Description

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“This is not a time to hunker down and lock our doors. I see clearly that the Lord is calling us out of ourselves, to get up and walk.” —From the Foreword by POPE FRANCIS 

Drawing on the wisdom of Pope Francis and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, Austen Ivereigh has written a captivating spiritual guide for our turbulent age. 

Designed as an eight-day Ignatian retreat, First Belong to God serves as a roadmap to deeper discipleship. It does this by focusing on the three foundational forms of belonging: to God, to creation, and to others. 

Structured around the core principles of St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, First Belong to God encapsulates the key aspects of the Francis pontificate: 

• the essence of being “God-belonging” entities 
• the way God’s mercy challenges our self-reliance 
• the journey to building the Kingdom in the footsteps of Christ 
• heeding the cry of the earth and the stranger 
• striving for fraternity by championing synodality 

Whether you’re embarking on a solitary spiritual expedition or a journey with like-minded individuals, First Belong to God offers the next best thing to a personal retreat with Pope Francis: a full-soul immersion into his wisdom via the classic Jesuit retreat that shaped him so profoundly.

About the Author

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Austen Ivereigh is a British writer, journalist, and commentator on religious and political affairs who holds a PhD from Oxford University. His work appears regularly in the Jesuit magazine America and in many other periodicals, and he is also the author of The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope and Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church. He is well-known as a Catholic commentator for the BBC, Sky, ITV, and Al-Jazeera.

Praise For…

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In First Belong to God, Austen Ivereigh brings together three rich treasuries of spiritual and moral insight -- the Exercises of Saint Ignatius, the retreats of Jose Maria Bergolio as a priest and bishop, and Francis' teachings as Pope.  In doing so, he powerfully illuminates the themes of grace, mercy, joy, and solidarity that lie at the heart of the renewal taking place in our Church.  Using a retreat format that can be utilized by both individuals and groups,  First Belong to God invites women and men to discover that amidst our global crisis of individualism and nonbelonging the pathway of authentic humanity lies precisely in belonging  -- to our Creator, to creation and to the whole of humanity.

-Cardinal Robert McElroy