Vatican officials train for leadership

Monday, November 9th, 2020

“Act like Wonder Woman.”

At the bottom of a wooden amphitheatre, the man with salt and pepper hair puts his hands on his hips.

With a Roman collar around his neck, he continues to give instructions from behind his black face mask: “Plant your feet firmly on the ground, rotate your body, and shake your hands.”

The some 40 people in the audience imitate his motions like good sports.

They are priests, male and women religious and even lay people employed by the Church who have come for a week-long leadership training workshop.

It took place from October 19-26 at the General Curia of the Society of Jesus, just a stone’s throw from St. Peter’s Square.

The man who is directing the course is Father David McCallum, vice-president of Jesuit-run Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.

A graduate of Columbia University, he draws directly from methods imported from business schools, many of which are run by his fellow Jesuits in the United States.

“What is the dream of your dicastery? Of your congregation?” he asks the group.

“The temptation is to shrink dreams. These dreams continue; they are Jesus’ dreams,” he says.

“Now is the time to make decisions”

The week-long training session is in English. Three weeks earlier, the Jesuits held the initial session in Spanish.

Most of the Catholic leaders in attendance hold major positions in the Roman Curia, the so-called Vatican Bank or religious congregations. But what are they looking for in these training sessions?

A better method for making decisions, several of them say.

“We have worked a lot on personal discernment, but we still need to discover what this means for a group or an institution,” explains Victor Assouad, general counsellor for the Jesuit superior general for Western Europe.

Father Assouad is one of those taking part in the training.

“The epidemic is a time for change,” he continues.

“There is a chance here to come out of it all different. Now is the time to make decisions,” the priest says.

He’s quite comfortable with the word “leadership”, although he admits that it can “embarrass many people in the Church.”

“Detectors of Grace”

The aim of the organizers, above all, is to find ways of decision-making that are both effective and adapted to the Church.

“There are two ways of doing things in religious congregations,” explains Father McCallum.

“We can either say God will provide and wait for the rest to follow, or we can pay a lot of money for consultants to come up with some kind of business plan, as though it were any kind of business. Neither option is satisfactory. So, we try to define a middle way,” he says.

“Our specificity is that we take into account vulnerability,” Father John Darvis, one of the trainers, points out to the participants.

“We must be aware of everyone’s shadow side, not forgetting that it exists,” he cautions.

Father Darvis also urges those present to be “detectors of grace”.

“For years, the Church has been a very good detector of disgrace and faults, especially in the field of sexuality. We must not stop there,” he tells them.