Franciscan at Home

“About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they’re just one thing, and we shouldn’t complicate the matter.”[i] These are the striking words of St. Joan of Arc, boldly spoken as she stood trial. “They’re just one thing” because Jesus himself described his relationship to the nascent Church as the relationship of vines united to a single branch (cf. Jn 15:1–5). In other words, while distinctions are not difficult to find between Christ and the Christians who make up the Church, at root (forgive my pun), they are one living thing.

We live in a time of heightened divisiveness and loneliness. Online social connections are, as we all know, meager substitutes for real connection and friendship. Perhaps you share with me the conviction that the Church is the needed antidote. The Church is—and at the same time is meant to become—a remarkable communion. The sacraments bring us into communion with the Blessed Trinity, and being in this communion means that we are also intimately united with everyone who is in this remarkable relationship with God: the angels, the saints, all those in Purgatory, and every baptized person on the planet. If Baptism makes us adopted sons and daughters of the Father, then it also makes us truly brother and sister to one another. This extraordinary truth arises out of what the sacraments accomplish.

Note

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In September, 2018, I received a bemusing phone call from Anthony Gordon, the director of Catholic schools in a rural Australian Diocese. He asked me whether I would consider applying for the position of Diocesan Director of Religious Education and Mission. At the time, I was working in my “dream job” as a professor of religious education at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia. I had just completed the book that, I thought, summed up everything I had learned as a parent, teacher, catechist, and college professor through forty years of professional life, and I was ready to retire. The suggestion that I should change course at that stage of life was preposterous! The diocese in question, Wilcannia-Forbes, was the size of Texas and its eighteen schools, for the most part, could only be reached by long and lonely driving. I thanked the director for his confidence in me and then told him that it was not really what I wanted to do at this point in my life.

Yet, almost from that moment, I could not think of anything else. Was this a call from God? Was I being asked to put what I had learned into practice in this very challenging environment? I pondered it for a couple of weeks, and then decided to visit and pray at the grave of Australia’s (so far) only saint. St. Mary Mackillop had founded an order of religious sisters whose purpose was to bring the Gospel to the people of isolated communities. After this, with complete serenity, I knew what I had to do. With one day to go, I applied for and was appointed to the position.

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In its “practical directions” for reading the Catechism the authors have placed a brief instruction:

This catechism is conceived as an organic presentation of the Catholic faith in its entirety. It should be seen therefore as a unified whole. Numerous cross-references in the margin of the text (numbers found at the end of a sentence referring to other paragraphs that deal with the same theme), as well as the analytical index at the end of the volume, allow the reader to view each theme in its relationship with the entirety of the faith.[1]

What is the meaning of such a direction? What would such a practice look like? How should it be undertaken and what is its value?

Once on a hot summer day in France, I hiked a winding path with some companions all the way to the very source of a small stream. Having grown hot and tired from our hike, our local guides instructed us to rest a few moments and refresh ourselves at the spring. I hesitated as I watched the others drink confidently, even eagerly. The closest I had ever come to drinking untreated water was in sipping from the garden hose!  

Their beckoning won me over, however, and I joined them. We drank the cold flowing water made all the more delicious by our thirst and the natural stone spicket. It occurred to me then that God intended water to be like that—pure, refreshing, a free gift of his goodness.  

In the Gospel of John, Jesus promises that “living water” will well up in those who believe. The scene of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in John 4:1–42 is one those passages. This scene is particularly valuable for those who evangelize and catechize because it offers us a model of an authentic encounter with Jesus Christ and reveals to us the effects of that living water he promises. 

In fact, we could almost name “the holy Samaritan”—as St. Teresa of Ávila calls her—our patron saint. We want to drink of the water Christ offers and teach others how to do the same, just as she did that day in Samaria.  

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