Welcome

KERRY ALYS ROBINSON:

Welcome to Philadelphia. Welcome to an extraordinary opportunity to make a substantive, innovative, creative, and faithful contribution to the Church at the local diocesan, national, and now global level. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your leadership in the Church and in the world. Thank you for your pastoral effect and your analytical acumen. Above all, thank you for your evident care of the Church, our beloved Church, and for your faith and your magnanimity reflected in the generosity of your time, expertise, financial support, inspiring witness, and advocacy of the Church you want to see and you know is possible, a Church that is trusted, accountable, transparent, ennobling, Christ-like, humble, powerful, effective, ethical, and irresistible.

One does not have to think long on the heartbreaking, deeply serious challenges facing our nation and the world to realize what an important asset the Church globally is, its explicit religious mission we attest as salvific. It is the largest global humanitarian network in the world. Its commitment to bearing witness to hope, to compassion, to mercy, and to reconciliation and justice, these are the reasons it matters to work on behalf of the Church, to ensure that the Church has every resource at its disposal to care for, account for, and carry forward its mission. What we collectively do matters, and it matters deeply. Our work is not for the faint of heart. There are no quick fixes, and it doesn’t intuitively pull at the heartstrings. But every day that we contribute to a change in consciousness about the importance of best managerial practices; every week that we advance the importance of utilizing the managerial expertise of laity; every month that we help Church leaders solve complex temporal challenges; and every year that we establish positive managerial reform, accountability, transparency, ethics, and excellence as constitutive of what it means to be Church, is time very well spent.

Twelve years ago, Geoff Boisi, our founder, convened hundreds of leaders from the Church and world in this very city. A conference entitled “Church in America,” in the aftermath of the devastating sexual abuse crisis, was designed to answer one important and deeply faithful question: How can we collectively effect healing and reconciliation in the Church, restore trust, solve temporal challenges, and create the conditions and the culture that would allow the Church to benefit from contemporary managerial practices and protocols of ethics and excellence? For many of the founding trustees and for me, returning to Philadelphia is nostalgic. We can appreciate how far we have come in 12 years. No longer an experiment, we are trusted and respected by Church leaders. These are exciting days for the Roundtable, new days requiring new strategic commitments, new leadership, new marketing, new philanthropic investors, new programmatic approaches, and new partnerships. How blessed we are to have the leadership of Pope Francis, who is making positive managerial reform a signature of his Pontificate. We have duly chosen the theme, The Francis Effect and Transforming Church Culture: Advancing Best Managerial and Leadership Practices. to the Church in Philadelphia, truly a sister foundation to my own family’s philanthropy, the Raskob Foundation for Catholic Activities. Tom has graciously agreed to lead us in prayer. His family has generously helped to support this gathering today, and we are very grateful.

And now before we formally begin the program, it is my pleasure to introduce a colleague in Catholic philanthropy and a friend over many years now, a local host, Vice President for Planning at the Connelly Foundation, Tom Riley. The Connelly Foundation has been a model and an inspiration, a remarkable support