Franciscan at Home

“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Mt 18:20). These familiar words of Jesus teach us as catechists that we have multiple opportunities to encounter him, not just in communal prayer but also in missionary outreach and every time we step into our catechetical sessions. Yes, even the mundane and hectic are sanctified by God’s presence. Since he called us, he won’t abandon us. The question is: are we watching and waiting for him? And, are we attuned to him and how he wishes to move us and those in our care?

No one arbitrarily volunteers to become a catechist. Rather, the Church understands this vital responsibility to have the dignity of a vocation [see General Directory for Catechesis, no. 233]. This means that being a catechist is a call that a person receives from God—an authentic path to sanctity. One reason for this is the profound level of cooperation with God that is needed in order for catechesis to be fruitful. Cooperating with God in the process of catechesis can sometimes be a grand and dramatic endeavor, but most of the time being attuned to God as a catechist happens in silent and simple experiences. Of course we know that God is always present and moving when his Word is proclaimed and encountered. We have Christ’s word on this: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” [Mt. 18:20].

It is our hope that regularly reading the testimonies of catechists, who share God’s powerful presence in the work of catechesis, will not only inspire but bring hope.

"Thank you, God, for shots!"

Sometimes God works in ways we could never imagine, let alone plan.

Just as parents were dropping off their three, four, and five year old students for an early evening catechetical session with me, a woman I had never seen before introduced herself. “I’m here to fill in for your aide. Her husband is in the hospital. I’m not sure whether she had a chance to call you, but I said I would take her place.”

The young woman had never served as an aide before, but there was precious little time to explain what was expected of her. Instead I breathed a prayer and she prayed along; “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful . . .”

The two hour session progressed peacefully and toward the end we gathered around the prayer table. As usual, the children offered spontaneous thanksgiving. A three year old, sporting a bright Band-aid on her upper arm spoke quietly, “Thank you, God, for shots.” “Shots?” A boy turned to her incredulously. “Why would you thank God for shots? They hurt!” “Because…even though they hurt, they keep you from getting very, very sick!” Satisfied, the boy offered his own prayers of gratitude and we sang a closing song.

Alone, we were cleaning up the room when the substitute aide turned to me, tears streaming down her face...

Angelo Cardinal Scola wrote of conversion to Christ and conversion to reality.[1] Just as conversion opens our eyes to the ugliness of sin and the beauty of grace, so it overflows in opening our hearts to the many and various splendours of creation.

The significance of place, geography and archaeology were subjects, I have to confess, that I accepted in principle—but, you might say, without enthusiasm and insight. In this brief reflection on a recent visit to the Holy Land, I want to consider the catechesis of place. The Holy Land is a testimony to the living interrelationship of archaeology, geography and the incarnation of the history of salvation. Just as God “in his wisdom … brought it about that the New should be hidden in the Old and that the Old should be made manifest in the New,”[2] so, simple as it might seem, there is an interplay between the events of Christ’s life and the historical locations in which they took place.

Briefly, then, I want to touch on three categories of place: first, those graced by the presence of the Holy Family, Christ and His disciples; second, the place of the Transfiguration, Mount Tabor; and, third, Jerusalem, the City of King David and the place of the Paschal Mystery of Christ.

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses. Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, no. 41

I just returned from visiting my former grade school teacher who is sick in the hospital. He is aging and has been chronically ill for many years. Most recently he’s had surgery to remove some cancer. While my three teenage boys dutifully sat around the hospital room showing quiet reverence to this suffering man, I told my teacher something that surely surprised my boys at least a little. I told him that he was my hero.
A hero doesn’t have to be perfect

The surprise in this comes from their immediate perception of the man to whom I was speaking. This is a guy who does not conform to modern society. He smokes and drinks and makes odd jokes and dresses out of step with the modern world. Today as he sits in that hospital bed, he is no longer particularly handsome or strong or athletic. He is not wealthy, has no spouse or children of his own, and never accumulated many public accolades for all the good things he has quietly done over the course of his lifetime. So how could their father possibly call him a hero? Was it just a white lie to comfort an ailing man? Or was there something more going on?

No lies were being told in that hospital room. This man is a hero to me. I first met him when he became my teacher in seventh grade. I was smart, but I didn’t care about school very much. In fact, I considered it embarrassing that I was pretty bright. My adolescent mind was filled with two things and two things only: sports and girls. The rest of life was simply a necessary inconvenience to endure. He changed all that for me.

