John Roche defends his thesis

This afternoon John Roche successfully defended his thesis. The theme he chose was Spiritual Accompaniment. The Salesian Pontifical University has awarded John with the Licentiate in Sacred Theology (STL) and is now qualified to teach theology. He will join the teaching team at the Institute of Salesian Studies at Don Bosco Hall in Berkeley.

Accompaniment? Is that about music? What is spiritual accompaniment?

Ah… you will have to read John’s thesis to find out! (j/k). It is a way of considering spiritual direction in the style and spirit of St Francis de Sales and the praxis of St John Bosco. Instead of sitting impartial in the role of spiritual guru, the Salesian guides those seeking spiritual direction by walking with them, journeying alongside them… and in the process, experiences everything of the same journey.

John entitled his thesis: The Salesian Youth Spirituality of Accompaniment: Fr. Juan Vecchi’s Vision of Youth Spirituality for a New Moment. However, in the course of the writing, John opened up three areas of investigation. I thought that he could have reduced all this to one, because he has the topics of three different theses really. Throughout the writing and correcting, he attempted to narrow it down, narrow it down… but in the end he wanted to be comprehensive in all this.

Well the defense went well, as I said. John had a huge group following the exchange, so much so that we had to move the examination to a bigger room. John was very articulate as well, and did extremely well on the oral examination. My own thought is that he will have a lot of material from this thesis that he can develop into courses for the ISS when he gets there for the Autumn Term.

Great work, John! Congratulations.