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 I want to credit Fr Stephen Sundborg, S,J. President of
Seattle University and Professor John Hardt, Ph.D.,
Assistant to the President for Mission & Identity at
Loyola University Chicago from whom I have drawn
much of the material that follows in this power point
presentation.
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Catholic Leadership
& Spirituality
 Leadership & Spirituality are both existential and only
seen in reality when alive in a person
 Leadership is personal and intimate and calls for a lot
of inner work
 Leadership does not mean leaving yourself behind
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 The word leader can be alienating but…..
 When thought of as influencing others through
relationship it is easier for many to see ourselves as
leaders
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The “I” and the “IT”
 It can be deadening if you are drawn into the expectations
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of the “IT.”
Most powerful way to live out leadership is to do so from
one’s spirituality
Be “you” and not the role
We need to have our rudder fully in the water of our
feelings in order to be able to steer our course of leadership
If not plugged into the “I” you will be living someone else’s
life
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Spirituality
 EVERYONE HAS A SPIRITUALITY
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What is Spirituality?
 Spirituality is, “One’s lived relationship to mystery.”
Stephen Sundborg, S.J.
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Religion & Spirituality
 Religion is a secondary interpretation of the mystery
we experience when life is broken open for us
 Religions do something with spirituality
 But mystery is the primordial experience
 Spirituality is the way life takes shape in you
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How Do you Know What Your
Spirituality Is?
 What symbols really grasp you?
 Words/ideas only get at us to a certain level
 Symbols reach deeply and get hold of us entirely
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Reflect on the symbols that have
power on you
 The symbols that remain significant over time can be
called “life symbols”
 E.g. “Alone in a boat without oars or sail in the midst of
ocean under midnight sky.” Ruth Burrows, OCD
 Our Life Symbol calls us to do something –to be
someone
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 What does the life symbol of someone who sees that
symbol as being “alone in a boat without oars or sail in
the midst of ocean under midnight sky” call her to do?
 YOU GOTTA LET LIFE GET AT YOU -----YOU
GOTTA TRUST/SURRENDER
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Another Example of a Life Symbol
 A knight in service to a great and magnanimous King
who calls this knight into a camp of service and the
doing of good
 WHO IS THIS?
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 What does Ignatius of Loyola’s life Symbol call him to?
 Something big with others.
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 Ignatius of Loyola & Sister Ruth Burrows, OCD called
to something entirely different because of their
different life symbols.
 Leading out of one’s Spirituality is
powerful/transformative
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How Do You Care for Your
Spirituality?
 Every Day One Hour
 Every Week One Day
 Every Month One Weekend
 Every Year One Week
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How Do You Care for Your
Spirituality?
 Music
 Friendships
 Art
 Nature
 Dialogue
 Justice
 Service
 Research
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How Do You Care for Your
Spirituality?
 Go Deeper within
 Don’t let immediate conflict override deeper
convictions
 Keep A Wider Perspective
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Norman MacLean, Young Men and
Fire” c. 1992
 The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for
the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the
problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no
longer does it should tell you that you are dead.”
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Jesuit Education
 Jesuit Education born from a Spirituality
 “Finding God in all things.”
 But if God is to be found in all things we must be able
to see all things.
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Marilynne Robinson “Gilead” 2004
 “It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord
breathes on this poor grey mater of creation and turns
it into radiance---for a moment or a year or the span of
a life…. . Wherever you turn your eyes the world can
shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a
thing to it except a little willingness to see.”
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What Do Jesuit Universities like
Fairfield do?
 They are world affirming
 Ignatian Spirituality is about going into the world
 God is in the world
 God is in all creation
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The Church of the Gesu in Rome
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Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
 GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and
plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
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 What’s behind the beautiful world Hopkins is caught
up in?
 What’s within it?
 The Beauty of Creation points to God.
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 Why is this approach to seeing the world important for
our schools, our parishes, our Catholic Universities?
 We hold out hope of finding God in the world?
 Yet, this kind of seeing(the eternal in the ephemeral)
is not at all obvious.
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 Jesuit priest Fr. Stephen Schloesser, S.J. refers to this as
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
 Roman Catholic Answer to this is that we anchor the
passing of our world in God. Sacraments used to talk
about this in Roman Catholicism.
 E.g. Denise Levertov’s “City Psalms” –Paradise is not
beyond the city but within it. She sees differently.
 God penetrates our world even where we do not expect
to find him.
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How Do We Come To See God
in All Things?
 Not an easy answer
 Cognitive Psychology helps us
 We filter information---we see it particularly
 “Tree of Life” a film by Terrence Malick (2011)----
Chance only happens to the prepared mind.
 So, how do we do it?
 We must love something to see it?
 Love of all God’s creation.
 Repeated habit of love gives you a knowledge of the
texture of someone or something
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So where does Science fit into
all this?
 Faith is a gift we receive from our parents, siblings and
teachers who taught us
 We question it, we grow with it, and in the end, as
mature adults, we continue to accept it or not
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Science and Religious Faith
A Conflict?
“As I do my science I find that it supports my faith, it
enriches it, it gives it a whole new dimension. But I
have never come to know God, to see God to believe in
God through doing science. He’s not the conclusion of
some sort of process of my personal scientific
investigations. But, my scientific investigation,
because God is reflected n the world in which he
made, in some sense, my scientific investigation has
always supported my belief in God in a very real sense.”
Fr. George V Coyne, S,.J.
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 “It helps me to pray better. I have made more things to
pray about, my prayer is enriched , et cetera. As a
religious priest I find it very enriching experience to do
scientific research. So far from there being any
conflict, … being a scientist helps to support both my
life and as a Jesuit and my belief in God. “
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Does Science diminish both
human beings and God?
 “For me science is an attempt to understand, it’s an
attempt to understand the universe. And I can’t see
for the life of me how an attempt to understand the
universe, which I believe comes form God, can alienate
us from God. So I would defend science on the basis
that it is an attempt to understand the universe, not an
attempt to manipulate the universe.”
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How does the Church react
today when faced with the new
developments in science like
genetics?
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 “I think it’s correct to say that Christinaity has always
had a sort of ability to absorb the developments in
scince. But, it’s always done it very slowly. SO take the
Copernican revolution, it took the church centuries
before it realized that the Copernican revolution was
actually a contribution to the life of the Church, the
development of our view of ourselves in terms of the
Universe, and before our view of God, et cetera. But,
that took centuries, and struggles, and conflicts before
that happened. I think today the Church faces a a very
real challenge in not repeating the errors of the past,
in sort of a stand off, a fear of science. I’m referring in
particular to the life sciences today, and especially
developments in research in genetics.”
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 A Catholic university…community is animated by a
spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by
mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the
rights of individuals. “

John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Para. 21.
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So what?
 Wake Up
 “Find God in all things” even Science
 We have nothing to Fear if we maintain an attitude of
mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the
rights of individuals.
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