Franciscan at Home

The Rosary is arguably the most widely prayed, most enduring devotion in Catholic history. Many have spoken about the power and beauty of the Rosary. Pope St. Pius X said, “Amidst all prayers, the Rosary is the most beautiful, the richest in graces, and the one that most pleases the Most Holy Virgin.”[1] October, the month of the Rosary, is the perfect time to introduce this beloved prayer to children and to encourage families to pray it together. The following are some recommendations for handing on this treasure of the Church.

1. Remind Your Learners That Mary Is Our Mother

Motherhood is associated with a gentle, approachable strength. Many children feel most comfortable going to their mothers first when they are distressed or in trouble. When Jesus commends his mother to St. John at the Cross (Jn 19:26–27) he is, by extension, offering her as mother to the whole Church. And indeed, she is—for the Church is the Body of Christ and Mary is his mother. As our mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary wishes to encourage us, to protect us, to nurture us, and to teach us by always pointing us to her Son. Jesus is a good Son who loves and listens to his mother, so we can be certain that he hears whatever questions, worries, and problems we place at her feet. As Pope Leo XIII wrote, “How unerringly right, then, are Christian souls when they turn to Mary for help as though impelled by an instinct of nature, confidently sharing with her their future hopes and past achievements, their sorrows and joys, commending themselves like children to the care of a bountiful mother.”[2]

My daughters’ high school religion teacher was known to ask his students, “Do you know da Way?” Although this often led to fun banter between the students and their teacher, it also helped the students focus on their relationship with Jesus. Wise Catholic school administrators will ask themselves this question but move one step forward. To “know the Way,” to have a relationship with Jesus, good administrators understand they must communicate with the Son of God—and communicating with Jesus means they are investing in their prayer life.

Catholic school administrators are busy people. They are required to attend meetings, answer their pastors’ questions, be visible throughout the school, substitute teach, supervise hallways, be available to parents, respond to inquiries from their superintendent . . . truthfully, they are lucky if they are given a moment to breathe. But it is within this incredibly hectic environment that good Catholic school administrators prioritize time to pray. They understand St. Francis de Sales’ maxim, “Every one of us needs half an hour of prayer a day, except when we are busy—then we need an hour.”

Community prayer is naturally a part of a Catholic school administrator’s life. The position demands that one is a visible leader; thus, the position demands prayer in community. It is important, however, for administrators to remember to invest into their personal prayer life, as well. Spending time alone talking with Our Lord allows them to strengthen their personal relationship with Jesus, making them stronger for those they lead.

During his tenure as the secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education (now part of the Dicastery for Culture and Education), Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, delivered a talk that outlined the five essential marks of a Catholic school. His fifth mark called for schools to be “sustained by a Gospel witness,” a responsibility borne primarily by the dedicated men and women who serve the students in the classroom every day.[1] The archbishop wrote, “More than a master who teaches, a Catholic educator is a person who gives testimony by his or her life.”[2] Later published as The Holy See’s Teaching on Catholic Schools, the archbishop’s text has become the framework on which the Office of Catholic Schools in the Diocese of Columbus has built its strategic vision for the future of Catholic education in central and southern Ohio.

In our diocese, we have actualized the archbishop’s vision of education into a mission of being an authentic and unapologetically Catholic school system. In order for this vision to become a reality, it requires us to strengthen and fortify in a deliberate and well-structured way the witnesses who make Catholic education happen in every classroom. Archbishop Miller emphasized the importance of those who serve in the ministry of schools by citing Gravissimum Educationis: “it depends chiefly on them whether the Catholic school achieves its purpose.”[3] With that high calling in mind, we must regard our administrators and teachers as ministers of our faith and support them in their essential mission as catechists.

Forming Missionary Catechists

Starting in 2019, the Diocese of Columbus recognized the importance of actively and intentionally forming our administrators and teachers so that they can be excellent catechists. Dr. James Pauley observed, “Today’s catechist is a missionary, though not in the sense of traveling to distant lands. Rather, we offer the content of the Gospel to people who live near us, yet who experience cultural influences increasingly foreign to Christianity.”[4] In Catholic schools, administrators and teachers are missionaries in their classrooms, inviting their students to know and love Jesus Christ every day while combatting the foreign influences of the secular culture.

