41 la propuesta cristiana ante los desafíos de un mundo en cambio You must love those you lead. It comes right from the dictionary. You will see different definitions of the word leadership of course, but they will always include one like this, “to point out a way, direction or goal and to influence others”. Probably everyone here is using these words all the time even though you are not holding a sign and literally pointing a direction, but by our behavior: how do we make use of our money, how we treat other people, how we use our time, how we are implicitly pointing our way and saying “this is how human beings should function in society”. And so, if we were to have any good influence in public life, in civic engagement surely this must begin with each of us, in some way, showing our own leadership and pointing out our behaviors, our priorities, and the right kind of direction. Now, we are also coming into this conference under the umbrella of our Catholic tradition and let me speak for a couple of minutes about how we might connect this idea of leadership, which seems a very secular and busy idea. To a faith tradition, and let me first say that for those of us in a Christian tradition, leadership is kind of a paradox, because I guess if I ask you to speak about yourselves as what does it mean to be a Christian, most of us would use words like “you have to be a follower of ideas, you are a follower of Jesus”, and indeed our religious language uses words like vocation and disciple that have a connotation of follower like “if I call you come to me”. Disciples learn, but our religious language also uses words like “apostle” and “mission”, and these words of course have exactly the opposite meaning. Mission means, I send, if I send you somewhere you’re not following, you’re going and this is how we might understand the paradox of how leadership works itself out for us as Christians. In other words, it has a following component, we’re following Jesus, Jesus words, but it also must have a dimension where we’re showing leadership in our family, for those of you in the university, of course, in the classroom and in the theme of this university, of this conference, in civic life as well. Now, to push further on the paradox. I guess some people are uncomfortable with the idea of leadership when talking about themselves. After all, we just heard about cardinal Maradiaga, this is a cardinal, we’re a hierarchical church, he’s a leader. Pope Francis is really the leader not me, but look, when we were baptized if you read your catechism, we had some share in Christ’s identity, as priest, prophet and king. This is the catholic catechism, not some nonsense from an American, from New York City, leadership, love and civic engagement: our "calling" in vuca world
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