s amazing my daughter even saw it.

It fluttered a few inches into the air then toppled over, one wing repeatedly dashing itself against the pavement. It moved like a leaf in a tiny windstorm: swaying this way, tumbling that way, bouncing up, down and sideways. Whatever grace had once propelled this creature to dance upon tufts of invisible air currents had given way to desperation.

“Something is wrong with its wing,” my wife said.

“Will it be okay?” my daughter asked.

My wife pursed her lips together. “A butterfly can’t really survive with only one wing.”

An uncomfortable silence fell upon us then, as we watched the sad little insect continue its hopeless attempts to regain altitude. Again and again, it crashed to the ground.

Our daughter wanted to pick it up, hold it. I was against the idea — “Let the thing be!” — but then she said she wanted to carry it upstairs and place it in a flowerpot on the deck overlooking the lake as a final resting place, and well, it was hard to argue with that.

“And maybe it will get better,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow it’ll be gone.”

“Maybe,” we said, though we encouraged her not to get her hopes up.

Carefully, carefully she walked up three flights of steps, through the family home we were visiting and back out into the sunshine. She slowly opened her hands, and the butterfly tumbled out and onto a cluster of pink flowers.

We watched it slowly open and close its wings. We watched as its grip on the petals visibly loosened. We watched as it regained its footing, determined to remain upright, beautiful.

“We’ll check on it tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came and the butterfly was still there, motionless, lifeless, though still full of color. It was a sad moment.

“At least it got to become a butterfly,” our daughter said in the car hours later. She’d been mulling over the whole ordeal. My wife and I were caught off guard. We asked for clarification. “At least it didn’t die as a caterpillar,” our daughter said by way of explanation.

I’ve been thinking about that simple statement for several days now. There was something beautiful and haunting and primal in those words. I’m amazed that, at seven years old, my daughter was able to articulate it. Put simply, we’re made for more; we’re made to flourish. And yet, we don’t all get the opportunity.

I’ve been reading “A Theology of Flourishing: The Fullness of Life for All Creation” by Paul Schutz, associate professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University, in preparation for an interview on an upcoming episode of “AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast.” Undoubtedly, my reading colored my experience with the butterfly and how I heard my daughter’s words.

For Schutz, Jesus’ declaration that he has come so that we might “have life and have it more abundantly” is foundational to the Christian project (Jn 10:10). Our focus can not solely be on the afterlife; we must relish and delight in the goodness God provides in the hear and now. Flourishing, Schutz says, is “an embodied process of self-actualization whereby creatures come to live in the fullness of what they are in relationship with God and other creatures.”

The image of a butterfly is a good one. There’s some comfort, perhaps, in our knowing that the butterfly we laid to rest was — in a measurable though imperfect way — the fullness of life for that caterpillar. It became what God always intended it to be. There is joy to be found in that.

Near and far, it’s not hard to see that we are falling short of the abundant life Jesus desires for us. It’s not hard to see that we are growing numb to this reality, that we are settling into a status quo that I can only imagine our God of abundance finds abhorrent.

And yet, I am buoyed by my daughter’s words. The desire for abundance, for flourishing, for more — the magis — seems to be an intrinsic one. God has placed it in our very selves from the beginning. I wonder what the world would look like if we all unearthed this holy desire, buried in our souls. I wonder what our own lives would look like, what we might do differently.

I wonder what the world would be if we all could live with confidence, trusting that each of us might one day flourish and flutter as our fully formed butterfly selves.

The post Now Discern This: To Flourish and Flutter appeared first on Jesuits.org.

Deep in the Wisconsin wilderness, between a hemlock and a maple, stands a woman in radiant white. She’s silent, still and waiting — and invisible to all but the eyes of one young woman, a Belgian immigrant named Adele. The year is 1859.

Adele passes the woman in the woods and wonders at the curious sight. She hurries on. Her family believes the specter to be a soul trapped in purgatory, but Adele is not so sure. She sees the woman a second time, now on her 10 mile walk to Mass.

