A critical analysis of servant leadership in the catholic tradition in the light of Robert Greenleaf's primus inter pares model

• Main Author: Mendoza, Kim S.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Christian leadership; Servant leadership—Religious aspects—Catholic Church; Greenleaf, Robert K.; Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_tred/3; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=etdm_tred
• Institution: De La Salle University

The main purpose of this study was to inquire whether Robert Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership can enrich the Catholic perspective on leadership within a servant church. We approached this question by doing a discourse analysis of servant leadership both in the Catholic and the Quaker-Greenleaf traditions. Our comparison yielded the following observations: 1) the Church has no operating structural model to function as a servant institution; and 2) the Church suffers from the disadvantages of hierarchical power even if governed by a hierarchical authority (in the context of service). On this basis, the paper proposes a critical appropriation of Greenleaf’s primus inter pares organizational model for servant institutions to the Church’s leadership structures at the universal, regional, national, diocesan, and parish levels. The study also demonstrates how a primus inter pares servant structure finds its equivalence in a collegial and truly synodal Church.