Catholic Leadership and the Art of Encounter
A knock on the door. it’s Monday morning in school, 8.28 am. Staff briefing is at 8.30 am. I’m fairly new in post as the headteacher of a Catholic secondary school, pacing my office, rehearsing my messages for the staff, some of them blunt. The atmosphere was edgy. Change was needed, but not everybody wanted change and I wasn’t all that secure about how to bring it about. I opened the door with a frown. It was Michelle, one of our young English teachers. “Have you got a minute?” she asked. I made it pretty clear I didn’t have a minute. Staff briefing was in two minutes and couldn’t this wait until later. But she held my gaze and quietly insisted. “I just need a minute.” So she came in and sat down and told me through tears that her sister who had two young children had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and she just wanted to know that she’d have some support from me.
I asked the deputy to do the staff briefing. We sat with cups of tea and she told me what was going on, while I listened, trying not to interrupt with the wrong words. I offered Michelle whatever help she would need to support her sister and her family in the difficult months ahead. She thanked me and went off to teach. Ten years later I left that school, and I got one of those very big farewell cards with dozens of scribbled messages from staff. There was a message from Michelle thanking me for the time I helped her when her sister was ill and had died. That was what stayed with her.
That taught me an important early lesson in leadership. Schools are very busy places and leadership in school is hard at times. You can lose yourself in the daily tasks and your attention can be dominated by the stressful situations and critical incidents you have to deal with. In a Catholic school, however, attention to each other should be at the heart of the mission, inspired by our vision of the human person, our anthropology, which is that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Made in love and for love, made to be relational, to grow in community, with a divine origin and an eternal destiny. The grandeur of this vision is sometimes hard to hold on to on a Monday morning in school. But it’s always there, waiting for us to re-focus.
Simone Weil, the great French philosopher, said, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love” (1). Attention, like prayer, is a form of generosity. Weil called it the purest form of generosity. In some of the leadership courses in those days, there was a lot of focus on the importance of visibility. Be seen: in the corridors, the playground, the classrooms. That’s not unimportant, but it feels to me now too much like surveillance. Now I’d want to stress the importance of presence as a key characteristic of leadership in a Catholic school, indeed for any role. Presence as a precondition for attention and encounter. In his homily for the opening of the synodal path, Pope Francis said, “Jesus did not hurry along, or keep looking at his watch to get the meeting over. He was always at the service of the person he was with, listening to what he or she had to say…We too are called to become experts in the art of encounter” (2).
These encounters with others are, If you like, sacramental. In On The Way to Life, a forgotten gem published by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference in 2005, the authors reflect on Vatican II’s theology of grace which “allows people to understand the sacramental nature of their ordinary lives, hence the universal call to holiness…In a sense, every member of the Church – not just the ordained priesthood and hierarchy – becomes a minister of grace and has the possibility of mediating it in and through their lives” (3), You won’t find that on many job descriptions for leaders in Catholic schools: ministers of grace. Yet, that is what we are, or can be. That is what we are called to be.
This is also sometimes referred to as the Catholic imagination, seeing presence where others see absence. As the same document puts it, “If grace is integral to nature, then all nature has in some way the capacity to disclose grace and be a vehicle of it.” This is the great insight at the heart of our faith, a profound understanding of the nature of graced presence: the presence of God in creation, the presence of Christ in those who experience poverty, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the presence of the Holy Spirit among us today, prompting us from within to love God and to love one another. And presence, for it to become a transforming encounter, needs time and attention.
In the 21st century, one of the acute challenges we face is the ‘theft of time’, what Pope Francis, in one of his wonderful neologisms, called rapidification. We are seduced by the culture of just-in-time delivery, instant response, the relentless pursuit of economic growth, with time spent just listening to each other considered a waste of time, unless it’s to extract information, or issue instructions. Leaders need time: for stillness, for reflection, for listening, for encounter. I can imagine many of the leaders I know reading that last sentence with a wry smile. Pull other one, Raymond! I’ve barely got time for a sandwich at my desk, before I fire off a dozen emails and go and take assembly. Then there’s a knock on the door…
Simone Weil, An Anthology (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 232
Pope Francis, Homily for Opening of Synodal Path (Rome, 10 October 2021)
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, On the Way to Life (2005)