In February, 2007 Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, former General Superior of the Society, gave the opening address entitled, “Cura Personalis” to those in Rome attending the course/workshop on “Spiritual Accompaniment in the Ignatian Tradition. (“ Cura Personalis”, Review of Ignatian Spirituality, Number 114.) 

Fr. Kolvenbach dealt principally with the application of this term in the context of the relationship between director and rereatant in the Spiritual Exercises. He stressed that the director must care for the retreatant in a personal way, to quote Fr. Kolvenbach, “refusing all professional or institutional terminology.” Fr. Kovenbach’s focus was the term “personalis” referring to the personhood of the retreatant.

     A little while ago we at St. Paul’s High School in Winnipeg were exploring how we should be applying the cura personalis in our work.   My contribution was to offer a different nuance to this Latin term, one which rather than stressing the personhood of the recipient/student instead stressed the giver/teacher.

For “personalis” in Latin most properly means “personal” in the sense of relating to the person who is the GIVER  not the RECEIVER of the care. An example of this use occurs in the Society of Jesus’s term “personalia” which refers to the stipend a Jesuit is given to spend on himself.

 What I write below is geared to education but I believe that the principles underpinning this approach are applicable to any endeavour where care is offered to those with less power than one has. And so I invite you to read the following mutatis mutandis.

   The Latin word “cura” has a wealth of meanings. It is often translated as “a care” usually in the sense of “taking care.” But it has other senses. It can mean a trouble or worry; it can mean exertion or diligence; it can even mean a “pain” in the sense of “taking pains to do something.” I’d like to mine these other meanings for a while.

To me, offering cura personalis to my students means that I pay personal attention to them. It means that I willingly undertake the pain and even sometimes the nuisance of giving them attention. It means that I exert myself to do the magis by them, the magis, of course, meaning that I give the best and most effective instruction and  care calculated to their maximum benefit.

 In the last paragraph of his article letter, Fr. Kolvenbach dealt with cura personalis more in the sense I have just mentioned and specifically in the context of education. He referred to St. Ignatius’s note for the  Contemplation to Obtain Divine Love that love is best expressed in actions, not words. In this spirit, the critical teaching I give my students is myself.

 I see cura personalis as our attempt to imitate the intensely personal, specific, wild and oceanic love which God has for each human being, a love so unimaginably great that he joins himself eternally to us as one of us and so persisting that he continues in the Eucharist to give food to our body and spirit and to intoxicate us with his love, his cura personalis.

 The opposite of cura personalis  is, I believe, bureaucracy. Fr. Kolvenbach suggested this, I think, by pointing out how St. Ignatius consciously strove to replace the scholastic approach with an approach of “conversation.”  Bureaucracy is what the Simpsons’ Patti and Selma give at the Springfield motor vehicles branch: a spiritless application of the rules, a focus on procedures rather than on persons, a bias towards preventing things from happening rather than on enabling and, most spirit-crushing, the sense that the experience, knowledge, desires, hopes and dreams of the recipient of the bureaucratic ministration are utterly irrelevant to the true task at hand…. which is the processing of this inconvenient person.

     And so I offer the following examples of cura personalis with students.

   Teachers are exercising cura personalis……

    -when we learn their names and greet them by name especially out of class

    -when we struggle hard to mark work quickly and get it back quickly…even if it just about kills us!

    -when we refuse to blindly apply rules

    -when we discipline with fairness, consistency and predictability….and when disciplining them costs us, too

     -when we exercise, as Fr. Kolvenbach advocates, “a respectful familiarity” with them

    -when we make prudent adaptations in our expectations to suit their needs

    -when we laugh with them, cry with them, rejoice with them, mourn with them

    -when we demand more of ourselves than of them

     -when we forgive their flaws, indolence and selfishness even seventy times seven times

     -when we allow our own human weakness to show through and allow them to exercise cura personalis towards us.         

   I am certain that you can think of many examples, too, for whenever we are Christ ministering to Christ as the least among us, we’re exercising cura personalis.   

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Source for all photos; Marc de Asis, SJ