Franciscan at Home

After a few minutes’ conversation on my doorstep, a Mormon missionary asked if I was, by chance, a “born-again Christian?” “Well,” I replied, “I’m a born-again Catholic.” This idea of being “born again” made me reflect on the challenge of awakening cultural Catholics to the radical implications of the Sacrament of Baptism. Living in County Kerry—the tourist magnet of Ireland—I’ve seen the trouble American visitors take to research their family tree and locate their Irish roots. They trawl through parish registers to find out about the births, marriages, and deaths of their ancestors. (“Who are your people?” is a familiar question in this part of the country.) Perhaps we can help cradle Catholics to develop the same kind of curiosity about their spiritual roots; to find out what difference it makes, in practice, to bear their surname, not just of O’Donnell, O’Sullivan, or O’Shea but “of Christ.”[1] Pope Francis, in one of his Wednesday catecheses, asked a set of questions that could form part of a parish or family catechesis on baptismal identity. “Is Baptism, for me, a fact of the past, relegated to a date…or is it a living reality, that pertains to my present, to every moment?” “Do you feel strong with the strength that Christ gave you by his death and his Resurrection? Or do you feel low, without strength?” “Baptism gives strength and it gives light. Do you feel enlightened, with that light that comes from Christ? Are you a man or woman of light? Or are you a dark person, without the light of Jesus?” (November 13, 2013) I would like to illustrate five points, based on this catechesis, which could help Catholic families to awaken to their baptismal identity and activate its power.

The doctrine of original sin is an essential component of the Christian faith. If catechists don’t explain well the nature, effect, and consequences of original sin, they will find it very difficult not only to address the major moral issues of our day, but also to effectively communicate the Gospel. Without original sin, the Gospel message loses much of its power and purpose. To fully appreciate the “good news” of the Christ’s redemption, we first must grapple with the “bad news” of our fallen condition. Why do we need a redeemer and savior? Are people not essentially good? Are they not able to live a good moral life regardless of their religious beliefs? In reply to those questions, our faith teaches that something in our human nature is inherently wounded and in need of healing. The Church affirms that original sin is “an essential truth of the faith,” and so “we cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ.”[i] Original Sin in Genesis To understand original sin, we must turn to the first chapters of the Bible. We read in Genesis 2 that God created Adam, placed him in the Garden of Eden, then created Eve out of his side. The Catechism tells us that God created the first couple in a state of “original holiness and justice.”[ii] Original holiness means that our first parents shared in God’s divine life and were free from suffering and death—a state symbolized by their free access to the Tree of Life. Original justice means that Adam and Eve possessed an inner harmony within themselves, with each other, and with all of creation.[iii] They were at peace with themselves and with the world. This state of friendship with God, however, depended on their submission to him and respect of his moral norms.[iv] The limit to man’s freedom is represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, strictly prohibited to Adam and Eve under penalty of death: “you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen 2:17). Unfortunately, this original state of holiness and justice did not last long. Genesis 3 describes the well-known story of the fall: A mysterious talking serpent urges Eve to eat of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, which appears to be “good for food”, “a delight to the eyes”, and “desirable to make one wise.” She yields to the temptation and persuades Adam to do the same in defiance of God’s command. As soon as they eat the fruit, the two realize that they are naked. Ashamed, they cover themselves with fig leaves; they also become afraid of God and attempt to hide from him. The consequences of the infraction are dire: God curses the serpent, imposes labor pains on the woman and inflicts hard toil on the man for his subsistence, along with the prospect of returning to the ground from which he was taken. Adam and Eve are banned from Eden and from the Tree of Life; suffering and death enter human history.[v] This narrative raises two initial questions. First, what is modern man to make of it? Doesn’t it display the characteristics of a myth or pious legend rather than history? The Church teaches that even though the account of the fall uses figurative language, it affirms a primeval event that truly “took place at the beginning of the history of man,” so that “the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.”[vi] Second, does the story really teach the Christian doctrine of original sin? Genesis 3 says nothing about a fallen angel called Satan, about Adam losing gifts of divine sonship and sanctifying grace, or about him transmitting a fallen nature to all his descendants. Religious Jews, in fact, interpret the fall of Adam and Eve differently: while they obviously agree that Adam and Eve sinned, they don’t accept the idea that Adam passed on a wounded human nature to the entire human race.[vii] While it is true that Genesis 3 does not explicitly teach the doctrine of Original Sin, the story does provide the “raw materials” of the doctrine that will gradually develop in Sacred Scripture and Christian Tradition.

