Franciscan at Home

Blessed John Henry Newman was a man with a vision for the battles of our times. He fought with courage, and he calls us to take up the fight today, confident in our ultimate victory.

The Saints and Blessed ones have, throughout England’s history, spoken a word of encouragement and hope to successive generations. Like those “witnesses in a great cloud on every side of us,”[i] of which the Letter to the Hebrews speaks, the witnesses of the saints from every corner of this land and beyond have urged us towards that victory which faith assures. From those first missionaries to the English people sent by Pope St. Gregory the Great to awaken the hope of holiness in our land down to our present age, throngs a great communion of saints. Amid a “new evangelization” fourteen centuries later, we look to these holy witnesses to our faith for example and prayers as we face the spiritual struggles of today.

The Sower profiles the catechetical work of one of the key catechetical charities working in the Church today.

In his motu proprio Ubiqumque et semper Pope Benedict XVI stresses that “[i]t is the duty of the Church to proclaim always and everywhere the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” The Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need has always supported the work of evangelisation and catechesis in a number of countries. Its mission helping Christians who are suffering, persecuted or in serious pastoral need has always included a spiritual dimension alongside the practical. Fr Werenfried van Straaten founded the charity more than 60 years ago when he responded to the needs of those who had entered West Germany fleeing the advance of communism. Among the help he provided for the people was rucksack priests, who visited the refugee camps to celebrate the Sacraments. More than 60 years on, support for people’s spiritual needs, including catechesis, remains a key part of the charity’s work.

ACN’s help for catechetical work is broad and diverse. In Iraq, many Christians have fled from the south of the country as Islamists target them. The bombing of Baghdad’s Our Lady of Salvation Syriac Catholic Cathedral in October 2010, which left at least 52 people dead, and a series of attacks that followed, added to the haemorrhaging of Christians from the south. Now most of the Christians remaining in the country have settled in the north. The Church is seeking to help those in the north lay down roots there and among the projects are two catechetical centres in Aqra and Zebur diocese, which ACN is helping with. The charity is supporting other projects around the world: in Malawi the charity recently provided 69 bicycles to help catechists travel to far flung parishes, bringing with them the knowledge of the Faith; in Tanzania ACN supported a five-day Christian education workshop for more than 300 catechists and teachers; and in Eastern Europe, where the charity started its work, it continues to help out, and is supporting the Basilian Fathers’ catechetical work.

The New Evangelization inspires a renewal of faith that leads to a desire for evangelization. More and more people are heeding the call of Pope Paul VI’s Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi to make a “clear and unequivocal proclamation of the Lord Jesus” (no. 22).The pontificates of Blessed John Paul II and our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI have reaffirmed and expounded upon Evangelii Nuntiandi.

In 1983, at the Opening Address of the 6th General Assembly of CELAM, Blessed John Paul II called for a New Evangelization: “The commemoration of the millennium of evangelization will achieve its full meaning if it is a commitment… not to re-evangelization, but to a new Evangelization. New in its ardor, its methods and its expressions.” This renewed vision of evangelization includes, as Pope Benedict stated at the homily of First Vespers on the Solemnity of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, a “re-proposing” of the Good News to all, including the Christian faithful actively participating in their faith and those who have drifted from the faith.

The influences of secularization and materialism have lead many people to question their faith and no longer consider Christ and the Church as relevant to their lives. The New Evangelization challenges catechists to discover new and creative ways to re-propose the truth of Christ to a society that has grown indifferent or antagonistic to the Gospel message.

Evangelii Nuntiandi states that “the Church is an evangelizer, but she begins by being evangelized herself” (no. 15). The New Evangelization involves a renewal of faith and deepening of sacramental worship so the sharing of the Good News of Christ with family, friends and neighbors will be effective. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Go and Make Disciples: A National Plan and Strategy for Catholic Evangelization in the United States and the newly-developed Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis web resource, Disciples Called to Witness: the New Evangelization offer a variety of suggestions for dioceses and parishes to create, enhance and renew their evangelization efforts.

A Year of Faith. A period of focus and of new evangelisation. A Synod, later this year, devoted to the question of the transmission of the Faith. Many initiatives are already beginning to emerge in response to this call from the Holy Father to prepare for a new springtime in the Church. What are some of the important things that the Church wants us to remember as we enter this time?

In this first article of a new series, examining the contribution the new movements in the Church are making to the universal work of catechesis, Deacon Tony Schmitz presents for us the Foyers of Charity and the founder of the Foyers, Marthe Robin.

When, seven years ago, he emerged onto the balcony high above the doors of St Peter’s as the newly elected successor to St Peter, Cardinal Ratzinger described himself as a “simple humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord”. And he chose for himself the name of Benedict. Why Benedict? “When it comes to the main priorities of the Pope,” says one who know him well, the theme of new evangelisation, especially for Europe, “is a key motive of his papacy and that's why he took the name Benedict.”

