How do we take care of the people entrusted to our care and ministry? How do we ensure our own harmonious psycho-sexual development and growth? How do we react as Jesuits to the global challenge of creating a safer environment for children and vulnerable adults in our ministries? How do we respond to the pain and to the request of justice of many victims of different kinds of abuse (sexual, psychological, etc)?
These are some of the questions we faced during a short and intensive workshop on Building a Safeguarding Culture and a Safe Ministry held in our community in Arrupe International Residence in Manila, from 3 to 6 August. We were led in this journey by a wise guide, Fr Roger Champoux SJ, who brought with him his decades-long experience as a spiritual director and counsellor.
Fr Roger, with his characteristic wit and deep and compassionate understanding of human nature, accompanied us in discovering our own sexuality as a gift. He pointed out the long journey towards a healthy and integrated psycho-sexual maturity, the main challenges we face as religious men called to chastity, as well as sexual orientation and gender identity issues, pornography, and abuses that confront our contemporary world. These sessions were coupled with small group discussions, in which we young Jesuits in formation had the precious opportunity to dialogue among ourselves on the many and challenging inputs we received.
Having spent 10 years of formation in the Society of Jesus, it was not the first time for me (and for my companions, too) to take a workshop on these topics. And yet, I realised how important it is to go deeper and deeper into reflection on my own journey to affective maturity. Jesuit formation is long and challenging. We are exposed to many different contexts and to people of different ages and conditions. I discovered how taking care of my own human growth is crucial in my mission to take care of and to serve the people entrusted to my ministry. We cannot protect and care for others if we don’t take good care of our own growth first.
I realised this particularly during my Regency, when I had to work for two years as a teacher and campus minister in a Jesuit high school in Palermo, Italy. Working with teenagers was very life-giving for me, but also very challenging. The daily contact with them forced me to face some unresolved issues in my own adolescence. I realised that the only way to love and to serve them fully was to deal with my own areas of immaturity and fears.
My journey to affective maturity and integration continues in the Philippines, where I am studying theology, the final stage of formation before the priestly ordination. The main challenge for me has been “cultural loneliness” being the only Italian and the only European in my religious community and in my school. Being the only one of your “kind” can be very exciting, and it has opened me to deeply different cultures and mindsets, but at the same time it can be challenging and stressful. Here I learned increasingly the importance of moving from a self-centred to a self-giving and “other-centred” attitude (the core of every real psycho-sexual growth). This progression is also the basis of a real safeguarding culture, of which all our guidelines and protocols are only external expressions.
With the help of this last workshop, as well as the other courses and personal experiences of accompaniment, I am learning more and more to welcome the personal wounds of my brothers and sisters in Christ, including their painful stories of abuse. Borrowing the title of a famous book by Henri Nouwen, I am discovering to a greater extent my nature as a “wounded healer”. I discover and accept my woundedness, but I also recognise my call to become a healer for others, as a Jesuit priest.
My journey of self-acceptance and self-giving is life-long, and it is far from being completed. This workshop, thanks to the insights of Fr Roger and to the sharing of my companions (which lent a fresh perspective particularly to the Asian context), has helped me make a deeper and wider discovery of the gift of myself. This in turn is the basis of a deeper care for the safety and wellbeing of my brothers and sisters who are and will be entrusted to my ministry.
Cesare Gabriele Sposetti SJ is a scholastic from Italy (Euro-Mediterranean Province) on his fourth year of theology at the Loyola School of Theology in Manila. He lives with 37 other formands from Asia and Africa in Arrupe International Residence, Manila.