People may be communicating at an unprecedented rate today with social media, but are these interactions satisfying? People may have hundreds of friends on Facebook, but recent research shows that 25% of Americans say they don’t have anyone they can talk to about their personal troubles. The truth is that while online social networks are exploding, we are growing increasingly socially isolated.
Yet we all need connection. It’s how we were created. It’s in our wiring. At our core, we were created with a God-shaped vacuum that cries out to be filled with our Creator. And most of us need a human hand to reach out to us with the love of God to help us to understand who our Creator is and why he is worth everything.

I can remember the day I decided I was going to leave the Catholic Church as if it were yesterday. I had had it. I was mad and disillusioned. I felt judged and devalued. One foot was out the door. What I didn’t know at the time was that what I was experiencing wasn’t a true or good representation of the Church. However, my experience was all I had on which to base my judgments.

Take yourself back to a similar day. Maybe you weren’t getting ready to leave the Church. Maybe you had just had it with God. Too many prayers had been unanswered. Too many questions remained unanswered. Your life (at least your spiritual life) wasn’t working for you, and God didn’t seem to be doing much about it. Maybe there was a disconnect between church on Sunday and the rest of your life. Maybe it was a slow fade, and one day your life got filled up with other things; and if God had ever played a part in it all, there just wasn’t room for him anymore.

Can you remember what those days felt like before your faith really came alive? Can you remember feeling empty and unsettled inside? Did you find yourself filling up your life with all sorts of things, but nothing totally satisfied? Did you have fears of the future? Did you long for something more?

Our faith should come with a warning label, shouldn’t it? C.S. Lewis once quipped: “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”[1] Lewis knew the dangers of Christianity. He knew it wasn’t easy, and we all know it too. We all have times when our faith is hard. Things are dark. Hope seems elusive. The future seems bleak. God seems distant. This is just life in its ebbs and flows. It has its euphoric highs and devastating lows. So maybe it’s not warnings we need but reassurances. Warnings won’t make the hard times avoidable. Warnings won’t save us when turmoil drags us down, but reassurances might. If there’s one question that holds people back from believing in the loving God that we worship it looks like this: “If God is so good, then why is there so much suffering in this world?” Of course the question takes many forms, but at its core is the apparent irreconcilability of the notion of a good and loving God with a fallen and often disappointing world. This question isn’t unique to unbelievers. It is common to all of us. But for us who call ourselves believers, this question is especially poignant. The God who should love me seems distant from me. What are we to make of this? The Catechism addresses the problem of suffering straight on: “If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question” (CCC 309). Evil (often experienced as pain and suffering) is acknowledged. But what is also acknowledged is that there is an answer. Not a quick answer, but a mysterious answer. Catechism 309 concludes with the assurance: “There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.” We can have confidence that our faith contains answers to the mystery of suffering. Easy answers? No. Reassurances? You bet!

Today, as ever, we need a savior, someone who will not simply accompany us to our death, but who will also save us and bring us back to life. This truth is even more evident considering we are living in the wake of the bloodiest century on record. The twentieth century saw innumerable crimes against humanity that precipitated agonizing questions in the hearts of many. It even left men and women of faith dumbfounded and floundering, including those of the Christian faith. How were Christians to respond to those who suffered or faced countless others who suffered or lost loved ones amid the trenches of World War I, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, the death camps of Nazi Germany, the peasant slaughters of Stalin’s Russia, the ditches of Vietnam, the “killing fields” of Cambodia, the mass murders of Mao’s “reform” in China, the roving death squads of South and Central America, the rivers of blood in Rwanda, the thousands starving on the African continent, or those dying of AIDS and cancer to name a few? Has Christian faith met its match and been found wanting? The answers to this question vary, even among Christians since; in a world of “might makes right,” it’s easy to view God as a weakling, perhaps even wimpy or, at the very least, powerful, though unconcerned. What good is it that the Son of God became flesh in Jesus Christ amid so much suffering?

