“The synod called by Pope Francis is a clarion call for Catholic Church, and for the whole world to change its leadership style.”

Bp Sebastian Adayanthrath, Mandya

There is palpable fear experienced by priests and sisters in pastoral ministry feeling incapable before the challenges of today’s ministry, which is haunted by child abuse, sexual fears of being attacked, of social media attacks. As a bishop how do you see the situation?
Having been ordained in the 1980’s, I strongly feel that there is a kind of fear, which is slowly gripping the priests and sisters and making them numb in their ministry. Our age is called the age of anxiety and fear. We no longer know where our foundations are. When we are not sure what is certain, when the world around us and the worldview we hold are constantly redefined, we are going to be anxious. We want to get rid of that fear or anxiety as fast as we can. Yet to be a leader today to be a good pastor, a good nun, a good bishop you have to be able to contain, to hold patiently a certain degree of fear or anxiety.
Now let us come down to our pastors and nuns. It is a bare fact that when priests and sisters take a strong stand on social issues, which are affecting many poor in the society, they are attacked and silenced. When priests and sisters are maligned, their families and relatives suffer along with them. It is very hard on their lives. Hence, there is a lukewarm approach that is beginning to surface in our ministries. In short, many of us really want to live out the gospel values but we are terribly afraid. I feel sad but our fear is a true reality.
Some priests feel a terrible lack of fulfilment and inaptitude in the complex world of ours. It has become terribly dangerous to be truthful to be committed to ecology or any value centred life. Even secular people can be wiped out at any time by the powerful and mighty. How to make priests committed to values, principles, and take stands.
Let us talk a bit about the term satisfaction in ministry before we go into answering this question. Each human person whether one is married or one remains celibate needs satisfaction in what one is doing. They talk about immediate gratification and delayed gratification. Immediate gratification talks about satisfaction, which is accrued immediately since I do something heroic. Delayed gratification denotes satisfaction, which may come years later for an activity which has been undertaken now. When we live in a society which values only immediate gratification, priests often feel a lack of fulfilment for what we do now since we may not reap during our lifetime. Edith Stein said once “ And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him.”
One of the major trials within mature discipleship is that of fidelity, or remaining steadfast and loving within our commitments or our duty for the long haul, after our emotional zeal has waned and some disappointments have set in.
In an increasingly complex world pastoral life becomes quite difficult because of the intellectual and emotional incapacity to cope up with accelerating technical and scientific progress in the world. Are our priests competent?
What we see in the last twenty years is that our society is drastically changing. While secular people are putting lots of energy in developing their intellectual and emotional capacities, we are not given much assistance in this regard in our ministry. For example, conflict resolution has become one major area in our society and often priests are called upon to undertake activities in this area. However, our formation does not equip us to undertake this activity in a meaningful way. We continue to try old solutions for new challenges. It is true that our rectors are trying their best to respond to these new challenges through extension lectures, exposure programs etc.
The young priest or sister finds themselves in troubled waters as they enter the ministry. What troubles them most is the unsettlement in the society. There is no permanent loyalty in institutional structures; people find no difficulty in changing their promises in a flash of a second, or change sides because somebody has influenced them overnight. We find it very hard to adjust to this reality. Sisters and we priests often feel incompetent in a world, which is highly complex, where loyalties are shifting drastically and where one finds no difficulty in moving forward for one’s own advantage.
Do we find new fields in the changing world situations where new pastoral fields could be opened and created? Are we finding birth pangs of finding new life of pastoral fulfilment facing new challenges?
For those priests and nuns who are strongly motivated by faith a good number of new avenues are opening up. It is quite interesting that Saint Catherine of Sienna shared once “Start being brave about everything. Drive out darkness and spread light. Don’ look at your weaknesses. Realize instead that in Christ crucified you can do everything”. Listening to people who carries burden is one beautiful ministry that is evolving. You just need to listen to their struggles and woes. Being with those who are sick is another field, which is opening up for priests and sisters. They need our presence and they value it a lot. Talking to young people is another field, which is highly appreciated today. They want to hear us; our struggles, our temptations, our attachment to God.
People in the street love our entry into their lives. They are poor, neglected and dismissed by society. Our work among the HIV Aids affected people, for nuns to work among women who sell their bodies for making a livelihood, our involvement with gays and lesbians and trans genders; all these are few examples. In many of these areas our weakness and inaptitude becomes our strength for they value your vulnerability and kindness. In other words, God is asking us to take His presence to people where they are and not to wait for them.
