An afternoon with the Jesuits

I only did four things of note today.  I got an apostolic blessing ordered for my teaching parish, St. Hubert's, because they are celebrating their 150th anniversary. Hopefully it gets to the states and doesn't have any typos.  As a class we then visited the Apostolic Penitentiary.  Despite the imposing name, they are the court that deals with cases in the internal forum and grant faculties to absolve 5 crimes/sins reserved to Holy See (desecration of the Eucharist, breaking the seal of confession, a priest absolving someone he is sleeping with, physical assaulting the pope, and illicitly ordaining a bishop).  It was a good visit and the priest presenter was full of very good advice for dealing with confession.

They also had some seriously nice art.  My personal favorite.

From there we had our last class, and then in the evening we visited the Gesu, the mother house of the Jesuits. The church itself is amazing and has the golden idol type statue of Ignatius I made fun of on Saturday over his tomb. The reason I joke about it is that it's normally covered by a very nice altar piece and then in the evening they reveal it with a light show set to an orchestral mass and quotes of Ignatius. It still is an awesome statute (and church) though.

The unveiling of the statue,

From there we moved into the Gesu's attached building which still include a seminary and the rooms that Ignatius lived in.  We had mass in the room he died in and Deacon Alvaro gave a great homily.  Tomorrow we head to St. Paul's outside the Walls again, and I am really looking forward to a more low key visit.  Then two more days until we go on retreat!

Some of St. Ignatius's furniture.