Greetings From The Arrupe Coordinator 

Hello all,

Our Arrupe formation program got off the ground with an intimate retreat in Santa Casa, (in Queenscliff), for all new candidates in the program in 2026. We began by reflecting deeply on “My Experience of the Spiritual Exercises”, which amounts to a ‘re-savouring’ of the graces of the Spiritual Exercises over a four-day period. We enjoyed lovely weather for the experience, good food, convivial conversation, and an ideal location. This was a wonderful start to the Arrupe experience, as it offered the opportunity not only to revisit the graces, but to share and bond together as a group. We all know, we learn just as much from listening deeply to each other, as we do from formal study. Now the year is well underway, and having just completed an overview of the Four Weeks of the Exercises with the entire cohort, we are exploring a variety of aspects of the Spiritual Exercises week on week. We have much to look forward to, with many guest speakers from Australia and overseas to come. We also have our 8-day retreat at Sevenhill in July, which is already fully subscribed.

Many may wonder why I would dedicate another newsletter to Artificial Intelligence and its impact on spiritual direction (the first was in 2024). Well, the reason is simple: the rate of change in the intervening two years has been rapid and consequential. Now, the real impact of AI is beginning to be felt in every area of human endeavour, as well as in our personal lives. So, this newsletter is somewhat of an ‘update’ on the previous one. I hope you will find something that will pique your interest from the many resources on offer.

By the way - just in case you haven’t already discovered it - I would like to let you know about a podcast that might be of interest to you. It is The Spiritual Life with James Martin SJ.  He started this podcast in June of last year and has now clocked up over 30 episodes. Why not sample a few? Here is a selection of my highlights: His very first interview last year was with Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe; then another early interview with Cardinal Stephen Chow, on being Christian in a Chinese culture; then Br. Buy Consolmagno on praying as a scientist; another very important one for spiritual directors was with Patrick Gilger SJ, on Why you need a spiritual director; then this year, an interview with Sister Norma Pimentel MJ, who ministers to migrants on the US-Mexico border; a lovely interview too with Anne Lamott on her “Help, Thanks, Wow” spirituality; and finally two outstanding podcasts on being gay and Catholic, one with Fr Bryan Massingale, and another with Gregory Maguire. There is much wisdom to be imbibed from these wells of experience and insight. 

Quo vadis, humanitas?

(Where are we as humanity going?)

“We are two decades into the era of social media and smartphones, and we're lonelier than ever. So we want to know, is tech displacing or even replacing the humans in our lives?”

(From All In The Mind: Brain Rot: Will AI turn us off human relationships?)

In recent years, artificial intelligence systems have increasingly taken control of the production of texts, music and videos. This puts much of the human creative industry at risk of being dismantled and replaced with the label “Powered by AI,” turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love. Meanwhile, the masterpieces of human genius in the fields of music, art and literature are being reduced to mere training grounds for machines.

(Message of Pope Leo XIV for the 60^th world Day of Social Communications 2026)

“In this moment of the 21st century, the human family finds itself facing questions so radical that they even threaten its existence as we have known it up to now,” the document says, adding that human beings today are exposed to risks “never imagined before.”

(Quo Vadis Humanitas?)

In January 2024 Pope Francis devoted his World Day of Social Communications message to the subject of Artificial Intelligence. This year, Pope Leo has devoted his first World Day of Social Communications address to the same subject. Now, just this month, the International Theological Commission, has published a lengthy reflection on AI and Social Media (Quo Vadis Humanitas?). This analysis offers a very balanced and measured approach to the challenge of AI.

The commission cautions that forms of knowledge and calculation detached from embodied, situated human intelligence — and from relational knowledge passed down through generations via education — can become a threat to the true good of humanity. 

