What Our Founding Charisms May Yet Be
Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
February 1, 2016
Susan M. Sanders, RSM, PhD
Charisms. Those special gifts that the Holy Spirit gives freely to the faithful for the building up and renewal of the Church. Gifts ready to be unwrapped and passed around. Ready for immediate use. No batteries needed. No assembly required. But unlike many Christmas presents, charisms can be appropriately “regifted.” In fact, charisms are supposed to be re-gifted, over and over again. Such are charisms. Gifts of the Spirit, and fruit of the Spirit’s gifts.
Gifts the Holy Spirit gave to the founders of our Catholic colleges and universities, whether founded by religious congregations, by a local Ordinary in the case of diocesan schools, or by the Holy See in the case of the Catholic
University of America. Gifts not to be kept but to be used for others, to be passed on to others as freely as the Spirit conferred them on us. Two-hundred or so colleges and universities in this country that name their identity as Catholic and attribute their distinctiveness to their founding charisms. And so we come to the
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conclusion of this meeting not only as Catholic colleges and universities, but also as Ursuline, or Benedictine, or Holy Names or LaSallian institutions, to name just a few of our sponsors.
But think, for a minute. Think beyond Catholic higher education and consider Catholic secondary education with its 1200 schools. Then, think of
Catholic health care with its 600 hospitals and 1400 long term care facilities, and consider the charism-inspired healing that physicians, nurses, technicians, and administrators offer to one out of every six people who are hospitalized in this country daily.
Like Catholic higher education, all these ministries – and so many others – are inspired by the charisms that the Holy Spirit gave to our institutional founders.
Gift of the Spirit to be fire for others. Fruit of the Spirit’s gifts, found in the light and the heat that attract and move people like us, people like our students, toward others, to be for others, and to build up and renew the people of God, in the name of Jesus Christ. Charisms. Gifts of the Spirit. Fruit of the Spirit’s gifts.
So, to conclude this conference, I will take a word from T.S. Eliot and
“return to the place” of our beginning and hope that we will “know the place for the first time.” To begin this “exploration,” as Eliot calls it, I will address three questions: The first is by way of summary, with the hope of building upon Sister
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Barbara Reid’s wonderful scholarship on charisms: “What are charisms?” How do they relate to our Catholic identity, a relationship that some have found problematic? Second, who is “on” for charisms? Here, I will tip my hand. It is
NOT just the members of your founding congregations or your diocesan sponsors.
And third, what may our charisms yet be? What might charisms still be able to do for Catholic higher education?
What are charisms? To help with an explanation, I turn to the late Joseph
Cardinal Bernardin, Archbishop of Chicago where, until community leadership in
Omaha, I had spent most of my religious life. Cardinal Bernardin called charisms fundamental to the identity of religious life. In his words, “they determine a congregation’s identity, way of life, spirit, spirituality, structures, and mission.” All very important to religious congregations.
Ministerially, for example, charisms are the touchstones, the reference points that help congregations discern the types of ministries we will become involved in – and those that we will leave to others. In Catholic higher education, for example, over 40 different religious congregations, and at least 10 dioceses find the ministry of higher education consonant with their charisms.
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Second, charisms touch and shape things that are essential and very personal to men and women religious: things like how we pray and worship and celebrate; and the way we relate to God and to one another in community.
Third, charisms create a distinctive character, spirit, or culture within our ministries themselves. It’s what people pick up when they walk around our campuses – and though it is very hard to measure, this ethos is very real. It is the family flavor that shows itself in Mercy hospitality and our monthly First Friday
Teas for faculty and staff at Saint Xavier; or in what we used to call Vincentian
“personalism” at DePaul, which meant that a staff member might actually walk a student who needed assistance to the location of help rather than just sending her or him to it. Or in the disputatio, the scholarly dialogue that Sister Barbara talked about and how it animates Dominican campuses.
Sister Sandra Schneiders, an IHM Sister and theologian, says it this way:
“Congregational charisms are best understood as the ongoing ‘deep narratives’ developed through a community’s history, with attendant myths and symbols, outstanding events and persons, struggles and triumphs, projects and challenges, psychology and symbols that the group has developed from its origin to the
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present and that [have] become the inner heritage of each member down through the years generating among them a shared identity.”
Deep narratives. Outstanding persons. Struggles and triumphs. History.
Symbols. That’s what charisms do for your founding congregations and sponsors, and that is what charisms can do for your campuses as well: develop a distinctive heritage, a culture, a way of being and doing on your campus; and raise up important historical figures and events to inspire and to ground your students in the examples of people who walked the very campus pathways they walk each day.
