Franciscan at Home

The focus of this article is a practical consideration: how to help parents in the task of “discipling” their own children. The topic is a rather vast one, so I’m going to break it down into two parts. The first part, the mindset catechists should have toward parents, is the focus of this article. Part 2, practical tools to empower parents for discipleship, will follow in the April issue. We all have heard the Church’s teaching on this: parents are the “primary educators” of their children.[i] But do we really believe this to be true, and indeed act as if we believe it? I have talked with many Church employees and volunteers who treat this statement like some empty platitude saying, “It’s a nice theory, but in reality WE are better at teaching young people the faith. We have degrees in Theology after all!” In the paragraphs that follow, I hope to shed some light in this area, and offer some practical ways we can empower parents to take up their call to educate, even “disciple” their own children. But fair warning: I may strike some deep-rooted cords and maybe even unnerve you a bit. This is an area that desperately needs attention in the Church today and needs serious renewal if we hope to be effective in the years ahead.

The education of the young, particularly in matters of faith and morals, is not merely a career but rather a calling. St. John Baptist de la Salle, founder of the Christian Brothers, in his Meditations on Christian Education, declared that those who teach the young are “cooperators with Christ in the salvation of souls.” Theirs is a task that must not be taken lightly. It requires much zeal and vigilance, indeed being “ambassadors for Christ” and “guardian angels” for their students, for on the Judgment Day the Lord God will ask these educators to render an account of the souls entrusted to their care.

Pius XI, in his encyclical on Christian Education, declares: “Perfect schools are the result not so much of good methods as of good teachers, teachers who are thoroughly prepared and well-grounded in the matter they have to teach; who possess the intellectual and moral qualifications required by their important office; who cherish a pure and holy love for the youths confided to them, because they love Jesus Christ and his Church.”[i] All Catholic educators must be professional, competent, and set an example of prayer and virtuous living. They must seek to “practice what they preach” and thus give integrity to the Gospel message.

Yet while the aforementioned characteristics can and ought to be embodied by both religious and laity who teach in Catholic schools, there further exist traits that can only be personified in one or the other. Thus by virtue of their different vocations, laity and religious both bring something unique to the world at large and to the educational apostolate specifically.

<p>The following article is an abridged text from a webinar created by the authors to orient new diocesan educational and catechetical leaders to principles for effective leadership. While the first part of the webinar gives an overview of the key ecclesial documents and focuses on evangelization, catechesis and inculturation, we highlight here the second part explaining the seven keys to diocesan leadership. These are particularly helpful to our readers who are involved in diocesan leadership positions but are also more widely applicable. The link for entire webinar is available for download on the USCCB’s website found at the end of this article. We thank the authors for sharing these insights with readers of The Sower.</p>
<p>On April 17, 2008, during his apostolic visit to the United States, Pope Benedict XVI gave an address to Catholic educators at The Catholic University of America. In very direct language the Holy Father laid out a vision of a Catholic educational institution. Early in his address he proclaimed that education is integral to the mission of the Church to proclaim the Good News. First and foremost, every Catholic institution is a place to encounter the living God who reveals his transforming love and truth in Jesus Christ. </p>
<p>As diocesan leaders consider the goals and achievements of their work, doing an evaluation of whether formational programs in our administrative care actually proclaim the Good News and cause students, teachers, and families to encounter Christ is an essential starting point. As Pope Benedict emphasized, Catholic identity is a question of conviction. He urged Catholic educators to reflect on whether our Catholic institutions and programs motivate people to commit themselves entirely to God, have tangible expressions of Faith, and give fervent expressions to Faith through liturgy, sacraments, prayers, acts of charity, concern for justice, and respect for God’s creation. The vision of Catholic education the Holy Father described can assist diocesan catechetical or school leaders to focus on goals for their work.</p>
<p>In this article, we shall examine seven key areas of leadership, which encompass most, if not all, of the roles of diocesan catechetical leaders. These administrative areas are imbedded in the General Directory for Catechesis, the U.S. National Directory for Catechesis and Our Hearts Were Burning Within Us. The seven diocesan leadership areas we will address are: planning, policies and guidelines, coordination, communications, research, personnel, and evaluation.</p>

In this twentieth anniversary year of the English edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Janet Benestad responds to concerns that the Catechism is not sufficiently related to human experience. Drawing on the insights of the late Avery Cardinal Dulles, she explains why this most important of catechetical texts is essential to parish evangelization.