“In God’s name, who are you and what do you want of me?” — those are the words the priest suggests Adele speak to the mysterious woman. And so, upon her third encounter, Adele does.

“I am the Queen of Heaven,” replies the woman in white. “Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation. Go and fear nothing, I will help you.”

Having been given her mission, young Adele Brice sets out to teach about God. She gathers to herself others who desire to embrace this holy task set out by the woman in white. And that mysterious woman? She is better known today as Our Lady of Champion, who in 2016 was designated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as an approved Marian Apparition and the first in the United States.

I have forgotten all of this, if I’ve ever known it at all, as I drive along Route 57 north of Green Bay. A sign along the road declares boldly something to the effect of, “The Blessed Mother appeared here! Visit the shrine!” I roll my eyes.

“I bet she did,” I mutter. My wife misses the sign all together yet chuckles all the same. But then I get to thinking, I get to remembering. I’ve recently co-authored a children’s book on Marian apparitions; it involved a fair amount of research, a virtual pilgrimage of sorts following in Mary’s footsteps all across the globe. The name “Champion” comes suddenly to mind.

“Wait,” I say aloud. “I think this is a Marian apparition. I think this is the real deal.” But we’ve missed the turn and have a timetable to keep, and so we travel on.

All the same, I say, “Look it up. Look up Our Lady of Champion.” And my wife does, scrolling through the story and the lore and cross-referencing maps. “Yeah — it is,” she says. “The real thing. Champion — that’s what it’s called. And not too far out of our way.”

We decide to hit the shrine on our return trip. Much to my surprise, our girls are pretty pumped about the idea. They stumble out of the rental car, scamper into the quiet church, fall to their knees in some mumbled prayer. They sit and stare and wonder in the chapel beneath the church, the one with rows of flickering candles lining every wall and relics adorning the back. They ask about the relics, why they’re important. They light candles and say aloud people who they’d like to pray for. They scribble names on the scrap paper for prayer intentions.

We wander the grounds. We pause at the gravesite of Adele — “She’s the one who first saw Mary,” I explain — and we stop at the grotto to Our Lady of Fatima — “I was there, too. Another place where Mary appeared. Cool right?” The girls nod and ask about the gift shop and rush to use the bathroom.

And then we set off again. We’ve a flight to catch, after all.

I find the image of Our Lady of Champion — this woman in radiant white — standing and waiting in the Wisconsin wilds enchanting. She doesn’t move to intercept Adele; she doesn’t call out. She’s just there. And it takes the young immigrant woman’s own curiosity and the encouragement of those she trusts to go before Our Lady. It takes curiosity and not a small amount of wonder for her to be given a mission, a mission to instill in others that same disposition of curiosity toward the awesome mystery that is God.

I think about myself driving by that sign, cynical and focused solely on my task. I think about my sudden spark of wonder and excitement, my wife’s quick-fingered, phone-based research, my girls’ unknowing enthusiasm. I think how those ingredients put us on the path to stand before Our Lady of Champion nearly 170 years after Adele. I think about the importance of religious experience, of encounters that pierce the veil and bridge the spiritual and the temporal.

And I wonder: Am I following in that same mission, bringing our little girls to have their own mystical experience of the Divine, an education at God’s own feet? I think so.

The Society of Jesus today emphasizes our shared mission to show the way to God. I think this is but one small piece, a trajectory-setting moment. We quite literally allow ourselves to be surprised by God appearing on the horizons of our days, nestled between hemlocks and maples, emblazoned on kitschy signs on the side of the road.

And then, turning with that disposition of curiosity and wonder and awe, we go together to God’s own self, still readily appearing, readily available, in the wilderness of our world and the quiet of our hearts. Once there, we let God speak to our souls; we let the Great Teacher show us something new and wonderful of our world and our part therein.

The post Now Discern This: Mary Says to Pray Like A Champion appeared first on Jesuits.org.

