Franciscan at Home

Since the death of my, our, beloved John Paul II, I have prayed for his beatification. Every spring I teach my course on catechetical saints and I have been itching to include him in the course material. Naturally, for the ten years that I have been teaching the course, he has played a pivotal role because his writings have been featured throughout the course. He has left catechists so much, and I will be focusing the next few articles on him.

I do not think that I need to go into any detail of the actual life of John Paul. I do, however, want to make this article personal, because I think that all of us engaged in the work of catechesis have a personal relationship with him. I was student teaching, doing my practice teaching before I received my degree in theology and elementary education, when John Paul was elected in 1978. I shared in the joy of his election like all the sisters in my congregation, but this was even more special for me. We had a Polish pope! My grandparents both came from Poland, and my grandfather was one of the founders of the Polish parish where my father and his brothers and sisters, as well as my brother and sisters received our first sacraments. I have always been proud of my heritage. Now our Holy Father was Polish, and the bond between us became even stronger than the bond I would have with any Pope. And when I called home to see how my father received the news, he told me, in between his sobs of joy, that he had been working on the church steps when a neighbor gave him the news. How appropriate!

Now my personal story isn’t all that important for catechists, but I think it does bear repeating here because most of us felt that we had a personal connection with our late, great Pope. And that was part of his gift to the Church upon ascending to the Chair of St Peter.

‘By faith, Mary accepted the Angel’s word and believed the message that she was to become the Mother of God in the obedience of her devotion (cf. Lk 1:38). Visiting Elizabeth, she raised her hymn of praise to the Most High for the marvels he worked in those who trust him (cf. Lk 1:46-55). With joy and trepidation she gave birth to her only son, keeping her virginity intact (cf. Lk 2:6-7). Trusting in Joseph, her husband, she took Jesus to Egypt to save him from Herod’s persecution (cf. Mt 2:13-15). With the same faith, she followed the Lord in his preaching and remained with him all the way to Golgotha (cf. Jn 19:25-27). By faith, Mary tasted the fruits of Jesus’ resurrection, and treasuring every memory in her heart (cf. Lk 2:19, 51), she passed them on to the Twelve assembled with her in the Upper Room to receive the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14; 2:1-4). ‘Let us entrust this time of grace to the Mother of God, proclaimed “blessed because she believed” (Lk 1:45).’ Pope Benedict XVI, Porta Fidei, for the indiction of the Year of Faith, October 11, 2011

In discerning which saint I should write about for these articles, I wanted to pay attention to this Year of Faith. I began to recollect the preparation for the Jubilee marking the New Millennium. In 1987, Pope John Paul II had initiated a Marian Year as the remote preparation for the Jubilee Year. Redemptoris Mater was written to guide us into the heart of Mary as we prepared to celebrate the New Millennium of the life of the Church. In this document, he focused our attention on Our Lady who leads the pilgrim Church from Pentecost until the Second Coming of Christ.

In our age of instant communication and social networking, we can often find ourselves involved in spending more and more time in relating to people in ways that have no grounding in what is profound. All that one has to say is increasingly reduced to utterances involving pressing a few characters on a keyboard or what can be expressed in a ‘tweet’. Our ‘friends’ exist only in cyberspace.

How different with the Incarnation! The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became flesh! He was born of the Virgin Mary and from the moment of her fiat her life was totally focused on her personal relationship with her Son. She continually tells us, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. And Jesus gave His mother to all of us from His cross –‘Behold your Mother’. She can teach us the meaning of personal relationship with Christ.

As part of the tribute to Sofia Cavalletti we reproduce here a short article from here writings.

In the Apostolic Exhortation Catechesi Tradendae (On Catechesis in Our Time), we read that the catechist “will not seek to keep directed towards himself and his personal opinions and attitudes the attention and the consent of the mind and heart of the person he is catechizing. Above all, he will not try to inculcate his personal opinions and options as if they expressed Christ's teaching and the lessons of his life. Every catechist should be able to apply to himself the mysterious words of Jesus: ‘My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me (John 7:16).’ Saint Paul did this when he was dealing with a question of prime importance: ‘I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you (1 Corinthians 11:23).’ …what detachment from self must a catechist have in order that he can say, ‘My teaching is not mine!’” (N. 6)
The need for rigorous objectivity

The text cited establishes a principle of the utmost importance in catechesis: the need for the catechist to be rigorously objective in the transmission of the message.

In every educational process the educator must put the one to be educated in relationship with reality so that he or she becomes capable of establishing his or her own personal relationship with it. The task of the catechist is to initiate into religious reality, that is to say (1) to point to the reality that we are surrounded by the presence of a Person, of a Love, because from this knowledge is born (2) a personal relationship with God.

In these articles I have looked at the lives of saints who were engaged in catechetical activities. Our Lady is the ultimate catechetical saint, as has been stated in Evangelii Nuntiandi (82), Catechesi Tradendae (73), and the General Directory for Catechesis (291). Continuing in my desire to prepare for the Year of Faith by looking at apparitions of Our Lady, today we will look at Our Lady of Lourdes.[i]

When we look at apparitions of Our Lady, we focus on the message that God chose to give us by sending the Mother of God as the mediator of his message. The story of St. Bernadette Soubirous (1844 -1879) and “the Lady” as Bernadette called her is one that is well known. She was born in a rugged part of France to a miller and his wife. By the time of the apparitions, her family was reduced to stark poverty, and was living in an old jail. Bernadette suffered from asthma, and missed school frequently. There is some evidence that she may have suffered from a learning disability.

