July Feature: Rome Leadership Conference

From 31st May to 5th June, CSAN hosted our Leadership Conference in the wonderful surroundings of Villa Palazzola, just outside of Rome.

We were delighted to be joined by delegates from across the CSAN family, including our members, trustees, reference group and generous sponsors, CCLA.

At the heart of our week together was the question: how do we (as leaders in the Catholic charity sector) contribute to the building of compassionate communities, where we can all flourish together?

After a period of reflection and discernment, the CSAN team determined that the most fruitful way to respond to this question was to invite our delegates to join one of our four distinct workstreams.

These included, “the Dignity of Workers”, led by Daisy, “Organisational Challenges”, led by Raymond, “Flourishing Communities”, led by Fiona, and “Youth and Young People” led by me, David.

In each workstream, we gathered together with our delegates, who joined one of these workstreams based on their own strengths, wisdom and expertise. Our task was to think about how to respond to this overarching question in relation to the specific theme we were engaging.

Over the course of the week, we came together in our workstreams to undertake a series of three conversations in the Spirit. In doing so, we followed the methodology of See-Judge-Act, and invited the Holy Spirit to guide us as we prayed and listened to eachother.

For all who participated, it was a powerful and moving experience. In our workstream, we found it painful to name what we were seeing in terms of the “Signs of the Times”. It is no secret that young people are having a particularly tough time at the moment, with record unemployment levels, spiralling mental health crises and the looming threat and uncertainty of the AI revolution.

Yet many more of us, across the workstreams, actually found the second step the most challenging. In this, we were invited to deepen our analysis of what the Holy Spirit had enabled us to see, and linger a little while before moving to the question of what we might do about it.

Traditionally called “judge” or “discern”, this second step calls for a more contemplative reflection on the basis of what we have uncovered in the first session. We considered things in light of CST, Scripture, the rich theological tradition of the Church, its Saints and holy people. This step establishes a powerful dialogue between the Holy Spirit as He has spoken to the People of God throughout the ages, and how He continues to speak to us, here and now, in the present.

Only after marinating in this sacred point of encounter between past and present were we equipped to consider how we are going to act to bring God’s graced vision of the future into being.

Within each of our workstreams, the Holy Spirit was powerfully at work, stirring our hearts and our minds, working through our intellects and our emotions to help us to see clearly, discern with wisdom and formulate actions with clarity and purpose.

The team at CSAN are now continuing this process into its next phase. We have received your generous sharing with gratitude. Before us, we now have a rich harvest, and we must consider carefully how the many fruits of our being together can be transformed into concrete plans for Spirit-led action.

Keep your eyes peeled for updates regarding this process, as we very much wish for the involvement of the whole network. Recognising that we are finite, we know that we can only achieve God’s mission when we all work together for the common good.

As well as our bountiful giving to this process, we had the opportunity to be nourished by inputs from an array of speakers, including Dr. Austen Ivereigh, Fr. Matthew Nunes from the School for Synodality, various representatives of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, Sr Helen Alford OP, Sylvia Sinibaldi from Caritas Italia, Maria Nyman from Caritas Europa, Rebecca Rathbone and Alistair Dutton from Caritas Internationalis and finally, Chris Trott, outgoing Ambassador to the Holy See.

This article was written by CSAN’s Communications and Programmes Officer, David Byrne. With special thanks to our photographer, Siân Thomas-Cullinan from Caritas Brentwood for the images used here.