How to use an existing application context as the web application root context.

I've bolted web support with SpringMVC into an existing Spring based application, however I consider the web tier to be subsidiary to my existing application. The basic SpringMVC app creates a new context in the ContextLoaderListener and uses this as the parent conext for the dispatcher servlet, so it cannot see my existing beans.

Is there way to make the ContextLoaderListener use my existing application context as its root?

Thanks.