Franciscan at Home

There is a compelling challenge that every catechist must face: having fallen in love with Christ ourselves, how do we pass this love on to others? The answer is far from simple. Human beings are multi-dimensional, so we have to work on many levels simultaneously. In considering how to approach this work, we are indebted to the great Roman catechist, Sofia Cavalletti. It was she who drew attention to the typical order in which catechesis—indeed all human learning—unfolds, especially for children: first the body, then the heart, then the mind. If we are to catechize well, we need to follow this order, or we may find ourselves working against human nature instead of with it. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in more elevated, theological language, proposed the same basic progression: first beauty, then goodness, then truth. Both Cavalletti and von Balthasar discerned the Trinitarian analogy underpinning this human learning process, and consequently, elements of Trinitarian theology can be applied. For example, while each “aspect” is distinct, none of them can be neatly separated from the others; they always operate together. Whatever is perceived by the senses will in some way affect the heart and then be reflected upon by the mind. Sometimes, it may seem like this is happening in the same instant of time, and at other times, each dimension may follow on from the other slowly and ponderously, with the meaning finally dawning on us weeks, months, or years afterwards. How then can we integrate this insight into our catechetical practice? It would seem that a significant part of the answer lies in retrieving a catechetical approach almost as ancient as the Church itself, one that uses the same human learning progression identified by Cavalletti and von Balthasar. It is called mystagogy, which is essentially an unfolding of the holy mysteries revealed in the Scriptures through the liturgical signs by which they are celebrated and made present.

When my son was a newborn, we brought him to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame for a Sunday Lenten Eucharist. Unable to comprehend the theologically rich prayer texts, he nonetheless was fascinated by the drama of light and darkness playing out in the stained glass windows, together with the choir’s sublime interpretation of a Palestrina motet. Such beauty was formative of his identity, teaching him something essential about the splendor of the triune God even before he could begin to understand the meaning of such words. Nonetheless, for many Catholics worshipping on a regular basis, the experience of liturgical beauty is noticeably absent from their lives. Churches, rather than eliciting awe and wonder from the worshipper, are too often designed as monuments to suburban banality. The narrative of salvation, once tangible and substantial in mosaics, frescos, and statuary, is traded in for bare walls and empty spaces. The highest standards of musical excellence relative to composition sometimes give way to mere sing-ability. Preaching and liturgical presiding can be performed clumsily. The problem with such inattention to liturgical beauty is not merely a concern of the aesthete; rather, a liturgy without beauty stifles the joy of the Gospel itself. As Pope Francis writes, “Evangelization with joy becomes beauty in the liturgy, as part of our daily concern to spread goodness. The Church evangelizes and is herself evangelized through the beauty of the liturgy, which is both a celebration of the task of evangelization and the source of her renewed self-giving.” A non-beautiful liturgy is not about bad art; it is about a failure of the Church to evangelize.

What a sweet consolation it is when we feel close to God in liturgy, with the help perhaps of inspiring music or a challenging homily or a strong connection with members of the assembly. But what happens when such consolations are not our regular experience? How can we encounter God in liturgy even when we’re not feeling “fed”?

Being attuned to the presence of God at Mass is vitally important if we are to be formed by liturgy over the course of life. In this article, Scripture teacher Gayle Somers reflects upon the encounter with God possible in the Liturgy of the Word and offers important concrete suggestions for entering more deeply into the Scriptures proclaimed at Mass. “When we take up the sacred Scriptures and read them with the Church, we walk once more with God in the Garden.”[i] Who can resist an invitation like this—to share the intimate communion with God given originally to Adam in Eden? Every time we are at Mass, the Church welcomes us to the Table of the Word, to this great reality. The Fathers of Vatican II told us that “…in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets his children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the Word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life.”[ii] When we truly comprehend this statement, the only question to be asked of us is: Are we paying attention? All of us know how easy it is for our minds to wander during the Scripture readings at Mass. We are particularly susceptible to this if (1) they are unfamiliar to us, (2) we don’t understand their meanings, and (3) we don’t recognize them as being spoken by God himself. St. Jerome put his finger on this last problem: “When we approach the [Eucharistic] Mystery, if a crumb falls to the ground we are troubled. Yet when we are listening to the Word of God, and God’s Word and Christ’s flesh and blood [in His Word] are being poured into our ears, yet we pay no heed, what great peril should we not feel?”[iii] The Church assures us that God is the author of Scripture; he inspired men to write what he desired his people to know.[iv] No wonder St. Jerome was so unsettled by the thought of indifference toward hearing Scripture read at Mass. He was echoing the sentiment of St. Augustine: “For now, treat the Scriptures of God as the face of God; melt in its presence.”[v]

