Franciscan at Home

Developing a Process

“And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all that were in his house.” Acts 16:32

In part one we established the rationale for the wise process of the RCIA to move to the forefront of our endeavors for evangelization and catechesis of entire families. Taking guidance from the Directory for Catechesis, our focus is on a “catechesis of catechumenal inspiration for those who have received the sacraments of initiation but are not yet sufficiently evangelized or catechized or for those who desire to resume the journey of faith.”[1] This article explores the elements involved in developing a process incorporating post-baptismal evangelization and catechesis for parents, inspired by the RCIA model. 

First Things First

A warm welcome with time set aside for conversation with the parents is essential as we begin our relationship with them. In other words, the more familiar model of “signing up” or “registering” the child for sacramental prep does not work in this situation. At this point we are most interested in meeting the parents and establishing a relationship.

Once a rapport has been developed, it is essential to determine why the parents believe it is important to bring their children of catechetical age to be baptized now and where they are in their faith journey. It is critical to begin looking into what their lived experience of “church” has been to determine what (if any) relationship they have with the person of Christ. Often, we find a bridge of trust with the Church itself through reception of sacraments as children, through relatives, etc., but not with Jesus Christ. They somehow sense God’s call but are often unable to articulate it. Our mission is to take them from where they are, bring them into the merciful arms of Jesus, and form them to be his disciples so that they, in turn, can form their children.

[1] Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, Directory for Catechesis (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2020), no. 62 (hereafter cited in text as DC); emphasis original.

At the Last Supper, Jesus celebrated his farewell meal with his disciples, the celebration of his approaching death and resurrection. It was the culmination of the entire saving mission of the Lord, as well as the assurance of the power of that very same event being ever present in time and space.

The bread, the Lord tells us, represented his body given for us, the wine his blood poured out for us. In celebrating this sacred meal with his disciples, Christ was giving to them, and to all mankind, what he had already offered to his heavenly Father, namely, his own self as a redeeming victim. All of this was accomplished through sacred signs, which continually made present this saving sacrifice so that all humankind could forever unite and share in it. Consequently, after the Ascension, when the glorified, risen Christ took his rightful place at the right hand of the Father, he did not leave us orphans but continued to act and to dispense grace through the Eucharist and the other six sacraments he had instituted during his earthly ministry. These would be sources of living grace that would flow into the hearts of all those who through faith would participate in them.

All of this is accomplished through humanly perceptible signs and symbols that not only signify grace but effect it through the power of the Holy Spirit. Initially, this saving event of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection took place in time and in history, once and for all, while simultaneously and in reality, transcending all time through the action of the Holy Spirit, the great catalyst who is always active in the liturgical life of the Church. “Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations." (Second Vatican Council, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum Concilium (December 4, 1963), no. 7) Having come to us from the Father, Jesus now leads us back to the Father.

On June 25, 2020, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, headed by its president, His Excellency Archbishop Rino Fisichella, presented for the Universal Church a new Directory for Catechesis.

Have you ever wondered why Jesus’ disciples found it so difficult to grasp his true identity, even after living so closely with him and directly witnessing his great works?

St. Paul did his homework carefully before proclaiming Christ to the Athenians. It paid off. In Acts 17, we find St.

I like to say that studying Judaism made me Catholic. Many years ago, I was a zealous, anti-Catholic evangelical Christian living in Jerusalem and active in the Messianic Jewish movement (the movement of Jews who believe in Jesus). Messianic believers are eager to rediscover the Jewish Jesus and the Jewish practices of the Early Church before it became tainted and compromised—so they say—with gentile beliefs and practices.

Like my Messianic Jewish friends, I accepted as the foundation of my faith the principle of sola scriptura—the great theological pillar of the Reformation positing that the Bible is our only and final source of authority in matters of faith. According to the Reformers and their followers, because human traditions are unreliable and prone to change, the Bible alone is the trustworthy Word of God that communicates to us the eternal truths that God revealed for our salvation (cf. 2 Tm 3:16).

