Franciscan at Home

What is the greatest word, the most powerful word we say in our life? Each of us has his or her own answer. So, let us ask: what is the greatest religious word? It is ‘Amen’.

When you receive Holy Communion you say ‘Amen’. You receive Jesus into your life. ‘Amen’ is ‘Yes – I accept you Lord’. We could say our ‘Amen’ better – be more loving, more thankful, be a more religious person when we say our ‘Amen’. I do not want to go into how good or how poor our ‘Amen’ may be. I do want to show how special we are just in being able to say our ‘Amen’ to Jesus.

We say another ‘Amen’ at end of the Eucharistic Prayer - the central part of the Mass - and we are saying ‘Amen’ to what the priest has just said – and what has happened. We are part of this long prayer. It is our prayer, too. Let us look at what is happening in this Eucharistic prayer and what is at the same time happening to us.

In the centre of the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest takes the bread and says ‘This is my body given up for you.’ Then, taking the chalice, he says, ‘This is my blood shed for you so that sins may be forgiven’, ending, ‘Do this in memory of me.’

The words of Jesus refer to his death and he wishes us to remember this. Good Friday is all about our remembering. We gather together in Church to remember the death of Jesus.

St John tells us who Jesus really is – the eternal Son of the Father. He also tells us why Jesus is dying – to save the whole world. We come together and allow the Church to guide us, to lead us in this remembering. We could say that we share in the memory of the Church.

I recently found myself in conversation with a non-denominational friend about the many attacks on the Christian faith in the world today. During the course of our conversation, she said many times, ‘I just trust in my personal Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’. At the time I didn’t think much about this point, but later I concluded: in the end, my faithful friend is right - it is about being in relationship with Jesus Christ and trusting that He will care for us in all of our needs. In fact, I thought, this truth concerning relationship and trust is what we ought to be catechizing for. Blessed John Paul II had famously made a similar point: the sum goal of all catechesis is ‘to put people not only in communion with—but in intimacy with Jesus Christ’.[i] It is Christ who leads us into the Trinity.

Is there a foundational way which we are called to follow as Christ summons us to share in the life of the Trinity? Blessed John Paul II suggests that it is poverty: ‘The Church feels ever more strongly the impulse of the spirit to be poor among the poor, to remind everyone of the need to conform to the ideal of poverty practiced and preached by Christ, and to imitate Him in His sincere and active love for the poor.’[ii] John Paul wants us to conform to ‘the ideal of poverty practiced and preached by Jesus Christ.’ And so, what kind of poverty was ‘practiced and preached by Christ?’ For our answer we can turn to the great charter for holiness in the Beatitudes, and in particular to the first Beatitude: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’.[iii] For it is in this Beatitude that we discover the mystery of our call to surrender to God.

The Catechism reminds us that spiritual poverty is the ‘abandonment of ourselves to the providence of the Father in heaven who frees us from the anxiety about tomorrow’[iv]; it is an entrustment of ourselves to God in all things. Trust, placing ourselves in the care of life-giving providence, is the most concrete act of our living sonship with God. And if we wish to imitate Christ’s pedagogy we will catechize for a deeper understanding of what it means humbly to unite ourselves in trust to the will of the Father.

For a great variety of reasons, many people who have received the grace of Baptism and Confirmation at a young age, and thereafter were regularly nourished with the sacrament of the Eucharist, do not progress to becoming faithful Catholic adults. The definition of what is sometimes called a ‘practising Catholic’ can be approached from different angles, but the reality is that even many of those children who sat obediently in the pews every Sunday, embraced their faith gladly and had some experience of Catholic family life cannot now be considered ‘practising Catholics’ in any sense. The same is unfortunately true of adults who become Catholics, usually now through the RCIA. Some estimates indicate that as many as 50-70% of new Catholics (neophytes) cease to practise their faith within two years.

Naturally, the reasons for failing to continue living a Catholic life are as diverse as the people who act on them. The pressure of a materialistic culture, constant undermining by family members and friends, or a failure to understand that the Church’s moral teaching is also good news and liberating for the individual; all these and many other factors can result in the drifting away of those who once took a full part in Catholic life. Somehow the Good News has failed to penetrate beyond the mind and to be absorbed within the soul. A sense of being one with Christ and with his Church in the life of the Trinity has stalled somewhere along the way, and the gradual process of transformation into members of Christ’s body has been interrupted.

It is not my purpose here to discuss those many factors which may interrupt a person’s progress more fully into the life of Christ, but rather to look further back at the foundations which underlie the original formation of that person as a Christian. There is insufficient space to outline a systematic and comprehensive approach, but I would like to look briefly at three areas which may contribute to the problem and to show how clear teaching on the identity between Christ and his Church is of foundational importance.

It was the first day of my final college course in Religion. One semester way from graduating at a public university and I had, through God’s grace, been able to maintain my faith. Our professor was one of the most highly respected on campus, a kind of cult figure with amazing gravitas and all the confidence of a great rhetorician. He sat in the desk in the front of the room as we sat with notebooks ready, and pens poised to transfer his knowledge onto paper. ‘I am a recovering Catholic,’ he began, and that statement acted as a thesis for the rest of his course. Frustrated with his childhood faith, anger and brokenness often spilled over into the class.

