Manu Gómez Cid appointed Director of the Secretariat of the Laity
Br Ernesto Sánchez, Superior General, and the General Council have appointed Manu Gómez Cid, of the Province of Mediterránea, as Director of the Secretariat of the Laity. He will assume this mission from 1 January 2024, replacing Raúl Amaya, from the Province of Santa María de los Andes, who has been director for the last six years.
Manu has been deputy director of the Secretariat since 2020, a role he has performed at the same time as his service as the coordinator of the Marist Life Council and the Laity Team of his Province.
The Laity Secretariat team includes a director and two deputy directors, as well as the group that forms the Extended Secretariat, with representatives from each region of the Institute.
Manu Gómez Cid is a lay Marist of the Province of Mediterránea who has made a formal commitment to the charism.
He was born in Seville, in the south of Spain. He is the eldest of a large family of five siblings. He has been married to María for 24 years, and they have three sons: Pablo (20), Marcos (18) and Daniel (13).
His whole life has been linked to Marists. He attended Marist schools in Granada, Badajoz and Seville, his home town. The key experience that led him over time to discover the richness of the Marist charism was joining the Friendship and Christian Life Group (GVX) of the former Province of Betica. He came to know the life lived by the brothers through meetings, gatherings, camps, vocational retreats, work camps… These helped in his personal growth and as a follower of Jesus, and he became captivated by the person of Marcellin Champagnat.
He studied Physics at the University of Seville and, on completing his studies, he qualified as a secondary school teacher. Throughout his university life, he was very involved as a group leader in the GVX and developed his social sensitivity, collaborating in some of the marginalised areas of his city and in rural work camps with other young people and brothers. He joined the Bolivia Project group, linked to the NGO SED, and lived for a year in the Marist community of Comarapa (Bolivia), supervising some development projects in the nearby rural area of Siberia.
On his return from that experience, he began to work as a teacher at the Marist school in Seville, while remaining involved with both the GVX and the Bolivia Project. It was in this group that he met his wife, María, whom he married in 1999. In 2002 they spent a whole year in a new experience of co-operation in Bolivia, forming part of the mixed community of Comarapa, with four Marist Brothers.
At his school in Seville he served as Pastoral Coordinator for four years, and as Director for another four years. During that last period he was a member of the preparatory commission for the II Marist International Mission Assembly, which took place in Nairobi (Kenya) in 2014.
In recent years he has been on the pastoral team of the Province of Mediterránea, providing animation, formation and support for school staffs and, in a special way, all that touches on Marist Youth Ministry. More recently, as coordinator of the Council of Marist Life and of the Laity Team of his Province, he has been offering his experience and leadership regarding lay vocational discernment, various types of mixed communities, living out Marist spirituality, and all that might help us grow in the charism of Champagnat as brothers and laypeople alike.
This whole experience of close-knit community and of pastoral and social service, is nourished by the life and faith he shares with a group of Marist lay men and women in his city.
From the beginning of 2020 until now, he has combined his work in the Province of Mediterránea with his service as assistant director of the Institute’s Secretariat of the Laity.