Memorial Mass for Father Hans: Jesuits in the Holy Land

Father Hans Putman, tireless spiritual director and giver of the Ignatian Exercises passed away in the Netherlands on March 29, 2020. On April 9, 2021, the Jesuit community in the Holy Land celebrated a mass in his memory during the Octave of Easter, the ongoing celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
About fifty men and women religious, priests and Auxiliary Bishop for Palestine, Giacinto-Boulos Marcuzzo, gathered in the garden of the Pontifical Biblical Institute for this memorial. The superior of the community, Father David Neuhaus presided at the mass. Father Peter Du Brul, who had lived with Father Hans for the last six years of his life in Bethlehem, delivered the homily.
In his remarkable homily, Father Peter evoked the different dimensions of Father Hans’s life and long years of service in the Middle East, in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Palestine. He underlined Father Hans’s cultivation of relationships with people, religious and lay, rich and poor, educated and uneducated. He evoked Father Hans’s devotion in the celebration of the Eucharist and his profound commitment to the sacrament of reconciliation. Although he made his mark in academics with the publication of his doctorate on the dialogue between the Assyrian Patriarch Timothy I (780-823) and the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi, Father Hans felt called to the spiritual apostolate and become a renown spiritual director and giver of the Spiritual Exercises. In Father Peter’s words, Father Hans was brought to life and one of the participants in the mass who had not known Father Hans directly commented, “I feel like I have made a new friend today!”.
After the homily, representatives of the Local Church and the various religious congregations with whom Father Hans had worked offered prayers of thanks giving for the life of Father Hans and his contribution to the Church.
May his memory continue to be a source of blessing.
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