Archdiocese, MU Join in New Leadership Initiative

JAY SORGI

SPECIAL TO THE CATHOLIC HERALD

Wisconsin’s biggest Catholic university, one of America’s largest, is offering the Archdiocese of Milwaukee many of its resources within a new partnership designed to fuel the Milwaukee area’s parishes and schools with a greater number of highly and uniquely qualified leaders.

“It’s Marquette University saying to the archdiocese, ‘How can we help?’” said Dr. Dan Scholz, the director of the new Catholic Schools and Parishes Initiative at the university, a joint venture with the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to grow professional development within the local Church.

“’Are there gaps in your programming? Are there things that, if you could really do more, what would you like to do if you had sort of a partnership?’”

Scholz, a Marquette alumnus, former Pius XI teacher and St. Francis de Sales Seminary faculty member, said such partnerships between dioceses and Catholic universities exist but “don’t happen nearly as much as it could, and probably should.”

The archdiocese previously had such a partnership built with Scholz, one called the Saint Clare Center for Lay Ministry, which began in 2007 when he was president of Cardinal Stritch University.

Cardinal Stritch closed in 2023, and Marquette brought on many of the university’s faculty and leaders. Scholz kept the vision for such a hub of Catholic leadership growth alive, with a chance to add muscle, greater variance of expertise and larger scale to the program due to Marquette’s size. It also had the support of Marquette’s late president, Dr. Michael Lovell.

“Mike was always an advocate for Catholic education here in Milwaukee,” said Edward Foy, Superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. “It really started with some conversations around Mike and Dan talking about what Dan (would) be interested in.”

“A big motivation for me coming over to Marquette is (to answer), ‘Could we replicate some of that programming that we had at Cardinal Stritch University here at Marquette?’” Scholz said. “It’s not exactly the same kind of programming, but the spirit is absolutely the same.”

The effort to expand education and leadership programming within the partnership is meant to fill what Catholic leaders in Milwaukee see as a multitude of gaps in parishes and schools.

“There’s tremendous need,” said Fr. Phillip Bogacki, Moderator of the Curia of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and pastor of Christ King Parish in Wauwatosa.

“There’s a dire shortage of lay leaders to work in our parishes and to support Catholic life through our parishes and our schools. As the dynamics of the practice of the Catholic faith have changed, we just don’t have people coming forward, in the same ways as perhaps 20 or 30 years ago, to staff our parishes.”

Fr. Bogacki sees beyond just the effort to turn qualified lay leaders into effective business managers, administrative leaders and others who play key roles in the life of a parish. He adds how Marquette can lead the continual evolution of understanding what makes a great leader at the local level in the Church.

“Something we are hoping for with this new partnership is that Marquette is an academic thought partner with us,” Fr. Bogacki said.

“In a sense, it serves like a think tank as to how to form leaders, how to form disciples in the church, where sometimes in our parishes and even at the diocesan offices, we’re on the ground keeping up with things. We’re hoping that an academic institution like Marquette will help us to think through and to reflect on these things more carefully as time goes on.”

Within education, Foy sees how the needed qualities in a Catholic school leader differ from their public school counterparts.

“They have to be business leaders. They have to be educational leaders. They have to drive the Catholic mission and formation of everyone,” said Foy. “Schools have grown more and more complicated in the last few decades, and there’s not this huge staff of dedicated religious, primarily our wonderful history of sisters serving in the schools. The lay leaders that we have leading our Catholic schools have a really complicated job, and anything we can do to provide them with additional training, support and professional development programming is really essential for them to be effective in what they do.”

While leaders have identified the need for continually growing skills meant for fostering Catholic identity and strategic planning for schools, Scholz explained how schools have had to continually evolve to the changing needs of their students. Students with special needs provide a major example.

“For a long time, kids with more complex special needs weren’t well served in Catholic schools and had to go to the public school. We have found that special need parents want their kids in Catholic schools,” Foy said. “One of the first areas that Marquette and the Office for Schools here at the archdiocese have been working on is how we develop a certificate to help train existing Catholic school teachers into becoming teachers with a certificate, and how to deal with special needs inclusion within the classroom. If that can open up more doors, more of our Catholic schools can say yes to special needs families.”

Scholz said the program will probably need about three years to get up and running, but Fr. Bogacki believes that by next year, some programming could begin.

“The fun part about this is, right now it’s sort of a blank slate,” said Fr. Bogacki. “We’ll be spending the next number of months carefully putting this together, and hopefully sometime in 2025 roll out some concrete programming that will continue to build.”

Scholz adds that within five to 10 years, he hopes the initiative becomes a true center “who are in full partnership with the archdiocese, with the schools office, with the parish office, and just in partnership helping do the work of the Church.”

“You know Marquette is so committed to that,” said Scholz. “The Jesuits and just Ignatian spirituality, it just flows really well with that mission.”