But the horse may have already bolted in this regard. What follows is a lengthy quote from the former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt in a recent interview. It offers a brief but sobering glimpse into the future that is opening up before us:

“We believe as an industry, that within one year, the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers. We also believe that within one year that they will replace graduate level mathematicians that are at the tippy-top of graduate math programmes; that's one year, okay. What happens in two years? Well, I've just told you about reasoning and I've told you about programming and I’ve told you about math; programming plus math are the basis of our whole digital world, so the evidence and the claims from the research groups in Open AI and Anthropic and so forth is that there now somewhere around 10% or 20% of the code that they are developing in their research programmes is being generated by the computer; that's called recursive self-improvement (it’s the technical term). So, what happens when this thing starts to scale? Well, a lot; one way to say this is that within the three to five years will have what is called general intelligence (AGI), which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician, physicist, artist, writer, thinker, politician … In the next year or two this foundation is being locked in, and it's not we're not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that, because remember the computers are now doing self-improvement; they're learning how to plan and they don't have to listen to us anymore. We call that super intelligence (ASI – Artificial Super Intelligence), and this is the theory that there will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans the San Francisco Consensus is that this occurs within six years, just based on scaling. Now in order to pull this off, you have to have an enormous amount of power. This path is not understood in our society, there's no language for what happens with the arrival of this. This is happening faster than our society, our democracy, our laws can address … that's why it's under-hyped; people do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level, which is largely free. …”

This is not reassuring. But it’s evident from what he says that a shift of enormous proportions is coming our way - one that has the potential to sideswipe us, not only collectively, but individually as well. It is quite difficult to take in. But we Christians have the rich resources of our tradition to sustain us. We do not succumb to the mystique of AI, but rely for our identity and our sustenance on the mystery of the Incarnation: God becoming our very identity. No manufactured machine, no matter how intelligent or ‘human-like’ can ever be granted this level of importance or sacredness.

I leave the last word to Pope Leo, who, (quoting Gregory of Nyssa), reinforces the uniqueness and sacredness of every single human being:

“The fact of being created in the image of God means that, from the moment of his creation, man has been imprinted with a regal character [...]. God is love and the fount of love: the Fashioner of our nature has made this to be our feature too, so that through love — a reflection of divine love — human beings may recognize and manifest the dignity of their nature and their likeness to their Creator” 

(Saint Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, quoted in Pope Leo’s recent message on the 60th World Day of Social Communications)

Pedro Arrupe SJ – His words, His Vision

Excerpts from: “A Beacon of Hope in a World of Despair”. (1977)

This powerful message from Pedro Arrupe SJ is so prescient it could have been written this week...

Today man experiences, at the individual and at the social level, a deep emptiness, a spiritual void that neither technological progress nor materialistic ideologies can fill up. Disillusioned in his search for something that transcending him might give him meaning and freedom, man turns to himself only to discover his utter inability to attain alone and unaided his final destiny. Torn between, on the one hand, a rationalism and a technology that often manipulate and dehumanize him, and, on the other, an hedonism which, instead of fulfilling him, only accentuates his inner solitude and dissatisfaction, man looks for support and understanding among his fellowmen. But this emerging hope soon vanishes, when he finds men deeply divided, envious and mistrustful of one another, and when he discovers that the community—which was to be his main source of security and support—threatens to absorb him and deprive him even of his personal freedom and identity.
[…] 
In a matter of such vital importance and urgency for the future of mankind, we Christians should take the lead. We should .show to a world that considers itself “post-Christian,” that Christian love and solidarity are still very much alive and operative in human society, even if we know that our example and witness will not always be recognized or appreciated. Thus we will prove, in a very effective way, that Christianity, far from being “the opium of the people’,” is a living force that can tackle the present situation, with courage and realism, and point out to contemporary man the path towards a solution which man, left to his own a-transcendental resources, would never be able to discover nor to find effectively a reason for utilizing here below.
[…]
To rely on power and might, to seek always personal prestige, is basically to place one’s hope in oneself. Though He also could justifiably have done so, this second temptation was rejected outright by Christ with the words: “You shall not tempt the Lord your God.” For man however, the temptation remains a particularly seductive one. The unprecedented progress of modern science and technology, as well as many other branches of knowledge, seems an open invitation to deny contingency and proclaim a self-sufficient autonomy in which transcendent values have no place or meaning. The perfect society seems not only within reach but attainable by human efforts alone.
In recent years, however, this confidence has diminished somewhat in the light of the spectacular failure of so many plans and projects, and of the hard evidence that several major world problems are becoming more acute rather than less. Some are beginning to acknowledge not only “the ambiguous nature of progress,” but also the fact that it “deepens rather than solves the mystery of the heart of man; nor does it provide the complete and definitive answer to the desire which springs from his innermost being.”
The true Christian hope that we expect from the Church today neither loses confidence in face of the futility of things nor places that confidence in itself. In the words of the liturgical prayer, it proclaims clearly: “Our help is in the name of the Lord.” There is a well-known saying of St. Ignatius, one version of which reads as follows: “So trust in God as if the issue depended entirely on Him and not at all on you; but put in a total effort as if it was to be all your doing and not God’s at all.”
[…]
The Christian, faced with the world and its problems, far from being a pessimist, is essentially an optimist; far from shunning human responsibility and effort he is the first to commit himself to the task of building a world more just and more human and never gives up in despair. In pursuing his temporal task the Christian, for the love of God and of his fellow-men works, struggles and, if need be, dies, “in hope against all hope,” knowing that while his work, struggle and life are necessary conditions for the World’s transformation and man’s liberation, that transformation and liberation will be ultimately and fully achieved only through God’s Grace: “By the grace of God I am what I am.”
This is the hope we and the Church have to offer the world of today. But first we must possess it ourselves. This requires, on our part, a deep faith and an intimate union with Christ.

