Barretta Speach

What is the Jesuit Education Foundation?

Leaving behind the instinctive thought that considers the Foundation as having an ATM function or distributing economic resources, we are instead talking about a participation Foundation.

What do you participate in?

An inspiration. I will not engage in discussions relating to the Jesuit and Ignatian inspiration of our educational apostolate, it would be interesting, but I refer you to everything stated at the level of the universal Society of Jesus, the Province, and indeed the Foundation in its guidelines.

Instead I'll tell you about how we arrived at the choice to create a participatory Foundation. We were at the end of the early 2000s, Carlo Casalone was Provincial. We had experienced the 5th Congregation of the former Province of Italy and had produced a decree relating to the closure of major works, a substantially far-sighted decree, but in the end not fully implemented due to the efforts and resistance towards strategic closures for the repositioning of the apostolic sectors: intellectual, youthful, social, in terms of sustainability. All this happened in the year 2000, but at the end of the decade the thought matured that reducing could not be the only solution, it was possible to support a complex and still numerically significant system of Works by reorganizing our governance and management system. Something had to change in our heads, even before the objective, albeit oversized, nature of the Works.

Thus, was born the idea of the Foundation as a new governance and management system for schools. Let's get into some details. Let's say straight away that the Foundation is not a government instrument of the Euro Mediterranean Province for the Colleges. In other words, the President cannot decide on the Jesuits and individual works as if he were a delegate of the Provincial. The government of people and works remains in the hands of the Provincial.

So, what authority does the Foundation have?

It has the authority that comes from the network agreement that the individual School makes when it asks to become part of the Foundation. Each School abides by certain conditions and rules, but first of all by an inspiration that is implemented in specific programs. This is how the FGE can exercise its role of accompaniment, stimulus to implement what we do not want to be lost in our educational apostolate. It will do this in multiple ways, receiving schools in refresher and training sessions, going to schools to learn about and discuss the initiatives being implemented to exercise the Network's prerogatives.

What has changed radically and more strongly since the end of the 2000s is the old concept of government centered on the presence of the so-called Rector. The Rector had become the poor martyr, by order of the Provincial, who had to exercise government and management together, with quite a few conflicts of interest. No one misused this conflict, but many were encouraged to make mistakes that we still suffer from in some schools. This way of conceiving the running of schools was unsustainable, risky, dangerous. It was necessary to divide the government level from the management level, to think of a Chairman of the Board of Directors and a General Manager under him. On the other hand, this is the classic concept of running a company, where our colleges are in a certain way and do not allow naivety or home-based management, which are only possible in a society that is not as complex as it once was. Then the ecclesiastical body provided itself with a Statute, which defined the composition and responsibilities of government and management.

By returning to the sustainability of a heavy apostolic sector on a structural level, thus positioning the Jesuits in government and in the classroom in their own competence, especially pastoral, we have also been able to offer a model to other private schools in the ecclesial world. Other schools managed in the old system no longer exist, condemned by the very weakness of religious life in numerical crisis.

In this way, with the FGE, what has changed?

There is no longer a concept of school defined and closed in the local: the Social Institute, the Gonzaga Campus, etc... there is an educational system that continuously intersects at government level: I meet the presidents of general directors, the administrators, etc... The students enjoy  common events and an extended community is conceived: "Let's set a tone", "Laudato sii", etc... Twinning, Kairos (initiation path to spirituality and the Spiritual Exercises). Network initiatives become structural.

I don't want to give an irenic scenario, there are many hardships, difficulties, but unlike in the past: they are not hidden, they are not left in the head of the Rector who can decide wrongly, but they are expressed, discussed and sought to resolve them within an overall relationship.

Many times we talk about the Internet, I had the opportunity to say in various circumstances that the use and abuse of this word. For the FGE, the Network can be guaranteed by a word that we prefer to put before everything: accompaniment, because this seems to us to be the node that then makes the Network. A network without nodes is only made up of its empty spaces. The FGE is a Foundation that puts itself at the service of local realities, to help them manage and govern themselves well, to support continuously updated training on the Ignatian inspiration to be guaranteed. I won't go into the details of economic management accompaniment, pastoral accompaniment, accompaniment in achieving the desired educational standard, accompaniment in the protection of minors... You understand that the detail of the accompaniment service is multiple and detailed.

A word again on the FGE and its relationship to the European context. I tell you that this Foundation system is not always easily understood. I had to take some time to make it clear that the EUM Province, not having a delegate for the colleges, does not lack something, but has something more than other Provinces, which are not organized like us. It was difficult to make people understand that the delegation, I said not of government, is not entrusted to a person, but to a system dictated by the functional purposes of the FGE. The real delegate for us is the Foundation, not its president. This is how the EUM Province is represented in JECSE by Nicola Bordogna and not by Claudio Barretta. Our past experience is that the Delegate of the Colleges, like the Rectors, was unable to achieve the set goals due to a disproportion between the strengths of the individual and the specific weight of the sector. In the end, the Delegate had little impact on the Colleges, because he was alone and not equipped with a structure that would help him convey the things he stated verbally in training courses.

I spoke about Schools today, to present an updated situation. I hope all this does not confuse you with respect to structures known in past decades, structures that no longer exist. Rather, I hope that all this stimulates you to think about what the specific places could be today in which former students can offer their service in a non-anachronistic way to works that have had to undergo a process of updating, under the pressure of a rapidly changing society.

I wish you good work and a fruitful discussion.