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Several years ago, I was working as a parish Coordinator of Youth Ministry, and one of my responsibilities was teaching a high school religious education class. The class was arranged by the parish DRE and met as part of her programming each Wednesday night. There was no set textbook or program. We had a wide range of topics and materials available, and we were able to move as the class needed. The class was comprised of a diverse range of students with varying backgrounds and levels of catechetical formation. Mid-year, a new family moved to the parish. The parents only spoke Spanish, and they had two sons in high school who had very little formal religious education.

The older of the sons was in eleventh grade. He didn’t speak much. I’ll refer to him as “Frank.” You could tell by what few personal stories he shared that Frank’s life was a hard one. He lived in a bad neighborhood. He adored his parents, who were hard-working, but recognized that they were consumed by the preoccupation of the family business and were also not as devout as they expected their children to be. The boys completed that school year and came back the following fall.

“With such affection for you, we were determined to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our very selves as well” (1 Thes 2:8).

In the United States, approximately “1,000,000 children a year experience their parents’ divorce.”[i] This is a staggering statistic, and it does not account for children whose parents are still married but separated, or who were cohabiting and have gone their separate ways. As catechists, it is certain that we will minister to people from broken families, if we have not done so already. As we encounter these people, we may find ourselves asking whether the experience of parental divorce impacts the faith of children of divorce.[ii] And if so, how can we as catechists respond to their needs? As a child of divorced parents, I have been pondering both of these questions for some time. In sharing my reflections, I am inviting you to ponder these questions with me in order to discern what answers the Holy Spirit leads you to in your particular ministry.

Before going further, I want to clarify that I am not condemning parents who divorce. Divorce is painful for everyone involved and parents never intend for their divorce to negatively impact their children. The hard truth is that it does. Through personal experience and research, I have learned that divorce can affect one’s faith profoundly.

A helpful analogy for understanding the impact of divorce is that of a culture. Children of divorce experience a different “culture” than people from intact families. Addressing the issues arising from parental divorce catechetically involves a process of inculturation. In this process, the threefold catechumenal model—with its pastoral, liturgical, and catechetical aspects—provides a helpful framework for addressing the needs of children of divorce.

For more information on the 2022 Steubenville Youth Conferences, go online at www.steubenvilleconferences.com or call 1-740-283-6315.

On the first full day of school, I found myself energized about the opportunities and enthusiasm that filled our hallways. I had visions of beautiful moments for our community as we were able to be a bit more “normal” after a tough year of COVID and quarantines. That evening, however, just before falling asleep, I received a phone call that one of our junior students had been involved in a fatal car accident. My heart plummeted as the text messages began to blow up my phone. Shock and grief were sweeping through our school families as the news spread and hearts broke.

Simultaneously, though, a beautiful phenomenon began to emerge. Our nearby parishes were inundated with teenagers flocking to adoration chapels. Parents were accompanying their kids as they knelt together in front of the Blessed Sacrament, praying rosaries and chaplets while holding each other up. They were on their knees before the Lord and their hearts were being nurtured by Christ himself. I was comforted to know that in this time of tragedy, a communal muscle memory kicked in, and we lived as a people rooted in Acts 2:42, “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.”

I have served on senior leadership teams at a parish, a camp, and a school that have each used the Acts 2:42 template to create dynamic Catholic communities. Community flows out of the core human desire to be known and loved. Blake Mulvaney, our former superintendent, would say each year, “Every student has one question on the first day of school: will my teacher care to know me and love me?” Whether at a parish, camp, or in a school, each staff member is needed to create an Acts 2:42 culture.

“Prayer is first of all a gift from God; in fact, in every one of the baptized, ‘the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words’ (Rom 8:26).” [1]

Our habit as Catholics is to begin our prayers with the Sign of the Cross—itself a gift we’ve received from Christ and the Church. By this ancient sign, we ground our prayer in the Holy Trinity, who was revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Because prayer is a gift, our work as catechists isn’t so much to teach children their prayers as it is to help them discover for themselves the gift of prayer and how they can receive it more fully.

Sofia Cavalletti, catechist and co-founder of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, cautions that adults ought not “impose our own prayer guidelines on children. We risk leading them on a path that is not theirs. We risk extinguishing the spontaneous expression of their relationship with God and give rise to the idea that when we pray, we say certain fixed things, without necessarily adhering to them within ourselves. We could separate prayer from life in children.”[2]

Ms. Cavalletti identifies a problem I have observed in my interactions with Catholic school children through the years. Having memorized their prayers and attended liturgies without having encountered Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God’s intimate love for them, they often perceive prayer, indeed the entire subject of religion, as boring. In my experience, this contrasts with the openness of the children in our parish religious education programs who come with little or no instruction on prayer. They are more likely to be curious about who Jesus is and how they can know him.

Notes

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to give a catechetical instruction to the seventh- and eighth-grade boys of my parish. Now, I was the Homiletics professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary and instructor of several other courses offered by the Seminary. My style of teaching leaned more toward following a carefully ordered outline for my presentation, after which I would elicit questions and provide time for discussion.

These eight boys, however, were active and undisciplined, and in no condition to listen to a lecture. Intuitively, I immediately changed my style of teaching to a lively and very animated one. I weaved in some stories and involved them in reading some texts. The change in style helped, but their response to the lesson was still rather tepid. Then something unexpected happened.

I posed a question to them as to how they would try to preach the Gospel to young people in today’s world. As soon as I presented to them a challenge, a specific situation to resolve based upon what they had heard and learned, their interest went way up. I served as a guide and kind of coach for keeping them on track in the discussion. Suddenly, I was hearing creative ideas, strong opinions, and some boys challenging the other boys. The class came alive, and a new mode of teaching the boys emerged.

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