Franciscan at Home

Examinamos las implicaciones concretas de una catequesis inspirada por la pedagogía de Dios.

En la última edición de The Sower notamos la centralidad del concepto de la pedagogía de Dios en el Directorio General para la Catequesis. Vemos que el Pedagogo es el mismo Dios y que los catequistas trabajan dentro de la pedagogía de Dios. "La catequesis, en cuanto comunicación de la Revelación divina, se inspira radicalmente en la pedagogía de Dios tal como se realiza en Cristo y en la Iglesia" (DGC 143). Como Pedagogo, la labor de Dios es la de disciplinar, o 'discipular' a su pueblo. En este artículo haremos un examen de las implicaciones concretas de este discipulado de Dios para nuestra labor catequética.

Una catequesis de gracia

El punto central que establece el Directorio General para la Catequesis es que la iniciativa en la catequesis pertenece, por encima de todo, a Dios mismo. La "transmisión del Evangelio por medio de la Iglesia es, ante todo y siempre, obra del Espíritu Santo" (DGC 138). La labor del catequista siempre es la de colaborar, ayudar, preparar, y trabajar con docilidad en la obra mayor del Señor. En verdad podemos tener la certeza de saber que, en la obra catequética, los frutos quedan en las manos del Señor. La fe es siempre un don divino (cf. Mat 16:17; 1 Cor 12:3).

Una catequesis exitosa, por lo tanto, no trata principalmente de aprender conjuntos mayores y mejores de habilidades. El catequista, por consiguiente, pone énfasis en la "iniciativa divina" (DGC 143), evitando toda confusión entre "la acción salvífica de Dios, que es pura gracia, con la acción pedagógica del hombre" (DGC 144). Luego, el DGC añade con cautela: "pero tampoco las contrapone y separa." El catequista no debe de confundirse con Dios - pero tampoco se le debe hacer a un lado. Él, también, por más insignificante que sea en comparación, ¡aún tiene una función que desempeñar! Las habilidades de enseñanza no son irrelevantes, ya que, aunque no podamos por nuestros propios esfuerzos hacer surgir la fe, sí podemos ayudar a los demás a que se preparen para la recepción y la profundización del don de la fe.

It would certainly be less work to use plastic beads for sorting in Montessori school or use battery operated candles to minimize clean up. However, the artificial does not hold the same attraction for young children as the real.

In our catechetical work, whatever methods we use, we may be tempted to avoid the real because it’s messy, risky, uncomfortable, expensive, and requires more work. Our parish youth minister does an activity with teens using lighted candles to remember babies whose lives were ended by abortion. The first year, the parish maintenance staff was more than a little displeased by the extra work involved in cleaning wax from the floor. The next year our youth minister considered using battery operated candles, but his team agreed that the symbol of the living flame being snuffed out is more powerful with a real candle; so, although it took more time and effort, they devised ways to keep the candles from dripping on the floor.

Real is Beautiful

We all find the real more beautiful than the artificial. Who does not prefer the glow of candlelight to other forms of lighting? A fine linen napkin is more beautiful than the best paper product, and silk flowers are only attractive in as much as they approximate the blooms they imitate.

In remarks to artists, Pope Benedict XVI connects reality and beauty: “the experience of beauty does not remove us from reality; on the contrary, it leads to a direct encounter with the daily reality of our lives, liberating it from darkness, transfiguring it, making it radiant and beautiful.”[i] In the remainder of this article we explore some practical ways catechists can honor the orientation of the human person toward reality.

Victory Over Death and Darkness

Ten years ago I woke up from a medical coma in Billings, Montana.

Five days earlier, while I was working at a Catholic ranch for delinquent youth in northwest Wyoming, I was nearly killed. One night, while we were camping out at a site in the middle of the Wyoming high desert, in an attempt to steal the keys to a truck so they could escape from the ranch, four teenage boys waited until I fell asleep. I was in a sleeping bag under the stars. They snuck out of their tent and picked up irrigation shovels nearby. Their goal was to knock me out so they could easily steal the keys. They gathered around me, counted to 3, and then repeatedly pummeled my head—about 8-10 hits—causing a skull fracture and blood clot on my brain. One boy, not involved in the assault, ran to the staff house to get help.