He said there were different reasons for his choice, “but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,” Pope Leo XIV said. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

The rapid rise of artificial intelligence, most potently visible through large language models like ChatGPT, was the driving force behind Pope Leo’s name choice. In the early days of his pontificate, he is suggesting that the Church has a key role to play in discussions about artificial intelligence – including its use, its regulation, and its effect on societies and individual human beings.

Our guest today is one of the world’s foremost experts on technology ethics and has served on a Vatican AI research group that is gathering scholars from multiple disciplines to engage issues around artificial intelligence. Brian Patrick Green is the director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and teaches AI ethics and space ethics in Santa Clara University’s Graduate School of Engineering. With a background in both technology and Catholic moral theology, Brian is perfectly positioned to help the church think through the potential benefits and risks of AI and what our own spiritual and ethical traditions might have to offer the societal conversation at large.

Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked him to talk about his work and how the Vatican is approaching the complex constellation of issues surrounding artificial intelligence. They also talked about how a Catholic might think about whether or not to use AI tools and how to use them. Mike loved how clearly and compellingly Brian talked about all this thorny stuff. As AI developments are changing every day, we feel like we’ll be calling Brian back before too long to hear his updated perspectives.

For more, check out the Vatican AI research group’s book that Brian contributed to, “Encountering Artificial Intelligence.”

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

The post Faith, Ethics and Artificial Intelligence with Brian P. Green appeared first on Jesuits.org.

August 5, 2025 — Last week, Fr. Carlos Orellana, SJ, and Reynaldo Dominguez brought their message from the Aguan Valley of Honduras to the capital of the United States — walking the halls of Congress and the streets of Washington — raising awareness about the devastating violence and impunity along their country’s northern coast. Hosted by the Jesuit Conference Office of Justice and Ecology, they traveled to Washington, D.C., on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the assassination of their dear friend, Juan Antonio López.

A tireless leader of the Catholic Church in Honduras who was at the forefront of the struggle for environmental protections in their community, López was assassinated one evening in September 2024 as he was leaving church. Dominguez, in addition to losing his friend Juan, has also lost two of his brothers and another friend to hired assassins, thus forcing him and his family to go into hiding before fleeing Honduras and resettling in the U.S. as refugees.

It all began in 2013, when the Honduran National Congress quietly reduced the boundaries of the protected Carlos Escaleras Botaderos Mountain National Park and subsequently offered two open-pit mining concessions to EMCO Group, a conglomerate owned by some of the most powerful families in Honduras and backed by Nucor, the largest steel manufacturer in United States. However, the rivers that run through this protected park are the only source of water for many of the surrounding communities, and when they became contaminated as a result of the mining, the community resisted. What has followed is years of threats, corruption, assassinations and environmental destruction.

Inspired by their faith — Fr. Orellana is a Jesuit priest and Dominguez a devout Catholic — their love for their neighbors, and their belief in the sacredness of our common home, they’ve risked their very lives for the call of the Gospel. Last week in Washington, they invited U.S. representatives and senators and other NGOs to join them in this struggle.

“In my 60 years of life, no one has ever told me that they can live happily without water. Defending it is not a crime,” Dominguez said.

Fr. Orellana agreed. “We must have justice in the case of Juan López, protection for environmental and human rights defenders, and the cancelation of mining concessions in the national park.” Without those elements, he fears the violence will continue.

September 14 marks the one-year anniversary of López’s death. His memory brings tears to Fr. Orellana and Dominguez’s eyes, but his legacy compels them on.

The post Jesuit Pastor and Parishioners from Honduras Advocate for Justice in Washington, D.C. appeared first on Jesuits.org.

When today’s host, Eric Clayton, was in college, he stumbled upon a book entitled “The Eucharist and Social Justice.” It’s a small volume and was easily tucked into his bag when he went to Nicaragua on a service immersion trip. He remembers paging through that book with an excitement that rarely appeared when reading other theology texts. But something about this one, this invitation to consider how the source and summit of our Catholic faith was in fact a radical call to justice — that was formative. It’s what he was looking for as an undergraduate who was very much searching for answers when it came to faith and God and the church.