The Archdiocese of Boston has undertaken a major pastoral planning effort. Called Disciples in Mission, it involves the realignment of parishes for administrative and financial success, and the training of diocesan and parish leaders. The goal is to create parishes that are vibrant centers of evangelization. The training of parish leaders includes best practices in the new evangelization.

At one meeting regarding adult formation, a long-serving parish pastoral associate questioned using the Catechism to evangelize adults. “Why use the Catechism,” she asked. “It’s 30 years old,” as if a re-writing were expected any day. At another meeting, a parish director of liturgy reacted to instruction on using parish websites and bulletins as tools for catechizing adults: “I prefer to let people rely on their own experiences,” he said.

Such comments by Church leaders beg the question: After 20 years of the Catechism, why the continued resistance to it among many professional Catholic Church leaders? Why the preference for experience, rather than doctrine, as a surer norm for spreading the faith? These questions sent me back to an article written by Avery Cardinal Dulles in 1994 entitled, “The Challenge of the Catechism.” In it, Dulles describes the confusion that results when experience becomes the preferred norm for faith formation.

“All statements about revelation,” says Dulles, “. . . are said to be so culturally conditioned that they cannot be transferred from one age or one cultural region to another. Every theological affirmation that comes to us from the past must be examined with suspicion because it was formulated in a situation differing markedly from our own. Each constituency must experience the revelation of God anew and find language and other symbolic forms appropriate to itself.”[i]

Dulles is describing the heresy of modern practical relativism—the position that each age or culture only knows what is true on the basis of its own experiences. This position denies the existence of any ultimate source of truth. When relativism informs the thinking of theologians and, as a result, catechetical leaders, it undermines faith in God, who is the source of all Truth. Unfortunately, relativism informs the thinking of a good many catechetical leaders, to wit, the examples above. For that reason, it is worth taking a look at what Dulles has to say about the ways in which the Catechism provides an “antidote” to tension between faith and experience.

Much ink has been spilled over the centuries in attempts to describe the varied contours of effective leadership. Tremendous insights may be gleaned from a variety of sources—both sacred and secular. The question that several of our authors attempt to answer in this issue of The Sower is this: what is distinctive to the Catholic vision of leadership?

When we address the topic of peer leadership in youth ministry, the conversation can be all over the board. Some use the term to speak of peer leadership roles, like older teens helping with junior high or the Confirmation program. Others refer to the actual formation of the teens, and still others refer to service projects and empowering teens for social justice. It will be helpful in this discussion to give some definition to what we are actually talking about. To do that, I’d like to look at the overall process of evangelization.

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses. Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 41

I just returned from visiting my former grade school teacher who is sick in the hospital. He is aging and has been chronically ill for many years. Most recently he’s had surgery to remove some cancer. While my three teenage boys dutifully sat around the hospital room showing quiet reverence to this suffering man, I told my teacher something that surely surprised my boys at least a little. I told him that he was my hero.
A hero doesn’t have to be perfect

The surprise in this comes from their immediate perception of the man to whom I was speaking. This is a guy who does not conform to modern society. He smokes and drinks and makes odd jokes and dresses out of step with the modern world. Today as he sits in that hospital bed, he is no longer particularly handsome or strong or athletic. He is not wealthy, has no spouse or children of his own, and never accumulated many public accolades for all the good things he has quietly done over the course of his lifetime. So how could their father possibly call him a hero? Was it just a white lie to comfort an ailing man? Or was there something more going on?

No lies were being told in that hospital room. This man is a hero to me. I first met him when he became my teacher in seventh grade. I was smart, but I didn’t care about school very much. In fact, I considered it embarrassing that I was pretty bright. My adolescent mind was filled with two things and two things only: sports and girls. The rest of life was simply a necessary inconvenience to endure. He changed all that for me.

A former military advisor illustrates how a small, highly motivated, highly trained group of evangelist "advisors" can affect a disproportionate change in the promotion of the goals of the New Evangelization.

What do you think of when you hear “Special Forces”? Most people think about an elite military team conducting an operation deep in unfriendly territory, appearing from and melting into the dark, still water of some jungle river. Or perhaps they think of a team conducting a hostage rescue in a desert environment with a HALO infiltration, utilizing night vision technology. These images represent only one aspect of Special Operations capabilities, which is direct action. However, another role of Special Forces, and one you might not think of, is that of highly trained advisors that facilitate the work of others, resulting in force-multiplication. Special Operations and the “quiet” professionals who carry them out are particularly suited to this role and its “work yourself out of job” methodology. Earlier in my life, I had the honor of working with men who demonstrated this methodology with profound professionalism, discipline and humility—true quiet professionals.