In the foreword to Dr. Pauley’s book, Dr. Scott Hahn emphasized, “Everybody needs a catechist. Even catechists need to be catechized. Even theologians need to be catechized. We all need to revisit and review the basics.”[5] In that same spirit, we realized that we must intentionally catechize the catechists of our diocese through a program of formation for the nearly 1,200 school employees in our diocese. Our goal was to ensure that a common, baseline knowledge of our faith and vision for Catholic instruction was shared among everyone coming into contact with our Catholic school students. Enrolling our new school employees in Franciscan University of Steubenville Catechetical Institute proved to be the ideal method for achieving this goal.

As we know, the term “catechesis” derives from the Greek word katechein, which means “to echo.” Our work as catechists is to announce the Good News of Jesus Christ—to hand on to others what we have received, what we have heard, seen, and touched (1 Jn 1:1). For this reason, it might seem counterintuitive to write an article on the specific pedagogical need for silence during one’s catechetical instruction. However, the conundrum gives way when we understand the role of silence in fostering an authentic dialogue of salvation between God and the person receiving catechesis.[1] First, a personal story.

I have been a catechist for over 30 years and have taught “children” from three to 93  years of age. In my glory days as a junior high religion teacher, I had the reputation of having such a rigorous religion curriculum that my former eighth-grade students never took notes in religion class their entire freshman year of high school and still got all A’s. Many students would lovingly tease, “Sister, your quizzes are like tests; your tests are like exams; and your exams are like dissertations.” Yes, we were rigorous in our study of Catholic doctrine, but it took me many years (and a doctoral degree) to realize that I had failed to teach my students the one thing necessary: how to listen to God’s silent voice. More egregious, I had failed to let God speak.

An Education in the Faith

The various catechetical directories have consistently referred to the work of catechesis in educational terms. The 1971 Directory spoke of catechesis as “catechetical education” and the formation of the child’s heart as an “interior education.”[2] The 1997 Directory asked catechists to envision catechesis as a “school of faith” and to recognize that it serves “the simple objective of education in the faith.”[3] The 2020 Directory likewise recognizes that catechesis draws its inspiration from the “great educational work of God.”[4] We instinctively know that an education in the faith differs substantially from an education in other subjects.[5] Yet, for years, catechists have adopted a pedagogical approach that mirrors their counterpart teachers of math or science.

To be sure, the math teacher’s cycle of instruction, guided practice, student evaluation, and remedial instruction as needed has proven successful for many students seeking to master algebra. In catechesis, however, our aim is not to have students master knowledge but to have a knowledge of the Master. This is no clever play on words. The 2020 Directory exhorts catechists to “evangelize by educating and educate by evangelizing.”[6] This means that we must include in our unique educational pedagogy a way for the child to encounter the Lord—a way for her to hear God’s voice. We must provide a way for the child to contemplate—not master—God’s truth, beauty, and goodness.

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I can remember distinct moments in my life when I have been wowed. In some way, all of them are connected to a sense of vastness that made me recognize my smallness, my earthly finitude—from the vistas of mountains in Switzerland to cathedrals with spires that reach toward heaven. These moments inspire a sense of wonder and awe within our souls, allowing us to recognize just how mighty, how powerful, how big God really is. It can give us a healthy respect for our Creator, helping us become humble in the way we see ourselves. 

Even in the eight short years I have been teaching, the culture has changed so much. I have noticed that there is a lot less that captivates my students. That gift of wonder appears to remain latent because we are trying to compete with a culture that tells our children that the latest and greatest is what people need in order to be happy. We can’t appreciate the iPhone we have because the next model is already out. And while technology is certainly a gift, having immediate answers to everything at our fingertips all the time can take away the process of wondering.  

Discovering answers requires minimal work, and so, nothing remains veiled or hidden—students don’t need to practice patience to learn what they want to know. I realize this struggle exists across disciplines, but it seems to have an even more pointed effect on catechesis. When the core of our very faith is a mystery—the mystery of the Triune God—cultivating a desire to dive deeper is essential. That dive takes effort and motivation and work beyond a Google search, and thus, we lose students’ interest. And growing in a relationship with God certainly requires effort. That gift of wonder and awe guides our souls in the desire to enter into that mystery, to make an effort to know God, and also to realize that some of him and his plan will always remain a mystery to us. 

