Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: The first shall be last

Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant;

whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.

For the Son of Man did not come to be served

but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Mark 10:43 - 45

Gregory I, in an attempt to out-manoeuvre John IV, archbishop of Constantinople (who claimed for himself the title of Ecumenical Patriarch), called himself the Servant of the Servants of God. It remains a title of the Roman Pontiff.

The desire for power or self-aggrandizement has accompanied humanity on its journey through history, and it has produced extraordinary, ordinary, disappointing and disastrous leaders. Some are acutely aware of their charisma, of their responsibility, of the effect their actions have on others, while others walk all over others in the process of achieving their goals.

What we do know, is that the model of leadership that places service to others as its priority is, on the whole, rare to see. Its proponents have tended to be deeply committed to an ideal: Aung San Suu Kyi, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Dag Hammarskjöld, Desmond Tutu, John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Mary MacKillop, Francis. Their service for others is driven by compassion and empathy, a desire to improve and transform lives, a willingness to listen, to draw others into a new vision and to manage resources with wisdom for the benefit of all. They may wield enormous power, political, religious and sometimes economic, but in essence the ideal must be achieved with a persistence, energy and strength that can only be the result of a lifetime’s effort.

While the concept of servant leadership has its beginnings in the market place of the 1970’s it was Robert Greenleaf who explored the need for a new leadership that would value autonomy and human dignity. The Christian servant leader goes further to model themselves on the person of Jesus. The scriptures are a rich in images of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, as the good shepherd, Jesus breaking open the Word on the road to Emmaus, being welcoming, challenging.

We have our share of disappointments with elected leaders, no doubt, and there are some we may note whose ambition for leadership has not been realized in office. But I firmly propose that while there are some great international exemplars of servant leadership, we meet servant leaders every day, and these people require no title, no honorific in order to serve those in need. They labour for Vinnies, Gran’s Van, Camp Quality, Eddie Rice Camps, Youth Off The Streets and a myriad of other causes.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

The Last Term arrives

The final term of 2015 has arrived, and while each term is full of the business of being a school, the final term accelerates towards end of year reports, allocating new staff, new class groupings, Advent and then Christmas. Despite the busyness we remember that Jesus is at the centre of what we do as educators and our students are reason we do it. Welcome back!

Pope Francis, the Prince of the Personal

by David Brooks, NY Times

One of Pope Francis’ favorite novels is “The Betrothed” by Alessandro Manzoni. It is about two lovers whose longing to marry is thwarted by a cowardly and morally mediocre priest and a grasping nobleman. A good simple friar shelters the suffering couple. Then a plague hits the country, reminding everyone of their mortality and vulnerability, and also bringing about a moral reckoning.

As the doctors serve in hospitals for the body, the good people in the church serve in hospitals for the soul. One cardinal remonstrates the cowardly priest. “You should have loved, my son; loved and prayed. Then you would have seen that the forces of iniquity have power to threaten and to wound, but no power to command.” In the end there are heart-wrenching scenes of confession, forgiveness, reconciliation and marriage.

I mention this novel, which Francis has read four times, because we in the press are about to over-politicize his visit to America. We’re comfortable talking about our ideological disputes, so we’ll closely follow and cover whatever hints he drops on abortion, gay marriage, global warming and divorce.

But this visit is also a spiritual and cultural event. Millions of Americans will display their faith in public. Francis will offer doctrinal instruction for Catholics. But the great gift is the man himself — his manner, the way he carries himself. Specifically, Francis offers a model on two great questions: How do you deeply listen and learn? How do you uphold certain moral standards, while still being loving and merciful to those you befriend?

Throughout his life Francis’ core message has been anti-ideological. As Austen Ivereigh notes in his biography “The Great Reformer,” Francis has consistently criticized abstract intellectual systems that speak in crude generalities, instrumentalize the poor and ignore the rich idiosyncratic nature of each soul and situation. He has written that many of our political debates are so abstract, you can’t smell the sweat of real life. They reduce everything to “tired, gray cartoon-book narratives.”

Francis’ great gift, by contrast, is learning through intimacy, not just to study poverty, but to live among the poor and feel it as a personal experience from the inside. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle,” Pope Francis told the interviewer Father Antonio Spadaro. “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. … Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. … And you have to start from the ground up.”

That closeness teaches you granular details, but also arouses a sense of respect. “I see the sanctity of God’s people, this daily sanctity,” Francis has said. “I see the holiness in the patience of the people of God: a woman who is raising children, a man who works to bring home the bread, the sick, the elderly priests who have so many wounds but have a smile on their faces.”

We practice material and intellectual elitism, looking upward for status and specialized and de-spiritualized knowledge. Pope Francis emphasizes that different kinds of knowledge come from different quarters. As he put it, “This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask the theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people.”

These days some religious people believe they need to cut themselves off from the corruptions of a decadent modern culture. But Francis argues that you need to throw yourself in the world’s diverse living cultures to see God in his full glory and you need faith to see people in their full depth. He is fond of quoting Dostoyevsky’s line from “The Brothers Karamazov,” “Whoever does not believe in God will not believe in the people of God. … Only the people and their future spiritual power will convert our atheists, who have severed themselves from their own land.”

Francis’ whole approach is personal, intimate and situation-specific. If you are too rigorous and just apply abstract rules, he argues, you are washing your hands of your responsibility to a person. But if you are too lax, and just try to be kind to everybody, you are ignoring the truth of sin and the need to correct it.

Only by being immersed in the specificity of that person and that mysterious soul can you strike the right balance between rigor and compassion. Only by being intimate and loving can you match the authority that comes from church teaching with the democratic wisdom that bubbles from each individual’s common sense.

Pope Francis is an extraordinary learner, listener and self-doubter. The best part of this week will be watching him relate to people, how he listens deeply and learns from them, how he sees them both in their great sinfulness but also with endless mercy and self-emptying love.