Anne Grycz, founding director of the Institute for Leadership in Ministry (ILM), is retiring at the end of this month. She will remain involved in ministry as a master of ceremonies for the bishop at liturgical celebrations and will serve on several diocesan ministry boards.
She plans to spend some time in Jamaica working with Father Robert Brocato who is currently on mission in Montego Bay. Grycz will support him as he is setting up a School of Ministry for parishioners there.
In addition, she will be working part time with Sulpician Father Gerald Brown as Associate Director of the Pastoral Year Program that Father Brown directs at St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park.
Grycz has mentored 608 lay leaders from local parishes through the ILM’s three-year program; 2010 marked the eleventh graduating class. The program started in the Diocese of San Jose in 1997.
Grycz reflected on her 24 years of diocesan ministry which have included serving as Assistant Director of the Office for Word and Worship (liturgy), being an MC, and service on ministry boards and commissions locally and nationally.
As ILM Director, Grycz has visited every pastor in the diocese and has been diligent in working with them over time to determine pastoral and ministry needs.
In addition to the regular course work for ILM students, the ILM has also provided a number of special courses over the years to deal with issues such as Marriage Preparation, Immigration, Restorative Justice, and the Spirituality of Aging.
Grycz has built ILM faculty by creating relationships with local Catholic universities, especially Santa Clara University. She said, “I think both the diocese and SCU have benefitted.”
Grycz reflected on her own life and “pathway to lay ecclesial ministry” and developments in the Church since the 1960s and Vatican II.
Daughter of an Irish Catholic family in San Francisco, she has an uncle who was a priest and a cousin who is a nun, and attended Catholic schools through college. She was President of the Sodality in high school and taught CCD in her local parish.
She attended the University of San Francisco at the time of Vatican II, married three weeks after her graduation and three years later was the mother of two children.
Her son attended St. Elizabeth Seton School in Palo Alto and she became a “school mom” while also serving as a lector and the Director of Religious Education at her parish, having completed the first Master Catechist program.
A significant place in her life has been the Redwood Monastery in northern California where she has made a retreat every year since 1967.
The road hasn’t always been smooth. After 10 years her marriage ended and was annulled three years later. She went to work in the corporate world, sustained a life-threatening illness and underwent surgery for a brain tumor.
Following the advice of her parish priest who told her, “You owe God something,” Grycz agreed to chair the parish liturgical planning committee.
She vividly recalls the 1981 announcement of the new Diocese of San Jose. “It was an exciting time. There was a lot of energy,” she said, “and there were already a number of full or part time liturgical lay leaders at parishes here, along with a flourishing catechetical ministry with mostly lay ministers.”
She said that Bishop Pierre DuMaine (first Bishop of San Jose) and local pastors were comfortable with lay leaders and that “Bishop DuMaine also encouraged connection with the broader Church on the national level.”
Grycz was involved with the FDLC (Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions) and the Commission on Certification and Accreditation of the national bishops’ conference which oversees standards, policies and procedures for ministry formation programs and for specialized ecclesial ministers.
By 1986 she found herself jobless when the company she worked for went bankrupt. After seeking work for six months, she had two viable offers, one in the corporate world and another at the Diocese of San Jose.
“I wasn’t too keen on the diocese,” she said, “but then I got advice from my two Jewish friends. The husband told me to take the job with the diocese because ‘it’s the oldest and largest corporation in the world and nobody is going to buy them out.’”
She accepted the position of Assistant Director in the diocesan liturgy office, working with Father Richard Hilliard whom she succeeded in 1990.
“It was during those years in the Worship Office that I came to realize that this was not a job, but a ministry; not a career, but a vocation,” she said.
She credits “significant people in my life,” including Father Hilliard, former Chancellor Presentation Sister Patricia Marie Mulpeters, theologian Father Jack Bonsor, Bishop DuMaine and his successor Bishop Patrick J. McGrath, for “their mentoring and leadership in promoting lay ministry.”
In 1997 Grycz became the first ILM director and has overseen the growth and development of the basic three-year course, with both English and Spanish tracks, as well as the Advanced Lay Leadership program which is the “graduate arm” of the ILM students in Advanced Lay Leadership study alongside the candidates for the permanent diaconate.
Grycz has a particular interest in multicultural ministry and is attuned to the diversity of people in the diocese. She was engaged with the local gathering of the Asian Pacific Institute in 2004 and with the Cultural Orientation Program for International Priests.
The ILM reflects the multicultural diversity of the diocese with an array of students – Latino, Vietnamese, Caucasian, Korean, Chinese, Indian – and is “the most clearly multicultural aspect of the diocese,” she said.
As she looks to an active retirement, she cherishes the “gifts and challenges of the Diocese of San Jose” and the “bishops and priests who have been so receptive of lay ecclesial ministry. We are blessed.”
She was recently honored with the Benedictus Award, a diocesan honor, and in 2007 she was given the Pro Ecclesia et Pontiface Award, a papal honor which recognizes service to the Church.