A good book...

... by Pope Francis, about the mercy of God - something we've heard him speak of many times. Perhaps a help for exercitants to come to that 'cry of wonder' (#60)

Read about it here.  Available from Amazon for Kindle, as well as a good old-fashioned book.

Hidden life of Jesus

An interesting reflection on the hidden years of Jesus' childhood here. Thoughts on the importance of this part of Week 2 of the Exercises.

Today's Jesuit Saint

From Universalis' "About Today" page:

St David Lewis (1616-1679)

David Lewis was born at Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, in 1616 and raised in the Church of England. At sixteen years of age, while visiting Paris, he became a Catholic and subsequently went to study in Rome, where in 1642 he was ordained priest.

 Three years later he became a Jesuit. In 1647 he returned home and, for over thirty years, worked in South Wales, with his base at the Cwm on the borders of Herefordshire, an area sheltered between the high ridges of the Welsh Black Mountains to the west and Malvern Hills to the east. Here the Jesuits maintained two remote farmhouses, which also functioned as shelters for hunted Catholic priests. Lewis used the name Charles Baker.

He was arrested in November 1678 in Monmouthshire, and condemned as a Catholic priest and for saying Catholic masses, at the Assizes in Monmouth in March 1679. He was then taken to Newgate Prison in London with John Kemble (Herefordshire) and questioned about the “gunpowder plot”. Oates and his companions could find nothing against him. The judge advised him that if he gave evidence about the “plot” or renounced his Catholic faith, his life would be spared and he would be greatly rewarded. Lewis said in his dying speech, “discover the plot I could not, as I knew of none; and conform I would not, for it was against my conscience”. He was returned to Usk and waited for three months for his call to death by execution. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered on 27 August 1679. After the Titus Oates affair (1679—80), the remaining Welsh-speaking Catholic clergy were either executed or exiled.