It was this image of former Catholics that I carried with me from college into full-time catechesis. With nearly 29 million former Catholics in the US[i] and an estimated 519,000 no longer attending Mass in England[ii], there is a tendency to assume that those who have left the faith have done so bitterly, and because of specific doctrinal teachings. However, recent experiences throughout the Church have illustrated that individuals like my professor are the exception, not the norm. What if our approach to welcoming people home began not with a caricature of the angry ‘recovering Catholic’ but with the more accurate and Biblical image of the lost sheep? What if our catechesis addressed the central obstacles to conversion that so many in western society face? The New Evangelization demands that we articulate the timeless truths of the faith with renewed ‘ardor, methods and expression.’[iii] To do so effectively requires knowledge of whom fallen away Catholics are and why they left their faith.

Marcus Grodi explains how he came to discover that the Church has given us all that we need to help us know how to defrag our minds, to put everything in order in a systematic and organic way.

How does one determine truth? This was the core of my own journey to the Church, and though I won’t repeat the details here, I must admit this journey, for me at least, did not cease once I became Catholic. I knew my old Protestant ways of determining truth did not work and led only to a cacophony of conflicting opinions that divides Christians from other Christians. But then once inside the gates of the Church, I was sadly stymied by the unexpected breadth of opinions and sad divisions amongst Catholics. To some people these divisions seem no different than the divisions amongst Protestants. For others these divisions have caused them to leave the Church and return to the more comfortable confusion of their past. Then there are those who are not happy with the bishops and have begun defining a Catholicism on their own terms.

But how are Catholics to determine what is true when we are surrounded by so many seemingly faithful Catholics with conflicting opinions and lifestyles? Allow me to approach this quest with the illustration of a personal experience—of my own ignorance.

Why it is more than doctrine that keeps Catholics and Protestants apart

I will never forget the first time I entered a Catholic Church and attended my first Mass. It was a strange, otherworldly experience. Not because I felt I was entering the holy of holies, but I was entering into an experience I had come to intellectually believe, but had never personally witnessed. I had lived 36 years as a Pentecostal Protestant and 13 of those as a pastor. I had spent my life trying to construct a Christian experience that was as far from the Catholic experience as one could get.

In preparation for the Year of Faith, Dr Alan Schreck reviews how the beginning of the Catechism of the Catholic Church answers basic questions about the virtue of faith.

Pope Benedict XVI, announcing the up-coming ‘Year of Faith,’ begins his apostolic letter Porta Fidei (The Door of Faith): ‘The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church’ (PF1). However, he notes we can no longer assume that people in traditionally Christian lands believe in God: ‘because of a profound crisis of faith that has affected many people’ (PF2).

The Catechism begins (Part I, Section I, Chapter I, subsection one) ‘The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God, and God never ceases to draw man to Himself’ (CCC27). Even people who are hardened against the concept of God experience that ‘restlessness’ that St. Augustine speaks of at the very beginning of his Confessions. Of course, some would deny or fail to recognize that this ‘restlessness’ in their hearts or spirits has anything to do with God, or try to ignore, suppress, or ‘sublimate’ it, but nonetheless it is there. Often, it appears that this inchoate desire or restlessness is the only way that God can ‘hint at’ His presence, when the beauty of creation or of art or music, or rational arguments for God’s existence have no apparent effect.

There is a shocking reality concerning the demographics of worshiping Catholics in the United States. If one would like to identify the largest community of Catholics it would seem logical to look at the largest Catholic parish in any diocese. However, in most cases that is not true. The largest group of Catholics will be found worshipping at the local ‘mega’ non-denominational church. If your country or diocese does not have a mega-church culture then the picture may be even blacker, the Catholics who no longer attend Mass may not be worshipping at all.

The reasons that Catholics leave the Church are many and complicated. Some drift away, some are driven away, many are in irregular marriage situations, many misunderstand what the Church teaches on moral issues and others know very well what the Church teaches and simply do not believe. There is enough blame to go around for all of us who remain and all of those who are gone! Although the particulars of each situation matter and need to be discerned and dealt with the problem for all of us goes much deeper. Through our baptism, we have been adopted into a filial relationship with Jesus Christ. His life is our inheritance and we share this inheritance with those who share our baptism. Our estranged companions are not a problem to be solved. We must seek out our brothers and sisters who have forgotten, misplaced, squandered, lost or rejected their inheritance.

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.

‘On the Spot’ aims to highlight some of the complex positions, questions and comments experienced by Catechists, teachers and parents. It tries to outline the knowledge necessary to be faithful to Church teaching and which will best help those we teach who call us to account for the hope that is in us. [cf I Peter 3:15]

This time we look at the name and titles of Jesus explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, considering how these complement each other and how we can help children to draw closer to Jesus in coming to understand them more fully.