While this may capture the imagination of some in your marketing and recruitment departments, charisms should not be thought of as branding or marketing tools. Rather, they should be referenced, as frequently as possible, to illustrate the great things God has done for your school, working through your founders and those, like you, who succeed them.
Gifts of the Spirit. Fruits of the Spirit’s gifts. For your campus community.
For your campus community to share beyond your campus community.
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And that really is the key word to understanding the nature of charisms: gifts. And didn’t Sister Barbara give us a wonderful presentation about what charisms are in the New Testament? And when she told us again how everything is gift, but that some gifts have obligations and responsibilities associated with them? And then, how Father Tim Radcliffe provided us with a great illustration of the Dominican charism and how it made sense in the life of Thomas Aquinas and Dominicans everywhere who followed him?
Coming from a background in the social sciences, I turned to anthropologist
Lewis Hyde for insight into the essence of gifts and, by implication, of the special gifts that are charisms. Hyde says that gifts, and by implication charisms, have three dimensions: First, they must be freely given; Second, they must be mobile or, as he says, in “constant donation;” Third, they are relational. They establish a relationship between the gift giver and the one who receives the gift.
So first, charism as free gifts. Charisms are not owned by anyone. Not even your founding religious congregations. Not even by dioceses or local
Ordinaries. No one can obligate the Spirit to confer charisms on anyone. No individual or group, regardless of status or position, not even Pope Francis or
Peyton Manning, not even your mother, can muster enough power or skill or prayer to successfully badger the Spirit into giving what she does not want to give.
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Thus, from the perspective of your development offices, this would make the Holy
Spirit your toughest but most prolific donor!
Second, charisms are mobile – and they need to stay mobile if the original gift of the Spirit is to be shared with others as the Spirit intended. Thus, charisms need to move among groups of people. And the Spirit did not intend that your congregational sponsors keep a lock on their founder’s charism, controlling what it does and where it goes. Not even all the sets of corporate bylaws, not even all the powers reserved to the Corporate Members, not even all the PJPs in the world can keep charisms under the control of your founding congregations.
Rather, charisms were intended to be passed on to other. And for your as college and university leaders, that means charisms need to be supported to move beyond your own campus communities.
However, from looking at our campus service projects, I think there is great evidence that charisms are moving beyond your campus communities. But for me, the best evidence of your charism’s reach is in the numbers of your students who commit themselves to volunteer service for a year or more following graduation. Just take a quick look at the website of the Catholic Volunteer
Network for evidence. There you will find a listing of 215 faith based domestic
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and international lay service programs that thousands of graduates commit to each year. And if the service of these young folks does not convince you of the mobility of charisms worldwide, then just listen to the names of some of the volunteer organizations, most of which reflect congregational charisms, for example, the Vincentian Mission Corps; the Jesuit Volunteer Corps; the Mercy
Volunteer Corps organization; the Incarnate Word Missionaries; the Loretto
Volunteer Program; the Christian Brothers Lay Volunteer Program, and so many others.
But students serving across the world are not the only way your schools can keep your charisms moving and vital. Your faculties can also play a role.
Specifically, through their research and writing, your faculty members can move the power and efficacy of charism from your campus even to points around the world. And I think it is Salvadoran Jon Sobrino, is his book The Principle of Mercy, who can give us some ideas.
Sobrino talks about the power that universities have because of their intellectual mission that Pope John Paul II summarized so succinctly in Ex Corde
Ecclesiae. And that mission? “To consecrate itself without reserve to the cause for truth.” Remember that line?
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Sobrino sees an important place for our colleges and universities because they are places for truth seeking, truth teaching, and truth telling. Specifically,
Sobrino suggests that our faculties teach, research, and write about what the world looks like from a non-First World perspective; that our faculty colleagues can help the privileged among us move away from our First World position of power to think about, research, teach, and write about the reality of people who are poor and have neither power, privilege, or prospects. By encouraging our faculties to do this kind of research and writing, we would begin to live a life based on the “principle of mercy” because we would be “unmasking the lies” about poor people: Who are they? Why are they poor? What is the role of the
First World in seeing to it that Third World people stay poor?
In this sense, I think, our faculty, most of whom already seem positively predisposed to the work of justice, can begin to mobilize others to take the first steps toward those whom Sobrino calls “the people of no consequence.” And those steps? The steps on the way to the cross toward those who are crucified, and who need to be taken down.
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Can departments of theology and business and the social sciences and science rise to this challenge? Can you, as campus leaders, challenge your colleagues that tolerating all opinions and unjust realities is really a mistaken notion of pluralism, objectivity, and academic freedom, and then encourage them to make a case on behalf of the poor?