On October 12, 1962, the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, bore the headline “Chief Aim of the Council: To Defend and Promote Doctrine.” Indeed, the day before, Pope John XXIII delivered his long-anticipated address opening the Second Vatican Council. His words were uplifting and set a tone of openness to dialogue and appreciation for the benefits of progress.

Vatican II, he said, was to be “predominantly pastoral in character” and focused on the Church relating effectively to the modern world, since “she must ever look to the present, to the new conditions and new forms of life introduced into the modern world, which have opened new avenues to the Catholic apostolate.” At the same time, the Council was to “to transmit the doctrine, pure and integral,” for “the Church should never depart from the sacred patrimony of truth received from the Fathers.” The Holy Father charged the Council with transmitting the Church’s teachings in the language of God’s 20th Century flock. In 2012, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Council and the 20th year of one of its spiritual offspring: the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

One of the preoccupations of the catechetical movement since the Second Vatican Council has been for the Church’s faith to be seen as clearly ‘relevant’; catechesis must be seen to address our ‘real needs’. And one might think that the urgency with which the Church reiterates today the need for a ‘new evangelisation’ is a further reinforcement of such a message. The Church, it might be thought, is asking us to focus upon understanding what our culture and society today most need; and to do this she must seek ‘new methods’ and must do so with a new ardour and commitment.

There is, of course, a sense in which we can affirm this desire for ‘relevance’. And it is also of course true that catechesis must always seek to announce the Gospel in a manner that engages our deepest needs. Nonetheless, the call to ‘relevance’ can easily be misdirected as a request that the Church’s attention focus upon relevance for me. I want the Church to concentrate upon me - upon my wishes, my aspirations, my hopes and my desires. Let me put the point in a way that sounds less self-centred: we understand the renewal of catechesis to be a call to focus upon us – upon our community and its wishes, desires and aspirations. Translated in this way, then, the call to a ‘Catechesis of Relevance’ means, in effect, ‘I want the Catechism to be about me and about our community.’

If this is how we understand the task of catechesis today, then the Catechism of the Catholic Church will be found to be frustratingly disappointing. For the Catechism is primary about God. ‘God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself’ opens the first paragraph of the text and the closing paragraphs climax upon the glory of the God who will be ‘all in all’. God is the alpha and the omega of the Catechism. He is the beginning, the end, and the centre.

What is urgently needed for the New Evangelisation, wrote Blessed John Paul II in Christifidelis laici, is a ‘mending of the Christian fabric of society’. And then: ‘for this to come about what is needed is to first remake the Christian fabric of the ecclesial community itself present in these countries and nations.’ Pope Benedict XVI echoes this call in Ubicumque et semper, the Apostolic Letter establishing the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelisation.

Catechesis in Poland

In each Catholic community the essential features of a Catholic approach to formation need to take root in the local soil, a soil that is specific to that environment. The challenges to the local church always revolve around how to engage fruitfully and creatively with this environment, so that Christians can come to maturity in an authentic way.

New catechetical movements are underway, especially movements to serve the new evangelization. There is a renewed effort being put forward in the area of catechetics from all over the world. A number of the “new movements” themselves have a strong commitment to catechesis. Another example of a “catechetical movement” is the Amicitia Catechistica, or ‘Catechetical Friendship’, of Franciscan University in the United States, Maryvale Institute in England, and Notre Dame du Vie in France. These three institutions have a special devotion to the work of catechesis. If we take a quick look at the recent history of catechesis in the Church, we can see this renewal has been gathering pace for a while.

The picture is a complex one, with solid tracks of renewal alongside wrong-turnings. Even before Vatican II, alongside many healthy currents of renewal, other fundamental shifts were taking place in the areas of philosophy, biblical interpretation, theology, and liturgy. Some of these trends encouraged an anthropocentric outlook. In the area of philosophy, for example, this can be traced back at least to the period of the Enlightenment. Once philosophy removed classical metaphysics from the equation, theology and liturgy also suffered. In his book The Mass and Modernity, Fr. Jonathan Robinson identifies what happened in the liturgy. “The liturgy is no longer primarily the worship of God, but a celebration of our needs and ‘our own life experience’.”[i] He quotes Cardinal Danneels, a progressive Belgian bishop who wrote, “It is the liturgy which must obey us and be adapted to our concerns, to the extent of becoming more like a political meeting or a ‘happening’. We are celebrating our own life experience!”[ii]

Msgr. Michael Wrenn, a special consultant for religious education to John Cardinal O’Connor, writes of this period,

“Basically what occurred in catechesis was a shift from God to man; from supernatural faith to more human concerns; from proclaiming the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ and everything that follows from that to espousing a purely human kind of effort featuring a struggling humanity trying to save itself by political means from oppression and injustice.”[iii]