Biography | Arturo Sosa — The Montalban Campus Where He Took the Philosophy Licence

People treat a Jesuit general as a Roman product. Arturo Marcelino Sosa Abascal took the first academic stamp of the Society on a hillside campus in western Caracas. He was born in the city on 12 November 1948, the eldest of six, and entered the Venezuelan novitiate on 14 September 1966, a few weeks before he turned eighteen. The philosophy course that followed was not a Roman seminar. It was taken at the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, the Jesuit university founded in 1953 and already moving, by the mid-1960s, from the old San Ignacio buildings downtown onto the Montalban terrace on Avenida Teheran. He received the licentiate in philosophy here in 1972. The campus is still the one a visitor finds: the main Caracas seat of UCAB, later listed among the country's national historical monuments, looking over the valley from La Vega. The family expectation had been a business career. His father, Arturo Sosa Sr., served twice as finance minister, in 1958 and again in 1982. The son stayed with the Society. After Montalban he was sent on to theology in Rome, then back to Venezuela for the social apostolate and a political-science doctorate at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1990. The later titles — provincial, rector, counsellor, general — sit on top of this first Venezuelan degree. A visitor who wants the origin of the 31st Superior General does not start at the Gesu. The licence that made him a Jesuit academic was taken on this slope. Photo: Campus Montalban, Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, JoseGre12, CC BY-SA 4.0, 12 November 2025, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Arturo Sosa, Irekia, CC BY 2.0, 12 January 2017.