Franciscan at Home

To the surprise of my friends and family, I love being a middle school teacher. While admiring my enthusiasm, most people picture a hectic classroom filled with rowdy youth. It is true, some days I swear my students are on their second cup of coffee by first period. I have learned to enjoy these days because underneath all of that energy rests a deep desire to encounter Christ. In their fast-paced culture, young people’s hearts crave moments of silence, peace, and union with Jesus. When I first started teaching, I wanted each middle schooler to learn how to pray and to begin their relationship with Christ, but my efforts were not bearing much fruit.

I was doing something wrong. I began by praying the Our Father and Hail Mary with each class. My students knew these prayers from elementary school and did not show much excitement for praying them. My solution was to further explain the biblical origin of these basic prayers. While doing this helped a little, I still knew most of my students were not encountering Christ. No matter how much time I spent explaining the Our Father or Hail Mary, my voice was always the loudest one in the room. Even after introducing other prayers, there was no noticeable change. Why did the Holy Spirit not seem present?

I prayed the words of Saint Paul, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). I needed the Spirit to teach my students to pray!

In modern culture, relativism reigns supreme. Consequently, the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty no longer seem to transcend beyond the subjective whims of every autonomous individual self. Truth is a matter of one’s opinion. Goodness is relative to each person. Beauty is a matter of personal preference.

Catechists and Catholic educators have been given a great opportunity to lead the young people entrusted to their care to encounter objective truth, consistent moral laws that lead to the flourishing of goodness, and to appreciate authentic beauty. Although the three transcendentals are inseparable, I would like to focus on the role of beauty in teaching, evangelization, and formation.

Bishop Robert Barron frequently exhorts the faithful to “lead with beauty.” Images are powerful means of conveying both the truth and distortions of the truth. Images have been used well to market products and lead people astray into ideology. The Church has employed the use of sacred art to convey the truth in a powerful and formative way. In the introduction to the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger explains the rationale for using sacred images within the Compendium:

Images are also a preaching of the Gospel. Artists in every age have offered the principal facts of the mystery of salvation to the contemplation and wonder of believers by presenting them in the splendor of color and in the perfection of beauty. It is an indication of how today more than ever, in a culture of images, a sacred image can express much more than what can be said in words, and be an extremely effective and dynamic way of communicating the Gospel message.[1]

The beauty within art, architecture, music, and film is a visible manifestation of a truth being communicated by the artist. Beauty, when used well, can lead the faithful to encounter the face of Christ the Incarnate Word.

In order to renew catechesis and Catholic schools with beauty, first we must discuss the definition and nature of beauty. Second, we need to examine what role beauty plays in our lectures, presentations, and classrooms. Finally, we must work toward greater manifestations of beauty within the liturgy.

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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.