Jesuit Journeys
Spring/Summer 2005

BY John Sealey

John Sealey Provincial Assistant for Social and International Ministries

Nylon rope, tattered notebooks and hiking boots belonging to Fr. Nicholas Schiel, SJ lie next to his duffle. It is early March and the 80-year-old Jesuit priest has just finished 15 months in southeast Wisconsin offering retreats in Spanish, a change of pace from his previous 35 years in Honduras.

Despite the long winter, he says they were terrific months. But now he is ready to get back to Honduras at the invitation of the Bishop of Juticalpa and minister among 50 villages in the rural state of Olancho.

The Ignatian spirit of magis (a desire to always serve more fully) might help explain his decision. According to Fr. Schiel, while he was able to coordinate about eight retreats while in Wisconsin, in Honduras he and his team of lay catechists can provide retreats every weekend.

Born the youngest of 10 children, one of Fr. Schiel’s surviving siblings is a fellow octogenarian. The others are all in their 90s. So the lean 140-pound priest eagerly anticipates some good years of service ahead in Honduras, where he often travels between villages on foot and by mule.

Thirty years ago, two priests and 14 lay catechists were killed in Olancho by landowners and their militias putting down a peasant movement. When the Church stood with the campesinos’ legal claim to land reform rights, the bishop and remaining clergy were expelled for eight years – until Pope John Paul II visited in the early 1980s and requested that the Church be allowed to return. Fr. Schiel was among the first volunteers. He disarmingly recalls that his Jesuit superior granted him permission, indicating that while “it was probably safe to go back, you might also get to be a martyr.”

What has changed the most in both the United States and Honduras over the past 35 years in Fr. Schiel’s view? In the U.S. he sees an upwardly spiraling desire to accumulate more and more material wealth and possessions. He notes the pressure parents feel to work longer to provide luxuries which are perceived as necessities. He cites the constant messages extolling convenience and personal freedom which can overtake our concern for life itself.

In Honduras, there have been massive flows of people from the countryside to the cities. While in the U.S. we consume more, in Honduras workers have lost ground. In 1970 a laborer earned 50 cents daily, which could modestly support a family. Now, a worker earns $3 a day, which will no longer support a family. This downward wage pressure displaces people from the countryside to chase a hope of finding employment in the North or in one of the two large Honduran cities. New arrivals inevitably encounter unemployment. Problems associated with overcrowding and poverty fragment families and fray civil society.

Not long after Fr. Schiel’s return to Honduras, two young Wisconsin scholastics, Paddy Gilger, SJ and Joe Hoover, SJ, began preparing to respond to that same Ignatian spirit of the magis. They will spend this summer in the Kohima Region of northeast India. As in Honduras, pressing social concerns in Kohima include access to land and resources, wages, and displacement.

During their current philosophy studies in Chicago, Paddy and Joe are also engaged in direct ministry designed to complement their training for priesthood. Paddy regularly visits Chicago’s Cabrini and Rockwell public housing sectors. Joe has worked with student theater projects, most recently Loyola’s production of Dead Man Walking, which which Walking examines the death penalty issue.

Paddy’s motivation to work in India stems directly from a desire to serve Christ’s poor. “The more experience I have with the enormous majority of the materially, emotionally, and spiritually wounded in our world,” he says, “the more I am reminded that I must live from my own deep wounds – from which can either flow resentment and despair, or healing waters as from the side of Christ.”

Jesuits and others attracted by the Ignatian vision are never content with the status quo. Rather they are compelled to explore and redefine the magis. What the 34th Jesuit General Congregation says of the Jesuit way of proceeding is evident in these three Wisconsin Jesuits: “For us, frontiers and boundaries are not obstacles or ends, but new challenges to be faced, new opportunities to be welcomed. Indeed, ours is a holy boldness, a certain apostolic aggressiveness.” (GC 34, D 26)

Return to Spring/Summer 2005 issue

Previous Article: Fr. Phil Pick, SJ On a mission since ’44

Next Article: Memorable Jesuits of the past