Visiting International Jesuit to Talk about Transmitting Faith Through Generations at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – Rev. Mario Farrugia, S.J., a visiting international Jesuit from the Gregorian University in Rome and the Malta Province, will give a lecture titled “Faith Across Generations” on Tuesday, April 1 at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross.

Fr. Farrugia will examine how we transmit faith from one generation to the next by exploring three particular images or moments in history: St. Paul’s encounter with Timothy’s family in the first century, AD; Caravaggio’s 16th-century masterpiece The Calling of Saint Matthew, in which the painter imagines Jesus calling Saint Matthew as if in a Roman tavern; and Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion, wherein the crucified Jesus, nailed to the cross and dressed in a Jewish prayer shawl, is surrounded by images of the atrocities of the 20th century.

Fr. Farrugia, a Maltese Jesuit, is currently on the faculty of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and he teaches classes at the University of Malta and at the Theological Faculty in Naples. He specializes in theological anthropology, which is the study of human existence in the light of Christian faith. He is currently offering a course at Holy Cross tilted “Catholicism in Word and Image.”