How do you conduct a “conversation in the Spirit?” At last year’s Synod on Synodality, Catholics heard this term frequently, and they surely will again when the second and final session begins in October.
The method, it turns out, has deep roots in a Jesuit form of communal discernment that was developed in Canada after the Second Vatican Council.
Conversation in the Spirit is a method of communal discernment that aims to help a group of people listen to the Holy Spirit through conversations with one another. Participants, having reflected privately on questions distributed earlier, gather in a circle with a facilitator. They begin with personal introductions, if necessary, and a prayer. Then each person shares for a limited amount of time (at the synod this was three minutes maximum) those things that stood out to them during their prayer and reflection with the questions.
The group takes a few minutes of silence to reflect on what they have heard, and then, in the second round of sharing, each person takes a turn saying what stood out to them from what the others shared. During this phase, some throughlines or tensions may emerge, but they are not yet discussed. The group again takes a few minutes of silence, and then, in the third round, they discuss what emerged in the previous rounds. At the synod, each group was invited to document at this point “convergences” and “divergences” of opinions from their conversations, along with any proposals or open questions they wanted to raise.
While the method has certainly gained popularity in the last two years because of its use in the synod, it is not new. The method is rooted in what Jesuits call the “Canadian method” of spiritual conversation, which was developed in Canada and the northeastern United States beginning in the 1970s, and the method grew richer in Canada and Belgium in subsequent decades.
After Vatican II, interest in individually directed retreats swelled, and some Jesuits, including the Canadians John English, John Veltri, and John Wickham, began to explore how to create something similar for groups. The three were seen as seminal members of the Montreal Directed Retreats movement rooted at the Guelph Centre of Spirituality (now called Loyola House/Ignatian Jesuit Centre) in the city of Guelph, Ontario.
Because the Spiritual Exercises are meant to guide individual retreatants through discernment of a decision, the exercises done by a group could be a type of communal discernment—for example, about the identity and future of the group.
With Father English, the American Jesuit George Schemel, himself the founder of multiple spirituality centers in the United States, co-founded a group called Ignatian Spiritual Exercises for the Corporate Person, which included James Borbely, S.J., Maria Carew, R.S.H.M., John Haley, and Sister Judith Roemer. The group developed a method for discernment in common, which it published in three volumes, one of which was released in 1989. The method guided groups through three questions: Who are you, as a group, before God? What do you do (or what are you called to do)? How do you do it?
Peter Bisson, S.J., recalls Father Schemel visiting Guelph, often to work with Father English and the I.S.E.C.P. group in the early 1980s, when Father Bisson was a novice there. He later returned for his tertianship—the final phase of Jesuit formation—to Guelph, where he and the other tertians “breathed, ate and dreamed spiritual conversation and discernment in common” under Father English’s direction, Father Bisson wrote in an email interview.
“Because of the influence of I.S.E.C.P. on Loyola House [novitiate in Guelph] and the centrality of Loyola House in the life of the English Canada province, many of the Jesuits of my generation had some exposure to it,” Father Bisson continued.
Meanwhile, in the mid-1980s, Father Wickham wrote and gave the first version of his communal exercises to small groups; he would expand this into a guide whose second edition was published in two parts in 1991. The same year, Father Schemel and Sister Roemer published a 16-part video series called “Ignatian Spirituality and the Directed Retreat,” geared toward groups, to meet the growing desire from groups for directed Ignatian retreats.
By the mid-1990s, the communal retreat and discernment model had caught on internationally. In 1995, a Belgian group called E.S.D.A.C. (Exercises Spirituelles pour Discernement Apostolique en Commun) was formed by some Jesuits, translating I.S.E.C.P.’s work into French. To this day, E.S.D.A.C. leads groups in discernment and has a presence across Europe and in Canada and Lebanon. As the method grew in Belgium, though, it waned in popularity in Canada.
In 2002, Father Bisson, today one of the most significant promoters of the “Canadian method” in Canada, returned from his doctoral studies in Rome and was tasked with “strengthening [the English Jesuits’] social justice sector with spiritual conversation and discernment in common.” He said the effort was “fruitful, and was the beginning of discernment in common taking root in the English Canada province.”
In 2008, he was asked to put together a toolkit on spiritual conversation and discernment in common, which he did with Earl Smith, S.J., and Elaine Regan-Nightingale, who had both been involved in the Jesuits’ Christian Life Communities in Canada. The communities had been working with Father English and had become “a strong repository of these skills,” Father Bisson said, “and their skills and knowledge in turn helped renew and spread these skills in the Jesuit province.”
By that point, he said, all of the Jesuit novices in Canada were learning the “Canadian method,” and it was used at province gatherings, including those attended by now-Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, who was influenced by the method.
The “discernment in common” or “spiritual conversation” method gained a global spotlight when it was used at the Jesuits’ 36th General Congregation in 2017 to get the order past an impasse in their conversations. The following year, the French- and English-speaking provinces of the Canadian Jesuits merged and, in 2019, the new province founded a committee called Service for Discernment in Common, which incorporated some of the French province’s work with E.S.D.A.C. and the English province’s developments from the Guelph school of thought. The group was headed by Laurence Loubières, X.M.C.J., who is now superior general of the small (about 100 members) Ignatian-inspired order of Xavières—of which Sister Nathalie Becquart, one of two undersecretaries for the Synod on Synodality, is a member.
The method has now spread through the Jesuits and other Ignatian-inspired orders well beyond Canada—so much so that, according to Father Bisson, it is no longer widely referred to as the “Canadian method” but simply “spiritual conversation” or “discernment in common.”
So, how exactly did what was once known as the “Canadian method” make the jump from the Jesuits of Canada to the global Synod on Synodality?
The method was proposed by the synod’s commission on methodology, which was headed by Sister Becquart, she confirmed in an email to America. She had learned the method from the Xavières of Canada, and others on the commission had had personal experience with it as well. Because the commission had been tasked with finding best practices for use at the synod, and because its members had heard from members of the Australian Plenary Council that the method had had positive results there, they proposed it for use at the synod assemblies.
