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By Michael Swan
Nader Nasralla, SJ, thinks everybody should have a flag to announce themselves to the world, to remind themselves of who they are, to declare the ideals they live by. As a Jesuit novice assigned to help out at Mother Teresa Middle School in Regina, Saskatchewan, Nasralla got all the kids to make their own flags.
“I really like flags,” Nasralla said.
“He loves flags,” said his former novice master Fr. Gabriel Côté, SJ.
In his room near Facultés Loyola Paris, a Jesuit school of theology and philosophy in the heart of Paris, Nasralla flies the flags of Canada, Quebec, Egypt, France and the Vatican, and then, on the opposite wall, his own.
“At some point I decided to create my own flag.” The yellow, blue and red flag sums up the 27-year-old Jesuit scholastic’s experience, ideals and sense of self. It is, by his own admission, a jumble of identities.
“I’m Egyptian by birth,” he offered. “My parents are Egyptian, but I don’t feel totally Egyptian. I’m a Quebecois and Canadian, but again, not fully. I grew up with French education and culture, but I’m not French. … When people ask ‘Where are you from?’ they expect a simple answer. In my case, that’s not possible.”
Baptized in the Coptic Catholic Church, Nasralla was educated in a French, Roman Catholic school system. Of course, he’s a Copt. The word Copt means Egyptian.
“But I don’t really have a relationship (with the Coptic Church), because I grew up in the Roman Rite Church,” he said.
At the same time, Nasralla is always careful to politely correct people who assume he is Arab. The Arab conquest of Egypt under the Rashidun Caliphate took place in the middle of the seventh century. The substantial Coptic Christian minority speaks Arabic, but it is made up mainly of non-Arab Egyptians.
Moving to Canada was a major undertaking for the Nasralla family. It took the Nasrallas 10 years to get through the immigration process before moving to Montreal. From Cairo, Nasralla was accepted into the Polytechnique Montréal but couldn’t get a student visa in time to start the year. Plan B was Paris.
“I never felt totally at home in Cairo, so I wanted to go somewhere else,” he said.
Nasralla completed the immigration process and reunited with his mother, father and brother in Montreal, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Montreal, a degree that he had started at the Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7). This gave him a somewhat tenuous connection with Jesuit founder St. Ignatius of Loyola. In 1529 Ignatius enrolled as a mature student (he was 38) at the University of Paris. Paris Diderot was part of the University of Paris until 1970. In 2019 it merged with Paris Descartes University to re-form the University of Paris, but quickly backed off the Renaissance moniker to be known today as Paris Cité University. Nasralla’s stronger connection with St. Ignatius and Ignatian spirituality was embedded in his psyche during his adolescence and teenage years as a member of the Mouvement Eucharistique des Jeunes, or MEJ.
“It looks like Scouts, or similar to that, but without the nature side,” Nasralla explained. “Nature is replaced with spiritual stuff and Ignatian spirituality.”
The school where Nasralla participated in the extracurricular club wasn’t Jesuit. So, it wasn’t all that clear to him that this style of prayer, this way of relating to Jesus, had anything to do with St. Ignatius. That little tidbit rose to the surface when he found himself in the Montreal novitiate.
“Maybe my surprise was in realizing that, ‘Oh, this is Ignatian spirituality.’ I thought it was what everyone was living — the Catholic experience or the Christian experience,” he said.
The years he spent in MEJ, rising from a young participant to a leader in the movement, grounded Nasralla in a sure sense of who God is in his life.
The years he spent in MEJ, rising from a young participant to a leader in the movement, grounded Nasralla in a sure sense of who God is in his life.
“I feel that I was formed spiritually,” he said of his MEJ experience. “This is where I find my way, spiritually — where I met Jesus as a friend and went on from there. Today, I don’t feel that I switched to the pro version. Not at all. I just feel that I’m continuing with something that I started when I was younger.”
Nasralla entered the novitiate in 2021 with a sure sense of his vocation and never really wavered, said his novice master, Fr. Côté.
“He didn’t really go through a crisis, or questioning, ‘Should I go through with it or not?’ He came in confident that God was calling him to become a priest in the Society,” Fr. Côté said. “He had, of course, some growing issues — you know, learning to live in community.”
It’s not that Nasralla was ever reticent to fully join in.
“He loves to be with people. He’s relational. He just loves to be out there. … He’s a great community guy,” said Fr. Côté.
Nasralla’s challenge was that the Montreal novitiate, with just three or four novices, couldn’t always satisfy his appetite for community. “We were just different personalities,” said his novice brother, Justin Sauro, SJ, a former Canadian Forces infantry officer who will take final vows as a brother, not a priest. “We went out. We had some conversations. But it’s not a natural friendship.”
Nasralla doesn’t disagree.
“We are totally different people,” he said. “There’s the mystery that both of us are attracted to the same Society of Jesus. This is something of the richness of the Society of Jesus, attracting people who are totally different.”
“This is something of the richness of the Society of Jesus, attracting people who are totally different.”
However their personalities meshed, or didn’t, the respect Sauro has for Nasralla is unmistakable.
“He values friendship so much,” said Sauro from his new home at Saint Louis University. “And he categorizes his relationship to Christ as a kind of deep, deep friendship.”
As the two pondered the vows (poverty, chastity and obedience) they would pronounce at the end of two years of discernment in the novitiate, Sauro saw that Nasralla had a profound attraction to the vows and religious life.
It means that there’s more room in Nasralla’s life for friendships, the kind of relationship the Egyptian-Canadian-Parisian values most.
Back in Paris studying philosophy and theology, Nasralla has discovered that his indeterminate, diverse identity that sprawls over continents and cultures isn’t weird — at least not in the Society of Jesus. He now lives with 32 other Jesuit scholars from 14 different nations. Many of them spent a year learning French before beginning their studies at the Facultés Loyola Paris, but the Indians, the Africans and the Europeans are all a little off-centre within their own cultures, each with a unique story of identity. Each of these stories is a joy and fascination for Nasralla.
His own story is pinned up on his bedroom wall in a flag.
“The cross in the middle is the old cross that was used by the MEJ, the Eucharistic Youth Movement. Then, I put it in a circle to represent the Eucharist. But the five spaces, they can also symbolize the five wounds of Christ. The cross of MEJ itself, it’s the name of Christ, but it looks like the Egyptian cross — which represents resurrection, or life,” he explained. “You have Christ’s death and resurrection in the Eucharist, and then the blue around it is for Mary. The blue cross in the background is inspired by the Quebec flag. Then you have a seven-pointed star, like an act of witness — to give witness in seven directions. And yellow is my favourite colour.”
