Boston College established an office of Ministry to Priests on a pilot basis starting in 2017 to offer pastoral care for those who do pastoral care for the people of God. The programs offered by the office are psychological consulting services, spiritual direction, retreats, and thematic days of prayer, renewal and enrichment.
Ministry to Priests supports priests through:
- Presentations on spirituality, scripture, and pastoral issues
- Preached retreats
- Spiritual direction
- Pastoral visits
- Cooperation with ongoing diocesan spiritual endeavors
The Reverend John C. Monahan, S.J. entered the Society of Jesus in 1991 and was ordained in 1999. He grew up in Lexington, MA.
Fr. Monahan has extensive pastoral experience in parishes, campus ministry, hospital ministry, prison ministry, faith formation and spiritual direction. He retired in January 2017 from the Navy where he served as a naval chaplain for the Navy, Marines and Coast Guard for 12 years. While in the Navy he served not only on ships and bases but also held the role of Command Chaplain at USCG Base Kodiak AK. In this position, he functioned as head of the Catholic Chapel; he was the base pastor.
Fr. Monahan has extensive training in spiritual direction and holds degrees from Community College of the Air Force, Maxwell AFB, Al (A.A.S), Anna Maria College, Paxton MA (B.S.), American International College, Springfield, MA (M.A.), Gonzaga University, WA (M.A. & a PHL) and finally a M.Div. from Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, CA. In addition, he has four units of C.P.E from St. Elizabeth Hospital, Brighton, MA and Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington D.C. Besides Fr. Monahan’s service in the United States Navy, he was an Associate Pastor and Campus Minister at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Storrs, CT as well as Associate Pastor at Saints Peter and Paul Church, Norwich, CT.
As part of Fr. Monahan’s ministry within the Navy, he's had numerous hours of training for stress assessment and reduction along with assessing emotional stability. He has also had training around issues of post traumatic stress, suicide assessment, depression and addictive behavior; these have all been part of his ministerial formation.
Fr. John Siberski was born in a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. He followed in his father’s footsteps and became a medical doctor. Fr. Siberski entered the Society of Jesus in 1997 at age 48 and was ordained ten years later.
Siberski received an M.D. in 1975 from Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia, PA and subsequently completed a residency in internal medicine. After ten years in practice, he returned to Temple University Hospital for three years of training in psychiatry. The following year was spent as a fellow in consultation psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston working under the supervision of the director of the fellowship, George Murray and the chief of psychiatry at MGH, Ned Cassem, (both Jesuit priests). Siberski was appointed assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire where he worked for four years.
During the course of his teaching career, he has held positions at many different colleges and organizations including Georgetown University Medical School, Harvard Medical School, and Geisinger Medical Center. While teaching over the past fifteen years Jack Siberski developed what could be called a 'side-practice' working with religious and priests (Dominican, Franciscan, Jesuit, Carthusian, and diocesan) in addition to some women religious orders. The nature of that work has included diagnostic evaluation, psychopharmacology, various forms of psychotherapy, and long-term follow-up. For approximately 20 years, well before he entered the Society, Fr. Siberski was very involved in the Conference for the Care of Aging Religious based at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA.
Jack Siberski is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (1993) and the American Board of Internal Medicine (1978).