Franciscan at Home

As tears filled his eyes and his voice broke, the 16-year-old sophomore told me, “I just can’t see her the way she deserves to be seen.” He meant his girlfriend, about whom he cared deeply. His compulsion to consume pornography was sabotaging his ability to love her.

Once hidden and socially condemned, porn is now ubiquitous and normalized. The mainstream tolerance of porn began gradually increasing in the 1960s, though you usually had to go looking for it. With the explosion of smart devices and artificial intelligence, porn now comes looking for you.

But rather than ushering in liberation, normalized porn has wrought enslaving devastation across our humanity. Porn dehumanizes those who produce it, those who consume it, those who are victimized and trafficked into it, and those whose relationships are fractured in the collateral damage. Porn inverts the meaning of human sexuality—designed to be a joyous, life-giving gift of self—into a reductive experience of pleasure and dominance. In all its terrible forms, porn reduces relationships to transactions. For so many like the young sophomore who recognized his own distorted vision, porn is a ruthless enemy of the love we yearn to give and receive.

Young people are experiencing porn’s harm in their lives regularly and distinctly. The average age of first exposure to porn fluctuates between 11 and 12. By age 13, more than half of teens have seen porn. They often report they feel ashamed and guilty after consuming porn. They often acknowledge its compulsive dynamic and destructiveness in their relationships. They wrestle to escape it.[1]

When I asked a group of about 150 teenage girls what normalized distortions they thought were causing harm to their own lives, almost all of them named pornography. They wrote: “You can’t get away from porn.” “Everyone cheats because people have extremely high and unrealistic expectations caused by porn.” “People lose interest so easily in you because they’re used to porn, which shows girls in a fictional way.” “Porn creates selfish fantasies for people, causing them to forget the meaning of love.”

Shame and secrecy only magnify and compound the problem. How can we help, and why does it matter so much that we do? With ideas about sexuality so commonly distorted, young people need clear vision.

My children love stories.

Our days are dotted with stories from the Bible, lives of the saints, fairy tales, biographies, Shakespeare, literature, and history. They retell them to their dad around the dinner table, act them out in the backyard, and make connections between the story and their own lives, even weeks later. They ask to read beloved picture books over and over again. They want to know the impetus of action and the background of the main characters.

Their pure hearts are enthralled by the idea that they, too, are living a story. Perhaps, when in the fullness of time the Father sent his Son into the world to save it, he saw in his creatures a similar trait: despite their wayward hearts and lost innocence, his children love stories.

God Is the Storyteller

Since the beginning of time, God has been writing a story in the world. It’s why the events of Sacred Scripture are called “the story of salvation history.”

Beyond the pages of the canon, we see God’s story written in the lives of the saints. Whether they were on the world stage or tucked away in a home or cloister, an encounter with the life of a saint is an encounter with an authored story.

As humans, we are enamored with story. Familial quips are passed through generations; we learn about right and wrong through fairy tales; heroic stories call us to bravery and perseverance; we long to know one another’s “life story.” Sharing in a story extends unity, aspiration, and education.

“If there is a story, there must also surely be a storyteller.”[1] We can be confident that the Author of Life has something to say to us through story. In the person of Jesus Christ, he teaches us through stories known as parables.

In the contemporary age, when utilitarian aims of education rule alongside individual choice, electives, and test prep, it may come as a surprise that a Catholic school might require each student to participate in a choral music program. A choral program, moreover, that is more than a so-called specials class, more than a diversion in the middle of the school day, more than an easy A. Situated on the campus of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham in Houston, Texas, Cathedral High School was founded in 2022. Here, music occupies such a central place in the curriculum that it forms one of the four foundational pillars of the school. And it is not the only school of its kind. Across the United States, a movement is taking place to return to the riches of an authentic liberal education.

Catholic schools are once again placing value on the study of the visual and performing arts. The training up of the young person in the art of singing and the study of music is an ancient and highly valued discipline of education. Music, in the great tradition of liberal education, is one of the four mathematical disciplines known together as the quadrivium—on equal footing with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. These, alongside the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, form what is known as the seven liberal arts. “Liberal” here comes from the word “free.” Young minds are freed to truly think, question, and learn in the search for truth.

As Catholics, we know that truth is not a disembodied idea; Truth has a name, and his name is Jesus Christ. The immense task of the Catholic school music teacher is to help form young people to listen, which, when done properly, leads them to hear the Word of God, to know Christ, and to attune their lives to him. Sacred music, as the language of the liturgy, rightly deserves a central place in the life of the Catholic school.

Catholic school educators: heed the challenge! Extend your vocation response to include the family.

The vocation of the Catholic school teacher calls us to be catalysts that lead students to come to know, love, and serve God. In bygone times, home and school worked “hand in glove” to form a Christian character within the child. Some contemporary families are enthusiastic about pursuing that call. Many others, however, admit feelings of inferiority when it comes to being the spiritual formators of their children. They count on us to fill in the gaps that they perceive exist. Those parents need us to evangelize them.

What? You might say, I am already on overload! Lesson plans that incorporate various learning styles and mediums, differentiating instruction, student support meetings, mainstreaming, maintaining the student information system, extracurricular activities, faculty committee work, school duties (arrival, lunch, dismissal) . . . and the list goes on. Now you want me to add intentional evangelization of the family? I have no more time! Well, the good news is that you do not need more time if you apply the adage, “work smarter, not harder.”

