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Ignatian Formation

The Ignatian Way

Formation at the Ateneo draws on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the pedagogy that grew from them: experience, reflection, and action. Students are invited to encounter the world directly, reflect on what it means, and act on what they discern. Repeated over years, this cycle becomes a way of living.

The Ignatian Spirituality and Formation Office

Formation at Ateneo de Davao University has a home: the Ignatian Spirituality and Formation Office (ISFO), based at Regis Hall on the 7th Floor of the Community Center of the First Companions. ISFO exists to accompany the entire University community, students, faculty, and staff alike, in the Ignatian tradition, through retreats, spiritual direction, and formation programs built for every stage of the Ateneo journey.

Contact: Regis Hall, 7th Floor, Community Center of the First Companions (CCFC), Roxas Avenue, Davao City. Tel +63 (82) 221-2411 local 8373 | isfo@addu.edu.ph

The Marks of Ignatian Formation

  • Cura personalis. Care for the whole person: mind, body, and spirit, each student known and accompanied individually.
  • Magis. The greater good: not more for its own sake, but the deeper, fuller response to God’s invitation in every situation.
  • Discernment. The practiced habit of noticing, weighing, and choosing well, in studies, in relationships, in vocation.
  • Men and women for others. The measure of an Ateneo education is the lives it touches beyond the graduate’s own.

Retreats and Recollections

Since 2012, the Ignatian Spirituality and Formation Office has organized annual Ignatian Conversations in the spirit of integral formation, alongside retreats and recollections held year-round for faculty, staff, and students, a tradition that has included the College of Law since 2016. Formal induction programs for incoming faculty and staff have been institutionalized since 2015, and Ateneo de Davao University began training its own retreat guides in 2017, building a formation ministry led increasingly by its own community.

Retreat formats vary by need and season:

  • 8-Day and 5-Day Summer Retreats
  • 3-Day Directed Retreat
  • 3-Day Annual Preached Retreat (Live-In or Live-Out)

The St. Ignatius Spirituality Center

In 2014, the University built the St. Ignatius Spirituality Center (SISC) on the Island Garden of Samal, a dedicated place of prayer and reflection away from campus. SISC hosts silent and individually-guided retreats, offering refuge, rest, and solitude to members of the Ateneo community and interested others alike.

A year later, in 2015, Our Lady of the Assumption Chapel was blessed on the Jacinto Campus, its interiors rich with cultural symbols of Mindanao rendered in brass, wood, and fabric, a second home for prayer, closer to daily campus life.

Formed for the Wider Church

Ateneo de Davao University’s formation ministry reaches beyond its own gates. In April 2024, the University’s Senior High School campus hosted the 2nd Ignatian Youth Camp, welcoming nearly 80 student delegates from Ateneo de Manila University alone, alongside their formators, in a gathering built entirely around holistic, Ignatian formation. It is a small sign of a larger truth: formation at Ateneo de Davao University is not only received, it is shared with the wider Jesuit network across the Philippines.

Formation in Practice

Retreats and recollections, faith formation programs, service learning and immersions, mentoring, and the daily life of a campus that prays and serves together: formation is not a subject at Ateneo de Davao University. It is the current under everything.

Formed Here. Sent Everywhere.

Ignatian formation ends the way it begins: with a person more fully themselves, given to the world.

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