The author of that little book is Sr. Margaret Scott. She’s a Handmaid of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a renowned spiritual director and retreat giver. She’s fluent in numerous languages, which has led her into ministries that have taken her around the world. She has a lived experience of the universal church and the needs and joys of God’s people in many, many places. She has brought those insights into the classroom; she taught theology at Philly’s own Jesuit university, St. Joe’s.

But most importantly for today, she’s brought that same global perspective, that tender pastoral care, to a new book all about Ignatian spirituality and ecological conversion. It’s called “Ignatius Was Green: Ecological Dimensions of the Spiritual Exercises” and it’s available now from Paulist Press. Like “The Eucharist and Social Justice,” this is a small, approachable volume. And for those of us engaged in the ministry of the Exercises, it’s quite helpful. Sr. Margaret invites us to deepen our own encounter with Christ through the Exercises by paying careful attention to those places in Ignatius’ text that invite deeper ecological reflection.

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

The post Why Ignatian Spirituality is a Green Spirituality with Sr. Margaret Scott appeared first on Jesuits.org.

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One of my favorite details from St. Ignatius’ life is that he loved to gaze at the stars. His friends reported finding him on rooftops or high places, looking up at the sky, often with tears in his eyes.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this stargazing lately because, well, astronomy is always on the brain in my household. My husband is an astrophysicist at the University of Washington; he’s part of the team working on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which just released its first stunning images of the cosmos this summer.

Decades of imagination, engineering, construction and problem-solving went into this project, which is the largest and most comprehensive all-sky study ever, just beginning its 10-year time-lapse survey of the cosmos. What began as a napkin sketch in 1998 has finally come to fruition.

Rubin’s huge camera will, quite plainly, allow us to see things we have never seen before, including brief supernovae bursts and near-earth asteroids. It will allow us to learn more than we’ve ever known about dark matter and the formation of the solar system. It’s a discovery machine, and I’m lucky enough to hear the news in real time. Last week my husband was late coming to the dinner table. “Sorry,” he said, “interstellar comet.”

The images released so far are breathtaking. The brightly colored one of the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae made me feel like I was like looking inside the mystery of a womb. For how many millennia have these sacred hidden treasures been developing and changing, each according to their own logic, set in motion by the Creator of all things?

Actually, it turns out that my favorite image of the nebulae is only a small part of the image Rubin captured. In order to see the entirety of it, we’d need over 400 of the largest TV screens available, laid out on a surface as big as a football field. There are moments, I think, when we can catch a small glimpse of something so beautiful, so far beyond our ability to create, that the only possible response is awe. And — I’m with Ignatius — also tears.

Although Ignatius himself wasn’t an astronomer, the spiritual life and the life of the cosmos have always been intertwined in the Jesuit tradition.

Ignatius had a much better view of the stars with his naked eye five centuries ago than most of us do now, in cities where light pollution dims their brilliance. But he didn’t have any concept of the expanding, ever-changing universe. How fitting, though, that when I think of the constant development of the cosmos and of the decades’ worth of dedication that led to Rubin’s incredible discoveries, it is another Jesuit I think of, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his words made famous in a beloved prayer: “Trust in the slow work of God.”

Although Ignatius himself wasn’t an astronomer, the spiritual life and the life of the cosmos have always been intertwined in the Jesuit tradition. Many Jesuits have been astronomers over the last 500 years, making discoveries, mapping the paths of the comets, the surface of the moon, and the spectra of the gases that make up the stars.

The Vatican Observatory, active since 1582, is run by Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, who has written extensively about Jesuit contributions to astronomy. Pope Leo visited just recently to greet students and researchers — and to gaze through a telescope himself.

I can’t speak for the long chain of Jesuit astronomers throughout history, but maybe they were driven by something I’ve found to be true in my own life: The more we understand creation, the more we understand God. And the better equipped we are to understand ourselves.

Maybe Ignatius understood, even without our high-definition close-up images of the stars we have now thanks to Rubin, that he was also in a long, beautiful process of becoming. The greatest comfort I’ve found in my spiritual life is that I am too.

