Franciscan at Home

When you began working in the Church, how many friends did you have who were also serving in ministry? For me, it was several dozen. These youth ministers, Catholic school teachers, missionaries, and seminarians all began their work with so much zeal for the mission ahead of them.

Yet, nearly ten years later, I can count on one hand the number of those friends who are still involved in full-time ministry. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar. Most of these friends of mine devoted several years of their lives to a university formation and tens of thousands of dollars to be trained for effective ministry. Yet, when I talk with former parish employees, the majority of them have fled from parish ministry with plenty of hurt and a noticeable level of bitterness toward their experience.

There’s a few obvious reasons—salary limitations and simply discerning a different calling are common ones. However, I’ve experienced another much more troubling and harmful reason: too often, Catholic parishes are some of the most dysfunctional places to work.

I can say this confidently having worked as a leadership consultant with hundreds of pastors who have told me this themselves, as well as having been an employee at two parishes myself. While a Catholic parish office is meant to be a hub of prayer, evangelization, and true Christian friendship, it is far more common that it is a festering pool for mediocrity, confusion, and frustration. This dynamic begs the question: why? What is causing this exodus from parish ministry?

The biggest reason people leave employment in a parish is not because of issues with liturgy, music, programs, or hospitality—things that often get lots of attention. They leave because the organization is unhealthy and tolerates low standards. Without healthy and clear leadership, the best homily or most dynamic video series will only get you so far. This is completely counterintuitive to almost everything that we are taught in studies and formation! We spend hours and hours crafting plans and reading theology (which are extremely important), yet almost no time learning how to effectively lead the people entrusted to us. When I discuss this with pastors, I can’t tell you the number of them who have incredulously told me, “No one ever teaches you this in seminary!”

Mark your calendar for the upcoming 2024 Steubenville Conferences for adults, held on our beautiful campus in Steubenville, OH. Registration will open in late January, 2024. NOTE: The St. John Bosco Conference for Evangelization & Catechesis is being postponed until summer of 2025 because of our involvement with the National Eucharistic Congress. Hope to see you there! Questions? Call 740-283-6315.

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“Have you heard something? Let it die with you. Be brave, it will not make you burst!” – Sirach 19:10

To learn more or to book a discovery meeting, go to steubenvilleconferences.com/parish-missions or call 866-538-7426, ext. 4.

This is a paid advertisement in the April 2023 issue. To schedule a demo, scan the QR code below or email Hallow at [email protected].

This is a paid advertisement in the April 2023 issue. To find out more about these books, go to https://ignatius.com or call 800-631-1531.

In 1583, nearing the end of a brilliant career as a painter, sixty-five-year-old Jacopo Robusti began work on The Annunciation, a scene of Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would be the mother of Jesus, the Son of God. Having grown up in his father’s dye business, Jacopo Robusti was better known as Tintoretto, the “little dyer,” from having drawn on the walls of the shop with pigments from his father’s dye pots. After absorbing the drawing style of Michelangelo and the color sense of Titian, he established a career in Venice. Tintoretto belonged to the group of Venetian painters known as Mannerists. Mannerism is a style characterized by exaggerations and unusual uses of color, light, and movement. As a mature painter, he also became known as Il Furioso—“The Furious”—for his energetic brushwork and powerful compositions, such as Paradise, an eighty-foot-long painting that is claimed to be the largest image ever painted on canvas. On a more moderate scale (13x17 feet!), Tintoretto’s The Annunciation is an example of how an artist can take what is conventionally seen as a quiet moment and turn it into a cosmic event. Tintoretto imaginatively, and correctly, transforms a well-known passage from Scripture into an exciting visual drama worthy of deep contemplation.

In the Gospel narrative, we are not given details of what Mary’s room in Nazareth was like, nor what Joseph was doing at the moment of the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel. Tintoretto gives us a significantly original point of view in which we see much more of the environment than expected. The side of the building facing us, the “fourth wall,” has been removed, which allows a broad expanse of space to be revealed. We get an “inside/outside” view of this moment and, at the same time, a vision of a needful world about to be transformed. Outside the house, the environment is dark, filled with broken boards in jumbled piles.

We can imagine this place as unkempt and disordered, a house and landscape that once was whole but now has fallen apart. This is a beautiful metaphor for the world as it was after the Fall of Adam and Eve. St. Joseph is in the distance working at some project alone in the darkness. The wall that separates the outside from the inside is itself a ruin of broken architecture. Mortar is peeling away from the brick wall. A piece of a classical column is topped with fragments of stones, bricks, and pottery—a haphazard stack of human designs that represent the failure of mankind to accomplish a true, beautiful, and lasting order. Mary’s room is tidy but also shows material poverty. The seat of the empty chair needs repair, and while the checkerboard of the floor depicts the order of classical perspective, it isshowing age and wear. But there is a glimmer of light on the horizon. Something is about to change—restoration and salvation are at hand. Christ will make all things new again.

In a 1978 Lenten catechesis given in Munich, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger spoke of the eucharistic mystery as an incomparable encapsulation of Christ’s transformative self-gift, whose meaning is best expressed in the act of washing his disciples’ feet: “He, who is Lord, comes down to us; he lays aside the gar