Do you feel a calling to become a Giver of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius? If you do, consider joining us in the Arrupe Program in 2027.

We are accepting applications for 2027. If you feel you have a calling to become a giver of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, we would be very happy to hear from you. We welcome those who have qualifications and experience in Spiritual Direction and those who do not.

Details of our program can be viewed on our website.

I can be contacted directly at michael.loughnane@arrupe.org.au. 

The Arrupe Program is separate from but collaborates closely with the Spiritual Direction course at ACU. Most of our candidates study at ACU as part of their formation to become givers of the Spiritual Exercises.

Would you like to study spiritual direction at the Australian Catholic University?

Develop knowledge, understanding and the foundational skills suited to the ethical, self-aware and safe practice of spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition by enrolling in the Graduate Diploma in Spiritual Direction, or, the Master of Spiritual Direction. 

The End and the Beginning
 By Wisława Szymborska 

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.
 
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
 
Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.
 
Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
 
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
 
The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.
 
Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
 
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.
 
From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.
 
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.
 
Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.
 
(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

What I love about Wisława Szymborska’s poetry is her courage and commitment not to resile from naming the world as it is. Yet, her work is never pessimistic; virtually every one of her poems is imbued with a deep hope for humanity. Szymborska won the Nobel prize for literature in 1996, and in my view, she richly deserved it. She received the award "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality". This poem exemplifies those traits. In these times it is a reminder of the catastrophic impact war has on ordinary people. But the passing of time dulls the memory and Szymborska leaves us with the image of someone who has no real memory or connection with the pain and trauma that exact place has been through in the past, “stretched out/blade of grass in his mouth/gazing at the clouds”. I am reminded of the wisdom of Flannery O’Connor on the connection between enlightenment and the passing of time: “It does not take much to make us realise what fools we are, but the little it takes is a long time coming.” 

Ignatian Silent Retreats

Individual guided residential retreats from 2 to 8 days, at beautiful locations nationally. Our silent retreats offer time away from the daily noise with a quiet still space to rest, reflect, and listen deeply to God’s presence within. Whether you are new to or familiar with Ignatian spirituality, you are welcome.

Australian Ignatian Trail

This ‘camino’ experience provides an opportunity for encountering Ignatian Spirituality, discerning, and listening to God’s presence in Nature. Step aside from everyday life, walk, reflect, experience nature day after day, time in silence, conversation and listening to God’s presence. And walk in the footsteps of the first Jesuits in Australia.

2026 Dates: 4 walking days – 6 nights in OCTOBER.

An Ignatian Journey from Contemplation to Action

A four-week online retreat during May 2026 to mark Laudato Si Week. Join us for a journey from contemplation to action, with Ignatian prayer and discernment practices to enlighten how we can care for our common home.

Pause, A Retreat for Women

A small group retreat for women who seek a time of prayer, guidance, and stillness amidst the natural transitions of life to come and rest, and discover the emerging call of transformation and flourishing that God is inviting you to, God’s love, wisdom and wish for you.

This popular retreat is being offered again in 2026 at
Sevenhill SA in May
Brisbane in July
Melbourne in October 
Sydney in October