In this article Dr. William Newton addresses the fundamental philosophical deficiencies in Richard Dawkins’ arguments to “prove” God does not exist.
Dear Patience,

Many thanks for your letter. Yes, I remember you telling me that your father was an armchair atheist. That is why I was so surprised when you said that your mother had bought him a “bible” for his birthday. It took me some time to realize you meant Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Armed with all that new ammunition to throw at you, I guess that made your visit back home more interesting than usual!

Yes, I read that book a while back…with trepidation. I braced myself for an onslaught against our shared faith like a man about to be hit by an intellectual tsunami. I was happily disappointed. Let me explain.

As far as I can see, The God Delusion has two main points. Professor Dawkins’ first point is that it is very improbable that God exists, so improbable that we ought to live as if He didn’t. The second point is that religion is a travesty in the world and we would all be a lot better off intellectually and morally if it were to disappear completely. The second point seems so obviously wrong in the face of universities, hospital systems, humanitarian outreaches and so many more good things that are directly linked to Christianity, but I’ll have to leave a more thorough comment for another occasion and deal with the first thing first.

An old pastor sits in the front corner of his small country church one autumn evening. The lamps are coming on outside, the children are hurrying home for supper, and each chime of the bells above brings the priest a moment closer to the time when he must deliver his Sunday sermon. But he is at a loss for words. He has drilled into his parishioners the proofs for God’s existence, the reasons for the immorality of abortion, and the importance of prayer. Time and again he preached about the need to live a life of stewardship, the significance of the confessional, and the wrongs of gossip. And the fruits of his work are visible. The children recite the catechism with diligence, the women’s guild prays the rosary with devotion, and the young men can reason through disputes over the saints and Blessed Mother with their protestant co-workers. Yes, his flock has been given a toolbox. What more then is there? What further work can he do?

Suddenly he hears the creaking of the door to the church open behind him. “Somebody has got to oil that one,” he thinks to himself, making a mental note of this task for the custodian. The quiet patter of feet passes him and then stops. As the priest lifts up his head, he is taken aback at the site of the scene before him. A little child is there, kneeling before the crucifix. Father recognizes the lad from Sunday school, a quiet fellow from a good family. His hat in his hands and his eyes fixed upon the mangled body of Christ hanging limply on the tree, the child’s lips move slowly, reverently. The priest leans in, trying to hear what soft sounds are exuding from the boy’s mouth. He is quietly uttering the Anima Christi, each powerful word taking on new meaning in this child’s sweet voice. With that, the priest falls to his knees. And then the answer comes…
In order to reconcile his people to himself, God became seeable, hearable, touchable, and reachable, taking on true human flesh. “By nature incomprehensible and inaccessible, [God] was invisible and unthinkable, but now he wished to be understood, to be seen and thought of,” writes St. Bernard of Clairvaux.[1] In a sense, he became concrete and graspable, yet at the same time mysterious and unknowable, bridging the imminent and the transcendent. Preface I for Christmas so beautifully reads, “By the wonder of the Incarnation, your Eternal Word has brought the eyes of faith a new and radiant image of your glory. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”

It is poetry that most fully takes on these characteristics, creating images that rouse our senses and help us to understand reality, yet always leaving a sense of the unknown, an aura of mystery. It is poetry, that theology (as St. Anselm defined it, “Faith seeking understanding”) so desperately needs, else it turn into the mechanical “study of God.” It is poetry for which the faithful long in order to come to know Christ, the Divine Poet himself. It is poetry, which this priest’s preaching is lacking.

It may sound strange but we want to sleep in a barn on Christmas Eve. After Christmas Eve Mass, we would put the children in the car, drive to a friend's farm and sleep in their hayloft, above the cows and sheep. We would leave the presents, decorations, and fancy clothes at home, and experience for ourselves what the birth place of Jesus was like.

Unfortunately, and I can't imagine why, the children aren't as impressed with this idea as we are. For the last three years, they've been yelling "No, No, No" whenever we try to discuss it. Well, yes, we'd miss the Christmas Eve feast at the grandparents, and yes, there's be no tree with presents in the morning. We could live without that for one year, couldn't we.

"No, NO, NO!"

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.

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.