How do we have a “dialogue of the Holy Spirit”? Catholics heard the phrase often during last year’s Synod on Communities and will no doubt hear it again when the second and final session begins in October.
In fact, this method has deep roots in the Jesuit method of community identification developed in Canada after the Second Vatican Council.
Dialogue in the Spirit is a method of communal discernment aimed at helping the group listen to the Holy Spirit by dialogue with one another. Participants meet in a circle with the facilitator after privately reflecting on pre-distributed questions. They begin with self-introductions and prayer, if appropriate. Then, each person has a limited time (maximum 3 minutes in synods) to share what impressed them during the prayer and reflection through questions.
The group takes a few minutes of silence to reflect on what they have heard, and then, in a second round of sharing, each person takes a turn to say what stood out to them from what others have shared. At this stage, some consistent themes or tensions may emerge but are not yet discussed. The group again takes a few minutes of silence, and then, in a third round, they discuss what had emerged in the previous round. At the synod, each group was asked to record any “convergences” and “divergences” of views that emerged from the conversation, as well as any suggestions or open questions they would like to raise.
This method has certainly grown in popularity in the past two years because of its use in the Synod, but it is not new. The method has its roots in what the Jesuits call the “Canadian Way” of spiritual dialogue, which developed in Canada and the northeastern United States beginning in the 1970s and was further developed in Canada and Belgium in subsequent decades.
After Vatican II, interest in individual guided retreats grew, and some Jesuits, including Canadians John English, John Veltri, and John Wickham, began exploring how to create something similar for groups. These three were considered key members of the Montreal guided retreat movement, which had its roots in the Guelph Spirituality Centre (now called Loyola House/Ignatius Jesuit Centre) in Guelph, Ontario.
Because the Spiritual Exercises are intended to lead individual practitioners through the discernment of decisions, the Spiritual Exercises undertaken in a group can be a kind of joint discernment, for example, about the group’s identity or future.
American Jesuit George Schemel, himself the founder of several spiritual centers in the United States, co-founded with Father English a group called Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for Corporate Personality, which included Fathers James Borbery, Maria Carew, John Haley, and Sister Judith Romer. The group developed a common method of discernment that they compiled into three volumes, the first of which was published in 1989. The method guided the group through three questions: Who are we as a group before God, what do we do (or are we called to do), and how do we do it?
Father Peter Bisson recalls that Father Schemel visited Guelph when Father Bisson was a novice in the early 1980s and often worked with Father English and the ISECP group. Father Bisson later returned to Guelph for his third term, the final stage of the Jesuit program, where he and other third terms “breathed, ate and dreamed spiritual conversations and discernments” under the tutelage of Father English, he wrote in an email interview.
“Because of the impact ISECP has had on Loyola House, [novitiate in Guelph] “The centrality of Loyola House in the life of English-speaking Canada is something that many Jesuits of my generation were aware of in some way,” Father Bisson continued.
Meanwhile, in the mid-1980s, Father Wickham wrote and distributed the first version of the Community Exercises to small groups, which he expanded into a guide and a second edition was published in two parts in 1991. In the same year, Father Shemel and Sister Romer published a 16-part video series for groups, “Ignatian Spirituality and Guided Retreats,” in response to growing requests from groups for guided Ignatian retreats.
By the mid-1990s, the communal retreat and discernment model had spread internationally. In 1995, a Belgian group, ESDAC (Exercises Spirituelles pour Discernement Apostolique en Commun), was formed by several Jesuits to translate the ISECP’s work into French. To this day, ESDAC leads discernment groups throughout Europe, in Canada, and Lebanon. But as the method has gained popularity in Belgium, it has waned in popularity in Canada.
In 2002, Father Bisson, today one of the most important promoters of the Canadian Way in Canada, returned from doctoral studies in Rome with the task of strengthening the Canadian Way. [the English Jesuits’] “We aim to bring spiritual dialogue and common discernment to the field of social justice,” he said, adding that the effort has been “fruitful and the beginning of common discernment taking root in the English-speaking Canadian province.”
In 2008, he was asked to put together a toolkit on common spiritual dialogue and discernment, working with Fathers Earl Smith and Elaine Regan Nightingale, who were involved with the Jesuit Community of Christian Life in Canada. The community, working with Father English, has been “a powerful repository of these skills,” Father Bisson said, “and their skills and knowledge have, in turn, helped to update and disseminate these skills in the Jesuit provinces.”
At that point, he said, all Jesuit novices in Canada were studying the “Canadian Method,” which was also used in interprovincial meetings such as those attended by Father Michael Czerny, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Promoting Integral Human Development, now a cardinal.
The technique of “common discernment” or “spiritual dialogue” attracted global attention when it was used at the 36th General Chapter of the Society of Jesus in 2017 to break the impasse in congregational dialogue. The following year, the French and English Provinces of the Society of Jesus in Canada merged, and in 2019 the new Province created a committee called the “Service for Common Discernment”. This committee incorporated some of the work of the French Province and ESDAC, as well as the development of thought from the Guelph School in the English Province. The group was led by Laurence Louvière XMCJ. Louvière is currently Superior General of the small (about 100 members) Xavierian Order inspired by Ignatius, and Sister Nathalie Bécart, one of the Synod’s two undersecretaries on the Synod, is also a Xavierian.
The method has now spread far beyond Canada through the Jesuits and other Ignatian orders, to the point that, according to Father Bisson, it is no longer widely referred to as the “Canadian way,” but simply as “spiritual dialogue” or “common discernment.”
So how did what was once known as the “Canadian Method” move from the Canadian Jesuits to a worldwide synod?
The approach was proposed by the Synod’s Methodology Committee, headed by Sister Beckert, she confirmed in an email. AmericaShe had learned the method from the Xavierians in Canada, and other members of the committee had personal experience with the method, and because the committee was tasked with finding best practices for use in the Synod, and because they had heard from members of the Australian General Assembly that the method had produced good results in Australia, the committee suggested that it be used in the Synod meeting.
