Franciscan at Home

In what is perhaps the most foundational statement in all the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read something puzzling: “The ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity.”

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If you have ever traveled internationally, you have undoubtedly experienced the challenge of interpreting unfamiliar signs. Deciphering these enigmatic symbols can be a funny exercise, as long as you are not desperately lost. The first time I traveled to Australia, my wife and I were regularly in stiches at the utterly unique signs. My favorite had to be the camel, wombat, and kangaroo caution sign. Seeing this sign was a clear indication that we were far from home and in very unfamiliar territory[CR1] .

The purpose of a sign is to teach the viewer something: warning, action, direction, etc. The Catholic Christian faith is filled with signs that are designed to teach, but just like unfamiliar signs in a foreign country, if someone does not clearly explain the meaning of the sign, we will remain in ignorance or left to make our best guess. Frequently, cradle Catholics do not understand the meaning of the signs that surround them and this leads to a deficient Christian life, lacking the full available richness .

When it comes to RCIA, explaining the meaning of the signs and symbols is all the more crucial. Being one who came to the Catholic Church later in life, I cannot state strongly enough how confusing are many of the actions within the liturgy to an uninitiated observer. I’ll never forget being handed the baptismal candle, when my children were baptized, and seeing the chi rho (☧) on the side of the candle. Not knowing what it was, I asked the three religious sisters present at the baptism what it meant and they didn’t know either. I now know and can give a wonderful explanation, but that is for another time.

Un día hace como 6 años, mientras trabajaba como Director de Formación Religiosa en una parroquia católica rural, estaba en mi oficina echando un vistazo a Facebook. Vi la imagen de un evangelista católico en un malecón público evangelizando a un hombre que portaba un casco de Darth Vader y montado en un monociclo. Por supuesto que tuve que darle clic al link para leer la historia acerca de St. Paul Street Evangelization (Evangelización Callejera San Pablo). Me puse en contacto con el apostolado y eché a andar un equipo en mi parroquia. Admito que en realidad no me esperaba a que la evangelización directa fuera fructífera, o por lo menos que una conversación que duraba 2 minutos con alguien que nunca en mi vida había conocido antes pudiera llevar a una conversión genuina hacia Jesucristo y su Iglesia. Pensé que la mayor parte de nuestro trabajo sería discutir acerca de la doctrina y sembrar semillas. En fin de cuenta, ¿no iba todo el mundo paseando por la calle preguntándose si los católicos adoran a María?

Por lo tanto, no sabía cómo reaccionar cuando, la segunda vez que salí a evangelizar en nuestra comunidad, conocimos a un señor, Tomás, quien acababa de leer el Catecismo de la Iglesia Católica y quería saber más acerca de Jesús. No conocía a ningún católico y tenía demasiado miedo de entrar en un templo católico al azar. Quedé asombrado cuando, tras nuestra explicación del Evangelio, su corazón “ardía dentro” y quiso saber qué hacer a continuación.

¿Cómo íbamos a ayudarle en ese momento a satisfacer su necesidad de Jesús en su vida? Sabía que mi sacerdote no le iba a gustar si mi equipo lo bautizaba allí mismo en ese momento. Pero decirle que se “uniera a un programa” tampoco era una respuesta satisfactoria. Y un programa que comenzaba varias semanas más adelante no se dirigía a su necesidad de una relación con el Salvador quien lo ama ahora mismo.

En su discurso a los obispos de las Filipinas del 18 de febrero del 2011, el Papa Emérito Benedicto XVI declaró que “vuestra gran tarea en la evangelización es proponer una relación personal con Cristo como clave para la realización plena”. Ese momento en la calle quizás no haya sido el momento preciso para bautizar a Tomás, pero sí fue el momento perfecto para presentarle a Jesús. Oramos juntos para agradecerle a Dios por la vida de Tomás, arrepentirnos de nuestros pecados, y pedirle a Cristo a que entrara al corazón de Tomás y que le diera todas las gracias que Dios le tenía guardadas. Lo conducimos hacia Jesús.