Help arrived. I was airlifted to Billings. The following morning I had head surgery—a 3-inch by 3-inch piece of skull was removed (to be replaced 5 months later)—to address the bleeding on my brain and swelling. Had this boy not ran, I would have bled to death that night.

He saved my life.

Since its initial presentation almost forty years ago, Pope St. John Paul II’s catechesis Man and Woman He Created Them (henceforth “Theology of the Body” or TOB) has borne inestimable fruits in the personal faith lives of countless men and women, in the life of the Church and its theology, and in the world at large. In my own work, I have seen firsthand just how transformative the TOB vision of sex, love, marriage, human personhood, and the mystery of redemption in Christ can be for those answering Christ’s call to discipleship. So much good has come from St. John Paul II’s gift to the Church that I think we can rightly stand in awe of all that God has been able to accomplish by way of this singular catechesis.

At the same time, I realize, like so many others, that we are still just tapping into the full potential of TOB and that important elements of the catechesis have yet to make their full impact.

One of those underdeveloped elements is what St. John Paul II refers to as “an anthropology of the resurrection,” which he describes as having “key meaning for the formation of our theological anthropology as a whole” (TOB 66:6).[MOU1] In saying this, St. John Paul II teaches us that the truth of the resurrection and the glorified state of humanity in heaven are decisive for our self-understanding and for understanding how God is working in us already in this life. Rather than being merely something that we celebrate at Easter and in our other liturgies, or merely something we look forward to in the next life, the resurrection is a truth of our faith that has great significance for our daily lives in the here and now.

To help us bring the relevance of the resurrection into our daily lives, St. John Paul II encourages us to cultivate “the hope of everyday” (TOB 86:6-8), which extends our hope in the resurrection of the dead in the future world of heaven into an expectation that the saving power of God will begin to conquer the death of sin and give us a newness of life in Jesus Christ already in this world. Simply put, hope enables us to grasp that if God can raise a corpse to everlasting life in him in heaven, then God can even make sinners like us holy in this life. The hope of everyday essentially means being convinced that he is going to do both.

What is the goal of catechesis? To make the faith the center of our lives. St. John Paul II made this clear: “Catechesis aims therefore at developing understanding of the mystery of Christ in the light of God's word, so that the whole of a person's humanity is impregnated by that word.” We come to know Christ so that he can shape the way that we live concretely and as a whole. Pope Benedict XVI said the same about Catholic education more broadly, claiming that it should “seek to foster that unity between faith, culture and life which is the fundamental goal of Christian education.” An important reason why catechists have to work for this goal is that education is the way in which we pass on an identity and way of life. Education forms culture, understood broadly as our way of life. Our children will either use their faith to navigate the challenges of the world or will subordinate their faith to a secular worldview. Catechists impart not just the content of the faith but seek to form a life that embodies that faith. If our children conform to the secular culture more than to the faith, this entails a breakdown of our catechetical and educational efforts. Christopher Dawson, more than any other Catholic thinker, has recognized the centrality of religion in culture and education’s role in forming culture. Dawson (1889-1970) was an English-Welsh convert to Catholicism and an historian who produced a vast synthesis of history, the human sciences, and theology stretching from prehistoric times to the crisis of the mid-twentieth century. The thread that united all of his works was the thesis that religion is the heart of culture. Tracing the role of religion throughout history, he noted that modern culture has a void in place of this heart, which it attempts to fill with other secular ideologies. Without a religious renewal, Dawson thought the material advances of technology would prove self-destructive for our culture, a prediction which partially came true in the World Wars.

Recently, a highly gifted colleague of mine told me of a visit she had made to officials of a nearby diocesan school system. This lady is an outstanding educational practitioner with very high quality skills in special and gifted educational strategies. The visit had gone very well, and the school authorities were very interested in what she was offering on behalf of the university. Yet there was one part of the visit that perplexed her. She had been asked this question: What is the difference between what you are offering as a Catholic university and what is available through the nearby public university? The lady is a very committed and faithful Catholic, but she felt a little ill at ease and unable to articulate the difference. So she asked me about it. This was not an attempt on her part to have a glib answer to offer. She was genuinely interested in what changes might be made to the actual work that she does. Actually, I was delighted to be asked. It is something that has occupied me for over thirty years and lay at the core of my own doctoral thesis. In this article, I intend to offer an overarching vision of the Catholic educational project.

