Decision-making in community

Sister Rejane  
This Random Nun Clip is brought to you by A Nun's Life Ministry. I'm Sister Rejane of A Nun's Life Ministry. And our guest today is Sister Mary Pellegrino, Senior Vice President of Plante Moran consulting firm. Mary and her consultant team work to ensure that religious institutes realize their potential and meet the challenges of the day through the lens of their mission and charism. Let's talk about your leadership time. Two terms in your congregation, also with LCWR, Leadership Conference of Women Religious. I mean, those are pretty big roles.

Sister Mary  
Yeah, it was. When I look back, I think I that really is the hand of God, because I certainly wouldn't have chosen that.

Sister Rejane  
Ah, interesting.

Sister Mary  
Just in the way things unfolded. So I was elected to my first term in leadership in 2008. And it was at a Chapter, as you described at the beginning of this conversation, Rejane--it's the Chapter where you kind of set direction for the next--for us, it's five years.

Sister Rejane  
Okay.

Sister Mary  
And we elect leaders. And so I was elected to my first term in 2008. In our community, we elect four sisters to serve on our leadership team. And then from among the four sisters who are elected, the community then elects what we call the congregational moderator. And that is kind of the public representative of the community. She doesn't hold any more authority internally, but she does have different tasks to do externally. So I was elected moderator as well, on that first term. So that was pretty overwhelming in many ways. I think I was prepared to be elected to the team, but maybe not prepared so much to be elected moderator. And so that was a really challenging five years. We came into office right as the market crashed in 2008.

Sister Rejane  
Oh, right.

Sister Mary  
Right. Yeah. So we just had a lot of challenges. In my first year, we faced a lot of factors, but certainly the market crash was one of them. We were not able to open our academy the following year. And that was our first and founding ministry, founded in 1869.

Sister Rejane  
And wow, just because of financial--

Sister Mary  
Yeah, just the finances of it. And so we were not able to open. We closed our academy, which was just so profoundly painful in many ways. It really shattered a myth of immortality that we had that, you know, that we'll go on forever. And we really had to, to come up and as a community say, "Wow, what does this mean for us?" And so that was very challenging.

Sister Rejane  
It's also a challenge of identity, too, right? Like, "This is who we are."

Sister Mary  
Yes. And that's how we were known, we were known as Mount Gallitzin. That was the name of the academy. And so there's so much symbolic in that and iconic in that. So we had to really work through a lot of grief and a lot of loss. Before we even announced the closing Academy, the apostolic visitation was announced from the Vatican, where all the religious communities and the women's religious communities in the United States were to be visited, which is a really a canonical process. That was also very, very challenging. So that was all like in my first year. Then in the following Chapter, so that would have been 2013, I was re-elected as congregation moderator as well. And that was a time where we had really converted our academy and its building. We were leasing it at that time, and we still do, to a charter school. So we saw all this new life on the campus that was just incredible. It's an arts-infused curriculum in this charter school. So it's just fabulous to see the building and the grounds used for education.

Sister Rejane  
Well, that just kind of speaks to the Paschal mystery in a way.

Sister Mary  
It does, absolutely.

Sister Rejane  
You had to let go of something that was an institution. And then in such a short amount of years, really, when you think about it, you're seeing like a new birth.

Sister Mary  
It is. It's an absolute new birth. And because many of the schools for religious communities are tuition-based, we had a dream--our hope had always been that we really could provide education for families and children who did not have means, so to speak, and other opportunity. And because we were tuition-based, we never were really able to accomplish that to any large degree. But to see now what is happening in that school and on the campus--I think the school is drawing on 10 or 12 different districts. It has a range of economic capacity within it. Very diverse student body. So it's really everything that we would have hoped to have accomplished on our own. But now we can look and see that it's accomplished in a way through us, but not by us.

Sister Rejane  
Right. That's really amazing.

Sister Mary  
Yeah. Then in my second term, that's when we really recognized that we needed to do so much more, we needed to be much more strategic about our planning. And so we brought in Plante Moran to help us with the planning process. And then in 2016, I was elected to serve in the presidency of Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and that was just an incredible opportunity and privilege--and a lot of work doing both roles: both my congregation and LCWR. And I always say that, when you look at anybody serving, in an office in LCWR and the presidency, it's their whole community that serving, it's not just that one person. It's their leadership team that is serving. Because I know I could not have been available for that ministry and that role. If my community and my team at that time were not able to say, "Yeah, we're going to support this, and we're going to renegotiate some of what we need to be about internally."

Sister Rejane  
Yeah, you can't do it, right? Those are both more than full-time, more than 40 hours a week jobs. And so I love how you brought that in: your team recognized they're gonna have to step up. And you had to negotiate and prioritize, where do I put my time?

Sister Mary  
We did a bit of a discernment on my team to say, you know, "This is the invitation. Can we respond to this together?" Because I had been invited to consider the candidacy before and I just never felt prepared enough or free enough. And so at that time, I felt like, if this were to be, it was really going to be a discernment among all four of us. And that's what it was. And I felt very free. If we felt like we could do this, and we could offer me in service, then I would do that. And if we didn't feel like we could do it, then I would not. And so I look back at that time, and it was such an incredible experience of discernment, and really being attentive communally to a call. And I think we all knew that, while I might be the one serving, it was really not about me. You know, it had to be about all of us.

Sister Rejane  
That's that idea of collective decision-making.

Sister Mary  
Right. Exactly.

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This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.