One day about 6 years ago, when I worked as a Director of Religious Education for a rural Catholic parish, I was in my office browsing Facebook. I saw an image of a Catholic evangelist on a boardwalk out in public evangelizing a man wearing a Darth Vader helmet and riding a unicycle. Of course, I had to click through the link to read the story about St. Paul Street Evangelization. I contacted the ministry and started a team at my parish. I admit that I didn’t actually expect that direct evangelization would be fruitful, at least I didn’t expect that a 2-minute conversation with someone that I never met could lead to a genuine conversion to Jesus Christ and his Church. I thought most of our work would just be arguing about doctrine and planting seeds. After all, wasn’t everyone walking down the street wondering whether Catholics worship Mary?

Therefore, I didn’t know how to react when, the second time I went out to evangelize in our community, we met a man, Tom, who had just read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and wanted to know more about Jesus. He didn’t know any Catholics and was too afraid to walk into a random Catholic Church. I was floored that after we explained the Gospel, his heart was “burning within him” and he wanted to know what to do next.

How were we going to help him at that moment to satisfy his need for Jesus in his life? I knew my priest wouldn’t be pleased if my team baptized him right then and there. Telling him that he should just “go to a program” wasn’t a satisfactory answer. A program a few weeks distant would not address his need for a relationship with the Savior who loves him right now.

In Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s 2011 address to the bishops of the Philippines, he states that “your great task in evangelization is therefore to propose a personal relationship with Christ as key to complete fulfillment.” That moment on the street may not have been the right moment to baptize Tom, but it was the perfect time to introduce him to Jesus. We prayed together to thank God for Tom’s life, repent of our sins, and ask Christ to come into Tom’s heart, to give him all of the graces God had for him. We led him to Jesus.

A brief survey of our world should be evidence enough that we are sorely in need of virtue. In need of a disposition for the good, beautiful, and true, as well as strength to choose them over what is bad, ugly, and false. Even within our own personal lives, the call to holiness requires both supernatural grace (what God does) and human virtue (what we do to participate in becoming who God made us to be). One of the principal responsibilities of any parent, teacher, or catechist is to help form their children/students with a vision of what a virtuous life looks like and how to acquire and grow in virtue. Most of us are familiar with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, as well as the cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude that build from and are strengthened by the theological virtues. However, many are not as familiar with virtue of magnanimity: the virtue of desiring and doing great things

I grew up in a relatively large Catholic family who never missed Sunday Mass. I was sent to Catholic elementary and high schools, where school Masses were celebrated with regularity. I also had what I now believe to be a special grace of faith from the Lord, where I never questioned the existence of God or Church teaching (as I understood it to be at the time)—even though by young adulthood many of those around me were questioning both. I also was a faithful altar-server straight up until college, serving at many Masses during the school year. Considering the trajectory of my life, I had received Communion nearly one thousand times by the time I went away to college.

But in reality, the effects that receiving my Lord in communion had on me were minimal. I went to Mass faithfully, and I even went prayerfully, but I was not coming away changed by the encounter in any visible way. While I had a personal faith in God, I was lacking in a personal understanding of what it meant to give my life to him, to desire to live a new life in Christ, and ultimately, to have this change of life flow from personal repentance and conversion. Sherry Weddell points out that any of these four obstacles “can block the ultimate fruitfulness of valid sacraments,”[1] and I was missing three out of four.

This stymied the flow of sacramental grace in my life. It would do the Lord a disservice to say that I had no spiritual benefit at all: I was going to Mass weekly, doing so in a spirit of faith, and offering sincere prayers during the liturgy. All the same, I can say with certainty that the spiritual effects of Communion for me were minimal. In terms of grace, I was collecting a dime each week at best, but the Lord had been offering me a dollar. And a central reason that I benefited so little was precisely because I had attended Mass in my parish so often.