Seeing with Both Eyes

The great Australian theologian, Frank Sheed, once wrote a book with the puzzling title Theology and Sanity. What does theology have to do with sanity? Everything! The classic definition of truth from St. Thomas Aquinas is: “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.”[i] To put that in layman’s terms, St. Thomas claims that we have the truth when what we have in our minds conforms to what really exists. In Sheed’s view, to see things as they really are is to be “sane” and by contrast, when a person genuinely believes in a world view that is not true, that person is “insane.” For this reason, Catholic teachers must teach differently from their public school counterparts, presenting reality as it is by incorporating both natural and supernatural perspectives. Pope John Paul II famously insisted that the human person ascends to God on two wings “faith and reason.” There are some educational systems that view reality from the perspective of faith alone: fideism; others insist on excluding whatever cannot be measured and observed: rationalism. Neither of these perspectives can properly express a Catholic vision of education. Chesterton put it rather more colorfully by reminding us that human sight is stereoscopic: to view anything with only one eye is to see it wrongly.

The Christian is not a prophet of misfortune. …The essence of the Christian proclamation is the opposite, the opposite of misfortune: it is Jesus who died for love and whom God raised on Easter morning. And this is the nucleus of Christian faith. If the Gospels had ended at Jesus’ burial, the story of this prophet would have been added to the many biographies of heroic figures who expended their lives for an ideal. The Gospel would then be an edifying book, and also a comforting one, but it would not be a proclamation of hope.

But the Gospels do not end on Good Friday. They go beyond it; and indeed, it is this additional fragment which transforms our lives. Jesus’ disciples felt dejected on the Saturday after the Crucifixion. The stone that was rolled against the door to the sepulchre had also sealed the three thrilling years they had lived with the Teacher of Nazareth.

Llegué al papel de catequista parroquial en una fase ya muy avanzada de mi carrera. Durante toda mi vida adulta, me había desempeñado como profesor en una escuela católica y una parte de mi vocación incluía ser responsable de la catequesis. Desde la edad de veinticinco años, también había ejercido la responsabilidad catequética principal con nuestros propios hijos. Con tal peso de la experiencia, creía que trabajar con el programa catequético de la parroquia no sería demasiado retador. Quienquiera que haya trabajado en este apostolado reconocería cuán equivocado estaba. El contexto parroquial es totalmente único ya que los estudiantes con quienes nos encontramos enfrentan retos muy distintos sin el apoyo de una comunidad escolar. El catequista parroquial es también sujeto a expectativas extraordinarias y demandantes. Mientras que el padre de familia y el maestro de escuela católica tienen cierto grado de "control" sobre las circunstancias en las que se transmite la catequesis, esto no es el caso de los programas parroquiales con los que estoy familiarizado. A menudo los estudiantes asisten de mala gana; habiendo ya pasado el día completo en el aula de escuela, distan de llegar en estado receptivo. En algunos casos, los papás de ellos tampoco dan mucho apoyo, y a veces incluso son injustamente críticos. De hecho, fue en el marco de la catequesis parroquial que escuché por primera vez aquellas temidas palabras: "Solo voy a dejar que mi hijito pruebe esta clase; si le gusta, se puede quedar." Por lo visto, si el catequista no está "a la altura", se le privará al niño del tesoro más rico que se le puede ofrecer al ser humano: la proclamación del Evangelio de Jesucristo.