Yet after spending a few years in the Messianic movement, I began to feel uneasy about sola scriptura. I found the doctrinal anarchy reigning in Protestantism and in Messianic Judaism increasingly disturbing. Even though all believers accepted the Bible as the Word of God, they constantly disagreed among themselves on substantial points of doctrine, with no final authority able to arbitrate between them. I began to think, moreover, that the endless multiplication of denominations found in Protestantism could surely not be God’s will. This led me to investigate what Scripture and Judaism had to say about the nature of God’s revelation to man.

It is not a secret that knowledge of the faith continues to decline. It is tempting to insist simply upon teaching more doctrine, but this overlooks a more fundamental problem. What is catechesis really about? It is not simply knowledge of the faith but knowledge of the living God, a knowledge that includes and goes beyond simply the intellect, as it must include a complete transformation of life. We are not simply missing knowledge of the faith but the entire structure of life and culture that should undergird and support this knowledge.

The Cultural Foundation for Catechesis

Grace builds upon nature, according to the scholastic adage. By “nature,” we mean the natural foundation of human life—our ability to think, make free choices, and order our lives through good habits. Even more foundationally, nature refers the basic soil of human potential that God uses to draw forth his divine fruit. But how would we describe the “state of nature” today? It is not a stretch to say that the soil of human life has worn thin through the saturation of technology and a fundamental change in the way we understand and relate to one another, mediated by a screen with less interpersonal contact. Catechesis has to compensate for these challenges, seeking to build up a more robust community to provide a stronger cultural context to receive the faith.

Just as grace builds upon nature, so faith builds upon culture. In fact, Pope St. John Paul II declared faith to be “incomplete” without a culture to live it out faithfully.[i] Culture is a shared way of life, one that is necessary because Christians need to live out their faith in communion with others. As we know from our own experience, it can be quite difficult to live the Christian life when you are pushing against the cultural currents. Perhaps our religious education has fallen short because we have not attended closely enough to the cultural dynamics of faith. Right thinking, healthy living, rightly ordered work, and robust community all contribute to building up the soil needed to support the Christian life.

In his encyclical letter Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II makes the claim that “since culture is a human creation and is therefore marked by sin, it too needs to be ‘healed, ennobled and perfected’” (John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, no. 54).

The Intellectual Backstory

Like many statements in ecclesial documents, one needs to know the intellectual history behind the statement above—the “backstory” as it were.

Here part of the backstory is the Romantic-era approach to the subject of culture, including the idea that every national group has its own culture and that each and every national culture is equally of value. In other words, it is a typical Romantic argument that no one culture is superior to another, all are of equal value.

Many people unreflectively adopt something like the Romantic approach because they have a memory of one particular culture (or anti-culture) trying to assert its superiority using tanks and aircraft bombers and gas chambers.

A Catholic theology of culture is, however, radically different from the Nazi ideology of culture. The Catholic vision has absolutely nothing to do with conceptions of racial superiority. Genetics has nothing to do with it. The Catholic conception is all about grace and how some human practices are more or less open to grace than others and thus some cultures are superior or more noble than others because they are more open to grace than others.

Since Catholics believe that all human beings are made in the image of God, whether they are born in one of the culturally sophisticated suburbs of Paris or in a village somewhere that has yet to obtain Wi-Fi, they all begin their lives with the same status before the throne of the Holy Trinity. In this sense the Catholic faith is both universal and egalitarian. Baptism does not recognize class distinctions. Once a person has been baptized they are a member of the Royal Priesthood. As the Orcadian Catholic writer George Mackay Brown poetically explained in his short story “The Treading of Grapes,” in heaven Christ will address his friends with the royal titles Prince and Princess. However, what Catholics do with the gift of their baptismal graces will have an impact upon their own nobility or lack of it, and upon their social practices and their culture. Those who are the most saintly are the most ennobled.

Many readers of this journal are familiar with how John Paul II describes the definitive aim of catechesis. Our objective as teachers of the faith is to lead those we teach into communion, into real intimacy, with Jesus Christ.[1] He is not only to be our model and example. He is not merely our brother and friend. And he is not only our High Priest and Divine Teacher, revealing to us the right way to see reality and live within it.