As we continue “Archbishop Mark Coleridge’s Reflections on 50 Years of Pastoral Service” series, this week, Archbishop Mark shared the key leadership qualities he has found essential during his time as a Bishop and later as an Archbishop.
Faith is at the forefront, involving a deep connection with Jesus Christ. Humility is also crucial, often learned through personal and collective challenges, like the impact of the sexual abuse crisis on the Church. Today’s leaders must navigate uncertainty with a faith-based approach, embracing the unknown and staying open to learning from diverse cultural interactions. Modern bishops must adjust to a changing societal landscape, engaging with a varied Catholic community while acknowledging a shift in traditional authority and political influence. Effective leadership requires working within these new parameters and maintaining the stamina needed to meet the demands of ministry.
Watch the Archbishop’s reflection here:
Ep6 – Faith, Humility, and Limits
Well, the first thing I would say is faith. Now I used to just take it for granted, I don’t anymore. You can be ordained and without faith, doesn’t mean to say you’re a bad person. But faith, being a disciple of Jesus Christ and really having experienced the encounter with Jesus Christ crucified and risen. That’s the first and most essential quality in anyone who is ordained to the priesthood or the episcopate.
You also need humility. This has taken me a lifetime to learn. And very often humility comes only through humiliation. Now, I have to say the greatest humiliation in my life as a priest and as a bishop has been the sexual abuse crisis. That has loomed over my whole life. Certainly as a bishop, but also as a priest. Now, that was has been, it’s not a was because it still is, that is nothing if not humiliating. I appeared four times before the Royal Commission and each time it was a humiliation. Not only for me personally, but for the Church that I love. And that’s a mysterious thing too.
So humility and an ability to move through the experience of humiliation in a way that makes you stronger and not weaker. Humility that opens you to a sense of service and makes you deeply suspicious of things like power and position and prestige and pomp and all the things that can go, particularly with Episcopal office. To develop a deep suspicion of those in oneself first of all. So I would underscore that, humility.
But you also need a capacity to lead when you don’t know where you’re going. And I think that’s the kind of moment we’re in, I often describe it as Abrahamic. These days if you want, if you can only lead with a GPS or a road map you’ll struggle, because very often it’s not as clear as that. A leader these days need needs to listen to the God who does know where we’re going, even if I don’t, I mean it’s not if I know nothing. But I don’t see in any great detail the way into the future, I can see the next steps.
And to rest easy with that sense of the provisional and the uncertain I think is a very important part of leadership these days.
A certain degree of learning I think also helps, and I’ve been given extraordinary opportunities to study at a high level and also to teach, the best way to learn is to teach. But I think these days a certain quality of learning is important and I don’t just mean Church learning. Because I think leadership these days, of a bishop it means you have to engage the culture, it always has been that. But the culture is not easy to engage because we’re much more marginal than we used to be, both as the Catholic Church and as Catholic Bishops. Now that doesn’t make me panic, but it just means that I engage the culture from a different position than would have been true of some of my predecessors like James Duhig here in Brisbane.
The world is vastly different when I read the lives of men like James Duhig or Daniel Mannix in Melbourne. They both died in my lifetime and yet it’s like reading about a bishop from another planet. The world has changed so much. So we’ve become as I say much more marginal and to be able to work as leader from the margin and also the Catholic community has become more diverse and even more fragmented. It used to be a much more compact, coherent sort of a group. These days it’s a bit all over the place and there are things both good and bad in that, but it’s like the politicians recognise that there is no such thing now as the Catholic vote. And that’s one of the reasons why we don’t have the political influence we once had because the politicians know with that uncanny instinct they have, there’s no such thing as the Catholic vote, no matter what a bishop says, Catholics will go off and do whatever they judge best.
So in other words, authority itself is not what it was. To accept that and work within those limitations is a very important part of leadership now. There are many other qualities that you need, another one just by the way is stamina. Physical stamina, because the ministry takes its toll and when I say stamina, I do mean physical stamina, but I also mean psychological stamina certain resilience, an emotional stamina and a spiritual stamina. I think all of those are part of leadership now.