Counterintuitive as that might sound, it’s true. This was because in my culturally Catholic parish, no one had ever modeled for me in my Catholic schooling or in my parish a discipled life flowing from the Eucharist, complete with active and visible spiritual fruit. Regularly observing and participating in a parish culture of churchgoing Catholics taught me to expect little transformation from receiving communion (either personally or in the community), and so I never did. Participation was the clear focus, not fruitfulness. Therefore, any catechesis on the Real Presence I received in a classroom setting was always obstructed by what my experience was teaching me—namely, that receiving the Lord in Communion was not meant to result in immediate spiritual fruit that could be visibly perceived in the community.

Uno de los signos de la experiencia contemporánea es un sentido muy extendido de quebrantamiento, una especie de pesadez de ser. Por lo mismo, una de las afirmaciones menos debatidas de la cristiandad es que tenemos necesidad de sanación, tanto a nivel personal como a nivel social. Los analistas sociales buscan sin cesar las causas de este descontento individual y colectivo. Mientras existan factores culturales que contribuyan a la enfermedad posmoderna, la teología cristiana siempre ha ofrecido una causa de raíz del descontento de la humanidad: el pecado original que heredamos y los pecados personales que cometemos. Si el pecado fuera el fin de la historia, la Cristiandad ofrecería un panorama bastante desolador. Según sugiere su mismo nombre, sin embargo, la Cristiandad no termina con nuestro quebrantamiento, sino que señala hacia arriba y hacia afuera a Cristo, quien vino a este mundo precisamente para salvarnos de nuestro pecado y del peso de sus efectos.

Aunque siga el debate sobre las raíces de los problemas de la humanidad, el punto central de la Buena Nueva del Evangelio es la verdad de que Jesús vino para que nosotros pudiéramos tener vida (Cf. Jn 10,10). Esta participación en la vida divina por medio de la gracia, recibida de manera especial por medio de la oración y de los sacramentos, se nos ofrece gratuitamente. La gracia es un don divino que a la vez sana nuestro quebrantamiento y nos eleva a la verdadera grandeza espiritual. Santo Tomás de Aquino escribió sobre este doble efecto de la gracia en la Summa Theologiae: “…el hombre para vivir rectamente necesita un doble auxilio de la gracia de Dios. El primero es el de un don habitual por el cual la naturaleza caída sea curada y, una vez curada, sea además elevada, de modo que pueda realizar obras meritorias para la vida eterna, superiores a las facultades de la naturaleza. El segundo es un auxilio de gracia por el cual Dios mueve a la acción. Ahora bien, el hombre que está en gracia no necesita otro auxilio de la gracia, en el sentido de un nuevo hábito infuso. Pero sí necesita un nuevo auxilio en el segundo sentido, es decir, necesita ser movido por Dios a obrar rectamente.”[1] Estos efectos curativos y transformativos de la gracia son precisamente el antídoto contra nuestros corazones rotos y nuestro mundo roto.

One of the marks of contemporary experience seems to be a widespread sense of brokenness, a sort of heaviness of being. Therefore, one of the least debated claims of Christianity is that we need healing, both personal and societal. Social analysts repeatedly look for the causes of this individual and collective discontent. While there are cultural factors that contribute to postmodern dis-ease, Christian theology has always offered a root cause for humanity’s discontent: original sin that we inherit and the personal sins that we commit. If sin were the end of the story, Christianity would indeed be rather bleak. As its name implies, however, Christianity does not stop with our brokenness but rather points us upward and outward to Christ, who came into this world precisely to save us from our sin and the weight of its effects. While debate may continue regarding the roots of humanity’s problems, central to the message of the Good News of the Gospel is the truth that Jesus came that we might have life (see Jn 10:10). This sharing in divine life by grace, received especially through prayer and the sacraments, is freely offered to us. Grace is a divine gift that both heals our brokenness and uplifts us to true spiritual greatness. Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote of this two-fold effect of grace in the Summa Theologiae: “In order to live righteously a man needs a twofold help of God—first, a habitual gift whereby corrupted human nature is healed, and after being healed is lifted up so as to work deeds meritorious of everlasting life, which exceed the capability of nature. Secondly, man needs the help of grace in order to be moved by God to act.”[1] These curative and transformative effects of grace are precisely the antidote to our broken hearts and our broken world.