The idea that “cultural capital,” in the sense of cultivated dispositions of mind and body, might play a role in catechesis is often resisted from two extreme positions. First, there are those who argue that faith formation is merely propositional. We simply need to teach people the Catechism. This we might call the opposition from the right. Second, there are those who instinctively tie the concept of “cultural capital” to the class-war and are aggressively hostile to the idea that some cultures and what we call “cultural formation” might be superior to others. This we might call the opposition from the left. It is often found in liberation theology circles where, for example, knowledge of more than one language or an ability to play a musical instrument, is associated with having had a bourgeois education.
In my first book Culture and the Thomist Tradition,[i] I was critical of the opposition from the right and did not really address the opposition from the left because I thought that battle had been won by Josef Ratzinger in the 1980s. The central principle of my book, which might be called a synthesis of the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre with the theology of Josef Ratzinger, is that if you want to catechize people, you need to give them an experience of a fully functional Catholic culture and not merely present them with doctrinal propositions (though these are important and have their place) and certainly not try to market the Catholic faith to them by transposing it into the idioms and practices of contemporary popular culture. Ratzinger described the latter practice, which was hugely popular in the 1960s and 70s and has been making a come-back among liberation theologians, as treating the Church as if it were a haberdashery shop with its windows needing to be re-dressed and decorated with each passing fashion season. What MacIntyre and Ratzinger have both argued, in different ways, is that the ethos of Christian institutions needs to be governed by practices that embody a Christian logic or meaning. If you feed people doctrine but the whole realm of praxis is running on a different logic (for example, a utilitarian logic or an economic rationalist logic), then the Holy Spirit can’t breathe, grace is suffocated, because there is a logical disjunction between the theory and the practice. God created us in such a way that even a five-year-old can sense that something is not quite adding up, even if the five-year-old is unable to explain the problem in terms of the relationship between logos and ethos. In theological language distinctions are often made between the “logos of love” (which is inherently Christian) and the logos of the machine (which is inherently atheistic). So, a preliminary MacIntyrean point is that if you want to catechize people it helps to expose them to a milieu where the set of social practices are running on the logos of love.

On October 11, 1992, Pope St. John Paul II declared the Catechism of the Catholic Church “a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion.”[i] Let us examine the key terms in this statement. They help us to understand the character of the Catechism. In the previous article I wrote of the Catechism as an instrument that would help us to reconnect the fragments of the faith back into a living whole.[ii] In other words, it is an instrument fitted for bringing about ecclesial communion. In the situation of the new evangelization, many whom we catechize live without a strong awareness of the organic wholeness of the Catholic faith, its beauty, symmetry, and coherence. They have even less recognition that this organic wholeness of the faith flows from the living Body of Christ, having God the Son as its Head. Many of the baptized and confirmed members of the Body of Christ, therefore, have only a partial understanding that the life of Christ, as Head of the Body, is available to them—his strengths, his virtues, his faculties. As St. Gregory the Great put it, “Our redeemer has shown himself to be one person with the holy Church whom he has taken to himself.”[iii] We long for the Holy Spirit to lead those whom we catechize into a lively consciousness of this loving union that God has established with them in his Church. This union is the “marvelous exchange” that we celebrate in the Christmas season when the Creator of all became man, born of the Ever-Virgin, making us “sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share our humanity.”[iv] Only in this way, we know, through living in the light of these truths, can the lives of those we catechize be more perfectly formed into the likeness of Christ. We long for the Holy Spirit to “indoctrinate”[v] those whom we teach—to imbue them with the teachings, the doctrines, of Christ. The Catechism is given to us precisely for the sake of enabling such an indoctrination to make the teachings of the Church accessible and available to every member of Christ’s Body so that each can become “fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.”[vi] We saw in the previous article how the Catechism has been carefully designed specifically to reach out to bring the saving doctrine of the faith to the “edges” and “peripheries” of the Church. This happens when we attend to those still holding to “fragments” of faith in order to gather and bring them into communion with the living whole.

