SPE Spotlight
Mantle of Elijah Prepares Priest Mentors
When the Rev. Marty Nocchi was ordained as a priest three years ago, he, like any new priest, faced a steep learning curve. While seminary had given him a solid foundation of theological knowledge about the church and its ministry, he still had much to learn.
Fortunately, as an associate pastor in his first appointment, he had a supervising pastor who could help him learn the day-to-day work of pastoral ministry. And, like most new priests, he had a spiritual advisor to help guide and nurture his continued spiritual growth.
But Nocchi also had something more: a mentor, specially trained and equipped by the Mantle of Elijah Seminar, a Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Project at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, to accompany him as he set out on the journey into pastoral ministry. Neither a spiritual adviser, supervisor nor friend, the mentor—as envisioned by Mantle of Elijah—helps the new priest integrate the human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral dimensions of his new vocation.
“It was invaluable to have a mentor,” says Nocchi, who now serves as director of the Monsignor O’Dwyer Retreat House in Sparks, Md. “I was able to talk about things that would have been difficult to discuss with the pastor I was serving under. This was more a peer-to-peer relationship where my mentor could give a more objective point of view than someone who was immersed in the situation.”
Nocchi’s mentor, the Rev. Jim Hannon, says he too benefited from the mentoring relationship.
“It was just a great experience for many reasons,” says Hannon, a priest for almost 20 years. “Mentoring helps connect and unite the priests, giving them one more level of support throughout the diocese. It helped me to better understand the younger priests and helped us both have mutual respect for each other’s generation of priests.”
Patricia LeNoir, director of the Mantle of Elijah Seminar, says mentoring takes more preparation than most people would realize. It’s not simply a matter of recruiting an older, more experienced priest who is willing to work with a new priest just beginning in pastoral ministry.
“It’s not obvious how a mentor is to maintain confidentiality and respect boundaries,” she says. “It’s not obvious how to know the difference between being and acting as a friend and as a mentor.”
The Mantle of Elijah project was founded on the premise that training and preparation are essential to effective mentoring, LeNoir says. At the outset of the project, Mantle team members did extensive research looking at the use of mentoring in various professions, such as law, medicine, teaching, and business. What they found was that mentoring, per se, had little effect on the lives and work of those being mentored. But good mentoring, provided by people who have been trained to serve as mentors, can have a significant and positive impact.
“We learned that mentors who have been trained for the job produce incredible results in retention of new people, whether teachers, doctors, or lawyers,” she says. In an era of growing priest shortages, when new priests are often saddled with tremendous responsibilities right out of seminary, mentoring can play a critical role in helping sustain priests in their ministry, she says.
Under the Mantle of Elijah program, experienced priests who have been selected by their diocese attend two five-day training sessions, one each in the spring and fall, to learn about mentoring. Much of the sessions are spent in role-play, using real-life case studies that were written by project staff, based on interviews conducted with priests from around the country. To date, 100 priests have been through the program, coming from dioceses throughout the country, and an entirely new mentor training program—Mantle West—is being developed in conjunction with St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, Calif.
Two of the most important skills the sessions are designed to impart to the mentors, says LeNoir, are how to listen deeply and deliberately and how to ask questions, the kind of open-ended, searching questions that can help a young priest find new insight about himself and his new role as priest.
“Many of the priest mentors are already good listeners but we help hone these skills and encourage them to use the techniques we practice to become more intentional listeners,” says LeNoir. “With these listening skills and the use of open-ended questions, the mentors help the priest mentee learn how to self-assess his own integration of the human, pastoral, intellectual and spiritual dimensions of his life.”
Mentoring, says Father Hannon, isn’t about “being the guy with wisdom to share,” but helping the new priest discern and understand what he is going through. Often, says Hannon, it’s about assuring the new priest that “what you’re experiencing is normal; don’t worry, you’re doing fine.”
Ultimately, however, teaching someone to be a mentor is not about imparting specific skills. Instead, good mentoring grows out of and reinforces good priesthood, says LeNoir.
Inevitably, the priests who are nominated to attend the Mantle of Elijah project are “the cream of the crop,” she says. They are already adept at integrating the various aspects of priesthood into their lives, though some may not be fully aware of that fact, she adds. Much of the seminar is designed to help the mentor priests become more aware of how they have integrated the pastoral, human, intellectual and spiritual dimensions into their lives and ministries.
“They may not consciously be tuned into the fact they do this, but it is already evident in the fruits of their life, the way they serve and the way they have gone about their ministry,” she says. “What we do is to help them tune into the fact that they already do this and to think deliberately about mentoring others in practicing those same aspects of integration.”
Such deliberate self-awareness is essential to mentoring, according to LeNoir.
“If you don’t think about where you are now, you can’t sit with another and help them figure out where they are,” she says. “You can’t facilitate in another what you cannot do within yourself. That’s why good mentors come out of good priesthood.”
In addition to taking part in case study and role playing exercises, participants in the Mantle of Elijah retreats also develop a statement of their own theology of ministry. As they work through the retreat sessions, they begin to see how they are already integrating the various dimensions of the priesthood into a way of life.
“These are priests who love being priests,” says LeNoir. “They’ve worked through hard times, many of them, and have committed and recommitted to the priesthood over and over again. They have a passion about walking with another person in this mentoring relationship, and that passion comes through. What the seminar does is to help them acknowledge what is already present and then develop and refine the necessary skills.”
As the mentor priests become more aware of how they developed and grew into their own identity as priests, they also learn in the seminars how to be a companion to another.
“The purpose of mentoring isn’t to make the new priest over into the mentor’s own image, but to listen to this person and facilitate in him what God is calling him to be, what the Church needs him to be,” says LeNoir. “The seminar helps the mentors figure out how to be a companion, how to be someone who sits in the presence of the other and appreciates who he is.”
For Father Nocchi, one of the greatest benefits of the mentoring program was to help him deal with the abrupt transition to public life that comes with being a priest.
“As a new priest, you go from being a fairly private figure to being a very public figure in the community,” he says. “People have certain expectations about a priest, sometimes unrealistic expectations. A lot of our conversations were about how to deal with that.”
LeNoir says the Mantle of Elijah project is also seeing clear benefits for the mentors, including recognition for their own years in ministry. In serving as mentors, the priests find renewed energy and develop a new interest in and commitment to the next generation of priests, she says.
For both the new priests and their mentors, Mantle of Elijah is aimed at helping them live a life that is healthy and holy, says LeNoir.
“It’s about not taking our best guys and using them up and burning them out,” she says. “Mantle of Elijah helps them to become more fully part of a presbyterate, working side by side with other priests and lay persons. It’s about helping everyone together serve the body of Christ and awaken in the body of Christ the life that all are called to live.”