If we were to engage our faculties, on behalf of the people of “no consequence” through our charisms, then perhaps we could find an argument for developing a different type of curriculum that is grounded in charisms. Each would be distinctive, but common in concern for the poor. This type of curriculum, while being both intellectually stimulating and academically rigorous, would invite our students to examine social realities, power constructs, and human conflict from the perspectives of race, gender, religion, patriarchy, social and economic class, ethnicity, and culture. Such a tack, one that Dominican scholar the late Sister Kaye Ashe, OP and I wrote about over ten years ago, could become the impetus for thought and study and research and writing that begins the work of taking crucified people down from the cross.
But while Sobrino thinks more in terms of the First and Third Worlds, there seem to be plenty of lies that need to be unmasked locally as well. Can our
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charisms move us toward unmasking the lies, for example, those that are told about victims of domestic violence – that “they deserved it” or that “she made” him beat her? Or when campus police make snide remarks about young women who have been sexually molested – they were “asking for it” because of where they were or how they dressed? Or the lies about immigrants who come to this country – that they come here to bring drugs, rape women, and take the jobs that everyone here is entitled and absolutely wants to do? Or the lies that we perpetuate about trafficking and human slavery – that it doesn’t happen here or, if it does, it stays in Las Vegas? And then there is the local culture, the tolerance of lies about what all black men are doing, and the racial profiling – if not death – that occurs when DWB – “driving while black.” These are areas where our founding charism can be even more mobile than they already are – transcending campus communities, even nations, through truth seeking and truth telling.
And the third of Hyde’s points about the essence of gifts? That they are relational.
One of the relationships that seems to be problematic for some of our colleagues is the one between Catholic identity and our congregational charisms.
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Some folks seem to view Catholic identity and our founding charisms as being in competition with each other, or even “trumping” Catholic identity.
For evidence of this, they point to references about founding congregations and charisms in our school mission statements and recruitment literature.
But I am not too worried about this really. In fact, my experience is that charisms often make possible the conversations about “things Catholic” that lead many – faculty, staff, and students -- to a better understanding of the Catholic faith. In fact, our charisms keep some folks – mostly our faculty members -- from dismissing Catholicism out of hand.
But most important, charisms are a point of access to “things Catholic” for our students, students who have no religion, or who self-identify as Catholic but whom we call “unchurched” – you know, the students of the five sacraments! But charisms are also an invitation to students of different faith traditions and, at my school Saint Xavier University, for our many Muslim students who find our founding charism – mercy – to be at the core of their religion as well.
Do charisms really “trump” Catholicism when student graduate with perhaps only a little knowledge of the Summa, but with a lot of affection for a
Dominican who inspired them to lead a life of study and prayer? Or should we
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feel that things Catholic lost out to charism because a student reflected on his faith journey more in term of an Augustinian he met and wants to emulate than because of what he read in the Confessions? Or has the world become worse off when a student, because of her close encounter with the Franciscan charism, linked her personal commitment to sustainability of Earth? Isn’t Catholic
“universal” enough to allow for these multiple avenues to God the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit who sustains us?
So to my thinking, charisms do not trump things Catholic. They simply name the suit and start the play of our universal faith.
So who gets these charisms? Obviously, the founders of our schools do.
But there is more. Lumen Gentium, one of the major documents of the Second
Vatican Council, tells us that “within the communion of the Church, the Holy Spirit distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank for the building up of the Church.”
The faithful of every rank. What does this term mean? It means that all of us, as believers in Jesus Christ, are “on” for charisms. We are all on for the preservation and transmission of charisms. Not just your founders. Not just the members of your founding congregations. Not just the local Ordinary of your
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founding diocese, if you are diocesan sponsored. Rather, all of us are “on” for these freely given gifts of the Holy Spirit.
But there is more for those of you here. While all the faithful are “on” for charisms, some are more “on” for charisms than others. And this would be the presidents and administrators among you. You are the ones who, at each of your schools, are especially responsible to see to it that charisms move freely within and beyond your campus communities. You are the ones who have both the vision and the authority, the power and the control of school resources, to ensure that your graduates take the charism that has been given to your school and share it with the rest of the world, for the “building up and renewal” of the
Church, for the people of God.
This will happen when you make your founding charism a reference point for the big decisions about planning and budget, and the daily ones around human resources, curriculum, student life, and development. It will happen when your speeches reference charism at occasions for celebration – founders’ days, commencements, convocations, Masses of the Holy Spirit – and are precise, consistent, and thoughtful about charisms. And mostly, as any book in organizational theory will tell you, what you say on these occasions will only have
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meaning if your leadership and administration, when personally exercised and exercised through your Cabinet members, model what you speak.
