Biography | Arturo Sosa — The Social Centre He Directed Off Esquina La Luneta

The Roman theology made him a priest.

The work that made him a public Venezuelan Jesuit was done a few blocks from the old centre of Caracas.

Centro Gumilla opened in 1968 as the first Jesuit centre of research and social action in Latin America under Pedro Arrupe.

It still occupies the ground floor of Edificio Centro Valores at Esquina La Luneta in Altagracia, published coordinates 10.51156 N, 66.91428 W.

After ordination in 1977 Sosa came back as coordinator of the Venezuelan social apostolate and as director of this house.

From 1979 to 1996 he also directed SIC, the Jesuit journal of politics and society that has appeared since 1938 and remains the country's longest-running magazine of that kind.

The centre trained cooperatives, published case work, and kept a desk on the Colombian border long before he became rector of the Universidad Catolica del Tachira in San Cristobal.

He was provincial of Venezuela from 1996 to 2004, then rector at Tachira until 2014.

The later election in Rome is easier to photograph than this address.

No usable exterior of the Luneta building sits on Wikimedia Commons as of September 2026, so the cover is the 2017 portrait.

The pin is the published headquarters, not a private house.

A visitor who wants the years that formed the general stands in Altagracia, not in the Aula.

Photo: Arturo Sosa, Irekia, CC BY 2.0, 12 January 2017, via Wikimedia Commons.