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Good news and bad news all at once…. According to Infovaticana, the North American Jesuits are reducing their novitiate locations from five to two. The two new novitiates will be located in Detroit (Michigan) and Culver City (California). Go woke. Go broke. And they are just about bankkrupt. I feel badly for the really great Jesuits who are trapped in that mess.
I simply must…
In Indiana, what started as a simple maternity photo shoot quickly turned into an unforgettable moment—thanks to Buckshot, arguably the most photogenic horse in the county.
Amanda and Phil, the expecting couple, wanted their horses to be part of the shoot since they consider… pic.twitter.com/Jr6VKUapbj
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 13, 2026
Black to move and mate in 4.
NB: I’ll hold comments with solutions ’till the next day so there won’t be “spoilers” for others.
The pity, here, is that the Southern Province, which traditionally had the largest numbers of vocations and, frankly, the most orthodox ones, is now joining with the Western Providence, which is exactly the opposite, and moving their noviciate to California. It is as if they want to create problems.
I attend a parish regularly that 23 years ago was staffed by Jesuits. I remember the pastor (a Jesuit who in my opinion he was pretty good) reading a letter at Mass with sadness that the parish was being turned over to the diocese within several months. One thing the pastor mentioned (he himself was a Navy veteran of WWII prior to entering religious life in his late 20s) was that out of 250 Jesuits in the province, over half were senior citizens. This was also around the time the scandals were making headlines.
For the record, I attended a Catholic college (mid-1980s) that was staffed by the Marianists. Like the Jesuits and some other orders, the Marianists have also had a decline, which has resulted in consolidations (one province in the United States now), schools either closing or being turned over to the diocese (the high school in my former diocese was one of these), and a few friends of mine who attended novitiate and became brothers (the five I knew had all left by 1996 prior to taking final vows – that I know of three are married) were at a novitiate that is now a retreat center.