¿Cómo sobrellevar circunstancias como éstas? Para el catequista nuevo, es tentador intentar ser "emocionante" e "interesante" - para rápidamente quedar agotado. En última instancia, este enfoque fracasa porque la vocación de catequista parroquial nos trae cara a cara con la cruda realidad que hay un solo regalo que vale la pena dar: Jesucristo. El catequista de parroquia, primero y ante todo, es testigo de Cristo. Vale la pena recordar las palabras del Beato Pablo VI en su encíclica, Evangelii Nuntiandi: "El hombre contemporáneo escucha más a gusto a los que dan testimonio que a los que enseñan - decíamos recientemente a un grupo de seglares - o si escuchan a los que enseñan, es porque dan testimonio"[1]. Ningún programa y ningún recurso, no importa lo superlativo de la elaboración, puede reemplazar al catequista enamorado de Dios. El vivo ejemplo de esto es San Juan Vianney, cuyas lecciones catequéticas atraían todos los días a cientos de personas de todas las esferas sociales, y no solamente a los niños de la parroquia.

came to the role of catechist in a parish setting very late in my career. For the whole of my adult life, I had worked in some way as a teacher in a Catholic school with responsibility for catechesis as part of my vocation. From the age of twenty-five, I had also exercised the primary catechetical responsibility with my own children. With such a weight of experience, I believed that working with the catechetical program in the parish would not be particularly challenging. Anyone who has worked in this mission will recognize how misguided I was. The parish context is utterly unique since the students we encounter face very different challenges without the support of a school community. The parish catechist is subjected to extraordinary and demanding expectations as well. Whereas a parent and a Catholic schoolteacher have a degree of “control” over the circumstances in which catechesis is delivered, this is not the case in parish programs with which I am familiar. The students can often be there “under sufferance”; having already spent a full day in a school classroom, they are often far from receptive. In some cases, parents are not particularly supportive and at times they are even unfairly critical. Indeed, it was in a parish catechetical setting that I heard for the first time those dreaded words: “I’ll just let my child try this out; and if she likes it, she can stay.” Presumably, if the catechist does not “perform,” the child will then be deprived of the richest treasure that can be offered to any human being: the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. How does one cope in circumstances like these? The temptation is to try to be “exciting” and “interesting” – and very quickly to burn out. This approach will ultimately fail, because the vocation of the parish catechist brings us face to face with the raw reality that there is only one gift worth giving: Jesus Christ. The parish catechist, first and foremost, is a witness to Christ. Here it is worth recalling the words of Blessed Paul VI’s encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.”[1] No program or resource, however superbly prepared, can replace a catechist who is in love with God. A telling example of this is St. John Vianney, whose catechetical lessons attracted hundreds from every walk of life every day, not just the children of the parish.

One of the most interesting elements of guidance given by the Church in the General Directory for Catechesis (GDC) is the pedagogical principle of “Fidelity to God and Fidelity to Man.”[1] What is unique about this and also essential for any catechist is the fact that this principle should guide both content and methodology. In fact, St. John Paul II wrote that catechesis must refer to “a law that is fundamental for the whole of the Church’s life: the law of fidelity to God and fidelity to man in a single loving attitude.”[2] As catechists, we must have this “single loving attitude.” We can find inspiration in this from the world of iconography. Many times in the writing of icons, the iconographer will draw the face of the saint with one eye slightly turned upward to God and one eye focused straight ahead. As catechists, like the saints we try to emulate, we look both upward and outward in a two-fold fidelity. The balance that a catechist must obtain is not between two conflicting motivations. If we look at the hypostatic union, we see that Christ’s divinity does not destroy his humanity nor does his humanity take anything away from his divinity. The two exist united yet distinct. Similarly, catechists must constantly be aware of those who are before them and the mystery they proclaim. We do not catechize in a vacuum but in a specific time, place, and to a particular people. It is the responsibility of catechists to be “heralds of the Gospel who are experts in humanity, who know the depths of the heart of many today, who share in his hopes and joys, his worries and his sadness, and at the same time are contemplatives, in love with God.”[3] This principle protects and directs the catechist in many ways. The GDC states, “The principle of ‘fidelity to God and fidelity to man’ leads to an avoidance of any opposition or artificial separation or presumed neutrality between method and content. It affirms, rather, their necessary correlation and interaction.”[4] In recent catechetical history, the relationship between content and method has been frequently discussed. Many catechetical textbooks are judged by these two standards and rightly so; but a textbook is not the most important aspect of catechesis.[5] The person of the catechist is that advocate on the part of God to explain and apply what God has revealed and an advocate on the part of the person to help him respond to what he has revealed. In order to better understand our role as catechists, let’s explore each side of the principle of fidelity to God and fidelity to man.