Ignatius, McAuley, and the Good Samaritan

Ignatius, Catherine McAuley, and the Good Samaritan: A Leadership Program Finds Sustainability in Its Spirit

University of Detroit Mercy is among a few Jesuit schools with a second Founding Order.  Just as Ignatius of Loyola stepped away from the isolation of wealth, so did Catherine McAuley, the founder of the Religious Sisters of Mercy.  Catherine used her inheritance to cleverly lease a house in the wealthiest neighborhood in Dublin . . . to care for the poor.  She knew that the rich needed to encounter the poor if justice was to be mutually discovered.  That mutuality is found in the parable of the Good Samaritan, too.  At UDM, the very spirit of these three, Ignatius, Catherine, and the Good Samaritan, sustains and deepens our growing community service programs.

I. History and scope of UDM Community Service Programs

University of Detroit Mercy’s Leadership Development Institute was established with the help of the Kellogg Foundation in 1995 to provide students with awareness of urban concerns, with leadership skills, and relationships with diverse staff, faculty, alumni, and community mentors to develop solution strategies.  It was our goal through LDI to help them become in the words of our Vision Statement, “graduates who lead and serve in their communities.”
    
Under the Kellogg grant, the existing Student Volunteer Center was augmented by a Service-Learning program, and by a Leadership-In-Service program that combined direct service with reflection, and leadership skill development.  Recently, a program of urban community service has been integrated into the Fall Orientation program. Currently, 63 Service-Learning courses enroll 1300 students annually.  Another 800 students engage in unpaid community service through other LDI programs, and 500 more through other UDM programs.  These include University Ministry Alternative Spring Break, Peace and Justice Residence Hall floor, and Hunger Week, as well as our Horizon Conference athletes' projects.

Service-Learning is a method of teaching which engages the student in direct service as an integral part of an existing course.  Essential components of Service-Learning are:

1. Analysis of community need: identification of real service that students can provide, by responding to unmet needs;
2. Preparation of students for the experience, capable of serving and open to its potential for transformation.
3. Performance of direct service, in which they are able to experience the humanity of the person served.
4. Reflection as a continuous state of mind, through examining, journaling, etc.
5. Integration of the experience with other sources of learning in the course;
6. Evaluation of the impact of the service on their learning.
   

II. Post-Grant Sustainability and Growth – the Emerging Spirit

While the Kellogg Foundation grant enabled us to establish a solid base, LDI needed to find ways to sustain and spread its programs in the post-grant period.   Response has come from a remarkably persistent and effective source: the spirit of this unique Jesuit and Mercy institution, formed in 1990 by the linking of the University of Detroit and Mercy College of Detroit.  Jesuit Superior General Fr. Kolvenbach said, at Santa Clara in October 2000, “When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind can be challenged to change.  Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustices others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection.”¹ The June 2003 Conference of Mercy Conference on Higher Education White Paper on Characteristics and Values calls for Mercy colleges that are “. . . ensuring Service-Learning and attention to what systemic changes are necessary in society for all to thrive.” ²
    
These Jesuit and Mercy calls for involvement of Service-Learning in Mission engagement have led to integration of the value of each human and the challenge to respond out of compassion-in-solidarity in the following ways:

• Orientation presentation in all Service-Learning class begins with the Baptism of Jesus as a model of humanity – unconditionally beloved and favored – and the usefulness of each person as a natural response to this belovedness;
• The use of Catholic Social Teaching issues serves as a replicable model for pre-and post-service self-assessment;
• The parable of the Good Samaritan is used as a model of ethical behavior based upon a hermeneutic process of seeing, feeling, helping, and fostering lasting change;
• The Four-year Leadership Development program has been changed from a model of individual accumulation (of service, reflections, and workshops) to one of collaborative formation-through-service.  
• A mission statement for LDI has literally emerged from the growth during these two years: “helping us continue the work of Catherine and Ignatius in compassionate service to the poor and marginalized by seeing, feeling, helping, and fostering lasting change.“
  

III: Servant Leadership and the Parable of the Good Samaritan

For years, our program has subscribed to the wisdom of R.K.Greenleaf’s maxim: “If you want to lead, serve first.” ³  It is only recently, in reflection upon the sustainability of our program, that the full significance of servant leadership came to light. We found the seed of our source in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.  Howard Gray, S.J. presents an analysis of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that proposes a sequence of four unfolding responses that are, he says, Jesus’ teaching on what it is to be human.⁴ These four responses, each of which arising from the prior, are: to see, to feel compassion, to provide immediate help, and to do all that one can to make things better when one is gone. 

Gray’s premise can be seen as an Ignatian interpretation of a scriptural source that further illuminates and animates Greenleaf’s maxim.  Leadership is born in the hermeneutic unfolding of human understanding of and response to the encounter with a person beaten and left on the side of life’s road.  From within the seeing, the Samaritan experiences the blossoming of compassion.  From within the compassion, he is moved to help.  In helping, he becomes determined to do all he can to change the situation of the person when he is gone.

The Samaritan was, when he encountered the victim, pre-occupied, much as we and our students are.  But his awareness of the victim opened him to an experience that gave him the opportunity to become capable of affecting the society that attempted to ostracize him.  Service provides the opportunity for the encounter that shocks us into momentary awareness and the hermeneutic that is ignited there.  The ignition and the awareness are animated by the nature as caring humans.

How do students respond to integrating service in their lifestyle?  Michael Berger, UDM graduate student in Psychology and recent Medallion of Service recipient, volunteers at Council on Temporary Shelter (COTS) in Detroit as an art therapist.  “I love helping kids, especially the ones who live in poverty or abusive family environments.  When I see a kid smile after doing an art project, it really lifts me up.”  And here are some “sound bites” from this year’s Freshmen regarding their Orientation service day: “Service makes you feel good about yourself”   —   “Sometimes it’s good to get out & do something for others”   —   “Each one can reach one”  “‘It’s better to give than receive”   —   “Helping is fun”   —   “It was a time to look openly at our own life”  —   “The more you put into getting to know someone the more you get out of it.”  Ignatius, Catherine, and the Good Samaritan would be in good company here at UDM.

¹Commitment to Justice in Higher Education, Santa Clara, CA, 10/6/2000
² Conference on Mercy Higher Education White Paper on Culture and Characteristics, 6/25/2003
³ R.K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership (New York, Paulist Press, 1977)
⁴ What Are We? An Introduction to Boston College and Its Jesuit and Catholic Tradition (Boston College, The Center for Ignatian Spirituality, 1991), 77-121.