All of the mysteries of our faith should naturally inspire wonder in us. But since this isn’t always the case for our students, we must find aspects of our faith that can help foster within them a sense of awe. The most effective of these that I have found are eucharistic miracles. 

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As another Holy Day of obligation rolls by, the question arises once again about the wisdom and sustainability of current Mass provision in our Catholic schools in Scotland. In our Cathedral parish here in Motherwell, we have three Sunday Masses, but between us as clergy we normally celebrate eight Masses on Holy Days, mainly in school settings, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and participation on the part of pupils. What is the point? Are we (as is often argued) sacramentalizing pupils who have never been evangelized, never mind catechized? In addition, as Catholic schools worldwide also become increasingly multi-faith—with, for example, 20 percent of non-Catholic pupils in Catholic schools today in the U.S. compared with 5 percent in 1972—is compulsory Mass attendance responding to the spiritual needs of all pupils?[1] And how can we strike a balance between the school’s responsibility to celebrate liturgically and the freedom of individual members to either embrace or opt out of such celebrations?

[1] National Catholic Educational Association (2022) Data Brief: 2021-22 Catholic School Enrollment, 1. https://images.magnetmail.net/images/clients/NCEA1/attach/Data_Brief_22_...

Diego is eleven years old. For years he has received religious formation through the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS) in a carefully prepared environment for the religious life of children called an atrium. He is working with a material known as the “Unity and Vastness of the Kingdom of God,” a timeline that takes a long and essential view of the history of salvation. Diego ponders the moment in this history when God says, “Let us make humankind in our image and likeness” (Gen 1:26). The catechist asks: “What do you think that means?” Diego never answers immediately. After a few minutes, he says, “It means we are able to live the Maxims.” Then, he brings over the box of “The Maxims of Jesus.”[1] This material consists of twelve wooden tablets, each holding a scripture verse of Jesus’ moral announcements. Under the words of Genesis, he places some of these Maxims:

• “. . . be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Mt 5:48)
• “I give you a new commandment: love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 13:34) 
• “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22:39)

While Diego has not yet studied the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he is living what it teaches: “Freedom is exercised in relationships between human beings. Every human person, created in the image of God, has the natural right to be recognized as a free and responsible being. All owe to each other this duty of respect. The right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person” (CCC 1738).

In the atrium, Diego is “recognized as a free and responsible being” and is given the time and the space needed for him to exercise that freedom. It is his response to being called by name by his Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who “loves you; he gave his life to save you; and he is now living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”[2]

What do the films A Wrinkle in Time, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Interstellar, and Avengers: End Game have in common? They all tap into our innate fascination with time travel. If you could travel through time, where in history would you go? Who would you visit? What would you alter for the sake of the future?

These are strategic questions I use to open the lesson on the sanctification of time. With this exercise, students are first invited into the time machine of their own memory and imagination. After this discussion, I pre-teach some basic doctrinal points about time:

• Time is created by God with a beginning and an end.
• Chronos time is time that we can measure and keep track of with calendars and clocks.
• Kairos time is time from God’s point of view. It is all of time at once in one “eternal now.” Eternity.
• The Eastern concept of time is cyclical. This is how beliefs such as karma and reincarnation emerged.
• The Western concept of time is linear and it has a telos or an end. It is progressing toward the future.
• We can think of the liturgical year as a spiral that is simultaneously cyclical and linear or advancing toward an end.
• Jesus, the Eternal Word, is timeless. (CCC 525)
• The Paschal Mystery changes how we experience time.

The fourfold event of Jesus’ Suffering, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension was so impactful and powerful that it reverberates through time in every direction. It hit history so hard that it broke it in two; that which came before Christ (BC) and that which began with Christ (AD). In the Old Testament, the Paschal Mystery is prefigured through typology and prophecy. In the age of the Church, it is echoed forward in the liturgical calendar. In the sacraments, the Paschal Mystery transcends time. The sacraments are, in a way, the only known means of time travel. When we remember our story and enter into it in the sacraments, we are entering into a dimension of time that is not stuck in the past, present, or future, but envelopes all of it. This is because, unlike any other religious figure, Jesus is not just a person of history. He is alive and actively encountering his people with his life-giving, saving love.