Bishop John Steinbock recently named me Acting Director of the Diocesan Social Action Ministry.  Let me introduce myself.  My name is James Rude, S.J.  That S.J. means Society of Jesus—I am a Jesuit priest.

I was born in Los Angeles in the early days of the Great Depression and so grew up in a world that was rather, shall we call it, simplified.  I never received an allowance from my parents but I did have a job from the age of eight.  During my early teen years our nation was thrust into an international world with the second Great War—wasn’t the First Great War supposed to end all wars?—and as we floated into yet another war, I floated into the Novitiate to begin my life as a Jesuit.

Being a good novice, I volunteered for the missions and four years later sailed the Pacific to the China Mission.  For me it meant one year in Taiwan and two just outside of Manila where the Chinese Jesuits had been exiled because of the mainland Communists.  There I discovered an amazing situation: young Chinese seminarians had to learn an ancient language (Latin) in order to study the thoughts of a medieval European theologian (St. Thomas Aquinas) in order to proclaim Catholicism to a modern Asian world.  It didn’t make sense to me.  In fact, the institutional cultural insensitivity stunned me and I returned to America to continue my studies.

I was ordained a priest in 1964 and spent some thirteen years teaching in our high school in Los Angeles, Loyola High.  At first I taught Latin but soon I was in the Theology Department creating courses in Social Justice.  At the same time I developed our school’s first strong community involvement program; I called it CAM, Christian Action Movement, and it brought our students into contact with jails inside and out (inside on the juvenile level, out, at the County Jail where we offered free coffee and doughnuts to the men as they were released each morning), with the homeless living on Skid Row (they ran the Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen on Sundays), with poor children who just needed a day away from their asphalt lives (our kids took them to parks and the green, green grass), with others living in poverty and need.  The program taught our kids a lot about their world and themselves.

After a couple of years at a Afro-American parish in San Diego and a Mexican parish in East LA, and a few more years at two of our universities (Santa Clara and Loyola Marymount), I returned to high school for a term as rector of the Jesuit community and then settled into working at our parish in Hollywood.  This introduced me to a whole new world, the world of HIV/AIDS.  I was part of a parish group of the most dedicated and generous men and women who each Saturday took turns cleaning the homes or apartments of men living with AIDS, but my part was mostly spiritual, working with the men dying from AIDS.

I spent four years with our Newman Center parish in Honolulu—an amazingly international world—before I was brought home to California and Fresno.  Now I work out of the Diocesan Ministries Office, excited that I will be able to participate in a program that is an absolutely essential part of our Catholic Faith—social justice is a constitutive part of the Gospel