Episode 287: Msgr. Patrick Gaalaas on the Ministry of the Spiritual Director (June 26, 2024)

In this episode of The Open Door (June 26),  panelists Jim Hanink, Christopher Zehnder, and Valerie Niemeyer discuss the role of spiritual direction. Just what is it? What is the ministry of the spiritual director? Our special and welcome guest is Msgr. Patrick Gaalaas. He is a priest of the Diocese of Tulsa and Eastern Oklahoma. Msgr. Gaalaas retired from parish work in 2022 at the age of 75. But “retirement” has led to “redirection.” He has worked as a spiritual director at Conception Seminary College in Missouri for the past two years. (Full disclosure: Monsignor has known Jim Hanink from the time they were fellow college seminarians at Assumption Seminary in San Antonio, Texas.) Msgr. Gaalaas spent his final four years in the seminary at the American College at the University of Louvain in Belgium. There he earned a bachelor’s degree in Sacred Theology and a master’s degree in Moral and Religious Sciences. Among the questions we’ll be asking are the following. 

1. You moved from parish work to a Benedictine Abbey. Is there a distinctive Benedictine spirituality?
2. Spiritual direction pairs a spiritual director with a person interested in direction. But how does the average Catholic, if there is such a creature, know whether to seek spiritual direction?
3. What’s the difference between spiritual direction and psychological counselling?
4. How does one go about finding a spiritual director? What might one expect if one Google searched “spiritual direction near me”?
5. How does one become a spiritual director? Who can become a spiritual director?
6. Is a personal calling from God requisite for being a spiritual director?
7. Do spiritual directors ordinarily have diocesan recognition?
8. What sort of direction do spiritual directors themselves have?
9. Might we say that the Holy Spirit is at the center of spiritual direction?
10. What are some signs that spiritual direction is going well? Or is not going well?