Co-founder of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd

“Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show his works by a good life in the humility that comes from wisdom…the wisdom from above is first of all pure, then peaceable, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, without inconstancy or insincerity.” James 3:13, 17

Sofia Cavalletti was aptly named and an appropriate answer to the question found in the Epistle of James. This woman lived among us, “wise and understanding.” She led a “good life” filled with the “humility that comes from wisdom.” Her reverence for the Bible and liturgy, her fresh and compelling style of writing and speaking, her wise and intelligent way of discussing complicated theological themes simply and her sense of humor and personal warmth will be greatly missed by many. She was a herald of wisdom and joy, a capacity developed through daily biblical study and liturgical celebration which led her to discover the profound religious potential of children. “How remarkable that a person of noble birth, a noted biblical scholar,[i] writer and educator who sat on the Vatican Council for Jewish-Christian relations (the SIDIC) would choose children and their relationship with God as the centerpiece of her life’s work.”[ii]

To many who live in the United States, ‘Montessori Catechesis’ may seem something of an oxymoron given the particular ‘unreligious’ mileu in which many Montessori schools find themselves. Yet anyone who has studied Maria Montessori and her educational philosophy knows that she was a devout Catholic, formed in the mind and heart of the Church. In her philosophy of education, we can hear an echo of St. Thomas Aquinas’ teachings on the nature of the human person[i] as well as Pope Leo XIII’s teaching on the nature of human liberty.[ii] Referring to her method, Maria boasted that ‘in its very substance (it) is Catholic!’[iii]

The General Directory for Catechesis states that ‘Catechetical methodology has the simple objective of education in the faith.’[iv] This being said, Maria Montessori offers us a unique ‘catechetical praxis’[v] that is both ‘faithful to man and faithful to God?’[vi]

We have been looking at Marian apparitions for the past few issues as a means of focus during this year of faith. Since the last issue of The Sower we have seen the historic retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis. Since Pope Paul VI we have seen our Popes eager to visit shrines and places of pilgrimage. Twelve hours after his election, Pope Francis went on pilgrimage to the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome. It is the oldest church dedicated to Our Lady in Rome built shortly after the Council of Ephesus (431). He prayed before the image of Mary, Salus Populi Romani [Protectress of the Roman People]. Afterwards, he greeted the people outside.

Dear brothers and sisters, good evening! Thank you very much for your presence in the house of the Mother of Rome, of our Mother. Long live the Salus Populi Romani [Protectress of the Roman People]. Long live Our Lady. She is our Mother. Let us entrust ourselves to her, because she cares for us like a buona mamma [good mom]. I pray for you, but I ask you to pray for me, because I need it. Three Hail Mary’s for me.

Why was this pilgrimage so important to the man from Argentina who had just been elected pope? He obviously understood the power of pilgrimage in our Catholic life. Instead of focusing on any specific apparition, I want to look at pilgrimages to shrines, which would be appropriate after looking at various apparitions. Shrines have been built on the sites of those apparitions and thousands and thousand of the faithful, including myself, have gone on pilgrimage to pray and praise God for his love for us.

On January 5, 2011, I had the privilege of attending Mass at the Shrine of St. John Neumann in Philadelphia. Justin Cardinal Rigali celebrated the liturgy which marked the beginning of the Redemptorist’s celebration of the Neumann Year, which will end on June 23, 2012.

‘The witness of his life speaks in a particular way to our own age,’ said Baltimore Provincial Patrick Woods. ‘As political battles are waged about undocumented immigrants and our borders, we think of our saint who was a zealous pastor to waves of immigrants. St. John Neumann lived in an age of fierce anti-Catholicism; today, we face a spirit-sapping secularism. Educating our young people is a great challenge for us today as it was for the founder of the parochial school system’.

His first assignment was to teach catechism to German children. He was ordained on June 25, 1836 and was able to gave first Holy Communion to children he catechized. On the day of his ordination, he prayed that God would ‘give me holiness, and to all the living and dead, pardon, that some day we may be all together with You, our dearest God.’ He ministered in upstate New York, traveling to all of the little villages and hamlets that had Catholics.

Br Louis explains why catechesis on the vocation to be a Brother in the Church is so important for our work.

The task of catechesis today faces many challenges as it attempts to address a generation of young people who have suffered from either poor catechesis or a complete lack of it. Those principles and teachings which generations before had taken for granted are unknown or distorted. One of these is an understanding of the rich history of our Church and the essence of the various vocations that have existed in the Church.

While most street Catholics have a clear enough understanding of the Priesthood and the Sisterhood, these in part being popularized over the years by the cinema, few have heard much about the vocation and role of the Religious Brother.

Heaven is exciting. I do not think this is always made clear. You have doubtless seen several pictures of the Last Judgement. There was often one on the West wall of Mediaeval Churches to remind the departing faithful to live in such a way that they would be among the sheep, not the goats. Many such paintings show the just being welcomed into Heaven, and the wicked cast into hell. Often you suspect that the artist enjoyed painting hell more than he enjoyed painting heaven!

One particular painting, for example, shows Heaven as a city wall, with Angels playing trumpets, while, below, hell is more interesting – a huge dragon breathing fire, inside whom the damned are being boiled in cauldrons, while demons push wheelbarrows full of the wicked into its mouth. You get the impression that the most interesting thing to do in Heaven is to look over the wall and watch what is going on in hell! A limited, even boring, picture of heaven is often seen in modern cartoons showing harps and clouds; a recent survey of children’s views of Heaven showed that they imagined things like endless ice cream. I wonder whether some artists and preachers of the past put too much energy into frightening people off hell because they found it hard to think of ways to attract them into Heaven; and I wonder how many modern preaches and teachers know how to speak excitingly about heaven.