Sydney
2 June 2002

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Sr Betty’s dream - filling the faith gap

Some of the participants in the first Madeleine Sophie Barat Program group, from left (rear) Lisa Humphrey and Wendy Mason; (front) Anna Fitzgerald, Ann Morgan and Maryann Pidcock, director of development at Kincoppal-Rose Bay.

By Kathleen Carmody

Sr Betty McMahon has fulfilled a dream of offering a leadership and spirituality program to young Catholic women in the workforce who may be missing the connection with their faith that they had when they were at school.

“I felt that we (the Church) do a lot for young people in schools and they show enormous depth of spirituality and leadership potential and then they go off to uni or work and they get married or whatever, but there’s a whole gap where there’s nothing for them to continue developing their own spirituality with a view to making a difference,” she says.

So with a number of other dedicated women - Sacred Heart religious and laywomen - Sr Betty set up the Madeleine Sophie Barat Program, Developing Women in Leadership and Service.

Targeted at the “lost generation” of women aged 22 to 40, the program - named after the founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart - aims to deliver “rich and diverse training, enabling participants to become aware of their reality, recognise their dignity, discover their potential and to be formed as leaders with the capacity for interdependence, solidarity and responsibility”.

Women aren’t taking enough of a leadership role, Sr Betty says.

It’s not just society not recognising women’s strengths and gifts; it’s the women themselves not volunteering for the job. “They are not sure enough of their own qualities,” she says.

Testimonies from older women in leadership positions form an important aspect of the program.

The girls also choose a mentor who has achieved something and who can provide encouragement and inspiration.

“Each month they have a testimony from somebody who has taken a stand in her life - like Dr Anne Bye, a paediatric neurologist at Prince of Wales (Hospital), or Leonie Degenhardt, the principal of Loreto Normanhurst,” says Sr Betty.

“Women of that standing can say what their faith has meant, how they experience leadership and what kind of service they give to the community.”

A further component is community service. The women choose an issue they identify with and put in 60 hours of community service in their chosen program.

The program is designed to ppeal to women from a diverse range of professions and backgrounds.

The first group - it included, among others, a lawyer, a speech therapist, a teacher, a PR executive, a uni student and an account director - has just completed the course.

Anna Fitzgerald, a lawyer, said she found it contemporary and meaningful.

“You don’t have to go to Africa and be a missionary for 10 years,” she says. “You can do it in Australia, while having your job, within your job, and in community service.”

But it can be intense at times, she adds, with “really intellectual and theoretical debate, in-depth analysis into social justice issues, (and) really harrowing stories; a lot of it’s been quite intense, but it’s always been flavoured with a really great sense of humour by everyone in the group. And it’s been really good fun”.

Anna says that when she began the program she was employed by a large law firm, but was having difficulty working in an environment “devoid of Christian values”.

“I guess at that stage that’s probably part of what brought me to the program,” she says. “I saw that there was so much more outside of that but it was hard to get to it.

“So it was a way of tapping into everything else that there is in life outside of your job.”

Soon, Anna decided to leave the “competitive, corporate environment” and move into a job that she could reconcile with her own values.

She says the program definitely influenced her decision.

“The first weekend away we had a lot of discussions about the problem of workplace environments being devoid of Christian values and often not valuing individuals as people,” she says.

“Through that I began to crystallise my understanding of how much I didn’t want to be where I was at in that job and how I wasn’t where I saw my life or my career going. That had a big impact on me.”

An important aspect of the program, she says, was being shown how to incorporate community service and contemplation into a busy life. It gave her time to just stop and look at her life and her faith, she said. “So often you don’t get that chance because you lead such a busy life and there’s all these commitments, and people, and things you’ve got to do, but (you) never actually stop to factor in the important stuff,” she says.

“It’s been amazing for me - almost life-changing - (to) learn to factor that in on a day-to-day basis without compromising your professional success or your commitments to your family or other people.”

Ann Morgan, a teacher at Mt St Michael’s College in Brisbane, was impressed by the incredible privilege and giftedness of the group. “I think many of us have had wonderful opportunities through our education and have had fantastic privilege in the kind of work we do,” she says.

“So to me it was really exciting that there are people who are saying: ‘Yes, I am in a privileged position, I have got a fantastic job/career, and that’s important, but I want to do it differently … to make a contribution and be, I guess, an authentic voice for what we have been brought up with in our faith and our traditions (but) in a contemporary way’.”

And that’s just the kind of thing that Sr Betty and her colleagues love to hear.

The Madeleine Sophie Barat Program costs $200 for two live-in weekends and eight evening meetings, including dinner, at Sancta Sophia College. The next program begins with a live-in weekend at Kerever Park, Burradoo, on June 28-30. For information or an application form, call Sr Betty McMahon on (02) 4861 2076.