Welcome to Central Command.
As a former Catholic school leader, my office served as my space to retreat, refocus, recharge and recreate. It was my space to invite others in for a meeting or shut the door and grind out some intense work. It was a place for privacy, a place for planning, a place for practicing, a place for preparing.
It was a place, most importantly, for prayer.
As a school leader, your office will take on many of these same characteristics and maybe a few more. Everything from interrogation space, to war room, to a place to cry or laugh or shout or breathe deeply, your office will become an incredibly personal and important space in your role as a Catholic school leader.
Hopefully you won’t spend much time in your office. Spending time in classrooms, at lunch and recess, or at carline or after school events, hopefully your office will be a place that isn’t often utilized.
But, whatever you lack in quantity of time you will undoubtedly make up for in quality. You’ll log many hours before anyone arrives and long after the rest of your school community has already gone home. It will be the place where you’ll do final preparations before a big meeting or presentation. It’s where courageous conversations will occur. It’s where some of your biggest, toughest, most important decisions will be made.
In a sense, your office will be the birthplace of your leadership. Everything from ideas to policies to programs to your own unique style will be forged here, so that you can go out into your school to transform it and our world.
As Catholic school leaders, the work before us is heroic. You must be both visionary and managerial. You must be both an administrator and a motivator. You must be an employer and a shepherd. You must balance professionalism with pastoral care. You must be versed at instruction and inspiration. You will need to know everything that’s going on in your school while still being able to delegate and empower others to share in your mission. Your school will require that you are all of these things and so much more.
But, most importantly, your role as a Catholic school leader will demand that you are a faithful follower of Jesus Christ.
For, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in To Teach As Jesus Did in 1972:
Thus one crucial measure of the success or failure of the educational ministry is how well it enables men to hear the message of hope contained in the Gospel, to base their love and service of God upon this message, to achieve a vital personal relationship with Christ, and to share the Gospel’s realistic view of the human condition which recognizes the fact of evil and personal sin while affirming hope. (#8)As a Catholic school leader you must ensure that students are both smarter and better once they leave our schools so that they can take a dynamic faith life out into the world and with competence, compassion and conviction transform it.
To Teach As Jesus Did ends with the following rallying cry:
The Christian community has every reason for hope in confronting the challenge of educational ministry today. To all our efforts we join prayer for God’s help, and for the intercession of Mary, the Mother of Jesus. We face problems; so did those who came before us, and so will those who follow. But as Christians we are confident of ultimate success, trusting not in ourselves, but in Jesus Christ, who is at once the inspiration, the content, the goal of Christian education: ‘the way, the truth and the life.’
The work of Catholic education is heroic. It has divine origins, earthly ramifications, and eternal consequences, and “The Christian community has every reason for hope in confronting the challenge of educational ministry today” because of transformational Catholic school leaders like you.