But what does the advisor role of Special Forces have to do with the New Evangelization? Special Forces advisors are a small, highly trained, highly motivated, well-equipped cadre of teachers who act as force-multipliers by forming the next formators. This role is utilized whether training personnel in small unit tactics, land navigation or combat casualty care. It is extremely effective because in addition to training the first generation of students, the team also establishes the infrastructure for this first generation to form the next ones.

This role is suited to the work of the New Evangelization for three reasons: (1) the limited resources that many dioceses and parishes have at their disposal, (2) our natural reluctance to change, and (3) the dynamic nature of the New Evangelization. Regarding limited resources, it is often easier to support a small group of incarnate-advisors who can multiply their effectiveness, especially in the “ad intra” phase of the New Evangelization. When it comes to the natural reluctance to change, advisors first act as incarnate examples of the change that they are encouraging, allowing a “bottom-up” example that can complement the “top-down” encouragement of the bishop or pastor. And finally, the dynamic nature of the New Evangelization (which parallels the dynamic nature of personal conversion) requires quicker assessment of needs and opportunities. Paired with diocesan structures that are already in place, advisors can be an efficient and effective leaven for them, responding quickly and allowing the mission of the New Evangelization to grow in present structures.

To explicate this approach, I will offer specific examples from my work, as well as best practices from other ecclesial situations. These examples fall into three general categories, which I call the “three P’s”: partnerships, parishes-schools and projects. These parallel the three dimensions of the Special Forces advisor: the subject matter expert, the force-multiplier and the incarnate example.

Just a few weeks ago I left a coffee shop after an hour-long conversation with a Director of Religious Education, a conversation for me that has seemingly repeated itself over recent years. These conversations usually start with catechists saying: “our Mystagogy is flat”; “we had thirty-something in our catechumenate and now we have an average of three in our follow-up adult-ed program”; and worse yet “our neophytes have little interest in being involved in Church life.” All of these comments focus on what they need to change in their Mystagogy and other follow-up adult-education programs, with no emphasis on the need to change their current catechetical programs. (To some degree this is understandable as we all have the tendency to fix the immediate, rather than go a little deeper.)

After discussing with them their respective follow-up formation programs, I redirected their attention back to their catechumenate programs by inquiring into how they approached catechesis in its nature, structure, method, and content. From these dialogues I discovered that they all had one thing in common: their catechesis had lost its sense of vigor and proclamation of faith and failed to summon the catechumenate into a living, spirit-filled relationship with Christ.1 This proclamation that starts with those all-important words “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.”[2]

For some parish formation programs, zeal for Christ and his message is robust, and it beckons us into a perpetual courtship that is alive and well. For other parish programs, encouragement and reminders are necessary and on going. Collectively, it is imperative we understand that catechizing for discipleship is quintessential to any formation program that is going to be fruitful and life giving.

Evangelizers thus take on the “smell of the sheep” and the sheep are willing to hear their voice. (Evangelii Guadium, 24)

Today when we hear the words disciple or discipleship these words have a specific religious connotation. We would normally not describe an apprentice plumber or student teacher as a disciple. In the world of the New Testament these words had a much wider usage. Among the ancient Greek philosophers, disciples learned by imitating the teacher’s entire way of life and not just by remembering the spoken words of the teacher. This is completely different from our modern lecture based modehttps://thesowerreview.org/sites/default/files/images/reading-torah.jpgl of classroom instruction. The first century philosopher Seneca appeals to the “living voice and intimacy of common life” of the disciple-teacher relationship of many different philosophers:
"Cleanthes could not have been the express image of Zeno, if he had merely heard his lectures; he also shared in his life, saw into his hidden purposes, and watched him to see whether he lived according to his own rules. Plato, Aristotle, and the whole throng of sages who were destined to go each his different way, derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates."
Although there was considerable tension between the influence of Greek culture and Jewish way of life, it appears that the educational methods of the Greeks were taken over and adapted by rabbinic schools. Clearly the rabbinic model of discipleship builds on the Old Testament examples of relationships such as Moses to Joshua, Eli to Samuel, and especially Elisha’s call to “follow” Elijah (1 Kgs. 19:19-20), but it also adapts many features common to the Greco-Roman tradition of philosophers and teachers of rhetoric.