Sharing our personal experiences and insights as religious and lay collaborators in education, we build important relationships. Together, we come to a fuller understanding of our Holy Cross mission — and a deeper commitment to it.

Holy Cross educators regularly gather to discuss what brought them to the teaching profession and specifically to Holy Cross. Combining action and contemplation, the Seminar usually features small-group discussions, a school visit, and the creation of action plans by school groups, balanced by a liturgy and individual reflections on a theme.

Our common ground as educators is strengthened by the awareness that our efforts contribute to an international mission of education: In Holy Cross, we belong to something bigger than our individual schools or provinces. Our shared experience is also a resource for the wider Congregation of Holy Cross, which seeks ways to articulate, transmit, and extend to future generations our educational heritage and mission.

Guest speakers have broadened our understanding of different facets of our mission, such as the characteristics of a Holy Cross educator and those common to pastoral and educational ministries. At another seminar, our high school principals addressed central themes of a Holy Cross education: Building Respect, Educating Hearts and Minds, Being Family, and Bringing Hope. These themes, in turn, have served as a multi-year mission focus across all schools, inspiring small- and large-group discussions, Board reflections, faculty retreats and formation experiences, liturgies, and other events.

Zeal for mission. Professionally renewing, these gatherings also promote spiritual growth. The Seminars energize us for our common cause, and these periods of reflection and discussion help direct that energy more intentionally. Father Moreau called this energy zeal, and he wrote that our mission is not just the education of young men and women, but their spiritual formation.

At one Mission Seminar, Holy Cross educator Patricia Geister described the power of zeal for mission thus:

“The moments when I was particularly conscious of zeal and its fullness of faith,” she said, “were often instances of challenge and difficulty, as well as times of great joy. Inevitably they were moments filled with hope, whether one realized it or not at the time, and above all, they were moments when imagination and tenacity were taxed to the fullest.”

Patricia reflected on the power of zeal to ripple throughout the community and become “the dynamo that drives us and where we see the fervor and conviction that is essential to us in our work.” The spontaneous sharing of that zeal occurs in part because, as a lay educator, she has experienced “no ceiling” in Holy Cross. A former principal of Moreau Catholic High School, she has consulted with Holy Cross schools in Chile and serves on the Board of Governors for the Holy Cross Institute.