Now perhaps you are sitting there wondering why you never heard much about this responsibility during the presidential search. Or perhaps you, as a university CFO or Vice President for Student Affairs. are thinking, “That’s not in my job description, is it? So how can she maintain I have yet another responsibility – and that – to protect and transmit something that is so vague, so ethereal, well, so religious?”
Well, to those presidential musings, I would say this: If your founding charism was not a topic during your hiring process, then it really should have been. So perhaps the absence of a discussion about your founding charism at your hiring might signal that now is the time to talk with your religious sponsors about the content of your board orientation processes and ongoing board education. And for you who are senior administrators, maybe this is the time to initiate a conversation with your Vice-President for Mission about how about you might make charisms real to the student body, your faculty, and your staff members. And if your school doesn’t have an Office of Mission, as distinct from a
Campus Ministry office, perhaps it is time to create one – one that does not run
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on sufferance, but one with Cabinet level authority, with budget. For where your budget is, there will be your values also. That’s a Catholic policy analyst’s interpretation of the Gospel!
You see, your founding congregations entrusted you with the protection and animation of nothing less than a huge gift from God. And if you let it, a charism should lead you to wise leadership. It should not be a burden or a punishment.
We who are your congregational or diocesan sponsors know that you have one of the most complicated jobs in the world. It’s called a college or university.
You run places for people to sleep. But you are not a Ritz Carlton. You feed people daily, but you are not McDonald’s. You provide health care, but you are not a hospital. You help people find jobs, but you are not an employment agency.
And you provide liturgy and worship and prayer opportunities, but you are not a church, a synagogue, or a mosque. Rather, yours is to lead a university, and to do what Pope John Paul II hoped that you would do: “Consecrate yourselves to the search for truth,” to help students learn that God loves them, and to teach them that they, in turn, must love and serve others.
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What might our Charisms yet be? They might be what they have always been: universal forces for inclusivity. Because with the Spirit who conferred your charisms on you and your school, there are no outsiders. All are worthy of the
Spirit’s gifts. All are included in the Spirit’s generosity.
And so our challenge is to keep the work that we do because of the Spirit’s gift inclusive, not exclusive; open and accessible to all, and not just the privileged, which is becoming more and more of a challenge given the rising costs of private higher education; Open and accessible to the very types of people whom we first serve when our founders first brought our institutions into being: to people who professed belief in God and expressed it in a minority religious faith that was misunderstood and oppressed: Catholicism; to immigrants who arrived new to this country full of hope only to face discrimination and death-dealing poverty; to hard working people of abundant talent and high hopes but with little cash to bring to education; to people of the dream who surely wanted education for a better life, but also found they could – and did -- make significant contributions to the common good.
This is what our charisms have done for so many already since the late
1700s when Catholic higher education first made its appearance in this newly
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formed country. And this is what all of in this room have benefitted from and what we now need to ensure so that our schools will continue to do for the many in the future what they did for us in the past. That’s how charisms keep us moving and relational.
With the Spirit, there are no outsiders. There is no exclusion based on power or privilege, white privilege or any other form of privilege. Rather, we are all included in the generosity of the Spirit, just as we were in the past, and just as the Spirit needs us to be inclusive and generous for the people on the “outside,” the “people of no consequence,” today. And with your help, that is what our founding charisms may yet be. Gifts of the Spirit. Fruit of the Spirit’s gift.
WORKS CITED
Bernardin, Joseph L. “Reflections on Religious Life, March 1986,” in Selected
Works of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Volume I: Homilies and Teaching
Documents, ed. Alphonse P. Spilly, C.P.P.S. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical
Press, 2000).
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
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Morey, Melanie and John Piderit, “Identity Crisis,” America (October 13, 2008), http://www.americamagazine.org/article.cfm?article_id=11119&o=33357.
Pope John Paul II. “Ex Corde Ecclesiae: On Catholic Universities,” http://www.vatican.va.holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_constitutions/ documents/hf_jp-ii_apc_15081990_ex-corde-ecclesiae_en.html.
Pope Paul VI. “Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/docments/ vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html
.
Sanders, Susan M., R.S.M. and Kaye Ashe, O.P. “Reflections from Higher
Education,” in Partners in the Between Time: Creating Sponsorship
Capacity, eds. Mary Catherine Grant and Patricia Vandenberg, C.S.C.
(Michigan City, IN: Ministry Development Resources, 2004).
Schein, Edgar. Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1985).
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Schneiders, I.H.M., Sandra M. Religious Life in a New Millenium, Volume II:
Selling All: Commitment, Consecrated Celibacy, and Community in Catholic
Religious Life (New York: Paulist Press, 2000).
Sobrino, Jon. The Principle of Mercy (New York: Orbis Books, 1992).
United States Catholic Conference. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2 nd Edition
Washington, D.C., 2000), sec. 799.
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