The formation of young Jesuits is an important investment in the future of the Society of Jesus in Europe. Each year, European Jesuits in Formation (EJIF) brings together Jesuits in formation from different European Provinces and Regions for a time of prayer, formation, apostolic service and fraternity. More than simply a meeting, EJIF offers a space where Jesuits from across Europe can grow together in their vocation, encounter different apostolic and cultural realities, and strengthen the bonds that will sustain their future collaboration in mission.

For the Jesuit Conference of European Provincials (JCEP), EJIF is significant precisely because it helps nurture a sense of a shared European Jesuit mission from the earliest stages of formation. By bringing together Jesuits from across the Conference, it creates opportunities to discover the richness of the different Provinces while also recognising what unites them as companions in the Lord. The programme combines apostolic experience, formation and communal prayer, with fraternity at its heart. The following article offers a personal testimonial from Mikhael Ahmad SJ of the British Province, who was part of the EJIF 2026 Coordination Committee, reflecting on the experience in Cluj-Napoca and on what this year’s gathering meant for those who took part.

This year’s EJIF (European Jesuits in Formation) meeting took place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, from 25 July to 9 August. We were warmly and generously welcomed by the Jesuit community, who hosted us at their Spirituality Centre and opened not only their home but also something of the life and mission of the Church in Cluj to us. The Jesuit community serves the wider Catholic community in a variety of ways, and we were deeply touched by the sense of fraternity that surrounded their ministry. Their relationships with those they serve were a beautiful witness to the Church not simply as an institution, but as a family: a community in which people are welcomed, accompanied and cared for.

EJIF is built around a number of important elements: apostolic service, formation around a common theme, communal prayer, and the opportunity to know one another more deeply as Jesuits in formation and as representatives of our different Provinces throughout Europe. Yet beneath these different elements is something even more important: the desire to become, in Ignatius’ language, companions in the Lord.

From the very beginning of the planning for EJIF 2026, the Coordination Committee, Miklós Forián-Szabó SJ, Ante Arambašić SJ and myself, felt that we should build upon some of the hopes and desires that had emerged from the previous meeting. As we prayed and discerned together, we gradually became aware of a theme that felt both important and, in some ways, risky: our vow of chastity and, more broadly, our affective lives as religious.

Religious life asks much of us in terms of our relationships, our freedom and the way in which we give ourselves to others. We wanted to create a space in which we could look honestly at this dimension of our lives, not simply as something to be managed, but as something through which God can help us to grow and flourish. As we continued to pray, one word became increasingly important for us: freedom.

We began to understand our vow of chastity not primarily in terms of restriction, but as an invitation to a deeper freedom, a freedom for love, for service and for generous self-giving. There was both an ad intra and an ad extra dimension to this. Ad intra, we wanted to explore how healthy affectivity and greater freedom can help us to flourish in our relationships with God, with our companions and within community. Ad extra, we wanted to ask how this same freedom might enable us to become increasingly available to the people and world around us: more ready to respond to the needs of others, more humble in our service, and more open to the magis.

One of our greatest challenges during the planning was finding a concrete way to connect this theme with apostolic service. We did not want affectivity to remain simply an intellectual or theoretical subject. We wanted our delegates to encounter it both through formation and through lived experience.

Looking back, we were continually struck by how providentially the pieces came together.

In Cluj, the Piarists were preparing their own week-long youth gathering, the Piarist Youth Movement (PYM), bringing together young people from across Europe for a week of prayer, pilgrimage, workshops, sharing and community. Alongside the main programme, some of the young people were being formed as group leaders so that they could accompany and serve the other participants. The motto of their week was “We grow together.” It was difficult to imagine a more natural way for our own EJIF theme to become concrete.

Our first week was therefore spent collaborating with the Piarists and accompanying these young leaders. EJIF delegates offered one-to-one sessions in which the leaders could reflect on their experience of the week and become more attentive to where God was present and active in it. During the pilgrimage to Turda, the delegates also offered spiritual input and opportunities for reflection. We extended this accompaniment to the Piarists, teachers and others involved in organising the event, offering discussion groups and opportunities to encounter something of Ignatian spirituality.

For the delegates, this service required a great deal of flexibility. Plans changed, groups changed and the needs of the young people shifted from day to day. In other words, the week demanded precisely the kind of interior freedom that we had been praying about during our preparation. We needed to let go of our own expectations and remain available to what was actually happening in front of us.

The fruits were striking. It was deeply consoling to see friendships grow between the Jesuits and the young people, and between the Jesuits and the Piarist organisers. As the week unfolded, we could see the delegates becoming increasingly attentive to the wellbeing of those they were accompanying. Their concern was not simply that the programme should run well, but that the young people themselves should flourish. For us as the Coordination Committee, this was one of the clearest confirmations of the discernment that had led us to this theme.

