What's New

There is another addition to the House Email Address Page, please make note of it.

• Portugal: Porto II obraabc@mail.telepac.pt

Please note: Due to the frequency of the additions and changes in email addresses, and the difficulty of making these changes to this webpage, we will make note of the changes as they are received and update the House Email Address Page once a month as needed.

The North Italian Province (IS) has two new websites posted this week to our Links page. Please make note of them:

• Edizioni Dehoniane (Bologna) - http://www.dehoniane.it
• I Dehoniani a Monza - http://www.ciaoweb.net/gapreghe/

In this week's Meet an SCJ we feature Marek Skórski, a brother from the Polish Province, who came to Rome in December of 1993 to assist the local house treasurer, and took over that office two years ago when the new local administration was appointed for the International College (Rome II).

The final two Justice & Peace representatives to the Recife General Conference have been selected:

• Latin America: Jesús García García (VEN)
• South Europe: José Agostinho Figueiredo de Souza (LU)

Also in preparation for the Recife General Conference we are posting to the conference page reports from North European Provincials Meeting (in English, French and Portuguese) and from the Latin American Justice & Peace Meeting (in Spanish).

They will be added to the list published on the February 12^th news page (Cf. Conference Participants).

The office of the General Secretary has published a listing of the 70 scjs who made their first profession in 1999 (cf. First Professions).

Last week we finished the Jubilee Postcard Series. For the next few months we will be featuring some of the postcards found in the Dehon Postcard collection in the Dehonian Archives.

Zdzislaw Huber (FIN) has posted photos and other documents relating to the funeral of Bishop Verschuren in Helsinki on February 29^th (Cf. http://www.dlc.fi/~scjregfi) .

What's Happening

Congratulations

Mario Fortuoso Nuñez (AU) who will be ordained Deacon on March 18, 2000, in in the Parish of Nuestra Sra. de la Guardia, Buenos Aires.

To the Province of Chile celebrating 50 years of dehonian presence in that country on March 18th. Celebrations will take place at the Colegio San Juan, in Santiago.

The first work in Chile was the Parish of Teno, in the Diocese of Talca, which was accepted on February 5, 1950, and given up in 1971. Chile was a Dutch SCJ foundation. It was erected as a province on December 1991.

Mozambique

Last week P. Sandro (MZ) sent an email message detailing the scope of the disaster that has fallen on the people of Mozambique. Though aid has finally started to arrive there is much that needs to be done (cf. Mozambique).

German Province

The German SCJs are offering a special service during Lent.
Every day on their provincial website www.scj.de there will be a meditation by an SCJ, combined with a quote from the scripture reading of the day. A similar program during Advent was very well received.

French Canada

Maurice Légaré was kind enough to send along a photo and short biography of Gérard Schoonebeek (CGA) who's portrait of Fr. Dehon we are using this month on our calendar news page.

Professed in 1948, he studied philosophy and theology at Liesbosch and Nijmegen, and was ordained on July 18, 1954. After five years in Finland (1955-1960), he came to Canada in 1960, where he worked in youth ministry and as a parish priest, while serving as local superior and provincial and regional treasurer. He is now pastor in St-Philippe-de-Laprairie, a rural parish, south of Montréal. His classmates will remember his artistic talents, as he used to illustrate liturgy booklets, or make cartoons of his teachers or classmates.

A reminder this week (March 14) we celebrate Dehon Day in the Congregation, marking the anniversary of his birth in 1843. Of special note this year will be the official opening of La Capelle as the first 'prophetic community in the congregation.

Please Remember

+ F Basilio García Martín HI

Born: 12.01.1940
First Profession: 17.01.1960
Died: 05.03.2000 at Málaga

Dehon Photo of the Week

After we listened last week to Dehon recall his birthday, this week we will hear two quite different voices who remember Fr. Dehon in 1923, i.e. his 80th birthday. On the one hand an article published in a Catholic newspaper in Rome, on the other the congratulations from the bishop of Soissons, Mgr. Henri Binet, published in the diocesan periodical 'Semaine Religieuse de Soissons'. We'll note the different accentuation in remembering Dehon: while Rome refers to the propaganda of the Church's social teachings, the diocese of Soissons remembers first of all the parish priest and founder of the College St. John.

So begins this week's commentary on the photo of Fr. Dehon at his desk by Stefan Tertünte (Cf. 80^th Anniversary).

Dehon in Canada and America

This dazzlingly beautiful city is already rising out of the ruins of its destruction five years ago. Its population is about 500,000; in 1848, the year of the discovery of gold in California, there were only 500. Like all of California, the city was originally a Spanish and Mexican possession, but there aren't many Spanish here now. (58)15 The only remembrance of their presence here is in the names of the locations and cities: Sierra Nevada, Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, etc., etc.

This week Fr. Dehon travels down the west coast to San Francisco. The 'destruction' he speaks about was caused by the Great San Francisco Earthquake that devastated the city around the turn of the century (cf. San Francisco).
 

The Flooded Pantheon (from around 1900)
From the Dehon Postcard Collection