Franciscan at Home

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.

Br Louis explains why catechesis on the vocation to be a Brother in the Church is so important for our work.

The task of catechesis today faces many challenges as it attempts to address a generation of young people who have suffered from either poor catechesis or a complete lack of it. Those principles and teachings which generations before had taken for granted are unknown or distorted. One of these is an understanding of the rich history of our Church and the essence of the various vocations that have existed in the Church.

While most street Catholics have a clear enough understanding of the Priesthood and the Sisterhood, these in part being popularized over the years by the cinema, few have heard much about the vocation and role of the Religious Brother.

Catholic Schools Week gives us all an opportunity to express our gratitude to the parents and families, pastors and parishes who entrust to us the privilege of teaching, and sharing in the Church’s teaching mission. They are good supporters of our work, and with them we share the weighty responsibility of bringing children to Jesus Christ; and bringing Jesus Christ to our children.

During these special days, I hope that you as administrators, teachers and staff, also hear the appreciation of God’s people for your vital work. You are the teaching Christ. You are participants in the work of the bishops, shepherding our young people. You are close co-workers with the parents. You love these children and spend so many hours with them, not only instructing them but also forming them in mind, heart, body and soul. You listen to them and correct them and encourage them. Sometimes you toss and turn at night because of them.

Thank you, dear teachers. Thank you for answering God’s call – fulfilling not just the contractual obligations of a job, but carefully and prayerfully responding to a vocation. When I was at one of the schools recently and asked the students what they were doing during Catholic Schools Week, one young boy answered that they were going to have a teacher appreciation day. He whispered to me that exactly what they were going to do was a secret. I hope you have received many signs of thanks and affection from your students.

Dad could hardly believe it. “You’re worried about which door to use? Use any door!”

The boldness of this idea did not comfort me. After all, wasn’t it important to follow the school rules? When the bell rang on the first day, we were to line up at the correct door with our class. Then we were to enter upon the journey of knowledge with our new teachers. This was supposed to happen out of a situation of chaos – hundreds of youngsters (rough-housing and yelling on our big playground) were expected to respond quickly. What if I did not hear my new teacher call me by name? I could end up in class 4-A rather than 4-B! What if I were left alone on the playground?

And yet, somehow, it happened! With the help of my older sisters, the strong voices of my teachers, and the belief that this was the way it was supposed to be, I entered upon the new school year!

I never seemed to have a doubt about what door to exit. We would pour back out onto the playground and make our way homeward to tell Mom how we had fared, by that time forgetting all about the entry door to the new year.

As God’s good children, we have already entered our Porta Fidei and started a New Church Year. Without forgetting what we have embarked upon, how can we use the “exit door” of Lent and Holy Week in the service of catechesis?

In this article, Léonie and Stratford Caldecott share their convictions about evangelization, drawn from many years of experience in Catholic cultural and faith renewal.

In Italy and other places there is a Slow Food movement, and there are designated “Slow Cities”. You can read on Wikipedia about Slow Fashion, Slow Money, Slow Parenting, and even a World Institute of Slowness. The Slow Movement believes that quality of life and thus real wealth comes from slowness, care, and contemplation, rather than non-stop activity and frenetic speed. We believe in Slow Evangelization.

Newman’s Spring

2012 was the 160th anniversary of John Henry Newman’s prophetic sermon, “The Second Spring”, marking a turning point in the history of Christianity in these islands – the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the beginnings of a Catholic revival that went on to produce Christopher Dawson, G.K. Chesterton, and a whole host of poets, novelists, and apologists, many of them published by Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward.

It is worth recalling that when Newman gave the Second Spring sermon at St Mary’s College in Birmingham, he was still only 51 years old, and a relatively recent Catholic. It was only two weeks after the ending of the humiliating Achilli trial, which had brought to the surface much anti-Catholic feeling around the country. The newly reconstituted Synod of Bishops was meeting for the first time, in a neo-Gothic seminary designed by Augustus Welby Pugin. Newman used his platform at the geographical centre of England and at the dawn of a new historical epoch to prophesy a resurgence of Catholic culture – one that would affect not just intellectuals but the whole population, through the building of churches and schools and the re-entry of Roman Catholics into the political, economic, and social life of the nation. “O Mary, my hope, O Mother undefiled, fulfill to us the promise of this Spring.”

Martha Drennan discusses how the parish can support the life-long process of growing in the knowledge of the faith, a process which starts in the family.
I was born into a Catholic family that would never miss Mass, made many sacrifices in their middle class life to send three girls to Catholic school, and could not imagine not being Catholic. With Dad serving as an Army officer, we moved to widely different areas of the country and experienced three different diocesan school systems.

As a product of all this cradle Catholic upbringing, I found myself to be 31 years old, a nominal Catholic who would not miss Mass, who wanted to go to heaven, but who did not know how to avoid hell. I had been left behind in my understanding of my Faith and how to live it as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

This was the beginning of my adult conversion experience. I was now going to begin the journey of catching up on my faith as an adult and how to live it as an adult. I was afraid and knew I needed God more in my life. That was all the Holy Spirit needed to take me on a whirlwind adventure.

The First Communion parents were gathered to listen to a talk on the Sacrament of Penance. It became apparent that some were uncomfortable with the idea that their children – or indeed they themselves – might be in need of God’s mercy and love in this sacrament.

‘Children don’t really sin, do they – they’re too young to understand.’

‘I don’t want my children frightened by telling them about hell and damnation at their age.’

‘We don’t really need to confess to a priest, do we? It’s okay` just to say sorry to God on our own, isn’t it?’

I would like to give some suggestions for the catechist who must respond to these kind of comments, explaining the Church’s teaching to those who either misunderstand it or are alienated from it.

The catechist must be a person of faith, hope and love with a strong grounding in the Church’s faith. He must be confident in the vision and hope for the future which the Church teaches and inspires, have a mature and courageous attitude to what love requires in order to deliver the truth. These three theological virtues must be foundational to catechesis, particularly where there may only be one chance to convey the truth of a doctrine or practice. They also provide the catechist with a sound framework for an answer or a discussion which utilises the true teaching of the Church rather than half understood concepts which have often been gained outside the Church, or in childhood.