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Two years ago, I was at Loyola Marymount University delivering the Cassasa Lecture in social values. I spoke on the 50thanniversary of Father Pedro Arrupe’s historic address to the World Union of Jesuit Alumni.

That evening, after Mass in the Jesuit community, I met a young Jesuit from Eastern Africa; he was studying in LMU’s school of Film and Television. When he introduced himself to me as “Taban” it brought me back to my first assignment after graduation from JST in 1994. I was missioned to work with Jesuit Refugee Service in Uganda. We oversaw education and ministered to those who were fleeing the Civil War in, what was then, one Sudan.

Taban is a very common name among the Má dí people, an ancient agricultural community living in Eastern Equatoria along the banks of the White Nile.

Although Christianity reached sub-Saharan Africa as early as the fourth century, most of those with whom I ministered encountered the Catholic faith through the Comboni Missionaries and other missionaries in the nineteenth century.

As a newly ordained priest, I learned to say ritual prayers and very basic conversation in the Má dí language. That night at Loyola Marymount I took a chance and greeted Taban in Má dí. 

“Ingoni”, I said, which is a form of ‘Hello.’ 

He immediately smiled and responded “Owi ra a”.

Now I wanted to converse more but could only remember ritual prayers and so I said, ‘Opi kolö anyi tro’, “The Lord be with you.” 

His face grew larger and he responded, “nyi sa kolö nyi tro,” and I could feel the enthusiasm building. 

But then I could only remember the Confiteor and the formula for absolution, hardly hallway banter, so I offered a Má dí blessing, before he blurted out in English, “How do you know this?” I sincerely doubt that he expected to speak his native tongue to a random stranger in Southern California on a Tuesday night in November. Such is the beauty of ministerial formation rooted in the mutual communication and Divine Love that we contemplate the Spiritual Exercises.”

In “Mission as Prophetic Dialogue,” Divine Word Missionary Fr. Stephen Bevans argues that missionaries must learn the language of the people they serve as a way of truly “bonding” with them. Yet language is more than words — it is a way of making meaning, a form of cultural literacy that opens a shared world.

What unfolded in 1994 on the banks of the Nile between Taban, a seven-year-old altar server, and me, a newly ordained priest, went deeper than the Nilotic language that we spoke. When we met again three decades later, we remembered Oliji Transit Camp and Magburu settlement camp where we first met —places marked by displacement, but also by encounter. We found ourselves astonished that our paths had crossed again, now joined by a shared Jesuit vocation.

In his first public remarks to over 200,000 in Saint Peter’s Square and an eager television audience of billions, Pope Leo XIV offered his vision for the Church. He said, “We must seek together how to be a missionary Church, a Church that builds bridges (and) dialogue, always open to receive people, like this square, with open arms – everyone, all those who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”

This vision is fundamental to the mission of the Jesuit School of Theology. Our commitment to prophetic dialogue, in the spirit of Pope Leo, is more than a tagline, it is embedded in what I studied and experienced here. 

In 2016 I returned to sub-Saharan Africa, this time I was only passing through, to attend a meeting of one of the other six Jesuit Conferences. I was leading the Conference of Canada and the United States and at that time your Dean, Father Orobator, was leading the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar. We met in Antananarivo, Madagascar during the Easter season. While the agenda focused mostly on that region, we were also in the planning stages for the 36th General Congregation which would elect a new Superior General. Many in attendance were already sizing each other up and beginning an unofficial “murmuratio” or murmuring about who our next Superior General might be.

My focus, though, changed rather abruptly on Sunday April 16th when I opened my New York Times app and saw the headline, “272 Slaves were sold to save Georgetown. What Does it Owe Their Descendants?” While Georgetown University took the headline, I locked eyes on the byline, “the Jesuit priests who ran the country’s top Catholic university needed money to keep it alive.” 

Even though we were 9,000 miles and eight time zones away from New York, my energy and focus suddenly shifted back home. I wasn’t the only one who read that story, many of the African Provincials in attendance came to me and asked, “Tim, how is the Society (of Jesus) going to respond?”

My first sense of how to respond came after the 36th General Congregation, when several descendants of the 1838 sale wrote to Fr. Arturo Sosa, the Jesuit Superior General, asking him “to investigate the unmitigated and enduring harm inflicted upon God’s one human family by the Society of Jesus’ direct extensive and long-term engagement in slavery.” 

In his response, Fr. Sosa lamented this history, writing, “Jesuit slaveholding in the United States and, in particular, the sale of 272 slaves from the Jesuit estates in southern Maryland to purchasers in Louisiana, were a sin against God and a betrayal of the human dignity of your ancestors.” He then entrusted the dialogue to the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, copying me.

Within days of receiving his letter I was invited to meet with Descendants. The meetings led to dialogue, the dialogue led to a facilitated process, the process led to a public apology, the creation of a charitable foundation, and no small amount of public attention – and opinion. 

Reflecting on the past decade since Jesuits learned of the living Descendants, I recognize that the tangible outcomes are only one part of our dialogue. What makes the dialogue prophetic is that it is not based on adjudicating the past. There was not a deal to be made, a transaction to be hammered out, a settlement to be negotiated. The Descendants with whom I prayed and discerned wanted to go much deeper than the practical realm. They wanted to restore a relationship that was borne of blood and tears but also rooted in Jesus Christ. Because their enslaved ancestors passed on the Catholic faith to their children and their children’s children, they wanted to be reunited with the Society of Jesus. Only then did they want to partner with us in something greater than what had been done before.

It is in moments of lived relationship—quiet, personal, and freely offered—that this deeper restoration becomes most visible. In 2019, Mr. Joseph Stewart, whose great-great-grandfather Isaac Hawkins was the first name on the manifest of those sold in 1838, asked me if I would celebrate his funeral Mass when the time comes. This gesture, this desire, is a living testament to Pope Leo’s vision for a missionary Church. Just as I began my presbyterial ministry in dialogue with those fleeing the oppression of Omar al-Bashir’s government, I was learning how to face and begin to heal our own Jesuit history of sin and oppression. I have come to see that, whatever the circumstance, with charity, presence, dialogue, and love, something new becomes possible.

May you who go forth today carry with you Pope Leo’s vision for a missionary Church. May you be those open arms, ready to embrace the city and the world.