Peter Balleis

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Peter Balleis, 2007

Peter Balleis SJ (born April 15, 1957 ) is a German Jesuit . It was from November 2007 to October 2014 International Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service (Jesuit Refugee Service - JRS). Since 2016 he has led Jesuit Worldwide Learning - Higher Education at the Margins (JWL) as Executive President.

Life

Peter Balleis grew up with six siblings on a farm near Augsburg . Half a year before graduating from high school, he made a big trip to Africa. As a student of a Benedictine boarding school he accompanied during the Christmas holidays in 1976 the headmaster to visit the Missionary Benedictines in Kenya. Balleis was fascinated by Africa. On a trip to Israel he made a preliminary decision for the priesthood in the lower church of St. Peter in Gallicantu . As a lay student at the University of Philosophy in Munich , he studied philosophy, then theology at the state Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . His decision to become a Jesuit was a book about Fr Rupert Mayer SJ . In September 1981 he entered the two-year novitiate of the Jesuits in Nuremberg, after which he worked as an educator at the St. Blasien college . During this time, Óscar Romero was a symbolic figure for him. Since 1984 Balleis has worked as a missionary in Africa ( Zimbabwe ) at various stations . After studying theology for two more years with African Jesuits in Nairobi , he was ordained a priest on July 31, 1988 in Zimbabwe . From 1989 to 1991 Balleis also studied Church Social Doctrine and Liberation Theology in Brazil , after which he traveled back to Zimbabwe. There the provincial sent him to the educational center in Harare, where Balleis - taking into account the church's social doctrine - dealt with the economic structural adjustments and their social costs for the poor in Africa.

After the genocide in Rwanda triggered a wave of refugees at the end of 1994 , Balleis took on a position within the JRS in Tanzania for the first time . In this position he was confronted with the fact that culture, cultural identity, and often also religion, play a more important role for people and peoples. In April 1995 he was appointed director of the newly created JRS Southern Africa Region. During this period, the JRS was involved in the repatriation of Mozambican refugees from Malawi . In 2000, the provincial of the southern German Jesuit province , Bernd Franke, appointed him mission procurator and head of the German Jesuit mission in Nuremberg.

In 2007, Balleis, who had previously been a member of the JRS Advisory Board, took over the management of the JRS from his predecessor Lluis Magriñà until he handed over the management in October 2015. Every year, the organization's approximately 1,000 employees look after around 450,000 refugees, internally displaced persons and asylum seekers in more than 50 countries. They follow the Jesuit mission, which has been expanded since 1995, as a service to the faith , as a commitment to justice , to the inculturation of the gospel and for dialogue with the religions . The three-year pilot project Jesuit Commons: Higher Education at the Margins (JC: HEM) started back in 2010, which , together with the Jesuit Refugee Service as an implementation partner on site, wanted to give young marginalized communities access to sustainable and high quality higher education. In 2016, JC: HEM became the new global work of the Central European Jesuit Province (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lithuania): Jesuit Worldwide Learning - Higher education at the margins (JWL) based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Since 2016, Peter Balleis has been the Executive President of Jesuit Worldwide Learning - Higher education at the margins (JWL). JWL's mission is to make higher education accessible to refugees and marginalized young people in conflict zones worldwide via mobile learning. Since the beginning of his leadership, JWL has been able to continuously expand its operations and now serves around 4,000 students in 39 learning centers in 15 countries.

Honors

In 2013 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Gonzaga University in Spokane, USA.

Fonts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Profiles Peter Balleis SJ . Website www.jrs.net. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  2. ↑ New head of the Jesuit refugee service appointed ( memento of August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). Internet presence of Radio Vatican. Retrieved July 30, 2014.
  3. ↑ people. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  4. ↑ a b c Peter Balleis: Passion for the world . Real, 2007.
  5. ↑ Be close to the poor. Change of baton at the Jesuit mission in Nuremberg: Väthröder follows Balleis ( memento from August 25, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) website Archdiocese of Bamberg. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  6. ↑ Who we are? Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  7. ^ Jesuit Worldwide Learning. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Home. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Annual Reports. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Gonzaga Magazine Spring 2013. Retrieved June 10, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Balleis, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Jesuit, director of the Jesuit refugee service
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1957