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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

What Fr. James Reuter SJ had to say about Ateneo's pro-contraception dissidents


From Minyong Ordonez's tribute to Fr. James Reuter SJ: "Ang Heswitang orig", published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer about 2 months ago:

Four years ago, I wrote the Catholic stand on the RH Bill, but couldn’t secure the space. I ran to Father Reuter, who wrote a weekly column in the Philippine Star. Happily, he gave way to my article in his column.
I confided to him my disenchantment with Ateneo philosophy professors who published their position papers arguing for the use of contraceptives in the government’s proposed law on birth control. 
          ...
In a sad voice, Father Reuter said, “Minyong, it ain’t the same anymore. Ateneo today is different from the Ateneo in your time.” 
As priest friend, he was fatherly and highly spiritual. I felt his profound and personal kindness inside the confessional box. His homilies during Mass were not only literary sounding, but eloquently and succinctly doctrinal. He was a terrific retreat master. His anecdotal meditation on sin, death and hell was guaranteed to keep you wide awake even in the sleepy hours of mid-afternoon. 
His sermon on Jesuit blind obedience (or “What it Means to be a Jesuit”) is classic. He delivered it on the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola in July 1953 in front of many of his fellow Jesuits. 
Father Reuter officiated at my wedding in 1991, and his steady admonitions on the sanctity and indissolubility of matrimony still ring in my ears. 
Father Reuter’s Catholic orthodoxy is a breath of fresh air, a gust of divine truth in a world enraptured by relativism and unbelief. True to the teachings of his church and obedient to his vows, Father Reuter is the classic and original Jesuit in the authentic mold of the Ignatian spirit laid down by the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola.

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