First, identify projects for liturgical seasons and other faith-formation topics that are part of your normal teaching curriculum. Then, develop interactive lessons that lead from the head (ideas) to the heart (affection, emotion). You may engage the students in the lesson with activities like becoming a character in the Christmas crib scene, defining the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit with modern examples, depicting timeline events of the Triduum, building a Jesse Tree, or choosing a favorite proverb or “Jesus one-liner” from the Bible. Within instructional class time, teach the students how to find Scripture citations and where to look for information on Church-related themes like feast days, novenas, litanies, women in the Bible, etc. Finally, Work with the full class or in small groups to produce a single, unified class project. Display it in the classroom for the season.

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Those who have children and those who teach children have firsthand experience of the child’s need to do his own work. The very young child expresses this need quite bluntly: “I do it!” As the child matures, the expression becomes more nuanced and polite: “May I try?” In what appears to be a regression, the adolescent expresses the same need, though not with the same charm: “Why don’t you trust me?” I would argue that the child’s desire to “do for self” stems not from unruliness but rather from an intrinsic need impressed upon his nature by God himself.

The Need Is in Our Nature

In the command to Adam to “subdue the earth,” God impressed upon the human soul both the dignity and the need for work. Reflecting on this passage from Genesis, St. John Paul II writes:

From the beginning . . . [man] is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. . . . work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.[1]

In this same section the Holy Father explains that “work” refers to “any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual.” Just as the person has a need to diligently build his environment, he has a similar need to intellectually build his knowledge.

The Holy Father’s insight that work is a constitutive need of our nature should cause us to pause and wrestle a moment with its meaning. Most certainly, the comment should not be taken to its extreme, suggesting that someone lacking the capacity for manual or intellectual work is somehow not fully human. Yet at the same time, the statement lends itself to a consideration of how personal work is in some fashion so integral to the human person that to deny him the opportunity is to violate his God-given nature.

The Child’s Need for Independent Work

During her many years of being with children, observing how they live, learn, and develop, Dr. Maria Montessori came to see that the child possesses the same intrinsic need for work as do adults. In fact, this need may be even more critical for the developing child. She writes:

The reaction of the children may be described as a “burst of independence” of all unnecessary assistance that suppresses their activity and prevents them from demonstrating their own capacities. . . . These children seem to be precocious in their intellectual development and they demonstrate that while working harder than other children they do so without tiring themselves. These children reveal to us the most vital need of their development, saying: “Help me to do it alone!”[2]

Think of the work that a baby chicken must do to peck its way out of its shell. Any attempt to help the tiny creature—to do for it what it must do for itself—results in the chick’s premature death. A similar phenomenon happens to the child when adults routinely overstep and do the work that the child can and must do for himself: he experiences a kind of psychic death. Some children become unnaturally timid, overly dependent, or abnormally compliant. Other children become rebellious against authority. In both extremes, the child’s interior freedom has failed to develop properly. “The child’s desire to work represents a vital instinct since he cannot organize his personality without working.”[3]

Teachers, administrators, and others working in Catholic schools are devoted to their students. They want what is best for them. This is why they will want to increase the variety and level of support offered to parents.

The two great commandments are to love the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself (see Mt 22:36–40). Catholic leaders are called to create and ensconce Catholic culture by striving to fulfill these two great commandments—and to guide the ministries that they lead to do the same. In my role as a high school vice president of faith and mission, I work alongside our principal and president to ensure that our school is a catalyst in the Eucharistic Revival and that the comprehensive operations of our school community serve these two commandments.

The first commandment calls Catholic leaders to prioritize facilitating first-generation encounters with Christ. To fulfill the second, we must foster a culture of evangelization in which we love our neighbor as ourselves and testify to Jesus’ kingship. Living out these commandments as Catholic leaders is especially exciting in this three-year sequence of Eucharistic Revival being guided by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB is calling on leaders to create personal encounters with Jesus, reinvigorate devotion, deepen formation, and engage in missionary sending. What follows are reflections on how we are answering this call in our school community. I hope that it can serve as inspiration for other Catholic leaders during this time of Eucharistic Revival.

As the students cleared out of my classroom at the end of the day, I leaned back in my chair, staring at the peeling painter’s tape framing a poster in the front of the class of Christ washing the feet of his apostles. It hadn’t been a bad day, but it hadn’t been a good day, either. My colleague—a good friend who accompanies me, sharing concerns and joys about teaching and life—entered the room. Neither of us said anything until I asked, “What am I doing when I come into the classroom?” This question was born out of frustration, but it was sincere. And it had been on my mind for weeks. He offered some words of encouragement. We talked for quite a while. But nothing satisfied my question.

As children, many of us learned the “Alphabet Song.” It is a universally known jingle that helps small children learn the ABCs of the English language. Other cultures use a different tune but the purpose is the same. At the start, a child merely repeats the sounds sung to him. In due time, he gradually learns that the sounds have corresponding symbols. (During this developmental stage, children in a Montessori environment trace sandpaper letters, providing a heightened sensorial experience that strengthens the sound-symbol relationship in the child’s mind.) Once the child understands the sound-symbol relationship, he is capable of arranging the alphabet letters to form words, then sentences, and eventually entire paragraphs. One need not be a trained linguist to recognize a kind of pedagogy in this method of language acquisition. If we were to draw an analogy to children’s catechesis, we would find that there, too, is a kind of pedagogy for the acquisition of religious language—or there should be.

The 2020 Directory for Catechesis exhorts catechists to ensure that our “linguistic form” be appropriate for the persons receiving catechesis.[1] Where children are concerned, there is more to this task than merely paraphrasing doctrine. Children’s catechesis requires a unique pedagogy of language. First, there is a particular religious alphabet—fundamental doctrines—which serves as building blocks for the child’s faith. Second, there is a particular scope and sequence to doctrine—one that follows the child’s natural spiritual and intellectual development. Finally, the particular expression of doctrine should evoke a sense of wonder that sparks continuous investigation and meditation.

Notes