No one sneaks into the Catholic Church. I absolutely love this aspect of becoming a Christian in the Catholic Church. Let me explain. I was raised in a Pentecostal Protestant denomination (International Church of the Foursquare Gospel). In some ways, Pentecostalism is closer to Catholic doctrine than Reformed Protestantism, but there is a major difference in how people become Christians. To become a Christian in the church of my youth, a person (let’s call him “Bob”) might have an experience like this. Upon being invited to church, Bob would hear Christ-centered praise and an expository sermon on a biblical text. At the end of each service, an appeal to become a Christian would be given. In doing this, the pastor would invite the congregation to bow their heads and close their eyes — no looking. Then he would ask those who wanted to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, for the first time, to raise their hands. If Bob wanted to respond, he would publically raise his hand and the pastor would invite him to silently repeat a simple prayer of belief in Jesus. As a child I always wanted to peek to see who raised their hands. I was fascinated that people were responding to Jesus for the first time, and I wanted to see who they were. I always wondered why we were not allowed to know who had just been “saved.” As a result, I never met the new Christians of my Church unless they freely divulged this information in conversation. Bob might have attended for one Sunday or twenty, but following the hand-raising response, there was no assessment of what he believed or understood. There was also little to no personal follow up and formation. Bob was simply invited to keep coming to Church. The RCIA process in the Catholic Church is notably different. We march people in front of the liturgical assembly several times before they are fully initiated: the Rite of Acceptance, Rite of Sending, Rite of Election, and three times during the Easter vigil! Catholicism emphasizes the public profession of faith and the consequent prayerful presence and affirmation by the community. While there are stark differences between the respective Pentecostal and Catholic understandings of salvation, many do not realize that the Catholic Church teaches that, objectively, the process of salvation begins with a public profession of faith, long before baptism. According to the Church, there is a profound transformation that takes place within each person in this public profession during the Rite of Acceptance. This transformation depends upon two essential catechetical milestones that prepare for the Rite of Acceptance. If these two milestones are lacking, the inquirer will not have the necessary disposition to allow the rite to bear its intended fruit. The rite will objectively take place, but its fruit in the life of a new catechumen will be stunted.

This second part of Wiliam Newton's article was never published in a printed issue of The Sower, as the magazine went ouf of print before the last installment was completed. However, the editor of The Catechetical Review adds it to this issue online for the benefit of subscribers interested in the conclusion of Dr. Newton's commentary on Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

Dearest Patience,

In the recent letter I sent to you concerning some of the arguments put forward by Richard Dawkins concerning the existence of God, I promised I would write to you again to address what he says about religion and morality in his book The God Delusion.[i] So as a friend who strives to keep his promises…here we go!

The first problem that Dawkins comes up against is that religion is still extremely widespread as well as ever-present throughout human history. This presents a problem for Dawkins, because it means he has to show how something so utterly wrongheaded and insidious is, nonetheless, so enduring and prevalent.

