Franciscan at Home

George Weigel’s second volume of John Paul II’s biography is entitled: The End and the Beginning. In the book’s penultimate chapter he reviews Karol Wojtyla’s life through ‘the prism of the three theological virtues’.1 By divine symmetry, John Paul II’s General Audience reflections commences where his predecessor, John Paul I, concluded his teaching, on the first three ‘lamps’ of Sanctification’ as John XXXIII called them: Faith, Hope and Charity.

Weigel speaks of the threads of John Paul II’s life as being woven into a tapestry of ‘ongoing’ intellectual, moral, psychological and emotional conversion. Through each of these deepening engagements with the presence of Christ in his life, he grew in the triple grace of baptism previously noted because of a profound commitment to giving the gift of himself to God and neighbour.

I had the grace to make a pilgrimage to Mexico City in the fall of 1999. The experience in front of the image was mine. I do have to tell you that I was one of the first persons in front of the image in the morning, and I definitely was there when they were closing. The miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one that has awakened faith in the hearts of many; here I look at her call to us in this Year of Faith.

Fr. Peter Conley highlights the importance of saints in catechesis and calls on us not to overlook some of their more unexpected sides.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, in his Fragment of a Life of St Philip, has left us an unexpected (and often overlooked) hermeneutic key to unlock the nature of holiness in both canonised saints and those in the making.

‘…a saint’s life may often have in it things not directly and immediately spiritual. To find a saint sitting down to cards, or reading a heathen author, or listening to music or taking snuff, is often a relief and an encouragement to the reader, as convincing him that grace does not supersede nature, and that as he is reading of a child of Adam and his own brother, and he is drawn up to his pattern and guide while he sees that pattern can descend to him; whereas that shadowy paper-Saint, as I may call it, bloodless, ideality which may be set up in the mind from the exclusive perusal of a roll of unconnected details, may, from the weakness of our hearts, chill us unduly, lead (us) to shrink from the Saints and to despond about ourselves. The lights and shades of the saintly character are necessary for understanding what a Saint is.’1

Blessed John Henry challenges us to admit that we can become susceptible to a diet of bland, lifeless accounts of holiness which emphasise the ‘sublime’ without ever delighting in the ‘ridiculous’ or, at least, the quirkiness about a saintly character. The passage pulsates in its appeal to search for a person’s humanity because it is in and through this that we encounter the kindly light of Christ’s divinity shining out from them.

Fr Peter Conley reminds us of the catechetical qualities of the Pope who had the shortest Pontificate in history.

I feel sure John Paul I would have incorporated the title of pop singer Taja Seville’s hit, ‘Love is Contagious’, in one of his Addresses. After all, he did suggest that we should ‘inject others with a goodness imbued with meekness and love taught by Christ’.1

His successor, John Paul II, spoke of him unleashing a ‘torrent of love’2 during his brief reign. The ‘Smiling Pope’ or ‘God’s Candidate’ to use Cardinal Basil Hume’s phrase, implored his audience to ‘throw me a safety belt with your prayers’3 and in imitation of his humble master admitted that Christ’s Yoke of Papal Office was laid on ‘fragile shoulders’.4 He literally, had an astronomic impact. Consider the Vatican preface to the collection of his homilies and addresses:

‘John Paul I passed in the Church and in the world like a whirling comet which casts a jet of inextinguishable light, like a flash of hope that leaves hearts ablaze, like a marvellous rainbow charged with promise for a poor, weary, divided and restless humanity.’5

His teaching was communicated with a brilliantly gifted catechist’s amalgam of compressed style, humour, honesty and humility. Seasoned with topical references, often from popular culture, John Paul I spoke passionately using simple yet profoundly-crafted observations on life, the universe and everything. This was a man who likened life’s journey to God to Jules Verne’s adventure stories and had the creative imagination to write letters to Pinocchio, Charles Darwin and even St Romedio’s bear! In his book Illustrissimi (the illustrious ones), he numbered Tom Sawyer’s creator Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott of Ivanhoe fame amongst his favourite authors.

Sean Innerst helps us respond to the Church’s call to place Christ at the center of our narration of salvation history.

The General Directory for Catechesis (GDC) at number 39 says, ‘Catechesis, for its part, transmits the words and deeds of Revelation; it is obliged to proclaim and narrate them and, at the same time, to make clear the profound mysteries that they contain’ (emphases added). That is only the first of several references in the GDC to a form of catechesis, the narratio or narration of salvation history, that was a standard part of the initiatory practices of the fourth and fifth century Church.i

Those practices, many of which have been revived in the modern RCIA, gave way over time to the requirements of a changing Church in which the catechetical focus became not so much adults who needed to be given a Judeo-Christian worldview to replace a Greco- Roman one, but children who had grown up in communities that were more and more shaped by a Christian vision.ii With the fading of the ancient practice of narratio, many catechists today feel incapable of responding to the obligation to narrate what God has revealed, spoken of in the GDC, because they just don’t know what a catechetical narration should look like.

