With Points for Personal Prayer from Jesuit Spiritual Masters
edited and annotated by Jesuit Father Sean Salai
It’s time to take your spiritual pulse, re-orient yourself to your Creator, and seek His guidance to live your faith more seriously. And there is no better way to do so than by delving into St. Ignatius’ classic Spiritual Exercises, which started the modern retreat movement and played a pivotal role in the conversions of many saints to a radical following of Christ. This book is one of very few that can truly be said to have changed the world. Now, let it change you!
This beautiful deluxe edition has been edited for the modern reader by Jesuit Father Sean Salai and contains a new preface to help orient readers to this timeless classic.
Arranged as a DIY retreat, it is an essential part of developing a fruitful and consistent interior life, a soldier-saint’s battle plan for spiritual warfare.
Peppered with quotes from Jesuit saints and spiritual masters, this new deluxe edition of the Spiritual Exercises brings St. Ignatius’ powerful spirituality to a new generation of Christians striving to become saints themselves.
At www.tanbooks.com: Order your copy of “The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola.” Catholic News Herald readers enjoy 20 percent off their order – use the exclusive coupon code “CNH20.”
SAN DIEGO — A powerful new documentary on sex trafficking makes its intentions clear from the outset. “Blind Eyes Opened: The Truth About Sex Trafficking in America” begins with this scriptural passage from Isaiah: “to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.”
Over the hour and a half that follows, viewers’ eyes will indeed be opened, not only by the many disturbing facts related by law enforcement personnel, legislators and those dedicated to facilitating the healing of trafficking victims, but also through the haunting first-person accounts of survivors of this modern-day form of slavery.
In a recent interview with The Southern Cross, San Diego’s diocesan newspaper, executive producer Geoffrey Rogers described the film as unabashedly “a Christian documentary.”
“Certainly it exposes the darkness, it shows the truth about sex trafficking in America – that’s the goal of it – but, when we produced it, we had a very clear objective and that was to show the hope in Jesus Christ to solve this problem,” he explained.
During the film, viewers hear from survivors who share Jesus’ role in their recovery. The film also shows Christian ministries reaching out to those in the commercial sex trade, and it concludes with a direct challenge to its Christian viewers to do more to combat this societal scourge.
Churches can host their own one-night screenings of the film until Feb. 20.
Several of those interviewed on camera in “Blind Eyes Opened” suggest that society’s blindness to this widespread crime is the result of simply not wanting to believe that such things are happening, with increasing frequency, in our own neighborhoods.
In the film, Cpl. Alan Wilkett of the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida tells viewers, “It’s happening right before our eyes, and yet we’re not seeing it.”
The film tackles such topics as the insidious ways in which children are lured by traffickers who often prey on vulnerabilities such as low self-esteem and an unstable family life; how law enforcement has shifted from viewing trafficked persons as criminals to recognizing them as crime victims; what additional steps that American society can take against trafficking; and what resources are currently available to those fortunate enough to escape from such a hellish life.
Among the many heartbreaking stories recounted in the film is that of Edie B. Rhea, founder of Healing Root Ministry Inc., a nonprofit led by trafficking survivors.
Her father died when she was 4. A few months later, a man named Bill moved in with her and her mother. He molested her when she was 10 and, two years later, began selling her for sex to strangers.
A childhood photo of a smiling Edie is seen onscreen as the grown woman recounts her lost innocence and the multiple rapes she endured at the butcher shop that Bill and her mother owned. On one occasion, Bill prostituted her in exchange for a new meat grinder.
Rhea says in the film that she believes that there were “lots of opportunities for people to see (what was happening), but they didn’t see.”
“The signs were there,” she said. “They just looked the other way.”
— Denis Grasska, Catholic News Service
Get more info
For more information about the film, visit www.BlindEyesOpened.com. Churches interested in learning how to host a screening can do so by visiting www.faithcontentnetwork.com, clicking on “See the Current Film Line-Up,” and selecting “Blind Eyes Opened: The Truth About Sex Trafficking in America.”