Evolution and Natural Selection

Given Dawkins’s intellectual commitments, the only acceptable explanation is going to have to conform to the theory of evolution and natural selection. This is problematic because natural selection is the very hardest of task-masters: it rewards only what is useful and harshly punishes everything that stands in the way of progress. Yet, as Dawkins has repeatedly asserted throughout The God Delusion, religion is the most negative of phenomena. It perpetuates ignorance, impedes scientific progress, and cripples individuals with feelings of guilt (p.279-308). In what conceivable sense could it, therefore, be useful?
Dawkins’s main argument is that religion is not directly useful but that it is a side effect of another useful human trait (p.174). This trait turns out to be the unquestioning acceptance by inferiors of what their superiors tell them. For example: because Billy believes the elders when they tell him that deadly nightshade is poisonous this increases Billy’s chances of survival (since he doesn’t eat it). However, little Johnny (genetically more inclined to disbelief/disobedience) does eat it and he dies. Accordingly, Johnny (and his kind) has no progeny, while Billy (and his kind) does. The upshot is that a genetic propensity to believe what the elders say (including the religious nonsense they spout) dominates.

For us catechists, St. John Paul II's "theology of the body" should strike a single, resounding chord in our hearts and minds: "good news!" It is, in essence, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. While St. John Paul II's 133 Wednesday catecheses include a profound application to sexual and marital morality, the application occurs primarily at the end of this series of discourses. As a consummate catechist, St. John Paul II knew that grace perfects nature.[1] It doesn't replace nature nor jump ahead of it. Thus, to truly understand how we should act, we have to first understand who we are and what our purpose is. In other words, the foundation of faith is a correct view of the human person, a correct metaphysics. Before you hurriedly skip to another article because you fear I'm about to launch into the philosophical stratosphere, let me reassure you I am not. Like you, I am a catechist in every pore of my being. I live to communicate the faith to others in a concrete and systematic way. However, I am increasingly convinced that our efforts to pass on the faith often fail to be transformative because we assume others have already adequately answered the key human questions of "Who am I?" and "What is my purpose?" Or, perhaps without realizing it, we have relegated those questions to the realm of psychology and philosophy, as if they are irrelevant to theology and catechetics. In truth, these two questions constitute the core of Christianity. The cataclysmic shock Christianity introduced into history was not its moral teachings; other cultures and religions embraced and taught similar moral norms. Rather, the novelty of Christianity is its illumination of personal identity. Confessions of faith in Jesus' divinity are the highpoints of the Gospels: Peter professes, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God" (Mt. 16:16); the centurion at the foot of the cross concludes, "Truly, this man was the Son of God" (Mk. 15:39); St. John declares the purpose of his gospel to be "that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God" (Jn. 20:31).

According to the General Directory for Catechesis, “adult catechesis must be given priority.”[1] In fact, the GDC links adult catechesis to the baptismal catechumenate: [Adult catechesis] “involves ‘a post-baptismal catechesis, in the form of a catechumenate...presenting again some elements from the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults with the purpose of allowing a person to grasp and live the immense, extraordinary richness and responsibility received at Baptism.’”[2] Therefore, adult catechesis is not simply a refresher course in content but is permeated by the idea that the life of Baptism (and each of the sacraments) must be lived in maturity. And this requires ongoing formation and support, a “permanent mystagogy.”[3] Therefore, Pope Benedict XVI, in Sacramentum Caritatis, calls for a “mystagogical approach to catechesis, which would lead the faithful to understand more deeply the mysteries being celebrated.”[4] Initiation is ultimately ordered to being one with our Lord in an intimate and eternal communion. Such intimacy requires that we approach Jesus’s Body with love, free from serious sin, and with a reverent disposition. However, many seem to take the reception of Communion lightly in the Church today. Reception of the Eucharist, for many, has become routine, uniform, and even presumed as a right, regardless of canonical standing or state of soul. We know from St. Paul that improper reception of Communion works against its true purpose and rather than deepening our participation in the life of God, it can actually alienate us from him: "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself" (1 Cor. 11:27-30, RSV).