Irish Jesuit Provincial, Fr Leonard Moloney SJ, launched and blessed the Belfast Jesuit Centre for Spirituality on Saturday 22 October 2022. The day-long event was attended by a large audience including Bishop Noel Traynor, Jesuits, colleagues, friends and local people. Dr Austen Ivereigh, author of two biographies on Pope Francis, was the keynote speaker and he launched a book on Ignatian spirituality.

In his opening words, the Provincial noted that the centre had been in gestation for quite some time. Jesuits had been living and working in 28 Brookvale Ave for 30 years and as the years passed the need and desire for a spirituality centre grew. He noted the work and sustained reflection of the Jesuits in Belfast who contributed to the culmination of this day including Terry Howard SJ, who played a key role in setting up the centre and Tom Layden SJ, Brendan McManus SJ and Piaras Jackson SJ, the three current team members.

Local historian Jimmy McDermott informed the audience of the rich history of the area which included an introduction to Belfast and St Patrick’s Church.

Fr Moloney noted that St Patrick’s Parish is a living, breathing community in Belfast’s City Centre not far from Ulster University Belfast Campus with its significant cohort of staff and students. The church serves a large local resident community, a thriving population of workers in Belfast’s cultural and social heartland – the Cathedral Quarter. So the centre he says, in its history and location, lends itself well to the vision held for it into the future as a place of service to the faithful in Belfast, open to and welcoming younger people in the city. The Jesuit centre, he said, would be ecumenical in its outreach and synodal in its way of proceeding. It would be a hub of activities such as spiritual companionship, workshops, courses in Ignatian spirituality, faith formation, and creative pathways to encountering God at work in the hearts and minds of those attending and at work in the wider socio-cultural surroundings.

Director Fr Clarke said the programmes and events already planned include preparing for Advent, creative writing and processing trauma. There will be weekly worship with music, a four-week course for priests, deacons and parish leaders on ‘Scripture at the heart of the parish’, and even a book club on Pope Francis’s reform of the Church, “using reflection to ‘channel your inner fire'” (The Irish News).