Fr Francisco Javier Álvarez de los Mozos, a Jesuit from the
Loyola Province, has been nominated as the new Secretary of the Social Justice
and Ecology Secretariat, replacing Fr Fernando Franco SJ.
Fr Álvarez is currently the formation program coordinator in
the Loyola Province, and the co-director of ALBOAN, a Jesuit non-government
organization promoting solidarity and cooperation with developing countries.
Responding to his new role, Fr Álvarez remembered his
experiences during regency living and working with refugees in Cambodia in the
late-1990s.
‘Those years in Cambodia were a time of grace: there was
interior distress at seeing so much suffering, but there was also great
consolation in witnessing the people's underlying hope and their enthusiasm for
life', he said.
‘All of us there - lay people, Jesuits, other religious -
worked and lived together. We were an
international team, and that was our home, a space where we could support one
another and where every day we learned more about serving with generosity.'
He said his two years there influenced him deeply, and
aroused a strong desire to offer himself in the service of the last and the
least. In particular, it lead him to focus on the area of ‘communities of
solidarity'.
Over the next few months, Fr Álvarez will be completing a
research project on the associations of Latin American immigrants in Spain
before joining the Secretariat.