RMG – Planning a School of Salesian Spiritual Accompaniment

17 October 2019

(ANS – Rome) – A group of 17 Salesians from all over the world met 11-12 October 2019 at Sacro Cuore, Rome, to plan a “School of Spiritual Accompaniment” to be offered to the Congregation and perhaps also to the Salesian Family.

The consultation was convoked by the Formation Department and involved Salesians from all over the world, who brought the wealth of their qualification and experience to bear on the topic in question. 

The School is meant primarily to prepare Salesians formators for Salesian spiritual accompaniment. Fr Fabio Attard, the general councilor for the Department of Youth Ministry and Br Raymond Callo, a member of the Formation Department, facilitated the meeting.

The training program to form Salesians in spiritual accompaniment is one of the directives of the document YOUNG SALESIANS AND ACCOMPANIMENT: Orientations and Guidelines recently approved by the Rector Major and his council. The document emerged from the research on Salesian personal accompaniment involving 4,000 confreres, including also 538 spiritual guides, in our Congregation (see Marco Bay, Young Salesians and Accompaniment: Results of an International Survey, soon to be published in English by Kristu Jyoti Publications, Bangalore).

There were three important areas the participants discerned as a priority in the training in Salesian personal spiritual accompaniment:

  • to create a culture of accompaniment – specifically Salesian, personal, and spiritual – for our confreres starting from those in initial formation;
  • to address the formation of the person of the formator and the lack of formators who are trained to spiritually accompany our confreres;
  • the methodology to be used and the processes to be initiated.

The next step for the Department of Formation is to design the training program based on this consultation and implement it as early as possible - hopefully even by the summer of 2020.

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