Faber Institute

The Art of Friendship and Cultivating Depth of Life

About Faber Institute

A Word From Fr. Rick Ganz, SJ

15 February 2019

Dear Friends,

I am grateful to be able to express this word to you. It was my Board – trusted friends all and dear to me – who have worked with me on this.

An allegation has been made against me, coming from a ministry somewhere in my years past.

I do not yet know who is the person, man or woman, who is connected with this allegation, or the nature of the allegation.

When any Jesuit has an allegation made against him it means that he is automatically sent into a protocol of investigation according to Jesuit norms. We are committed to do this process well. This process includes that the Jesuit is temporarily removed from his public ministry until the investigation is completed.

I ask you to remember me and to pray for me that I can navigate this worthily, and not to lose heart.

But I want you to know this too.

Getting relationships right is the centrally important task of a human being. This is at the core of my life’s project. It is also at the heart of what the Faber Institute is, because it is what God meant in Christ. And when a person learns how to do this, he or she knows the joy of true friends.

And it matters to me that my Jesuit Order, and the Church, and every Institution (the family included) is also at work establishing, often repairing, “right relationship” with others.

In consultation with my Provincial Superior, and with the Faber Board, I elected to move to the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos, CA. Some long-time and close Jesuit friends of mine live here, and it matters to me to be able to be physically near them in this process likely to take some four months to complete.

While I am here, my Provincial encourages me to keep up with my writing, with my email, and so I will do so. I will also be in touch with Mary Edmonds as she continues her work at the Faber Institute (office@faberinstitute.com). There is much that I can help her with, and I will. I am grateful for our many friends – talented, thoughtful, religious leaders in the region – some of whom have already stepped forward to lead specific works of the Institute from which for a time I am absent.

Love,
Rick, SJ

About Faber Institute

The Faber Institute was founded in 2014 by Fr. Rick Ganz, SJ (a Jesuit priest) and is based in Portland, Oregon. The Faber Institute is committed to “awakening souls” in an age when the existence of the soul, and of its particular capacities and formidable powers, is overlooked. We do this by putting people in touch with sources of depth and vision within themselves through which they gain a discerning capacity to recognize the highest good of persons, and its counterfeits.

The works of the Institute are the “works of soul”:

  • teaching spiritual and theological doctrine in accessible ways which inspire personal conversion
  • preaching the Gospel and opening the riches of the Scriptures
  • giving the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius through Retreats
  • giving spiritual direction to individuals
  • doing the priestly work of the Sacraments
  • giving counsel to the doubtful
  • creating bonds of trust and giving help to all Christian denominations
  • teaching people how to deliberate well and to make good decisions in Christ
  • and perhaps most of all, how to practice the art of friendship in the way that Christ Himself demonstrated in his earthly life as possible, and necessary, for us

 

Staff and Board of Directors

These works are made especially famous in world history by the Jesuits (the Society of Jesus), who exercise them for the strengthening of the common good, and as a specific expression of the meaning of the work of Jesus Christ. The Faber Institute is a work of the Society of Jesus, though it is an independently established 501(c)(3) entity, under the oversight of its own Board of Directors. The writings of Fr. Ganz, SJ, most especially in the “Writings” section of the Faber Institute website, express his ongoing, and constantly developing understanding of the long and tested traditions of the Church, and in accord with the habits and “style” of the Jesuits. But because Fr. Ganz is always a learner in these profound matters, his writings are not to be understood as “speaking for” the Catholic Church or for the Society of Jesus. Those Institutions are proficient at speaking for themselves.