Arrupe Jesuit Community (AJC) has evolved over the years and has had three incarnations as the status of the institution the community is attached to also changed. It started as Arrupe House, a juniorate for scholastics preparing to do their philosophical studies in Kinshasa situated at St Anne’s hospital in Avondale. Though flourishing it was, the juniorate’s four-year existence ended with the erection of Arrupe College as an African English-speaking philosophate in 1994.
Writing about Arrupe House and its graduation into Arrupe College, Fr David Harold-Barry, who served as the last junior Master, stated that, “We had served our purpose. Floreat ut pereat is the motto of the Irish School of Ecumenics; ‘May it flourish so that it may perish’. That was Arrupe House.” The third incarnation without change on the structure of the community was another change of status from Arrupe College to Arrupe Jesuit University.
Back to 1994, the first batch of scholastics to join Arrupe College came from four Jesuit jurisdictions which were Nigeria-Ghana region, Zambia-Malawi province, Zimbabwe province and Eastern Africa province. At the beginning they lived in the old Arrupe House while others lived in another house belonging to the Inter-Regional Meeting of Bishops of Southern Africa (IMBISA). They were accompanied by twelve formators most of whom had come from the United States of America and a few from Africa.
As Arrupe College was taking shape structurally, other houses were purchased around the area of Mt Pleasant to ensure that scholastics stay not too far from nor in the college campus. On this model, Fr David writes that, “The model we chose was to have autonomous houses at some distance from the college and maybe from one another where small communities could develop a more robust community life of their own.”
Scholastics of the founding days of Arrupe College used bicycles to go to the campus to attend classes or to read in the library. Today, AJC has eight different small communities dotted around Mt Pleasant composed of scholastics and formators. Together, these communities form one large community which we refer to as AJC which is a representation of nine different jurisdictions of the Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar (JCAM). AJC is led by the Rector who has delegates in each of the small communities.
Community life remains the centre of the life of all Jesuits who live at Arrupe. Meals, recreations, social Saturdays and cooking are some of the things that companions do together in their small communities to facilitate a life lived together. Wednesday masses are an important event in the life of AJC. All communities come together to celebrated mass in the main Chapel at the university campus. This mass is also attended by friends of AJC from outside of the community.
The beauty of the Wednesday mass is that it incorporates different cultures and songs from various countries that companions come from. After Wednesday mass, people then head to the Loyola Multi-Purpose Hall for an evening meal during which people are free to play a variety of indoor games including volleyball, table tennis, darts, mini soccer, and pool/snooker while others take this opportunity to relax and share stories and experiences.
AJC holds community recollections on the last Friday of every month and large community meetings once in two months. Each year, scholastics and formators join to offer retreats in daily life to several people during the season of lent to add to the already ongoing apostolates that scholastics are involved in throughout the year. Currently, the community is guided by the Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus which are: Showing the way to God, Walking with the excluded, Journeying with the youth, and Caring for our Common Home.