One moment that has stayed with me, and which was echoed by several of the other delegates, was the way in which the presence of the young people became a sign of hope for all of us. We saw it in the way they looked after one another, encouraged those who were struggling and supported those who were still learning. No one seemed to be left on the margins; rather, people were encouraged to participate and to discover that they had something to contribute. During our sharing sessions, I was particularly struck by the fraternal bonds between the young people. Those who felt more hesitant or intimidated about speaking were encouraged and gently held by their companions. In their care for one another, we caught a glimpse of something profoundly Gospel-like: a compassionate and counter-cultural way of loving that places the dignity and flourishing of the other before the self. In a week in which we had been reflecting on freedom for love and service, their witness became an unexpected gift to us. We had come to accompany them, yet in many ways they also accompanied us.

We too had our own work of accompaniment. Each member of the Coordination Committee had responsibility for accompanying some of the young people involved in the practical running of the PYM, including communications, logistics, music and liturgy. At the same time, we were responsible for listening to the delegates, receiving their feedback and remaining open to adapting the programme when necessary. In that sense, organising EJIF itself became another experience of Ignatian freedom: having a plan, but holding it lightly enough to allow God to work through the reality before us.

For me personally, one of the unexpected graces of being part of the Coordination Committee was discovering how much freedom is also required in leadership. It is one thing to make a plan; it is another to remain sufficiently free to listen when the experience of the group asks something different of you. Learning to hold the programme firmly enough to provide direction, yet lightly enough to allow it to change, became a small but important lesson in discernment.

The second week turned more explicitly towards formation. We were very grateful to Brendan Callaghan SJ, who led us in an affectivity workshop. These days gave us the opportunity to approach our affective lives from both a practical and intellectual perspective, examining our relationships, our vulnerabilities and the ways in which we seek to live religious life healthily and freely. We were challenged by the material, by the case studies and by our conversations with one another. Perhaps most importantly, we were given permission to speak honestly about a subject that can sometimes be difficult to name.

This was ultimately what we had hoped EJIF could provide: a space in which important questions could be approached with honesty, fraternity and prayer.

Alongside all of this, the simpler elements of EJIF remained just as important. We gathered each day for Mass and communal prayer, and we made space for sharing together about how the programme was unfolding. Our Province presentations were another particularly rich part of the meeting. We came from different countries, cultures and backgrounds, with very different journeys and vocation stories, yet there was something profoundly consoling in recognising the common thread that united us: we had each, in our own way, heard a call from God to follow Christ in the Society of Jesus.

These moments of fraternity are not simply an optional extra to EJIF. They are part of its very heart. For a short time, we live, pray, work and learn together. We become a small community in ourselves, discovering again the truth that Jesuit mission is sustained not only by what we do, but by the relationships through which we do it.

The feast of St Ignatius was perhaps the clearest expression of this. Friends and members of the Jesuit community came together at the Spirituality Centre to celebrate, and we were deeply touched by the warmth and generosity of the occasion. Once again, we were reminded of the Church as family and community. We were not simply visitors passing through Cluj; for a brief time, we became part of something larger than ourselves.

Our time in Cluj also gave us an opportunity to discover more about the richness of the local Church. In particular, our visit to the Greek Catholic community and cathedral was a real gift. To encounter something of the history of the Greek Catholic Church in Romania, and to be welcomed so warmly, broadened our understanding of the place in which we were privileged to spend these weeks.

As I look back on EJIF 2026, I am struck most of all by the sense of God’s providence throughout the whole experience. In the early stages of planning, we knew that we were taking a risk by choosing to focus so directly on affectivity and chastity. Yet again and again, we experienced the consolation of seeing the pieces come together: the theme, the service, the Piarist collaboration, the formation and the life of the group itself.

For me, perhaps this is one of the most enduring fruits of EJIF 2026: the discovery that freedom in religious life is not freedom from responsibility or from relationship, but freedom for love. It is the freedom to be available to God, to our companions and to those we are sent to serve. And perhaps this is what it means to become more deeply companions in the Lord: to grow together, to serve together, and to become increasingly free to love.

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius reminds us that we are created to “praise, reverence, and serve God” (Spiritual Exercises, 23). Our experience in Cluj seemed to give this a very concrete expression. We began EJIF asking what greater freedom might look like in our religious lives. We ended it having experienced something of that freedom together: freedom to accompany, freedom to serve, freedom to be vulnerable with one another, and freedom to allow God to lead us somewhere we might not have chosen for ourselves.