Biography | Adolfo Nicolás — Six Years Directing the Institute on Loyola Heights

People remember him as the man elected in Rome.

The Asian classroom came first.

In Christmas 1977 the outgoing director of the East Asian Pastoral Institute, Alfonso Nebreda, wrote that the long search for a successor had ended.

The new director, he said, was a theologian already known in Japan and elsewhere in Asia: Adolfo Nicolás.

Nicolás took the post in 1978 and held it until 1984.

EAPI sits on the Loyola Heights campus of Ateneo de Manila University in Quezon City, a Jesuit university on Katipunan Avenue.

The institute is a residential school for clergy, religious, and lay pastoral workers from across East Asia and the Pacific.

It had been reorganized in 1965 by Pedro Arrupe and moved into its present campus buildings by 1968.

Six years in Manila put Nicolás inside the local churches that later elected him to lead the whole Society.

He went back to Tokyo as rector of the Jesuit scholasticate from 1991 to 1993, then served as provincial of Japan from 1993 to 1999.

English Wikipedia sometimes shortens that provincial term to 1993–1996; the official 2008 election communique and contemporary agency reports give 1993–1999.

From 2004 he moderated the Jesuit Conference of East Asia and Oceania, the post he held when the electors called him to Rome.

The campus a visitor reaches from Katipunan is larger than the institute he ran.

The work itself happened here, in the pastoral house Arrupe planted on this hill.

Photo: Ateneo Loyola Heights, campus files via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Hannes Heinsar, CC BY-SA 3.0, 2008.