The Catherine of Siena Institute hits the road
Sherry Weddell, Associate Director

Spring found our Institute teaching team on the road as we responded to invitations to teach about the lay office and gifts discernment in parishes and dioceses up and down the West Coast. Just before we began our travels in late February, we recorded a Called & Gifted Workshop before a specially-invited audience at Blanchet High School in Seattle. We meticulously planned and timed everything down to the last detail. Maury Sheridan, a member of our advisory committee and a long-time teacher at Blanchet, arranged for us to have the use of their beautiful new library. Steve Diebert, Blanchet’s audio-visual guru, loaned us recording equipment and set it up. Mary Ann Gurol and Stuart Trippel arranged wonderful on-site meals and snacks. Fr. Michael and I furiously re-wrote several sections of the workshop, once again proving that nothing so wonderfully concentrates the mind as the prospect of a hanging. Anthony seemed to spend most of the weekend holding up shocking orange signs warning us all to be quiet at critical moments. All of the work and prayer resulted in a really clear recording that will make the Called & Gifted Workshop available to Catholics everywhere.

Some parish leaders from Boise heard about our recording weekend and excitedly asked if they could attend. We were delighted to have Joanne Lechner, Carol McGee, and Ann Kelley present for the taping and managed to squeeze in personal interviews for each of them before they left. They were so excited about the implications of gifts discernment for their parish that they left determined to see if they could bring us to Boise later in the spring.

The next weekend, Fr. Michael and I were off to Vancouver, British Columbia, to speak about the lay office and collaboration between the

clergy and the laity at a workshop for lay leaders arranged by Mary Boucher, Executive Director of the Office of Religious Education. Most of the lay leaders present had questions about the recent Vatican instruction on the participation of the laity in the ministry of priests. Fr. Michael was able to clarify some misunderstandings about the actual content of the instruction and to help those present to understand it in the context of Church teaching about the lay office since the Second Vatican council (see Fr. Michael’s article in the first issue of the Siena Scribe.) From Vancouver, we went to Surrey, B.C., where we taught another Called & Gifted Workshop for Fr. John Tritschler and the laity of Precious Blood Church.

The beginning of March found Fr. Michael and me flying down to Los Angeles to teach gifts discernment in the lovely parish of St. Dominic’s. We had been invited by Simon Rebullida, the parish youth minister and an energetic young man with a passion for evangelism. The workshop was filled with lively questions. I was especially moved by one particular woman, who cried as she told me that she had sought for a long time to know God’s call for her life and that now, because of the Called & Gifted Workshop, she felt that she finally had a specific sense of direction.

Fr. Michael and I separated for the weekend of March 21 to minister in two very different settings. He preached a mission on the role and office of the laity at St. Augustine’s parish in Vancouver, B.C., while I flew down to teach at the Institute for Lay Ministry in Sacramento, California. I taught a short, one-day version of the Called & Gifted Workshop to a capacity crowd of lay leaders from all over the diocese.

The last weekend of March found us teaching in Redmond, Washington, at St. Jude’s parish, a workshop for a hundred participants, including teams from several other area parishes who are preparing to bring the workshop to their own communities. Fr. Michael and I were hardly able to eat lunch as we were constantly being approached by eager participants with personal questions.

The workshop at Saint Jude’s included teams from several other parishes who are preparing to bring the workshop to their own communities.

After a much-appreciated break for Holy Week and Easter, we offered the Called & Gifted Workshop at our home parish of Blessed Sacrament in Seattle. This one was attended by a fascinatingly eclectic group that included two Dominican sisters, a Dominican brother, several former Catholics who were cautiously beginning to practice their faith again, as well as a several Protestants, including one woman from a fundamentalist background like myself who was just discovering the larger Church. One delightful Dominican sister, who was preparing simultaneously for her seventieth birthday party and a brand-new ministry, told me that she wished that the Called & Gifted Workshop had been available fifty years ago when she was going through her novitiate!

Fr. Michael offered his new course on moral decision-making, Discerning on Your Feet: Navigating Life’s Moral Complexity, for the first time at Blessed Sacrament in early May. I got to sit in as a participant for a change and ever since have been pondering Thomas Aquinas’ dictum that the first moral question is not "What should I do?" but "What will make me happy?"

The last two Called & Gifted Workshops of the spring sprang out of presentations we had done earlier in the year. Fr. Michael’s mother and sister attended the May 8–9 workshop at St. Augustine’s in Vancouver, B.C., during which we found ourselves an hour behind schedule because of the intensity of the questions that were being raised as people really wrestled with what it meant to be called and gifted. We finished by flying to Boise, Idaho, the following weekend to conduct a gifts workshop for vibrant Sacred Heart Church. Carol McGee, Ann Kelley, and JoAnne Lechner, all "alumni" of our recording weekend in February, treated us royally. A series of evangelization retreats over the past four and a half years had dramatically renewed the faith of people at Sacred Heart and made the discernment of the charisms of the Holy Spirit a perfect next step. With the help of Mary Ann Gurol, we were able to do twenty-six personal interviews in addition to the workshop in a single weekend.

In June, we’ll be making our East Coast debut as a five-member Institute team travels to Manassas, Virginia, to give a Called & Gifted Workshop at All Saints Church, a huge parish of 17,000 near Washington, D.C. I’ll tell you all about our adventures in historic Virginia in the next issue of the Siena Scribe.