Franciscan at Home

I walked along the forbidden streets of one of Philadelphia’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods while being greeted respectfully by neighbors. They knew I lived at the church and, despite countless warnings about the safety of this community, I encountered only joyful faces. One of the first conversations I had as I walked from the El station to the church rectory, where I lived with other young adults, was with a seven-year-old girl, who asked me: “Is God a father and Mary a mother?”

Yes, Mary is a mother, and she is the mother of all of us; she is Comforter of the Afflicted and Refuge for Sinners. She is Mother of Divine Grace and Mother Most Pure. Her mission as Mother continues in the world today, through the Church.[1] This is why we turn to the Church in time of need—we bring our spiritual, material, social, and emotional needs to the Church.

“The church has always been here,” another man explained to me, “but the doors were always locked. No one was there.” It was as if our neighbors intrinsically knew that this grandiose, beautiful building that stretched up to the heavens was meant to be their saving grace; that they should be able to look to the church in time of need and find comfort (Is 66:13); that they should be able to knock and have the door open unto them (Mt 7:7).

In 2020, the Shepherds of the Church gave us a treasure in the new Directory for Catechesis. Dr. Farey was a member of the working party for the bishops on the new Directory and shares additional reflections on its practical implications in this issue and the next two issues.

There is an uncomfortable reality of spiritual multiplication with which we catechists, ministers, and missionaries must wrestle. That reality is this: spiritual multiplication produces results, but not always in the way we imagine.

There is a growing trend within the Church, rightly so, toward mentorship or coaching of our leaders. The idea is that great programs are not effective without great people leading those programs. Associated with this focus on mentorship is a theory some people call “spiritual multiplication”, which attempts to go one step further in mentoring leaders to multiply themselves into others who would be able to do the same. Spiritual multiplication is considered a theory because it depends on the precarious “if”: if one disciple multiplies into two others. 

To actualize the extraordinary potential of spiritual multiplication, we must go beyond the theory and begin living out of the principles that make multiplication possible. 

Early Memories 

It was yet another miraculous catch of fish.

If you were being investigated and the detective had access to highly detailed records of your personal income and spending, what would this evidence reveal about your Christian commitment? How does your credit card transaction registry provide a clue to the seriousness of your Christian faith?

Do these questions sound strange? Oftentimes we aren’t very thoughtful about the relationship between money and faith, yet the way we spend our money reveals quite a bit about who we are and what we value.

It’s no secret that over the past year the use of media has become a near necessity, causing its importance in our youth programs to skyrocket. The conversation about what it looks like to effectively use media within the realm of youth ministry is more paramount today than it has ever been in the Church’s history. 

There is certainly no lack of differing perspectives when it comes to the best media practices, and there’s not necessarily “one right way” to engage with the youth culture through media. But there are most definitely some dangers in regard to the use of media within youth ministry as well as some practices that can help us become lights in the lives of our young people.

On June 25, 2020, the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization, headed by its president, His Excellency Archbishop Rino Fisichella, presented for the Universal Church a new Directory for Catechesis.

In his encyclical letter Redemptoris Missio, John Paul II makes the claim that “since culture is a human creation and is therefore marked by sin, it too needs to be ‘healed, ennobled and perfected’” (John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, no. 54).

The Intellectual Backstory

Like many statements in ecclesial documents, one needs to know the intellectual history behind the statement above—the “backstory” as it were.

Here part of the backstory is the Romantic-era approach to the subject of culture, including the idea that every national group has its own culture and that each and every national culture is equally of value. In other words, it is a typical Romantic argument that no one culture is superior to another, all are of equal value.

Many people unreflectively adopt something like the Romantic approach because they have a memory of one particular culture (or anti-culture) trying to assert its superiority using tanks and aircraft bombers and gas chambers.

A Catholic theology of culture is, however, radically different from the Nazi ideology of culture. The Catholic vision has absolutely nothing to do with conceptions of racial superiority. Genetics has nothing to do with it. The Catholic conception is all about grace and how some human practices are more or less open to grace than others and thus some cultures are superior or more noble than others because they are more open to grace than others.

Since Catholics believe that all human beings are made in the image of God, whether they are born in one of the culturally sophisticated suburbs of Paris or in a village somewhere that has yet to obtain Wi-Fi, they all begin their lives with the same status before the throne of the Holy Trinity. In this sense the Catholic faith is both universal and egalitarian. Baptism does not recognize class distinctions. Once a person has been baptized they are a member of the Royal Priesthood. As the Orcadian Catholic writer George Mackay Brown poetically explained in his short story “The Treading of Grapes,” in heaven Christ will address his friends with the royal titles Prince and Princess. However, what Catholics do with the gift of their baptismal graces will have an impact upon their own nobility or lack of it, and upon their social practices and their culture. Those who are the most saintly are the most ennobled.