Small prayer groups advocated for parishes, schools

   A familiar concept was reinforced in spades at Loyola University’s three-day Summer Institute for Catholic Educational Leadership: For Catholic educators to be the most effective evangelizers they can be, they must first be rooted in prayer themselves and be forever seeking the Holy Spirit’s guidance as they minister to the young people in their care.
   Enhancing the culture of prayer in a parish or school setting could be as fundamental as inviting a few of your fellow teachers to come together regularly to reflect on how to see the people in their midst – even those who are difficult to love – the way Jesus sees them, and then helping them as Christ would.

Fostering Catholic identity

   “When we talk about some of those defining characteristics of a Catholic school or a Catholic institution of any kind, if we say that they need to be centered in who Jesus is – if we say that they’re places of community and communion – then we need to be coming from a place where we’re praying, where we’re grounded in that reality, before we can look at how to guide other people on that journey, whether it’s an educational endeavor or someone who’s coming to us for a sacramental need,” said Jennifer Coito, the facilitator of this year’s institute and a faith formation programmer for the Jesuits of the California Province, in Los Gatos, Calif.
   “If we’re not grounding every way we interact with people and every way we implement programs in prayer, then we’re missing real opportunities to listen for how God’s inviting us to respond,” Coito said.
   In all, 35 teachers, principals, directors of religious education and parish catechists attended the sixth annual institute June 10-13. In addition to promoting individual prayer, the workshops proposed that a richer, more disciplined and even infectious culture of prayer could be infused into countless parish and school settings through the establishment of Christian Life Communities (CLCs) – groups of six to 10 persons who meet every two weeks to pray, reflect and share their faith with one another.
   “You can (set up a CLC) with students in high school; you can do it with teachers, your faculty; or maybe principals could get together regularly and have a small prayer community to strengthen their own prayer lives and spread that to others – so that others can begin to develop a closer personal relationship with Jesus,” said Charlotte Crusta, a religion teacher at St. Cletus School in Gretna.
   Things one cannot express in front of a whole faculty, such as one’s deepest feelings and desires, are more easily expressed in a smaller group of one’s peers, said Crusta, hailing the intimate CLC model.
   “In a group of six to 10 people you can really get on a personal level, talk about your own struggles in life and relate that to your faith experience and (to) your personal experience with Jesus,” Crusta said.

Time out for teachers

   Sister of the Holy Family Mary Clare of Assisi Pierre, president of St. Mary’s Academy, appreciated how the CLC prayer model, which encourages group reflections on Scripture and time for members to identify their specific blessings of the week, will enable her teachers to regularly step out of the confines of academics and paperwork and into a prayerful space alongside colleagues with varying talents and a common craving: to improve themselves, both spiritually and professionally.
   “(Coito) helped people to see that God is practical, real and down to earth, and that you can love and serve God in more than one way,” Sister Clare said. “That is something all of us long for – something more than what we have (currently). When we share prayer, that’s when we really discover how much we are alike.”
   Barbara McAtee, associate director of catechesis for elementary and secondary parish programs in the archdiocesan Office of Religious Education, said having all types of Catholic educators together at the institute – from administrators to math teachers to religion teachers to parish catechists – was “a triumph.”
   These two important agents of evangelization – parishes and schools – don’t always work together, McAtee said.
   “They were able to share their wants, their desires, their vision, and recognize that we are all engaged in the one mission of the church, which is to sanctify the world, to evangelize, to make this a better place to live and work in,” McAtee said, noting that while all the attendees have a shared mission of “bringing youth to Christ,” they often minister in two different worlds.
   Catholic school teachers and administrators work weekdays and have religious education as one facet of their jobs, while most parish catechetical leaders are entirely focused on religious education, tend to work evenings or weekends – sometimes as volunteers – and primarily teach children who attend public schools.
   “A lot of times (the two groups of educators) are ships that pass in the night,” McAtee said. “But if we can evangelize and bring them to faith-sharing groups, to fellowships with one another where they can share their gifts with other teachers or with other catechists, that group – once evangelized, once catechized, once growing in their love of Jesus Christ – just can’t help but spill over into their constituencies’ lives.”

Positive reaction

   Upon completion of the institute, participants were sent off to develop the small, ongoing communities of prayer in their respective educational settings and to train others to set up their own. Many attendees said they couldn’t wait to take the CLC model back to their home parishes and schools.
    Matt Downey, principal of St. Benilde School in Metairie, said he gained a renewed sense of how prayer is a vital “anchor” in the busy life of a principal, a vocation that one of his colleagues defined as “crisis management.”
   Prayer, Downey said, can help administrators to refocus on their charisms on days when they feel they are treading water. Prayer also reminds us that we are the “vessels” through which God brings good to the world, no matter how ordinary the tasks at hand might seem, he said.
   “In the minutia of the day you can feel like you’ve done nothing,” Downey said, “but in reality, you’ve done a whole heck of a lot; it just happened to be nothing that was on your list.”
   The institute was co-sponsored by the Office of Catholic Schools, the Office of Religious Education and the Loyola Institute for Ministry (LIM). Dr. Tom Ryan, LIM director, invited participants to share their CLC success stories at a follow-up brunch at Loyola on Oct. 5.
   Beth Donze can be reached at bdonze@clarionherald.org.