FR. WILLIAM M. WATSON, S.J., D.MIN.

Sacred Story Institute (SSI) was founded in 2012 by Fr. Bill Watson, S.J. Fr. Bill discovered his vocation while listening to a sermon in church and thinking: “I could do better than that!” He heard God was telling him: “Bill, make Jesus and the spiritual life more understandable and accessible to people.” Those were his missioning orders. As a young Jesuit, he inherited a campus ministry program that had nine directors in eleven years. This taught him that he needed to create sound spiritual programs that could stand the test of time. Forty-four years later, the retreat program he created at that school has transformed twenty thousand students and the campus culture. After theological studies in Boston, he created the retreat programs office at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. From no programs in 1986, he left the university in 1998 with 4 major programs that have served over thirty thousand students to date. A transformative sabbatical in Northern Ireland awakened in him the seeds of his life goal of creating the Sacred Story Institute. That would take nearly twenty years and a doctoral program and another decade of development to where we find ourselves today.