Ignatius and the Stars
By Cameron Bellm

Before the vigil at Montserrat,
Before the pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
Before the foundation of the Society,
There was a man, on a castle balcony,
Gazing up in wonder at the stars.
St. Ignatius, awed by mystery,
Draw our eyes ever upward to the heavens,
Our hearts to the holy adventures that await us,
And our spirits to the grandeur that surrounds us.
May we, too, see all things within us and beyond us
As sacred galaxies, formed and held,
From age to age, by loving hands.
Amen.

The post St. Ignatius, Stargazing and the Spiritual Life appeared first on Jesuits.org.

In Door County, Wisconsin, nestled within Sister Bay and overlooking a smaller section of Lake Michigan sits a popular Swedish restaurant. Tourists flock to the place, and why? Because atop that Swedish restaurant and nestled in rooftop grass sit a popular tourist sight: Goats.

Goats roam the angular roofs doing basic goat stuff. That is to say, there are goats on the roof eating grass, and — consequently — there are people gathered all around the property, necks craned, eyes shielded against the sun, fingers pointed upward, taking photos of those goats just living their goat lives.

It’s an absolute delight.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not what one might call an avid goat watcher. I don’t usually clamor to stand in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant I’m not actually patronizing simply to stare at the roof. I don’t usually rush across a busy street clutching my children’s hands in order to ogle what is one of the standard offerings at most petting zoos. And I’m at best reticent to stand in the summer heat any longer than necessary, let alone while rubbing elbows with other not-quite-avid goat watchers.

But I did all those things this past weekend. More than once. Me and like every other person there. And why? C’mon — there were goats on the roof!

The great Indian Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello wrote in his classic text, “Awareness,” how easily we dismiss the things we think we already know, we’ve already seen. For a child, everything is new; everything is wonderful; everything is distinct. But those of us who’ve been around a while readily abstract the specific thing in front of us into a generalized concept.

Consider the sparrow. De Mello writes: “The first time the child sees that fluffy, alive, moving object, and you say to him, ‘Sparrow,’ then tomorrow when the child sees another fluffy, moving object similar to it he says, ‘Oh, sparrows. I’ve seen. Sparrows. I’m bored by sparrows.’” (p 121)

And yet, we know every sparrow is distinct. We know every aspect of creation is unique — and wonderfully made! St. Ignatius of Loyola teaches us that God is present in all things. De Mello is simply reminding us to look at all things. To sink into the awesome reality that is each individual speck of stardust placed here to reveal some unique wonder of God’s own dream.

God doesn’t want us to aggregate and dismiss; God wants us to marvel in the specificity of this and every moment.

It took putting the goats on the roof to get us to really see them. To marvel at them. It took an extraordinary setup for us to delight in an ordinary situation. After all, what were those goats doing? Eating grass.

Ignatian spirituality challenges us to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. We encounter our God of the universe in all things — the simple and the mundane. But it occurs to me that the rituals of our faith, the sacraments through which God so tangibly manifests Godself, insist that we ground ourselves in the ordinary while simultaneously receiving the extraordinary. Bread and wine. Water and oil. Rings and words.

As we prepare to celebrate the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola tomorrow, July 31^st, as we once again remind ourselves that God is truly present and speaking to us in and through all things, I wonder: Where might an extraordinary moment be pointing us back to God already at work in the quiet places of our days? And where might an ordinary encounter offer us a glimpse of the transcendent?

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Just this year, Chris is back with a supplement to his first book: “The Heroic Leadership Workbook,” which he wrote with an educational design expert named Judy Wearing. The workbook is a 30-day guide for leaders in any field to help them grow in qualities like self-awareness, ingenuity, love and heroism. The workbook’s exercises are great – they invite deep reflection and are so usable. Host Mike Jordan Laskey invited Chris on the show to talk about “Heroic Leadership” and why Chris thinks the Jesuit charism and history continue to be so helpful to 21st-century leaders both inside institutional church structures and far outside them.

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

The post What Leaders in All Fields Can Learn from St. Ignatius with Chris Lowney appeared first on Jesuits.org.