In the Prologue to his early 5th century work De catechizandis rudibus (DCR), which in its newest English translation is titled Instructing Beginners in the Faith,iii St. Augustine of Hippo tells us that the narration, or narration of salvation history, which he used to catechize those newly entering the faith is intended to display ‘the central points of the faith’ and that it ‘gives us our identity as Christians.’iv He goes on to say that it represents an ‘initial grounding in the faith’ and then even that through it ‘the content of the faith is communicated’ to these newcomers.v That a half-hour to an hour-and-a-half discourse could do all that might seem a rather exalted claim, but Augustine is clear that in either a shorter or longer form, when constructed properly, the narratio will be ‘at all times perfectly complete.’vi

Since the death of my, our, beloved John Paul II, I have prayed for his beatification. Every spring I teach my course on catechetical saints and I have been itching to include him in the course material. Naturally, for the ten years that I have been teaching the course, he has played a pivotal role because his writings have been featured throughout the course. He has left catechists so much, and I will be focusing the next few articles on him.

I do not think that I need to go into any detail of the actual life of John Paul. I do, however, want to make this article personal, because I think that all of us engaged in the work of catechesis have a personal relationship with him. I was student teaching, doing my practice teaching before I received my degree in theology and elementary education, when John Paul was elected in 1978. I shared in the joy of his election like all the sisters in my congregation, but this was even more special for me. We had a Polish pope! My grandparents both came from Poland, and my grandfather was one of the founders of the Polish parish where my father and his brothers and sisters, as well as my brother and sisters received our first sacraments. I have always been proud of my heritage. Now our Holy Father was Polish, and the bond between us became even stronger than the bond I would have with any Pope. And when I called home to see how my father received the news, he told me, in between his sobs of joy, that he had been working on the church steps when a neighbor gave him the news. How appropriate!

Now my personal story isn’t all that important for catechists, but I think it does bear repeating here because most of us felt that we had a personal connection with our late, great Pope. And that was part of his gift to the Church upon ascending to the Chair of St Peter.

‘By faith, Mary accepted the Angel’s word and believed the message that she was to become the Mother of God in the obedience of her devotion (cf. Lk 1:38). Visiting Elizabeth, she raised her hymn of praise to the Most High for the marvels he worked in those who trust him (cf. Lk 1:46-55). With joy and trepidation she gave birth to her only son, keeping her virginity intact (cf. Lk 2:6-7). Trusting in Joseph, her husband, she took Jesus to Egypt to save him from Herod’s persecution (cf. Mt 2:13-15). With the same faith, she followed the Lord in his preaching and remained with him all the way to Golgotha (cf. Jn 19:25-27). By faith, Mary tasted the fruits of Jesus’ resurrection, and treasuring every memory in her heart (cf. Lk 2:19, 51), she passed them on to the Twelve assembled with her in the Upper Room to receive the Holy Spirit (cf. Acts 1:14; 2:1-4). ‘Let us entrust this time of grace to the Mother of God, proclaimed “blessed because she believed” (Lk 1:45).’ Pope Benedict XVI, Porta Fidei, for the indiction of the Year of Faith, October 11, 2011

In discerning which saint I should write about for these articles, I wanted to pay attention to this Year of Faith. I began to recollect the preparation for the Jubilee marking the New Millennium. In 1987, Pope John Paul II had initiated a Marian Year as the remote preparation for the Jubilee Year. Redemptoris Mater was written to guide us into the heart of Mary as we prepared to celebrate the New Millennium of the life of the Church. In this document, he focused our attention on Our Lady who leads the pilgrim Church from Pentecost until the Second Coming of Christ.

In our age of instant communication and social networking, we can often find ourselves involved in spending more and more time in relating to people in ways that have no grounding in what is profound. All that one has to say is increasingly reduced to utterances involving pressing a few characters on a keyboard or what can be expressed in a ‘tweet’. Our ‘friends’ exist only in cyberspace.

How different with the Incarnation! The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became flesh! He was born of the Virgin Mary and from the moment of her fiat her life was totally focused on her personal relationship with her Son. She continually tells us, ‘Do whatever he tells you’. And Jesus gave His mother to all of us from His cross –‘Behold your Mother’. She can teach us the meaning of personal relationship with Christ.

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.

In these articles I have looked at the lives of saints who were engaged in catechetical activities. Our Lady is the ultimate catechetical saint, as has been stated in Evangelii Nuntiandi (82), Catechesi Tradendae (73), and the General Directory for Catechesis (291). Continuing in my desire to prepare for the Year of Faith by looking at apparitions of Our Lady, today we will look at Our Lady of Lourdes.[i]

When we look at apparitions of Our Lady, we focus on the message that God chose to give us by sending the Mother of God as the mediator of his message. The story of St. Bernadette Soubirous (1844 -1879) and “the Lady” as Bernadette called her is one that is well known. She was born in a rugged part of France to a miller and his wife. By the time of the apparitions, her family was reduced to stark poverty, and was living in an old jail. Bernadette suffered from asthma, and missed school frequently. There is some evidence that she may have suffered from a learning disability.