The notion of leadership has perhaps changed, there is no single leader who can become dictatorial, but a team of leaders is the pattern in the world. What does it tell the pastors? Even in the scientific world inventions are no more by one person but by a team of collaborators. But it does not happen in art and literature. Why? Which is highly a matter of interiority? What does it tell a pastor?
The nature of leadership is evolving. We are moving from authority to trust; from hierarchy to networking; from decision making to inspiration; from power to self-awareness. Learning how to manage your own behaviour has become central to leadership today. Communication seems to be the key word in leadership today. Our ministry is highly extroverted and we need to get interested in people and their challenges, which means that we badly need help, assistance and support from others. We can learn a lot from new forms of leadership.
Many of the priests and sisters are learning this hard reality today and responding to it. They are willing to walk with people and are willing to show them their vulnerabilities. One might remember that famous saying- kindly do not walk in front of me, I may not be able to follow; kindly do not walk behind me, I may not be able to lead; just walk with me and we shall make the miracles happen. The synod called by Pope Francis is a clarion call for Catholic Church, and for the whole world to change its leadership style. There may be areas in life where one works singly and achieve great merits but general leadership style today is to “go out and seek help”
Are we living the madness of our dominant culture? The symptoms of this cultural madness are all pervasive throughout our institutions, with psychotic manifestations. Mystics and schizophrenics drown. What makes the difference?
Prior to the Renaissance, religious beliefs were widely shared, and socio-political organization was hierarchical. Status was ascribed rather than achieved. Our society today is marked by secularism, growing egalitarianism, social mobility from parent to offspring, rising literacy, novel occupations, university learning, passion, and romance. Our culture struggles between individualism vs Collectivism, gender egalitarianism, assertiveness, being vs doing, indulgence vs restraint etc.
When we begin to realize that we are not transforming our culture; that we do not have much of an influence at the bigger levels, we often move to the world of micro management. We find some tiny world where we can exercise control and we often lose the big picture. Such a step does not help us or our institutions in our journey forward towards the kingdom of God.
The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not exist at all. Said Father Karl Rahner SJ. What does it signify and tell?
Today we live in a culture, which is agnostic, pluralistic, secular, seductive and quite distracting. Today to be a believer means to live in a certain moral loneliness. To sustain faith means that one stands outside dominant consciousness. One can no longer simply roll with the flow one’s particular community, even one’s faith community, if one wishes to have a living faith.
There is a challenge in Rahner’s comment. To have a living faith today one must make a deep, private act of faith. It is a difficult process because the very forces that have helped erode our cultural communal faith also work against us making this private act of faith. What are these forces? There are all those things in my life, which are good, and bad, within me and around me that tempt me from prayer, self-sacrifice, from being more communal, from being willing to sweat blood in a garden in order to keep my integrity and commitments. It is those forces, which keeps me away from mustering up enough energy to enter deeply into my soul. Ron Rolheiser gives a beautiful explanation about it; it is a long quote but quite powerful “ What blocks faith is that myriad of innocent things within our ordinary, normal lives which precisely makes our life comfortable: our laziness, our self-indulgence, our ambition, our restlessness, our envy, our refusal to live in tension, our consumerism, our greed for things and experience, our l need to have certain life style, our busyness and overextension, our perpetual tiredness, our obsession with celebrities…… these are the anti-mystical forces against us”. We need to be a person of personal prayer to face the reality of anti mysticism.
Life in general is that it constantly requires the living reconciliation of opposites, which, in strict logic are irreconcilable. The need to balance the two has found eloquent expression in the slogan, Think globally- act locally? Are we passing out of the solar age, an age of solar hegemony of the look of conquer and subjugation?
Hegemony refers to the social or cultural influence wielded by a dominant member over others of its kind, such as the domination within an industry by a business conglomerate over smaller businesses. There is gluttony and addictions within us. Wayne Muller expresses this matter in a beautiful quote “Life has become a maelstrom in which speed and accomplishment, consumption and productivity have become the most valued human commodities. In the trance of overwork, we take everything for granted. We consume things, people and information. We do not have time to savour this life, nor to care deeply and gently for ourselves, our loved ones, or our world; rather we increasingly dizzying haste, we use them all up and throw them away”. In short, we are warned consistently we are moving in the wrong direction and we are heading for trouble.