The 4 focal points in the Jesuit Curia at Rome

Since he started his new role over a year ago, Father General Arturo Sosa has expressed his desire to involve the Curia in the same type of discernment and planning dynamics that the provinces and conferences have been asked to undertake. Consequently, our main government team has been involved in a dynamic of strategic reflection that has resulted in an organizational proposal focused on four main priorities:

1. Helping the Superior General to promote imaginative and discernment-based leadership within the Society of Jesus. Included in this focus is a review of the universal apostolic preferences, the renewal of the communication strategy in Rome, and the design and implementation of structures and legal frameworks for the new types of leadership desired for the Secretariats, including offices and roles at the Curia in Rome.
2. Attending to the conferences, provinces and regions to develop structures and policies that foster discernment, collaboration and networking. This priority includes the work of an extended council, which since includes conference presidents and secretaries, an emphasis on apostolic discernment, networking at the local level and its link to overall processes and to the central government.
3. Developing financial and institutional resources so that the missions we face have the resources needed, are sustainable and have adequate capacities for strong management and governance. In particular, there is a focus on the importance of sharing resources in dynamics of collaboration at the local as well as at the global levels.
4. Support and promote deeper training of the Jesuits and our collaborators for a discernment-focused mission at the service of the Gospel.

It is important to highlight that we do not have a roadmap for the Universal Society with regard to these four emphases but rather a plan for the activities to be carried out at the Curia in Rome, which, through this approach, seeks to discern and plan the work for the next three years.

The most interesting part of this strategic discernment process is that these priorities display a set of lines of action that are being developed by specific working groups made up of the Secretariats, ordinary working committees of the Curia, as well as the post-GC36 team that we discussed in our previous post.
Apart from this matrix of teams and lines of action, many research Committees have been created to tackle topics of strategic interest to our current situation, such as the promotion of vocations, the digital world, leadership training or the Pope’s global network of prayer.

This way of proceeding represents an effort of internal organization that seeks to promote an increasingly open, participatory, and dynamic Roman Curia that will undoubtedly help us to continue fostering a Society in continuous discernment, able to succeed in our efforts to inspire, comfort and reconcile.

Originally published at https://jesuit.network on January 22, 2018.