Perkumpulan-alumni-kolese-jesuit: The 11th World Congress of Jesuit Alumni is being held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. "Interfaith dialogue" takes on very concrete meaning here: a Congress within a Jesuit University that has adopted an absolutely Hindu name, "Sanata Dharma", in a predominantly Muslim country.
Indonesia, before becoming today the "most populous Muslim country in the world", was doubly Buddhist (Srivijaya) and Hindu (Majapahit) during the period (6th-16th centuries AD) that historians call "classical". While Christians have just marked ten years since Father Jacques Hamel's assassination during Mass at Saint-Étienne de Rouvray by two Islamists, and while these same fanatics sow barbaric terror in numerous European cities, here is Indonesia offering a counter-example of tolerance, openness and plurality. Or the possibility, in 2026, of another Islam that is not grotesquely medieval.
Had we been among the Taliban, ISIS and Boko Haram, the Hindu temple of Prambanan, built in the 9th century, would already be razed. And the sanctuary of Borobudur, a monumental Buddhist temple, also built in the 9th century, would have been bombed with artillery like the giant Buddha of Bamiyan (6th century) in Afghanistan.
Returning to the Congress of Jesuit Alumni, it remains a matter of "translating the values of Ignatian pedagogy into concrete actions": "Magis", always doing more for the greater good. However virtuous and remarkable these values may be, the Alumni know how complex and difficult, sometimes impossible, even dangerous it is to speak words that may be dissonant in a concert of ignorant and obtuse imprecations. This in no way exempts one from an attitude of humility in acknowledging, and accepting without resignation, a collective failure, particularly regarding education and general culture available to the greatest number, which public opinion would do well to use.
Yogyakarta, the city hosting the WUJA (World Union of Jesuit Alumni, July 29 to August 2, 2026), is located on the island of Java where the Pithecanthropus or "Java Man", a hominid discovered in 1891, lived 500,000 years ago. Considerably younger, "Wajak Man", Java's first Homo sapiens, walked upright 40,000 years ago.
The Austronesians, our ancestors from the eastern confines of the Indian Ocean, whose maritime journey began 7,000 years ago in South China, toward Taiwan and the Philippines before reaching the numerous islands of the Indonesian archipelago, were the first great navigators in human history. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, on an island, Madagascar, the extreme western limit of this Austronesian expansion, more precisely among the Jesuits of Saint-Michel, the motto was "Miorim-paka, hanasoa olona": anchored in your identity, you will better serve humanity.
On May 20, 1908, young Javanese aristocrats with European education created the nationalist movement Budi Utomo: the concept aimed to educate Javanese by combining Western science and traditional Javanese culture. I do not know whether this should be seen as a form of inculturation: "adaptation of faith to local cultures while respecting their own traditions". A challenge that has spared no society torn between tradition (of one's own) and modernity (of others).
"Miorim-paka, hanasoa olona": in the age of the existential question of permanent questioning, have we kept the appointment?
Nasolo-Valiavo Andriamihaja