Seventeen years ago this May, I had the extraordinary blessing of meeting one of my heroes: Pope St. John Paul II. I did not meet the young pope who had once famously escaped the Vatican in disguise to enjoy a day of skiing. Rather, this was the much older man whose body was being ravaged by Parkinson’s Disease. As I stood in line inching forward to meet him, I noticed the muscles in his face were so weakened that saliva was pooling by his feet.

The Catechetical Institute at Franciscan University has officially launched it's LMS (Learning Management System) FranciscanAtHome.com for online catechist formation in all areas of catechesis; we're adding new courses weekly. You can try it out for as little as $5 for the month, just for enrichment, or $13 for a month with a mentor to accompany you.

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My early years as a high school religion teacher overflowed with exciting moments of watching teens open up to the Lord in the midst of my efforts to bring them to him. Students’ faces lit up as they understood a truth of the faith for the first time; students expressed a sense that God was speaking to them in prayer; students turned away from serious sin because they realized God wanted more for them. But one year I had an extraordinarily difficult class. None of my previously successful efforts engaged these students, and try as I might to identify other successful means of reaching them, each of those failed as well. I recall sharing a part of my testimony with them, a story that had previously been very effective, and they burst into derisive laughter. While other teachers spoke of this group’s extreme immaturity, I thought I must be a failure as a teacher and a catechist. As the year dragged on, I experienced a growing conviction that I could not reach these students, or any students, and that I did not belong in this ministry. I lost hope that these students could meet the Lord, hope that God was at work in this situation, hope that I was even called to this ministry to begin with. The end of the year found me physically and spiritually exhausted, and hopelessly convinced that God had abandoned me. Catechetical ministry is often fraught with challenges to hope. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) observed, “The drama faced by our contemporaries is…that of living without hope in an ever more profane world.” The drama we face as catechists is to remain steadfast in our own hope and to help those to whom we minister grow in hope as well. According to Cardinal Ratzinger’s synthesis of Augustine, Aquinas, and others, beauty brings us to an encounter with Christ Jesus our Hope, giving us hope to carry on. By imbuing our catechesis with beauty, we nourish our own hope and create the conditions for realizing the definitive aim of catechesis: “to put people…in intimacy with Jesus,” stirring our “hope [that] he invites us to.”

O Happy Fault!

“The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (Gen 3:6). How easily this tragic story becomes just that to us—a tragic story—in the Bible or in a sermon, but not recognized in our own personal history. Yet it is our story, often re-enacted in our personal lives.

Each Easter Vigil we hear the striking words of the Exsultet, “O happy fault! O necessary sin of Adam, which won for us so great a Redeemer,” as we celebrate our Redeemer’s decisive victory over sin and death. This victory is real for us, because original sin is real for us, too; and we have all felt the effects of both.

We live simultaneously in the already and not yet. Jesus already has redeemed us once and for all, yet St. Paul instructs us to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 3:13). Even though Christ has won the victory over sin and death, we are still in the fight as the fruits of Christ’s redemptive act must be realized in us. The threefold enticement that the serpent used against Eve in the garden continues to be a favorite trick of his. The temptation today does not come in the form of fruit from a tree but in the seemingly countless ways that St. John himself warns us: “Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life, is not from the Father but is from the world” (1 Jn 2:15-16).

Eve sees that the tree is “good for food”—indicative of a sensual lust and a search for goodness, but outside of God. She sees it is “pleasing to the eyes”—an enticement for the eyes, to a beauty also outside of God. Eve sees that the tree is “desirable for gaining wisdom”—a pretentious clutching for truth outside of God. Eve doubts and then fully denies that God, who is the Goodness, Truth and Beauty she desires, is already giving himself to her. She seeks these three apart from God, and in doing so with her husband, they grasp to “become like gods”, instead of receiving the eternal gift of Self that God was giving them in the garden.