by Duncan MacLaren

This is possibly the first time that a PhD thesis has been reviewed in Open House. The author is the former Director of the Craighead Institute of Life and Faith, Dr Pauline Petrie, who prematurely passed away in 2014. The University of Glasgow has only recently given permission for the thesis to be made public on the university website.

University theses are written according to an academic format whose main purpose is to award the scholar with a doctorate. A thesis is often only read by very few experts in whatever field it is covering and has to be an original piece of research that contributes to knowledge. In this case, the thesis is not only of great importance to the history and methodologies of the Craighead Institute but acts as a template for organisations that want to make the poor and their allies agents of change, inspired by the Christian story and teaching.

The Board of the Craighead Institute was keen that Pauline’s work which, while being written with academic rigour, manages to be readable and engaging, should be known to a wider audience. In lieu of the thesis being turned into a book, facilitating access to the thesis on the current University of Glasgow website seemed to be the best option.

Integrating Life and Faith

The Craighead Institute for Life and Faith was founded in 1987 by Faithful Companion of Jesus sister, Christine Anderson. Her experience in teaching, family and social action work and in being a pastoral assistant to a bishop in the Westminster archdiocese led her to conclude that the Church had to invest in the relationship between the faith of lay people and their everyday life. It was deemed necessary to equip the laity with tools to carry out their Christian vocation, particularly towards the poor and vulnerable. That resulted in Integration of Life and Faith (ILF) courses for which the Institute is still most known.

Pauline unpacks the influences and forces behind the ILF, beginning with three giants of theological and pedagogical praxis: Belgian Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, and St Ignatius of Loyola, the Spanish founder of the Jesuits and author of the Spiritual Exercises.

Joseph Cardijn (1882-1967) was a Belgian priest who devoted his life to bringing the faith back to the working class. He founded the Young Christian Workers’ (YCW) Movement and is renowned as the creator of the ‘See, Judge, Act’ formula, taken up by the YCW and used by countless other Catholic organisations such as SCIAF and Justice and Peace Commissions and, most recently, in the encyclicals of Pope Francis, notably Laudato Si’. After being blessed by Pope Pius XI in March 1925, that Holy Father is said to have exclaimed of Cardijn, ‘Here at last is someone who comes to speak to me about the masses!....The Church needs the workers and the workers need the Church’.

The second inspiration is Paulo Freire (1921-1997) who was a Brazilian educator engaged with adult literacy in the 1960s which, in Pauline’s words, ‘led to his theories about liberatory or emancipatory education and to the part critical consciousness plays in the liberation of oppressed peoples from their oppressors’. Critical consciousness or conscientisation (from conscientização in Freire’s native Portuguese) is the process of developing greater awareness of the social reality which is oppressing you through reflection and action and using that knowledge to transform structures in society in order to humanise it. That requires the slow transformation of oneself from being a passive bystander in society to being involved in conscious, practical action (praxis) to change oneself, one’s surroundings and the world. This led to Craighead particularly focusing on giving courses to people who lived on the margins of Scottish society.

The third inspiration for Craighead’s work is the man who became Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), born in the Basque country of Spain to minor nobility and founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1541. He was known for showing humankind how God worked in the ordinary events of people’s lives and emphasised a spirituality based on experience. In the words of Craighead’s founder, Sr Christine Anderson FCJ, cited in the thesis, ‘As an Ignatian Institute, we too work from the raw material of our experience, especially as we live our lives day by day. This is the history of the people of God today – not yesterday – not theory – but reality’.

The way of life and thoughts of Cardijn, Freire and St Ignatius combine together to make the heady brew that provides the methodology, content and spirituality of the Integrating Life and Faith programmes. They are analysed in the rest of the thesis by case studies based on the transformative experiences of participants in ILFs in Edinburgh, Liverpool and Glasgow.

In Pauline’s own summary, ‘the study offers a new contribution to knowledge about the way in which a pastoral approach to critical pedagogy can be employed in a liminal space to enable lay people to use their faith as a resource in the way they live out their Christian vocation to transform the world by humanising it. The study has implications, not only for The Craighead Institute but also for religiously affiliated Higher Educational institutions where the aim is to bring about “mature discipleship” and humanising pedagogies for learners and leaders of all ages’.

I would add, in this age of synodality, it is also, as the International Theological Commission concluded in its synodal document, ‘for the people of God, a source of the joy promised by Jesus, a catalyst of new life, the springboard for a new phase of missionary commitment’ and therefore appropriate for parishes to take up enthusiastically to reinvigorate ecclesial life.

In the end, this thesis should not be characterised as an arcane piece of academic research gathering dust in a library. It is a living validation of the work of the Craighead Institute as a whole, and a fascinating insight into its methodologies which continue to transformed lives through Integration of Life and Faith courses.

Petrie, Pauline Dawn (2011) A pastoral approach to critical pedagogy: effecting social justice. . PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Dr Duncan MacLaren has been a Trustee of the Craighead Institute since 2015 and has worked for the offshoot, Faith and Praxis, in Rome, Ghana and Cameroun along with Sr Christine Anderson FCJ, the founder of the Institute, and the Institute’s Chair, Fr Jim Christie SJ, using similar methodologies described in Dr Petrie’s thesis. He knew Dr Petrie when she was Director of the Craighead Institute. For the latest iteration of an Integrating Life and Faith course, see the article in February’s edition of Open House, Skills for a Synodal Church by Lisa Curtice. If you are interested in establishing a course in your parish contact Rev Lisa on craigheadinstitute@gmail.com.