Province of Spain – Linked to the source, together for a better world – The 20th Meeting of Management Teams
“Our mission ceases to be fruitful, or rather, it is extinguished at the very moment when the link with the source is interrupted.” (Pope Francis)
On the 6th, 7th and 8th July, the 20th Meeting of Management Teams of the Province of Spain took place at the SG-Barcelona school. The objective of this meeting can be formulated briefly and partially as follows: “To lead our schools in the manner of the Brothers of St. Gabriel”.
On this occasion, the Formation Team for Shared Mission with the collaboration of the Leadership Team developed two cooperative seminars out of a total of six, according to the Formation Plan of)the MCG, designed for the leaders of our educational communities. These seminars are an adaptation to our context of those organised by the Province of France, in collaboration with the Gabriel Deshayes International Community in Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvre, for the management teams of the educational network of France and Belgium.
The seminars are organised around themes that are approached from two angles: the historical point of view of the educational tradition and the articulation between this tradition and modern management. During the first two days, based on the intuitions of our founders: Saint Louis Marie de Montfort and Gabriel Deshayes, we worked on the Founder’s Project and Montfortian Gabrielite Leadership.
In order to apply the skills and priorities identified by our tradition to our current context, we have the participation of the facilitators José Mª Bautista Guadalupe and Ana Isabel San José, directors of the Learningflow consultancy, specialising in the integral transformation of educational centres, coaching, emotional intelligence, cooperative work, culture of thought, change management, institutional educational project, pedagogical audit, marketing, design thinking…
Working in workshops, mini-groups, macro-groups and school management teams, the facilitators provided and showed us the tools and techniques necessary for the implementation in our schools of their guidelines and priorities in our current reality.
Just as Father de Montfort and Gabriel Deshayes read the signs of their times and created something new, it is up to us to make our own reading and to imagine, create, take risks as they did for the benefit of our pupils and society. Because this return to the origin, far from being a circular process, is a creative process. The aim is to invent the present; to take charge of the signs of the times; to continue to give life to an educational history; to be tradition ourselves and to commit ourselves to transmitting the values, the principles and a common vision of education that can be found in any of our schools, not only in our Province, but in the whole Montfortian-Gabrielite network.
On the morning of July 8, we lived an experience that will remain engraved in our hearts forever. We visited the parish church of Santa Inés, the former Czech San Elías, where our Brother Martyrs, witnesses to the Faith, were imprisoned during the Spanish civil war and later shot in the cemetery of Montcada. Brother Ángel Llana, vice-postulator of the cause, told us the facts and we all had at our disposal the notebook drawn up by Brother Camille Lucas, also vice-postulator in which he gives a detailed account of everything that happened to our Brothers at that time.
Afterwards we went to Can Valls, in Sant Vicenç de Montalt, where the formation house of the Brothers was located and where the armed revolutionary militiamen arrested our alleged martyred Brothers. Nowadays Can Valls has become the Gabrielite Brothers’ Park. There we all enjoyed hearing first hand from the Brothers who accompanied us, the experiences lived in the house and the memory of what others told them about those times.
Equipo de Formación para la MCG
