IT was the dreaded Friday-afternoon Study of Religion class when one of Marist Brother Michael Callinan’s students raised their hand to ask if they could ditch the day’s material to have a “prayer experience” instead.
“I thought, ‘Here we go, they’re just trying to get out of doing some work’,” Br Callinan said.
He played along with it and he was glad he did because it turned out to be a transformative experience.
The students took it seriously and soon the one who raised his hand was putting together rosters to manage the prayer leaders for each Friday afternoon class to follow.
Br Callinan said it meant the class had to move quicker through the set content but it all worked out perfectly by semester’s end.
“To this day, I know that student,” he said.
“He’s someone who came from a faith-filled family; his family were both Catholic educators and leaders.
“It’s one of those moments where, I’m so glad that request … found a place to operate.”
Br Callinan said Catholic schools were busy places with lots of pressure where chances to develop students’ prayer leadership could be unintentionally overlooked.
He remembered his own first term as a teacher in the ’80s.
“I remember feeling really exhausted at the end of it,” he said.
“I can understand, if you were not really attentive to what was going on inside yourself and you aren’t saying a couple of ‘no’s’ here and there, that whole area of (teacher) burnout is going to be a reality.”
Br Callinan had graduated from Marist College, Ashgrove, with an attraction towards religious life.
Religious life had not been on the radar during his childhood and teenage years in South Africa but, with him returning to Brisbane for senior schooling, the Marists modelled to him something he had never experienced before.
With the calibre of their teaching and the influence of their Christian witness in his life, he became more attracted to the idea of being a religious brother than being a teacher.
He was young when he joined. In his congregation, he was the last person to have joined straight out of school.
He was often asked if it was the right idea at the time.
His parents were happy for him and supportive in whatever path he took while his peers responded more with confusion than anything else.
“I think you’ve got to understand God gives grace and provides opportunity, and invites all the time,” he said.
“It’s a matter of exploring that road and working out if it is God’s will or not … In the end it always works out the right way.”
He studied teaching while in formation, forming his first connection with what would become Australian Catholic University at one of its predecessor colleges in Sydney.
A good chunk of his teaching career as a brother was spent pioneering a now well-understood idea – developing the mission of a Catholic school as something more than just religious education in the classroom.
By his reckoning, Br Callinan was the second person to hold the position of mission director in a school in Australia.
He said it was ground-breaking to be saying more than 20 years ago that a Catholic school had a duty to form their students and staff.
His next big change was in 2016 when the Marists asked him to go to Sicily, Italy, with Lavalla200>, the Marist outreach, working with refugees coming from Africa.
“At the time, when I was there, up to 200,000 people were coming each year, and 20,000 of them were unaccompanied minors,” he said.
“French-speaking, English-speaking and some Arabic-speaking – it was very interesting work, these young people came, mostly boys.
“It was hard work because the kids couldn’t all speak to each other and Italian, which they were learning, became the emerging common language.
“That was the time I was in most contact with very raw need.”
Br Callinan returned to Australia and joined Australian Catholic University as campus ministry manager, a role he was just finishing up after five-and-a-half years.
He said he loved his time with ACU and was proud of what the campus ministry team had accomplished in his time there.
“(Campus ministry) is strategic, it’s detailed, it’s aligned with the universities hopes for graduates, it’s connected with stakeholders, and ACU is seen as a really good of social glue for the Church,” he said.
Now, Br Callinan was moving on to assist his congregation in investigating and developing frameworks for improved experiences of prayer and liturgy in their 55 schools.
“We know with all the good efforts put into teacher formation and evangelising students, there still are pretty significant gaps just in how a student would experience praying in their school,” he said.
“There’s some examples where it’s become fairly perfunctory, it’s like – we do this at certain times – or there’s other places where we know that running large-scale liturgies … it’s a big job, and I think there’s some assistance needed to get some frameworks in place.
“I think people get to the end of those large feast- day liturgies or graduation Masses … and say, ‘Thank goodness we got through that’, rather than, ‘Didn’t we nail it?’”
Creating a praying community had benefits to everyone at school, Br Callinan said.
He said it had a positive effect on classroom discipline – not by using prayer as a control mechanism – but by creating a welcoming presence of encounter with Jesus and helping teachers build relationships with students.
“I think I can count on one hand how many times I had a prayer experience purposefully disrupted by a student – that’s not many times in 20 or 30 years,” he said.
It also can help the devastating problem of teacher burnout in schools, he said.
“I do believe that a community that prays can help to create mini oases in (the staff’s) lives,” he said.
“It’s fairly well proven, if your staff is a bit more integrated and happier in general, the number of days required for sick leave and all that changes because some of those genuine mental health concerns are being addressed in another way.”
Schools also have captive audiences.
Br Callinan said people kept signing up to Catholic schools – for the values, for the care, the breadth of formation of the whole character.
This meant schools had a captive audience with an enormous opportunity to evangelise, he said.
He remembered his Friday-afternoon class and said the way forward was encouraging students to be leaders in prayer.
“There’s got to be some young people in every single class who have the capacity to be leaders here (in prayer),” he said.
“When we switch our minds to see student leadership of prayer as an evangelising tool then we might have awakened something.”
